
Changelog Interviews
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.
Latest episodes

Feb 17, 2017 • 1h 14min
Managing Secrets Using Vault
Seth Vargo, the Director of Technical Advocacy at HashiCorp, joined the show to talk about managing secrets with their open source product called Vault which lets you centrally secure, store, and tightly control access to secrets across distributed infrastructure and applications. We talked about Seth’s back story into open source, use cases, what problem it solves, key features like Data Encryption, why they choose to write it in Go, and how they build tooling around the open core model.
Join the discussionChangelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:GoCD – GoCD is an on-premise open source continuous delivery server created by ThoughtWorks that lets you automate and streamline your build-test-release cycle for reliable, continuous delivery of your product.
Toptal – Scale your team and hire from the top 3% of developers and designers with Toptal. Email adam@changelog.com for a personal introduction.
Featuring:Seth Vargo – Website, GitHub, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes:JS Party goes live February 24 at Noon PT / 3pm ET.
Click here to subscribe or submit an issue to suggest topics for future episodes.
Carnegie Mellon University
CustomInk
Thanks to @DerfOh (Fredrick) for submitting issue #605 to suggest this topic
Vault by HashiCorp
Vault on GitHub
Vault docs
Terraform
The Tao of HashiCorp is the foundation that guides HashiCorp’s vision, roadmap, and product design.
HashiCorp Releases
Shamir’s Secret Sharing
HashiConf
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Feb 10, 2017 • 1h 18min
ANTHOLOGY – Hacker stories from OSCON and All Things Open
Karen Sandler, Rachel Nabors, and Jono Bacon joined the show by way of some great conversations at OSCON in London, UK and All Things Open in Raleigh, NC. We talked about free software, web animation and motion in user interfaces, and how open source communities organize.
Join the discussionChangelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:GoCD – GoCD is an on-premise open source continuous delivery server created by ThoughtWorks that lets you automate and streamline your build-test-release cycle for reliable, continuous delivery of your product.
Rollbar – Put errors in their place! Full-stack error tracking for all apps in any language.
Toptal – Scale your team and hire from the top 3% of developers and designers with Toptal. Email adam@changelog.com for a personal introduction.
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:Karen Sandler – XRachel Nabors – Website, GitHub, Mastodon, XJono Bacon – Website, GitHub, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes:Karen Sandler
Karen Sandler is the the executive director of the Software Freedom Conservancy. She has a big heart, literally. Her heart condition requires a pacemaker, but she can’t access the source code that runs it. For this and other reasons, Karen is a passionate advocate for free software. In this interview, Jerod talks with Karen about her convictions, what she’s doing about them, and how this affects her personal life and the lives of those she loves.
“I literally want to hack my heart! But I can’t.” - Karen Sandler
Software Freedom Conservancy — Become a supporter!
Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy
Is software freedom a social justice issue? - this is the talk that Karen Sandler gave at OSCON 2016
IANAL (“I am not a lawyer”) — IAAL (“I am a lawyer”) and TINLA (“This is not legal advice”) also redirect to this page on Wikipedia
Rachel Nabors
Rachel Nabors is a motion design for the web and UI animations expert and she was at All Things Open as a keynote and featured speker. Adam talked to Rachel about discovering repeatable business models, the state of web animation and where we’re heading, the cognitive science behind motion in user interfaces, some great places to start adding motion and animation to your interfaces, and what we might expect to see with animation and motion in Microsoft Edge.
The UI Animation Newsletter: weekly web animation resources & inspiration
What is Vestibular Disorder?
Follow Dan C. Wilson to learn more about motion paths and web animiation
If you haven’t been, check out CSS Dev Conf
Learn with Rachel — You can check out her courses here.
Rachel’s Keynote at All Things Open
Microsoft Edge
Jono Bacon
Jono Bacon is a consultant and leader in community management and strategy. Jono was at All Things Open as a keynote and featured speker. Adam talked with Jono about his talk “Building a Community Exoskeleton” and how open source communities break down into read and write — those with a common interst who get together to consume something (a read community), and those who get together because they want to build something together (a write community).
The Art of Community (Jono’s book)
Bad Voltage (Jono’s podcast)
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Feb 3, 2017 • 1h 15min
Reproducible builds and secure software
Chris Lamb joined the show to talk about his project Reproducible Builds — which is funded by The Linux Foundation’s Core Infrastructure Initiative. We talked about the importance of having a verifiable path from source code to compiled binary, what this set of software development practices is all about, what it means to have Reproducible Builds, the challenges faced when implementing these development practices, and the inherent security you gain from them.
