Changelog Interviews

This week we’re talking about Nix with Domen Kožar. The Nix ecosystem is a DevOps toolkit that takes a unique approach to package management and system configuration. Nix helps you make reproducible, declarative, and reliable systems. Domen is writing the Nix ecosystem guide at nix.dev and today he takes us on a deep dive on all things Nix. Join the discussionChangelog++ members save 4 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. O'Reilly Media – Learn by doing — Python, data, AI, machine learning, Kubernetes, Docker, and more. Just open your browser and dive in. Learn more and keep your teams’ skills sharp at oreilly.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. 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:Domen Kožar – GitHub, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes: NixOS.org Nix Manual Nix Pills Nix shorts - A collection of short notes about Nix, down to what is immediately needed for users. nix.dev - The Nix ecosystem guide NixOS Weekly newsletter The Changelog #237: Reproducible builds and secure software with Chris Lamb NixOS on ARM - for example, if you want to try it out on a Raspberry Pi Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

This week we’re talking with Daniel Stenberg about 23 years of curl. Daniel shares how curl came to be, what drives and motivates him, maintaining a good cadence of an open source product, what to expect from http3, how many billions of users curl has, and Daniel also shares some funny stories like the “Spotify and Instagram hacking ring.” Join the discussionChangelog++ members get a bonus 2 minutes 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 makes it super simple to build back-office apps in hours, not days. The tool is is built by engineers, explicitly for engineers. Learn more and try it for free at retool.com/changelog O'Reilly Media – Learn by doing — Python, data, AI, machine learning, Kubernetes, Docker, and more. Just open your browser and dive in. Learn more and keep your teams’ skills sharp at oreilly.com/changelog 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:Daniel Stenberg – Website, GitHub, Mastodon, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes: The Changelog #153: 17 Years of curl with Daniel Stenberg The Changelog: BONUS — Magic cURL Feature The Changelog #299: Curl turns 20, HTTP/2, QUIC with Daniel Stenberg HTTPie Half of curl’s vulnerabilities are C mistakes curl is C Rust in curl with Hyper “I will slaughter you” curl Commercial Support Everything curl: –libcurl The Changelog #389: Securing the web with Let’s Encrypt featuring Josh Aas Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

This week we’re joined by long-time web developer Matt Patterson. Earlier this year Matt wrote an evocative article for A List Apart called The Future of Web Software Is HTML-over-WebSockets. In this episode Matt sits down with Jerod to discuss, in-detail, why he believes the future of the web is server-rendered (again) and how Ruby on Rails is well positioned to bring that future to us today. Join the discussionChangelog++ members get a bonus 2 minutes 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 makes it super simple to build back-office apps in hours, not days. The tool is is built by engineers, explicitly for engineers. Learn more and try it for free at retool.com/changelog O'Reilly Media – Learn by doing — Python, data, AI, machine learning, Kubernetes, Docker, and more. Just open your browser and dive in. Learn more and keep your teams’ skills sharp at oreilly.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. Featuring:Matt E. Patterson – Website, GitHub, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes: The Future of Web Software Is HTML-over-WebSockets StimulusReflex Hotwire ChaosMage M.E. Patterson on Amazon Matt works at SkillsEngine Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

This week Alexander Neumann takes Jerod on a tour of Restic, the world-class backup solution that’s fast, secure, and cross-platform. We discuss why he created Restic in the first place, how (and why you should) you use it, some of its more interesting technical bits, lessons learned over the years building and maintaining a community, and more of course. 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. 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. O'Reilly Media – Learn by doing — Python, data, AI, machine learning, Kubernetes, Docker, and more. Just open your browser and dive in. Learn more and keep your teams’ skills sharp at oreilly.com/changelog Grafana Cloud – Grafana Cloud is 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:Alexander Neumann – Website, GitHub, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes: Go Time #48 Restic Version 0.12 release announcement Relica Restic on GitHub The famous Issue #21 Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

