Changelog Interviews

This week we’re back for part 2 with Adam Wiggins — going beyond Heroku and the story of Muse (listen to part 1). After a six-year adrenaline high on Heroku, Adam needed time to recover and refill the creative well. So, he moved to Berlin, did some gig work with companies…dabbled in investing and advising. But he wasn’t satisfied. Adam likes to build things. Ultimately, he was just waiting for the right time to reconnect with James Lindenbaum and Orion Henry — the same fellas he created Heroku with. Eventually they founded Ink & Switch, an independent research lab which led to innovations that made Muse possible. Muse is a tool for deep work and thinking on iPad and Mac. Today’s show is all about that journey and the details in-between. Join the discussionChangelog++ members get a bonus 6 minutes at the end of this episode and zero ads. Join today!Sponsors: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 CHANGELOG and get the team plan free for three months. FireHydrant – The reliability platform for every developer. Incidents impact everyone, not just SREs. FireHydrant gives teams the tools to maintain service catalogs, respond to incidents, communicate through status pages, and learn with retrospectives. Small teams up to 10 people can get started for free with all FireHydrant features included. No credit card required to sign up. Learn more at firehydrant.com/ Retool – The low-code platform for developers to build internal tools — Some of the best teams out there trust Retool…Brex, Coinbase, Plaid, Doordash, LegalGenius, Amazon, Allbirds, Peloton, and so many more – the developers at these teams trust Retool as the platform to build their internal tools. Try it free at retool.com/changelog Featuring:Adam Wiggins – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes: (Part 1) The Changelog #513: The story of Heroku with Adam Wiggins My journey into the Berlin startup scene Making computers better Museapp.com Ink & Switch Adam’s Heroku values.md Muse principles Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

This week on The Changelog we’re joined by Adam Wiggins, co-founder and former CTO of Heroku, for an exclusive trip down Heroku memory lane. Adam and Jerod are both tremendous fans of Heroku and believe (to this day) they represent the apex in developer experience for delivering code to production. We talk through the beginnings of Heroku, the v1 most people have forgotten about, the era of web hosting back in 2008-2010, the serendipity of Silicon Vally in those days, pitching to Y Combinator, the makings of git push heroku, the Heroku style and name, the sale of Heroku to Salesforce, potential regrets — and we tee up part 2 coming next week with Adam going beyond Heroku and the story of Muse. Join the discussionChangelog++ members save 5 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors: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 CHANGELOG and get the team plan free for three months. FireHydrant – The reliability platform for every developer. Incidents impact everyone, not just SREs. FireHydrant gives teams the tools to maintain service catalogs, respond to incidents, communicate through status pages, and learn with retrospectives. Small teams up to 10 people can get started for free with all FireHydrant features included. No credit card required to sign up. Learn more at firehydrant.com/ Sourcegraph – Transform your code into a queryable database to create customizable visual dashboards in seconds. Sourcegraph recently launched Code Insights — now you can track what really matters to you and your team in your codebase. See how other teams are using this awesome feature at about.sourcegraph.com/code-insights 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:Adam Wiggins – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes: Heroku.com Heroku Lifts Ruby on Rails Development into the Cloud Post-exit: What on earth is Heroku co-founder Adam Wiggins doing in Europe? (spoiler: not vacationing) My journey into the Berlin startup scene Heroku on Crunchbase Adam Wiggins’ Heroku values End of a chapter: My Heroku departure message Making computers better The Twelve-factor App Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

This week we’re doing some Linux mythbusting and talking retro gaming with Jay LaCroix from Learn Linux TV. This is a preview of what’s to come from our trip to All Things Open next week. By the way, make sure you come and check us out at booth 60. We’ll be recording podcasts, shaking hands, giving out t-shirts and stickers…and speaking of gaming, you can go head-to-head with us on Mario Kart or Rocket League on the Nintendo Switch. We’re giving that Switch away to a lucky winner at the conference, but you have to play to win. If you’re there, make sure you come see us because we want to see you. Join the discussionChangelog++ members get a bonus 8 minutes at the end of this episode and zero ads. Join today!Sponsors: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 CHANGELOG and get the team plan free for three months. InfluxData - InfluxDays 2022 – InfluxDays is back — this is a two-day developer conference from our friends at InfluxData dedicated to building IoT, analytics, and cloud applications with InfluxDB. It’s happening on Nov 2nd and 3rd - learn more and register at influxdays.com Sourcegraph – Transform your code into a queryable database to create customizable visual dashboards in seconds. Sourcegraph recently launched Code Insights — now you can track what really matters to you and your team in your codebase. See how other teams are using this awesome feature at about.sourcegraph.com/code-insights 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:Jay LaCroix – LinkedIn, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes: Learn Linux TV RetroPie The Homelab Show All Things Open 2022 Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

