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Software's best weekly news brief, deep technical interviews & talk show

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #396

De-Google-ing your website analytics

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2020-05-27T11:00:00Z #oss +1 🎧 25,915

Plausible creators Uku TĂ€ht and Marko Saric join the show to talk about their open source, privacy-friendly alternative to Google Analytics. We talk through the backstory of the project, why it’s open source, the details behind a few viral blog posts Marko shared to bring in a ton of new interest to the project, why privacy matters in web analytics, how they prioritize building new features, the technical details behind their no cookie light-weight JavaScript approach, and their thoughts on a server-side option.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #395

Leading GitHub to a $7.5 billion acquisition

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2020-05-18T18:30:00Z #github +1 🎧 25,991

Jason Warner (CTO at GitHub) joined the show to talk with us about the backstory of how he helped to lead GitHub to a $7.5 billion acquisition by Microsoft. Specifically how they trusted their gut not just the data, and how they understood the value they were bringing to market. We also talk about Jason’s focus on “horizon 3” for GitHub, and his thoughts on remote work and how they’re leading GitHub engineering today.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #393

Gatsby's long road to incremental builds

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2020-05-06T11:00:00Z #gatsby +2 🎧 23,094

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.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #392

Indeed's FOSS Contributor Fund

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2020-04-30T21:00:00Z #oss +1 🎧 21,115

Duane O’Brien (head of open source at Indeed) joined the show to talk about their FOSS Contributor Fund and FOSS Responders. He’s super passionate about open source, and through his role at Indeed Duane was able to implement this fund and open source it as a framework for other companies to use. We talk through all the details of the program, its impact and influence, as well as ways companies can use the framework in their organization. We also talk about FOSS Responders an initiative to support open source that has been negatively impacted by COVID-19.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #391

Work from home SUPERCUT

Today we’re featuring conversations from different perspectives on working from home from our JS Party, Go Time, and Brain Science podcasts here on Changelog.com. Because, hey
if you didn’t know we have 6 active podcasts in our portfolio of shows. Head to changelog.com/podcasts to collect them all!

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #390

Visualizing the spread of Coronavirus

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2020-04-13T21:00:00Z #dataviz +1 🎧 22,435

Harry Stevens is a Graphics Reporter at The Washington Post and the author of “Why outbreaks like coronavirus spread exponentially, and how to ‘flatten the curve’” — the most popular post in The Washington Post’s online history.

We cover the necessary details of this global pandemic, the journalist, coding, and design skills required to be a graphics reporter, the backstory on visualizing this outbreak, why Harry chooses R over Python, advice for aspiring graphics reporters, and how all of this came together at the perfect time in history to give Harry a chance to catch lightning in a bottle.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #389

Securing the web with Let's Encrypt

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2020-04-07T20:00:00Z #oss +1 🎧 24,703

We’re talking with Josh Aas, the Executive Director of the Internet Security Research Group, which is the legal entity behind the Let’s Encrypt certificate authority. In June of 2017, Let’s Encrypt celebrated 100 Million certificates issued. Now, just about 2.5 years later, that number has grown to 1 Billion and 200 Million websites served. We talk with Josh about his journey and what it’s taken to build and grow Let’s Encrypt to enable a secure by default internet for everyone.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #388

The 10x developer myth

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2020-03-31T21:00:00Z #culture +1 🎧 28,554

In late 2019, Bill Nichols, a senior member of the technical staff at Carnegie Mellon University with the Software Engineering Institute published his study on “the 10x developer myth.” On this show we talk with Bill about all the details of his research. Is the 10x developer a myth? Let’s find out.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews

Welcome to The Changelog

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2020-03-30T20:31:18Z 🎧 33,248

The Changelog is deep discussions in & around the world of software
 and it’s been going for over a decade.

