The Changelog

Adam and Jerod invite back Katrina Owen after years away focusing on Exercism—a 100% free platform for code practice and mentorship with over 2500 exercises and 48 different language tracks. They talk to Katrina about how the platform has changed, the direction it’s taken, the backstory on the recently launched version 2, and how she plans to turn Exercism into a sustainable business. Also, what happens if that doesn’t work?!

Adam and Jerod are on location at OSCON and talk with Camille Eddy about recognizing biases in AI, Jerome Hardaway about the work he’s doing to prepare veterans for jobs in software, and Abby Cobunoc Mayes about the work she’s doing at Mozilla for open science.

We talk with Nader Dabit, Developer Advocate for Amazon Web Services, about the role of DevRel and what’s involved in this “dream job”, frontend and mobile developers using AWS Amplify to build cloud-enabled applications, how GraphQL, React, and others fit in, and the direction of React Native.

From open source project to a $3.8 million dollar seed round to transform Gatsby.js into a full-blown startup that’s building what’s becoming the defacto modern web frontend. In this episode, we talk with Jason Lengstorf about this blazing-fast static site generator, its building blocks and how they all fit together, the future of web development on the JAMstack (JavaScript + APIs), the importance of site performance, site rebuilds, getting started, and how they’re focused on building an awesome product and an awesome community.

In this special episode of The Changelog we’re sharing a full-length episode of our newly launched podcast called Practical AI — covering AI, Machine Learning, and Data Science. In this episode Mat Ryer and David Hernandez joined Daniel and Chris to talk about MachineBox, building a company around AI, and democratizing AI.

We’re on location at Microsoft Build 2018 talking with Corey Sanders and Steve Guggenheimer — two Microsoft veterans focused on artificial intelligence and cloud computing. We talked about the direction and convergence of AI, ethics, cloud computing, and how the day to day lives of developers will change because of the advancements in AI.

Jerod Santo is riding solo talking with Kurt Mackey, co-founder of Fly. He talked to him about his work at Ars Technica, his prediction on tabs being a fad, and Kurt being a founding member of MongoHQ, which was later renamed to Compose and acquired by IBM. Jerod also talked to him about lighthouse scores, performance, and an interesting program Fly is instituting to compensate open source project maintainers.

Adam Stacoviak and Jerod Santo talk with Tim Bell, the founder and creator of CS Unplugged, a collection of free teaching material that teaches computer science through engaging games and puzzles. They talk to him about where this program came from him, the need for computer science in today’s K-12 education programs, how CS Unplugged fits in, and how you can get involved.

We talked with Steve Dower and Dan Taylor at Microsoft Build 2018 about the history of Python at Microsoft, the origination of IronPython, Python Tools for Visual Studio, flying under the radar to add support Python, fighting from within to support open source, and more.

Zed Shaw – creator of Mongrel, Learn Python the Hard Way, and more – joined the show to talk through a recent Twitter thread from Zed where he shared his thoughts on open source, making money in open source, corporate interests and involvement, developer culture, and more.

Daniel Stenberg joined the show to talk about 20 years of curl, what’s new with http2, and the backstory of QUIC - a new transport designed by Jim Roskind at Google which offers reduced latency compared to that of TCP+TLS+HTTP/2.

We’re on location at Microsoft Build 2018 talking with Julia White, Corporate Vice President at Microsoft — a 17 year Microsoft veteran. We talked with Julia about her take on this “new Microsoft”, Satya Nadella’s first appearance as CEO when they revealed the first glimpse of Microsoft’s cloud offering which started with Office, the beginnings of Microsoft Azure, Azure as the world’s computer, and how every company is becoming a software company.

Johannes Schickling, co-founder and CEO of Prisma, joined the show to catch us up on all things GraphQL — the tech, the possibilities, the community, how Prisma turns your database into a GraphQL API, their new business direction, Prisma Cloud, open source vs enterprise, and the upcoming GraphQL Europe in Berlin on June 15th.

Adam is on location at ZEIT Day talking with Jessica Rose about burnout, Henry Zhu about his passions and pursuit of open source, and Simon Willison about data and his passion for interesting datasets in the world.

Julia Grace joined the show to talk bout about scaling all the things at Slack. Julia is currently the Senior Director of Infrastructure Engineering at Slack, and has been their since 2015 — so she’s seen Slack during its hyper-growth. We talked about Slack’s growth and scale challenges, scaling engineering teams, the responsibilities and challenges of being a manager, communicating up and communicating down, quality of service and reliability, and what it takes to build high performing leadership teams.

Lin Clark joined the show to talk about Code Cartoons, her work at Mozilla in the emerging technologies group, Rust, Servo, and WebAssembly (aka Wasm), the Rust community’s big goal in 2018 for Rust to become a web language (thanks in part to Wasm), passing objects between Rust and JavaScript, Rust libraries depending on JavaScript packages and vice versa, Wasm ES Modules, and Lin’s upcoming keynote at Fluent on the parallel future of the browser.

Chad Hietala joined the show to talk with us about the long history of Ember.js, how he first got involved, his work at LinkedIn and his work as an Ember Core team member, how the Ember team communicates expectations from release to release, their well documented RFC process, ES Classes in Ember, Glimmer, and where Ember is being used today.

Philipp Krenn joined the show to talk with us about Elasticsearch, the problem it solves, where it came from, and where it’s at today. We discussed the query language, what it can be compared to, whether or not it’s a database replacement or a database complement, Elasticsearch vs Elastic the company. We also talked about the details behind Elastic’s plan of “doubling down on open” to open up X-Pack, which is open code paid add-on features to Elasticsearch. We discussed the implications of this on their business model, and what changes will take place at the code and license level on GitHub.

Jordan Eldredge joined the show to talk with us about Winamp2-js — a reimplementation of Winamp 2.9 in HTML5 and Javascript. For many of our listeners, talking about Winamp may bring to mind some extreme nostalgia about the internet of the past … and it’s certainly that way for Jerod and I. Jordan started this project in 2014 and it’s what ultimately got the attention of some folks at Facebook, where he now works on Nuclide. We shared stories about Winamp back in the day, actually listening to music as an mp3, the technical hurdles and learning Jordan has experienced, skinning it, playlists, making it a frontend for Spotify – which is so ironic to actually say. Also, Jerod has been hacking it via livestream on Twitch to add it as an alternate audio player on Changelog.com.

We’re rebroadcasting the finale episode of the beloved Request For Commits. But don’t worry, The Changelog will be back with new episodes next week. In this finale episode of Request For Commits, we regroup to discuss the podcast from its start to its finish, lessons learned, community impact, and where the conversations around open source sustainability are taking place, now and in the future. It’s the end of Request For Commits, but the conversations we’ve had will continue on The Changelog. We also have some guest-host appearances for Nadia and Mikeal planned in the near future on this podcast. So, stay tuned.