The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source

Adam sat down with Designer/Developer John Long, creator of RadiantCMS about his new project Serve, design, and running a successful open source project. Join the discussionChangelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!Featuring:Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes:John Long of Wiseheart design Serve is a rapid prototyping framework for web applications John created RadiantCMS, later extended by Sean Cribbs Radiant led John to a relationship with Pragmatic Programmers and formation of a Ruby Visual Identity team Serve is basically the Rails View layer, sans the Model and Controller. Serve’s makes it easier to use URLs that end in a / instead of file extension Serve’s view helper are Rails compatible Serve is Rack under the hood Acoustic is Django-inspired and aims to be between Sinatra and Rails “What Rails can learn from Django” Running a successful open source project can take over your life In the early days of Radiant, Subversion made it difficult to accept community contributions Git and GitHub has increased community participation Use Compass’s CSS3 module and save your sanity Compass can change your design workflow Fancy Buttons is a Compass plugin to easily create image-less buttons Grab the code for Adam’s nifty Serve bootstrap, which adds easy support for Haml, Sass, Compass, and more. Join the newly created Serve Users group Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Steve and Wynn sat down with Eliot Horowitz from 10gen to talk about MongoDB, the NoSQL landscape, and the fun of building at Web Scale. Join the discussionChangelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!Featuring:Wynn Netherland – GitHub, XSteve Klabnik – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes: Eliot Horowitz CTO and Co-Founder of 10gen Dwight Merriman CEO & Co-Founder at 10gen NoSQL is a loose term for Key Value Stores, Graph Databases, and Document Databases MongoDB still has a large roadmap ahead MongoDB was first featured on The Changelog over a year ago Single server durability tops the list of new additions in 1.8 Replica sets are an elaboration on the existing master/slave replication, adding automatic failover and automatic recovery of member nodes Shutterfly and Foursquare boast some of the largest MongoDB implemenation MongoDB’s sharding enables horizontal scaling across multiple nodes. Mongo vs. Riak (and other Dynamo inspired stores) Full vs. eventual consistency Compound indexes Increment operations Be sure and check out our Riak interviews: Part 1 and Part 2 Mongo vs. CouchDB Couch uses Map/Reduce views Couch has great master-master replication Couch runs on mobile Mongo’s sharding is closer to a relational database Mongo’s Geo features now support more precise, spherical geospatial indexing Mongo shines at User profiles CMS data Mongo enjoys wide language binding support Eliot and 10gen think the Web Scale meme is all in good fun BSON [bee · sahn], short for Bin­ary JSON, is a binary-encoded serialization of JSON-like documents Our interview with Douglas Crockford on JSON MongoDB 2.0 will be focusing on concurrency, aggregation, online compaction, and TTL temporal collections Eliot likes Racket when he’s not slinging C. Linus Torvalds is one of Eliot’s heroes Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Steve and Wynn caught up with Dr. Nic from Engine Yard to talk about the cloud, Jenkins, Ruby, and lowering the barrier of entry for learning Rails on Windows. Join the discussionChangelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!Featuring:Wynn Netherland – GitHub, XSteve Klabnik – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes: Catch up with us at Red Dirt Ruby Conf Steve will be at Codeconf Kenneth will be covering PyCon 2011 Thanks for putting up with us for 50 episodes! Dr. Nic Williams is Developer Advocate at Engine Yard has a ton of open source projects Engine Yard uses Amazon AWS and Terremark Dr. Nic actively and aggressively abandons most of his 154 public repos and feels good about it due to Git and GitHub Steve maintains a couple of projects from _why Dr. Nic liked how Jamis Buck declared he abandoned Capistrano Dr. Nic prefers TextMate instead of “1960s technology” Steve likes Janus for Vim Steve asks about Redcar Engine Yard has partnered with Appcelerator for mobile app developers Dr. Nic helps maintain Rails Installer, the easiest way to get up and running with Ruby on Rails. For Windows. Mac and Linux coming soon. Luis Lavena and Charles