We talk to hackers, like Chris Anderson from 3D Robotics
 leaders, like Devon Zuegel from GitHub
 and innovators, like Amal Hussein


Welcome to The Changelog! Please listen to an episode from our catalog that interests you and subscribe today. We’d love to have you with us.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #387

Prepare yourself for Quantum Computing

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2020-03-24T19:00:00Z #qc +1 🎧 24,242

Johan Vos joined us to talk about his new book ‘Quantum Computing for Developers’ which is available to read right now as part of the Manning Early Access Program (MEAP). Listen near the end of the show to learn how you can get a free copy or check the show notes for details. We talked with Johan about the core principles of Quantum Computing, the hardware and software involved, the differences between quantum computing and classical computing, a little bit of physics, and what can we developers do today to prepare for the perhaps-not-so-distant future of Quantum Computing.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #386

Engineer to manager and back again

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2020-03-18T20:30:00Z #career 🎧 25,624

Lauren Tan joined us to talk about her blog post titled “Does it spark joy?” In this post Lauren shared the news of her resignation as an engineering manager at Netflix to return to being a software engineer. We examine the career trajectory of a software engineer and the seemingly inevitable draw to management for continued career growth. The idea of understanding “What are you optimizing for?” and whether or not what you’re doing truly brings you joy.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #385

Pushing webpack forward

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2020-03-13T21:45:00Z #maintainer-spotlight +3 🎧 23,540

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.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews

Altair 8800 and the dawn of a revolution

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2020-03-11T11:00:00Z #oss 🎧 21,460

We partnered with Red Hat to promote Season 4 of Command Line Heroes — a podcast about the people who transform technology from the command line up. Season 4 is all about hardware that changed the game. We’re featuring episode 3 from season 4 — called “Personal Computers: The Altair 8800 and the Dawn of a Revolution.” This is the story of personal computers and the revolution that took place in the PC era.

Learn more and subscribe at redhat.com/commandlineheroes.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #384

Enter the Matrix

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2020-03-09T20:15:00Z #oss 🎧 22,778

Matthew Hodgson (technical co-founder) joined us to talk about Matrix - an open source project and open standard for secure, decentralized, real-time communication. It’s open source, it’s decentralized, it’s end-to-end-encrypted, and it’s also self-sovereign. Matrix also provides a bridge feature to bridge existing platforms and communication silos into a global open matrix of communication. A recent big win for Matrix was Mozilla’s announcement of switching off its IRC network that it had been using for 22 years and now uses Matrix instead.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #383

From open core to open source

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2020-03-02T22:00:00Z #oss +1 🎧 24,081

Frank Karlitschek joined us to talk about Nextcloud - a self-hosted free & open source community-driven productivity platform that’s safe home for all your data. We talk about how Nextcloud was forked from ownCloud, successful ways to run community-driven open source projects, open core vs open source, aligned incentives, and the challenges Nextcloud is facing to increase adoption and grow.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #382

The developer's guide to content creation

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2020-02-21T15:30:00Z #oss +1 🎧 23,640

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 Interviews Changelog Interviews #381

The dawn of sponsorware

Caleb Porzio is the creator & maintainer of Livewire, AlpineJS, and more. His latest open source endeavor was announced as “sponsorware”, which means it lived in a private repo (only available to Caleb’s GitHub Sponsors) until he hit a set sponsorship threshold, at which point it was open sourced.

On this episode, we talk through this sponsorware experiment in-depth. We learn how he dreamt it up, how it went (spoiler: very well), and how he had to change his mindset on 2 things in order to make sustainability possible.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #380

Productionising real-world ML data pipelines

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2020-02-14T21:00:00Z #python +3 🎧 23,153

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.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #379

Good tech debt

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2020-02-06T12:00:00Z #practices +1 🎧 27,805

Jon Thornton (Engineering Manager at Squarespace) joined the show to talk about tech debt by way of his post to the Squarespace engineering blog titled “3 Kinds of Good Tech Debt”. We talked through the concept of “good tech debt,” how to leverage it, how to manage it, who’s in charge of it, how it’s similar to ways we leverage financial debt, and how Squarespace uses tech debt to drive product development.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews

The soul of an old machine

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2020-02-04T12:00:00Z #hardware 🎧 24,391

We partnered with Red Hat to promote Season 4 of Command Line Heroes — a podcast about the people who transform technology from the command line up. Season 4 is all about hardware that changed the game. We’re featuring episode 1 from season 4 — called “Minicomputers: The soul of an old machine.” This is the story of Minicomputers and how they paved the way for the personal computers that could fit in a bag and, eventually, the phones in our pockets.

