Changelog Interviews

Justin Garrison, a former Amazon employee, shares his firsthand insights into the tech industry's recent transformations and the reality of silent layoffs. He discusses how tools like Kubernetes are reshaping software development and the consequences of corporate restructuring on employee morale. Justin emphasizes the critical role of operations teams, the need for employee advocacy, and the complex dynamics of trust in high-stakes environments. Plus, he reveals his new role as host of Ship It!, promising fresh content and community engagement.

Dan Moore, author of 'Letters to a New Developer,' shares wisdom on online communities for developers, communication skills, and staying relevant in the industry. Advice includes saying no, improving code, and skill stacking.

Our 6th annual year-end wrap-up episode! This time we’re featuring 12 (yes, 12!) listener voice mails, our favorite episodes of the year & some insanely cool Breakmaster Cylinder beats made just for this occasion. Thanks for listening! 💚 Join the discussionChangelog++ members get a bonus 5 minutes at the end of this episode and zero ads. Join today!Sponsors: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 Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — 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. Typesense – Lightning fast, globally distributed Search-as-a-Service that runs in memory. You literally can’t get any faster! Featuring:Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes:Arthur Maltson’s favs: Friends #11: An aberrant generation of programmers with Justin Searls & Landon Gray Interviews #551: DX on DX with Abi Noda Interviews #453: Leading leaders who lead engineers with Lara Hogan Hal’s favs: Interviews #524: Mainframes are still a big thing with Cameron Seay Interviews #545: Rebuilding DevOps from the ground up with Adam Jacob Friends #20: Beat freak in residence with BMC Changelog News Rory O’Connor’s favs: Interviews #524: Mainframes are still a big thing with Cameron Seay Brett Cannon’s favs: Interviews #565: Pushing back on unconstrained capitalism with Cory Doctorow Interviews #558: Open source is at a crossroads with Steve O’Grady Interviews #549: Storytime with Steve Yegge Interviews #537: Hard drive reliability at scale with Andy Klein Special: Next Level Interviews #553: 30 years of Debian with Jonathan Carter Interviews #533: A new path to full-time open source with Filippo Valsorda Interviews #524: Mainframes are still a big thing with Cameron Seay Interviews #523: Just Postgres with Craig Kerstiens Jarvis Yang’s favs: Friends #9: Homelab nerds, unite! with Techno Tim Jamie Curnow’s favs: Interviews #540: Engineering management (for the rest of us) with Sarah Drasner Interviews #527: What it takes to scale engineering with Rachel Potvin Friends #16: The beginning of the end of physical media with Christina Warren Changelog Beats! AJ Kerrigan’s favs: Interviews #553: 30 years of Debian with Jonathan Carter Interviews #547: Efficient Linux at the CLI with Danil J. Barrett Friends #15: #define: a game of fake definitions JS Party #299: Tech by Choice with Valerie Phoenix Friends #20: Beat freak in residence with BMC Alex’s favs: Friends #23: The state of the 2023 tech market with Gergely Orosz Interviews #535: Examining capitalism’s chokepoints with Cory Doctorow Interviews #565: Pushing back on unconstrained capitalism with Cory Doctorow Interviews #534: LLMs break the internet with Simon Willison Schalk Neethling’s favs: Friends #11: An aberrant generation of programmers with Justin Searls & Landon Gray JS Party #288: Refined thinking with Jim Nielsen Friends #12: You call it tech debt I call it malpractice with Kris Brandow Go Time #291: Go templating using Templ Friends #18: Human skills to pay the bills with KBall JS Party #299: Tech by Choice with Valerie Phoenix Cory Doctorow on restoring the dream of tech workers - YouTube Matteo Collina on how he believes AWS fooled devs & sabotaged the industry (to make more money) - YouTube Unpopular opinion! We’ll move from streaming back to owning content - YouTube Tillman Jex’s favs: Interviews #549: Storytime with Steve Yegge Interviews #565: Pushing back on unconstrained capitalism with Cory Doctorow Friends #7: Dear Red Hat… with Jeff Geerling Jamie Tanna’s favs: Interviews: #568: Gleaming the KubeCon Friends #24: HATEOAS corpus with Kris Brandow Adam’s favs: Friends #17: Kaizen! Slightly more instant Interviews #557: Attack of the Canaries! with Haroon Meer from Thinkst Jerod’s favs: Interviews #526: Git with your friends featuring Mat Ryer Interviews #532: Bringing Whisper and LLaMA to the masses with Georgi Gerganov Also mentioned: Hobo Johnson’s Tiny Desk Concert AllttA - The Woods Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

