The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source

Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch and JS Party panelist Amal Hussein join Jerod to discuss the state of the web platform! We opine on why it's so important and unique, where it stands today, what modern web development looks like, and where the whole thing is headed in 2021 and beyond.

It's the end of 2020 and on this year’s "State of the log" episode Adam and Jerod carry on the tradition of looking back at our favorite moments of the year -- we talk through our most popular episodes, our personal favorites and must listen episodes, top posts from Changelog Posts, and what we have in the works for 2021 and beyond.

Today we welcome Mike Pennisi into our Maintainer Spotlight. This is a special flavor of The Changelog where we go deep into a maintainer's story. Mike is the maintainer of JSHint which, since its creation in 2011, was encumbered by a license that made it very hard for legally-conscious teams to use the project. The license was the widely-used MIT Expat license, but it included one additional clau...

What do you do when you make a living typing on a keyboard, but you can no longer do that for more than a few minutes at a time? Switch careers?! Not Josh Comeau. He decided to learn from others who have come before him and develop his own solution for coding without his hands. Spoiler Alert: he uses weird noises and some fancy eye tracking tech. On this episode Josh tells us all about the fascina...

Gergely Orosz joined Adam for a conversation about his journey as a software engineer. Gergely recently stepped down from his role as Engineering Manager at Uber to pursue his next big thing. But, that next big thing isn't quite clear to him yet. So, in the meantime, he has been using this break to write a few books and blog more so he can share what he's learned along the way. He's also validatin...

We have a BIG show for you today. We're talking about the future of the Mac. Coming off of Apple's "One more thing." event to launch the Apple M1 chip and M1 powered Macs, we have a two part show giving you the perspective of Apple as well as a Mac app developer on _the future of the Mac_. **Part 1 features Tim Triemstra from Apple.** Tim is the Product Marketing Manager for Developer Technologies...

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...

We're talking with Gerhard Lazu, our resident SRE, ops, and infrastructure expert about the evolution of Changelog's infrastructure, what's new in 2020, and what we're planning for in 2021. The most notable change? We're now running on Linode Kubernetes Engine (LKE)! We even test the resilience of this new infrastructure by purposefully taking the site down. That's near the end, so don't miss it!

Today we welcome Matt Klein into our Maintainer Spotlight. Matt is the creator of Envoy, born inside of Lyft. It's an edge and service proxy designed for cloud-native applications. Envoy was unexpectedly popular, and completely changed the way Lyft considers what and how to open source. While Matt has had several opportunities to turn Envoy into a commercial open source company, he didn't. In toda...

PostgreSQL aficionado Craig Kerstiens joins Jerod to talk about his (and our) favorite relational database. Craig details why Postgres is unique in the world of open source databases, which features are most exciting, the many things you can make Postgres do, and what the future might hold. Oh, and some awesome `psql` tips & tricks!

Maxime Vaillancourt joined us to talk about Shopify's massive storefront rewrite from a Ruby on Rails monolith to a completely new implementation written in Ruby. It's a fairly well known opinion that rewrites are "the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make" and generally something "you should never do." But Maxime and the team at Shopify have proved successful in their...

We're joined by Jim Haughwout (Head of Infrastructure and Operations) and Stefan Ålund (Principal Product Manager) from Spotify to talk about how they manage hundreds of teams producing code and shipping at scale. Thanks to their recently open sourced open platform for building developer portals called Backstage, Spotify is able to keep engineering squads connected and shipping high-quality code q...

We're helping Atlassian to promote Season 2 of Teamistry. If this is the first time you're hearing about this podcast, Teamistry is an original podcast from Atlassian that tells the stories of teams who work together in new and unexpected ways, to achieve remarkable things. Today, we're sharing a full-length episode from Season 1 which tells the story of the team that fashioned the Apollo 11 space...

Gitter is exiting GitLab and entering the Matrix...ok, we couldn't help ourselves with that one. Today we're joined by Sid Sibrandij (CEO of GitLab) and Matthew Hodgson (technical co-founder of Matrix) to discuss the acquisition of Gitter. A little backstory to tee things up...back in 2017 GitLab announced the acquisition of Gitter to help push their idea of chatops within GitLab. As it turns out,...

Today we welcome Hisham Muhammad into our Maintainer Spotlight. Hisham is the creator of htop - a well known cross-platform interactive process viewer. This conversation with Hisham covers the gamut of being an open source software maintainer. To set the stage, a new version of htop was announced, but not by Hisham -- it was a kind takeover of the project and needless to say Hisham was surprised,...

We're joined by Simon Eskildsen, Principal Engineer at Shopify, talking about how he uses a concept called napkin math where you use first-principle thinking to estimate systems without writing any code. By the end of the show we were estimating pretty much everything using napkin math.

Earlier this year on February 2nd, 2020 Jon Evans and his team of archivists took a snapshot of all active public repositories on GitHub and sent it to a decommissioned coal mine in the Svalbard archipelago where it will be stored for the next 1,000 years. On this episode, Jon chats with Jerod all about the GitHub Archive Program and how they're preserving open source software for future generatio...

Carbon is an open source web app that helps you create and share beautiful images of your source code. Whether you've used Carbon personally or not, odds are you've seen its dent on the universe of social code sharing. Mike Fix has been maintaining Carbon for a few years and he's embraced the project as an opportunity to experiment and practice working in public. On this Maintainer Spotlight episo...

We're so excited to see Chris and Daniel take this show to 100 episodes, and that's exactly why we're rebroadcasting Practical AI #100 here on The Changelog. They've had so many great guests and discussions about everything from AGI to GPUs to AI for good. In this episode, we circle back to the beginning when Jerod and I joined the first episode to help kick off the podcast. We discuss how our per...

Nadia Eghbal is back and this time she's talking with us about her new book _Working in Public_. If you're an old school listener you might remember the podcast we produced with Nadia and Mikeal Rogers called Request for Commits. If you weren't listening then, or can't remember...don't worry...the back catalog of Request for Commits is still online and subscribe-able via all the podcast ways. That...

We're talking about designing and building HEY with Jonas Downey, the lead designer behind HEY. In their words, “Email sucked for years, but not anymore.” We were super interested in how they went about solving the problems with email, so we invited Jonas on to share all the details and a behind-the-scenes look at the making of HEY.

Kayla Cinnamon, Program Manager at Microsoft for Windows Terminal, Console, Command Line, and Cascadia Code joined us to talk about the release of Windows Terminal 1.0 and the new Windows command-line experience. We talk about everything that went into rethinking the command line experience on Windows, the UX and UI design behind it all, the learnings of working in open source, and what's to come...

Adam loves a good dark theme and supporting a fellow creator, and Hedy Li finished the episode we did with Nikita Prokopov covering FiraCode and reached out saying Zeno Rocha's work on Dracula deserved the same credit. _We agreed._ So we linked up with Zeno about his passion for open source, how he's changed his mind on making money with open source, his big release of Dracula Pro and the future o...

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're joined again by José Valim talking about the recent acquihire of Plataformatec and what that means for the Elixir language, as well as José. We also talk about Dashbit a new 3 person company he helped form from work done while at Plataformatec to help startups and enterprises adopt and run Elixir in production. Lastly we talk about a new idea José has called Bytepack that aims to help develo...