Changelog Interviews

Jonathan Turner, Andrés Robalino, and Yehuda Katz joined the show to talk about Nushell, or just Nu for short. It’s a modern shell for the GitHub era. It’s written in Rust, and it has the backing of some of the greatest minds in open source. We talk through what it is, how it works and cool things you can do with it, why Rust, ideas for the future, and ways for the community to get involved and co...

Amal Hussein (Engineering Manager at npm) joined the show to talk about AST’s — aka, abstract syntax trees. Amal is giving a talk at All Things Open on the subject so we asked her to give us an early preview. She’s on a mission to democratize the knowledge and usage of AST’s to push legacy code and the web forward.

Dave Kaplan (Head of Software Engineering at Policygenius) joined the show to talk about Generative Engineering Cultures and how they have become the goal of industry-aware tech teams. We talk through the topology of organizational cultures ranging from pathological, to bureaucratic, to generative, the importance of management buy-in (from the top down) on leading a generative culture, the ability...

Abhinav Asthana (founder of Postman) joined the show to talk about Postman, an ADE — API Development Environment — that began as open source and is now a full-fledged company that just announced a $50 million dollar Series B. We talk about why Postman has grown so successfully, APIs and their impact to core business factors, what it means to be an API Development Environment (ADE), and how they cr...

In this episode we’re shining our maintainer spotlight on Feross Aboukhadijeh. Feross is the creator and maintainer of 100's of open source projects which have been downloaded 100's of million of times each month — projects like StandardJS, BitMidi, and WebTorrent to name a few. This episode with Feross continues our maintainer spotlight series where we dig deep into the life of an open source sof...

We're on the expo hall floor of OSCON 2019 talking with Eric Holscher, Ali Spittel, and Hong Phuc Dang. First up, we talk to Eric about his work at Write the Docs, ethical advertising, and the Pac-Man rule at conferences. Second, we talk with Ali about her passion for teaching developers, her passion for writing, and her new found love for podcasting. Last, we talk with Hong about her work at FOSS...

Ryan Singer, head of Product Strategy at Basecamp, joined the show to talk about their newest book — Shape Up: Stop running in circles and ship work that matters. It's written by Ryan himself and you can read it right now for free online at Basecamp.com/shapeup. We talked about the back story of the book, how the methodology for Shape Up developed from within at Basecamp, the principles and method...

Christine Yen (co-founder and CEO of Honeycomb) joined the show to talk about her upcoming talk at Strange Loop titled “Observability: Superpowers for Developers.” We talk practically about observability and how it delivers on these superpowers. We also cover the biggest hurdles to observability, the cultural shifts needed in teams to implement observability, and even the gains the entire organiza...

We're joined by C J Silverio, aka ceejbot on Twitter, aka 2nd hire and former CTO at npm Inc. We talk with Ceej about her recent JS Conf EU talk titled “The Economies of Open Source” where she laid our her concerns with the JavaScript language commons being owned by venture capitalists. Currently the JavaScript language commons is controlled by the npm registery, and as you may know, npm is a VC b...

We're joined by Ron Evans at OSCON on the expo hall floor talking about Go and how it's eating the world of software. Specifically we're talking about TinyGo and what they're doing to bring the Go programming language to micro-controllers and modern web browsers. According to Ron Evans, "embedded systems and Go are the most exciting things happening right now."

Adam Jacob (co-founder and board member of Chef) joins the show to talk about the keynote he’s giving at OSCON this week. The keynote is titled "The war for the soul of open source." We talked about what made open source great in the first place, what went wrong, the pitfalls of open core models, licensing, and more. By the way, we’re at OSCON this week so if you make your way to the expo hall, ma...

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.

Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt, best known as the authors of The Pragmatic Programmer and founders of The Pragmatic Bookshelf, joined the show today to talk about the 20th anniversary edition of The Pragmatic Programmer. This is a beloved book to software developers all over the world, so we wanted to catch up with Andy and Dave to talk about how this book came to be, some of the wisdom shared in its c...

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...

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 a...

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 collectio...

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...

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...

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 Emma Bostian about going from zero to thought leader in 6 months. We talk about the nuances of UX including the differences between an UX Designer and a UX Engineer, we touch on “the great divide”, and we talk about Coding Coach — the open source project and community that Emma and others are building to connect software developers and mentors all over the world.

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...