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

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #367

Back to Agile's basics

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2019-10-31T14:00:00Z #practices +2 🎧 34,575

Robert C. Martin, aka Uncle Bob, joined the show to talk about the practices of Agile. Bob has written a series of books in order to pass down the wisdom he’s gained over his 50 year software career — books like Clean Architecture, Clean Code, The Clean Coder, The Software Craftsman, and finally Clean Agile — which is the focus of today’s discussion. We cover the origins of his “Uncle Bob” nickname, the Agile Manifesto, why Agile is best suited for developing software, how it applies today, communication patterns for teams, co-location vs distributed, and more importantly Bob shares his “why” for writing this book.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #365

Let's talk Elixir!

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2019-10-09T19:00:00Z #elixir +2 🎧 30,213

Jerod is joined by Chris and Desmond (co-hosts of the ElixirTalk podcast) to catch up on what’s moving and shaking in the Elixir and Phoenix communities. We discuss what’s attractive about Elixir, what it means to have the language finalized, why folks are so excited by Phoenix LiveView, the ambitious new Lumen project that’s bringing Elixir to WebAssembly, and more.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #364

Maintainer spotlight! Valeri Karpov

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2019-10-02T17:42:58Z #maintainer-spotlight +4 🎧 24,694

In this episode we’re shining our maintainer spotlight on Valeri Karpov. Val has been the solo maintainer of Mongoose since 2014. This episode with Val 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 #363

Nushell for the GitHub era

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2019-09-27T19:00:00Z #oss +2 🎧 26,788

Jonathan Turner, Andrés Robalino, and Yehuda Katz joined the show to talk about Nushell, or just Nu for short. It’s a modern shell for the GitHub era. It’s written in Rust, and it has the backing of some of the greatest minds in open source. We talk through what it is, how it works and cool things you can do with it, why Rust, ideas for the future, and ways for the community to get involved and contribute.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #361

Generative engineering cultures

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2019-09-17T11:00:00Z #practices +1 🎧 25,393

Dave Kaplan (Head of Software Engineering at Policygenius) joined the show to talk about Generative Engineering Cultures and how they have become the goal of industry-aware tech teams. We talk through the topology of organizational cultures ranging from pathological, to bureaucratic, to generative, the importance of management buy-in (from the top down) on leading a generative culture, the ability to contribute original value which is deeply rooted in the concept of aligned autonomy. We also covered the 6 core skills required for us to be empowered in our teams.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #360

Modern software is built on APIs

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2019-09-06T11:00:00Z #oss +1 🎧 31,171

Abhinav Asthana (founder of Postman) joined the show to talk about Postman, an ADE — API Development Environment — that began as open source and is now a full-fledged company that just announced a $50 million dollar Series B. We talk about why Postman has grown so successfully, APIs and their impact to core business factors, what it means to be an API Development Environment (ADE), and how they created one of the most popular API platforms and community.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #359

Maintainer spotlight! Feross Aboukhadijeh

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2019-08-29T20:00:00Z #maintainer-spotlight +2 🎧 25,431

In this episode we’re shining our maintainer spotlight on Feross Aboukhadijeh. Feross is the creator and maintainer of 100’s of open source projects which have been downloaded 100’s of million of times each month — projects like StandardJS, BitMidi, and WebTorrent to name a few. This episode with Feross 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 #358

OSCON 2019 anthology

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2019-08-23T11:00:00Z #oss +2 🎧 24,031

We’re on the expo hall floor of OSCON 2019 talking with Eric Holscher, Ali Spittel, and Hong Phuc Dang. First up, we talk to Eric about his work at Write the Docs, ethical advertising, and the Pac-Man rule at conferences. Second, we talk with Ali about her passion for teaching developers, her passion for writing, and her new found love for podcasting. Last, we talk with Hong about her work at FOSSASIA, the disconnect between America and Asia in open source, and several of the cool open source projects they have on GitHub.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #357

Shaping, betting, and building

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2019-08-16T11:00:00Z #practices 🎧 29,355

Ryan Singer, head of Product Strategy at Basecamp, joined the show to talk about their newest book — Shape Up: Stop running in circles and ship work that matters. It’s written by Ryan himself and you can read it right now for free online at Basecamp.com/shapeup.

