Changelog Interviews

In late 2019, Bill Nichols, a senior member of the technical staff at Carnegie Mellon University with the Software Engineering Institute published his study on "the 10x developer myth." On this show we talk with Bill about all the details of his research. Is the 10x developer a myth? Let's find out.

The Changelog is deep discussions in & around the world of software... and it's been going for over a decade. We talk to hackers, like Chris Anderson from 3D Robotics... leaders, like Devon Zuegel) from GitHub... and innovators, like Amal Hussein... Welcome to The Changelog! Please listen to an episode from our catalog that interests you and subscribe today. We'd love to have you with us.

Johan Vos joined us to talk about his new book 'Quantum Computing for Developers' which is available to read right now as part of the Manning Early Access Program (MEAP). Listen near the end of the show to learn how you can get a free copy or check the show notes for details. We talked with Johan about the core principles of Quantum Computing, the hardware and software involved, the differences be...

Lauren Tan joined us to talk about her blog post titled "Does it spark joy?" In this post Lauren shared the news of her resignation as an engineering manager at Netflix to return to being a software engineer. We examine the career trajectory of a software engineer and the seemingly inevitable draw to management for continued career growth. The idea of understanding "What are you optimizing for?" a...

We sit down with Tobias Koppers of webpack fame to talk about his life as a full-time maintainer of one of the most highly used (4 million+ dependent repos!) and influential tools in all of the web. Things we ask Tobias include: how he got here, how he pays himself, has he ever gotten a raise, what his typical day is like, how he decides _what_ to work on, if he pays attention to the competition,...

We partnered with Red Hat to promote Season 4 of Command Line Heroes — a podcast about the people who transform technology from the command line up. Season 4 is all about hardware that changed the game. We’re featuring episode 3 from season 4 — called "Personal Computers: The Altair 8800 and the Dawn of a Revolution." This is the story of personal computers and the revolution that took place in th...

Matthew Hodgson (technical co-founder) joined us to talk about Matrix - an open source project and open standard for secure, decentralized, real-time communication. It's open source, it's decentralized, it's end-to-end-encrypted, and it's also self-sovereign. Matrix also provides a bridge feature to bridge existing platforms and communication silos into a global open matrix of communication. A rec...

Frank Karlitschek joined us to talk about Nextcloud - a self-hosted free & open source community-driven productivity platform that's safe home for all your data. We talk about how Nextcloud was forked from ownCloud, successful ways to run community-driven open source projects, open core vs open source, aligned incentives, and the challenges Nextcloud is facing to increase adoption and grow.

Stephanie Morillo (content strategist and previously editor-in-chief of DigitalOcean and GitHub's company blogs) wrote a book titled The Developer's Guide to Content Creation — it's a book for developers who want to consistently and confidently generate new ideas and publish high-quality technical content. We talked with Stephanie about why developers should be writing and sharing their ideas, cra...

Caleb Porzio is the creator & maintainer of Livewire, AlpineJS, and more. His latest open source endeavor was announced as "sponsorware", which means it lived in a private repo (only available to Caleb's GitHub Sponsors) until he hit a set sponsorship threshold, at which point it was open sourced. On this episode, we talk through this sponsorware experiment in-depth. We learn how he dreamt it up,...

Yetunde Dada from QuantumBlack joins Jerod for a deep dive on Kedro, a workflow tool that helps structure reproducible, scaleable, deployable, robust, and versioned data pipelines. They discuss what Kedro's all about and how it's "changing the landscape of data pipelines in Python", the ins/outs of open sourcing Kedro, and how they found early success by sweating the details. Finally, Jerod asks Y...

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 de...

We partnered with Red Hat to promote Season 4 of Command Line Heroes — a podcast about the people who transform technology from the command line up. Season 4 is all about hardware that changed the game. We’re featuring episode 1 from season 4 — called "Minicomputers: The soul of an old machine." This is the story of Minicomputers and how they paved the way for the personal computers that could fit...

