Changelog Interviews

This week we’re joined by Jacob Kaplan-Moss and we’re talking about his extensive writing on work sample tests. These tests are an exercise, a simulation, or a small slice of real day-to-day work that candidates will perform as part of their job. Over the years, as an engineering leader, Jacob has become a practicing expert in effectively hiring engineers — today he shares a wealth of knowledge on the subject. 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 developer.squareup.com 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. Try FireHydrant free for 14 days at firehydrant.io Retool – Retool is a low-code platform built specifically for developers that makes it fast and easy to build internal tools. Instead of building internal tools from scratch, the world’s best teams, from startups to Fortune 500s, are using Retool to power their internal apps. Learn more and try it for free at retool.com/changelog WorkOS – A platform that gives developers a set of building blocks for quickly adding enterprise-ready features to their application. Add Single Sign-On (Okta, Azure, Google, Microsoft OAuth), sync users from any SCIM directory, HRIS integration, audit trails (SIEM), free magic link sign-in. WorkOS is designed for developers and offers a single, elegant interface that abstracts dozens of enterprise integrations. Learn more and get started at WorkOS.com Featuring:Jacob Kaplan-Moss – Website, Mastodon, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes: Series: Work Sample Tests Work Sample Tests: A Framework for Good Work Sample Tests: Eight Rules for Fair Tests Work Sample Tests: Wrap Up and Q&A The Changelog #474: Complex systems & second-order effects with Paul Orlando A New Morality of Attainment (Goodhart’s Law) Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

This week we’re joined by Nora Jones, founder and CEO at Jeli where they help teams gain insight and learnings from incidents. Back in December Nora shared here thoughts in a Changelog post titled “Incident” shouldn’t be a four-letter word - which got a lot of attention from our readers. Today we’re talking with Nora about all things incidents — the learning and growth they represent for teams, why teams should focus on learning from incidents in the first place, their Howie guide to post‑incident investigations, why the next emerging role is an Incident Analyst, and she also shares a few book recommendations which we’ve linked up in the show notes. Join the discussionChangelog++ members get a bonus 10 minutes at the end of this episode and zero ads. Join today!Sponsors:InfluxData – 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 about the wide range of use cases of InfluxDB 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. WorkOS – A platform that gives developers a set of building blocks for quickly adding enterprise-ready features to their application. Add Single Sign-On (Okta, Azure, Google, Microsoft OAuth), sync users from any SCIM directory, HRIS integration, audit trails (SIEM), free magic link sign-in. WorkOS is designed for developers and offers a single, elegant interface that abstracts dozens of enterprise integrations. Learn more and get started at WorkOS.com Subspace – Network-as-a-Service that helps developers accelerate real-time applications for hundreds of millions of users worldwide. When every millisecond counts, Subspace gives you the fastest, most reliable network to route your traffic through. And it all works via a global IP proxy that sets up using a simple API. Learn more and get started for free at subspace.com/changelog Featuring:Nora Jones – LinkedIn, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes: “Incident” shouldn’t be a four-letter word Howie: The Post-Incident Guide About Chesley B. “Sully” Sullenberger, III Minding the Weather (How Expert Forecasters Think) Seeing What Others Don’t: The Remarkable Ways We Gain Insights Community: Learning from Incidents in Software The Changelog #462: Learning-focused engineering with Brittany Dionigi Costa Concordia disaster Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Welcome to Song Encoder, a special series of The Changelog podcast featuring people who create at the intersection of software and music. This episode features Pwnie Award-winning songwriter Forrest Brazeal. Join the discussionChangelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. 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 Changelog++ – You love our content and you want to take it to the next level by showing your support. We’ll take you closer to the metal with no ads, extended episodes, outtakes, bonus content, a deep discount in our merch store (soon), and more to come. Let’s do this! Featuring:Forrest Brazeal – Website, GitHub, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes: 168 AWS Services in 2 minutes The Ransomware Song That Sinking Feeling (The #HugOps Song) Serverless v Containers Look At You Now (The Google Cloud Song) Kingston Trio-Merry Minuet Big Tech ((It’s Probably Fine)) The AWS Elastic Load Balancer Yodel Rag Song Encoder: $STDOUT Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

