The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - podcast cover

The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source

Changelog Mediachangelog.com
Software's best weekly news brief, deep technical interviews & talk show.

Episodes

Trending up GitHub's developer charts (Interview)

In this episode we’re shining our maintainer spotlight on Ovilia. Hailing from Shanghai, China, Ovilia is an up-and-coming developer who contributes to Apache ECharts, maintains Polyvia, which does very cool low-poly image and video processing, and has a sweet personal website, too. This episode with Ovilia continues 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 Tidel...

Dec 14, 201945 min

Building an open source excavation robot for NASA (Interview)

Ronald Marrero is a software developer working on NASA's Artemis program, which aims at landing the first woman and next man on the Moon by 2024. How Ron got here is a fascinating story, starting at UCF and winding its way through the Florida Space Institute, working with NASA's Swamp Works team, and building an open source excavation robot. On this episode Ron tells us how it all went down and shares what he learned along the way.

Dec 11, 20191 hr 7 min

Re-licensing Sentry (Interview)

David Cramer joined the show to talk about the recent license change of Sentry to the Business Source License from a BSD 3-clause license. We talk about the details that triggered this change, the specifics of the BSL license and its required parameters, the threat to commercial open source products like Sentry, his concerns for the "open core" model, and what the future of open source might look like in light of protections-oriented source-available licenses like the BSL becoming more common.

Dec 08, 20191 hr 19 min

The making of GitHub Sponsors (Interview)

Devon Zuegel is an Open Source Product Manager at GitHub. She's also one of the key people responsible for making GitHub Sponsors a thing. We talk with Devon about how she came to GitHub to develop GitHub Sponsors, the months of research she did to learn how to best solve the sustainability problem of open source, why GitHub is now addressing this issue, the various ways and models of addressing maintainers' financial needs, and Devon also shared what's in store for the future of GitHub Sponsors...

Dec 01, 20191 hr 26 min

Five years of freeCodeCamp (Interview)

Today we have a very special show for you – we're talking with Quincy Larson the founder of freeCodeCamp as part of a two-part companion podcast series where we each celebrate our 5 and 10 year anniversaries. This year marks 5 years for freeCodeCamp and 10 years for us here at Changelog. So make sure you check out the freeCodeCamp podcast next week when Quincy ships our episode to their feed. But, on today's episode we catch up with Quincy on all things freeCodeCamp.

Nov 15, 20191 hr 32 min

Finding collaborators for open source (Interview)

Jeff Meyerson, host of Software Engineering Daily, and the founder of FindCollabs (a place to find collaborators for open source software) joined the show to talk about living in San Francisco, his thoughts on podcasting and where the medium is heading, getting through large scale market changes. We talk at length about his new project FindCollabs, the difficulty of reliably finding people to collaborate with, the importance of reputation and ratings systems, and his invite to this audience to c...

Nov 10, 20191 hr 9 min

Back to Agile's basics (Interview)

Robert C. Martin, aka Uncle Bob, joined the show to talk about the practices of Agile. Bob has written a series of books in order to pass down the wisdom he's gained over his 50 year software career — books like Clean Architecture, Clean Code, The Clean Coder, The Software Craftsman, and finally Clean Agile — which is the focus of today's discussion. We cover the origins of his “Uncle Bob” nickname, the Agile Manifesto, why Agile is best suited for developing software, how it applies today, comm...

Oct 31, 20191 hr 20 min

Pioneering open source drones and robocars (Interview)

Chris Anderson, former Editor-in-Chief of WIRED and a true pioneer in the world of drones, joined the show to talk about his hobby gone wrong, how he started 3D Robotics, DIY Drones, and Dronecode. We also talked about his newest passion, DIY Robocars.

Oct 18, 201952 min

Let's talk Elixir! (Interview)

Jerod is joined by Chris and Desmond (co-hosts of the ElixirTalk podcast) to catch up on what's moving and shaking in the Elixir and Phoenix communities. We discuss what's attractive about Elixir, what it means to have the language finalized, why folks are so excited by Phoenix LiveView, the ambitious new Lumen project that's bringing Elixir to WebAssembly, and more.

Oct 09, 201940 min

Maintainer spotlight! Valeri Karpov (Interview)

In this episode we’re shining our maintainer spotlight on Valeri Karpov. Val has been the solo maintainer of Mongoose since 2014. This episode with Val continues 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.

Oct 02, 201943 min

Nushell for the GitHub era (Interview)

Jonathan Turner, Andrés Robalino, and Yehuda Katz joined the show to talk about Nushell, or just Nu for short. It’s a modern shell for the GitHub era. It’s written in Rust, and it has the backing of some of the greatest minds in open source. We talk through what it is, how it works and cool things you can do with it, why Rust, ideas for the future, and ways for the community to get involved and contribute.

