Changelog Interviews

Today we’re joined by Jessica Lord, talking about the origins of Electron and her boomerang back to GitHub to lead GitHub Sponsors. We cover the early days of Electron before Electron was Electron, how she advocated to turn it into a product and make it a framework, how it’s used today, why she boomeranged back to GitHub to lead Sponsors, what’s next in funding open source creators, and we attempt to answer the question “what happens to open source once it’s funded?” Join the discussionChangelog++ members get a bonus 7 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 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:Jessica Lord – Website, GitHub, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes: GitHub Sponsors GitHub Sponsors docs GitHub Sponsors is now out of beta in 30 countries changelog.com/search?q=GitHub+Sponsors Sponsor Mat Ryer Sponsor curl I just hit $100,000/yr on GitHub Sponsors 🎉 We Just Gave $154,999.89 to Open Source Maintainers Datasette Desktop The Changelog #216: GitHub’s Electron with Zeke Sikelianos The Changelog #241: The Story of Atom with Nathan Sobo The Changelog #370: The making of GitHub Sponsors with Devon Zuegel The Changelog #381: The dawn of sponsorware with Caleb Porzio Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Today we’re joined by Ilya Grigorik to talk about Shopify’s developer preview release of Hydrogen and the preview release of Oxygen which is in early access preview with select merchants on Shopify. Hydrogen is their React framework for dynamic, contextual, and personalized e-commerce. And Oxygen is Shopify’s hosted V8 JavaScript worker runtime that leverages all of their platform with the hope of scaling millions of storefronts. We cover what developers can expect from the Hydrogen framework, Shopify’s big bet on React Server Components, the future of Shopify at scale with Hydrogen powered by Oxygen, and a world where merchants never have to think about the complexities of scaling infrastructure. 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. 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 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. 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:Ilya Grigorik – Website, GitHub, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes: Ilya’s Twitter thread Meet Hydrogen: A React Framework For Dynamic, Contextual And Personalized E-Commerce Hydrogen > new Shopify/hydrogen Changelog Search > “Ilya Grigorik” Changelog Merch Kids Anthem React Server Components Explained Building Blocks of High Performance Hydrogen-powered Storefronts The Changelog #416: Shopify’s massive storefront rewrite with Maxime Vaillancourt JS Party #178: Running Node natively in the browser with Eric Simons from StackBlitz Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

