Changelog Interviews

By Changelog MediaTechnology

Changelog Interviews episodes

November 05, 2021Connecting the dots in public
Today we’re joined by Shawn “swyx” Wang, also known as just “swyx” — and we’re talking about his interesting path to becoming a software developer, what it means to “learn in public” and how he’s been able to leverage that process to not only level up his skills and knowlege, but to also rapidly advance his career. We cover Swyx’s recent writing on the light and dark side of the API economy — something he calls “living above or below the API,” his thoughts on Cloudflare eating the cloud by playing Go instead of Chess, and we also talk about the work he’s doing at Temporal and how’s taking his frontend skills to the backend.
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Sponsors:
Fly.io – Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs.
Teleport – Securely access any computing resource anywhere. Engineers and security teams can unify access to SSH servers, Kubernetes clusters, web applications, and databases across all environments. Try Teleport today in the cloud, self-hosted, or open source at goteleport.com
Square – Develop on the platform that sellers trust. There is a massive opportunity for developers to support Square sellers by building apps for today’s business needs. Learn more at developer.squareup.com to dive into the docs, APIs, SDKs and to create your Square Developer account — tell them Changelog sent you.
LaunchDarkly / TrajectoryConf – Software powers the world. LaunchDarkly empowers all teams to deliver and control their software. DevOps and feature management are reimagining how we build and release new products. On November 9th and 10th, LaunchDarkly is hosting Trajectory Conference 2021 — a two-day event for software innovators who want to break orbit, not systems. Trajectory is a fully-virtual conference that focuses on the technology, people, and processes that continuously deliver better user experiences and more powerful software. Register for free at trajectoryconf.com
Featuring:
Shawn Wang – Website, GitHub, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
Learn in Public
The Light and Dark Side of the API Economy
Eating the Cloud from Outside In
The Coding Career Handboox (this link includes an embedded coupon code for 30% off)
Cloud Operating Systems and Reconstituting the Monolith
No Zero Days: My Path from Javascript Newbie to Full Stack Developer at Age 30
freeCodeCamp.org
#Doccies (we’re planning to do something around this soon, stay tuned in 2022)
Cloud Distros and the Deployment Age of the Cloud
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
1 hr 10 min
October 29, 2021Song Encoder: $STDOUT
Welcome to Song Encoder, a special series of The Changelog podcast featuring people who create at the intersection of software and music. This episode features $STDOUT and contains explicit language.
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Sponsors:
Fly.io – Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs.
Featuring:
$STDOUT – Website, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
Listen to $STDOUT
on YouTube
on Spotify
on Apple Music
on Patreon
Track list (in order of appearance)
Pair Programming
Hell.js
Language Flamewars
Meetings
Tech Lead
Over Engineering
Opinions
Interviews
Estimates
3AM in San Fransisco
Remote Life
Integrations
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
38 min
October 25, 2021Oh my! Zsh.
Robby Russell is back on The Changelog after more than 10 years to catch us up on all things Oh My Zsh — a delightful, open source, community-driven framework for managing your Zshell configuration. It comes bundled with plugins, themes, and can be easily customized and contributed to, because hey, that’s how open source works. In this episode Robby gives us a glimpse into the passion and the struggle of being an open source software maintainer.
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Changelog++ members get a bonus 10 minutes at the end of this episode and zero ads. Join today!
Sponsors:
Fly.io – Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs.
LaunchDarkly / TrajectoryConf – Software powers the world. LaunchDarkly empowers all teams to deliver and control their software. DevOps and feature management are reimagining how we build and release new products. On November 9th and 10th, LaunchDarkly is hosting Trajectory Conference 2021 — a two-day event for software innovators who want to break orbit, not systems. Trajectory is a fully-virtual conference that focuses on the technology, people, and processes that continuously deliver better user experiences and more powerful software. Register for free at trajectoryconf.com
Teleport – Securely access any computing resource anywhere. Engineers and security teams can unify access to SSH servers, Kubernetes clusters, web applications, and databases across all environments. Try Teleport today in the cloud, self-hosted, or open source at goteleport.com
Square – Develop on the platform that sellers trust. There is a massive opportunity for developers to support Square sellers by building apps for today’s business needs. Learn more at developer.squareup.com to dive into the docs, APIs, SDKs and to create your Square Developer account — tell them Changelog sent you.
