The Changelog

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

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #313

The first cloud native programming language

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2018-09-05T11:00:00Z #ballerina +2 🎧 22,892

Jerod talked with Paul Fremantle, the CTO and Co-Founder of WSO2, about their new programming language, Ballerina — a cloud-native language which aims to make it easier to write microservices that integrate APIs. They talked about the creation of the language and how it was inspired by so many technologies, cloud native features like built-in container support, serverless-friendly, observability, and how it works with, or without, a service mesh — just to name a few.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #311

Istio service mesh and microservices

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2018-08-22T16:47:06Z #cloud 🎧 24,035

Adam and Jerod talk with Jason McGee, VP and CTO of IBM Cloud Platform about Istio — an open platform that provides a uniform way to connect, secure, control, and observe microservices. They cover what service mesh is, why its suddenly so interesting, who’s involved in Istio, their involvement with the CNCF, getting started, and what’s next for Istio.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #310

Open sourcing the DEV community

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2018-08-15T17:00:00Z #culture +2 🎧 21,253

We talk with Ben Halpern the founder and webmaster of dev.to — a community for developers to talk about software. Last Wednesday they open sourced the codebase of the dev.to platform, so we wanted to talk through all the details with Ben. We talked through the backstory, how Ben realized this could become a business, how the team was formed, their motivations for open sourcing it and why they didn’t open source it from the start, the technical stack, and their vision for the future of the site.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews

Jeff Robbins is an actual rockstar [rebroadcast]

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2018-08-10T19:06:44Z #culture 🎧 20,471

On this special bonus episode of The Changelog, we’re playing the latest episode of Away from Keyboard with Jeff Robbins. While some dream of having a successful career, Jeff Robbins has already had several. Once the lead singer and guitarist for Orbit, Jeff has worked on some of the most famous Drupal websites. He talks to Tim about his early interest in computers, starting Lullabot, and adjusting to life after leaving the company he built and ran.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #309

Rebuilding Exercism from the ground up

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2018-08-08T16:20:51Z #learn +2 🎧 20,750

Adam and Jerod invite back Katrina Owen after years away focusing on Exercism—a 100% free platform for code practice and mentorship with over 2500 exercises and 48 different language tracks. They talk to Katrina about how the platform has changed, the direction it’s taken, the backstory on the recently launched version 2, and how she plans to turn Exercism into a sustainable business. Also, what happens if that doesn’t work?!

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #306

The Great GatsbyJS

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2018-07-18T11:00:00Z #gatsby +2 🎧 23,625

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.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #305

Putting AI in a box at MachineBox [rebroadcast]

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2018-07-11T17:51:44Z #machinelearning +2 🎧 20,918

In this special episode of The Changelog we’re sharing a full-length episode of our newly launched podcast called Practical AI — covering AI, Machine Learning, and Data Science. In this episode Mat Ryer and David Hernandez joined Daniel and Chris to talk about MachineBox, building a company around AI, and democratizing AI.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #304

The impact of AI at Microsoft

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2018-07-04T11:00:00Z #ai +2 🎧 22,928

We’re on location at Microsoft Build 2018 talking with Corey Sanders and Steve Guggenheimer — two Microsoft veterans focused on artificial intelligence and cloud computing. We talked about the direction and convergence of AI, ethics, cloud computing, and how the day to day lives of developers will change because of the advancements in AI.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #303

Programmable infrastructure

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2018-06-27T11:00:00Z 🎧 22,732

Jerod Santo is riding solo talking with Kurt Mackey, co-founder of Fly. He talked to him about his work at Ars Technica, his prediction on tabs being a fad, and Kurt being a founding member of MongoHQ, which was later renamed to Compose and acquired by IBM. Jerod also talked to him about lighthouse scores, performance, and an interesting program Fly is instituting to compensate open source project maintainers.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #302

Computer Science without a computer

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2018-06-20T11:00:00Z 🎧 23,238

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.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #298

The beginnings of Microsoft Azure

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2018-05-23T15:05:00Z #microsoft +3 🎧 23,097

We’re on location at Microsoft Build 2018 talking with Julia White, Corporate Vice President at Microsoft — a 17 year Microsoft veteran. We talked with Julia about her take on this “new Microsoft”, Satya Nadella’s first appearance as CEO when they revealed the first glimpse of Microsoft’s cloud offering which started with Office, the beginnings of Microsoft Azure, Azure as the world’s computer, and how every company is becoming a software company.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #295

Scaling all the things at Slack

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2018-05-02T15:04:27Z #culture +1 🎧 25,689

Julia Grace joined the show to talk bout about scaling all the things at Slack. Julia is currently the Senior Director of Infrastructure Engineering at Slack, and has been their since 2015 — so she’s seen Slack during its hyper-growth. We talked about Slack’s growth and scale challenges, scaling engineering teams, the responsibilities and challenges of being a manager, communicating up and communicating down, quality of service and reliability, and what it takes to build high performing leadership teams.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #294

