What would happen if everyone in your company was reading and responding to incoming support emails? In this post, Simon Schultz shares why he spends more time on incoming support emails than internal reports, plus six good reasons you should do so as well.

I love my numbers, and I love my spreadsheets, but the heart and soul of all the great people using and being in contact with your service, product and company are too often buried somewhere in a soulless column in your beloved spreadsheets.

Valuable insights, information, and data are too often ignored and forgotten.

The new changelog.com setup for 2019 is packed with exciting features that are too good to keep to ourselves. Since the infrastructure code is already public and has been running changelog.com for a few months now, the value that we are sharing is proven to us.

Until now, the best way to add a contributor to the list was via the CLI tool. That works great when you’re at your computer in “code mode”, but not when you’re mobile or just browsing the web.

Building an open source business is hard. Octobox co-founders Andrew Nesbitt and Benjamin Nickolls know this all too well. They’re walking a preverbal “tightrope” with the introduction of new pricing in order to move towards sustainability.

By all accounts, Octobox is a success. It’s a thriving open source project that’s being adopted by the software community using GitHub. It has a growing community of maintainers and contributors. Organizations like Shopify run company-wide instances for their own use. Octobox is also run as a SaaS that hosts more than 11k users.

But there’s one tiny little problem…Octobox is not sustainable (yet).

If you’ve been watching the news, you know that the latest data breach involved Marriott exposing 500 million guest reservations from its Starwood database. The kicker is that the unauthorized access to the Starwood guest database stretches back to 2014. That’s FOUR YEARS of unfettered access to this database!

It’s breaches like these that helped motivate the team at the Cryptography Research Group at Microsoft to be “extremely excited” to announce the release of Microsoft SEAL (Simple Encrypted Arithmetic Library) as open source under the MIT License.

Dgraph founder Manish R Jain gave us an excellent explanation of graph databases on episode 322 of The Changelog. I extracted that section from our trusty episode transcript for your reading pleasure…

Little bits of appreciation can make big differences in maintainers’ lives. Here’s one way you can show appreciation that will take less than five minutes out of your day and just might make someone else’s. 🙌

Hacktoberfest is here once again, and we devs will do just about anything for a free shirt.

However, there’s a war inside us. The Acquire Free Swag inclination is at odds with the Be Super Lazy inclination, leaving many wondering… “What’s the absolute easiest route to that sweet, sweet swag?!”

Overcast reports podcast subscriber counts in is crawler user agent. How cool is that? All podcast apps that have their own crawler should do this! 🙏

Those of you who’ve been following along on Twitch know we’ve been working towards open sourcing our podcast show notes so the community can help improve them. I’m happy to announce that THIS is now a thing!

Kevin Ball — panelist and frequent emcee of JS Party, and Tim Smith — Senior Producer here at Changelog were on location at O’Reilly’s Fluent Conference and Velocity Conference for the past few days.

Here’s a sneak peek of our coverage!

Today, we are open-sourcing the code behind Changelog’s infrastructure as is, and are giving you the opportunity to influence the way we continue investing our time.

I was perusing this popular VS Code feature request yesterday when I spotted a disturbing trend: more than a dozen comments containing nothing more than a +1

I’m excited to welcome Tim Smith as our newest team member and Senior Producer.

Tim joins the team to help us take our podcasts and films to the next level. I’ve known Tim for many years (since 2012) and I’m truly excited to have him on our team to help us continue to grow and produce some really awesome content.

Please take a moment to hop in Slack and say hi to Tim or send a tweet his direction.

If you haven’t been to changelog.com in awhile, check it out. We rejiggered our publishing flow so we’re now delivering news to the homepage as we write it. And we’re open for submissions.