This week we’re bringing JS Party to The Changelog — Mitch and Andrew from the 1Password team talk with Amal and Nick about the company’s transition to Electron and web technologies, and how the company utilized its existing web stack to shape the future of its desktop experience. Join the discussionChangelog++ members save 4 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. 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. 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 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. 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:Mitchell Cohen – GitHub, XAndrew Beyer – GitHub, XNick Nisi – Website, GitHub, Mastodon, XAmal Hussein – GitHub, XShow Notes: 1Password 8: The Story So Far w3c community group for web extensions 1Password Security Design GopherJS React Svelte Electron Rust Neon (rust in Electron) RFCs for JMAP? 1Password Careers Page (they are hiring!) Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Today we’re joined by Shawn “swyx” Wang, also known as just “swyx” — and we’re talking about his interesting path to becoming a software developer, what it means to “learn in public” and how he’s been able to leverage that process to not only level up his skills and knowlege, but to also rapidly advance his career. We cover Swyx’s recent writing on the light and dark side of the API economy — something he calls “living above or below the API,” his thoughts on Cloudflare eating the cloud by playing Go instead of Chess, and we also talk about the work he’s doing at Temporal and how’s taking his frontend skills to the backend. Join the discussionChangelog++ members get a bonus 13 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. 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. LaunchDarkly / TrajectoryConf – Software powers the world. LaunchDarkly empowers all teams to deliver and control their software. DevOps and feature management are reimagining how we build and release new products. On November 9th and 10th, LaunchDarkly is hosting Trajectory Conference 2021 — a two-day event for software innovators who want to break orbit, not systems. Trajectory is a fully-virtual conference that focuses on the technology, people, and processes that continuously deliver better user experiences and more powerful software. Register for free at trajectoryconf.com Featuring:Shawn Wang – Website, GitHub, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes: Learn in Public The Light and Dark Side of the API Economy Eating the Cloud from Outside In The Coding Career Handboox (this link includes an embedded coupon code for 30% off) Cloud Operating Systems and Reconstituting the Monolith No Zero Days: My Path from Javascript Newbie to Full Stack Developer at Age 30 freeCodeCamp.org #Doccies (we’re planning to do something around this soon, stay tuned in 2022) Cloud Distros and the Deployment Age of the Cloud 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 $STDOUT and contains explicit language. Join the discussionChangelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:Fly.io – Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs. Featuring:$STDOUT – Website, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes:Listen to $STDOUT on YouTube on Spotify on Apple Music on Patreon Track list (in order of appearance) Pair Programming Hell.js Language Flamewars Meetings Tech Lead Over Engineering Opinions Interviews Estimates 3AM in San Fransisco Remote Life Integrations Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Robby Russell is back on The Changelog after more than 10 years to catch us up on all things Oh My Zsh — a delightful, open source, community-driven framework for managing your Zshell configuration. It comes bundled with plugins, themes, and can be easily customized and contributed to, because hey, that’s how open source works. In this episode Robby gives us a glimpse into the passion and the struggle of being an open source software maintainer. Join the discussionChangelog++ members get a bonus 10 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. LaunchDarkly / TrajectoryConf – Software powers the world. LaunchDarkly empowers all teams to deliver and control their software. DevOps and feature management are reimagining how we build and release new products. On November 9th and 10th, LaunchDarkly is hosting Trajectory Conference 2021 — a two-day event for software innovators who want to break orbit, not systems. Trajectory is a fully-virtual conference that focuses on the technology, people, and processes that continuously deliver better user experiences and more powerful software. Register for free at trajectoryconf.com 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:Robby Russell – GitHub, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes: The Changelog #61: Oh My Zsh with Robby Russell Oh My Zsh ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh/pulls on GitHub d’Oh My Zsh colorize plugin Planet Argon maintainable.fm Oh My Zsh merch Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

This week we’re joined by Gergely Orosz and we’re talking about the insane tech hiring market we’re in right now. Gergely was on the show a year ago talking about growing as a software engineer and his book The Tech Resume Inside Out. Now he’s laser focused on Substack with actionable advice for engineering managers and engineers, with a focus on big tech and high-growth startups. On today’s show we dig into his recent coverage of “the perfect storm” that’s causing this insane tech hiring market. Join the discussionChangelog++ members save 4 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:InfluxData – InfluxDays NA 2021 Virtual Experience (October 26-27) — InfluxDays is an event focused on the impact of time series data. Find out why time series databases are the fastest growing database segment providing real-time observability of your solutions. Get practical advice and insight from the engineers and developers behind InfluxDB, the leading time series database. Our listeners get $50 off the Hands-on Flux Training - use the code changelog21. Learn more and register for free at influxdays.com 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 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. 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:Gergely Orosz – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes: blog.pragmaticengineer.com The Perfect Storm Causing an Insane Tech Hiring Market The FB engineering manager interview process What are ways you can prepare for a software engineering or engineering manager promotion ahead of time? The Web 2.0 Show #63: Twilio - Telephony in the Cloud Jeff Lawson and his book Ask Your Developer Chris Herd on Twitter — “Every time a competitor mentions return to office our recruiters reach out to their people. We’ve hired 15+ of their engineers in the last 2 months.” The Changelog #422: Growing as a software engineer with Gergely Orosz Anonymous job search with Djinni.co Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Today we’re talking to Matt Rickard about his blog post, Reflections on 10,000 Hours of Programming. Matt was clear to mention that these reflections are purely about coding, not career advice or other soft skills. These reflections are just about deliberately writing code for 10,000 hours, which also correlates with the number of hours needed to master a skill. If you count the reflections we cover on the show and be the first to comment on this episode, we’ll get in touch and send you a coupon code to use for a 100% free t-shirt in the merch store. Good luck… Join the discussionChangelog++ members save 4 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:InfluxData – InfluxDays NA 2021 Virtual Experience (October 26-27) — InfluxDays is an event focused on the impact of time series data. Find out why time series databases are the fastest growing database segment providing real-time observability of your solutions. Get practical advice and insight from the engineers and developers behind InfluxDB, the leading time series database. Our listeners get $50 off the Hands-on Flux Training - use the code changelog21. Learn more and register for free at influxdays.com 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 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. 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:Matt Rickard – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes: Reflections on 10,000 Hours of Programming Heptagon of Configuration Linux Kernel Docs on commenting Ahmad Nassri on JS Party Todo or Die - Python Edition Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

