This week we’re sharing one of the most popular episodes from our new podcast Ship It. Ship It launched in May and now has 8 episodes in the feed to enjoy…it’s hosted by Gerhard Lazu, our SRE here at Changelog.

In this episode, Gerhard talks with Dave Farley, co-author of Continuous Delivery and the inventor of the Deployment Pipeline. Today, most of us ship code the way we do because 25 years ago, Dave cared enough to drive the change that we now call CI/CD. He is one of the great software engineers: opinionated, perseverant & focused since the heydays of the internet. Dave continues inspiring and teaching us all via his newly launched YouTube channel, courses, and recent books. The apprentice finally meets the master 🙇‍♂️🙇‍♀️

Why Cloud Native? What are the guiding principles that you should keep in mind as you are choosing a project from the Cloud Native Landscape? How do you build & ship an app in a Cloud Native way? Katie Gamanji, Ecosystem Advocate @ CNCF and former cloud engineer for American Express, Condé Nast and Microsoft, joins Gerhard to cover these topics in the context of the Cloud Native Fundamentals course that she developed. 15,000 students have already enrolled, and the initial feedback has been great. Tune in if you want to know why you should too, how to do it and when the course will become available for free.

This week on Ship It! Gerhard talks with Ian Miell, author of Docker in Practice as well as Learn Git, Bash, and Terraform the Hard Way. They talk about being comfortable with the uncomfortable, focusing on the tech while keeping a holistic view of the business. Following the money flows is key. Ian explains this concept really well, and Gerhard feels fairly confident you will be better off if you pay attention. Let us know in the comments!

This week on Ship It! Gerhard talks with Dave Farley, co-author of Continuous Delivery and the inventor of the Deployment Pipeline. Today, most of us ship code the way we do because 25 years ago, Dave cared enough to drive the change that we now call CI/CD. He is one of the great software engineers: opinionated, perseverant & focused since the heydays of the internet. Dave continues inspiring and teaching us all via his newly launched YouTube channel, courses and recent books. The apprentice finally meets the master 🙇‍♂️🙇‍♀️

This week on Ship It! Gerhard talks with Ben Ford, former Royal Marine and founder of Commando Development, about the OODA loop (observe, orient, decide, act). Shipping is just a small part of it. The OODA loop that you know is probably the wrong one. We explore Mission & Command, Situational Awareness and a few other practices that will help you deal with complexity as you code and ship. As a former Royal Marine Commando, Ben learned these skills the hard way, and then refined them over many years as a software engineer. Check out the diagrams in the show notes - they are a work of art and precision.

Brian LeRoux has been building the web long enough to see many ways we produce HTML come in and go out of fashion. On this episode, he joins Amal & Nick to discuss the past, present, and potential future of rendering patterns on the web. SSR, ISR, & DSR (oh my!)

Carlos Alexandro Becker joins Mat, Natalie, & Johnny to discuss the ins and outs of releasing your Go code. Carlos created and maintains GoReleaser, a popular tool that helps you deliver your Go binaries as fast and easily as possible.

In this insight-filled episode, Bill Kennedy joins Johnny and Kris to discuss best practices around the design of software in Go. Bill talks through scenarios, lessons learned, and pitfalls to avoid in both architecture and coding of Go projects.

In this episode we talk about various types of writing and how we as Go developers can learn from them. Whether it is planning and preparing to write, communicating with team members, or making our code clearer for future developers to read through style guides.

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.

Marc Beinder is building a podcast hosting web application as a part of his senior project while at Lindenwood University. In this brief Backstage episode, Marc picks Jerod’s brain about how we built our platform and challenges we ran into along the way.

Ahmad Nassri returns to the party for a deep, nuanced discussion around the thoughts he shared in a recent blog post called Solving Solved Problems. We hear about the common issue Ahmad’s seen at software shops of all sizes, learn the anatomy of the total cost of software ownership, and debate what to build and what to buy.

Node.js development began a bit like the Wild West, but over time idioms, anti-patterns, and best practices have emerged. Yoni Goldberg’s Node Best Practices repo on GitHub collects, documents, and explains the best practices for Node developers. On this episode, Yoni joins us to discuss.

Dave Kerr joins Jerod to discuss the various laws, theories, principles, and patterns that we developers find useful in our work and life. We unpack Hanlon’s Razor, Gall’s Law, Murphy’s Law, Kernighan’s Law, and too many others to list here.

We take a listener request this week and discuss how we evolve alongside (or opt out of) the ever changing JavaScript syntax. Arrow functions and variable declarations take center stage, but a wide range of new(ish) JS syntax and features are discussed.

Then Feross shares his new app, Nick talks fiction books, and Jerod switches coding fonts.

Mat, Jon, and Jaana discuss reflection and meta programming. How do other languages use reflection, and how does that differ from Go’s approach? What libraries are using reflection well? What are some examples of bad times to use reflect? What alternative approaches exist? And what are those weird struct tags I keep seeing in Go code?

Distributed systems are hard. Building a distributed messaging system for these systems to communicate is even harder. In this episode, we unpack some of the challenges of building distributed messaging systems (like NATS), including how Go makes that easy and/or hard as applicable.

What is a microservice, and what is a monolith? What differentiates them? When is a good time for your team to start considering the transition from monolith to microservice? And does using microservices mean you can’t use a monorepo?

Jerod and KBall are joined by Micro Frontends in Action author Michael Geers to discuss (you guessed it) micro frontend architecture. We ask: what is the concept? How is it similar/different to micro services? Who is it best fitted for? How do you put it in practice? And much more.

Dave Cheney talks to us about the Zen of Go (ten engineering values for writing simple, readable, maintainable Go code). What makes code good in Go? What guiding principles should we bear in mind when writing Go?

Jon Thornton (Engineering Manager at Squarespace) joined the show to talk about tech debt by way of his post to the Squarespace engineering blog titled “3 Kinds of Good Tech Debt”. We talked through the concept of “good tech debt,” how to leverage it, how to manage it, who’s in charge of it, how it’s similar to ways we leverage financial debt, and how Squarespace uses tech debt to drive product development.

KBall, Divya, Mikeal, and Feross dig deep into refactoring. When to do it, best practices, things to watch out for, and the difference between a refactor and a rewrite. We then close out with some key pro tips.

Mat, Carmen, and Jon are joined by Dan Scales to talk about Mat’s favorite keyword in Go - defer. Where did the defer statement come from? What problems can it solve? How has it shaped how we write Go code? How are other languages solving similar problems? And what exactly was changed in Go 1.14 to improve the performance of defer?

Guests are catching the bug, so we decided to spend this episode talking about bugs! How do you find and fix your bugs? Do you sketch things out, whip out the debugger, or something else?

Jerod and Divya welcome npm CTO Ahmad Nassri to discuss modular architecture. What it is, why it matters, and how you can achieve it. Ahmad has been thinking deeply about this topic lately and we have a very fruitful discussion that should have takeaways for developers of all experience levels.