Nutter are core to the Ruby community “If you have to put the shortcuts on a coffee mug!” - Dr. Nic on Vim Jeremy Ashkenas from DocumentCloud is a regular on The Changelog for projects like Docco, CloudCrowd, Underscore.js, CoffeeScript The Jenkins rename shows the power of the community to stick together Dr. Nic is sticking with Jenkins, but Travis is worth a look for Rubyists Someone send Dr. Nic an Octocat badge Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Kenneth and Wynn caught up with GitHubber Scott Chacon to talk about Git, distributed version control, and his quest to kill Word as a book authoring tool. Join the discussionChangelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!Featuring:Scott Chacon – GitHub, XWynn Netherland – GitHub, XKenneth Reitz – GitHub, XShow Notes: Scott Chacon, Git evangelist, GitHubber, author of ProGit rsync is a software application for Unix and Windows systems which synchronizes files and directories from one location to another while minimizing data transfer using delta encoding when appropriate. Perforce is a commercial, proprietary, centralized revision control system developed by Perforce Software, Inc. Git Internals, Scott’s PeepCode PDF Chris, Tom, PJ, founders of GitHub Continuous integration is one of Git’s strengths Surprisingly, Scott’s .gitconfig isn’t pimped out gitk The git GUI repository browser gitx Git GUI for OS X gitgui Unlike gitk, git gui focuses on commit generation and single file annotation and does not show project history. Why Git and not Mercurial? Mercurial bookmarks are references to commits that are automatically updated when new commits are made. If you do hg bookmark feature the feature bookmark refers to the current changeset. hg-git is the Hg-Git plugin for Mercurial, adding the ability to push to and pull from a Git server repository from Mercurial. BitBucket is to Hg as GitHub is to Git Scott says he had good intentions in comparing Git to other version control systems and was not lobbing stones at Mercurial Scott says distributed source control systems are key to helping the open source community thrive because it lets anyone commit and get involved The RubyGems.org 404 is amusing libgit2 is a portable, pure C implementation of the Git core methods provided as a re-entrant linkable library with a solid API, allowing you to write native speed custom Git applications in any language which supports C bindings. GitHub has continued the libgit2 Google Summer of Code effort, supporting Vicent Marti to continue the development Scott says that Git is basically a key value store and we should look at uses beyond version control Eclipse is moving to Git away from CVS Git Tower is a beautiful Git UI for the Mac Showoff is a Sinatra web app that reads simple configuration files for a presentation. It is sort of like a Keynote web app engine. Kinectaby, Ruby bindings for XBox Kinect Wynn is excited about Scott’s project Git Scribe for writing, feeling the pain of using Word for archaic book publisher workflows Jason J Williams’s tools have lessened the pain for Wynn in writing the upcoming Sass book for Manning Everybody that works at GitHub is Scott’s programming hero but Ryan Tomayko is one of the smartest developer’s Scott knows. Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Kenneth and Wynn caught up with Kohsuke Kawaguchi and Andrew Bayer from the Jenkins project to talk about continuous integration, Java, and corporate backing drama. Join the discussionChangelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!Featuring:Wynn Netherland – GitHub, XKenneth Reitz – GitHub, XShow Notes: CI Joe is GitHub’s continuous integration server Knowing is half the battle Jenkins née Hudson is the leading open-source continuous integration server. Built with Java, it provides over 300 plugins to support building and testing virtually any project. Kohsuke Kawaguchi is the creator of Jenkins Andrew Bayer is a Build Engineer at Cloudera Nearly 30K Jenkins installations worldwide Jenkins is written in Java but with its rich plugin system, you can run almost anything with it Jenkins supports Git, Mercurial, SVN, and even Visual SourceSafe Jenkins does more than running tests, it can also do parameterized deploys GitHub has fueled an explosion in Jenkins community growth Wynn asks why Java is only 6% of GitHub projects Funny cartoon on how language fanboys see one another Git and GitHub adoption actually sparked the name change and Oracle split The community voted 214-14 to rename Andy addresses how plugins will migrate to the new