Join the discussionChangelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:GoCD – GoCD is an on-premise open source continuous delivery server created by ThoughtWorks that lets you automate and streamline your build-test-release cycle for reliable, continuous delivery of your product.
Flatiron – Are you ready to take the first step to being full-time programmer? Enroll in the FREE Bootcamp Prep course from Flatiron. Free enrollment is offered to the first 500 students only. So if you’re considering enrollment, don’t waste any time. Use our special link when you enroll to get $500 off your first month’s tuition when you move on to a career or certificate course.
Linode – Our cloud server of choice! Get one of the fastest, most efficient SSD cloud servers for only $10/mo. We host everything we do on Linode servers. Use the code changelog2017 to get 2 months free!
Featuring:Chris Lamb – Website, GitHub, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes:
This show began as an issue on GitHub
The Linux Foundation’s Core Infrastructure Initiative Funds the Reproducible Builds Project
Reproducible Builds
apt-secure (Ubuntu)
apt-secure (Debian)
thread.com
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Jan 27, 2017 • 1h 6min
GunDB, Venture Backed and Decentralized
Mark Nadal joined the show to talk about his hacker story and his venture backed open source datastore project called GunDB — a realtime, decentralized, offline-first, graph database engine. We talked about the details behind this database, how Mark secured funding, why yet another datastore, who’s using the database, how Mark plans to sustain this project through products and services, his thoughts on the RethinkDB postmortem and more.
Join the discussionChangelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:GoCD – GoCD is an on-premise open source continuous delivery server created by ThoughtWorks that lets you automate and streamline your build-test-release cycle for reliable, continuous delivery of your product.
Linode – Our cloud server of choice! Get one of the fastest, most efficient SSD cloud servers for only $10/mo. We host everything we do on Linode servers. Use the code changelog2017 to get 2 months free!
Flatiron – Are you ready to take the first step to being full-time programmer? Enroll in the FREE Bootcamp Prep course from Flatiron. Free enrollment is offered to the first 500 students only. So if you’re considering enrollment, don’t waste any time. Use our special link when you enroll to get $500 off your first month’s tuition when you move on to a career or certificate course.
Featuring:Mark Nadal – Website, GitHub, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes:
Thanks to Kevin McGee for suggesting this show on GitHub
The Changelog #201: Why SQLite Succeeded as a Database
GunDB Homepage
GunDB on GitHub
GunDB on Patreon
GubDB todo app tutorial
Neo4j
Firebase
BoostVC
Tim Draper on angel.co
DFJ
Why RethinkDB Failed
Comparisons of popular DBs (thanks Anzumana!)
If you’ve been enjoying our new beets from Breakmaster Cylinder, give us a shout out on Twitter, we’re @Changelog. Also Breakmaster Cylinder is looking for a video game project to score, so if you know someone or you are that someone email us - editors@changelog.com
The best way to keep up with all things open source and software development is to subscribe to Changelog Weekly — subscribe today, don’t miss an issue.
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Jan 13, 2017 • 1h 13min
ANTHOLOGY – Hacker Stories From OSCON, All Things Open, and Node Interactive
In this anthology episode we’re featuring three awesome hacker stories from OSCON, All Things Open, and Node Interactive — Giovanni Caligaris about how he brought LibreOffice to the people of Paraguay by translating it to their native tongue. Stu Keroff about the Linux user group he started for kids called The Asian Penguins. Shiya Luo about how China does Node, translations of documentation and books from English to Chinese, and the Great Firewall of China.
Join the discussionChangelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:GoCD – GoCD is an on-premise open source continuous delivery server created by ThoughtWorks that lets you automate and streamline your build-test-release cycle for reliable, continuous delivery of your product.
OSCON – O’Reilly’s Open Source Convention combines the experience of the open source community with ideas and strategies for using open source tools and technologies. There’s no event quite like OSCON! Make plans now to be at OSCON May 8-11, 2017, in Austin, TX. Registration is now open — save 20% on most passes by using the code CHANGELOG20 when you register.
All Things Open – Join 2,000+ technologists and decision makers in Raleigh, NC — The epicenter of innovation, technology and open source, and home to one of the most sophisticated audiences on Earth.
Node.js Interactive – Node.js Interactive is a conference for the Node community focused on education and community building. Use the code CNGJS16 to get 15% off registration.
