We’re back! This is from our “lost episodes” — This is your brain…and this is your brain on burnout, any questions? OK, but seriously, burnout effects everyone, even if they/you don’t admit it. Burnout is a state of physical, emotional, and mental exhaustion caused by prolonged stress. It can affect ANYONE, but it is especially common among high-performers who push themselves to the limit. In this episode, we dive into the latest research on burnout and its effects on the brain, as well as offer practical advice for preventing and managing burnout. If you’re heading into 2023 feeling overwhelmed and drained, this episode is for you.

This week we’re joined by Christina Warren, Senior Developer Advocate at GitHub, and a true tech and pop culture connoisseur. From her days at Mashable covering the intersections of entertainment and technology, to Gizmodo, to Microsoft, and now her current role at GitHub we talk with Christina about her journey from journalist to developer, and the latest happenings coming out of GitHub Universe.

BTW, we’re planning to get Christina on Backstage in the new year to talk about Plex, MakeMKV, and all things that go into hosting your own media server. Drop a commment on this episode with a +1 if you want to see that happen.

Every year Mozilla releases an Internet Health Report that combines research and stories exploring what it means for the internet to be healthy. This year’s report is focused on AI. In this episode, Solana and Bridget from Mozilla join us to discuss the power dynamics of AI and the current state of AI worldwide. They highlight concerning trends in the application of this transformational technology along with positive signs of change.

KBall and Jerod digest and disect recent JS community news (React 18, Redwood 1.0, MDN Plus) then sit down for yet another game of HeadLIES! Can KBall fare better than Nick Nisi did last April Fools?!

The incomparable Jessica Kerr is back with another grab-bag of amazing topics. We talk about her journey to Honeycomb, devs getting satisfaction from the code they write, why step one for her is “get that new project into production” and step two is observe it, her angst for the context switching around pull requests, some awesome book recommendations, how game theory and design can translate to how we skill up and level up our teams, and so much more.

Daniel and Chris talk with Lukas Egger, Head of Innovation Office and Strategic Projects at SAP Business Process Intelligence. Lukas describes what it takes to bring a culture of innovation into an organization, and how to infuse product development with that innovation culture. He also offers suggestions for how to mitigate challenges and blockers.

Here’s a little bonus episode before we get back to your regularly scheduled Go Time. We’re calling it the funny bits. It’s a compilation of times we cracked up making the show for y’all. If you dig it, holler at Jerod. If you don’t, email Mat Ryer.

Today we’re bringing our appearance on DevDiscuss right here to The Changelog. Jerod and I guested their launch episode for Season 7 to talk about deeply human stories we’ve covered over the years on this podcast. For long-time listners this will be a trip down memory lane and for recent subscibers this will be a guided tour on some of our most impactful episodes. Special thanks to Ben Halpern and Christina Gorton for hosting us. Check out their show at dev.to/devdiscuss

This week we are joined by Sophie Alpert, Head of Engineering at Humu, and former lead of the React Core team, to discuss her experience on being a very early adopter, contributor, and eventually maintainer of React. In her 4+ years on the Core team, she went from supporting a new niche OSS UI library to supporting a project used by millions of developers around the world. Join us to hear about this epic journey, as well as Sophie’s thought’s on some common critiques and misconceptions of React.

We’re “doing it live” with Jerome Hardaway, a Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft and the Executive Director of Vets Who Code — a veteran-led and operated 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that focuses on training veterans, active duty military, and military spouses in software development and open source with the goal of starting careers in the technology industry.

This is a lengthly conversation in and around Jerome’s story, the Vets Who Code mission and impact, the experience of being in the United States Military, and the opportunity and potential of 1.5x’ing one of the most elite group of people on the planet.

Today we’re joined by Shawn “swyx” Wang, also known as just “swyx” — and we’re talking about his interesting path to becoming a software developer, what it means to “learn in public” and how he’s been able to leverage that process to not only level up his skills and knowlege, but to also rapidly advance his career. We cover Swyx’s recent writing on the light and dark side of the API economy — something he calls “living above or below the API,” his thoughts on Cloudflare eating the cloud by playing Go instead of Chess, and we also talk about the work he’s doing at Temporal and how’s taking his frontend skills to the backend.

This week we’re joined by Gergely Orosz and we’re talking about the insane tech hiring market we’re in right now. Gergely was on the show a year ago talking about growing as a software engineer and his book The Tech Resume Inside Out. Now he’s laser focused on Substack with actionable advice for engineering managers and engineers, with a focus on big tech and high-growth startups. On today’s show we dig into his recent coverage of “the perfect storm” that’s causing this insane tech hiring market.

After months of talking about and planning this episode, we decided near the very end to invite Paul from Heavy Spoilers to join us for a deep, spoiler filled, discussion on the movie Tenet, which was directed by Christopher Nolan and released September 2020. If you’re a fan of Tenet, you’ll love this episode.

Warning: This episode literally includes heavy spoilers. So come back after you’ve watched the film, or proceed if that doesn’t bother you.

This week we’re talking about open source on Mars. Martin Woodward (Senior Director of Developer Relations at GitHub) joins us to talk about the new Mars badge GitHub introduced. This collaboration between GitHub and NASA confirmed nearly 12,000 people contributed code, documentation, graphic design, and more to the open source software that made Ingenuity’s launch possible. Today’s show is a celebration of this human achievement and the impact of open source on space exploration as we know it.

