
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Software's best weekly news brief, deep technical interviews & talk show.
Latest episodes

Dec 9, 2010 • 57min
Rails 3.1 and SproutCore (Interview)
Adam and Wynn caught up with Yehuda Katz to talk about upcoming changes in Rails 3.1, SproutCore, and his growing list of open source projects.
Join the discussionChangelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!Featuring:Yehuda Katz – Website, GitHub, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XWynn Netherland – GitHub, XShow Notes:
Wynn’s deck from ‘07 pays tribute to Yehuda
Merb influenced and later merged with Rails
SproutCore is an HTML5 application framework for building responsive, desktop-caliber apps in any modern web browser, without plugins.
Carl Lerche is the other half of carlhuda
Desktop MVC != Server MVC
Handlebars.js is Yehuda’s optimization of Mustache.js
Backbone.js is a lightweight MVC framework from DocumentCloud
Bundler manages an application’s dependencies through its entire life across many machines systematically and repeatably.
One of the biggest changes in Rails 3 is The Great Decoupling
Railtie is the core of the Rails Framework and provides several hooks to extend Rails and/or modify the initialization process
Asset handling is coming in Rails 3.1, meaning better support for Sass, Compass, and CoffeeScript
Do you modify your Nginx setup?
Yehuda prefers Sass and Compass to Less since the introduction of the SCSS syntax.
Haml is the templating language of choice for sophisticated web devs.
Yehuda likes JavaScript on the server but thinks evented frameworks like Node are more for edge cases than for the heart of the web.
The Ruby Racer is a Ruby binding to V8 and is great for testing your JavaScripts without a browser
Charles Lowell wrapped Handlebars.js as Handlebars.rb
Yehuda loves CoffeeScript wants a runtime debugger before taking the plunge.
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.
Adam really loves Thor, a scripting framework that replaces rake and sake and is used by the new Rails 3 generators.
There is no shortage of thor tasks from users on GitHub.
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Nov 30, 2010 • 45min
Building Telephony Apps (Interview)
Wynn caught up with Chris Matthieu of Voxeo Labs to talk about Phono, Tropo, Adhearsion, and building telephony apps with open source tools.
Join the discussionChangelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!Featuring:Wynn Netherland – GitHub, XShow Notes:
We’re excited to team up with GitHub Jobs! To have your job posting read on air, just check “Advertise this listing on The Changelog Podcast for an additional $100” when you post your job.
Chris Matthieu founder of Teleku, now with Voxeo Labs, the company behind Tropo, Teleku, and Phono.
Tropo’s GitHub projects
Adhearsion uses Ruby to create voice-enabled applications on top of Asterisk
Asterisk turns an ordinary computer into a communications server
Phono, a jQuery plugin that lets you make phone calls right from your browser.
Jay Phillips orginally created Adhearsion
Jason Goecke VP of Innovation at Voxeo
AGI protocol is at the core of Asterisk
Wynn and Chris go way back with TAPI, MAPI, and SAPI
Google Voice transcriptions gone bad
The SIP protocol allows multimedia communication sessions such as voice and video calls over Internet Protocol
The Jingle protocol extends XMPP and powers Google Talk
Wynn asks how Tropo stacks up against Twilio
Tropo does TTS in nine languages
Tropo’s Scripting Environment supports Ruby, Python, PHP, Groovy, and Javascript
Tropo’s REST API offers a more traditional API approach
Facebook Telephone lets you call your Facebook friends via Phono.
Twelephone, if Twitter is more your bag
Michael Bleigh from Intridea makes Twitter apps easier for Rubyists
Facebook’s OpenGraph API makes building Facebook apps much easier than previous APIs
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Nov 9, 2010 • 38min
Riak Revisited (Interview)
Wynn sat down with Andy Gross and Mark Phillips of Basho and John Nunemaker of Ordered List to talk about Riak, Riak Search, and moving an open source community to GitHub.
Join the discussionChangelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!Featuring:John Nunemaker – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XWynn Netherland – GitHub, XShow Notes:
NoSQL smackdown, live from SXSW 2010.
Are you web scale?
Drop us a ping@thechangelog.com and let us know who you want to get on The Changelog
Andy Gross VP of Engineering at Basho, the company behind Riak.
Mark Phillips Community Manager at Basho AKA * @pharkmillups
John Nunemaker of Ordered List and MongoMapper fame
Riak is now available as a binary download
Bitcask, the new backend for Riak
Riak key value store, decentralized datastore from Basho Technologies
Riak Search, full-text search engine based on Riak
Riak buckets, container and keyspace for data stored in Riak
Riak KVS buckets can be automatically searchable by installing the Search pre-commit hook
Riak supports an Apache SOLR interface
Sean Cribbs made some waves with Ripple
Ruby, Python, Node.js are the biggest adopters of Riak
Riak aims to scale both up and down. Adding a node adds a linear increase in throughput and storage capacity. 50 nodes run easily on a laptop.
