

Changelog Interviews
Changelog Media
Conversations with the hackers, leaders, and innovators of the software world. Adam Stacoviak and Jerod Santo face their imposter syndrome so you don’t have to. Expect in-depth interviews with the best and brightest in software engineering, open source & leadership. This is a polyglot podcast. All programming languages, platforms & communities are welcome.
Episodes
Mentioned books

Aug 31, 2021 • 1h 14min
Why Neovim?
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!

Aug 23, 2021 • 1h 10min
OAuth, "It's complicated."
Today we’re joined by Aaron Parecki, co-founder of IndieWebCamp and maintainer of OAuth.net, for a deep dive on the state of OAuth 2.0 and what’s next in OAuth 2.1. We cover the complications of OAuth, RFCs like Proof Key for Code Exchange, also known as PKCE, OAuth for browser-based apps, and next generation specs like the Grant Negotiation and Authorization Protocol, also known as GNAP. The conversation begins with how Aaron experiements with the IndieWeb as a showcase of what’s possible.
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 – 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
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.
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:Aaron Parecki – Website, GitHub, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes:
IndieWeb.org
IndieWeb Chat
It’s Time for OAuth 2.1
OAuth 2.0
OAuth 2.0 Simplified
GNAP Core Protocol
oktadev.events
GNAP (Grant Negotiation and Authorization Protocol)
PKCE (Proof Key for Code Exchange)
Books about OAuth 2.0
OAuth 2.0 Playground
The Nuts and Bolts of OAuth 2.0
Okta Developer Day - Auth for All - Virtual Event: August 24, 2021
Okta Developer Day Labs - August 25, 2021
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Aug 23, 2021 • 1h 12min
Building software for yourself
Today we’re talking to Linus Lee about the practice of building software for yourself. Linus has several side projects we could talk about, but today’s show is focused on Linus’ dynamically typed functional programming language called Ink that he used to write his full text personal search engine called Monocle.
Linus is focused on writing software that solves his own needs, all of which is open source, to help him learn more deeply and organize the knowledge of his life.
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
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.
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.
Linode – Get $100 in free credit to get started on Linode – Linode is our cloud of choice and the home of Changelog.com. Head to linode.com/changelog OR text CHANGELOG to 474747 to get instant access to that $100 in free credit.
Featuring:Linus Lee – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes:
Monocle
Ink
Building your own programming language
Crafting Interpreters
Thorsten Ball on creating a programming language (Go Time 28)
GopherCon 2021: Linus Lee - When Toy Languages Grow Up
Monocle search for Taylor Swift
Linus’s Taylor Swift tweet
Apollo
Purple Cow
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Aug 19, 2021 • 1h 26min
Richard Hipp returns
This week, Richard Hipp returns to catch us up on all things SQLite, his single file webserver written in C called Althttpd, and Fossil – the source code manager he wrote and uses to manage SQLite development instead of Git.
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
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.
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.
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:Richard Hipp – Website, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes:
The Changelog #201:Why SQLite succeeded as a database
SQLite
Althttpd
Fossil SCM
Bedrock
DuckDB
AskGit
Chisel
Pkchr
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Aug 11, 2021 • 1h 9min
Leading leaders who lead engineers
This week we’re joined by Lara Hogan – author of Resilient Management and management coach & trainer for the tech industry. Lara led engineering teams at Kickstarter and Etsy before she, and Deepa Subramaniam stepped away from their deep roots in the tech industry to start Wherewithall – a consultancy that helps level up managers and emerging leaders.
The majority of our conversation focuses on the four primary hats leaders and managers end up wearing; mentoring, coaching, sponsoring, and delivering feedback. We also talk about knowing when you’re ready to lead, empathy and compassion, and learning to lead.
Join the discussionChangelog++ members save 3 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. 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
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
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.
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.
Featuring:Lara Hogan – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes:
An excerpt from Resilient Management on A List Apart
Paloma Medina
Core Needs: BICEPS
Lara’s book
The Manager’s Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change
Your brain on progress – Increment
Voltron!
I’m a cog
The Changelog #342: From zero to thought leader in 6 months with Emma Bostian
Lara Hogan on mentorship and sponsorship
What does sponsorship look like?
Linchpin from Seth Godin
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Aug 5, 2021 • 1h 8min
Kaizen! The day half the internet went down
This week we’re sharing a special episode of our new podcast called Ship It. This episode is our Kaizen-style episode where we point our lens inward to Changelog.com to see what we should improve next. The plan is do this episode style every 10 episodes.
Gerhard, Adam, and Jerod talk about the things that we want to improve in our setup over the next few months. We talk about how the June Fastly outage affected changelog.com, how we responded that day, and what we could do better. We discuss multi-cloud, multi-CDN, and the next sensible and obvious improvements for our app.
Join the discussionChangelog++ members get a bonus 1 minute 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
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.
