Changelog Interviews

This week we’re joined by Deepthi Sigireddi, Vitess Maintainer and engineer at PlanetScale — of course we’re talking about all things Vitess. We talk about its origin inside YouTube, how Vitess handles sharding, Deepthi’s journey to Vitess maintainer, when you should begin using it, and how it fits into cloud native infra. Join the discussionChangelog++ members get a bonus 10 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 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 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 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:Deepthi Sigireddi – GitHub, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes: vitess.io Vitess Architecture github.com/vitessio/vitess Vitess Benchmarks (Are we fast yet?) New in MySQL 8.0 CNCF Graduation Criteria v1.3 Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Today we have a special treat. A conversation with Brian Kernighan! Brian’s been in the software game since the beginning of Unix. Yes, he was there at Bell Labs when it all began. And he is still at it today, writing books and teaching the next generation at Princeton. This is an epic and wide ranging conversation. You’ll hear about the birth of Unix, Ken Thompson’s unique skillset, why Brian thinks C has stood the test of time, his thoughts on modern languages like Go and Rust, what’s changed in 50 years of software, what makes platforms like Unix and the web so powerful, his take as a professor on the trend of programmers skipping the university track, and so much more. Seriously, this is a must-listen. Join the discussionChangelog++ members get a bonus 2 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 changelog.com/square to dive into the docs, APIs, SDKs and to create your Square Developer account — tell them Changelog sent you. 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 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 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:Brian Kernighan – WebsiteAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes: Brian’s Wikipedia PDP-7 on Wikipedia Understanding the Digital World: What You Need to Know about Computers, the Internet, Privacy, and Security The C Programming Language UNIX: A History and a Memoir The Go Programming Language The Mythical Man-Month Dick Hamming’s You and Your Research Brian on Lex Fridman’s podcast Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

The incomparable Jessica Kerr is back with another grab-bag of amazing topics. We talk about her journey to Honeycomb, devs getting satisfaction from the code they write, why step one for her is “get that new project into production” and step two is observe it, her angst for the context switching around pull requests, some awesome book recommendations, how game theory and design can translate to how we skill up and level up our teams, and so much more. Join the discussionChangelog++ members save 5 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. 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. 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 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:Jessica Kerr – Website, GitHub, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes: The ONE thing every dev should know (and other words of wisdom) with Jessica Kerr Graceful.Dev - the successor to Ruby Tapas Games: Agency As Art Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn Shigeru Miyamoto on Wikipedia Better coordination, or better software? Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

This week we’re joined by the “mad scientist” himself, Feross Aboukhadijeh…and we’re talking about the launch of Socket — the next big thing in the fight to secure and protect the open source supply chain. While working on the frontlines of open source, Feross and team have witnessed firsthand how supply chain attacks have swept across the software community and have damaged the trust in open source. Socket turns the problem of securing open source software on its head, and asks…“What if we assume all open source may be malicious?” So, they built a system that proactively detects indicators of compromised open source packages and brings awareness to teams in real-time. We cover the whys, the hows, and what’s next for this ambitious and very much needed project. Join the discussionChangelog++ members get a bonus 10 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. 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. 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:Feross Aboukhadijeh – Website, GitHub, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes: Socket.dev socket.dev/npm/issue socket.dev/npm/lists/removed socket.dev/npm/package/left-pad socket.dev/npm/package/umbrellajs socket.dev/npm/package/airbnb-fejax Dev corrupts NPM libs ‘colors’ and ‘faker’ breaking thousands of apps Popular ‘coa’ NPM library hijacked to steal user passwords Popular NPM package UA-Parser-JS poisoned with cryptomining, password-stealing malware Vulnerabilities in NPM allowed threat actors to publish new version of any package cve.org browserslist.dev The Changelog #227: Mad science, WebTorrent, WebRTC with Feross Aboukhadijeh The Changelog #326: The insider perspective on the event-stream compromise with Dominic Tarr JS Party #185: Into the Wormhole with Feross Aboukhadijeh JS Party #210: What’s in your package.json? with Tobie Langel Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

This week we’re talking to Toby Padilla, Co-Founder at Charm — where they build tools to make the command line glamorous. We talk about the state of the art, the next big thing happening on the command line and in ssh-land. They have an array of open source tooling to build great apps for the terminal and Charm Cloud to power a new generation of CLI apps. We talk through all their tooling, where things are headed for CLI apps, the focus and attention of their team, and what’s to come in bringing glamor to the command line. Join the discussionChangelog++ members save 6 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. 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 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:Toby Padilla – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes: charm.sh Charm Cloud kitty - The fast, feature-rich, GPU based terminal emulator betaworks: build better Julie Zhang on Twitter Glamour projects GitHub’s CLI Wish projects Wordle clone Bubble Tea projects achannarasappa/ticker maaslalani/slides mergestat/mergestat minio/mc supabase/cli antonmedv/llama dlvhdr/gh-prs tendermint/starport mathaou/termdbms mvisonneau/gitlab-ci-pipelines-exporter oz/tz trashhalo/imgcat maaslalani/gambit Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

This week we’re joined by Annie Sexton, UX Engineer at Render, to talk about her blog post titled Git Organized: A Better Git Flow that made the internet explode when she suggested using reset instead of rebase for a better git flow. On this show we talk about the git flow she suggests and why, how this flow works for her when she’s hacking on the Render codebase (and when she uses it), the good and the bad of Git, and we also talked about the cognitive load of Git commits as you work. Join the discussionChangelog++ members get a bonus 4 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 – 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 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 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:Annie Sexton – Website, LinkedIn, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes: Git Organized: A Better Git Flow I wrote a thing (on Twitter) A User’s Guide to the Brain - by John J. Ratey, M.D. How to Squash Commits in Git Move assets to S3 #400 What is executive function? Dopamine Norepinephrine Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

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!