Featuring:
Robby Russell – GitHub, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
The Changelog #61: Oh My Zsh with Robby Russell
Oh My Zsh
ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh/pulls on GitHub
d’Oh My Zsh
colorize plugin
Planet Argon
maintainable.fm
Oh My Zsh merch
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
1 hr 12 min
October 19, 2021This insane tech hiring market
This week we’re joined by Gergely Orosz and we’re talking about the insane tech hiring market we’re in right now. Gergely was on the show a year ago talking about growing as a software engineer and his book The Tech Resume Inside Out. Now he’s laser focused on Substack with actionable advice for engineering managers and engineers, with a focus on big tech and high-growth startups. On today’s show we dig into his recent coverage of “the perfect storm” that’s causing this insane tech hiring market.
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Sponsors:
InfluxData – InfluxDays NA 2021 Virtual Experience (October 26-27) — InfluxDays is an event focused on the impact of time series data. Find out why time series databases are the fastest growing database segment providing real-time observability of your solutions. Get practical advice and insight from the engineers and developers behind InfluxDB, the leading time series database. Our listeners get $50 off the Hands-on Flux Training - use the code changelog21. Learn more and register for free at influxdays.com
Retool – Retool is a low-code platform built specifically for developers that makes it fast and easy to build internal tools. Instead of building internal tools from scratch, the world’s best teams, from startups to Fortune 500s, are using Retool to power their internal apps. Learn more and try it for free at retool.com/changelog
Sourcegraph – Move fast, even in big codebases. Sourcegraph is universal code search for every developer and team. Easily search across all the code that matters to you and your organization: find example code, explore and read code, debug issues, and more. Head to info.sourcegraph.com/changelog and click the button “Try Sourcegraph now” to get started.
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:
Gergely Orosz – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
blog.pragmaticengineer.com
The Perfect Storm Causing an Insane Tech Hiring Market
The FB engineering manager interview process
What are ways you can prepare for a software engineering or engineering manager promotion ahead of time?
The Web 2.0 Show #63: Twilio - Telephony in the Cloud
Jeff Lawson and his book Ask Your Developer
Chris Herd on Twitter — “Every time a competitor mentions return to office our recruiters reach out to their people. We’ve hired 15+ of their engineers in the last 2 months.”
The Changelog #422: Growing as a software engineer with Gergely Orosz
Anonymous job search with Djinni.co
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
1 hr 14 min
October 08, 2021Lessons from 10k hours of programming
Today we’re talking to Matt Rickard about his blog post, Reflections on 10,000 Hours of Programming. Matt was clear to mention that these reflections are purely about coding, not career advice or other soft skills. These reflections are just about deliberately writing code for 10,000 hours, which also correlates with the number of hours needed to master a skill.
If you count the reflections we cover on the show and be the first to comment on this episode, we’ll get in touch and send you a coupon code to use for a 100% free t-shirt in the merch store. Good luck…
Join the discussion
Changelog++ members save 4 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!
Sponsors:
InfluxData – InfluxDays NA 2021 Virtual Experience (October 26-27) — InfluxDays is an event focused on the impact of time series data. Find out why time series databases are the fastest growing database segment providing real-time observability of your solutions. Get practical advice and insight from the engineers and developers behind InfluxDB, the leading time series database. Our listeners get $50 off the Hands-on Flux Training - use the code changelog21. Learn more and register for free at influxdays.com
Retool – Retool is a low-code platform built specifically for developers that makes it fast and easy to build internal tools. Instead of building internal tools from scratch, the world’s best teams, from startups to Fortune 500s, are using Retool to power their internal apps. Learn more and try it for free at retool.com/changelog
Sourcegraph – Move fast, even in big codebases. Sourcegraph is universal code search for every developer and team. Easily search across all the code that matters to you and your organization: find example code, explore and read code, debug issues, and more. Head to info.sourcegraph.com/changelog and click the button “Try Sourcegraph now” to get started.
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:
Matt Rickard – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
Reflections on 10,000 Hours of Programming
Heptagon of Configuration
Linux Kernel Docs on commenting
Ahmad Nassri on JS Party
Todo or Die - Python Edition
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
1 hr 14 min
October 01, 2021Learning-focused engineering
This week we’re joined by Brittany Dionigi, Director of Platform Engineering at Articulate, and we’re talking about how organizations can take a more intentional approach to supporting the growth of their engineers through learning-focused engineering.
Brittany has been a software engineer for more than 10 years, and learned formal educational and classroom-based learning strategies as a Technical Lead & Senior Instructor at Turing School of Software & Design. We talk through a ton of great topics; getting mentorship right, common coaching opportunities, classroom-based learning strategies like backwards planning, and ways to identify and maximize the learning opportunities for teams and org.
Join the discussion
Changelog++ members get a bonus 4 minutes at the end of this episode and zero ads. Join today!
Sponsors:
InfluxDB – InfluxDays NA 2021 Virtual Experience (October 26-27) — InfluxDays is an event focused on the impact of time series data. Find out why time series databases are the fastest growing database segment providing real-time observability of your solutions. Get practical advice and insight from the engineers and developers behind InfluxDB, the leading time series database. Our listeners get $50 off the Hands-on Flux Training - use the code changelog21. Learn more and register for free at influxdays.com
Teleport – Teleport Access Plane lets you access any computing resource anywhere. Engineers and security teams can unify access to SSH servers, Kubernetes clusters, web applications, and databases across all environments. Try Teleport today in the cloud, self-hosted, or open source at goteleport.com
LaunchDarkly – Ship fast. Rest easy. 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.
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:
Brittany Dionigi – GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
Camille Fournier (Camille Forn-yay) - An incomplete list of skills senior engineers need
Katrina Owens - Cultivating Instinct
Note-taking and the decision to externalize memory
Guide to Medical Education in the Teaching Hospital - lots of good things about how they integrate learning into their day-to-day business operations
Science of Learning Concepts for Teachers (Project Illuminated)
Culturally Responsive Teaching - A 50-State Survey of Teaching Standards
What is Project Based Learning (PBL)?
A powerful way to improve learning and memory
Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon
Jeli - dedicated incident analysis platform
Turing School of Software and Design
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
1 hr 13 min
September 24, 2021Fauna is rethinking the database
This week we’re talking with Evan Weaver about Fauna — the database for a new generation of applications. Fauna is a transactional database delivered as a secure and scalable cloud API with native GraphQL. It’s the first implementation of its kind based on the Calvin paper as opposed to Spanner. We cover Evan’s history leading up to Fauna, deep details on the Calvin algorithm, the CAP theorem for databases, what it means for Fauna to be temporal native, applications well suited for Fauna, and what’s to come in the near future.
Join the discussion
Changelog++ members save 4 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!
Sponsors:
InfluxDB – InfluxDays NA 2021 Virtual Experience (October 26-27) — InfluxDays is an event focused on the impact of time series data. Find out why time series databases are the fastest growing database segment providing real-time observability of your solutions. Get practical advice and insight from the engineers and developers behind InfluxDB, the leading time series database. Our listeners get $50 off the Hands-on Flux Training - use the code changelog21. Learn more and register for free at influxdays.com
LaunchDarkly – Ship fast. Rest easy. 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.
Teleport – Teleport Access Plane lets you access any computing resource anywhere. Engineers and security teams can unify access to SSH servers, Kubernetes clusters, web applications, and databases across all environments. Try Teleport today in the cloud, self-hosted, or open source at goteleport.com
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:
Evan Weaver – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
Spanner vs. Calvin: Distributed Consistency at Scale
Trust Fauna
Fauna pricing
Fauna on GitHub
CAP theorem
What is a Relational Database Management System?
Fauna on Crunchbase
Fauna on Changelog.com
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
1 hr 6 min
September 17, 2021The business model of open source
This week we’re joined by Adam Jacob, CEO of System Initiative and Co-Founder of Chef, about open source business models and the model he thinks is the right one to choose, his graceful exit from Chef and some of the details behind Chef’s acquisition in 2020 for $220 million…in cash, and how his perspective on open source has or has not changed as a result. Adam also shared as much stealth mode details as he could about System Initiative.
Join the discussion
Changelog++ members get a bonus 11 minutes at the end of this episode and zero ads. Join today!
Sponsors:
InfluxDB – InfluxDB empowers developers to build IoT, analytics, and monitoring software. It’s purpose-built to handle massive volumes and countless sources of time-stamped data produced by sensors, applications, and infrastructure. Learn about the wide range of use cases of InfluxDB at influxdata.com/changelog
Square – Develop on the platform that sellers trust. There is a massive opportunity for developers to support Square sellers by building apps for today’s business needs. Learn more at developer.squareup.com to dive into the docs, APIs, SDKs and to create your Square Developer account — tell them Changelog sent you.