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 SHIPIT 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:Gerhard Lazu – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes:
What does Kaizen mean? (Wikipedia)
Fastly 8th of June outage took offline The Guardian, CNN, New York Times, BBC and Changelog. Slack, Amazon, Stackoverflow and many others were also affected
This is how it all started
@danhett becomes famous on Twitter because of this tweet
WIRED: What really went down when the internet went down
BLOOMBERG: What Is Fastly and Why a Slew of Websites Went Offline
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Jul 31, 2021 • 1h 15min
Modern Unix tools
This week we’re talking with Nick Janetakis about modern unix tools, and the various commands, tooling, and ways we use the commmand line. Do you Bash or Zsh? Do you use cat or bat? What about man vs tldr? Today’s show is a deep dive into unix tools you know and love, or should know and maybe love.
Join the discussionChangelog++ members get a bonus 1 minute 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
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.
Sentry – Sentry shipped their SDK for Next.js. Now in your Next.js apps, you can capture errors, measure performance, manage releases, configure suspect commits, and automatically upload sourcemaps to view unminified JavaScript and TypeScript with zero(-ish) configuration. 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:Nick Janetakis – Website, GitHub, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes:
Modern alternatives to Unix commands
Modern Unix
bat
fzf
mcfly
envsubst from GNU gettext; envsubst in Go
Nick’s blog post on envsubst
https://uses.tech
NanoVMs let you run your apps faster and safer with Unikernels
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Jul 21, 2021 • 45min
Why we 💚 Vim
On this special edition of The Changelog, we tell Vim’s story from the mouths of its users. Julia Evans, Drew Neil, Suz Hinton, and Gary Bernhardt join Jerod Santo for a deep and wide-ranging discussion about “the best text editor that anyone ever wrote.”
Join the discussionChangelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:Sourcegraph – 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:Julia Evans – Website, GitHub, Mastodon, XDrew Neil – Website, GitHub, XSuz Hinton – GitHub, Mastodon, XGary Bernhardt – GitHub, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes:Companion “Vim with me” videos
Vim with me: Suz Hinton
Vim with me: Julia Evans
Vim with me: Gary Bernhardt
Vim configs
Julia’s dotfiles
Suz’s dotfiles
Gary’s dotfiles
Drew’s dotfiles
Jerod’s dotfiles
Links from Julia
vimwiki
basic.vim from The Ultimate vimrc
Links from Drew
vim-exchange
vim-textobj-user
vim-commentary
vim-surround
Links from Suz
vim-twitch-line-sign
nerdtree
vim-airline
git-gutter
Links from Gary
Wat
Execute Program
fzf.vim
selecta
Learning Vim
Vim Adventures
vimcasts
Practical Vim by Drew Neil
Extras
Changelog Community (join us in #vimparty)
Changelog++
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Jul 19, 2021 • 1h 25min
The story behind Inter
This week we’re talking to Rasmus Andersson about his journey as a software creator. We talk about the work he’s doing right now on Playbit, a computing environment which encourages playful learning, building, and sharing of software. We also talk about his work on the Inter typeface, as well as the reasons why this font family needed to be free and open source.
Join the discussionChangelog++ members save 3 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:Sourcegraph – 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.
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
Sentry – Sentry shipped their SDK for Next.js. Now in your Next.js apps, you can capture errors, measure performance, manage releases, configure suspect commits, and automatically upload sourcemaps to view unminified JavaScript and TypeScript with zero(-ish) configuration. Use the code PARTYTIME 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:Rasmus Andersson – Website, GitHub, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes:
Playbit - a computing environment which encourages playful learning, building & sharing of software.
The Inter typeface family + the project page on Rasmus’s site
Rasmus’s projects
shop.rsms.me
The Roboto family of fonts
InterFace from Dalton Maag
What notable logos are set in Helvetica or Helvetica Neue?
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Jul 9, 2021 • 1h 13min
Massive scale and ultra-resilience
This week we’re sharing a recent episode from Founders Talk that we continuously hear about from listeners. Listen and subscribe to Founders Talk at founderstalk.fm and anywhere you listen to podcasts.
On Founders Talk #75 — Adam talks with Spencer Kimball, CEO and Co-founder of Cockroach Labs — makers of CockroachDB an open source cloud-native distributed SQL database. Cockroach Labs recently raised $160 million dollars on a $2 billion dollar valuation. In this episode, Spencer shares his journey in open source, startups and entrepreneurship, and what they’re doing to build CockroachCloud to meet the needs of applications that require massive scale and ultra-resilience.
Join the discussionChangelog++ members save 3 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:Sourcegraph – 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.
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
Sentry – Build better software, faster with Sentry’s application monitoring platform. Diagnose, fix, and optimize the performance of your code. Cut your time on error resolution from hours to minutes. 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:Spencer Kimball – Website, GitHub, LinkedInAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes:
Spencer is a co-founder of GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) (but is no longer involved with the project)
Cockroach Labs
CockroachCloud - Build and scale fast with CockroachDB-as-a-service on AWS and Google Cloud.
How We’re Building a Business to Last
Cockroach Labs scores $160M Series E on $2B valuation
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!


