Changelog Interviews

By Changelog MediaTechnology

Changelog Interviews episodes

April 27, 2011Amplify.js, jQuery, CoffeeScript
Wynn caught up with Mike Hostetler and Scott González from AppendTo to talk about Amplify.js, jQuery, CoffeeScript, Microsoft, the web, and open source.
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Featuring:
Wynn Netherland – GitHub, X
Show Notes:
AppendTo offers training and consulting for jQuery.
Amplify.js is a set of components designed to solve common web application problems with a simplistic API.
Mike Hostetler is CEO at AppendTo.
Scott González works on jQuery UI.
amplify.request makes building JavaScript API wrapper easier, providing hooks for mocking transport and payload transformation.
amplify.store is a wrapper for various persistent client-side storage systems and provides advanced features such as cache expiration.
Amplify’s PubSub system provides offers advanced options for handling custom events including priority.
The AppendTo guys weigh in on the all-in-one vs. best-of-breed JavaScript framework debate.
Wynn asks how Microsoft’s adoption of jQuery has led to its adoption.
DamianEdwards worked to get jQuery UI packages for Nuget.
Rails now includes CoffeeScript by default.
Wynn loves cake.
CommonJS aims to create a standard library for JavaScript.
Keep an eye out for AppendTo’s new Learn site, a JavaScript 101 course for newcomers.
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
46 min
April 12, 2011Vim round table discussion
Wynn sat down with three Vim users and experts to talk about tips and tricks for using and pimping the popular text editor.
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Featuring:
Drew Neil – Website, GitHub, X
Yehuda Katz – Website, GitHub, X
Tim Pope – GitHub, X
Wynn Netherland – GitHub, X
Show Notes:
Vim seeks to provide the power of Unix’s Vi
Drew Neil hosts VimCasts
Tim Pope has created numerout Vim plugins
Yehuda Katz from SproutCore, Rails, and jQuery fame.
Dr. Nic says Vim is cutting edge 1960s tech.
Janus Yehuda and Carl’s MacVim bundle
Everyone that tried to convince Yehuda to try Vim were wrong.
Vim is a modal interface
Wynn laments that TextMate 2 is the new Duke Nukem
NerdTree is a text-based treeview inside your vim
Tim uses his vibrantink mod called vividchalk
Yehuda wants to give Solarized Vim is cutting edge 1960s tech.
Yehuda like visual block mode
MacVim lets you use ?-S.
Wynn asks how the world would be different if DHH had used Vim instead of TextMate for his famous Rails screencast.
Tim likes CTRL-X, CTRL-E to bind an editor to the command line.
Yehuda says you should be using ruby -e instead of grep
Drew loves CTRL-R, CTRL-W in Vim.
“Matz is (under)rated.”
Tim says we owe so much to Linus for Linux and Git.
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
42 min
April 06, 2011Goliath, Event Machine, SPDY
Wynn caught up with Ilya Grigorik, Founder and CTO of PostRank to talk about Goliath, async Ruby web development, and Google’s SPDY.
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Featuring:
Ilya Grigorik – Website, GitHub, X
Wynn Netherland – GitHub, X
Show Notes:
Look for Steve Klabnik at CodeConf.
Ilya Grigorik founder and CTO of PostRank.
PostRank taps into intelligence from the social web.
igvita.com is Ilya’s awesome Ruby, performance, and big data blog.
Goliath Goliath is an open source version of the non-blocking (asynchronous) Ruby web server framework powering PostRank.
Thin glues together Mongrel parser, Event Machine, and Rack.
Evidently we’ve discussed Node.js “at length” on this show.
Goliath hides much of the complexity of its asynchronous architecture from the developer
Goliath was designed for and has been benchmarked on MRI, JRuby and Rubinius
PostRank heavily employs AMQP
The PostRank APIs allow you to create applications that interact with the subscription management component of the PostRank website, as well as, create and retrieve story ratings and customized RSS feeds for your users.
The Top Posts Widget lets you showcase the most important articles on your site, encouraging viewers to click on more articles and read what matters.
A GitHub account and a blog are key differentiators for developers looking to get hired at PostRank.
Ilya says “presentation is 50% of the actual deliverable”. Great READMEs are important.
Ilya looks up to Brad Fitzpatrick of LiveJournal and Memcached fame.
Ilya’s blog tagline: “A goal is a dream with a deadline.”
Anybody still using GTD?
Ilya isn’t beholden to any one editor but loves both Vim and TextMate.