This week we’re talking with Will McGugan about using the terminal to not just build software, but also to deliver software. Will is a few months into his journey of building Textualize, a company he started around his open source projects Textual and Rich. When combined Textual and Rich give you a Python framework to build beautiful full-featured TUIs for the Terminal. We talk with Will about his big idea of the terminal as a platform, how he got here from first principles, what it takes to build Textual apps and whether or not they can replace not so good web admins, building, launching, and distributing Textual apps, why Python was his choiice of language, the big picture and business model behind Textualize, and why he’s building this as open source and in public. Join the discussionChangelog++ members save 5 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors: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 changelog.com/square to dive into the docs, APIs, SDKs and to create your Square Developer account — tell them Changelog sent you. FireHydrant – The reliability platform for every developer. Incidents impact everyone, not just SREs. FireHydrant gives teams the tools to maintain service catalogs, respond to incidents, communicate through status pages, and learn with retrospectives. Small teams up to 10 people can get started for free with all FireHydrant features included. No credit card required to sign up. Learn more at firehydrant.com/ Sourcegraph – Transform your code into a queryable database to create customizable visual dashboards in seconds. Sourcegraph recently launched Code Insights — now you can track what really matters to you and your team in your codebase. See how other teams are using this awesome feature at about.sourcegraph.com/code-insights 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:Will McGugan – GitHub, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes: Textualize.io Textualize is Hiring! Textualize/textual Projects using Textual Textualize/rich Projects using Rich Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

This week we’re talking about serverless Postgres! We’re joined by Nikita Shamgunov, co-founder and CEO of Neon. With Neon, truly serverless PostgreSQL is finally here. Neon isn’t Postgres compatible…it actually is Postgres! Neon is also open source under the Apache License 2.0. We talk about what a cloud native serverless Postgres looks like, why developers want Postgres and why of the top 5 databases only Postgres is growing (according to DB-Engines Ranking), we talk about how they separated storage and compute to offer autoscaling, branching, and bottomless storage, we also talk about their focus on DX — where they’re getting it right and where they need to improve. Neon is invite only as of the recording and release of this episode, but near the end of the show Nikita shares a few ways to get an invite and early access. Join the discussionChangelog++ members get a bonus 6 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. InfluxData - InfluxDays 2022 – InfluxDays is back — this is a two-day developer conference from our friends at InfluxData dedicated to building IoT, analytics, and cloud applications with InfluxDB. It’s happening on Nov 2nd and 3rd - learn more and register at influxdays.com Retool – The low-code platform for developers to build internal tools — Some of the best teams out there trust Retool…Brex, Coinbase, Plaid, Doordash, LegalGenius, Amazon, Allbirds, Peloton, and so many more – the developers at these teams trust Retool as the platform to build their internal tools. Try it free at retool.com/changelog Featuring:Nikita Shamgunov – Website, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes: neon.tech Neon doubles funding to $54M DB-Engines Ranking datafold.com The Changelog #476: Supabase is all in on Postgres The Changelog #461: Fauna is rethinking the database Practical AI #94: Operationalizing ML/AI with MemSQL Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

This week we’re talking fresh, faster, and new web frameworks by way of JS Party. Yes, today’s show is a web framework sampler because a new batch of web frameworks have emerged. There’s always something new happening in the front-end world and JS Party does an amazing job of keeping us up to date. So…what’s fresh, faster, and new? The first segment of the show focuses on Deno’s Fresh new web framework. Luca Casonato joins Jerod & Feross to talk about Fresh – a next generation web framework, built for speed, reliability, and simplicity. In segment two, AngularJS creator Miško Hevery joins Jerod and KBall to talk about Qwik. He says Qwik is a fundamental rethinking of how a web application should work. And he’s attempting to convince Jerod & KBall that the implications of that are BIG. In the last segment, Amal talks with Fred Schott about Astro 1.0. They go deep on how Astro is built to pull content from anywhere and serve it fast with their next-gen island architecture. Plus there’s an 8 minute bonus for our ++ subscribers (changelog.com/++). Fred Schott explains Astro Islands and how Astro extracts your UI into smaller, isolated components on the page, and the unused JavaScript gets replaced with lightweight HTML — leading to faster loads and time-to-interactive. Join the discussionChangelog++ members get a bonus 7 minutes at the end of this episode and zero ads. Join today!Sponsors:InfluxData - InfluxDays 2022 – InfluxDays is back — this is a two-day developer conference from our friends at InfluxData dedicated to building IoT, analytics, and cloud applications with InfluxDB. It’s happening on Nov 2nd and 3rd - learn more and register at influxdays.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 changelog.com/square to dive into the docs, APIs, SDKs and to create your Square Developer account — tell them Changelog sent you. FireHydrant – The reliability platform for every developer. Incidents impact everyone, not just SREs. FireHydrant gives teams the tools to maintain service catalogs, respond to incidents, communicate through status pages, and learn with retrospectives. Small teams up to 10 people can get started for free with all FireHydrant features included. No credit card required to sign up. Learn more at firehydrant.com/ Retool – The low-code platform for developers to build internal tools — Some of the best teams out there trust Retool…Brex, Coinbase, Plaid, Doordash, LegalGenius, Amazon, Allbirds, Peloton, and so many more – the developers at these teams trust Retool as the platform to build their internal tools. Try it free at retool.com/changelog Featuring:Luca Casonato – GitHub, XFred K. Schott – Website, GitHub, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XFeross Aboukhadijeh – Website, GitHub, XKevin Ball – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XAmal Hussein – GitHub, XShow Notes:JS Party #234 - # Fresh docs Islands Architecture Deno’s Discord JS Party #237 - # Qwik Partytown JS Party #238 - # Astro 1.0 announcement post Astro’s website Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