Riak nodes are truly decentralized, no node is special
Riak compares to Cassandra and Voldemort
Riak has built-in JavaScript map reduce but unlike Couch, it’s more an ad hoc approach.
Andy explains Riak’s link walking or bucket-key-tag relationships between objects.
Riak now has two interfaces, the original REST HTTP interface, and a new protocol buffers interface, a faster binary interface
Eric Brewer, a Basho board member, and his cap theorem
Bitcask is an append-only file format where the keys are stored in memory for ultra fast lookups.
InnoStore, the original Riak backend
John Muellerleile, author of the popular NoSQL cartoon about distributed map reduce in Erlang
Apache Lucene query syntax a growing standard for search
The move from BitBucket to GitHub was ultimately about community, not about DVCS
The THANKS file lists many Riak community contributors
Harmony - the MongoDB-powered hosted CMS from Ordered List
Mozilla runs several Riak clusters to log data from their Test Pilot project
Francisco Treacy uses Riak in WideScript, “an innovative app that helps you focus and interact with your texts — on your desktop, your couch or on the go.”
Inagist recently moved from Cassandra to Riak
Riak has partnered with Joyent and Node creator Ryan Dahl to create Riak SmartMachines
Mark also is a fan of Redis
Scala and Clojure have Andy excited, too.
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Oct 26, 2010 • 51min
Scripty2, Zepto.js, Vapor.js (Interview)
Wynn caught up with Thomas Fuchs to talk about script.aculo.us, Scripty2, Zepto.js and the future of Prototype.
Join the discussionChangelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!Show Notes:
The Magic Roundabout is crazy
Wynn got his UK badge on Gowalla
script.aculo.us JavaScript effects framework built on top of Prototype
Prototype - JavaScript Framework that aims to ease development of dynamic web applications.
Thomas is one of many talented RoR core team alumni
Scripty2 - completely rewritten version of script.aculo.us
RaphaelJS - JavaScript vector graphics library featured in Episode 0.2.5
Johnson Page asks “What’s the future of Prototype.js?”
Underscore.js utility library for jQuery, inspired by Prototype, featured in Episode 0.0.5
Zepto.js minimalist inlinable framework for mobile WebKit browsers, with a jQuery-like chaining syntax
EveryTimeZone.com - handy tool to pick a time to meet across time zones. A promotional site for Freckle, chock full of JavaScript best practices.
Thomas’ blog post on approaches taken with EveryTimeZone.com
Gury Chainable syntax wrapper for the <canvas> element
Vapor.js “The only JS framework compatible with every browser.”
MadRobby gives mad props to @janl, @hblank, @cramforce and other JSConf.eu organizers.
FabJS - modular async framework for Node.js
Chris Williams’ talk on PromoteJS, an effort The Changelog supports.
Eyeballs.js - A lightweight MVC framework for building fast, tidy JavaScript web apps
CoffeeScript, featured in Episode 0.2.9
Amy Hoy, Thomas’ wife, product proponent, and usability diva.
Freckle helps you manage your time
JavaScript Performance Rocks - three books on ultimate web app performance
Charm Desk - Thomas and Amy tackle customer support
PeepCode’s Smashing into Vim with the soothing voice of Dan Benjamin
Mensch and Meslo, the latest stops on Thomas’ journey to find the ultimate Terminal.app font
Thomas likes to fly his AR.Drone around the office
He’s also building the Lego Milennium Falcon
SchnitzelConf a 1-day, full-contact conference in Vienna, Austria focusing on creating products, launching businesses, and charging real money.
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Oct 12, 2010 • 37min
DevOps and Chef (Interview)
Wynn sat down with Corey Donohoe from GitHub and Seth Chisamore from Opscode to talk about DevOps, Chef, agile infrastructure and innovation in the datacenter.
Join the discussionChangelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!Show Notes:
Corey Donahoe aka @atmos, DevOps dude at GitHub
Seth Chisamore aka @schisamo, evangelist at Opscode, makers of Chef
Chef, an open source systems integration framework built to bring the benefits of configuration management to your entire infrastructure.
DevOps is defined as a set of processes, methods and systems for communication, collaboration and integration between departments for Development (Applications/Software Engineering), Technology Operations and Quality Assurance (QA)
Puppet, an open source data center automation and configuration management framework.
