Changelog Interviews

By Changelog MediaTechnology

Changelog Interviews episodes

February 01, 2011Open Government and the Citizen Coder
Adam and Wynn caught up with Carl Tashian from Open Government to talk about OpenGovernment.org, OpenCongress.org, and the rise of the Citizen Coder.
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Featuring:
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Wynn Netherland – GitHub, X
Show Notes:
Carl Tashian is Director of Technology at Open Government
OpenGovernment: Empower individuals and organizations to track government at every level
OpenCongress.org - open source Rails app to track the goings on in the US Congress
Library of Congress THOMAS site is the source for federal legislative information
OpenGovernment.org, a public resource for government transparency at the state, city, and local levels. Free and open-source.
Open States API
The Sunlight Foundation aims to make government transparent and accountable
Wynn helped create TweetCongress.org winner of a SXSW 2009 Web award for activism, making use of Sunlight APIs
Follow the money and connect the dots between bills, key votes, and campaign donations.
Transparency Data is a central source for federal lobbying disclosure, federal grants and contracts, earmarks and federal and state campaign contributions, complete with it’s own API
GovKit
Luigi Montanez and Wynn wrote a wrapper for Transparency Data
Fog, the Ruby cloud services library
Carl worked at ZipCar prior to joining Open Government
Syncing large datasets from different providers is a big challenge
PostgreSQL and PostGIS power the backend of OpenGovernment
GeoServer is an open source software server written in Java that allows users to share and edit geospatial data.
MongoDB and Rack provide a fast way to track page views in the app
Sunlight, Code for America, and Open Government - rise of the Citizen Coder?
Oakland Crimespotting is a case study on developers having an impact on government
DocumentCloud, featured in Episode 0.0.5
Jammit, Industrial Strength Asset Packaging for Rails
Pythonistas, why not help out by creating a scraper for your state?
Kenneth and Wynn debate the best terminal font
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
33 min
January 25, 2011YUI 3, Node.js, JSLint, Douglas Crockford Code Reviews
Adam and Wynn caught up with Adam Moore and Satyen Desai from the YUI team to talk about YUI 3, Node.js, and working with Douglas Crockford.
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Show Notes:
YUI is the Yahoo! User Interface library, a collection of front end code goodies for JavaScript and CSS
Follow the YUI Blog for the latest developments, such as the new 3.3.0 release
Adam Moore and Satyen Desai are engineers on the YUI team.
The Autocomplete widget provides a flexible, configurable, and accessible implementation of the AutoComplete design pattern.
The DataTable widget renders columnar data into a highly customizable and fully accessible HTML table
The Dial widget is an alternative to sliders
The YUI Charts recently moved from Flash to JavaScript in YUI 3
The Community developed the drag/move component
YUI is on GitHub, fueling community involvement
YUI Theater is a great source for JavaScript talks and all things YUI
Douglas Crockford is the author of JSLint, the JSON spec, featured on Episode 0.2.6 from TXJS
Nicholas C. Zakas aka @slicknet is the author of a number of JavaScript books
Eric Miraglia is the Engineering Manager for the YUI team
JSLint improves your JavaScript but will not spare your feelings
Dave Glass - has a great talk about YUI + Node
“I love async, but I can’t code like this”
Many of the additional Node.js modules deal with parallel execution
Adam suggests targeting features, not platform since features like touch will be on the desktop eventually.
Satyen’s talk on YUI’s mobile strategy
The module pattern in JavaScript
The YUI Gallery lists discoverable components contributed by the community
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
32 min
January 17, 2011Redis In-Memory Data Store
Wynn caught up with Salvatore Sanfilippo to talk about Redis, the super hot key value store.
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Featuring:
Salvatore Sanfilippo – Website, GitHub, X
Wynn Netherland – GitHub, X
Show Notes:
VMware signs the paychecks for Salvatore and Pieter Noordhuis
Redis is an open source, advanced key-value store and data structure server wherein keys can contain strings, hashes, lists, sets and sorted sets
Redis internals consist of ANSI C with an evented model
Non-blocking replication has always been a Redis design goal
Replication in Redis is async
Salvatore’s Redis toolbox includes the Redis Ruby gem and Sinatra
Chances are you can find a Redis library in your favorite language
The C client is the only officially supported wrapper
Salvatore thinks the NoSQL moniker isn’t perfect, focusing too much on performance, but it frames a discussion
Redis Pub/Sub is perfect for real-time apps
GitHub’s adoption of Redis in Resque helped fuel the growth of the project
Redis users tend to use it as a database, as a messaging bus, or as a cache
Salvatore thinks hosted solutions like Redis-to-Go need to add more value like more frequent backups and seamless upgrades.