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:Giovanni Caligaris – XStu Keroff – Website, XShiya Luo – Website, GitHub, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes:First, we talk with Giovanni Caligaris about how he brought LibreOffice to the people of Paraguay by translating it to their native tongue: Guaraní.
Second, we talk with Stu Keroff about the Linux user group he started for kids called The Asian Penguins in a school for Asian refugees where they learn to install, use, and configure Linux and open source software.
Last, we talk with Shiya Luo about how China does Node, translations of documentation and books from English to Chinese, and the Great Firewall of China (a censorship and surveillance project of the Chinese government) which makes it very difficult for the people of China to interact with the rest of the web.
LibreOffice
Asian Penguins
Stu Keroff’s talk at ATO 2016 - Middle Schoolers, Linux, and the Digital Divide and the talk’s details on the ATO site.
Shiya Luo’s talk at Node Interactive - How China Does Node
cnpm - npm client for China mirror of npm
Thanks Breakmaster Cylinder!
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Jan 9, 2017 • 1h 22min
Open Collective and funding open source
Pia Mancini joined the show to talk about Open Collective, her background and where she came from, her passion to upgrade democracy, funding and sustaining open source, what open collective is, how it works, how you can support your favorite open source communities, but more importably how you can take part and start your own collective.
Join the discussionChangelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:GoCD – GoCD is an on-premise open source continuous delivery server created by ThoughtWorks that lets you automate and streamline your build-test-release cycle for reliable, continuous delivery of your product.
Toptal – Scale your team and hire the top 3% of developers and designers at Toptal. Email Adam at adam@changelog.com for a personal introduction to Toptal.
Rollbar – Put errors in their place! Full-stack error tracking for all apps in any language.
Featuring:Pia Mancini – Website, GitHub, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes:
Pia gave a talk at TEDGlobal 2014 on How to upgrade democracy for the Internet era (over a million views 😱)
DemocracyOS
Democracy Earth
OpenCollective.com
Open Collective — Open Source Collective
Webpack on Open Collective
2016 on Open Collective, and what’s in the works for 2017!
Open Collective Issues
Support for paid events - Issue #177
Together we crowdfunded a yearly budget of over $100,000 for Open Source
Check out Gratipay and our past episode with Chad Whitacre.
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Dec 17, 2016 • 1h 20min
webpack
Sean Larkin joined the show to talk about Webpack, how fast open sources moves, how fast Webpack is moving, the core team, the formation, joining JS Foundation, the problem it’s solving, the bleeding edge features, sustainability, Sean and team’s efforts to build the community, their work on Open Collective, and more.
Join the discussionChangelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:Code School – Give the gift of code! You can gift someone Code School for 1 month for $29, 6 months for $99, or a full year for $189 (46% off). Offer starts December 12, 2016 and ends January 6, 2017.
Toptal – Scale your team and hire the top 3% of developers and designers at Toptal. Email Adam at adam@changelog.com for a personal introduction to Toptal.
Rollbar – Put errors in their place! npm install --save rollbar for error tracking in your JavaScript apps.
Featuring:Sean Larkin – GitHub, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes:
Webpack homepage
Webpack docs
Webpack on Medium
Webpack on GitHub
Donate to Webpack on Open Collective
“The first time you demo #webpack for a friend 😅” – @Changelog
SurviveJS
Read Sustaining Webpack for the Future — Part 1 and Part 2
“Tobias Koppers (sokra, the creator of webpack) has made my life as a developer so much better. So I gave him 💰💰💰💰 – sokra.github.io” — @kentcdodds
Webpack team members mentioned by Sean.
Tobias Koppers
Juho Vepsäläinen
Kees Kluskens
Johannes Ewald
Pavithra Kodmad
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Dec 9, 2016 • 1h 23min
Homebrew and Swift
Max Howell, famous for creating Homebrew, joined the show to talk about his start in software and open source, the tweet that was heard around the world when he interviewed with Google and didn’t get accepted, the creation of Homebrew, the naming process, as well as the difficulty letting go. We also talked about his passion for the Swift programming language, and his work on Swift Package Manager while at Apple.
Join the discussionChangelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:Code School – Give the gift of code! You can gift someone Code School for 1 month for $29, 6 months for $99, or a full year for $189 (46% off). Offer starts December 12, 2016 and ends January 6, 2017.
Toptal – Scale your team and hire the top 3% of developers and designers at Toptal. Email Adam at adam@changelog.com for a personal introduction to Toptal.
