The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source

Latest Episodes:

OSCON 2019 anthology (Interview) Aug 23, 2019

Show notes

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 FOSSASIA, the disconnect between America and Asia in open source, and several of the cool open source projects they have on GitHub.

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Sponsors:

Linode – Our cloud server of choice. Deploy a fast, efficient, native SSD cloud server for only $5/month. Get 4 months free using the code changelog2019. Start your server - head to linode.com/changelog
Keen – Keen makes customer-facing metrics simple. It’s the platform that gives you powerful in-product analytics fast with minimal development time. Go to Keen.io/Changelog and get your first 30-days of Keen for free.
TeamCity by JetBrains – Deliver software faster with TeamCity — a self-hosted continuous integration and delivery server developed by JetBrains. TeamCity is super-smart at running incremental builds, reusing artifacts, and building only what needs to be built, which can save over 30% of the daily build time.
Innovate Software at OSCON – Whether you’re looking to understand where software development is headed, or want to dive into the key technologies that you need to build resilient, useful, innovative software, the O’Reilly Open Source Software Conference (OSCON) is where you’ll find the answers you need. Secure your spot for 2020 now and save 20% on your pass with code CHANGELOG20.

Featuring:

Eric Holscher – Website, GitHub, X
Ali Spittel – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Hong Phuc Dang – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

Special thanks to our friends at O’Reilly Media and OSCON for making our trip to Portland possible.

Eric:

Ali:

Hong:

FOSSASIA

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Shaping, betting, and building (Interview) Aug 16, 2019

Show notes

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 methodologies of Shape Up, how teams of varying sizes can implement Shape Up. Ryan even shared a special invitation to our listeners near the end of the show to his live and in-person Shape Up workshop on August 28th in Detroit, Michigan.

Join the discussion

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

Sponsors:

Linode – Our cloud server of choice. Deploy a fast, efficient, native SSD cloud server for only $5/month. Get 4 months free using the code changelog2019. Start your server - head to linode.com/changelog
Keen – Keen makes customer-facing metrics simple. It’s the platform that gives you powerful in-product analytics fast with minimal development time. Go to Keen.io/Changelog and get your first 30-days of Keen for free.
TeamCity by JetBrains – Deliver software faster with TeamCity — a self-hosted continuous integration and delivery server developed by JetBrains. TeamCity is super-smart at running incremental builds, reusing artifacts, and building only what needs to be built, which can save over 30% of the daily build time.
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:

Ryan Singer – Website, GitHub, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

Shape Up
Foreword by Jason Fried
Principles of shaping
Example pitches — “How we do it in Basecamp”
Bets, Not Backlogs
How to Begin to Shape Up
Summary of the Shape Up method
Shape Up glossary
Ryan’s tweet about the Shape Up workshop
If you have questions — email shapeup@basecamp.com
Getting Real
All of Basecamp’s books

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Observability is for your unknown unknowns (Interview) Aug 07, 2019

Show notes

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 organization can enjoy when you deliver high-quality code and you’re able to respond to system failure with resilience.

Join the discussion

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

Sponsors:

DigitalOcean – The simplest cloud platform for developers and teams Whether you’re running one virtual machine or ten thousand, makes managing your infrastructure too easy. Get started for free with a $50 credit. Learn more at do.co/changelog.
GoCD + Kubernetes – With GoCD running on Kubernetes, you define your build workflow and let GoCD provision and scale build infrastructure on the fly. GoCD installs as a Kubernetes native application. Scale your build infrastructure elastically. Learn more at gocd.org/kubernetes
CrossBrowserTesting – The ONLY all-in-one testing platform that can run automated, visual, and manual UI tests – on thousands of real desktops and mobile browsers.
Strange Loop – A conference for software developers in St. Louis, MO. covering programming languages, databases, distributed systems, security, machine learning, creativity, and more! Sep 12-14, 2019 / Oct 1-3, 2020 / Sep 30-Oct 2, 2021

Featuring:

Christine Yen – Website, GitHub, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

“testing is for known knowns, monitoring is for known unknowns, observability is for unknown unknowns” – Jez Humble

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Federating JavaScript's language commons with Entropic (Interview) Aug 02, 2019

Show notes

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 backed for profit start up. Of course we also talk with Ceej about the bomb she dropped, Entropic, at the end of that talk — a federated package registry for JavaScript C J hopes will unseat npm and free the JavaScript language commons.

Join the discussion

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

Sponsors:

DigitalOcean – The simplest cloud platform for developers and teams Whether you’re running one virtual machine or ten thousand, makes managing your infrastructure too easy. Get started for free with a $50 credit. Learn more at do.co/changelog.
GoCD + Kubernetes – With GoCD running on Kubernetes, you define your build workflow and let GoCD provision and scale build infrastructure on the fly. GoCD installs as a Kubernetes native application. Scale your build infrastructure elastically. Learn more at gocd.org/kubernetes
CrossBrowserTesting – The ONLY all-in-one testing platform that can run automated, visual, and manual UI tests – on thousands of real desktops and mobile browsers.
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:

CJ Silverio – GitHub, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

The Economies of Open Source
entropic.dev
npm, Inc. has a new CEO (Bryan Bogensberger)
JS Party #82: LIVE from NodeConf Colombia featuring Kat Marchán, Anna Henningsen, Ruben Bridgewater & James Snell — We’re linking to the transcript to point out what Kat Marchán said at NodeConf Colombia

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Go is eating the world of software (Interview) Jul 25, 2019

Show notes

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.”