name. Thanks, Matthew J McCullough. At what point do projects look at a jQuery Foundation-style governance model? Hudson was the butler in Upstairs, Downstairs Alfred, the butler from Batman was a consideration, but conflicted with the Mac program James Clark is Kohsuke’s programming hero Kohsuke and Lisp’s Guy Steele are Andrew’s heroes MZ Scheme now Racket makes Kenneth’s head hurt Andrew recommends Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs from MIT As a build guy, Selenium gets Andrew excited Kohsuke is trying to hack the Airport Express to stream tunes from Linux Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Adam and Wynn caught up with Carl Tashian from Open Government to talk about OpenGovernment.org, OpenCongress.org, and the rise of the Citizen Coder. Join the discussionChangelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!Featuring:Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XWynn Netherland – GitHub, XShow Notes: Carl Tashian is Director of Technology at Open Government OpenGovernment: Empower individuals and organizations to track government at every level OpenCongress.org - open source Rails app to track the goings on in the US Congress Library of Congress THOMAS site is the source for federal legislative information OpenGovernment.org, a public resource for government transparency at the state, city, and local levels. Free and open-source. Open States API The Sunlight Foundation aims to make government transparent and accountable Wynn helped create TweetCongress.org winner of a SXSW 2009 Web award for activism, making use of Sunlight APIs Follow the money and connect the dots between bills, key votes, and campaign donations. Transparency Data is a central source for federal lobbying disclosure, federal grants and contracts, earmarks and federal and state campaign contributions, complete with it’s own API GovKit Luigi Montanez and Wynn wrote a wrapper for Transparency Data Fog, the Ruby cloud services library Carl worked at ZipCar prior to joining Open Government Syncing large datasets from different providers is a big challenge PostgreSQL and PostGIS power the backend of OpenGovernment GeoServer is an open source software server written in Java that allows users to share and edit geospatial data. MongoDB and Rack provide a fast way to track page views in the app Sunlight, Code for America, and Open Government - rise of the Citizen Coder? Oakland Crimespotting is a case study on developers having an impact on government DocumentCloud, featured in Episode 0.0.5 Jammit, Industrial Strength Asset Packaging for Rails Pythonistas, why not help out by creating a scraper for your state? Kenneth and Wynn debate the best terminal font Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Adam and Wynn caught up with Adam Moore and Satyen Desai from the YUI team to talk about YUI 3, Node.js, and working with Douglas Crockford. Join the discussionChangelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!Show Notes: YUI is the Yahoo! User Interface library, a collection of front end code goodies for JavaScript and CSS Follow the YUI Blog for the latest developments, such as the new 3.3.0 release Adam Moore and Satyen Desai are engineers on the YUI team. The Autocomplete widget provides a flexible, configurable, and accessible implementation of the AutoComplete design pattern. The DataTable widget renders columnar data into a highly customizable and fully accessible HTML table The Dial widget is an alternative to sliders The YUI Charts recently moved from Flash to JavaScript in YUI 3 The Community developed the drag/move component YUI is on GitHub, fueling community involvement YUI Theater is a great source for JavaScript talks and all things YUI Douglas Crockford is the author of JSLint, the JSON spec, featured on Episode 0.2.6 from TXJS Nicholas C. Zakas aka @slicknet is the author of a number of JavaScript books Eric Miraglia is the Engineering Manager for the YUI team JSLint improves your JavaScript but will not spare your feelings Dave Glass - has a great talk about YUI + Node “I love async, but I can’t code like this” Many of the additional Node.js modules deal with parallel execution Adam suggests targeting features, not platform since features like touch will be on the desktop eventually. Satyen’s talk on YUI’s mobile strategy The module pattern in JavaScript The YUI Gallery lists discoverable components contributed by the community Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Wynn caught up with Salvatore Sanfilippo to talk about Redis, the super hot key value