GoCD – GoCD is an on-premise open source continuous delivery server created by ThoughtWorks that lets you automate and streamline your build-test-release cycle for reliable, continuous delivery of your product.
Featuring:Max Howell – GitHub, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes:
Max was on The Changelog #35 way back in September, 2010
Max’s latest open source project PromiseKit
The BBC Micro was the first computer Max used
Amarok - a powerful music player for Linux, Unix and Windows
qt - cross-platform development
Last.fm - bring together your favourite music services
Scrobble
“The foundation of the modern world is developer tools.”
The Changelog #223: Homebrew and Package Management with Mike McQuaid
The tweet heard aroud the world with 6,825+ retweets — “Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but you can’t invert a binary tree on a whiteboard so f**k off.”
Swift Package Manager
BBC BASIC programming language
QBasic (Quick Beginners All purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) is an IDE and interpreter for a variety of the BASIC programming language
Max’s new thing — mixmsg lets you make mixtapes with friends directly in iMessage.
Max’s new project — Growler is planned for Homebrew, but he was hush hush about what it will do
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Dec 6, 2016 • 41min
HTTP/2 in Node.js Core
In this special episode recorded at Node Interactive 2016 in Austin, TX Adam talked with James Snell (IBM Technical Lead for Node and member of Node’s TSC and CTC) about the work he’s doing on Node’s implementation of http2, the state of http2 in Node, what this new spec has to offer, and what the Node community can expect from this new protocol.
Join the discussionChangelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:Rollbar – Put errors in their place! npm install --save rollbar for error tracking in your Node.js apps.
Hacker Paradise – Do you want to spend a month in South America, expenses paid, working on open source? We teamed up with Hacker Paradise to offer two Open Source Fellowships for a month on one of their upcoming trips to either Argentina or Peru.
GoCD – GoCD is an on-premise open source continuous delivery server created by ThoughtWorks that lets you automate and streamline your build-test-release cycle for reliable, continuous delivery of your product.
Featuring:James Snell – Website, GitHub, Mastodon, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes:This episode is a preview of our upcoming “Future of Node.js” series recorded at Node Interactive 2016 in Austin, TX. The series is produced in partnership with Node.js Foundation and sponsored by IBM. We’ll be releasing the full series soon on our new podcast “Spotlight”. If you haven’t subscribed to Changelog Master yet, which includes all the podcasts we produce, now would be a good time to do so. You can also subscribe to Changelog Weekly where we announce all the new things we’re up to.
Checkout the http2 repo James is working on
Watch the talk James gave at Node Interactive — Implementing HTTP/2 for Node.js Core by James Snell
Watch all the talks from Node Interactive
Checkout Spotlight, our new show around big announcements, conferences, the hallway track, behind the scenes — meaningful conversations with real people in the community.
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Nov 25, 2016 • 1h 19min
18F and OSS in the U.S. Federal Government
From 18F — Hillary Hartley and Aidan Feldman joined the show to talk about how 18F is changing the way the federal government builds and buys digital services.
Join the discussionChangelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:Code School – Black Friday Special (November 21-28) — Save 49% on a 6-month plan, and 51% on a yearly plan. These are HUGE savings for a limited time only.
Rollbar – Put errors in their place! Full-stack error tracking for all apps in any language.
GoCD – GoCD is an on-premise open source continuous delivery server created by ThoughtWorks that lets you automate and streamline your build-test-release cycle for reliable, continuous delivery of your product.
Featuring:Hillary Hartley – GitHub, XAidan Feldman – GitHub, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes:
The Presidential Innovation Fellows (PIF) program brings the innovation economy into government, by pairing talented, diverse technologists and innovators with top civil-servants and change-makers within the federal government.
The White House’s Presidential Innovation Fellows program on Twitter
The Changelog #157: Building Bridges with Sarah Allen
The CC0 1.0 license - “Additionally, we waive copyright and related rights in the work worldwide through the CC0 1.0 Universal public domain dedication.”
cloud.gov - The Government Innovation platform by government developers, for government developers.
analytics.usa.gov on GitHub
18F on GitHub
The System for Award Management (SAM) - certification for working as a vendor for the U.S. government
FedRAMP Ready Products
The Washington Post - Why a federal high-tech start-up is a money loser
Tom VanAntwerp on Medium - 18F is Hardly a Waste of Money
Join one of 18F’s Slack rooms
code.gov is the next milestone in federal open source code
Micro-purchase
Micro-purchase stats page
18F Guides
18F Open Source Style Guide
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!