Join the discussion

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

Sponsors:

DigitalOcean – The simplest cloud platform for developers and teams Whether you’re running one virtual machine or ten thousand, makes managing your infrastructure too easy. Get started for free with a $50 credit. Learn more at do.co/changelog.
GoCD + Kubernetes – With GoCD running on Kubernetes, you define your build workflow and let GoCD provision and scale build infrastructure on the fly. GoCD installs as a Kubernetes native application. Scale your build infrastructure elastically. Learn more at gocd.org/kubernetes
Rollbar – We move fast and fix things because of Rollbar. Resolve errors in minutes. Deploy with confidence. Learn more at rollbar.com/changelog.
Innovate Software at OSCON – Whether you’re looking to understand where software development is headed, or want to dive into the key technologies that you need to build resilient, useful, innovative software, the O’Reilly Open Source Software Conference (OSCON) is where you’ll find the answers you need. Secure your spot for 2020 now and save 20% on your pass with code CHANGELOG20.

Featuring:

Ron Evans – Website, GitHub, Mastodon, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

TinyGo - Go compiler for small places
Gopherbot - Robotic Gopher plushie you can code

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Learning the BASICs (Interview) Jul 16, 2019

Show notes

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.

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:

Tom Cormen – Website, X
Denise Dumas – LinkedIn
Avi Flombaum – GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Femi Owolade-Coombes – Website, X
Saron Yitbarek – Website, GitHub, X

Show Notes:

Check the show notes and transcript for more details.

Becoming a programmer used to require a PhD and having access to some serious hardware. Then, in 1965, a couple of engineers had a radical idea: make it easier for people to get started.

Beginner languages, like BASIC, burst the doors to coding wide open. Tom Cormen and Denise Dumas recall how BASIC changed everything. Avi Flombaum and Saron share tips on picking a first language in this new era of software development. And we hear from Femi Owolade-Coombes and Robyn Bergeron about how the next generation of coders are getting their start with video games.

Beginner languages give everyone an opportunity to get their foot in the door. And that helps the industry as a whole.

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

The war for the soul of open source (Interview) Jul 16, 2019

Show notes

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, make sure you come by our booth and say hi.

Join the discussion

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

Sponsors:

Linode – Our cloud server of choice. Deploy a fast, efficient, native SSD cloud server for only $5/month. Get 4 months free using the code changelog2019. Start your server - head to linode.com/changelog
GoCD + Kubernetes – With GoCD running on Kubernetes, you define your build workflow and let GoCD provision and scale build infrastructure on the fly. GoCD installs as a Kubernetes native application. Scale your build infrastructure elastically. Learn more at gocd.org/kubernetes
GitPrime – Download GitPrime’s 20 Patterns book, a field guide to help engineering managers recognize achievement, spot bottlenecks, and debug development processes with data.
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:

Adam Jacob – Website, GitHub, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

You can now watch Adam’s OSCON keynote on his YouTube channel.

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

The Pragmatic Programmers (Interview) Jul 11, 2019

Show notes

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 contents, as well as the impact it’s had on the world of software.

Also, the beta book is now “fully content complete” and is going to production. If you decide to pick up the ebook, you’ll get a coupon for 50% off the hardcover when it comes out this fall.

Join the discussion

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

Sponsors:

Linode – Our cloud server of choice. Deploy a fast, efficient, native SSD cloud server for only $5/month. Get 4 months free using the code changelog2019. Start your server - head to linode.com/changelog
GoCD + Kubernetes – With GoCD running on Kubernetes, you define your build workflow and let GoCD provision and scale build infrastructure on the fly. GoCD installs as a Kubernetes native application. Scale your build infrastructure elastically. Learn more at gocd.org/kubernetes
GitPrime – Download GitPrime’s 20 Patterns book, a field guide to help engineering managers recognize achievement, spot bottlenecks, and debug development processes with data.
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:

Andy Hunt – Website, GitHub, X
Dave Thomas – 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!

Python's Tale (Interview) Jul 02, 2019

Show notes

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!

Featuring:

Emily Morehouse – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Michael Kennedy – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Diane Mueller – Website, GitHub, X
Saron Yitbarek – Website, GitHub, X

Show Notes:

Check the show notes and transcript for more details.

A benevolent dictator for life steps down and changes the course of the Python language forever. Guido van Rossum’s “Transfer of Power” memo brings attention to the way programming languages evolve.

In this episode, Emily Morehouse makes the connection between Python’s technical extensibility and its inclusive community. Michael Kennedy explains how Python is both easy to learn and powerful enough to build YouTube and Instagram. And Diane Mueller highlights how the Python community took the lead on so many inclusive practices that are spreading in tech—including the rise of community-led decision-making.

Sometimes, a benevolent dictator can get a language started. But Python shows it’s communities that make languages thrive.

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Maintainer spotlight! Ned Batchelder (Interview) Jun 28, 2019

Show notes

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 spotlight series where we dig deep into the life of an open source software maintainer. We’re producing this series in partnership with Tidelift. Huge thanks to Tidelift for making this series 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: