Changelog Interviews

By Changelog MediaTechnology

Changelog Interviews episodes

February 06, 2020Good tech debt
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.
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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!
1 hr
February 04, 2020The soul of an old machine
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.
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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!
31 min
January 31, 2020Open source meets climate science
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.
Featuring:
Anders Damsgaard – Website
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
adamsgaard.dk
The Scholarref Tools
Why I deleted my GitHub account
Anders Damsgaard’s photography
stagit - Static git web viewer
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
1 hr 7 min
January 24, 2020Intro to Rust programming
We teamed up with some friends of ours at Heroku to promote the Code-ish podcast so we’re sharing a full-length episode right here in The Changelog’s feed. This episode features Chris Castle with special guests Carol Nichols and Jake Goulding talking about the strengths of the Rust programming language.
Learn more and subscribe at heroku.com/podcasts/codeish.
Join the discussion
Changelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!
Sponsors:
Code-ish by Heroku – A podcast from the team at Heroku, exploring code, technology, tools, tips, and the life of the developer. Listen on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Featuring:
Carol Nichols – Website, GitHub, X
Jake Goulding – Website, GitHub, X
Chris Castle – Website, GitHub, X
Show Notes:
Rust is a type-safe, concurrent, and memory efficient language from Mozilla. Developers from various backgrounds are turning towards it more as a means of quickly writing performant and functional code for browsers, cryptocurrencies, operating systems, CLIs, and–oh yeah, embedded devices. Carol Nichols and Jake Goulding are Rust instructors and enthusiasts, and they join Chris Castle to talk about Rust’s underlying strengths as an ideal blend of simpler languages, like Ruby, with more memory conscious ones, like C.
Check the show notes and transcript for more details.
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
45 min
January 20, 2020Meet Algo, your personal VPN in the cloud
The commercial VPN industry is a minefield to navigate and many open source solutions are a pain to use or ill-suited for the task. Algo VPN, on the other hand, is a self-hosted personal VPN designed for ease of deployment and security. It uses the securest industry standards, builds on rock-solid solutions like WireGuard and Ansible, and runs on an ever-growing list of cloud hosting providers.
On this episode Dan Guido –CEO of security firm Trail of Bits and Algo’s creator– joins Jerod to discuss the project in depth.
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.
Algolia – Our search partner. Algolia’s full suite search APIs enable teams to develop unique search and discovery experiences across all platforms and devices. We’re using Algolia to power our site search here at Changelog.com. Get started for free and learn more at algolia.com.
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.
Featuring:
Dan Guido – GitHub, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
About Trail of Bits
Meet Algo, the VPN that works
Algo on GitHub
Most VPN Services are Terrible
An Analysis of the Privacy and Security Risks of Android VPN Permission-enabled Apps (PDF)
101 VPN products run by just 23 companies
Every “free” VPN
No one is going to risk jail for your $5/mo
A story of the entire VPN industry, in 4 acts. Starring NordVPN.
WireCutter’s review of the best VPN service for 2019
WireGuard
Getting 2FA Right in 2019
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
55 min
January 14, 2020State of the “log” 2019
Welcome to 2020 — on this year’s “State of the ‘log’” episode Jerod and I look back at our favorite moments from 2019 and forward to 2020 and beyond. We talk through our most popular episodes, our personal favorites, our 10-year anniversary, the excitement we have for Brain Science our newest podcast, it’s for the curious! And we also look forward to plans we have for 2020 and the decade to come…
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.
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.
Algolia – Our search partner. Algolia’s full suite search APIs enable teams to develop unique search and discovery experiences across all platforms and devices. We’re using Algolia to power our site search here at Changelog.com. Get started for free and learn more at algolia.com.
Featuring:
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
We shipped 46 episodes of The Changelog this year (47 last year) and 200 across our entire catalog.
Most popular episodes of 2019:
#331: GitHub Actions is the next big thing with Kyle Daigle
#339: Why smart engineers write bad code with Adam Barr
#352: The Pragmatic Programmers
#354: Go is eating the world of software with Ron Evans