SPDY: (pronounced “SPeeDY”) An experimental protocol for a faster web. The usual HTTP GET and POST message formats remain the same; however, SPDY specifies a new framing format for encoding and transmitting the data over the wire.
If you’re using Chrome, you may be using SPDY and not even know it.
mod_spdy is an experimental proof-of-concept SPDY Apache module.
ØMQ zeromq: socket library that acts as a concurrency framework as discussed on Episode 0.3.4.
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
51 min
March 30, 2011Erlang, CouchBase, merging with Membase
Wynn sat down with Chris Anderson from CouchBase to talk about CouchDB, the merger with Membase, Erlang, and bringing NoSQL to PHPers.
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Featuring:
Chris Anderson – GitHub, X
Wynn Netherland – GitHub, X
Show Notes:
Chris Anderson is a Couchbase cofounder, Mobile Architect, CouchDB committer, new dad
The CouchDB music video (served up from CouchDB no less)
Chris sings the official CouchDB theme song to kick off Episode 0.1.8
Apache CouchDb is a distributed, fault-tolerant and schema-free document-oriented database accessible via a RESTful HTTP/JSON API.
Damien Katz is the creator of CouchDB.
CouchBase was formed from merging Membase and CouchOne
Chris is one of the rare CFOs with a GitHub account
CouchBase makes the case for NoSQL
Membase Server currently uses Sqlite under the hood, but will be swapped out for Couch’s storage engine soon
Mobile Couchbase runs on iOS and brings Couch to your mobile device
CouchApps are JavaScript and HTML5 applications served directly from CouchDB.
Zynga makers of Farmville use Membase
The CouchApp toolkit is now maintained by Benoît Chesneau
Aaron Miller led the charge to get Erlang on iOS, changing dynamic linking to static linking.
SpiderMonkey was included iOS for CouchMobile and its JIT compiler made it preferable to V8 or Nitro for Couch tasks.
GeoCouch adds geospatial features to CouchDB
Chris outlines the distinctives for Couch’s incremental Map/Reduce
Jason Smith in Thailand keeps the lights on for CouchBase hosting solutions
Cloudant offers hosting for Couch in the cloud
Wynn wants to see integration for CouchBase and Appcelerator Titanium
Todd Anderson has a great tutorial on using jQuery mobile and CouchDB
Damien Katz is Chris’ programming hero
Chris says working with Jan Lehnardt is a blast
Be sure and check out CouchDB - The Definitive Guide by Chris, Jan, and Noah
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
46 min
March 22, 2011Formalize and News Roundup "Design Edition"
Adam and Wynn were joined by Nathan Smith, creator of 960.gs to talk about his new project Formalize and the latest news on The Changelog.
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Show Notes:
Nathan Smith, front end dev, speaker, and author
960 Grid System is a versatile CSS grid framework
Formalize teaches your forms some manners
An exhaustive list of HTML5 cross-browser polyfills
Formalize even comes with Sass support out of the box
Compass’s CSS3 module is powerful
Wynn <3 Mustache
Adam writes Sass but converts his stylesheets to SCSS for those who prefer it
Haml means never looking for a missing ever again
The Changelog on Convore
HSLPicker - Most excellent color picker for your enjoyment
Fancy buttons makes your buttons fancy with CSS
Octopress is a blogging framework for hackers
Brandon was on Episode 0.1.7 on open source publishing
Nesta CMS is our favorite Ruby CMS
reveal: jQuery modal for HTML5 and data attributes
Zurb’s CSS playground is awesome
rawler: Crawl your website and find broken links with Ruby
Inception explained in C code
JavaScript version of the Inception code, demonstrating console.group
BeerCamp 2011 site design is fun (scroll all the way down)
compass-magick: Extend Sass with power of ImageMagick
jQuery Mobile Alpha 3 released
Nathan recently spoke at DrupalCon in Chicago on his jQuery desktop project
Adam is tickled SourceForge runs Grid Coordinates
The Open Government project demonstrates how the space is growing
Stylus from LearnBoost brings Node.js-flavored CSS preprocessing
Zeldman on designers who can’t code
Adam loves the work of Mike Kus
Wynn’s rant should be read as ten things you can do to spread the word about your open source project
Wynn’s post actually spurred Nathan to create a homepage at Formalize.me
Ryan Bates’ Railscasts are awesome
Jenkins née Hudson almost became Alfred
Nathan loves Alfred app
Adam and Wynn are on Team Launchbar
Nathan stumbled across a really neat way to target Firefox in CSS
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
50 min
March 16, 2011Serve, RadiantCMS, Design and Prototyping
Adam sat down with Designer/Developer John Long, creator of RadiantCMS about his new project Serve, design, and running a successful open source project.
