Changelog Interviews

The incomparable Jessica Kerr is back with another grab-bag of amazing topics. We talk about her journey to Honeycomb, devs getting satisfaction from the code they write, why step one for her is "get that new project into production" and step two is observe it, her angst for the context switching around pull requests, some awesome book recommendations, how game theory and design can translate to h...

This week we're joined by the "mad scientist" himself, Feross Aboukhadijeh...and we're talking about the launch of Socket — the next big thing in the fight to secure and protect the open source supply chain. While working on the frontlines of open source, Feross and team have witnessed firsthand how supply chain attacks have swept across the software community and have damaged the trust in open so...

This week we're talking to Toby Padilla, Co-Founder at Charm — where they build tools to make the command line glamorous. We talk about the state of the art, the next big thing happening on the command line and in ssh-land. They have an array of open source tooling to build great apps for the terminal and Charm Cloud to power a new generation of CLI apps. We talk through all their tooling, where t...

This week we're joined by Annie Sexton, UX Engineer at Render, to talk about her blog post titled Git Organized: A Better Git Flow that made the internet explode when she suggested using `reset` instead of `rebase` for a better git flow. On this show we talk about the git flow she suggests and why, how this flow works for her when she's hacking on the Render codebase (and when she uses it), the go...

This week we’re joined by Jacob Kaplan-Moss and we're talking about his extensive writing on work sample tests. These tests are an exercise, a simulation, or a small slice of real day-to-day work that candidates will perform as part of their job. Over the years, as an engineering leader, Jacob has become a practicing expert in effectively hiring engineers — today he shares a wealth of knowledge on...

This week we're joined by Nora Jones, founder and CEO at Jeli where they help teams gain insight and learnings from incidents. Back in December Nora shared here thoughts in a Changelog post titled "Incident" shouldn't be a four-letter word - which got a lot of attention from our readers. Today we're talking with Nora about all things incidents — the learning and growth they represent for teams, wh...

Welcome to _Song Encoder_, a special series of The Changelog podcast featuring people who create at the intersection of software and music. This episode features Pwnie Award-winning songwriter Forrest Brazeal.

This week Paul Copplestone, CEO of Supabase joined us to catch us up on the next big thing happening in the world of Postgres. Supabase might be best known as "the open source Firebase alternative," a tagline they might be reluctant to maintain. But from Adam's perspective, he's never been more excited about what they're bringing to market for Postgres fans. In the last year, Supabase has gone fro...

This week Matt Ahrens joins Adam to talk about ZFS. Matt co-founded the ZFS project at Sun Microsystems in 2001. And 20 years later Adam picked up ZFS for use in his home lab and loved it. So, he reached out to Matt and invited him on the show. They cover the origins of the file system, its journey from proprietary to open source, architecture choices like copy-on-write, the ins and outs of creati...

Paul Orlando joins Jerod to talk through some unintended consequences that occur when systems operate at scale. We discuss Goodhart's Law, The Cobra Effect, how to design incentive systems, dependency management decisions, the risks of autonomous vehicles, and much more along the way.

Our 4th annual year-end wrap-up episode! We don't naval gaze often, but when we do... we make sure you get your money's worth. Reflections, most popular episodes, our favs, and new this year: listener voice mails. Thanks for listening! 💚

We're joined by Eran Yahav — talking about AI assistants for developers. Eran has been working on this problem for more than a decade. We talk about his path to now and how the idea for Tabnine came to life, this AI revolution taking place and the role it will play in developer productivity, and we talk about the elephant in the room - how Tabnine compares to GitHub Copilot, and what they're doing...

Today we're bringing our appearance on DevDiscuss right here to The Changelog. Jerod and I guested their launch episode for Season 7 to talk about deeply human stories we've covered over the years on this podcast. For long-time listners this will be a trip down memory lane and for recent subscibers this will be a guided tour on some of our most impactful episodes. Special thanks to Ben Halpern and...

We're prepping for our 4th annual state of the "log" episode where we look back at the year, discuss some of our favorite episodes as well as the most popular ones, and talk a bit about what we have in the works for 2022 and beyond. We thought it'd be **awesome** to include some listener voices on the show! So, please share your favorite Changelog guests, topics, or a-ha moments you've had over th...

Today we're joined by Jessica Lord, talking about the origins of Electron and her boomerang back to GitHub to lead GitHub Sponsors. We cover the early days of Electron before Electron was Electron, how she advocated to turn it into a product and make it a framework, how it's used today, why she boomeranged back to GitHub to lead Sponsors, what's next in funding open source creators, and we attempt...

Today we're joined by Ilya Grigorik to talk about Shopify's developer preview release of Hydrogen and the preview release of Oxygen which is in early access preview with select merchants on Shopify. Hydrogen is their React framework for dynamic, contextual, and personalized e-commerce. And Oxygen is Shopify's hosted V8 JavaScript worker runtime that leverages all of their platform with the hope of...

This week we're bringing JS Party to The Changelog — Mitch and Andrew from the 1Password team talk with Amal and Nick about the company’s transition to Electron and web technologies, and how the company utilized its existing web stack to shape the future of its desktop experience.

Today we're joined by Shawn "swyx" Wang, also known as just "swyx" — and we're talking about his interesting path to becoming a software developer, what it means to "learn in public" and how he's been able to leverage that process to not only level up his skills and knowlege, but to also rapidly advance his career. We cover Swyx's recent writing on the light and dark side of the API economy — some...

Welcome to _Song Encoder_, a special series of The Changelog podcast featuring people who create at the intersection of software and music. This episode features $STDOUT and contains explicit language.

Robby Russell is back on The Changelog after more than 10 years to catch us up on all things Oh My Zsh — a delightful, open source, community-driven framework for managing your Zshell configuration. It comes bundled with plugins, themes, and can be easily customized and contributed to, because hey, that’s how open source works. In this episode Robby gives us a glimpse into the passion and the stru...

This week we're joined by Gergely Orosz and we’re talking about the insane tech hiring market we’re in right now. Gergely was on the show a year ago talking about growing as a software engineer and his book The Tech Resume Inside Out. Now he’s laser focused on Substack with actionable advice for engineering managers and engineers, with a focus on big tech and high-growth startups. On today’s show...

Today we're talking to Matt Rickard about his blog post, Reflections on 10,000 Hours of Programming. Matt was clear to mention that these reflections are purely about coding, not career advice or other soft skills. These reflections are just about deliberately writing code for 10,000 hours, which also correlates with the number of hours needed to master a skill. If you count the reflections we cov...

This week we're joined by Brittany Dionigi, Director of Platform Engineering at Articulate, and we're talking about how organizations can take a more intentional approach to supporting the growth of their engineers through learning-focused engineering. Brittany has been a software engineer for more than 10 years, and learned formal educational and classroom-based learning strategies as a Technical...

This week we’re talking with Evan Weaver about Fauna — the database for a new generation of applications. Fauna is a transactional database delivered as a secure and scalable cloud API with native GraphQL. It's the first implementation of its kind based on the Calvin paper as opposed to Spanner. We cover Evan's history leading up to Fauna, deep details on the Calvin algorithm, the CAP theorem for...

This week we're joined by Adam Jacob, CEO of System Initiative and Co-Founder of Chef, about open source business models and the model he thinks is the right one to choose, his graceful exit from Chef and some of the details behind Chef's acquisition in 2020 for $220 million...in cash, and how his perspective on open source has or has not changed as a result. Adam also shared as much _stealth mode...