Blizzard uses an 8-node Redis install in serving avatars for WoW
Justin Campbell asks will VMWare feature Redis in any upcoming projects?
Ezra Zygmuntowicz and GitHub were among the first “few brave users”
After a few months Salvatore noticed a dip in adoption , but he trusted his gut and stuck with it
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
40 min
January 10, 2011Ruby 1.9, Nokogiri, Tender Lovemaking
Wynn caught up with Aaron Patterson, aka @tenderlove, to talk about Ruby 1.9, Nokogiri, and muscle cars.
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Show Notes:
RubyCommitters.org lists all the folks who hack on the Ruby language
Nokogiri is a library for parsing XML and HTML
The origins of tenderlove, Aaron’s online persona
Hot linking, check it and see. Got a page rank of a hundred and three., to the tune of Hot Blooded
Mechanize adds an API to any website
Being a Ruby committer is ‘alright’
Yugui, release manager for Ruby 1.9
The current state of rubycommitters.org reminds us of CSS Naked Day
REXML is a pure Ruby XML processor
MiniTest is Aaron’s favorite testing framework
His favorite Ruby 1.9.2 feature is speed
texticle is a wrapper around Postgress T-Search APIs
Aaron will be keynoting at Red Dirt Ruby Conf
FasterCSV from JEG2, one of the organizers for Red Dirt Ruby Conf.
El Camino, IROC-Z, or Firebird with T-tops are Aaron’s top three dream cars
For those who have never shaved a Yak and otherwise did not know it.
Arel is at the heart of Rails 3 ActiveRecord improvements
Debian’s Ruby maintainer says he’s out
Ruby Kaigi, the C conference disguised as a Ruby conference
In addition to Japanese, Aaron also speaks Scheme and Haskell
Wynn ? CoffeeScript
Aaron wants to pair program with Jim Weirich
Wynn suggests Aaron capitalize on Tenderlovemaking by organizing promiscuous pair programming
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
35 min
January 05, 2011Hackety Hack and _why
Steve Klabnik joined the show to talk about learning to program with Hackety Hack and why the lucky stiff.
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Featuring:
Steve Klabnik – Website, GitHub, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Wynn Netherland – GitHub, X
Show Notes:
Steve Klabnik, maintainer of Hackety Hack, newest contributor to The Changelog
Hackety Hack will teach you the absolute basics of programming from the ground up.
_why, creator of Hackety Hack. Help keep his memory alive.
Abbott and Costello’s classic “Who’s on first?”
Yakety Yak is a song written, produced, and arranged by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller for The Coasters and released on Atlantic Records in 1958
Shoes is a tiny graphical app kit for ruby
GTK is a highly usable, feature rich toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces which boasts cross platform compatibility and an easy to use API.
MacRuby is an implementation of Ruby 1.9 directly on top of Mac OS X core technologies such as the Objective-C runtime and garbage collector, the LLVM compiler infrastructure and the Foundation and ICU frameworks.
The Shoebox is a gallery of Shoes apps.
Mad props to Heroku, Sinatra, and MongoMapper for handling a LifeHacker traffic spike
Ruby is a great language to teach programming
_why’s Poignant Guide to Ruby
ChunkFive is a nice bold free and open source typeface
Steve is intrigued by projects like cool.io and node.js and the evented style of programming.
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
32 min
December 09, 2010Rails 3.1 and SproutCore
Adam and Wynn caught up with Yehuda Katz to talk about upcoming changes in Rails 3.1, SproutCore, and his growing list of open source projects.
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Featuring:
Yehuda Katz – Website, GitHub, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Wynn Netherland – GitHub, X
Show Notes:
Wynn’s deck from ‘07 pays tribute to Yehuda
Merb influenced and later merged with Rails
SproutCore is an HTML5 application framework for building responsive, desktop-caliber apps in any modern web browser, without plugins.
Carl Lerche is the other half of carlhuda
Desktop MVC != Server MVC
Handlebars.js is Yehuda’s optimization of Mustache.js
Backbone.js is a lightweight MVC framework from DocumentCloud
Bundler manages an application’s dependencies through its entire life across many machines systematically and repeatably.
One of the biggest changes in Rails 3 is The Great Decoupling
Railtie is the core of the Rails Framework and provides several hooks to extend Rails and/or modify the initialization process
Asset handling is coming in Rails 3.1, meaning better support for Sass, Compass, and CoffeeScript
Do you modify your Nginx setup?
