John Nunemaker joins us to share his new thesis for acquiring Rails based SaaS apps. He’s early days on his next big thing called Very Good Software and recently acquired Fireside, a podcast hosting service started by Dan Benjamin. This comes after many years since John’s acquisition of a lifetime of Speakerdeck to GitHub, which laid the foundation for these moves.
Justin Dorfman joined us for a special BONUS episode of The Changelog to share some details about Sustain Conference with you. It’s a one day conversation for Open Source Software sustainers at GitHub HQ (SF) on June 19, 2017. No keynotes, expo halls or talks. Only discussions about how to get more resources to support digital infrastructure. Plus, we’ll be there.
Stephanie Morillo (content strategist and previously editor-in-chief of DigitalOcean and GitHub’s company blogs) wrote a book titled The Developer’s Guide to Content Creation — it’s a book for developers who want to consistently and confidently generate new ideas and publish high-quality technical content.
We talked with Stephanie about why developers should be writing and sharing their ideas, crafting a mission statement for your blog and thoughts on personal brand, her 4 step recipe for generating content ideas, as well as promotional and syndication strategies to consider for your developer blog.
Changelog’s resident infrastructure expert Gerhard Lazu is on location at KubeCon 2019. This is part one of a two-part series from the world’s largest open source conference. In this episode you’ll hear from event co-chair Bryan Liles, Priyanka Sharma and Natasha Woods from GitLab, and Alexis Richardson from Weaveworks.
Stay tuned for part two’s deep dives in to Prometheus, Grafana, and Crossplane.
Jerod is joined by Ryan Dahl to discuss his second take on leveling up JavaScript developers all around the world. Jerod asks Ryan why not try to fix or fork Node instead of starting fresh, how Deno (the open source project) can avoid the all too common rug pull (not cool) scenario, what’s new in Deno 2 & their pragmatic decision to support npm, they talk JSR, they talk Deno KV & SQLite, they even talk about Ryan’s open letter to Oracle in an attempt to free the unused “JavaScript” trademark from the giant’s clutches.
This week we’re talking about Swift with Ben Cohen, the Swift Team Manager at Apple. We caught up with Ben while at KubeCon last week. Ben takes us into the world of Swift, from Apple Native apps on iOS and macOS, to the Swift Server Workgroup for developing and deploying server side applications, to the Swift extension for VS Code, Swift as a safe C/C++ successor language, Swift on Linux and Windows, and of course what The Browser Company’s Arc browser is doing to bring Arc to Windows.
From open source project to a $3.8 million dollar seed round to transform Gatsby.js into a full-blown startup that’s building what’s becoming the defacto modern web frontend. In this episode, we talk with Jason Lengstorf about this blazing-fast static site generator, its building blocks and how they all fit together, the future of web development on the JAMstack (JavaScript + APIs), the importance of site performance, site rebuilds, getting started, and how they’re focused on building an awesome product and an awesome community.
In this special crossover episode of Founders Talk, Adam talks with Donald Fischer. Donald Fischer and the team at Tidelift are on a mission of making open source work better — for everyone. To pay the maintainers of open source software they are putting a new spin on a highly successful business model that’s a win-win for the maintainers as well as the software teams using the software. In this episode we dig into that backstory and Donald’s journey.
Adam is on location at ZEIT Day talking with Jessica Rose about burnout, Henry Zhu about his passions and pursuit of open source, and Simon Willison about data and his passion for interesting datasets in the world.
For the past year, David Crawshaw has intentionally sought ways to use LLMs while programming, in order to learn about them. He now regularly use LLMs while working and considers their benefits a net-positive on his productivity. David wrote down his experience, which we found both practical and insightful. Hopefully you will too!
We sit down with Tobias Koppers of webpack fame to talk about his life as a full-time maintainer of one of the most highly used (4 million+ dependent repos!) and influential tools in all of the web.
Things we ask Tobias include: how he got here, how he pays himself, has he ever gotten a raise, what his typical day is like, how he decides what to work on, if he pays attention to the competition, and if he’s ever suffered from burnout.
(Includes expletives) David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH), creator of Ruby on Rails and co-owner of 37signals, joined the show to discuss this Rails moment and renewed excitement for Rails. We discuss hard opinions, developers being cooked too long in the JavaScript soup, finding developer joy, the pros and cons of the BDFL, the ongoing WordPress drama with WP Engine, and what’s to come in Rails 8.
We talked with Steve Dower and Dan Taylor at Microsoft Build 2018 about the history of Python at Microsoft, the origination of IronPython, Python Tools for Visual Studio, flying under the radar to add support Python, fighting from within to support open source, and more.
Jerod is joined by Andrew Nesbitt and Ben Nickolls to talk Octobox, their open source web app that helps you manage your GitHub notifications. They discuss how Octobox came to be, why open source maintainers love it, the experiments they’re doing with pricing and business models, and how Octobox can continue to thrive despite GitHub’s renewed interest in improving notifications.