This week we’re joined by Brittany Dionigi, Director of Platform Engineering at Articulate, and we’re talking about how organizations can take a more intentional approach to supporting the growth of their engineers through learning-focused engineering. Brittany has been a software engineer for more than 10 years, and learned formal educational and classroom-based learning strategies as a Technical Lead & Senior Instructor at Turing School of Software & Design. We talk through a ton of great topics; getting mentorship right, common coaching opportunities, classroom-based learning strategies like backwards planning, and ways to identify and maximize the learning opportunities for teams and org. Join the discussionChangelog++ members get a bonus 4 minutes at the end of this episode and zero ads. Join today!Sponsors:InfluxDB – InfluxDays NA 2021 Virtual Experience (October 26-27) — InfluxDays is an event focused on the impact of time series data. Find out why time series databases are the fastest growing database segment providing real-time observability of your solutions. Get practical advice and insight from the engineers and developers behind InfluxDB, the leading time series database. Our listeners get $50 off the Hands-on Flux Training - use the code changelog21. Learn more and register for free at influxdays.com Teleport – Teleport Access Plane lets you 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 LaunchDarkly – Ship fast. Rest easy. Deploy code at any time, even if a feature isn’t ready to be released to your users. Wrap code in feature flags to get the safety to test new features and infrastructure in prod without impacting the wrong end users. 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:Brittany Dionigi – GitHub, LinkedIn, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes: Camille Fournier (Camille Forn-yay) - An incomplete list of skills senior engineers need Katrina Owens - Cultivating Instinct Note-taking and the decision to externalize memory Guide to Medical Education in the Teaching Hospital - lots of good things about how they integrate learning into their day-to-day business operations Science of Learning Concepts for Teachers (Project Illuminated) Culturally Responsive Teaching - A 50-State Survey of Teaching Standards What is Project Based Learning (PBL)? A powerful way to improve learning and memory Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon Jeli - dedicated incident analysis platform Turing School of Software and Design Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

This week we’re talking with Evan Weaver about Fauna — the database for a new generation of applications. Fauna is a transactional database delivered as a secure and scalable cloud API with native GraphQL. It’s the first implementation of its kind based on the Calvin paper as opposed to Spanner. We cover Evan’s history leading up to Fauna, deep details on the Calvin algorithm, the CAP theorem for databases, what it means for Fauna to be temporal native, applications well suited for Fauna, and what’s to come in the near future. Join the discussionChangelog++ members save 4 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:InfluxDB – InfluxDays NA 2021 Virtual Experience (October 26-27) — InfluxDays is an event focused on the impact of time series data. Find out why time series databases are the fastest growing database segment providing real-time observability of your solutions. Get practical advice and insight from the engineers and developers behind InfluxDB, the leading time series database. Our listeners get $50 off the Hands-on Flux Training - use the code changelog21. Learn more and register for free at influxdays.com LaunchDarkly – Ship fast. Rest easy. Deploy code at any time, even if a feature isn’t ready to be released to your users. Wrap code in feature flags to get the safety to test new features and infrastructure in prod without impacting the wrong end users. Teleport – Teleport Access Plane lets you 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 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:Evan Weaver – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes: Spanner vs. Calvin: Distributed Consistency at Scale Trust Fauna Fauna pricing Fauna on GitHub CAP theorem What is a Relational Database Management System? Fauna on Crunchbase Fauna on Changelog.com Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!