We talked about the back story of the book, how the methodology for Shape Up developed from within at Basecamp, the principles and methodologies of Shape Up, how teams of varying sizes can implement Shape Up. Ryan even shared a special invitation to our listeners near the end of the show to his live and in-person Shape Up workshop on August 28th in Detroit, Michigan.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #356

Observability is for your unknown unknowns

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2019-08-07T20:00:00Z #ops +1 🎧 27,750

Christine Yen (co-founder and CEO of Honeycomb) joined the show to talk about her upcoming talk at Strange Loop titled “Observability: Superpowers for Developers.” We talk practically about observability and how it delivers on these superpowers. We also cover the biggest hurdles to observability, the cultural shifts needed in teams to implement observability, and even the gains the entire organization can enjoy when you deliver high-quality code and you’re able to respond to system failure with resilience.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #355

Federating JavaScript's language commons with Entropic

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2019-08-02T11:00:00Z #oss +2 🎧 24,702

We’re joined by C J Silverio, aka ceejbot on Twitter, aka 2nd hire and former CTO at npm Inc. We talk with Ceej about her recent JS Conf EU talk titled “The Economies of Open Source” where she laid our her concerns with the JavaScript language commons being owned by venture capitalists. Currently the JavaScript language commons is controlled by the npm registery, and as you may know, npm is a VC backed for profit start up. Of course we also talk with Ceej about the bomb she dropped, Entropic, at the end of that talk — a federated package registry for JavaScript C J hopes will unseat npm and free the JavaScript language commons.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #354

Go is eating the world of software

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2019-07-25T17:00:00Z #oss +2 🎧 31,387

We’re joined by Ron Evans at OSCON on the expo hall floor talking about Go and how it’s eating the world of software. Specifically we’re talking about TinyGo and what they’re doing to bring the Go programming language to micro-controllers and modern web browsers. According to Ron Evans, “embedded systems and Go are the most exciting things happening right now.”

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #353

The war for the soul of open source

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2019-07-16T11:05:00Z #oscon +1 🎧 26,167

Adam Jacob (co-founder and board member of Chef) joins the show to talk about the keynote he’s giving at OSCON this week. The keynote is titled “The war for the soul of open source.” We talked about what made open source great in the first place, what went wrong, the pitfalls of open core models, licensing, and more.

By the way, we’re at OSCON this week so if you make your way to the expo hall, make sure you come by our booth and say hi.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews

Learning the BASICs

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2019-07-16T11:05:00Z #oss +1 🎧 53,258

We partnered with Red Hat to promote Season 3 of Command Line Heroes — an original podcast from Red Hat, hosted by Saron Yitbarek, about the people who transform technology from the command line up. It’s an awesome show and we’re huge fans of Saron and the team behind the podcast, so we wanted to share it with you.

Learn more and subscribe at redhat.com/commandlineheroes.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #352

The Pragmatic Programmers

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2019-07-11T11:00:00Z #learn +2 🎧 31,780

Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt, best known as the authors of The Pragmatic Programmer and founders of The Pragmatic Bookshelf, joined the show today to talk about the 20th anniversary edition of The Pragmatic Programmer. This is a beloved book to software developers all over the world, so we wanted to catch up with Andy and Dave to talk about how this book came to be, some of the wisdom shared in its contents, as well as the impact it’s had on the world of software.

Also, the beta book is now “fully content complete” and is going to production. If you decide to pick up the ebook, you’ll get a coupon for 50% off the hardcover when it comes out this fall.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews

Python's Tale

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2019-07-02T11:00:00Z #python 🎧 26,262

We partnered with Red Hat to promote Season 3 of Command Line Heroes — an original podcast from Red Hat, hosted by Saron Yitbarek, about the people who transform technology from the command line up. It’s an awesome show and we’re huge fans of Saron and the team behind the podcast, so we wanted to share it with you.

Learn more and subscribe at redhat.com/commandlineheroes.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #351

Maintainer spotlight! Ned Batchelder

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2019-06-28T20:00:00Z #maintainer-spotlight +2 🎧 23,268

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.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #350

Boldly going where no data tools have gone before

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2019-06-19T18:20:57Z #oss +1 🎧 25,317

Computer Scientist Yaw Anokwa joins the show to tell us how Open Data Kit is enabling data collection efforts around the world. From monitoring rainforests to observing elections to tracking outbreaks, ODK has done it all. We hear its origin story, ruminate on why it’s been so successful, learn how the software works, and even answer the question, “are people really using it in space?!” All that and more…

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #349

The state of CSS in 2019

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2019-06-14T19:00:00Z #oss +2 🎧 26,251

We’re talking with Sacha Greif to discuss the State of CSS survey and results. CSS is evolving faster than ever. And, coming off the heels of their annual State of JavaScript survey, they’ve decided to take on the world of styles and selectors to help identify the latests patterns and trends in CSS.