This week we’re talking with Ben Johnson. Ben is known for his work on BoltDB, his work in open source, and as a freelance Go developer. Late January when Ben open sourced his newest project Litestream in the readme he shared how the project was open source, but not open for contribution. His reason was to protect his mental health and the long term viability of the project. On this episode we talk with Ben about what that means, his thoughts on mental health and burnout in open source, choosing a license, and the details behind Litestream - a standalone streaming replication tool for SQLite. Join the discussionChangelog++ members save 3 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. 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 makes it super simple to build back-office apps in hours, not days. The tool is is built by engineers, explicitly for engineers. Learn more and try it for free at retool.com/changelog Render – Get $100 in free credit to give Render a try! Plus they’re going to assign a world-class engineer to your account to provide guidance and answer any questions. Render is built for modern applications and offers everything you need out-of-the-box — one-click scaling, zero-downtime deploys, built-in SSL, private networking, managed databases, secrets and config management, persistent block storage, and Infrastructure-as-Code. Send an email to changelog@render.com to get your free credits. 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:Ben Johnson – Website, GitHub, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes: Go Beyond Open source, but closed to contributions Litestream.io & benbjohnson/litestream Litestream getting started The Changelog #201: Why SQLite succeeded as a database with Richard Hipp, creator of SQLite SQLite copyright SQLite - Professional Support & Extension Products boltdb/bolt Kubernetes Failure Stories The Changelog #170: BoltDB, InfluxDB, Key-Value Databases with Ben Johnson Cockroach Labs Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

This week we’re talking about big security breaches with Neil Daswani, renowned security expert, best-selling author, and Co-Director of Stanford University’s Advanced CyberSecurity Program. His book, Big Breaches: Cybersecurity Lessons for Everyone helped to guide this conversation. We cover the six common key causes (aka vectors) that lead to breaches, which of these causes are exploited most often, recent breaches such as the Equifax breach (2017), the Capital One breach (2019), and the more recent Solarwinds breach (2020). Join the discussionChangelog++ members save 3 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. 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 makes it super simple to build back-office apps in hours, not days. The tool is is built by engineers, explicitly for engineers. Learn more and try it for free at retool.com/changelog Render – Get $100 in free credit to give Render a try! Plus they’re going to assign a world-class engineer to your account to provide guidance and answer any questions. Render is built for modern applications and offers everything you need out-of-the-box — one-click scaling, zero-downtime deploys, built-in SSL, private networking, managed databases, secrets and config management, persistent block storage, and Infrastructure-as-Code. Send an email to changelog@render.com to get your free credits. Grafana Cloud – Grafana Cloud is 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:Neil Daswani – Website, LinkedIn, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes: Big Breaches: Cybersecurity Lessons for Everyone on Amazon Equifax data breach FAQ: What happened, who was affected, what was the impact? Capital One fined $80 million for 2019 hack of 100 million credit card applications What you need to know about the biggest hack of the US government in years Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

This week we’re talking about the future of freeCodeCamp with Quincy Larson and what it’s taken to build it into the non-profit unicorn that it is. They’re expanding their Python section into a full-blown data science curriculum and they’ve launched a $150,000 fundraiser to make it happen with 100% dollar-for-dollar matching up to the first $150,000 thanks to Darrell Silver. As you may know, we’re big fans of Quincy and the work being done at freeCodeCamp, so if you want to back their efforts as well, learn more and donate. 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. LaunchDarkly – Test in production! 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. Render – Get $100 in free credit to give Render a try! Plus they’re going to assign a world-class engineer to your account to provide guidance and answer any questions. Render is built for modern applications and offers everything you need out-of-the-box — one-click scaling, zero-downtime deploys, built-in SSL, private networking, managed databases, secrets and config management, persistent block storage, and Infrastructure-as-Code. Send an email to changelog@render.com to get your free credits. Grafana Cloud – Grafana Cloud is 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:Quincy Larson – Website, GitHub, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes: We’re Building a Data Science Curriculum with Advanced Mathematics and Machine Learning Why I’m donating $150k to freeCodeCamp to help fund their advanced math & machine learning curriculum freeCodeCamp in 2020 (and other year-end facts) The Changelog #369: Five years of freeCodeCamp with Quincy Larson The Best Tech Podcasts for Software Developers in 2021 Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