This week we’re taking you to the hallway track of All Things Open 2023 in Raleigh, NC. Today’s episode features: Heikki Linnakangas (Co-founder of Neon and Postgres hacker), Robert Aboukhalil (Bioinformatics software engineer) working on bringing desktop apps to the web with Wasm, and Scott Ford who loves taking a codebase from brown to green at Corgibytes. Join the discussionChangelog++ members save 12 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:Neon – The fully managed serverless Postgres with a generous free tier. We separate storage and compute to offer autoscaling, branching, and bottomless storage. Sentry – Get $100 towards your error monitoring with Sentry! Use the code changelog. Socket – Secure your supply chain and ship with confidence. Install the GitHub app, book a demo or learn more Typesense – Lightning fast, globally distributed Search-as-a-Service that runs in memory. You literally can’t get any faster! Featuring:Heikki Linnakangas – Website, GitHub, LinkedInRobert Aboukhalil – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XScott Ford – Website, GitHub, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes: Neon Sandbox.bio Corgibytes Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Drew DeVault, a free software developer and creator of the Hare programming language, dives deep into his passion for open-source and sustainable systems. He crafted Hare out of necessity, aiming for it to achieve unprecedented stability over a century. Drew discusses its unique C-like features, the philosophy behind SourceHut’s email-first approach versus GitHub, and the importance of community governance. Plus, he humorously touches on the art of making a perfect peanut butter and jelly sandwich!

This week we’re gleaming the KubeCon. Ok, some people say CubeCon, while others say KubeCon…we talk with Solomon Hykes about all things Dagger, Tammer Saleh and James McShane about going beyond cloud native with SuperOrbital, and Steve Francis and Spencer Smith about the state of Talos Linux and what they’re working on at Sidero Labs. Join the discussionChangelog++ members save 12 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:Neon – The fully managed serverless Postgres with a generous free tier. We separate storage and compute to offer autoscaling, branching, and bottomless storage. .Tech Domains – They’re giving selected startups guest spots on the biggest podcasts, conferences, and billboards in the tech game. Apply at startups.tech/changelog Traceroute – Listen and follow Season 3 of Traceroute starting November 2 on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts! Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — 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:Solomon Hykes – GitHub, XTammer Saleh – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XJames McShane – GitHub, XSteve Francis – GitHub, LinkedInSpencer Smith – GitHub, LinkedInAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XGerhard Lazu – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XShow Notes: SOTL 2023 dagger.io SuperOrbital Talos Linux Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

This week on we’re joined by Emil Sjölander from Figma — talking about bringing Dev Mode to Figma. Dev Mode is their new workspace in Figma that’s designed to bring developers and design to the same tool. The question they’re trying to answer is “How do you create a home for developers in a design tool?” We go way back to Emil’s startup that was acquired by Figma called Visly, how we iterated to here from 20 years ago (think PSD > HTML days), what they did to build Dev Mode, what they’re doing around codegen, the popularity of design systems, and what it takes to go from zero to Dev Mode. Join the discussionChangelog++ members get a bonus 5 minutes at the end of this episode and zero ads. Join today!Sponsors:Neon – The fully managed serverless Postgres with a generous free tier. We separate storage and compute to offer autoscaling, branching, and bottomless storage. Socket – Secure your supply chain and ship with confidence. Install the GitHub app, book a demo or learn more Traceroute – Listen and follow Season 3 of Traceroute starting November 2 on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts! Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — 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:Emil Sjölander – GitHub, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes: Dev Mode: Building a design tool that works harder for developers Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