This week Paul Copplestone, CEO of Supabase joined us to catch us up on the next big thing happening in the world of Postgres. Supabase might be best known as “the open source Firebase alternative,” a tagline they might be reluctant to maintain. But from Adam’s perspective, he’s never been more excited about what they’re bringing to market for Postgres fans. In the last year, Supabase has gone from 0 to more than 80,000 databases on their platform — and they’re still in beta…and it’s open source. Hopefully today’s show sheds some light on why everyone is talking about Supabase. 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. Try FireHydrant free for 14 days at firehydrant.io Subspace – Network-as-a-Service that helps developers accelerate real-time applications for hundreds of millions of users worldwide. When every millisecond counts, Subspace gives you the fastest, most reliable network to route your traffic through. And it all works via a global IP proxy that sets up using a simple API. Learn more and get started for free at subspace.com/changelog MongoDB – An integrated suite of cloud database and services — They have a FREE forever tier, so you can prove to yourself and to your team that they have everything you need. Check it out today at mongodb.com/changelog Featuring:Paul Copplestone – Website, GitHub, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes: Supabase Supabase docs supabase/supabase Supabase Realtime Tweet: Total databases on the Supabase platform Tweet: In 2021 Supabase grew… The Changelog #461: Fauna is rethinking the database with Evan Weaver postgresql.org Firebase Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

This week Matt Ahrens joins Adam to talk about ZFS. Matt co-founded the ZFS project at Sun Microsystems in 2001. And 20 years later Adam picked up ZFS for use in his home lab and loved it. So, he reached out to Matt and invited him on the show. They cover the origins of the file system, its journey from proprietary to open source, architecture choices like copy-on-write, the ins and outs of creating and managing ZFS, RAID-Z and RAID-Z expansion, and Matt even shares plans for ZFS in the cloud with ZFS object store. Join the discussionChangelog++ members get a bonus 3 minutes at the end of this episode and zero ads. 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 developer.squareup.com to dive into the docs, APIs, SDKs and to create your Square Developer account — tell them Changelog sent you. InfluxData – 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 about the wide range of use cases of InfluxDB at influxdata.com/changelog MongoDB – MongoDB Atlas is an integrated suite of cloud database and services. Try Atlas today. They have a FREE forever tier, so you can prove to yourself and to your team that they have everything you need. Check it out today at mongodb.com/changelog Retool – Retool is a low-code platform built specifically for developers that makes it fast and easy to build internal tools. Instead of building internal tools from scratch, the world’s best teams, from startups to Fortune 500s, are using Retool to power their internal apps. Learn more and try it for free at retool.com/changelog Featuring:Matthew Ahrens – GitHub, LinkedIn, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes: Matt Ahrens on openzfs.org State of OpenZFS 2021 by Matt Ahrens ZFS RAIDZ stripe width, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love RAIDZ ZFS fans, rejoice—RAIDz expansion will be a thing very soon Common Development and Distribution License 1.0 Linus Torvalds: Avoid Oracle’s ZFS kernel code on Linux until ‘litigious’ Larry signs off Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Paul Orlando joins Jerod to talk through some unintended consequences that occur when systems operate at scale. We discuss Goodhart’s Law, The Cobra Effect, how to design incentive systems, dependency management decisions, the risks of autonomous vehicles, and much more along the way. Join the discussionChangelog++ members save 6 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:InfluxData – 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 about the wide range of use cases of InfluxDB at influxdata.com/changelog 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 developer.squareup.com 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. Try FireHydrant free for 14 days at firehydrant.io Retool – Retool is a low-code platform built specifically for developers that makes it fast and easy to build internal tools. Instead of building internal tools from scratch, the world’s best teams, from startups to Fortune 500s, are using Retool to power their internal apps. Learn more and try it for free at retool.com/changelog Featuring:Paul Orlando – Website, LinkedIn, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes: The Unintended Consequences blog A New Morality of Attainment (Goodhart’s Law) The Cobra Effect Redesigned (Examples & Antidotes) The Cobra Effect (Part 2) Uncertainty Saves Lives – the Peltzman Effect Garmin Hack and Dependence Autonomous Vehicles and Scaling Risk A Pattern Language Growth Units: Learn to Calculate Customer Acquisition Cost Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Our 4th annual year-end wrap-up episode! We don’t naval gaze often, but when we do… we make sure you get your money’s worth. Reflections, most popular episodes, our favs, and new this year: listener voice mails. Thanks for listening! 💚 Join the discussionChangelog++ members save 5 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:InfluxData – 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 about the wide range of use cases of InfluxDB at influxdata.com/changelog Retool – Retool is a low-code platform built specifically for developers that makes it fast and easy to build internal tools. Instead of building internal tools from scratch, the world’s best teams, from startups to Fortune 500s, are using Retool to power their internal apps. Learn more and try it for free at retool.com/changelog LaunchDarkly – Fundamentally change how you deliver software. Innovate faster, deploy fearlessly, and make each release a masterpiece. FireHydrant – The reliability platform for teams of all sizes. With FireHydrant, teams achieve reliability at scale by enabling speed and consistency from a service deployment to an unexpected outage. Try FireHydrant free for 14 days at firehydrant.io Featuring:Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes:The Changelog’s most popular episodes of 2021: Why we love Vim Modern Unix tools with Nick Janetakis OAuth, “It’s complicated.” with Aaron Parecki Why Neovim? with TJ DeVries Jerod’s personal favorites of 2021: Community perspectives on Elastic vs AWS Exploring Deno Land with Ryan Dahl Why we love Vim Lessons from 10k hours with Matt Rickard Song Encoder: $STDOUT Adam’s personal favorites of 2021: We ask a lawyer about GitHub Copilot Exploring Deno Land with Ryan Dahl Leading a non-profit unicorn with Quincy Larson Let’s mint some NFTs with Mikeal Rogers Every commit is a gift with Brett Cannon Shopify’s vision for the future of commerce with Ilya Grigorik Oh my! Zsh with Robby Russell The business model of open source with Adam Jacob Other links mentioned: Ship It! 1 Ship It! 15 Changelog Merch Tim Caswell on Twitter Dumb & Dumber: And Totally redeem yourself! Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