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Featuring:
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
John Long of Wiseheart design
Serve is a rapid prototyping framework for web applications
John created RadiantCMS, later extended by Sean Cribbs
Radiant led John to a relationship with Pragmatic Programmers and formation of a Ruby Visual Identity team
Serve is basically the Rails View layer, sans the Model and Controller.
Serve’s makes it easier to use URLs that end in a / instead of file extension
Serve’s view helper are Rails compatible
Serve is Rack under the hood
Acoustic is Django-inspired and aims to be between Sinatra and Rails
“What Rails can learn from Django”
Running a successful open source project can take over your life
In the early days of Radiant, Subversion made it difficult to accept community contributions
Git and GitHub has increased community participation
Use Compass’s CSS3 module and save your sanity
Compass can change your design workflow
Fancy Buttons is a Compass plugin to easily create image-less buttons
Grab the code for Adam’s nifty Serve bootstrap, which adds easy support for Haml, Sass, Compass, and more.
Join the newly created Serve Users group
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
1 hr 3 min
March 09, 2011MongoDB, NoSQL, Web Scale
Steve and Wynn sat down with Eliot Horowitz from 10gen to talk about MongoDB, the NoSQL landscape, and the fun of building at Web Scale.
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Featuring:
Wynn Netherland – GitHub, X
Steve Klabnik – Website, GitHub, X
Show Notes:
Eliot Horowitz CTO and Co-Founder of 10gen
Dwight Merriman CEO & Co-Founder at 10gen
NoSQL is a loose term for Key Value Stores, Graph Databases, and Document Databases
MongoDB still has a large roadmap ahead
MongoDB was first featured on The Changelog over a year ago
Single server durability tops the list of new additions in 1.8
Replica sets are an elaboration on the existing master/slave replication, adding automatic failover and automatic recovery of member nodes
Shutterfly and Foursquare boast some of the largest MongoDB implemenation
MongoDB’s sharding enables horizontal scaling across multiple nodes.
Mongo vs. Riak (and other Dynamo inspired stores)
Full vs. eventual consistency
Compound indexes
Increment operations
Be sure and check out our Riak interviews: Part 1 and Part 2
Mongo vs. CouchDB
Couch uses Map/Reduce views
Couch has great master-master replication
Couch runs on mobile
Mongo’s sharding is closer to a relational database
Mongo’s Geo features now support more precise, spherical geospatial indexing
Mongo shines at
User profiles
CMS data
Mongo enjoys wide language binding support
Eliot and 10gen think the Web Scale meme is all in good fun
BSON [bee · sahn], short for Binary JSON, is a binary-encoded serialization of JSON-like documents
Our interview with Douglas Crockford on JSON
MongoDB 2.0 will be focusing on concurrency, aggregation, online compaction, and TTL temporal collections
Eliot likes Racket when he’s not slinging C.
Linus Torvalds is one of Eliot’s heroes
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
36 min
March 01, 2011Ruby, Rails, the Cloud
Steve and Wynn caught up with Dr. Nic from Engine Yard to talk about the cloud, Jenkins, Ruby, and lowering the barrier of entry for learning Rails on Windows.
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Featuring:
Wynn Netherland – GitHub, X
Steve Klabnik – Website, GitHub, X
Show Notes:
Catch up with us at Red Dirt Ruby Conf
Steve will be at Codeconf
Kenneth will be covering PyCon 2011
Thanks for putting up with us for 50 episodes!
Dr. Nic Williams is Developer Advocate at Engine Yard has a ton of open source projects
Engine Yard uses Amazon AWS and Terremark
Dr. Nic actively and aggressively abandons most of his 154 public repos and feels good about it due to Git and GitHub
Steve maintains a couple of projects from _why
Dr. Nic liked how Jamis Buck declared he abandoned Capistrano
Dr. Nic prefers TextMate instead of “1960s technology”
Steve likes Janus for Vim
Steve asks about Redcar
Engine Yard has partnered with Appcelerator for mobile app developers
Dr. Nic helps maintain Rails Installer, the easiest way to get up and running with Ruby on Rails. For Windows. Mac and Linux coming soon.