Teleport – Teleport Access Plane lets you access any computing resource anywhere. Engineers and security teams can unify access to SSH servers, Kubernetes clusters, web applications, and databases across all environments. Try Teleport today in the cloud, self-hosted, or open source at goteleport.com
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:
Read this Twitter thread from Adam Jacob
The Changelog #353: The war for the soul of open source featuring Adam Jacob
The Changelog #429: Community perspectives on Elastic vs AWS (a deep dive on the business of open source)
Progress Announces Acquisition of Chef
Chef co-founder and CTO Adam Jacob stepping down, will remain on board of directors
Tailwind CSS
Why We’re Relicensing CockroachDB
Founders Talk #75: The journey to massive scale and ultra-resilience
featuring Spencer Kimball, CEO & Co-founder of Cockroach Labs
System Initiative
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
1 hr 21 min
September 11, 2021Coding in the cloud with Codespaces
On this special edition of The Changelog, we’re talking with Cory Wilkerson, Senior Director of Engineering at GitHub, about GitHub Codespaces. For years now, the possibility of coding in the cloud seemed so close, yet so far away for a number of reasons. According to Cory, the raw ingredients to make coding in the cloud a reality have been there for years. The challenge has really been how the industry thinks, and we are now at a place where the skepticism in cloud based workflows is “non-existent.”
After 15 months in preview, GitHub not only announced the availability of Codespaces for Teams and Enterprise — they also showcased their internal adoption, with 600 of their 1,000 engineers using it daily to develop GitHub.com.
On this episode, Cory shares the full backstory of that journey and a peek into the future where we’re all coding in the cloud.
Join the discussion
Changelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!
Sponsors:
Fly.io – Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs.
Featuring:
Cory Wilkerson – GitHub, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
GitHub’s Engineering Team has moved to Codespaces
Cory’s companion Twitter thread to his blog post
Codespaces marketing page
Kelsey Hightower on Twitter — “Back in the day we wrote code on our own computers.”
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
1 hr 8 min
September 08, 2021We ask a lawyer about GitHub Copilot
This week we’re bringing JS Party to The Changelog — Nick Nisi and Christopher Hiller had an awesome conversation with Luis Villa, co-founder and General Counsel at Tidelift. They discuss GitHub Copilot and the implications of an AI pair programmer and fair use from a legal perspective.
Join the discussion
Changelog++ members save 4 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!
Sponsors:
Gitpod – Spin up fresh, ephemeral automated dev environments, in the cloud, in seconds. Their free tier is open to every developer with a GitLab, GitHub, and/or Bitbucket account. Learn more at gitpod.io
Retool For Startups – More and more startups are using Retool to focus their time on their core product. That’s exactly why Retool launched “Retool For Startups” — it’s a program that gives early-stage founders free access to a lot of the software needed for great internal tooling. Retool has bundled together a year of free access to Retool with over $160,000 in partner discounts to save you money while building Retools apps with common integrations. Learn more, apply, join lightening demos and much more at retool.com/startups
Sentry – Working code means happy customers. That’s exactly why teams choose Sentry. From error tracking to performance monitoring, Sentry helps teams see what actually matters, resolve problems quicker, and learn continuously about their applications - from the frontend to the backend. Use the code THECHANGELOG and get the team plan free for three months.
Grafana Cloud – Our dashboard of choice Grafana is the open and composable observability and data visualization platform. Visualize metrics, logs, and traces from multiple sources like Prometheus, Loki, Elasticsearch, InfluxDB, Postgres and many more.
Featuring:
Luis Villa – Website, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Nick Nisi – Website, GitHub, Bluesky, Mastodon, X
Christopher Hiller – Website, GitHub, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
GitHub Copilot
OpenAI
Google v. Oracle
GNU General Public License
Fair use
Lotus v. Borland
Transformative Use
Authors Guild v. Google
Ethical Open Source Movement
Eleuther AI
W3C Web Machine Learning Working Group
Does free software benefit from ML models being derived works of training data?
Cassidy Plays with GitHub Copilot
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
1 hr

About Changelog Interviews

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Conversations with the hackers, leaders, and innovators of the software world. Adam Stacoviak brings you in-depth interviews with the best and brightest in software engineering, open source &…