Code Cartoons, Rust, WebAssembly

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2018-04-25T11:00:00Z #rust +2 🎧 24,365

Lin Clark joined the show to talk about Code Cartoons, her work at Mozilla in the emerging technologies group, Rust, Servo, and WebAssembly (aka Wasm), the Rust community’s big goal in 2018 for Rust to become a web language (thanks in part to Wasm), passing objects between Rust and JavaScript, Rust libraries depending on JavaScript packages and vice versa, Wasm ES Modules, and Lin’s upcoming keynote at Fluent on the parallel future of the browser.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #293

Ember four years later

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2018-04-18T11:00:00Z #ember +2 🎧 21,139

Chad Hietala joined the show to talk with us about the long history of Ember.js, how he first got involved, his work at LinkedIn and his work as an Ember Core team member, how the Ember team communicates expectations from release to release, their well documented RFC process, ES Classes in Ember, Glimmer, and where Ember is being used today.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #292

Elasticsearch and doubling down on "open"

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2018-04-11T11:00:00Z #elasticsearch +1 🎧 24,682

Philipp Krenn joined the show to talk with us about Elasticsearch, the problem it solves, where it came from, and where it’s at today. We discussed the query language, what it can be compared to, whether or not it’s a database replacement or a database complement, Elasticsearch vs Elastic the company.

We also talked about the details behind Elastic’s plan of “doubling down on open” to open up X-Pack, which is open code paid add-on features to Elasticsearch. We discussed the implications of this on their business model, and what changes will take place at the code and license level on GitHub.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #291

Winamp2 JS

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2018-04-06T11:30:00Z #javascript +1 🎧 20,558

Jordan Eldredge joined the show to talk with us about Winamp2-js — a reimplementation of Winamp 2.9 in HTML5 and Javascript. For many of our listeners, talking about Winamp may bring to mind some extreme nostalgia about the internet of the past … and it’s certainly that way for Jerod and I. Jordan started this project in 2014 and it’s what ultimately got the attention of some folks at Facebook, where he now works on Nuclide.

We shared stories about Winamp back in the day, actually listening to music as an mp3, the technical hurdles and learning Jordan has experienced, skinning it, playlists, making it a frontend for Spotify – which is so ironic to actually say. Also, Jerod has been hacking it via livestream on Twitch to add it as an alternate audio player on Changelog.com.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #290

That's it. This is the finale!

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2018-03-30T19:00:00Z #sustainability +1 🎧 19,206

We’re rebroadcasting the finale episode of the beloved Request For Commits. But don’t worry, The Changelog will be back with new episodes next week. In this finale episode of Request For Commits, we regroup to discuss the podcast from its start to its finish, lessons learned, community impact, and where the conversations around open source sustainability are taking place, now and in the future. It’s the end of Request For Commits, but the conversations we’ve had will continue on The Changelog. We also have some guest-host appearances for Nadia and Mikeal planned in the near future on this podcast. So, stay tuned.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #289

Automated dependency updates

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2018-03-23T19:00:00Z #packages 🎧 20,811

Rhys Arkins joined the show to talk about automating dependency updates using Renovate. Renovate is an open source tool to keep source code dependencies up-to-date using automated Pull Requests. We talked about who’s using it, the languages and environments that are supported, self-hosted vs SaaS and how that plays into supporting this open source, auto-merging, being a GitHub App and in the GitHub Marketplace, and building this as a business on someone else’s platform.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #287

Truffle framework and decentralized Ethereum apps

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2018-03-13T19:00:00Z #ethereum +2 🎧 20,457

Tim Coulter joined the show to talk about Truffle — a development environment, testing framework, and asset pipeline for Ethereum. We talked with Tim about how he got into Ethereum and dapp development, Solidity vs JavaScript, smart contract testing, EthPM which is like npm but for Ethereum, Why decentralization? Why dapps? Basically, why rebuild the internet? And last but not least - who’s using Truffle and what have they built with it?

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #286

JavaScript sprinkles in Basecamp turned Stimulus

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2018-03-06T20:00:00Z #stimulus +2 🎧 26,120

David Heinemeier Hansson joined the show to share the story of how JavaScript sprinkles in Basecamp evolved into a full-fledged framework called Stimulus. We talked about ins and outs of Basecamp as it is today, Ruby, JavaScript and David’s somewhat new found love for that language. How they open source because they can. And David’s new YouTube series called “On Writing Software Well”.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #285

We couldn’t afford an Oculus so we built one

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2018-02-23T20:00:00Z #vr 🎧 20,474

Max Coutté joined the show to share his journey of learning the math and programming required to build an open source Oculus headset for $100. Max is 16 and lives in a small village in France. And one day he and his friends decided to built an Oculus headset because they couldn’t afford one. This show takes you through Max’s journey, how his teacher (aka Sensei) made all the difference, and how the chief architect at Oculus, Atman Binstock, advised him to make it all open source.

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