The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source

Latest Episodes:

Pushing webpack forward (Interview) Mar 13, 2020

Show notes

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, and if he’s ever suffered from burnout.

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Changelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!

Sponsors:

Tidelift – Tidelift is the first managed open source subscription that pays the maintainers of the exact open source projects you depend on while giving you the commercial support you’ve been looking for. Learn more at tidelift.com.

Featuring:

Tobias Koppers – GitHub, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Altair 8800 and the dawn of a revolution (Interview) Mar 11, 2020

Show notes

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 the PC era.

Learn more and subscribe at redhat.com/commandlineheroes.

Join the discussion

Changelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!

Sponsors:

Command Line Heroes – A podcast from Red Hat about the people who transform technology from the command line up. Head to redhat.com/commandlineheroes to learn more and subscribe.

Featuring:

Saron Yitbarek – Website, GitHub, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

The Altair 8800 is why we have computers in most homes today. It was initially designed for hobbyists. But a few visionaries saw massive potential in this strange little machine—and worked hard to make others see it too. What they created led to so much more than anyone could have ever imagined.

Forrest Mims tells us how his co-founder, Ed Roberts, planned to save their struggling electronics company. His idea? A microcomputer made for hobbyists. That computer led to a fateful phone call from Bill Gates and Paul Allen. Dan Sokol and Lee Felsenstein recall the unveiling of the Altair 8800 at the Homebrew Computer Club, and how it sparked Steve Wozniak’s eureka moment for the Apple I. We then hear from John Markoff about an infamous software heist that set the stage for the debate about whether code should be proprietary. And finally, Limor Fried reflects on how this story continues to influence today’s open source hardware movement.

First Invite to the Homebrew Computer Club by Fred Moore
The Altair story; early days at MITS by Forrest M. Mims III
WIRED article on the Altair by Randy Alfred
Video: Demo of the Altair by Don Russ
PC Mag article on Altair by Michael J. Miller

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Enter the Matrix (Interview) Mar 09, 2020

Show notes

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 recent big win for Matrix was Mozilla’s announcement of switching off its IRC network that it had been using for 22 years and now uses Matrix instead.

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Changelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!

Sponsors:

Linode – Our cloud of choice and the home of Changelog.com. Deploy a fast, efficient, native SSD cloud server for only $5/month. Get 4 months free using the code changelog2019 OR changelog2020. To learn more and get started head to linode.com/changelog.
Square – The Square developer team just launched their new developer YouTube channel. Head to youtube.com/squaredev or search for “Square Developer” on YouTube to learn more and subscribe.
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:

Matthew Hodgson – GitHub, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

Matrix.org
Matrix spec
Matrix on GitHub
Welcoming Mozilla to Matrix!
Synchronous Messaging at Mozilla (the decision post)
Check out this link and discussion on HN about “candidates for Mozilla’s IRC successor”

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

From open core to open source (Interview) Mar 02, 2020

Show notes

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.

Join the discussion

Changelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!

Sponsors:

Linode – Our cloud of choice and the home of Changelog.com. Deploy a fast, efficient, native SSD cloud server for only $5/month. Get 4 months free using the code changelog2019 OR changelog2020. To learn more and get started head to linode.com/changelog.
Square – The Square developer team just launched their new developer YouTube channel. Head to youtube.com/squaredev or search for “Square Developer” on YouTube to learn more and subscribe.
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:

Frank Karlitschek – Website, GitHub, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

Special thanks to André Jaenisch and AJ Jordan for suggesting this show and topic!

Nextcloud
Nextcloud community on GitHub
Frank Karlitschek’s talk at FOSDEM — Why I forked my own project and my own company (ownCloud to Nextcloud)

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

The developer's guide to content creation (Interview) Feb 21, 2020

Show notes

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, crafting a mission statement for your blog and thoughts on personal brand, her 4 step recipe for generating content ideas, as well as promotional and syndication strategies to consider for your developer blog.

Join the discussion

Changelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!

Sponsors:

DigitalOcean – DigitalOcean’s developer cloud makes it simple to launch in the cloud and scale up as you grow. They have an intuitive control panel, predictable pricing, team accounts, worldwide availability with a 99.99% uptime SLA, and 24/7/365 world-class support to back that up. Get your $100 credit at do.co/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
Square – The Square developer team just launched their new developer YouTube channel. Head to youtube.com/squaredev or search for “Square Developer” on YouTube to learn more and subscribe.
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:

Stephanie Morillo – GitHub, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

The Developer’s Guide to Content Creation
The book did well on Product Hunt with 356 upvotes
Writing a dev blog and need help? Schedule a 30 minute content session with Stephanie.
What Admiral Grace Hopper really meant when she said, “It’s easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission”

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

The dawn of sponsorware (Interview) Feb 17, 2020

Show notes

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, how it went (spoiler: very well), and how he had to change his mindset on 2 things in order to make sustainability possible.

