Maintainer Week is finally here and we’re excited to make this an annual thing! If Maintainer Week is new to you, check out episode #442 with Josh Simmons and Kara Sowles.

Today we’re talking Brett Cannon. Brett is Dev Manager of the Python Extension for VS Code, Python Steering Council Member, and core team member for Python. He recently shared a blog post The social contract of open source, so we invited Brett to join us for Maintainer Week to discuss this topic in detail.

Thank a maintainer on us! We’re printing a limited run t-shirt that’s free for maintainers, and all you gotta do is thank them, today!

This week we’re joined by Ryan Dahl, Node.js creator, and now the creator of Deno - a simple, modern and secure runtime for JavaScript and TypeScript that uses V8 and is built in Rust.

We talk with Ryan about the massive success of Node and how it impacted his life, and how he eventually created Deno and what he’s doing differently this time around. We also talk about The Deno Company and what’s in store for Deno Deploy.

This week is all about Maintainer Week — it’s a week long event starting June 7th for open source maintainers to gather, share, and be celebrated. We’re joined by Josh Simmons (Ecosystem Strategy Lead at Tidelift & President of Open Source Initiative) and Kara Sowles (Senior Open Source Program Manager at GitHub). Of course we love open source maintainers, that’s why we’re so excited about Maintainer Week and making it an annual thing. Today we talk through all the details of this event, what we can expect for this year and the years to come.

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.

This week we’re talking about NFTs — that’s right, non-fungible tokens and we’re joined by Mikeal Rogers, who’s leading all things InterPlanetary Linked Data at Protocol Labs. We go down the NFT rabbit hole on a very technical level and we come out the other side with clarity and a compelling use of NFTs.

This week we’re talking about Nix with Domen Kožar. The Nix ecosystem is a DevOps toolkit that takes a unique approach to package management and system configuration. Nix helps you make reproducible, declarative, and reliable systems. Domen is writing the Nix ecosystem guide at nix.dev and today he takes us on a deep dive on all things Nix.

This week we’re talking with Daniel Stenberg about 23 years of curl. Daniel shares how curl came to be, what drives and motivates him, maintaining a good cadence of an open source product, what to expect from http3, how many billions of users curl has, and Daniel also shares some funny stories like the “Spotify and Instagram hacking ring.”

This week Alexander Neumann takes Jerod on a tour of Restic, the world-class backup solution that’s fast, secure, and cross-platform. We discuss why he created Restic in the first place, how (and why you should) you use it, some of its more interesting technical bits, lessons learned over the years building and maintaining a community, and more of course.

This week we’re talking with Ben Johnson. Ben is known for his work on BoltDB, his work in open source, and as a freelance Go developer. Late January when Ben open sourced his newest project Litestream in the readme he shared how the project was open source, but not open for contribution. His reason was to protect his mental health and the long term viability of the project. On this episode we talk with Ben about what that means, his thoughts on mental health and burnout in open source, choosing a license, and the details behind Litestream - a standalone streaming replication tool for SQLite.

This week Adam talks with Spencer Kimball, CEO and Co-founder of Cockroach Labs — makers of CockroachDB an open source cloud-native distributed SQL database. Cockroach Labs recently raised $160 million dollars on a $2 billion dollar valuation. In this episode, Spencer shares his journey in open source, startups and entrepreneurship, and what they’re doing to build CockroachCloud to meet the needs of applications that require massive scale and ultra-resilience.

This week we’re talking about the future of freeCodeCamp with Quincy Larson and what it’s taken to build it into the non-profit unicorn that it is. They’re expanding their Python section into a full-blown data science curriculum and they’ve launched a $150,000 fundraiser to make it happen with 100% dollar-for-dollar matching up to the first $150,000 thanks to Darrell Silver.

As you may know, we’re big fans of Quincy and the work being done at freeCodeCamp, so if you want to back their efforts as well, learn more and donate.

This week we’re talking about the recent falling out between Elastic and AWS around the relicensing of Elasticsearch and Kibana. Like many in the community, we have been watching this very closely.

Here’s the tldr for context. On January 21st, Elastic posted a blog post sharing their concerns with Amazon/AWS misleading and confusing the community, saying “They have been doing things that we think are just NOT OK since 2015 and it has only gotten worse.” This lead them to relicense Elasticsearch and Kibana with a dual license, a proprietary license and the Sever Side Public License (SSPL). AWS responded two days later stating that they are “stepping up for a truly open source Elasticsearch,” and shared their plans to create and maintain forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana based on the latest ALv2-licensed codebases.