#367: Back to Agile’s basics with Bob Martin
Jerod’s favorites:
#366: Pioneering open source drones and robocars
#370: The making of GitHub Sponsors
#353: The war for the soul of open source
Adam’s favorites:
#361: Generative engineering cultures with David Kaplan
#357: Shaping, betting, and building with Ryan Singer
Backstage #7: The John Wick trilogy
Listener todo’s:
Go Time is back (as of April 2019) and hit their 100th episode — you should subscribe and listen
We launched a new podcast called Brain Science — listen and subscribe
Help us celebrate 10 years of Changelog
Keep up with all our shows by subscribing to Master (this is the only way to get Backstage)
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
1 hr 1 min
December 27, 2019Gerhard goes to KubeCon (part 2)
Gerhard is back for part two of our interviews at KubeCon 2019. Join him as he goes deep on Prometheus with Björn Rabenstein, Ben Kochie, and Frederic Branczyk… Grafana with Tom Wilkie and Ed Welch… and Crossplane with Jared Watts, Marques Johansson, and Dan Mangum.
Don’t miss part one with Bryan Liles, Priyanka Sharma, Natasha Woods, & Alexis Richardson.
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.
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.
GitPrime – GitPrime helps software teams accelerate their velocity and release products faster by turning historical git data into easy to understand insights and reports. Ship faster because you know more. Not because you’re rushing. Learn more at gitprime.com/changelog.
Featuring:
Björn Rabenstein – GitHub
Ben Kochie – GitHub
Frederic Branczyk – Website, GitHub, X
Tom Wilkie – GitHub, X
Ed Welch – GitHub, X
Jared Watts – GitHub, X
Marques Johansson – GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Dan Mangum – Website, GitHub, X
Gerhard Lazu – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Show Notes:
See also: Gerhard goes to KubeCon (part 1)
Prometheus
Prometheus’ website
Grafana Loki
KubeCon Barcelona videos
Unit testing rules
Community meeting info
Grafana
Grafana’s website
Cortex
Tanka
Crossplane
Crossplane’s website
rook.io
The Binding Status show
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
2 hr 20 min
December 18, 2019Gerhard goes to KubeCon (part 1)
Changelog’s resident infrastructure expert Gerhard Lazu is on location at KubeCon 2019. This is part one of a two-part series from the world’s largest open source conference. In this episode you’ll hear from event co-chair Bryan Liles, Priyanka Sharma and Natasha Woods from GitLab, and Alexis Richardson from Weaveworks.
Stay tuned for part two’s deep dives in to Prometheus, Grafana, and Crossplane.
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.
GitPrime – GitPrime helps software teams accelerate their velocity and release products faster by turning historical git data into easy to understand insights and reports. Ship faster because you know more. Not because you’re rushing. Learn more at gitprime.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
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.
Featuring:
Bryan Liles – Website, GitHub, X
Priyanka Sharma – GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Natasha Woods – GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Alexis Richardson – GitHub, X
Gerhard Lazu – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Show Notes:
See also: Gerhard goes to KubeCon (part 2)
The GitLab handbook
Weaveworks
Argo Workflows
GitOps.tech
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
1 hr 25 min
December 14, 2019Trending up GitHub's developer charts
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 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:
Ovilia – Website, GitHub, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
Apache ECharts
Polyvia on GitHub
Try Polyvia for yourself
Ovilia’s website
The Apache Way
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
46 min
December 11, 2019Building an open source excavation robot for NASA
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.
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.
GitPrime – GitPrime helps software teams accelerate their velocity and release products faster by turning historical git data into easy to understand insights and reports. Ship faster because you know more. Not because you’re rushing. Learn more at gitprime.com/changelog.
Beginning Machine Learning with TensorFlow.js – Get an introduction to the world of Machine Learning with Javascript and TensorFlow.js. This is a three-week course covering an introduction to Machine Learning models, tensors, and the TensorFlow.js framework. Use the code CHANGELOG to get $100 till the end of 2019.
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.
Featuring:
Ronald Marrero – GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
Introducing the EZ-RASSOR
EZ-RASSOR on GitHub
ROS.org
What I learned working with NASA on a robotics project
NASA Artemis program
The Space Robotics Challenge
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
1 hr 7 min

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 &…