This week Jerod is joined by Paul Biggar the creator of Dark, a new way to build serverless backends. Paul shares all the details about this all-in-one language, editor, and infrastructure, why he decided to make Dark in the first place, his view on programming language design, the advantages Dark has as an integrated solution, and also why it’s source available, but NOT open source. Join the discussionChangelog++ members save 3 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. 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. LaunchDarkly – Test in production! 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. Render – Get $100 in free credit to give Render a try! Plus they’re going to assign a world-class engineer to your account to provide guidance and answer any questions. Render is built for modern applications and offers everything you need out-of-the-box — one-click scaling, zero-downtime deploys, built-in SSL, private networking, managed databases, secrets and config management, persistent block storage, and Infrastructure-as-Code. Send an email to changelog@render.com to get your free credits. Grafana Cloud – Grafana Cloud is 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:Paul Biggar – GitHub, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes:Special thanks to Jon Stodle for requesting this episode. Dark’s website Dark on GitHub Structured Procrastination Why Dark didn’t choose Rust Leaving OCaml Dark’s new backend will be in F# Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

This week we’re talking about the recent falling out between Elastic and AWS around the relicensing of Elasticsearch and Kibana. Like many in the community, we have been watching this very closely. Here’s the tldr for context. On January 21st, Elastic posted a blog post sharing their concerns with Amazon/AWS misleading and confusing the community, saying “They have been doing things that we think are just NOT OK since 2015 and it has only gotten worse.” This lead them to relicense Elasticsearch and Kibana with a dual license, a proprietary license and the Sever Side Public License (SSPL). AWS responded two days later stating that they are “stepping up for a truly open source Elasticsearch,” and shared their plans to create and maintain forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana based on the latest ALv2-licensed codebases. There’s a ton of detail and nuance beneath the surface, so we invited a handful of folks on the show to share their perspective. On today’s show you’ll hear from: Adam Jacob (co-founder and board member of Chef), Heather Meeker (open-source lawyer and the author of the SSPL license), Manish Jain (founder and CTO at Dgraph Labs), Paul Dix (co-founder and CTO at InfluxDB), VM (Vicky) Brasseur (open source & free software business strategist), and Markus Stenqvist (everyday web dev from Sweden). Join the discussionChangelog++ members save 3 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. 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 makes it super simple to build back-office apps in hours, not days. The tool is is built by engineers, explicitly for engineers. Learn more and try it for free at retool.com/changelog Render – Get $100 in free credit to give Render a try! Plus they’re going to assign a world-class engineer to your account to provide guidance and answer any questions. Render is built for modern applications and offers everything you need out-of-the-box — one-click scaling, zero-downtime deploys, built-in SSL, private networking, managed databases, secrets and config management, persistent block storage, and Infrastructure-as-Code. Send an email to changelog@render.com to get your free credits. Grafana Cloud – Grafana Cloud is 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:Adam Jacob – Website, GitHub, XHeather Meeker – Website, XManish R Jain – Website, GitHub, XPaul Dix – GitHub, XVM (Vicky) Brasseur – Website, GitHub, XMarkus – Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes: Amazon: NOT OK - why we had to change Elastic licensing Stepping up for a truly open source Elasticsearch The SSPL is Not an Open Source License MongoDB transitions to Server Side Public License (SSPL) for MongoDB Community Server Elastic Changes Licences for Elasticsearch and Kibana: AWS Forks Both Truly Doubling Down on Open Source Read the Open Source Definition OR the annotated version of the Open Source Definition Keeping Open Source Open – Open Distro for Elasticsearch The Commons Clause Initial thoughts on MongoDB’s new Server Side Public License SSPL Re-Takes the Stage in 2021 Server Side Public License (SSPL) SSPL approval process on the OSI mailing list February 2019 License-Review Summary Dgraph InfluxDB The Changelog #353: The war for the soul of open source with Adam Jacob The Changelog #424: You can FINALLY use JSHint for evil with Mike Pennisi The Changelog #371: Re-licensing Sentry with David Cramer The Changelog #322: There and back again (Dgraph’s tale) with Manish Jain Adam Jacob Adam Jacob is the co-founder and board member of Chef and talked with us back in July 2019 on The Changelog #353 about “The war for the soul of open source,” and the title of the episode could not have been more prophetic. We pulled a segment from that episode where we talk about business models and how they correlate to open source business models, and how from Adam’s perspective…the AWS’s, the Azure’s and the Google Clouds of the world provide a humongous marketing funnel for open source businesses like Mongo and Elastic. At the time of this conversation with Adam, Elastic was worth 1.5 Billion dollars and “killing it.” Adam Jacob at OSCON 2019 “The war for the soul of open source!” Heather Meeker Heather Meeker is a well respected open-source lawyer and specialist in open source software licensing and strategy. She wrote the book Open Source for Business which serves as a practical guide to open source software licensing. She is also well known for her work on the Commons Claus license which gained a lot of attention with the dust up it caused when Redis Labs’ transitioned their modules to use the license. Side note here, Redis Labs’ has since transitioned away from the Apache2 plus Commons Clause licensing due to undesired confusion in favor of the Redis Source Available License (RSAL) — which we might cover in a future episode as we chase this saga of not-quite-open source yet permissive licensing for commercial open source companies. The whole reason for this conversation with Heather is because she’s the open-source lawyer who wrote The Server Side Public License (SSPL). We wanted to understand the design and intention of the license. SSPL Re-Takes the Stage in 2021 In this Tweet, Heather Meeker said “Congratulations to Elastic on its new license!” Manish Jain Manish Jain is the founder and CTO at Dgraph Labs. We talked with Manish a little over two years ago on episode #322 about their challenges with licensing and re-licensing Dgraph — so, we thought it would fitting to get him on this episode. The Changelog #322: There and back again (Dgraph’s tale) with Manish Jain Graph databases 101 Paul Dix Paul Dix is the co-founder and CTO at InfluxData and shared his perspective on running an open source business, how InfluxData is innovating their commercial offering while having a permissive MIT licensed version of InfluxDB. Paul also shares his thoughts on the stand off between Elastic and AWS and why he’s long on Mongo and short on Elastic. Paul shared a few links to Twitter threads he started: https://twitter.com/pauldix/status/1352604892754542594 https://twitter.com/pauldix/status/1352615503366381570 https://twitter.com/pauldix/status/1352727425717825536 VM (Vicky) Brasseur VM (Vicky) Brasseur has been in free and open source software for 30 years and has been working with startups and enterprises doing open source & free software business strategy for quite a while now. We used Vicky’s post titled “Elasticsearch and Kibana are now business risks” as a reference on this situation. We even quoted her post a few times in our conversation on this episode with with Heather Meeker. Elasticsearch and Kibana are now business risks Markus Stenqvist Markus Stenqvist self-describes as “a normal everyday web developer from Sweden.” AWS gives open source the middle finger Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