Luis Lavena and Charles Nutter are core to the Ruby community
“If you have to put the shortcuts on a coffee mug!” - Dr. Nic on Vim
Jeremy Ashkenas from DocumentCloud is a regular on The Changelog for projects like Docco, CloudCrowd, Underscore.js, CoffeeScript
The Jenkins rename shows the power of the community to stick together
Dr. Nic is sticking with Jenkins, but Travis is worth a look for Rubyists
Someone send Dr. Nic an Octocat badge
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
44 min
February 22, 2011Git, Showoff, XBox Kinect
Kenneth and Wynn caught up with GitHubber Scott Chacon to talk about Git, distributed version control, and his quest to kill Word as a book authoring tool.
Join the discussion
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Featuring:
Scott Chacon – GitHub, X
Wynn Netherland – GitHub, X
Kenneth Reitz – GitHub, X
Show Notes:
Scott Chacon, Git evangelist, GitHubber, author of ProGit
rsync is a software application for Unix and Windows systems which synchronizes files and directories from one location to another while minimizing data transfer using delta encoding when appropriate.
Perforce is a commercial, proprietary, centralized revision control system developed by Perforce Software, Inc.
Git Internals, Scott’s PeepCode PDF
Chris, Tom, PJ, founders of GitHub
Continuous integration is one of Git’s strengths
Surprisingly, Scott’s .gitconfig isn’t pimped out
gitk The git GUI repository browser
gitx Git GUI for OS X
gitgui Unlike gitk, git gui focuses on commit generation and single file annotation and does not show project history.
Why Git and not Mercurial?
Mercurial bookmarks are references to commits that are automatically updated when new commits are made. If you do hg bookmark feature the feature bookmark refers to the current changeset.
hg-git is the Hg-Git plugin for Mercurial, adding the ability to push to and pull from a Git server repository from Mercurial.
BitBucket is to Hg as GitHub is to Git
Scott says he had good intentions in comparing Git to other version control systems and was not lobbing stones at Mercurial
Scott says distributed source control systems are key to helping the open source community thrive because it lets anyone commit and get involved
The RubyGems.org 404 is amusing
libgit2 is a portable, pure C implementation of the Git core methods provided as a re-entrant linkable library with a solid API, allowing you to write native speed custom Git applications in any language which supports C bindings.
GitHub has continued the libgit2 Google Summer of Code effort, supporting Vicent Marti to continue the development
Scott says that Git is basically a key value store and we should look at uses beyond version control
Eclipse is moving to Git away from CVS
Git Tower is a beautiful Git UI for the Mac
Showoff is a Sinatra web app that reads simple configuration files for a presentation. It is sort of like a Keynote web app engine.
Kinectaby, Ruby bindings for XBox Kinect
Wynn is excited about Scott’s project Git Scribe for writing, feeling the pain of using Word for archaic book publisher workflows
Jason J Williams’s tools have lessened the pain for Wynn in writing the upcoming Sass book for Manning
Everybody that works at GitHub is Scott’s programming hero but Ryan Tomayko is one of the smartest developer’s Scott knows.
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
54 min
February 08, 2011Jenkins and Continous Integration
Kenneth and Wynn caught up with Kohsuke Kawaguchi and Andrew Bayer from the Jenkins project to talk about continuous integration, Java, and corporate backing drama.
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Featuring:
Wynn Netherland – GitHub, X
Kenneth Reitz – GitHub, X
Show Notes:
CI Joe is GitHub’s continuous integration server
Knowing is half the battle
Jenkins née Hudson is the leading open-source continuous integration server. Built with Java, it provides over 300 plugins to support building and testing virtually any project.
Kohsuke Kawaguchi is the creator of Jenkins
Andrew Bayer is a Build Engineer at Cloudera
Nearly 30K Jenkins installations worldwide
Jenkins is written in Java but with its rich plugin system, you can run almost anything with it
Jenkins supports Git, Mercurial, SVN, and even Visual SourceSafe
Jenkins does more than running tests, it can also do parameterized deploys
GitHub has fueled an explosion in Jenkins community growth
Wynn asks why Java is only 6% of GitHub projects
Funny cartoon on how language fanboys see one another
Git and GitHub adoption actually sparked the name change and Oracle split
The community voted 214-14 to rename
Andy addresses how plugins will migrate to the new name. Thanks, Matthew J McCullough.
At what point do projects look at a jQuery Foundation-style governance model?
Hudson was the butler in Upstairs, Downstairs
Alfred, the butler from Batman was a consideration, but conflicted with the Mac program
James Clark is Kohsuke’s programming hero
Kohsuke and Lisp’s Guy Steele are Andrew’s heroes
MZ Scheme now Racket makes Kenneth’s head hurt
Andrew recommends Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs from MIT
As a build guy, Selenium gets Andrew excited
Kohsuke is trying to hack the Airport Express to stream tunes from Linux
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
40 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 &…