This week we’re talking about Swift with Ben Cohen, the Swift Team Manager at Apple. We caught up with Ben while at KubeCon last week. Ben takes us into the world of Swift, from Apple Native apps on iOS and macOS, to the Swift Server Workgroup for developing and deploying server side applications, to the Swift extension for VS Code, Swift as a safe C/C++ successor language, Swift on Linux and Windows, and of course what The Browser Company’s Arc browser is doing to bring Arc to Windows. Join the discussionChangelog++ members save 11 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:Statsig – Build faster with confidence. Startups to Fortune 500s rely on Statsig to make data-driven decisions. Ship smarter and faster with the unified platform for feature flags, experimentation, and analytics. Our listeners get free white-glove onboarding, migration support, and 5 million free events per month. Neon – The fully managed serverless Postgres with a generous free tier. We separate storage and compute to offer autoscaling, branching, and bottomless storage. Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — 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. Typesense – Lightning fast, globally distributed Search-as-a-Service that runs in memory. You literally can’t get any faster! Featuring:Ben Cohen – GitHub, Mastodon, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes: Swift is available for macOS, Windows, and Linux The Browser Company (who are bringing their Arc browser, written in Swift, to Windows) recently open sourced their bindings for WinRT The Swift on Server Working Group Swift extension for VS Code (if Xcode isn’t your thing) NSA recently published a report urging people to move off of C and C++: John McCall (who chairs the Language Steering Group) at CppNow recently The goals for Swift 6 Miguel de Icaza proposing using Swift in the Godot game engine Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

This week we’re talking with Cory Doctorow (this episode contains explicit language) about how we can get back to that “new good internet.” Cory’s new book The Internet Con offers a lens to this conversation about disenshittifying the internet through anti-trust laws, limits on corporate tweaking, regulating unconstrained capitalism, and all the ways enshittification is enabled. Cory also shares his experience recording his own audio book under the direction of Gabrielle de Cuir at Skyboat Media, and what’s to come from his next Science Fiction book The Lost Cause. Join the discussionChangelog++ members get a bonus 9 minutes at the end of this episode and zero ads. Join today!Sponsors:Socket – Secure your supply chain and ship with confidence. Install the GitHub app, book a demo or learn more Statsig – Build faster with confidence. Startups to Fortune 500s rely on Statsig to make data-driven decisions. Ship smarter and faster with the unified platform for feature flags, experimentation, and analytics. Our listeners get free white-glove onboarding, migration support, and 5 million free events per month. Changelog News – A podcast+newsletter combo that’s brief, entertaining & always on-point. Subscribe today. Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — 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 Doctorow – Website, GitHub, Mastodon, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes: The Internet Con libro.fm The Lost Cause Cory’s talk at DEF CON 31 Changelog Interviews #535: Examining capitalism’s chokepoints Skyboat Media The History of the Standard Oil Company by Ida M. Tarbell Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Jean Yang’s research on programming languages at Carnegie Mellon led her to realize that APIs are the layer that makes or breaks quality software systems. Unfortunately, developers are underserved by tools for dealing with, securing & understanding APIs. That realization led her to found Akita Software, which led her to join Postman by way of acquisition. That move, at least in part, also led her to join us on this very podcast. We think you’re going to enjoy this interview, we sure did. Join the discussionChangelog++ members save 10 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:Sentry – Get $100 towards your error monitoring with Sentry! Use the code changelog. Statsig – Build faster with confidence. Startups to Fortune 500s rely on Statsig to make data-driven decisions. Ship smarter and faster with the unified platform for feature flags, experimentation, and analytics. Our listeners get free white-glove onboarding, migration support, and 5 million free events per month. Traceroute Podcast – Listen and follow Season 3 of Traceroute starting November 2 on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts! Featuring:Jean Yang – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes: Modern software is built on APIs featuring Abhinav Asthana (Changelog Interviews #360) Why Aren’t There More Programming Languages Startups? Building for the “99% Developers” Postman Live Insights: automatically discover, monitor, and add APIs Zapier | Automation that moves you forward Flows | Postman API Platform Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!