Changelog Master Feed

OSS developer Jessica Sachs joins Jerod & Kball to discuss re-launching and maintaining Faker.js after it was abandoned last January, Component Driven Development & Neopets!

In our 6th Kaizen, we talk with Jerod about all the things that we cleaned up after migrating changelog.com from a managed Kubernetes to Fly.io. We deleted the K8s cluster and moved wildcard cert management to Fastly & all our vanity domain certs to Fly.io. We migrated the Docker Engine that our GitHub Actions is using - PR #416 has all the details. We did a few other things in preparation for our secrets plan. Thank you Maikel Vlasman, James Harr, Adrian Mester, Omri Gabay & Owen Valentine for kicking it off in our Slack #shipit channel. Gerhard’s favourite improvement: the new shipit.show domain.

We’re talking about the tools we use every day help us to be productive! This show will be a great introduction for those new to Go tooling, with some discussion around what we think of them after using some of them for many years.

We’re listening! This week’s experimental, super-brief Monday edition of “The Changelog” has the following new features: It’s longer, there’s no background music during the stories, and it includes stories previously not featured in the newsletter. If you like this better than the last one, would listen to it, and want us to keep it going… let us know in the comments or by tweeting @changelog!

Adam and Jerod are joined once again by James Long. He was on the podcast five years ago discussing the surprise success of Prettier, an opinionated code formatter that’s still in use to this day. This time around we’re going deep on Actual, his personal finance system James built as a business for over 4 years before recently opening it up and making it 100% free. Has James given up on the business? Or will this move Actual(ly) breathe new life into a piece of software that’s used and beloved by many? Tune in to find out.

Jerod, Nick & Ali partake in a few rounds of Story of the Week, TIL, and I’m Excited about $X. Oh, and is TypeScript the new Java? Nick responds and emotes all over the place!

A deep discussion on that tension between development speed and software quality. What is velocity? How does it differ from speed? How do we measure it? How do we optimize it?

Ben Johnson, the creator of Litestream, joined Fly.io a few weeks after we migrated changelog.com - episode 50 has all the details. That was pure coincidence. What was not a coincidence, is Gerhard jumping at the opportunity to talk to Ben about Postgres vs SQLite with Litestream. The prospect of running a cluster of our app instances spread across all regions, with local SQLite & Litestream replication, is mind boggling. Let’s find out from Ben what will it take to get there. Thanks Kürt for kicking off this dream.

Drausin Wulsin, Director of ML at Immunai, joins Daniel & Chris to talk about the role of AI in immunotherapy, and why it is proving to be the foremost approach in fighting cancer, autoimmune disease, and infectious diseases. The large amount of high dimensional biological data that is available today, combined with advanced machine learning techniques, creates unique opportunities to push the boundaries of what is possible in biology. To that end, Immunai has built the largest immune database called AMICA that contains tens of millions of cells. The company uses cutting-edge transfer learning techniques to transfer knowledge across different cell types, studies, and even species.

We’re experimenting with something new: a super-brief Monday edition of “The Changelog” to help start your week off right and keep you up with the fast-moving software world. If you like this, would listen to it, and want us to keep it going… let us know in the comments or by tweeting @changelog. If you’d rather we didn’t… also let us know!

Nick went to Amsterdam for JSNation & React Summit 2022 and he joins Jerod to report on all the goodness! He also sits down with two special guests involved with the confs to talk Jest Preview and GraphQL Cache

Adam and Jerod are joined by Ken Kantzer, co-founder of PKC Security. Ken and his team performed upwards of 20 code audits on well-funded startups. Now that it’s 7 or 8 years later, he wrote up 16 surprising observations and things he learned looking back at the experience. We gotta discuss ’em all!

The year is 2053. The tabs-vs-spaces wars are long over. Ron Evans is the only Go programmer still alive on Earth. All he does is maintain old Go code. It’s terrible! He must find a way to warn his fellow gophers before it’s too late. Good thing he finally got that PDQ transmission system working…

Rob Barnes (a.k.a. Devops Rob) and Rosemary Wang (author of Infrastructure as Code - Patterns & Practices) are joining us today to talk about infrastructure secrets. What do Rosemary and Rob think about committing encrypted secrets into a repository? How do they suggest that we improve on storing secrets in LastPass? And if we were to choose HashiCorp Vault, what do we need to know? Thank you Thomas Eckert for the intro. Thank you Nabeel Sulieman (ep. 46) & Kelsey Hightower (ep. 44) for your gentle nudges towards improving our infra secrets management.

While scaling up machine learning at Instacart, Montana Low and Lev Kokotov discovered just how much you can do with the Postgres database. They are building on that work with PostgresML, an extension to the database that lets you train and deploy models to make online predictions using only SQL. This is super practical discussion that you don’t want to miss!

This week Lee Robinson joins us to talk about his journey as a DevRel. We talk about what it means to be a DevRel, what orgs they fall under, how he runs his team at Vercel, Lee’s three pillars of DevRel: education, community, and product, we compare the old days of DevRel vs now, and of course what makes a DevRel a good DevRel.

Today we are talking with Frederic Branczyk, founder of Polar Signals & Prometheus maintainer. You may remember Frederic from episode 33 when we introduced Parca.dev. This time, we talk about a database built for observability: FrostDB, formerly known as ArcticDB. eBPF generates a lot of high cardinality data, which requires a new approach to writing, persisting & then reading back this state. TL;DR FrostDB is sub zero cool & well worthy of its name.

Josh Goldberg joins Nick, Chris & a very nasally-sounding KBall for a fun conversation around TypeScript ESLint. They discuss why we need ESLint when we have TypeScript, some useful rules in typescript-eslint, how it works, and a few hot takes along the way!

This week we’re featuring an episode of Grafana’s Big Tent! LEGO Group principal engineer Nayana Shetty swaps observability survival stories (to drill or not to drill?) with hosts Mat Ryer and Matt Toback. The trio also reveals new and different observability strategies that have been successful and effective in their organizations. Plus: Nayana shares how she built her successful observability career brick by brick.

Could we create a digital human that processes data in a variety of modalities and detects emotions? Well, that’s exactly what NTT DATA Services is trying to do, and, in this episode, Theresa Kushner joins us to talk about their motivations, use cases, current systems, progress, and related ethical issues.