Yehuda prefers Sass and Compass to Less since the introduction of the SCSS syntax.
Haml is the templating language of choice for sophisticated web devs.
Yehuda likes JavaScript on the server but thinks evented frameworks like Node are more for edge cases than for the heart of the web.
The Ruby Racer is a Ruby binding to V8 and is great for testing your JavaScripts without a browser
Charles Lowell wrapped Handlebars.js as Handlebars.rb
Yehuda loves CoffeeScript wants a runtime debugger before taking the plunge.
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.
Adam really loves Thor, a scripting framework that replaces rake and sake and is used by the new Rails 3 generators.
There is no shortage of thor tasks from users on GitHub.
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
57 min
November 30, 2010Building Telephony Apps
Wynn caught up with Chris Matthieu of Voxeo Labs to talk about Phono, Tropo, Adhearsion, and building telephony apps with open source tools.
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Featuring:
Wynn Netherland – GitHub, X
Show Notes:
We’re excited to team up with GitHub Jobs! To have your job posting read on air, just check “Advertise this listing on The Changelog Podcast for an additional $100” when you post your job.
Chris Matthieu founder of Teleku, now with Voxeo Labs, the company behind Tropo, Teleku, and Phono.
Tropo’s GitHub projects
Adhearsion uses Ruby to create voice-enabled applications on top of Asterisk
Asterisk turns an ordinary computer into a communications server
Phono, a jQuery plugin that lets you make phone calls right from your browser.
Jay Phillips orginally created Adhearsion
Jason Goecke VP of Innovation at Voxeo
AGI protocol is at the core of Asterisk
Wynn and Chris go way back with TAPI, MAPI, and SAPI
Google Voice transcriptions gone bad
The SIP protocol allows multimedia communication sessions such as voice and video calls over Internet Protocol
The Jingle protocol extends XMPP and powers Google Talk
Wynn asks how Tropo stacks up against Twilio
Tropo does TTS in nine languages
Tropo’s Scripting Environment supports Ruby, Python, PHP, Groovy, and Javascript
Tropo’s REST API offers a more traditional API approach
Facebook Telephone lets you call your Facebook friends via Phono.
Twelephone, if Twitter is more your bag
Michael Bleigh from Intridea makes Twitter apps easier for Rubyists
Facebook’s OpenGraph API makes building Facebook apps much easier than previous APIs
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
46 min
November 09, 2010Riak Revisited
Wynn sat down with Andy Gross and Mark Phillips of Basho and John Nunemaker of Ordered List to talk about Riak, Riak Search, and moving an open source community to GitHub.
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Featuring:
John Nunemaker – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Wynn Netherland – GitHub, X
Show Notes:
NoSQL smackdown, live from SXSW 2010.
Are you web scale?
Drop us a [email protected] and let us know who you want to get on The Changelog
Andy Gross VP of Engineering at Basho, the company behind Riak.
Mark Phillips Community Manager at Basho AKA * @pharkmillups
John Nunemaker of Ordered List and MongoMapper fame
Riak is now available as a binary download
Bitcask, the new backend for Riak
Riak key value store, decentralized datastore from Basho Technologies
Riak Search, full-text search engine based on Riak
Riak buckets, container and keyspace for data stored in Riak
Riak KVS buckets can be automatically searchable by installing the Search pre-commit hook
Riak supports an Apache SOLR interface
Sean Cribbs made some waves with Ripple
Ruby, Python, Node.js are the biggest adopters of Riak
Riak aims to scale both up and down. Adding a node adds a linear increase in throughput and storage capacity. 50 nodes run easily on a laptop.
Riak nodes are truly decentralized, no node is special
Riak compares to Cassandra and Voldemort
Riak has built-in JavaScript map reduce but unlike Couch, it’s more an ad hoc approach.
Andy explains Riak’s link walking or bucket-key-tag relationships between objects.
Riak now has two interfaces, the original REST HTTP interface, and a new protocol buffers interface, a faster binary interface
Eric Brewer, a Basho board member, and his cap theorem
Bitcask is an append-only file format where the keys are stored in memory for ultra fast lookups.
InnoStore, the original Riak backend
John Muellerleile, author of the popular NoSQL cartoon about distributed map reduce in Erlang
Apache Lucene query syntax a growing standard for search
The move from BitBucket to GitHub was ultimately about community, not about DVCS
The THANKS file lists many Riak community contributors
Harmony - the MongoDB-powered hosted CMS from Ordered List
Mozilla runs several Riak clusters to log data from their Test Pilot project
Francisco Treacy uses Riak in WideScript, “an innovative app that helps you focus and interact with your texts — on your desktop, your couch or on the go.”