There’s a ton of detail and nuance beneath the surface, so we invited a handful of folks on the show to share their perspective. On today’s show you’ll hear from: Adam Jacob (co-founder and board member of Chef), Heather Meeker (open-source lawyer and the author of the SSPL license), Manish Jain (founder and CTO at Dgraph Labs), Paul Dix (co-founder and CTO at InfluxDB), VM (Vicky) Brasseur (open source & free software business strategist), and Markus Stenqvist (everyday web dev from Sweden).

Benjamin Coe joins Amal and Divya to discuss his wide-ranging open source projects, test coverage with Istanbul, and the future of testing in JavaScript.

This week we’re talking about open source industrial machines. We’re joined by Marcin Jakubowski from Open Source Ecology where they’re developing open source industrial machines that can be made for a fraction of commercial costs, and they’re sharing their designs online for free. The goal is to create an efficient open source economy that increases innovation through open collaboration. We talk about what it takes to build a civilization from scratch, the Open Building Institute and their Eco-Building Toolkit, the right to repair movement, DIY maker culture, and how Marcin plans to build 10,000 micro factories worldwide where anyone can come and make.

This week we’re talking with Gregory Kurtzer about Rocky Linux. Greg is the founder of the CentOS project, which recently shifted its strategy and has the Linux community scrambling. Rocky Linux aims to continue where the CentOS project left off — to provide a free and open source community-driven enterprise grade Linux operating system. We discuss the history of the CentOS project, how it fell under Red Hat’s control, the recent shift in Red Hat’s strategy with CentOS, and how Rocky Linux is designed to be 100% bug-for-bug compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Today we welcome Mike Pennisi into our Maintainer Spotlight. This is a special flavor of The Changelog where we go deep into a maintainer’s story. Mike is the maintainer of JSHint which, since its creation in 2011, was encumbered by a license that made it very hard for legally-conscious teams to use the project. The license was the widely-used MIT Expat license, but it included one additional clause: “The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil.” Because of this clause, many teams could not use JSHint.

Today’s episode with Mike covers the full gamut of JSHint’s journey and how non-free licensing can poison the well of free software.

Amal and Divya turn our spotlight inward and interview our very own Christopher “Boneskull” Hiller about maintaining Mocha.js. Mocha has been a mainstay in the JavaScript testing community for ten (!) years now! They discuss the secret to Mocha’s success, what it’s like to maintain it, and how to make maintainers (and users) happy!

What do you do when you make a living typing on a keyboard, but you can no longer do that for more than a few minutes at a time? Switch careers?! Not Josh Comeau. He decided to learn from others who have come before him and develop his own solution for coding without his hands. Spoiler Alert: he uses weird noises and some fancy eye tracking tech.

On this episode Josh tells us all about the fascinating system he developed, how it changed his perspective on work & life, and where he’s going from here. Plus we mix in some CSS & JS chat along the way.

Tailwind CSS creator Adam Wathan joins Jerod, Nick, & Feross for an in-depth discussion of his trending utility-first CSS framework. We cover why everyone complains about CSS, how Tailwind began and how it gained popularity, how developers use with Tailwind and integrate it into their workflows, and how Adam has managed to build a business around the project. Thanks, Bette Midler!

Today we welcome Matt Klein into our Maintainer Spotlight. Matt is the creator of Envoy, born inside of Lyft. It’s an edge and service proxy designed for cloud-native applications. Envoy was unexpectedly popular, and completely changed the way Lyft considers what and how to open source. While Matt has had several opportunities to turn Envoy into a commercial open source company, he didn’t. In today’s conversation with Matt we learn why he choose a completely different path for the project.

PostgreSQL aficionado Craig Kerstiens joins Jerod to talk about his (and our) favorite relational database. Craig details why Postgres is unique in the world of open source databases, which features are most exciting, the many things you can make Postgres do, and what the future might hold. Oh, and some awesome psql tips & tricks!

We’re joined by Jim Haughwout (Head of Infrastructure and Operations) and Stefan Ålund (Principal Product Manager) from Spotify to talk about how they manage hundreds of teams producing code and shipping at scale. Thanks to their recently open sourced open platform for building developer portals called Backstage, Spotify is able to keep engineering squads connected and shipping high-quality code quickly — without compromising autonomy.

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.

Today we welcome Hisham Muhammad into our Maintainer Spotlight. Hisham is the creator of htop - a well known cross-platform interactive process viewer. This conversation with Hisham covers the gamut of being an open source software maintainer. To set the stage, a new version of htop was announced, but not by Hisham – it was a kind takeover of the project and needless to say Hisham was surprised, but ultimately relieved. Why? Well, that’s what this episode it all about…

Earlier this year on February 2nd, 2020 Jon Evans and his team of archivists took a snapshot of all active public repositories on GitHub and sent it to a decommissioned coal mine in the Svalbard archipelago where it will be stored for the next 1,000 years.

On this episode, Jon chats with Jerod all about the GitHub Archive Program and how they’re preserving open source software for future generations.