We’re joined by Eran Yahav — talking about AI assistants for developers. Eran has been working on this problem for more than a decade. We talk about his path to now and how the idea for Tabnine came to life, this AI revolution taking place and the role it will play in developer productivity, and we talk about the elephant in the room - how Tabnine compares to GitHub Copilot, and what they’re doing to make Tabnine the AI assistant for every developer regardless of the IDE or editor you choose. Join the discussionChangelog++ members save 6 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:InfluxData – 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 about the wide range of use cases of InfluxDB at influxdata.com/changelog Teleport – Securely access any computing resource anywhere. Engineers and security teams can unify access to SSH servers, Kubernetes clusters, web applications, and databases across all environments. Try Teleport today in the cloud, self-hosted, or open source at goteleport.com FireHydrant – The reliability platform for teams of all sizes. With FireHydrant, teams achieve reliability at scale by enabling speed and consistency from a service deployment to an unexpected outage. Try FireHydrant free for 14 days at firehydrant.io Sourcegraph – Move fast, even in big codebases. Sourcegraph is universal code search for every developer and team. Easily search across all the code that matters to you and your organization: find example code, explore and read code, debug issues, and more. Head to info.sourcegraph.com/changelog and click the button “Try Sourcegraph now” to get started. Featuring:Eran Yahav – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes: Tabnine Tabnine Pro rogram synthesis Sublime Text Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Today we’re bringing our appearance on DevDiscuss right here to The Changelog. Jerod and I guested their launch episode for Season 7 to talk about deeply human stories we’ve covered over the years on this podcast. For long-time listners this will be a trip down memory lane and for recent subscibers this will be a guided tour on some of our most impactful episodes. Special thanks to Ben Halpern and Christina Gorton for hosting us. Check out their show at dev.to/devdiscuss Join the discussionChangelog++ members save 4 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:InfluxData – 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 about the wide range of use cases of InfluxDB at influxdata.com/changelog LaunchDarkly – Fundamentally change how you deliver software. Innovate faster, deploy fearlessly, and make each release a masterpiece. Teleport – Securely access any computing resource anywhere. Engineers and security teams can unify access to SSH servers, Kubernetes clusters, web applications, and databases across all environments. Try Teleport today in the cloud, self-hosted, or open source at goteleport.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 developer.squareup.com to dive into the docs, APIs, SDKs and to create your Square Developer account — tell them Changelog sent you. Featuring:Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XBen Halpern – GitHub, XChristina Gorton – GitHub, LinkedIn, XShow Notes: Five years of freeCodeCamp with Quincy Larson Oh my! Zsh. with Robby Russell A Protocol for Dying with Pieter Hintjens Leading Leaders Who Lead Engineers with Lara Hogan Every Commit is a Gift Open Sourcing the DEV Community with Ben Halpern Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

We’re prepping for our 4th annual state of the “log” episode where we look back at the year, discuss some of our favorite episodes as well as the most popular ones, and talk a bit about what we have in the works for 2022 and beyond. We thought it’d be awesome to include some listener voices on the show! So, please share your favorite Changelog guests, topics, or a-ha moments you’ve had over the last year. If you get your message included in the episode, we’ll send you a free t-shirt. It doesn’t have to be super produced. Just pop open your Voice Memos app on your phone or use QuickTime or Audacity on your laptop. Tell us what’s on your mind. Then upload your audio to ~> changelog.fm/sotl We’re recording the episode next week, so don’t sleep on the opportunity. We’d love to hear from you! Join the discussionChangelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!Featuring:Jerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes:Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!