Inagist recently moved from Cassandra to Riak
Riak has partnered with Joyent and Node creator Ryan Dahl to create Riak SmartMachines
Mark also is a fan of Redis
Scala and Clojure have Andy excited, too.
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
38 min
October 26, 2010Scripty2, Zepto.js, Vapor.js
Wynn caught up with Thomas Fuchs to talk about script.aculo.us, Scripty2, Zepto.js and the future of Prototype.
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Show Notes:
The Magic Roundabout is crazy
Wynn got his UK badge on Gowalla
script.aculo.us JavaScript effects framework built on top of Prototype
Prototype - JavaScript Framework that aims to ease development of dynamic web applications.
Thomas is one of many talented RoR core team alumni
Scripty2 - completely rewritten version of script.aculo.us
RaphaelJS - JavaScript vector graphics library featured in Episode 0.2.5
Johnson Page asks “What’s the future of Prototype.js?”
Underscore.js utility library for jQuery, inspired by Prototype, featured in Episode 0.0.5
Zepto.js minimalist inlinable framework for mobile WebKit browsers, with a jQuery-like chaining syntax
EveryTimeZone.com - handy tool to pick a time to meet across time zones. A promotional site for Freckle, chock full of JavaScript best practices.
Thomas’ blog post on approaches taken with EveryTimeZone.com
Gury Chainable syntax wrapper for the element
Vapor.js “The only JS framework compatible with every browser.”
MadRobby gives mad props to @janl, @hblank, @cramforce and other JSConf.eu organizers.
FabJS - modular async framework for Node.js
Chris Williams’ talk on PromoteJS, an effort The Changelog supports.
Eyeballs.js - A lightweight MVC framework for building fast, tidy JavaScript web apps
CoffeeScript, featured in Episode 0.2.9
Amy Hoy, Thomas’ wife, product proponent, and usability diva.
Freckle helps you manage your time
JavaScript Performance Rocks - three books on ultimate web app performance
Charm Desk - Thomas and Amy tackle customer support
PeepCode’s Smashing into Vim with the soothing voice of Dan Benjamin
Mensch and Meslo, the latest stops on Thomas’ journey to find the ultimate Terminal.app font
Thomas likes to fly his AR.Drone around the office
He’s also building the Lego Milennium Falcon
SchnitzelConf a 1-day, full-contact conference in Vienna, Austria focusing on creating products, launching businesses, and charging real money.
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
51 min
October 12, 2010DevOps and Chef
Wynn sat down with Corey Donohoe from GitHub and Seth Chisamore from Opscode to talk about DevOps, Chef, agile infrastructure and innovation in the datacenter.
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Show Notes:
Corey Donahoe aka @atmos, DevOps dude at GitHub
Seth Chisamore aka @schisamo, evangelist at Opscode, makers of Chef
Chef, an open source systems integration framework built to bring the benefits of configuration management to your entire infrastructure.
DevOps is defined as a set of processes, methods and systems for communication, collaboration and integration between departments for Development (Applications/Software Engineering), Technology Operations and Quality Assurance (QA)
Puppet, an open source data center automation and configuration management framework.
Cfengine, continuous datacenter automation and repair
Knife, the Chef command line interface
Chef Hosted platform is an instant hosted, highly scalabe Chef Server
Chef solo lets you run Chef without a Chef server
Chef was architected to be multi-tenant
The Opscode Team members have impressive resumes.
Chef includes impressive role-based authorities
Cookbooks are like Rubygems for Chef
Cinderella née Cider = apple + homebrew + chef + rvm
Homebrew as the most forked project is GitHub’s stress test. Be sure to catch Max on Episode 0.3.5
Wynn makes the case that the Swedish Chef be the face of the DevOps movement
Silverline from Librato does complex systems management and monitoring
EY or EngineYard, Corey’s former employer uses VMs in their architecture
Simon Wardley’s OSCon keynote
OpenStack is an effort to standardize the cloud
DevOps version of the account that got Shatner back on TV
DevOps Borat tweets from the datacenter
Fog, Wesley Beary’s excellent Ruby abstraction layer for popular cloud providers
Knife, donated by 37 Signals
Wynn digs infinity_test to test against multiple versions of Ruby at the same time
collectd, system statistics collection daemon
Using Visage to graph collectd stats
Sign up for the Opscode platform free beta
Look up Seth as schisamo in #chef and #chef-hacking on IRC
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
37 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 &…