Changelog Interviews

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!

This week we’re joined by Adam Jacob, CEO of System Initiative and Co-Founder of Chef, about open source business models and the model he thinks is the right one to choose, his graceful exit from Chef and some of the details behind Chef’s acquisition in 2020 for $220 million…in cash, and how his perspective on open source has or has not changed as a result. Adam also shared as much stealth mode details as he could about System Initiative. Join the discussionChangelog++ members get a bonus 11 minutes at the end of this episode and zero ads. Join today!Sponsors:InfluxDB – 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. 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:Adam Jacob – Website, GitHub, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes: Read this Twitter thread from Adam Jacob The Changelog #353: The war for the soul of open source featuring Adam Jacob The Changelog #429: Community perspectives on Elastic vs AWS (a deep dive on the business of open source) Progress Announces Acquisition of Chef Chef co-founder and CTO Adam Jacob stepping down, will remain on board of directors Tailwind CSS Why We’re Relicensing CockroachDB Founders Talk #75: The journey to massive scale and ultra-resilience featuring Spencer Kimball, CEO & Co-founder of Cockroach Labs System Initiative Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

On this special edition of The Changelog, we’re talking with Cory Wilkerson, Senior Director of Engineering at GitHub, about GitHub Codespaces. For years now, the possibility of coding in the cloud seemed so close, yet so far away for a number of reasons. According to Cory, the raw ingredients to make coding in the cloud a reality have been there for years. The challenge has really been how the industry thinks, and we are now at a place where the skepticism in cloud based workflows is “non-existent.” After 15 months in preview, GitHub not only announced the availability of Codespaces for Teams and Enterprise — they also showcased their internal adoption, with 600 of their 1,000 engineers using it daily to develop GitHub.com. On this episode, Cory shares the full backstory of that journey and a peek into the future where we’re all coding in the cloud. 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:Cory Wilkerson – GitHub, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes: GitHub’s Engineering Team has moved to Codespaces Cory’s companion Twitter thread to his blog post Codespaces marketing page Kelsey Hightower on Twitter — “Back in the day we wrote code on our own computers.” Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

This week we’re bringing JS Party to The Changelog — Nick Nisi and Christopher Hiller had an awesome conversation with Luis Villa, co-founder and General Counsel at Tidelift. They discuss GitHub Copilot and the implications of an AI pair programmer and fair use from a legal perspective. Join the discussionChangelog++ members save 4 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:Gitpod – Spin up fresh, ephemeral automated dev environments, in the cloud, in seconds. Their free tier is open to every developer with a GitLab, GitHub, and/or Bitbucket account. Learn more at gitpod.io Retool For Startups – More and more startups are using Retool to focus their time on their core product. That’s exactly why Retool launched “Retool For Startups” — it’s a program that gives early-stage founders free access to a lot of the software needed for great internal tooling. Retool has bundled together a year of free access to Retool with over $160,000 in partner discounts to save you money while building Retools apps with common integrations. Learn more, apply, join lightening demos and much more at retool.com/startups 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 THECHANGELOG and get the team plan free for three months. Grafana Cloud – Our dashboard of choice Grafana is the open and composable observability and data visualization platform. Visualize metrics, logs, and traces from multiple sources like Prometheus, Loki, Elasticsearch, InfluxDB, Postgres and many more. Featuring:Luis Villa – Website, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XNick Nisi – Website, GitHub, Bluesky, Mastodon, XChristopher Hiller – Website, GitHub, Mastodon, XShow Notes: GitHub Copilot OpenAI Google v. Oracle GNU General Public License Fair use Lotus v. Borland Transformative Use Authors Guild v. Google Ethical Open Source Movement Eleuther AI W3C Web Machine Learning Working Group Does free software benefit from ML models being derived works of training data? Cassidy Plays with GitHub Copilot Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

This week Neovim core maintainer TJ DeVries joins Jerod and guest co-host Nick Nisi (from JS Party) to follow-up on our Vim episode with a conversation dedicated to Neovim. TJ tells us why Neovim was created in the first place, how it differs from Vim, why Lua is awesome for configuration and plugins, what LSPs are all about, the cool tech inside tree-sitter, and how he’s writing his own fuzzy file finder for Neovim called Telescope. Join the discussionChangelog++ members save 4 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:Gitpod – Spin up fresh, ephemeral automated dev environments, in the cloud, in seconds. Their free tier is open to every developer with a GitLab, GitHub, and/or Bitbucket account. Learn more at gitpod.io Retool For Startups – More and more startups are using Retool to focus their time on their core product. That’s exactly why Retool launched “Retool For Startups” — it’s a program that gives early-stage founders free access to a lot of the software needed for great internal tooling. Retool has bundled together a year of free access to Retool with over $160,000 in partner discounts to save you money while building Retools apps with common integrations. Learn more, apply, join lightening demos and much more at retool.com/startups Square – Develop on the platform that sellers trust! Use API Explorer to interact with, test, or play with your applications in Square. You can build, view, and send HTTP requests that call Square APIs with API Explorer. Get started with Square, check out the API Explorer, or the API Explorer docs. Grafana Cloud – Our dashboard of choice Grafana is the open and composable observability and data visualization platform. Visualize metrics, logs, and traces from multiple sources like Prometheus, Loki, Elasticsearch, InfluxDB, Postgres and many more. Featuring:TJ DeVries – Website, GitHub, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XNick Nisi – Website, GitHub, Bluesky, Mastodon, XShow Notes: Our Vim episode neovim.io Twilight on Changelog News tree-sitter nvim-lspconfig Nick’s dotfiles nvim-ts-context-commentstring LuaSnip telescope.nvim TJ’s Twitch stream Nick Nisi on TJ’s YouTube channel - Neovim Builtin LSP Tutorial: Customizing Renames w/ Nick Nisi Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!