KBall, Amal, and Nick dive into key dimensions of what makes a developer work environment good – or bad. They discuss systemic factors, individual factors, what you can do about it, and a proposed scoring system for good work environments.

Chris has the privilege of talking with Stanford Professor Margot Gerritsen, who co-leads the Women in Data Science (WiDS) Worldwide Initiative. This is a conversation that everyone should listen to. Professor Gerritsen’s profound insights into how we can all help the women in our lives succeed - in data science and in life - is a ‘must listen’ episode for everyone, regardless of gender.

Empirical analysis from Roy Schwartz (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) and Jesse Dodge (AI2) suggests the AI research community has paid relatively little attention to computational efficiency. A focus on accuracy rather than efficiency increases the carbon footprint of AI research and increases research inequality. In this episode, Jesse and Roy advocate for increased research activity in Green AI (AI research that is more environmentally friendly and inclusive). They highlight success stories and help us understand the practicalities of making our workflows more efficient.

Today we’re sharing a full-length episode of Command Line Heroes from Season 6 for you to check out. We hand picked this episode for you to listen to.

Many of us grew up playing cartridge-based games. But there’s few who know the story behind how those cartridges came to be. And even fewer who know the story of the man behind them: Jerry Lawson. Before Jerry, a gaming console could only play one game. Jerry quite literally changed the game. This episode shares Jerry’s story of inventing the cartridge-based system for gaming consoles.

Gergely Orosz joined Adam for a conversation about his journey as a software engineer. Gergely recently stepped down from his role as Engineering Manager at Uber to pursue his next big thing. But, that next big thing isn’t quite clear to him yet. So, in the meantime, he has been using this break to write a few books and blog more so he can share what he’s learned along the way. He’s also validating some startup ideas he has on platform engineering. His first book is available to read now — it’s called The Tech Resume Inside Out and offers a practical guide to writing a tech resume written by the people who do the resume screening. Both topics gave us quite a bit to talk about.

We’re joined by George Neville-Neil, aka Kode Vicious. Writing as Kode Vicious for ACMs Queue magazine, George Neville-Neil has spent the last 15+ years sharing incisive advice and fierce insights for everyone who codes, works with code, or works with coders. These columns have been among the most popular items published in ACMs Queue magazine and it was only a matter of time for a book to emerge from his work. His book, The Kollected Kode Vicious, is a compilation of the most popular items he’s published over the years, plus a few extras you can only find in the book. We cover all the details in this episode.

We’re joined by Elisha Goldstein, PhD - one of the world’s preeminent mindfulness teachers, a clinical psychologist, founder of the Mindful Living Collective and, creator of the six-month breakthrough program - A Course in Mindful Living. If you’ve ever used the Calm app, you might be familiar with his voice as he walks you through mindfulness practices to help calm negative emotions and anxious thoughts. He has extensive expertise in mindfulness based stress reduction (MBSR) and today he’s sharing his wealth of knowledge using mindfulness to naturally reduce anxiety and be more present and aware in our lives.

We’re helping Atlassian to promote Season 2 of Teamistry. If this is the first time you’re hearing about this podcast, Teamistry is an original podcast from Atlassian that tells the stories of teams who work together in new and unexpected ways, to achieve remarkable things. Today, we’re sharing a full-length episode from Season 1 which tells the story of the team that fashioned the Apollo 11 spacesuits.

When Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon for the first time, we don’t actually see his face. We see his moonsuit. That moonsuit — in effect — is Neil Armstrong; an inseparable part of this historic moment. While the spacesuit kept him alive to tell that story in his own words, what went unnoticed is the extraordinary team that stitched it together.

Most of us have heard how important “self-care” is and how important it can be for healthy living. But what exactly IS self-care? In this episode, not only do we define what self-care is, but we talk through the physical, emotional, and spiritual aspects of what’s involved in self-care and why this can so often be misunderstood and challenging. While we might be familiar with this term, many may not consider how they can be deliberate around managing themselves by both reflecting on and engaging in activities that help support their brains and bodies. It isn’t enough to simply know that self-care is important, rather discovering practical actions you can take to improve both how you feel and how you engage with the world.

Gitter is exiting GitLab and entering the Matrix…ok, we couldn’t help ourselves with that one. Today we’re joined by Sid Sibrandij (CEO of GitLab) and Matthew Hodgson (technical co-founder of Matrix) to discuss the acquisition of Gitter. A little backstory to tee things up…back in 2017 GitLab announced the acquisition of Gitter to help push their idea of chatops within GitLab. As it turns out, the GitLab team saw a different path for Gitter as a core part of Matrix rather than a non-core project at GitLab. We talk through all the details in this episode with Matthew and Sid.

Stress is something that we will inevitably encounter throughout our lives. It isn’t all bad or maladaptive, but how we manage it can make a significant difference in our lives. The degree of stress we feel impacts how we show up in the world including both how we relate and how we do the work before us each day.

In this episode, Mireille and Adam discuss the impact of stress on our systems including the role of different stress hormones on our immune system, cardiovascular system and our metabolism. Like many other conversations on previous episodes, we provide research relative to the value of relationships as having close connections helps us all combat the stress that loneliness can cause as well. When we utilize resources to support us as well as set limits on what we expose ourselves to and focus our attention to, we have the opportunity to better navigate the stresses of our lives.