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

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #336

Containerizing compute driven workloads with Singularity

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2019-02-28T12:00:00Z #containers +2 🎧 25,936

We’re talking with Greg Kurtzer, the founder of CentOS, Warewulf, and most recently Singularity — an open source container platform designed to be simple, fast, and secure. Singularity is optimized for enterprise and high-performance computing workloads. What’s interesting is how Singularity allows untrusted users to run untrusted containers in a trusted way. We cover the backstory, Singularity Pro and how they’re not holding the open source community version hostage, as well as how Singularity is being used to containerize and support workflows in artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, and more.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #333

Tactical design advice for developers

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2019-02-06T12:00:00Z #design 🎧 29,708

Adam talks with Erik Kennedy about tactical design advice for developers. Erik is a self-taught UI designer and brings a wealth of practical advice for those seeking to advance their design skills and learn more about user interface design. We cover his seven rules for creating gorgeous UI, the fundamentals of user interface design — color, typography, layout, and process. We also talk about his course Learn UI Design and how it’s the ultimate on-ramp for upcoming UI designers.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #332

A UI framework without the framework

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2019-01-30T21:25:14Z #javascript +3 🎧 30,482

Jerod and Adam talked with Rich Harris –a JavaScript Journalist on The New York Times Investigations team– about his magical disappearing UI framework called Svelte. We compare and contrast Svelte to React, how the framework is embedded in a component, build time vs. run time, scoping CSS to components, and CSS in JavaScript. Rich also shares where Svelte v3 is heading and the details on Sapper, a framework for building extremely high-performance progressive web apps, powered by Svelte.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #331

GitHub Actions is the next big thing

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2019-01-23T21:38:27Z #github 🎧 33,939

Adam and Jerod talk to Kyle Daigle, the Director of Ecosystem Engineering at GitHub. They talk about GitHub Actions, the new automation platform announced at GitHub Universe this past October 2018. GitHub Actions is the next big thing coming out of GitHub with the promise of powerful workflows to supercharge your repos and GitHub experience. Build your container apps, publish packages to registries, or automate welcoming new users to your open source projects — with access to interact with the full GitHub API and any other public APIs, Actions seem to have limitless possibilities.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #330

source{d} turns code into actionable insights

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2019-01-16T12:00:00Z #machinelearning +2 🎧 25,682

Adam caught up with Francesc Campoy at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2018 in Seattle, WA to talk about the work he’s doing at source{d} to apply Machine Learning to source code, and turn that codebase into actionable insights. It’s a movement they’re driving called Machine Learning on Code. They talked through their open source products, how they work, what types of insights can be gained, and they also talked through the code analysis Francesc did on the Kubernetes code base. This is as close as you get to the bleeding edge and we’re very interested to see where this goes.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #328

State of the "log" 2018

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2018-12-19T12:00:00Z #sotl 🎧 26,482

On this year’s “State of the ‘log’” episode we’re going behind the scenes to look back at 2018 as we prepare for 2019 and onward. We talk through our most popular episodes, most controversial episodes, and even some of our personal favorites. We also catch you up on some company level updates here at Changelog Media. We hired Tim Smith earlier this year as our Senior Producer, we retired Request for Commits, started some new shows…

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #327

Untangle your GitHub notifications with Octobox

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2018-12-13T18:41:10Z #github +1 🎧 23,711

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.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #326

The insider perspective on the event-stream compromise

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2018-12-05T21:50:10Z #infosec +3 🎧 25,267

Adam and Jerod talk with Dominic Tarr, creator of event-stream, the IO library that made recent news as the latest malicious package in the npm registry. event-stream was turned malware, designed to target a very specific development environment and harvest account details and private keys from Bitcoin accounts.

They talk through Dominic’s backstory as a prolific contributor to open source, his stance on this package, his work in open source, the sequence of events around the hack, how we can and should handle maintainer-ship of open source infrastructure over the full life-cycle of the code’s usefulness, and what some best practices are for moving forward from this kind of attack.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #325

A good open source password manager? Inconceivable!

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2018-11-28T18:22:36Z #infosec +2 🎧 30,198

Perry Mitchell joined the show to talk about the importance of password management and his project Buttercup — an open source password manager built around strong encryption and security standards, a beautifully simple interface, and freely available on all major platforms. We talked through encryption, security concerns, building for multiple platforms, Electron and React Native pros and woes, and their future plans to release a hosted sync and team service to sustain and grow Buttercup into a business that’s built around its open source.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #324

Tidelift's mission is to pay open source maintainers

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2018-11-21T12:00:00Z 🎧 23,824

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.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #323

The road to Brave 1.0 and BAT

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2018-11-14T12:00:00Z #brave +2 🎧 25,655

