

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 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!

Jul 2, 2021 • 1h 14min
The foundations of Continuous Delivery
This week we’re sharing one of the most popular episodes from our new podcast Ship It. Ship It launched in May and now has 8 episodes in the feed to enjoy…it’s hosted by Gerhard Lazu, our SRE here at Changelog.
In this episode, Gerhard talks with Dave Farley, co-author of Continuous Delivery and the inventor of the Deployment Pipeline. Today, most of us ship code the way we do because 25 years ago, Dave cared enough to drive the change that we now call CI/CD. He is one of the great software engineers: opinionated, perseverant & focused since the heydays of the internet. Dave continues inspiring and teaching us all via his newly launched YouTube channel, courses, and recent books. The apprentice finally meets the master 🙇♂️🙇♀️
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.
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:Dave Farley – Website, XGerhard Lazu – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XShow Notes:
Continuous Delivery, the YouTube Channel (new video every Wednesday)
Continuous Delivery, the course
Continuous Delivery, the staple book
Continuous Delivery Pipelines, the new book
Dave Farley’s blog
TDD Quiz
Dave Farley on Twitter
Gerhard’s favourite CD videos, in order of preference:
SpaceX and Software Engineering | How To Learn
How To Build Quality Software Fast
Why CI is BETTER Than Feature Branching
What’s Wrong With The State Of DevOps?
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Jun 21, 2021 • 1h 5min
xbar puts anything in your macOS menu bar
On this episode we’re talking with our good friend Mat Ryer whom you may know from the Go Time podcast. Mat created an awesome open source tool for putting just about anything in your Mac’s toolbar. It was originally written in Objective-C, but it just got a big rewrite in Go and abig rename from BitBar to xbar.
If you don’t use a Mac don’t hit skip on this episode quite yet! There are lessons to be learned for anyone interested in hacking on tools to make your life better. Plus, with this rewrite Mat has positioned xbar to go cross-platform, which we talk about as well.
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
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.
Featuring:Mat Ryer – GitHub, LinkedIn, Bluesky, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes:
The Changelog #3 - Rob Pike
xbar’s website
What happens when your old open-source project unexpectedly gets to the top of Hacker News?
Go Time #154 - Where Jerod shares his unpopular opinion
Go Time #144 - Building desktop apps with Go + web tech
Wails.app
Become a sponsor to Mat Ryer
xbar on GitHub
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Jun 18, 2021 • 1h 2min
Funds for open source
This week we’re talking with Pia Mancini about the latest updates to the mission of Open Collective. Earlier this year Open Collective announced “Funds for Open Source.” The idea is simple, make it easy for companies to invest in open source, and they will. Also, since recording this episode, Pia and the team at Open Collective along with Gitcoin announced fundoss.org as part of Maintainer Week announcements. And right now, they have a matching fund of $75,000 dollars funding open source that you can support.
Join the discussionChangelog++ members get a bonus 1 minute at the end of this episode and zero ads. Join today!Sponsors: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.
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:Pia Mancini – Website, GitHub, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes:
Introducing: Funds for Open Source
Airbnb on Open Collective
Indeed on Open Collective
Pia Mancini on Open Collective
Chrome’s Web Framework & Tools Performance Fund on Open Collective
Discover awesome collectives to support
fundoss.org - Open Source Collective partnered with GitCoin to launch FundOSS, a pilot matching campaign based on a democratic funding model.
The Changelog #392: Indeed’s FOSS Contributor Fund with Duane O’Brien
About Open Collective
Open Source Collective
Sustain
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Jun 10, 2021 • 1h 8min
Every commit is a gift
Maintainer Week is finally here and we’re excited to make this an annual thing! If Maintainer Week is new to you, check out episode #442 with Josh Simmons and Kara Sowles.
Today we’re talking Brett Cannon. Brett is Dev Manager of the Python Extension for VS Code, Python Steering Council Member, and core team member for Python. He recently shared a blog post The social contract of open source, so we invited Brett to join us for Maintainer Week to discuss this topic in detail.
Thank a maintainer on us! We’re printing a limited run t-shirt that’s free for maintainers, and all you gotta do is thank them, today!
Join the discussionChangelog++ members save 4 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
CloudZero – For software-driven companies focused on growing margins, CloudZero is the only cloud cost intelligence platform that puts engineering in control by connecting technical decisions to business results. Visit cloudzero.com/changelog to get started.
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:Brett Cannon – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes:
The social contract of open source
github/maintainerweek
Upstream
Global Maintainer Summit also accessible via maintainerds.com
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!


