The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source

Latest Episodes:

You can FINALLY use JSHint for evil (Interview) Dec 20, 2020

Show notes

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 clause: “The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil.” Because of this clause, many teams could not use JSHint.

Today’s episode with Mike covers the full gamut of JSHint’s journey and how non-free licensing can poison the well of free software.

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Sponsors:

Retool – Retool makes it super simple to build back-office apps in hours, not days. The tool is is built by engineers, explicitly for engineers. Learn more and try it for free at retool.com/changelog
DigitalOcean – Get apps to market faster. Build, deploy, and scale apps quickly using a simple, fully managed solution. DigitalOcean handles the infrastructure, app runtimes and dependencies, so that you can push code to production in just a few clicks. Try it free with $100 credit at do.co/changelog.
Equinix – Get $500 in free credit to play with plus a rad t-shirt at info.equinixmetal.com/changelog. Equinix Metal is built from the ground up to empower developers with low-latency, high performance infrastructure anywhere.
New Relic – Observability made simple. New Relic One is an observability platform built to help engineers create more perfect software — Telemetry Data Platform, Full-Stack Observability, Applied Intelligence. Get one (1) user and 100GB per month, totally free. Forever.

Featuring:

Mike Pennisi – Website, GitHub, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Coding without your hands (Interview) Dec 13, 2020

Show notes

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 fascinating system he developed, how it changed his perspective on work & life, and where he’s going from here. Plus we mix in some CSS & JS chat along the way.

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Sponsors:

Linode – Get $100 in free credit to get started on Linode – Linode is our cloud of choice and the home of Changelog.com. Head to linode.com/changelog OR text CHANGELOG to 474747 to get instant access to that $100 in free credit.
Retool – Retool makes it super simple to build back-office apps in hours, not days. The tool is is built by engineers, explicitly for engineers. Learn more and try it for free at retool.com/changelog
New Relic – Observability made simple. New Relic One is an observability platform built to help engineers create more perfect software. Get one (1) user and 100GB per month, totally free. Forever.
Equinix – Get $500 in free credit to play with plus a rad t-shirt at info.equinixmetal.com/changelog. Equinix Metal is built from the ground up to empower developers with low-latency, high performance infrastructure anywhere.

Featuring:

Josh Comeau – Website, GitHub, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Growing as a software engineer (Interview) Dec 02, 2020

Show notes

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 validating some startup ideas he has on platform engineering. His first book is available to read now — it’s called The Tech Resume Inside Out and offers a practical guide to writing a tech resume written by the people who do the resume screening. Both topics gave us quite a bit to talk about.

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Sponsors:

Retool – Retool makes it super simple to build back-office apps in hours, not days. The tool is is built by engineers, explicitly for engineers. Learn more and try it for free at retool.com/changelog
DigitalOcean – Get apps to market faster. Build, deploy, and scale apps quickly using a simple, fully managed solution. DigitalOcean handles the infrastructure, app runtimes and dependencies, so that you can push code to production in just a few clicks. Try it free with $100 credit at do.co/changelog.
New Relic – Observability made simple. New Relic One is an observability platform built to help engineers create more perfect software. Get one (1) user and 100GB per month, totally free. Forever.
Equinix – Equinix Metal is built from the ground up to empower developers with low-latency, high performance infrastructure anywhere. Get $500 in free credit to play with plus a rad t-shirt at info.equinixmetal.com/changelog

Featuring:

Gergely Orosz – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

The future of Mac (Interview) Nov 20, 2020

Show notes

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. He’s been at Apple for 15 years and the team he manages is responsible for developer tools and technologies including Xcode, Swift Playgrounds, the Swift language, and UNIX tools.

Part 2 features Ken Case from The Omni Group. Ken is the Founder and CEO of The Omni Group and they’re well known for their Omni Productivity Suite including OmniFocus, OmniPlan, OmniGraffle, and OmniOutliner – all of which are developed for iOS & Mac.

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Changelog++ members get a bonus 1 minute at the end of this episode and zero ads. Join today!

Sponsors:

Linode – Get $100 in free credit to get started on Linode – our cloud of choice and the home of Changelog.com. Head to linode.com/changelog
New Relic – Observability made simple. New Relic One is an observability platform built to help engineers create more perfect software. Get one (1) user and 100GB per month, totally free. Forever.
Equinix – Equinix Metal is built from the ground up to empower developers with low-latency, high performance infrastructure anywhere. Get $500 in free credit to play with plus a rad t-shirt at info.equinixmetal.com/changelog
LaunchDarkly – Power experimentation at any scale. Fast and reliable feature management for the modern enterprise.

Featuring:

Tim Triemstra – LinkedIn, X
Ken Case – Website, GitHub, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

The Kollected Kode Vicious (Interview) Nov 13, 2020

Show notes

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.

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Changelog++ members save 3 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!

Sponsors:

Linode – Get $100 in free credit to get started on Linode – our cloud of choice and the home of Changelog.com. Head to linode.com/changelog
Retool – Retool makes it super simple to build back-office apps in hours, not days. The tool is is built by engineers, explicitly for engineers. Learn more and try it for free at retool.com/changelog
Equinix – Equinix Metal is built from the ground up to empower developers with low-latency, high performance infrastructure anywhere. Get $500 in free credit to play with plus a rad t-shirt at info.equinixmetal.com/changelog
LaunchDarkly – Power experimentation at any scale. Fast and reliable feature management for the modern enterprise.