This week Adam and Jerod talk with Brian Bondy, Co-founder and CTO of Brave. They talked through the beginnings of Brave and how BAT (Basic Attention Token) could be driving the future of how we offer funding and tips to our favorite websites and content creators. Of course, they go deep into the historical and the technical details of the Brave browser and their march to Brave 1.0. The last segment of the show covers how BAT works, how it’s being used, and also their interesting spin on an ad model that respects the user’s privacy.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #322

There and back again (Dgraph's tale)

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2018-11-09T17:45:00Z #databases +2 🎧 24,373

This week we talk with Manish Jain about Dgraph, graph databases, and licensing and re-licensing woes. Manish is the creator and founder Dgraph and we talked through all the details. We covered what a graph database is, the uses of a graph database, and how and when to choose a graph database over a relational database. We also talked through the hard subject of licensing/re-licensing. In this case, Dgraph has had to change their license a few times to maintain their focus on adoption while respecting the core ideas around what open source really means to developers.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #321

Drupal is a pretty big deal

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2018-10-31T18:35:18Z #drupal +1 🎧 28,464

Adam and Jerod talk with Angie Byron, a core contributor and staple of the Drupal community. We haven’t covered Drupal really (sorry about that), but the call with Angie was inspiring! From the background, to the tech, the usage of the software, the communication at all levels of the community — Drupal is doing something SO RIGHT, and we’re happy to celebrate with them as they march on to the “Framlication” beat of their own drum.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #320

Venture capital meets commercial OSS

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2018-10-25T15:35:00Z #sustainability +2 🎧 23,340

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.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #319

Keepin' up with Elm

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2018-10-17T11:00:00Z #elm +1 🎧 26,250

Jerod invites Richard Feldman back on the show to catch up on all things Elm. Did you hear? NoRedInk finally had a production runtime error, the community grew quite a bit (from ‘obscure’ to just ‘niche’), and Elm 0.19 added some killer new features around asset optimization.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews

BONUS – Sustain Summit 2018

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2018-10-15T18:24:03Z #sustainability 🎧 21,775

In this special bonus call, Adam and Jerod talk with Allen “Gunner” Gunn about the Sustain Summit. They talk about what it is, the kind of conversations that happen there, issues the open source community are facing right now, and how Sustain stands out from traditional “unconferences.”

Sustain 2017 was a big hit, and this year’s event should be even better. Join us!

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #318

A call for kindness in open source

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2018-10-10T17:05:23Z #python +1 🎧 24,714

Adam and Jerod talk to Brett Cannon, core contributor to Python and a fantastic representative of the Python community. They talked through various details surrounding a talk and blog post he wrote titled “Setting expectations for open source participation” and covered questions like: What is the the purpose of open source? How do you sustain open source? And what’s the goal?

They even talked through typical scenarios in open source and how kindness and recognizing that there’s a human on the other end of every action can really go a long way.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #317

#Hacktoberfest isn’t just about a free shirt

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2018-10-01T18:10:36Z #hacktoberfest 🎧 24,209

#Hacktoberfest is a once per year event in the month of October celebrating open source. For many it’s an on ramp to open source, PRs galore for maintainers, and t-shirts for those who submit 5 or more pull requests. In the end, however, it’s about the awareness of open source and its significance to the greater good to humanity as we know it.

Adam and Jerod talk with Daniel Zaltsman, Dev Rel Manager at DigitalOcean and key leader of Hacktoberfest to cover the backstory, where this project began, its impact on open source, how it has had to scale each year by many orders of magnitude, and of course we cover how you can play your part in #Hacktoberfest and give back to open source.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #315

Join the federation?! Mastodon awaits...

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2018-09-19T16:50:57Z #social-networking 🎧 25,415

We talked with Eugen Rochko, the creator of Mastodon, about where Mastodon came from the problem it aimed to solve. How it’s not exactly Twitter alternative, although that’s its known claim to fame. Why it’s probably not going anywhere. The ins-and-outs of federation, getting started, running an instance, why you would want to — cool stuff you’ve never considered could be built on top of Mastodon. And finally, the story behind naming posted content a “toot”.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #314

Kubernetes brings all the Cloud Natives to the yard

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2018-09-12T11:00:00Z #kubernetes +1 🎧 26,942

We talk with Dan Kohn, the Executive Director of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation to catch up with all things cloud native, the CNCF, and the world of Kubernetes.

Dan updated us on the growth KubeCon / CloudNativeCon, the state of Cloud Native and where innovation is happening, serverless being on the rise, and Kubernetes dominating the enterprise.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #313

The first cloud native programming language

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2018-09-05T11:00:00Z #ballerina +2 🎧 23,097

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 🎧 24,251

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 🎧 21,449

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 🎧 20,687

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 🎧 20,953

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?!

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