We talk through the history and motivations of this survey, the methodology of their data collection, the tooling involved to build and run the survey, and of course we dig deep into the survey results and talk through the insights we found most interesting.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #348

Python's new governance and core team

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2019-06-06T11:00:00Z #oss +1 🎧 26,259

We’re talking with Brett Cannon for a behind the scenes look at Guido stepping down as Python’s BDFL (Benevolent dictator for life) and the process they had to go through to establish a new governance model, the various proposed PEPs to establish this new direction, the winning PEP, and what the future holds for Python.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #347

Creating and selling multiplayer online games

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2019-05-24T11:00:00Z #oss +2 🎧 27,898

We’re talking with Victor Zhou about the explosion of the .io game genre. We talked through all the details around building and running one of these games, the details behind Victor’s super popular game called Generals — which he eventually sold, and we also covered the economics behind creating and selling one of these games.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #346

Off the grid social networking with Manyverse

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2019-05-18T21:00:00Z #oss +2 🎧 26,000

We’re talking with Andre Staltz, creator of Manyverse — a social network off the grid. It’s open source and free in every sense of the word. We talked through the backstory, how a user’s network gets formed, how data is stored and shared, why off-grid is so important to Andre, and what type of user uses an “off-the-grid” social network.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #345

Quirk and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)

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2019-05-10T21:00:00Z #oss +2 🎧 27,124

We’re talking with Evan Conrad — for most of Evan’s life he has suffered from severe panic attacks, often twice per week. Eventually he stumbled upon a therapy method called Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, or CBT for short, and saw positive results. This led him to create Quirk, an open source iOS app which allows its users to practice one of the most common formats of CBT.

On the show we mentioned a new podcast we’re launching called Brain Science — it’s hosted by Adam Stacoviak and Mireille Reece, a Doctor of Clinical Psychology. Brain Science is a podcast for the curious that explores the inner-workings of the human brain to understand behavior change, habit formation, mental health, and the human condition. It’s Brain Science applied — not just how does the brain work, but how do we apply what we know about the brain to better our lives. Stay tuned after the show for a special preview of Brain Science.

If you haven’t yet, right now would be a great time to subscribe to Master at changelog.com/master. It’s one feed to rule them all, plus some extras that only hit the master feed.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #344

Inside 2019's infrastructure for Changelog.com

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2019-05-05T04:00:00Z #oss +2 🎧 25,681

We’re talking with Gerhard Lazu, our resident ops and infrastructure expert, about the setup we’ve rolled out for 2019. Late 2016 we relaunched Changelog.com as a new Phoenix/Elixir application and that included a brand new infrastructure and deployment process. 2019’s infrastructure update includes Linode, CoreOS, Docker, CircleCI, Rollbar, Fastly, Netdata, and more — and we talk through all the details on this show.

This show is also an open invite to you and the rest of the community to join us in Slack and learn and contribute to Changelog.com. Head to changelog.com/community to get started.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #343

Running functions anywhere with OpenFaaS

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2019-04-25T17:00:00Z #serverless +2 🎧 26,397

We’re talking with Alex Ellis, the founder of OpenFaaS — serverless functions made simple for Docker and Kubernetes. We talked about the backstory and details of OpenFaaS, “the curious case of serverless on Kubernetes,” the landscape of open source serverless platforms, how Alex is leading and building this community, getting involved, and maintainership vs leadership.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #342

From zero to thought leader in 6 months

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2019-04-18T16:30:00Z #ux +2 🎧 28,333

We’re talking with Emma Bostian about going from zero to thought leader in 6 months. We talk about the nuances of UX including the differences between an UX Designer and a UX Engineer, we touch on “the great divide”, and we talk about Coding Coach — the open source project and community that Emma and others are building to connect software developers and mentors all over the world.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #341

Wasmer is taking WebAssembly beyond the browser

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2019-04-12T11:00:00Z #wasm +3 🎧 27,197

We’re talking with Syrus Akbary about WebAssembly and Wasmer — a standalone just in time WebAssembly runtime aiming to be fully compatible with Emscripten, Rust, and Go. We talked about taking WebAssembly beyond the browser, universal binaries, what’s an ABI?, running WebAssembly from any language, and what a world might look like with platform independent universal binaries powered by WebAssembly.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #340

All things text mode

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2019-04-04T19:00:00Z #oss +2 🎧 29,257

We’re talking all things text mode with Lucas da Costa — we logged his post “How I’m still not using GUIs in 2019” a guide focused on making the terminal your IDE. We talked through his Terminal starter pack which includes: neovim, tmux, iterm2, and zsh by way of oh-my-zsh, his rules for learning vim, the awesomeness of CLI’s, and the pros and cons of graphical and plain text editors.

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