Cfengine, continuous datacenter automation and repair
Knife, the Chef command line interface
Chef Hosted platform is an instant hosted, highly scalabe Chef Server
Chef solo lets you run Chef without a Chef server
Chef was architected to be multi-tenant
The Opscode Team members have impressive resumes.
Chef includes impressive role-based authorities
Cookbooks are like Rubygems for Chef
Cinderella née Cider = apple + homebrew + chef + rvm
Homebrew as the most forked project is GitHub’s stress test. Be sure to catch Max on Episode 0.3.5
Wynn makes the case that the Swedish Chef be the face of the DevOps movement
Silverline from Librato does complex systems management and monitoring
EY or EngineYard, Corey’s former employer uses VMs in their architecture
Simon Wardley’s OSCon keynote
OpenStack is an effort to standardize the cloud
DevOps version of the account that got Shatner back on TV
DevOps Borat tweets from the datacenter
Fog, Wesley Beary’s excellent Ruby abstraction layer for popular cloud providers
Knife, donated by 37 Signals
Wynn digs infinity_test to test against multiple versions of Ruby at the same time
collectd, system statistics collection daemon
Using Visage to graph collectd stats
Sign up for the Opscode platform free beta
Look up Seth as schisamo in #chef and #chef-hacking on IRC
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Oct 5, 2010 • 30min
PubSubHubBub and the Real-Time Web (Interview)
Wynn chatted with Julien Genestoux (github/twitter) from Superfeedr about PubSubHubBub, XMPP, Websockets, and the real-time web.
Join the discussionChangelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!Show Notes:
Superfeedr - pushes realtime data at scale using PubSubHubBub and XMPP.
PubSubHubHub - simple, open, server-to-server web-hook-based pubsub (publish/subscribe) protocol as an extension to Atom and RSS.
XMPP - Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) is an open technology for real-time communication and generalized routing of XML data.
Discovery links in feeds
Superfeeder has some big names among its publishers and subscribers
Gowalla demo using websockets and Gowalla’s hub.
Twitter’s streaming APIs
Considerations for PubSubHubBub vs. XMPP
Superfeedr’s GitHub profile
EventMachine and Node.js are cool
Julien loves Redis, Cassandra, MongoDB
Superfeedr’s list of popular feeds, firehose of the blogosphere
Redis’ as a pubsub store
Chef from Opscode is serious cool for setting up servers
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Sep 23, 2010 • 27min
Django Dash, Python, Ruby (Interview)
Kenneth and Wynn caught up with Daniel, Christian, and Matt from Pragmatic Badger to talk about the Django Dash, Python, and Ruby.
Join the discussionChangelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!Show Notes:
Daniel, Christian, and Matt from Pragmatic Badger host the Django Dash.
Django Dash - you’ve got 48 hours to build a Django app. Go!
Pyweek - Build a Python app in a week
Rails Rumble - Ruby on Rails’ a own 48 hour web application development competition.
The Dash rules
Great Big Crane - 2010 Dash winner
The Dash moved to distributed version control this year on GitHub & BitBucket
Love for Pythons’ explicit imports and Python’s module system
Twisted - an event-driven networking engine written in Python.
Node.js - Evented I/O for V8 JavaScript.
Eventlet - a concurrent networking library for Python that allows you to change how you run your code, not how you write it.
EventMachine - fast, simple event-processing library for Ruby programs.
Christian is using Compass and Sass in Django, but hates on Haml
Forkinit - forkin’ brilliant! Share and fork your favorite recipes.
Flask - Flask is a microframework for Python based on Werkzeug, Jinja 2 and good intentions.
Web.py - a web framework for python that is as simple as it is powerful.
Google’s AppEngine Run your Python web apps on Google’s infrastructure.
Pypy - implemenation of the Python language focusing on speed, memory usage, and sandboxing.
Rubinius - an implementation of the Ruby programming language. The Rubinius bytecode virtual machine is written in C++.
Manoria - an MMO city-building and resource management game [Source]
Server tail - a service which lets you quickly and easily see real time output of log files on your servers, with just a web browser. [Source]
Read the docs - a place to create, host, and browse docs. [Source]
GitHub made covering the event live much more fun
PhoneGap - open source development framework for building cross-platform mobile apps using HTML and JavaScript.
Leah Culver, who created Leafy Chat in last year’s Dash, talked about it in Episode 0.1.5
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Sep 14, 2010 • 33min
Homebrew and OSX Package Management (Interview)
Adam and Wynn caught up with Max Howell, creator of Homebrew to talk about package managment on OSX, beer, and scrobbling.