This week we’re talking about open source industrial machines. We’re joined by Marcin Jakubowski from Open Source Ecology where they’re developing open source industrial machines that can be made for a fraction of commercial costs, and they’re sharing their designs online for free. The goal is to create an efficient open source economy that increases innovation through open collaboration. We talk about what it takes to build a civilization from scratch, the Open Building Institute and their Eco-Building Toolkit, the right to repair movement, DIY maker culture, and how Marcin plans to build 10,000 micro factories worldwide where anyone can come and make. Join the discussionChangelog++ members get a bonus 2 minutes 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 makes it super simple to build back-office apps in hours, not days. The tool is is built by engineers, explicitly for engineers. Learn more and try it for free at retool.com/changelog Render – Get $100 in free credit to give Render a try! Plus they’re going to assign a world-class engineer to your account to provide guidance and answer any questions. Render is built for modern applications and offers everything you need out-of-the-box — one-click scaling, zero-downtime deploys, built-in SSL, private networking, managed databases, secrets and config management, persistent block storage, and Infrastructure-as-Code. Send an email to changelog@render.com to get your free credits. LaunchDarkly – Test in production! 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:Marcin Jakubowski – Website, LinkedIn, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes:Special thanks to Josh Fong for requesting this episode back in July 2020. Marcin’s TED Talk OpenSourceEcology.org Open Building Institute Kickstarter From this post on Vice/Motherboard — Kyle Schwarting is a farmer by trade, and a hacker by necessity. His farm, about 20 minutes outside the city limits of Lincoln, Nebraska, is full of tractors and agricultural equipment, which he picks up in various states of repair from fellow farmers, fixes up, and resells. “I would say what I’m doing is hacking,” Schwarting tells me, gesturing to a Windows laptop and a USB-to-tractor cable he Frankensteined himself. Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!