This week we turn the mics on ourselves, kind of. Lars Wikman joins the show to give us a guided tour through ID3 esoterica and the shiny new open source Elixir library he developed for us. We talk about what ID3 is, its many versions, what it aims to be and what it could have been, how our library project got started, all the unique features and failed dreams of the ID3v2 spec, how ID3v2 and Podcasting 2.0 are solving the problem differently, and how all of this maps back to us giving you (our listeners) a better experience while listening to our shows. Join the discussionChangelog++ members get a bonus 14 minutes at the end of this episode and zero ads. Join today!Sponsors:InfluxData – The time series platform for building and operating time series applications — 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 more at influxdata.com/changelog 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 CHANGELOG and get the team plan free for three months. 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. 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:Lars Wikman – Website, GitHub, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes: A new chapter for Changelog podcasts (our shows have chapters baked in now, whoop whoop!) thechangelog/id3vx Id3vx – a library for parsing and encoding ID3 tags Ship It! #70: Kaizen! Four PRs, one big feature Folyo Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

This week we’re talking about product development structures as systems with Lucas da Costa. The last time we had Lucas on the show he was living the text-mode only life, and now we’re more than 3 years later, Lucas has doubled down on all things text mode. Today’s conversation with Lucas maps several ideas he’s shared recently on his blog. We talk about deadlines being pointless, trajectory vs roadmap and the downfall of long-term planning, the practices of daily stand-ups and what to do instead, measuring queues not cycle time, and probably the most controversial of them all — actually talking to your customers. Have you heard? It’s this newly disruptive Agile framework that seems to be working well. Join the discussionChangelog++ members get a bonus 6 minutes at the end of this episode and zero ads. Join today!Sponsors:DEX: Sort the Madness – Join our friends at Sentry for their upcoming developer experience conference called DEX: Sort the Madness. This event will be in-person in San Francisco AND virtual on September 28. This is a free conference by developers for developers where you’ll sort through the madness and look at ways to improve workflow productivity. Learn more and register FireHydrant – The reliability platform for every developer. Incidents impact everyone, not just SREs. FireHydrant gives teams the tools to maintain service catalogs, respond to incidents, communicate through status pages, and learn with retrospectives. Small teams up to 10 people can get started for free with all FireHydrant features included. No credit card required to sign up. Learn more at firehydrant.com/ Sourcegraph – Transform your code into a queryable database to create customizable visual dashboards in seconds. Sourcegraph recently launched Code Insights — now you can track what really matters to you and your team in your codebase. See how other teams are using this awesome feature at about.sourcegraph.com/code-insights Featuring:Lucas Fernandes da Costa – Website, GitHub, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes: Useful engineering metrics and why velocity is not one of them How finishing what you start makes teams more productive and predictable How high capacity utilisation hurts a team’s performance How and why exploiting uncertainty makes products more profitable Why tall hierarchies slow organizations down and how to fix them Talking to your customers: a disruptive Agile framework Why your daily stand-ups don’t work and how to fix them Why long-term plans don’t work and how to fix them “Planning Is Guessing” at Startup School by David Heinemeier Hansson Actionable Agile Metrics for Predictability The Changelog #488: Mob programming deep dive (with Woody Zuill) The Changelog #340: All things text mode (with Lucas da Costa) Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