Join the discussionChangelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!Featuring:Max Howell – GitHub, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XWynn Netherland – GitHub, XShow Notes:
Homebrew The awesome OSX package manager from Max Howell
Last.fm - The world’s largest online music catalogue, powered by your scrobbles. Max’s former employer.
Tweet Deck Desktop and mobile Twitter client
ImageMagick - fabulous software suite to create, edit, and compose bitmap images which can be a pain to install on OSX.
Amarok - is a free software music player for Linux and other varieties of Unix
GitHub - where all the cool people put code
Homebrew terms in the Homebrew Cookbook
No sudo for you and the dangers therein
MacPorts - an open-source community initiative to design an easy-to-use system for compiling, installing, and upgrading either command-line, X11 or Aqua based open-source software on the Mac OS X operating system
Gentoo - highly optimized Linux distro
Most forked projects on GitHub
Max prefers British ales
pengwynn is looking to get his hands on the Tatical Nuclear Penguin from Brewdog
The Silicon roundabout gets its name due to the prominence of British web based companies
Max created the Last.fm Scrobbler, proving open source can land you a job
Transmission is beautiful on the Mac
Glasses, This is the next generation of VLC for Mac also called Lunettes.
brew install sl, then sl — enjoy the ride!
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Sep 8, 2010 • 38min
Mongrel2 and high performance web sites (Interview)
Wynn caught up with Zed Shaw’s non-rockstar alter ego to talk about Mongrel2, high performance web sites, guitar, and software community ponzi schemes.
Join the discussionChangelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!Featuring:Zed Shaw – Website, GitHub, XWynn Netherland – GitHub, XShow Notes:
Mongrel2 - an application, language, and network architecture agnostic web server that focuses on web applications using modern browser technologies.
Original mongrel
_why an anonymous and prolific writer, cartoonist, musician, artist, and computer programmer notable for his work with Ruby
Unicorn - Eric Wong’s mostly pure-Ruby HTTP backend
Thin A fast and very simple Ruby web server
0MQ Fastest. Messaging. Ever.
Node.js Evented I/O for V8 JavaScript.
Nginix is a HTTP and reverse proxy server, as well as a mail proxy server written by Igor Sysoev
HAProxy The Reliable, High Performance TCP/HTTP Load Balancer
Twisted an event-driven networking engine written in Python
libevent Asynchronous event notification library
EventMachine fast, simple event-processing library for Ruby programs
Websockets - technology providing for bi-directional, full-duplex communications channel, featured in Episode 0.3.1
SPDY - An experimental protocol for a faster web
Fretwar The guitar competition and social time waster.
LayerTennis from Coudal
MP3 streaming demo in Mongrel2
Librelist a free as in freedom mailing list site for open source projects.
Dethklok, Pantera, Slayer, Metallica
Wynn asks if Rails is still a ghetto
Joyent
Ajax.im an open-source, extensible, theme-able instant messaging framework.
Qt Cross platform UI framework
Awesome window manager is a highly configurable, next generation framework window manager for X
Vimperator Vimperator is a Firefox browser extension with strong inspiration from the Vim text editor, with a mind towards faster and more efficient browsing.
Screen screen manager with VT100/ANSI terminal emulation
Reaper is a digital audio workstation: a complete multitrack audio and MIDI recording, editing, processing, mixing, and mastering environment.
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Aug 31, 2010 • 24min
Node Knockout (Interview)
Micheil and Wynn caught up with Gerad and Visnu from the Node Knockout to talk about the 48 hour Node.js development competition and its entries.
Join the discussionChangelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!Show Notes:
Lone Star Ruby Conference - Texas’ regional Ruby conference in Austin
Mike Perham - The awesome Rubyist whose name gives Wynn fits
Node Knockout - The 48 hour Node.js coding competition
Rails Rumble - Ruby’s own 48 hour coding bash
Gerad - of Gerad & Visnu, the “data-y” and “product-y” guy
Visnu - the “developer-y” and “designer-y” guy
Fortnight Labs - the proper name for Gerad & Visnu, Inc.
List of great Node Knockout Judges
Joyent & Heroku are great places to host your Node.js apps.
Express High performance, high class web development for Node.js
Connect - high performance middleware framework for node featuring robust middleware for serving static files, advanced routing, cookie and session implementations, error handling and much more.
npm is a package manager for node. You can use it to install and publish your node programs. It manages dependencies and does other cool stuff.
Node Inspector is a web inspector based Node.js debugger
Socket.io - Websockets toolkit covered in 0.3.1 and used in so many contest entries
Go vote for your favorite entries!
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!