We partnered with Red Hat to promote Season 3 of Command Line Heroes — an original podcast from Red Hat, hosted by Saron Yitbarek, about the people who transform technology from the command line up. It’s an awesome show and we’re huge fans of Saron and the team behind the podcast, so we wanted to share it with you.
Learn more and subscribe at redhat.com/commandlineheroes.
In this episode we’re shinning our maintainer spotlight on Ned Batchelder. Ned is one of the lucky ones out there that gets to double-dip — his day job is working on open source at edX, working on the Open edX community team. Ned is also a “single maintainer” of coverage.py - a tool for measuring code coverage of Python programs. This episode with Ned kicks off the first of many in our maintainer spotlight series where we dig deep into the life of an open source software maintainer. We’re producing this series in partnership with Tidelift. Huge thanks to Tidelift for making this series possible.
Computer Scientist Yaw Anokwa joins the show to tell us how Open Data Kit is enabling data collection efforts around the world. From monitoring rainforests to observing elections to tracking outbreaks, ODK has done it all. We hear its origin story, ruminate on why it’s been so successful, learn how the software works, and even answer the question, “are people really using it in space?!” All that and more…
We’re talking with Sacha Greif to discuss the State of CSS survey and results. CSS is evolving faster than ever. And, coming off the heels of their annual State of JavaScript survey, they’ve decided to take on the world of styles and selectors to help identify the latests patterns and trends in CSS.
We talk through the history and motivations of this survey, the methodology of their data collection, the tooling involved to build and run the survey, and of course we dig deep into the survey results and talk through the insights we found most interesting.
Panelists Mark Bates, Johnny Boursiquot, and Carmen Andoh discuss Go and open source — what is it, the value in contributing, what it means to be a maintainer, best practices, and the recent blog post from Chris Siebenmann titled “Go is Google’s language, not ours.”
We’re talking with Brett Cannon for a behind the scenes look at Guido stepping down as Python’s BDFL (Benevolent dictator for life) and the process they had to go through to establish a new governance model, the various proposed PEPs to establish this new direction, the winning PEP, and what the future holds for Python.
We’re talking with Victor Zhou about the explosion of the .io game genre. We talked through all the details around building and running one of these games, the details behind Victor’s super popular game called Generals — which he eventually sold, and we also covered the economics behind creating and selling one of these games.
We’re talking with Andre Staltz, creator of Manyverse — a social network off the grid. It’s open source and free in every sense of the word. We talked through the backstory, how a user’s network gets formed, how data is stored and shared, why off-grid is so important to Andre, and what type of user uses an “off-the-grid” social network.
We’re talking with Evan Conrad — for most of Evan’s life he has suffered from severe panic attacks, often twice per week. Eventually he stumbled upon a therapy method called Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, or CBT for short, and saw positive results. This led him to create Quirk, an open source iOS app which allows its users to practice one of the most common formats of CBT.
On the show we mentioned a new podcast we’re launching called Brain Science — it’s hosted by Adam Stacoviak and Mireille Reece, a Doctor of Clinical Psychology. Brain Science is a podcast for the curious that explores the inner-workings of the human brain to understand behavior change, habit formation, mental health, and the human condition. It’s Brain Science applied — not just how does the brain work, but how do we apply what we know about the brain to better our lives. Stay tuned after the show for a special preview of Brain Science.
If you haven’t yet, right now would be a great time to subscribe to Master at changelog.com/master. It’s one feed to rule them all, plus some extras that only hit the master feed.
Nick Janetakis joins Jerod backstage to talk shop. We discuss how Nick is using the Changelog.com source code as a guide to build his video course platform, coding practices we’ve developed over the years, how to balance between shipping features and creating content, newsletters as the new social network, how Nick makes his videos, and a whole lot more.
Nick and Mikeal catch up with Henry Zhu, the maintainer of Babel and host of the Maintainers Anonymous and Hope in Source podcasts. We discuss his path to open source maintainer-ship. We also chat about best practices for interacting with maintainers, while remembering that people are behind open source, and we talk self-care and avoiding burnout, culminating in a self-care repo being created to gather and discuss tips to care for yourself.