Evan Prodromou has been involved in open source since the mid ‘90s. His open source travel guide – Wikitravel – grew up alongside Wikipedia and the web itself. In this episode, we hear Evan’s history, try to solve open social networking once and for all, and learn how sprinkling a little artificial intelligence on to our products can yield big wins without having to shoot the moon.
Our friends Johannes Schickling & James Long join us to discuss the movement of local-first, its pros and cons, the tradeoffs, and the path to the warming waters of mostly local apps.
Adam and Jerod talk with two members of Segment’s engineering team: Co-founder and CTO, Calvin French-Owen, as well as Software Engineer, Alex Noonan, about their journey from monorepo to microservices back to monorepo. 100s of problem children to 1 superstar child.
Daniel Kokotajlo and the AI Futures Project lays out a potential scenario of superhuman AI’s impact, Liam ERD generates beautiful, interactive ER diagrams from your database, Mozilla takes on Gmail with “Thundermail”, algernon explains why grepping remains terrible & Vitor M. de Sousa Pereira rans on the insanity of being a software engineer.
Nathan Sobo, founding member of the Atom editor team at GitHub, joined the show take us all the way back to the beginning of Atom to learn where it came from, the founding team, the problem it solves, on through to shipping 1.0 and beyond.
Will Norris (Engineering Manager at Google’s Open Source office) joined the show to talk about their new release of the Google Open Source website as well as the release of Google’s internal documentation on how they do open source. Nearly 70 pages of documentation have been made public under creative commons license for the world to use. We talked about the backstory of Google’s Open Source office, their philosophy on OSS, their involvement in the TODO group, and much more.
Nick Sweeting joins Adam and Jerod to talk about the importance of archiving digital content, his work on ArchiveBox to make it easier, the challenges faced by Archive.org and the Wayback Machine, and the need for both centralized and distributed archiving solutions.
In this episode we’re shinning our maintainer spotlight on Ned Batchelder. Ned is one of the lucky ones out there that gets to double-dip — his day job is working on open source at edX, working on the Open edX community team. Ned is also a “single maintainer” of coverage.py - a tool for measuring code coverage of Python programs. This episode with Ned kicks off the first of many in our maintainer spotlight series where we dig deep into the life of an open source software maintainer. We’re producing this series in partnership with Tidelift. Huge thanks to Tidelift for making this series possible.
Adam Stacoviak and Jerod Santo talk with Tim Bell, the founder and creator of CS Unplugged, a collection of free teaching material that teaches computer science through engaging games and puzzles. They talk to him about where this program came from him, the need for computer science in today’s K-12 education programs, how CS Unplugged fits in, and how you can get involved.
Dan Kohn, Executive Director of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, joined the show to talk about what it means to be Cloud Native, the ins and outs of Dan’s role to the foundation, how they make money to sustain things, membership, the support they give to open source projects, the home they’ve given to Kubernetes, Prometheus and many other projects that have become the de facto projects to build cloud native applications on.
Yetunde Dada from QuantumBlack joins Jerod for a deep dive on Kedro, a workflow tool that helps structure reproducible, scaleable, deployable, robust, and versioned data pipelines. They discuss what Kedro’s all about and how it’s “changing the landscape of data pipelines in Python”, the ins/outs of open sourcing Kedro, and how they found early success by sweating the details. Finally, Jerod asks Yetunde about her passion project: a virtual reality film which debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in January.
This week we’re joined by Haroon Meer from Thinkst — the makers of Canary and Canary Tokens. Haroon walks us through a network getting compromised, what it takes to deploy a Canary on your network, how they maintain low false-positive numbers, their thoughts and principles on building their business (major wisdom shared!), and how a Canary helps surface network attacks in real time.
Gatsby creator Kyle Mathews joins Jerod fresh off the launch of incremental builds to tell the story of this feature that’s 3 years in the making. We talk about Kyle’s vision for Gatsby, why incremental builds took so long, why it’s not part of the open source tool, how he makes decisions between Cloud and open source features, and more.
We talked with Miguel de Icaza last week at Microsoft Connect(); in New York City. Miguel gave us the backstory on how he’s been competing with Microsoft for most of his developer career, and he shares the history of GNOME, Mono, and Xamarin — and what led him to now work at Microsoft.
Today we welcome Mike Pennisi into our Maintainer Spotlight. This is a special flavor of The Changelog where we go deep into a maintainer’s story. Mike is the maintainer of JSHint which, since its creation in 2011, was encumbered by a license that made it very hard for legally-conscious teams to use the project. The license was the widely-used MIT Expat license, but it included one additional clause: “The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil.” Because of this clause, many teams could not use JSHint.
Today’s episode with Mike covers the full gamut of JSHint’s journey and how non-free licensing can poison the well of free software.
Joseph Jacks, the Founder and General Partner of OSS Capital joined the show to share his plans for funding the future generation of commercial open source software based companies. This is a growing landscape of $100M+ revenue companies ~13 years in the making that’s just now getting serious early attention and institutional backing — and we talk through many of those details with Joseph.
We cover the whys and hows, why OSS now, deep details around licensing implications, and we speculate the types of open source software that makes sense for the types of investing Joseph and other plan to do.