Featuring:

George Neville-Neil – GitHub, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Inside 2020's infrastructure for Changelog.com (Interview) Nov 06, 2020

Show notes

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!

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Changelog++ members get a bonus 2 minutes at the end of this episode and zero ads. Join today!

Sponsors:

Linode – Get $100 in free credit to get started on Linode – our cloud of choice and the home of Changelog.com. Head to linode.com/changelog
Teamistry – Teamistry is a podcast that tells the stories of teams who work together in new and unexpected ways to achieve remarkable things. Season 2 of Teamistry is out now. Search for Teamistry anywhere you listen to podcasts, or head here to subsribe.
Equinix – Equinix Metal is built from the ground up to empower developers with low-latency, high performance infrastructure anywhere. Get $500 in free credit to play with plus a rad t-shirt at info.equinixmetal.com/changelog
LaunchDarkly – Power experimentation at any scale. Fast and reliable feature management for the modern enterprise.
Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com.

Featuring:

Gerhard Lazu – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

Read Gerhard’s post covering all the details for Changelog’s 2020 and beyond infrastructure.

The Changelog #254: Deploying Changelog.com with Gerhard Lazu
The new Changelog.com setup for 2019
Inside the 2019 infrastructure for Changelog.com
grafana.changelog.com - Compute Resources / Workload in Grafana
Join Linode Green Light to get early access and test new Linode products before they hit the market, provide valuable feedback to influence product direction, and become part of a community of developers helping us build the cloud that works for you.
fluxcd/flux
Introducing Flux
Check out Fernand Galiana and K9s
Bitwarden
Grafana Labs
Keel

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Maintaining the massive success of Envoy (Interview) Oct 30, 2020

Show notes

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 today’s conversation with Matt we learn why he choose a completely different path for the project.

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Sponsors:

Tidelift – The first managed open source subscription helps you develop apps with components that just work—including comprehensive security updates, active maintenance, and accurate licensing. And the best part of all—with the Tidelift Subscription, you help open source maintainers get paid for their work. Learn more at tidelift.com.

Featuring:

Matt Klein – Website, GitHub, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

What's so exciting about Postgres? (Interview) Oct 23, 2020

Show notes

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!

Join the discussion

Changelog++ members get a bonus 2 minutes at the end of this episode and zero ads. Join today!

Sponsors:

Linode – Get $100 in free credit to get started on Linode – our cloud of choice and the home of Changelog.com. Head to linode.com/changelog
Teamistry – Teamistry is a podcast that tells the stories of teams who work together in new and unexpected ways to achieve remarkable things. Season 2 of Teamistry is out now. Search for Teamistry anywhere you listen to podcasts, or head here to subsribe.
Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com.
Equinix – Equinix Metal is built from the ground up to empower developers with low-latency, high performance infrastructure anywhere. Get $500 in free credit to play with plus a rad t-shirt at info.equinixmetal.com/changelog
LaunchDarkly – Test in production! Deploy code at any time, even if a feature isn’t ready to be released to your users. Wrap code in feature flags to get the safety to test new features and infrastructure in prod without impacting the wrong end users.

Featuring:

Craig Kerstiens – Website, GitHub, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Shopify’s massive storefront rewrite (Interview) Oct 16, 2020

Show notes

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 efforts in this massive storefront rewrite and today’s conversation covers all the details.

Join the discussion

Changelog++ members save 4 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!

Sponsors:

Linode – Get $100 in free credit to get started on Linode – our cloud of choice and the home of Changelog.com. Head to linode.com/changelog
Pixie – Pixie gives you a magical API to get instant debug data. The best part is this doesn’t involve changing code, there are no manual UIs, and this all lives inside Kubernetes. Pixie lives inside of your platform, harvests all the data that you need, and exposes a bunch of interfaces that you can ping to get the data you need. It’s a programmable edge intelligence platform which captures metrics, traces, logs and events, without any code changes.
Retool – Retool makes it super simple to build back-office apps in hours, not days. The tool is is built by engineers, explicitly for engineers. Learn more and try it for free at retool.com/changelog
Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com.

Featuring:

Maxime Vaillancourt – Website, GitHub, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Spotify's open platform for shipping at scale (Interview) Oct 09, 2020

Show notes

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 quickly — without compromising autonomy.

Join the discussion

Changelog++ members save 4 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!

Sponsors:

Linode – Our cloud of choice and the home of Changelog.com. Get started on Linode today with a $100 in free credit. You can find all the details at linode.com/changelog
Pixie – Pixie gives you a magical API to get instant debug data. The best part is this doesn’t involve changing code, there are no manual UIs, and this all lives inside Kubernetes. Pixie lives inside of your platform, harvests all the data that you need, and exposes a bunch of interfaces that you can ping to get the data you need. It’s a programmable edge intelligence platform which captures metrics, traces, logs and events, without any code changes.
Retool – Retool makes it super simple to build back-office apps in hours, not days. The tool is is built by engineers, explicitly for engineers. Learn more and try it for free at retool.com/changelog
Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com.