The Changelog

The Changelog Artwork

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

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #392

Indeed's FOSS Contributor Fund

Play
2020-04-30T21:00:00Z #oss +1 🎧 21,155

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

Play
2020-04-13T21:00:00Z #dataviz +1 🎧 22,474

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

Play
2020-04-07T20:00:00Z #oss +1 🎧 24,817

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

Play
2020-03-31T21:00:00Z #culture +1 🎧 28,612

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 #387

Prepare yourself for Quantum Computing

Play
2020-03-24T19:00:00Z #qc +1 🎧 24,298

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

Play
2020-03-18T20:30:00Z #career 🎧 25,675

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

Play
2020-03-13T21:45:00Z #maintainer-spotlight +3 🎧 23,584

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

Play
2020-03-11T11:00:00Z #oss 🎧 21,495

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

Play
2020-03-09T20:15:00Z #oss 🎧 22,812

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

Play
2020-03-02T22:00:00Z #oss +1 🎧 24,124

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

Play
2020-02-21T15:30:00Z #oss +1 🎧 23,693

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

Play
2020-02-14T21:00:00Z #python +3 🎧 23,188

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

Play
2020-02-06T12:00:00Z #practices +1 🎧 27,860

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

Play
2020-02-04T12:00:00Z #hardware 🎧 24,439

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

Play
2020-01-31T22:30:00Z #oss +1 🎧 22,747

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

Play
2020-01-20T21:00:00Z #cloud +3 🎧 24,776

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

Play
2020-01-14T22:30:00Z #updates +1 🎧 22,481

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)

Play
2019-12-18T16:30:00Z #kubernetes +3 🎧 23,712

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

Play
2019-12-14T16:00:00Z #maintainer-spotlight +3 🎧 24,191

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

Play
2019-12-11T16:00:00Z #space +2 🎧 22,627

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

Play
2019-12-08T04:00:00Z #oss +2 🎧 22,357

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.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #370

The making of GitHub Sponsors

Play
2019-12-01T04:00:00Z #github +2 🎧 23,091

Devon Zuegel is an Open Source Product Manager at GitHub. She’s also one of the key people responsible for making GitHub Sponsors a thing. We talk with Devon about how she came to GitHub to develop GitHub Sponsors, the months of research she did to learn how to best solve the sustainability problem of open source, why GitHub is now addressing this issue, the various ways and models of addressing maintainers’ financial needs, and Devon also shared what’s in store for the future of GitHub Sponsors.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #369

Five years of freeCodeCamp

Play
2019-11-15T18:00:00Z #learn +2 🎧 26,107

Today we have a very special show for you – we’re talking with Quincy Larson the founder of freeCodeCamp as part of a two-part companion podcast series where we each celebrate our 5 and 10 year anniversaries. This year marks 5 years for freeCodeCamp and 10 years for us here at Changelog. So make sure you check out the freeCodeCamp podcast next week when Quincy ships our episode to their feed. But, on today’s episode we catch up with Quincy on all things freeCodeCamp.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #368

Finding collaborators for open source

Play
2019-11-10T04:00:00Z #oss +1 🎧 24,679

Jeff Meyerson, host of Software Engineering Daily, and the founder of FindCollabs (a place to find collaborators for open source software) joined the show to talk about living in San Francisco, his thoughts on podcasting and where the medium is heading, getting through large scale market changes. We talk at length about his new project FindCollabs, the difficulty of reliably finding people to collaborate with, the importance of reputation and ratings systems, and his invite to this audience to check out what he’s doing and get involved.

Player art
  0:00 / 0:00