store. Join the discussionChangelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!Featuring:Salvatore Sanfilippo – Website, GitHub, XWynn Netherland – GitHub, XShow Notes: VMware signs the paychecks for Salvatore and Pieter Noordhuis Redis is an open source, advanced key-value store and data structure server wherein keys can contain strings, hashes, lists, sets and sorted sets Redis internals consist of ANSI C with an evented model Non-blocking replication has always been a Redis design goal Replication in Redis is async Salvatore’s Redis toolbox includes the Redis Ruby gem and Sinatra Chances are you can find a Redis library in your favorite language The C client is the only officially supported wrapper Salvatore thinks the NoSQL moniker isn’t perfect, focusing too much on performance, but it frames a discussion Redis Pub/Sub is perfect for real-time apps GitHub’s adoption of Redis in Resque helped fuel the growth of the project Redis users tend to use it as a database, as a messaging bus, or as a cache Salvatore thinks hosted solutions like Redis-to-Go need to add more value like more frequent backups and seamless upgrades. Blizzard uses an 8-node Redis install in serving avatars for WoW Justin Campbell asks will VMWare feature Redis in any upcoming projects? Ezra Zygmuntowicz and GitHub were among the first “few brave users” After a few months Salvatore noticed a dip in adoption , but he trusted his gut and stuck with it Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Wynn caught up with Aaron Patterson, aka @tenderlove, to talk about Ruby 1.9, Nokogiri, and muscle cars. Join the discussionChangelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!Show Notes: RubyCommitters.org lists all the folks who hack on the Ruby language Nokogiri is a library for parsing XML and HTML The origins of tenderlove, Aaron’s online persona Hot linking, check it and see. Got a page rank of a hundred and three., to the tune of Hot Blooded Mechanize adds an API to any website Being a Ruby committer is ‘alright’ Yugui, release manager for Ruby 1.9 The current state of rubycommitters.org reminds us of CSS Naked Day REXML is a pure Ruby XML processor MiniTest is Aaron’s favorite testing framework His favorite Ruby 1.9.2 feature is speed texticle is a wrapper around Postgress T-Search APIs Aaron will be keynoting at Red Dirt Ruby Conf FasterCSV from JEG2, one of the organizers for Red Dirt Ruby Conf. El Camino, IROC-Z, or Firebird with T-tops are Aaron’s top three dream cars For those who have never shaved a Yak and otherwise did not know it. Arel is at the heart of Rails 3 ActiveRecord improvements Debian’s Ruby maintainer says he’s out Ruby Kaigi, the C conference disguised as a Ruby conference In addition to Japanese, Aaron also speaks Scheme and Haskell Wynn ? CoffeeScript Aaron wants to pair program with Jim Weirich Wynn suggests Aaron capitalize on Tenderlovemaking by organizing promiscuous pair programming Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Steve Klabnik joined the show to talk about learning to program with Hackety Hack and why the lucky stiff. Join the discussionChangelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!Featuring:Steve Klabnik – Website, GitHub, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XWynn Netherland – GitHub, XShow Notes: Steve Klabnik, maintainer of Hackety Hack, newest contributor to The Changelog Hackety Hack will teach you the absolute basics of programming from the ground up. _why, creator of Hackety Hack. Help keep his memory alive. Abbott and Costello’s classic “Who’s on first?” Yakety Yak is a song written, produced, and arranged by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller for The Coasters and released on Atlantic Records in 1958 Shoes is a tiny graphical app kit for ruby GTK is a highly usable, feature rich toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces which boasts cross platform compatibility and an easy to use API. MacRuby is an implementation of Ruby 1.9 directly on top of Mac OS X core technologies such as the Objective-C runtime and garbage collector, the LLVM compiler infrastructure and the Foundation and ICU frameworks. The Shoebox is a gallery of Shoes apps. Mad props to Heroku, Sinatra, and MongoMapper for handling a LifeHacker traffic spike Ruby is a great language to teach programming _why’s Poignant Guide to Ruby ChunkFive is a nice bold free and open source typeface Steve is intrigued by projects like cool.io and node.js and the evented style of programming. Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!