Join the discussion

Changelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!

Sponsors:

Tidelift – Tidelift is the first managed open source subscription that pays the maintainers of the exact open source projects you depend on while giving you the commercial support you’ve been looking for. Learn more at tidelift.com.

Featuring:

Caleb Porzio – Website, GitHub, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Productionising real-world ML data pipelines (Interview) Feb 14, 2020

Show notes

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 Yetunde about her passion project: a virtual reality film which debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in January.

Join the discussion

Changelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!

Sponsors:

DigitalOcean – DigitalOcean’s developer cloud makes it simple to launch in the cloud and scale up as you grow. They have an intuitive control panel, predictable pricing, team accounts, worldwide availability with a 99.99% uptime SLA, and 24/7/365 world-class support to back that up. Get your $100 credit at do.co/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
Brain Science – For the curious! Brain Science is our new podcast exploring the inner-workings of the human brain to understand behavior change, habit formation, mental health, and being human. It’s Brain Science applied — not just how does the brain work, but how do we apply what we know about the brain to transform our lives.
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:

Yetunde Dada – GitHub, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Good tech debt (Interview) Feb 06, 2020

Show notes

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 development.

Join the discussion

Changelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!

Sponsors:

Linode – Our cloud of choice and the home of Changelog.com. Deploy a fast, efficient, native SSD cloud server for only $5/month. Get 4 months free using the code changelog2019 OR changelog2020. To learn more and get started 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
Brain Science – For the curious! Brain Science is our new podcast exploring the inner-workings of the human brain to understand behavior change, habit formation, mental health, and being human. It’s Brain Science applied — not just how does the brain work, but how do we apply what we know about the brain to transform our lives.
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:

Jon Thornton – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

3 Kinds of Good Tech Debt ~> discuss

“Tech debt” is a dirty word in the software engineering world. It’s often said with an air of regret; a past mistake that will eventually need to be atoned for with refactoring.

Head to changelog.com/submit if you’ve written something your fellow devs would find interesting that you’d like us to promote.

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

The soul of an old machine (Interview) Feb 04, 2020

Show notes

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 in a bag and, eventually, the phones in our pockets.

Learn more and subscribe at redhat.com/commandlineheroes.

Join the discussion

Changelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!

Sponsors:

Command Line Heroes – A podcast from Red Hat about the people who transform technology from the command line up. Head to redhat.com/commandlineheroes to learn more and subscribe.

Featuring:

Saron Yitbarek – Website, GitHub, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

They don’t fit in your pocket. But in their day, minicomputers were an order of magnitude smaller than the room-sized mainframes that preceded them. And they paved the way for the personal computers that could fit in a bag and, eventually, the phones in your pocket.

16-bit minicomputers changed the world of IT in the 1970s. They gave companies the opportunity for each engineer to have their own machines. But it wasn’t quite enough, not until the arrival of 32-bit versions.

Carl Alsing and Jim Guyer recount their work at Data General to create a revolutionary new 32-bit machine. But their now legendary work was done in secret. Codenamed “Eagle,” their machine was designed to compete with one being built by another team in their own company. These engineers recall the corporate politics and intrigue required to keep the project going—and how they turned restrictions into advantages. Neal Firth discusses life on an exciting-but-demanding project. One where the heroes worked together because they wanted to, without expectations of awards or fame. And all three discuss how this story was immortalized in the non-fiction engineering classic, The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder.

The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder
The New Golden Age of Building with Soul by Jessie Frazelle
The Minicomputers of the 70s by Georg Wittenburg
Rise and Fall of Minicomputers by Gordon Bell

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Open source meets climate science (Interview) Jan 31, 2020

Show notes

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 needed during the writing phase of an academic paper. We also discuss climate science, physics, self hosting Git, and why Anders isn’t present on any “social” networks.

Join the discussion

Changelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!

Sponsors:

Linode – Our cloud of choice and the home of Changelog.com. Deploy a fast, efficient, native SSD cloud server for only $5/month. Get 4 months free using the code changelog2019 OR changelog2020. To learn more and get started 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
Brain Science – For the curious! Brain Science is our new podcast exploring the inner-workings of the human brain to understand behavior change, habit formation, mental health, and being human. It’s Brain Science applied — not just how does the brain work, but how do we apply what we know about the brain to transform our lives.
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.