Learn more and subscribe at redhat.com/commandlineheroes.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #378

Open source meets climate science

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2020-01-31T22:30:00Z #oss +1 🎧 22,707

Anders Damsgaard is a climate science researcher working on cryosphere processes at the Department of Geophysics at Stanford University. He joined the show to talk with us about the intersection of open source and climate science. Specifically, we discuss a set of shell tools he created called The Scholarref Tools which allow you to perform most of the tasks required to gather the references needed during the writing phase of an academic paper. We also discuss climate science, physics, self hosting Git, and why Anders isn’t present on any “social” networks.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #377

Meet Algo, your personal VPN in the cloud

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2020-01-20T21:00:00Z #cloud +3 🎧 24,712

The commercial VPN industry is a minefield to navigate and many open source solutions are a pain to use or ill-suited for the task. Algo VPN, on the other hand, is a self-hosted personal VPN designed for ease of deployment and security. It uses the securest industry standards, builds on rock-solid solutions like WireGuard and Ansible, and runs on an ever-growing list of cloud hosting providers.

On this episode Dan Guido –CEO of security firm Trail of Bits and Algo’s creator– joins Jerod to discuss the project in depth.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #376

State of the “log” 2019

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2020-01-14T22:30:00Z #updates +1 🎧 22,437

Welcome to 2020 — on this year’s “State of the ‘log’” episode Jerod and I look back at our favorite moments from 2019 and forward to 2020 and beyond. We talk through our most popular episodes, our personal favorites, our 10-year anniversary, the excitement we have for Brain Science our newest podcast, it’s for the curious! And we also look forward to plans we have for 2020 and the decade to come


Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #375

Gerhard goes to KubeCon (part 2)

Gerhard is back for part two of our interviews at KubeCon 2019. Join him as he goes deep on Prometheus with Björn Rabenstein, Ben Kochie, and Frederic Branczyk
 Grafana with Tom Wilkie and Ed Welch
 and Crossplane with Jared Watts, Marques Johansson, and Dan Mangum.

Don’t miss part one with Bryan Liles, Priyanka Sharma, Natasha Woods, & Alexis Richardson.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #374

Gerhard goes to KubeCon (part 1)

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2019-12-18T16:30:00Z #kubernetes +3 🎧 23,669

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.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #373

Trending up GitHub's developer charts

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2019-12-14T16:00:00Z #maintainer-spotlight +3 🎧 24,138

In this episode we’re shining our maintainer spotlight on Ovilia. Hailing from Shanghai, China, Ovilia is an up-and-coming developer who contributes to Apache ECharts, maintains Polyvia, which does very cool low-poly image and video processing, and has a sweet personal website, too.

This episode with Ovilia continues 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.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #372

Building an open source excavation robot for NASA

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2019-12-11T16:00:00Z #space +2 🎧 22,585

Ronald Marrero is a software developer working on NASA’s Artemis program, which aims at landing the first woman and next man on the Moon by 2024. How Ron got here is a fascinating story, starting at UCF and winding its way through the Florida Space Institute, working with NASA’s Swamp Works team, and building an open source excavation robot.

On this episode Ron tells us how it all went down and shares what he learned along the way.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #371

Re-licensing Sentry

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2019-12-08T04:00:00Z #oss +2 🎧 22,310

David Cramer joined the show to talk about the recent license change of Sentry to the Business Source License from a BSD 3-clause license. We talk about the details that triggered this change, the specifics of the BSL license and its required parameters, the threat to commercial open source products like Sentry, his concerns for the “open core” model, and what the future of open source might look like in light of protections-oriented source-available licenses like the BSL becoming more common.

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