Sep 27, 20191 hr 33 min

Machine powered refactoring with AST's (Interview)

Amal Hussein (Engineering Manager at npm) joined the show to talk about AST’s — aka, abstract syntax trees. Amal is giving a talk at All Things Open on the subject so we asked her to give us an early preview. She’s on a mission to democratize the knowledge and usage of AST’s to push legacy code and the web forward.

Sep 19, 20191 hr 4 min

Generative engineering cultures (Interview)

Dave Kaplan (Head of Software Engineering at Policygenius) joined the show to talk about Generative Engineering Cultures and how they have become the goal of industry-aware tech teams. We talk through the topology of organizational cultures ranging from pathological, to bureaucratic, to generative, the importance of management buy-in (from the top down) on leading a generative culture, the ability to contribute original value which is deeply rooted in the concept of aligned autonomy. We also cov...

Sep 17, 20191 hr 17 min

Modern software is built on APIs (Interview)

Abhinav Asthana (founder of Postman) joined the show to talk about Postman, an ADE — API Development Environment — that began as open source and is now a full-fledged company that just announced a $50 million dollar Series B. We talk about why Postman has grown so successfully, APIs and their impact to core business factors, what it means to be an API Development Environment (ADE), and how they created one of the most popular API platforms and community.

Sep 06, 20191 hr 8 min

Maintainer spotlight! Feross Aboukhadijeh (Interview)

In this episode we’re shining our maintainer spotlight on Feross Aboukhadijeh. Feross is the creator and maintainer of 100's of open source projects which have been downloaded 100's of million of times each month — projects like StandardJS, BitMidi, and WebTorrent to name a few. This episode with Feross continues 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 ...

Aug 29, 20191 hr 4 min

OSCON 2019 anthology (Interview)

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 pr...

Aug 23, 20191 hr 20 min

Shaping, betting, and building (Interview)

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 i...

Aug 16, 20191 hr 29 min

Observability is for your unknown unknowns (Interview)

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 ...

Aug 07, 20191 hr 6 min

Federating JavaScript's language commons with Entropic (Interview)

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...

Aug 02, 20191 hr 5 min

Go is eating the world of software (Interview)

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."

Jul 25, 201955 min

Learning the BASICs (Interview)

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.

Jul 16, 201926 min

The war for the soul of open source (Interview)

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.

Jul 16, 20191 hr 31 min

The Pragmatic Programmers (Interview)

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 ...

Jul 11, 20191 hr 19 min

Python's Tale (Interview)

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.

Jul 02, 201929 min

Maintainer spotlight! Ned Batchelder (Interview)

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 produc...

Jun 28, 201951 min

Boldly going where no data tools have gone before (Interview)

Computer Scientist Yaw Anokwa joins the show to tell us how Open Data Kit is enabling data collection efforts around the world. From monitoring rainforests to observing elections to tracking outbreaks, ODK has done it all. We hear its origin story, ruminate on why it's been so successful, learn how the software works, and even answer the question, "are people really using it in space?!" All that and more...

Jun 19, 20191 hr 14 min

The state of CSS in 2019 (Interview)

We’re talking with Sacha Greif to discuss the State of CSS survey and results. CSS is evolving faster than ever. And, coming off the heels of their annual State of JavaScript survey, they've decided to take on the world of styles and selectors to help identify the latests patterns and trends in CSS. We talk through the history and motivations of this survey, the methodology of their data collection, the tooling involved to build and run the survey, and of course we dig deep into the survey resul...

Jun 14, 20191 hr 17 min

Python's new governance and core team (Interview)

We’re talking with Brett Cannon for a behind the scenes look at Guido stepping down as Python’s BDFL (Benevolent dictator for life) and the process they had to go through to establish a new governance model, the various proposed PEPs to establish this new direction, the winning PEP, and what the future holds for Python.

Jun 06, 20191 hr 11 min

Creating and selling multiplayer online games (Interview)

We’re talking with Victor Zhou about the explosion of the .io game genre. We talked through all the details around building and running one of these games, the details behind Victor’s super popular game called Generals — which he eventually sold, and we also covered the economics behind creating and selling one of these games.

May 24, 20191 hr 19 min

Off the grid social networking with Manyverse (Interview)

We’re talking with Andre Staltz, creator of Manyverse — a social network off the grid. It’s open source and free in every sense of the word. We talked through the backstory, how a user’s network gets formed, how data is stored and shared, why off-grid is so important to Andre, and what type of user uses an “off-the-grid” social network.

May 18, 20191 hr 19 min
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