Welcome to Spotlight

Hey everyone, welcome to the first episode of Spotlight. You may know me as Adam Stacoviak, the editor in chief here at Changelog…

…and you may know me as Jerod Santo, managing editor at Changelog.

Jerod, one thing we love doing is going out in the community.

That’s right.

And we’re launching this new show called Spotlight. It’s been a labor of love for a while now. We’ve wanted to do this for at least a year.

Yeah, we’ve been attending conferences, getting out there in the trenches, as we like to call it, having conversations, and we just started recently recording those audio chats for this special show called Spotlight.

It’s going out into the community, revolving around big announcements, hallway track… The kind of conversations you tend to have in a conference, just not in front of a microphone, basically, and we get to share that with this awesome community who loves what we do. We get to have great conversations at places like OSCON, All Things Open, Node Interactive, and maybe even your favorite conference out there, so let us know where we can go.

Yeah, there’s something special about the hallway tracks at conferences and the conversations that you have there. I don’t know about you, Adam, but when I was at OSCON London, having these sit-downs with different people - Katrina Owen, Kris Borchers, Sid Sijbrandij among others… You know, we’re used to interviewing people over the internet, and maybe seeing their face, maybe not, but there’s something about sitting in front of somebody, having a conversation - it feels more real, it feels like things come out that wouldn’t come out otherwise. Have you had that experience at All Things Open?

That exact experience, and my connection was so deep that I got a hug. Sandi Metz…

Really?

I sat down with Sandi… She loves us, she’s a sweetheart to us, but when we were done talking, it was such a joy to have a face-to-face conversation, a real conversation. Not that the conversations we have through the internet and through Skype and the wonders of the internet aren’t real, but it was face-to-face, and when we were done it wasn’t a handshake, it was a hug. She’s like, “Bring it in, I need a hug.”

That’s awesome. One thing that makes this show unique - not just the style it is - is the way that we’re producing it in batches. So it’s not gonna be a weekly Spotlight episode; it’s going to be us at an event having a bunch of conversations, and then we’ll produce a series from that event, that hopefully captures the essence of what the people and the things going at that event were, and then we’ll release those as a bit of a series.

So a little bit different in its cadence, Adam, than we’re used to. We’ll have batches, and that might be interesting, as well.

It also gives us a chance to meet fans, too. I can’t tell you how many people I met that love The Changelog, love Request for Commits, love GoTime. On the note of being a series - I like that because we don’t have to feel like we have to keep up. It’s more like when we get a chance - you and I are both family men, so we weigh our time away from our family very wisely, and so we get out there, we have some fun, we meet people in the community, we have conversations with speakers at the conference, and they’re very real conversations. We bring those back, do some production around it and release it for the world. That’s a lot of fun, and it also gives us a chance to make some new partners out there too, like O’Reilly. Great partners out there.

Absolutely. Maybe let’s end with this - if you’re an organizer of a conference or you’re going to a conference that you love and you want us to come record Spotlight there in 2017 and beyond, get in touch with us editors at Changelog.com. And if you’re a listener of our other shows and you’re just finding Spotlight, make sure you go to Changelog.com/spotlight, hit subscribe there in your favorite podcast app, and you will get all those interviews when they’re ready for you.

And you could even go into iTunes and search for Changelog Spotlight; it will come up, and just click the button Subscribe, and you’ll get all this goodness when we release new series. Before we tail off, what are some of the upcoming ones we have going on? We’ve mentioned OSCON, All Things Open… What else have we got?

Yeah, so just a few interviews that are coming down the pipeline - I mentioned Katrina Owen, Kris Borcher is talking about JS Foundation, Coby Chapple, who’s an interesting guy from GitHub, he’s a product designer there and has lots of insights into the recent product announcements; like I mentioned, Sid Sijbrandij… These are all OSCON, so this will be our first series, and Giovanni Caligaris, who’s told me the awesome story about how he went to extreme lengths to translate LibreOffice into Guarani, which is the native language of Paraguay. Interesting stuff.

Very cool stories. Then All Things Open was in Raleigh, North Carolina - that’s like the other OSCON, basically… So we hit both open source conferences, talked about Ethereum, talked about Blockchain, talked about Mozilla (a lot of fun stuff happening there), talked about animation in web design, and then more recently Node Interactive - a lot of fun conversations coming out at Node Interactive. Basically, that series was the future of Node, and that was sponsored by IBM.

Very unique opportunities for us to get out there in the community, make new friends, meet new people, and even the occasional hug.

Gotta get a hug.

With that, we’ll leave it there. Once again, changelog.com/spotlight, or go to your favorite podcast app and search for Changelog Spotlight, hit subscribe and we’ll see you soon.