We’re talking with Gerhard Lazu, our resident ops and infrastructure expert, about the setup we’ve rolled out for 2019. Late 2016 we relaunched Changelog.com as a new Phoenix/Elixir application and that included a brand new infrastructure and deployment process. 2019’s infrastructure update includes Linode, CoreOS, Docker, CircleCI, Rollbar, Fastly, Netdata, and more — and we talk through all the details on this show.
This show is also an open invite to you and the rest of the community to join us in Slack and learn and contribute to Changelog.com. Head to changelog.com/community to get started.
We’re talking with Alex Ellis, the founder of OpenFaaS — serverless functions made simple for Docker and Kubernetes. We talked about the backstory and details of OpenFaaS, “the curious case of serverless on Kubernetes,” the landscape of open source serverless platforms, how Alex is leading and building this community, getting involved, and maintainership vs leadership.
We’re talking with Syrus Akbary about WebAssembly and Wasmer — a standalone just in time WebAssembly runtime aiming to be fully compatible with Emscripten, Rust, and Go. We talked about taking WebAssembly beyond the browser, universal binaries, what’s an ABI?, running WebAssembly from any language, and what a world might look like with platform independent universal binaries powered by WebAssembly.
We’re talking all things text mode with Lucas da Costa — we logged his post “How I’m still not using GUIs in 2019” a guide focused on making the terminal your IDE. We talked through his Terminal starter pack which includes: neovim, tmux, iterm2, and zsh by way of oh-my-zsh, his rules for learning vim, the awesomeness of CLI’s, and the pros and cons of graphical and plain text editors.
We’re talking with Adam Barr, a 23 year Microsoft veteran, about his book “The problem with software,” sub-titled “Why smart engineers write bad code.” We examine that very idea, the gap between industry and academia, and more importantly what we can do to get a better feedback loop going between them.
We’re talking with Mehan Jayasuriya program officer at Mozilla about MOSS — the Mozilla Open Source Support (MOSS) program which recognizes, celebrates, and supports open source projects. Earlier this year we caught the “MOSS 2018 Year in Review” blog post — this post highlighted many of their efforts in 2018 so we reached out to talk through the history, goals, and impact of this very generous project.
We’re talking with Gina Helfrich the Communications Director for NumFOCUS about their story and history, the impact of open code on science, the difference between sponsored and affiliated projects, corporate backing, the back story of their education and events program PyData, and the struggles of storytelling and fundraising.
Adam and Jerod are joined by JS Party panelist Nick Nisi and #causeascene advocate Kim Crayton for a deep discussion on ethics in the technology industry at-large and our roles as software developers. If you’ve never heard Kim describe what life is like online for underrepresented and marginalized folks, you have to listen to this show!
KBall, Chris, Nick, and Safia discuss how they keep a healthy relationship with dependencies in their codebase. Listen to learn how they decide when to use third-party dependencies, how they verify and validate dependencies, and how to support the ecosystem of open source libraries.
Nathan Sobo, founding member of the Atom editor team at GitHub, joined the show take us all the way back to the beginning of Atom to learn where it came from, the founding team, the problem it solves, on through to shipping 1.0 and beyond.
Pia Mancini joined the show to talk about Open Collective, her background and where she came from, her passion to upgrade democracy, funding and sustaining open source, what open collective is, how it works, how you can support your favorite open source communities, but more importably how you can take part and start your own collective.
Nadia Eghbal joined the show to discuss a HUGE topic that’s near and dear to our heart – funding open source! We discussed what it takes to fund open source software development, Nadia’s current investigative journalism efforts around funding open source (funded by the Ford Foundation), venture-backed open source projects, what it means for an open source project to be in good shape, some potential solutions to provide better long-term support for open source, and we tried to determine how much the open source of the world might be worth.