This week on The Changelog we’re talking about Stable Diffusion, DALL-E, and the impact of AI generated art. We invited our good friend Simon Willison on the show today because he wrote a very thorough blog post titled, “Stable Diffusion is a really big deal.” You may know Simon from his extensive contributions to open source software. Simon is a co-creator of the Django Web framework (which we don’t talk about at all on this show), he’s the creator of Datasette, a multi-tool for exploring and publishing data (which we do talk about on this show)…most of all Simon is a very insightful thinker, which he puts on display here on this episode. We talk from all the angles of this topic, the technical, the innovation, the future and possibilities, the ethical and the moral – we get into it all. The question is, will this era be known as the initial push back to the machine? Join the discussionChangelog++ members get a bonus 5 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. FireHydrant – The reliability platform for every developer. Incidents impact everyone, not just SREs. FireHydrant gives teams the tools to maintain service catalogs, respond to incidents, communicate through status pages, and learn with retrospectives. Small teams up to 10 people can get started for free with all FireHydrant features included. No credit card required to sign up. Learn more at firehydrant.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 changelog.com/square to dive into the docs, APIs, SDKs and to create your Square Developer account — tell them Changelog sent you. Honeycomb – Guess less, know more. When production is running slow, it’s hard to know where problems originate: is it your application code, users, or the underlying systems? With Honeycomb you get a fast, unified, and clear understanding of the one thing driving your business: production. Join the swarm and try Honeycomb free today at honeycomb.io/changelog Featuring:Simon Willison – Website, GitHub, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes: Simon Willison on Wikipedia Stable Diffusion is a really big deal Exploring 12 Million of the 2.3 Billion Images Used to Train Stable Diffusion’s Image Generator Exploring the training data behind Stable Diffusion Stability.ai Greg Rutkowsk on ArtStation and on Twitter Stable Diffusion Launch Announcement Stable Diffusion Public Release The full text of the CreativeML Open RAIL-M license Prompt injection attacks against GPT-3 Twitter thread about the ethics of the Stable Diffusion release from Joshua Achiam who works on AI safety at OpenAI Lexica.art - that really good search engine for 10m+ Stable Diffusion images and prompts Simon’s Twitter thread about Stable Diffusion - I keep on adding new things to this as they happen, the thread has been running for a few weeks now 4.2 Gigabytes, or: How to Draw Anything - a great post that talks through the process involved in getting good results out of Stable Diffusion using image2image and multiple round-trips through the model This tweet from Simon has a animated GIF of the Stable Diffusion Discord scrolling by during the 1.5 model preview Textual Inversion also see this thread on Twitter This tweet talks about the Stable Diffusion concepts library, using Textual Inversion This tweet has great examples of Textual Inversion in action Simon’s Datasette Cloud preview - Check it out and signup Compressing images with Stable Diffusion “neuromancer” on Lexica Online Art Communities Begin Banning AI-Generated Images The Changelog #296: Burnout, open source, Datasette Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

This week we’re joined by Jason Bosco, co-founder and CEO of Typesense — the open source Algolia alternative and the easier to use ElasticSearch alternative. For years we’ve used Algolia as our search engine, so we come to this conversation with skin in the game and the scars to prove it. Jason shared how he and his co-founder got started on Typesense, why and how they are “all in” on open source, the options and the paths developers can take to add search to their project, how Typesense compares to ElasticSearch and Algolia, he walks us through getting started, the story of Typesense Cloud, and why they have resisted Venture Capital. Join the discussionChangelog++ members get a bonus 5 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. Sourcegraph – Transform your code into a queryable database to create customizable visual dashboards in seconds. Sourcegraph recently launched Code Insights — now you can track what really matters to you and your team in your codebase. See how other teams are using this awesome feature at about.sourcegraph.com/code-insights InfluxData – All of the open source software InfluxData creates is either MIT-licensed or Apache2-licensed. These are very permissive licenses. But why are they all for permissive licenses? Paul Dix shares his thoughts on the spirit of open source and why freedom, evolution, and impact drive them to license InfluxData’s open source software as permissively possible. Learn more at influxdata.com/changelog Retool – The low-code platform for developers to build internal tools — Some of the best teams out there trust Retool…Brex, Coinbase, Plaid, Doordash, LegalGenius, Amazon, Allbirds, Peloton, and so many more – the developers at these teams trust Retool as the platform to build their internal tools. Try it free at retool.com/changelog Featuring:Jason Bosco – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes: Typesense on the iconic Nasdaq billboard in Times Square typesense.org typesense/typesense Typesense Cloud pricing Typesense on HN Why Upgrade to GPLv3 Airbyte Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!