Anders Damsgaard is a climate science researcher working on cryosphere processes at the Department of Geophysics at Stanford University. He joined the show to talk with us about the intersection of open source and climate science. Specifically, we discuss a set of shell tools he created called The Scholarref Tools which allow you to perform most of the tasks required to gather the references neede...

We teamed up with some friends of ours at Heroku to promote the Code-ish podcast so we're sharing a full-length episode right here in The Changelog’s feed. This episode features Chris Castle with special guests Carol Nichols and Jake Goulding talking about the strengths of the Rust programming language. Learn more and subscribe at heroku.com/podcasts/codeish.

The commercial VPN industry is a minefield to navigate and many open source solutions are a pain to use or ill-suited for the task. Algo VPN, on the other hand, is a self-hosted personal VPN designed for ease of deployment and security. It uses the securest industry standards, builds on rock-solid solutions like WireGuard and Ansible, and runs on an ever-growing list of cloud hosting providers. On...

Welcome to 2020 — on this year’s “State of the ‘log’” episode Jerod and I look back at our favorite moments from 2019 and forward to 2020 and beyond. We talk through our most popular episodes, our personal favorites, our 10-year anniversary, the excitement we have for Brain Science our newest podcast, it's for the curious! And we also look forward to plans we have for 2020 and the decade to come.....

Gerhard is back for part two of our interviews at KubeCon 2019. Join him as he goes deep on Prometheus with Björn Rabenstein, Ben Kochie, and Frederic Branczyk... Grafana with Tom Wilkie and Ed Welch... and Crossplane with Jared Watts, Marques Johansson, and Dan Mangum. Don't miss part one with Bryan Liles, Priyanka Sharma, Natasha Woods, & Alexis Richardson.

Changelog's resident infrastructure expert Gerhard Lazu is on location at KubeCon 2019. This is part one of a two-part series from the world's largest open source conference. In this episode you'll hear from event co-chair Bryan Liles, Priyanka Sharma and Natasha Woods from GitLab, and Alexis Richardson from Weaveworks. Stay tuned for part two's deep dives in to Prometheus, Grafana, and Crossplane...

In this episode we’re shining our maintainer spotlight on Ovilia. Hailing from Shanghai, China, Ovilia is an up-and-coming developer who contributes to Apache ECharts, maintains Polyvia, which does very cool low-poly image and video processing, and has a sweet personal website, too. This episode with Ovilia continues our maintainer spotlight series where we dig deep into the life of an open source...

Ronald Marrero is a software developer working on NASA's Artemis program, which aims at landing the first woman and next man on the Moon by 2024. How Ron got here is a fascinating story, starting at UCF and winding its way through the Florida Space Institute, working with NASA's Swamp Works team, and building an open source excavation robot. On this episode Ron tells us how it all went down and sh...

David Cramer joined the show to talk about the recent license change of Sentry to the Business Source License from a BSD 3-clause license. We talk about the details that triggered this change, the specifics of the BSL license and its required parameters, the threat to commercial open source products like Sentry, his concerns for the "open core" model, and what the future of open source might look...

Devon Zuegel is an Open Source Product Manager at GitHub. She's also one of the key people responsible for making GitHub Sponsors a thing. We talk with Devon about how she came to GitHub to develop GitHub Sponsors, the months of research she did to learn how to best solve the sustainability problem of open source, why GitHub is now addressing this issue, the various ways and models of addressing m...

Today we have a very special show for you – we're talking with Quincy Larson the founder of freeCodeCamp as part of a two-part companion podcast series where we each celebrate our 5 and 10 year anniversaries. This year marks 5 years for freeCodeCamp and 10 years for us here at Changelog. So make sure you check out the freeCodeCamp podcast next week when Quincy ships our episode to their feed. But,...

Jeff Meyerson, host of Software Engineering Daily, and the founder of FindCollabs (a place to find collaborators for open source software) joined the show to talk about living in San Francisco, his thoughts on podcasting and where the medium is heading, getting through large scale market changes. We talk at length about his new project FindCollabs, the difficulty of reliably finding people to coll...