The Changelog

Mike Perham is back for his 4th appearance to talk about his new project Faktory, a new background job system that’s aiming to bring the best practices developed over the last five years in Sidekiq to every programming language. We catch up with Mike on the continued success and model of Sidekiq, the future of background jobs, his thoughts on RocksDB in Faktory vs BoltDB, Redis, or SQLite, how he plans to support Sidekiq for the next 10 years, and his thoughts on Faktory being a SaaS option in the future.

We went back into the archives to conversations we had around data science at OSCON 2017. We talked with Vida Williams (Data Scientist) and Michelle Casbon (Director of Data Science at Qordoba) about the social impact of open data, personal data and transparency, privacy, the big data problem of public surveillance, electronic fingerprinting, the rift between data scientists and computer scientists, natural language processing, machine learning, and more.

Adam Morse joined the show to talk about Functional CSS and his project Tachyons - a CSS Toolkit that lets you quickly build and design new UI without writing CSS. We talk about Scalable CSS, the difference between “Atomic”, “OOCSS”, “BEM” and others, semantic class names, and where we go from here.

Preethi Kasireddy, a self-employed blockchain and smart contract Engineer, joined the show to talk about why she left the best job in the world at Andreessen Horowitz on the deal team, how she got entrepreneurship envy, the roadmap she laid out in 2015 and where she’s at today as an engineer, her excitement for blockchain-based technologies, and why blockchains don’t scale.

Sean Griffin joins the show to talk about doing Rails full-time, his love of Rust. and his project Diesel - a safe, extensible ORM and query builder for Rust. We discuss Sean’s path to working full-time on Rails, what he works on specifically, why Rust, why Diesel, and how much of Diesel’s design and featureset is a product of his experience with ActiveRecord and Rails.

Chris Beams joins the show to talk about Bisq, the P2P decentralized Bitcoin exchange and open-source desktop application that allows you to buy and sell bitcoins in exchange for national currencies, or alternative crypto currencies. We get some background on the issues faced by crypto exchanges like CoinBase, and the now defunkt Mt. Gox. We discuss whether or not Bitcoin is a censorship resistant payment system and what it means to have anonymous transaction currency options. Bisq also has an interesting white paper about its own DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) to support its contributors and we discuss that in detail at the end of the episode.

Eduardo Cuducos joined the show to talk about Operação Serenata de Amor an Artificial Intelligence and Data Science project that aims to inform the general public about government corruption and spending. We talked about how this artificial intelligence project analyzes claims for reimbursement from congresspeople to determine illegal probability, how it monitors government spending, the technology behind it, and how other governments might be able to follow this model.

Eric Normand joined the show to talk about Functional Programming. We talked about FP vs OOP vs Imperative, why FP is popular again, the advantages and disadvantages of Functional Programming, and teaching Functional Programming concepts.

Mike Glukhovsky joined the show to talk about the future of RethinkDB. Mike was a co-founder of RethinkDB along-side Slava Akhmechet. RethinkDB shutdown a year ago officially on October 5, 2016 — and today we’re talking through all the details with Mike. The shutdown, getting purchased by the CNCF, relicensing, buying back their IP and source code, community and governance, and some specific features that Mike and the rest of the community are excited about.

Dmitry Jemerov joined the show to talk about Kotlin - a language created by JetBrains that’s designed to be an industrial-strength object-oriented language, and a “better language” than Java. We asked Dmitry “Why invent a new language?”, talked through Google announcing official Android support, covered some of Kotlin’s characteristics, Kotlin vs Swift, and more.

We talk with Brandon Keepers and Bex Warner about GitHub’s Probot — GitHub Apps to automate and improve your workflows. You can use pre-built apps or easily build and share your own.

This episode features conversations from Sustain 2017 at GitHub HQ with Richard Littauer, Karthik Ram, Andrea Goulet, and Scott Ford. Sustain was a one day conversation for open source software sustainers to share stories, resources, and ways forward to sustain open source.

Karolina Szczur joined the show to talk about community building, building remote-first teams, the hiring process in tech, product development, and the inclusivity factor of web performance.

We talked with Tim Mecklem about building an artificial Pancreas with Elixir and Nerves to help those with Type 1 Diabetes who want to “loop” — a process which involves monitoring glucose levels, predicting where a person’s glucose levels are heading, then delivering insulin based on that prediction. Tim is a Developer at Gaslight in Cincinnati where he builds software solutions with Ruby and Elixir, and he’s a member of the Nerves Core team.

If you find yourself chasing shiny objects and squirrels all time, you should

This is an anthology episode from OSCON 2017 featuring awesome conversations with Kelsey Hightower (OSCON Co-Chair and Developer Advocate at Google Cloud Platform), Safia Abdalla (Open Source Developer and Creator of Zarf), and Mike McQuaid and Nadia Eghbal (GitHub Open Source Programs).

We are thrilled to produce this show to honor RabbitMQ’s 10th anniversary. Karl Nilsson and Michael Klishin joined the show to talk through 10 years of RabbitMQ — one of the most widely deployed open source message brokers with more than 35,000 production deployments worldwide.

Evan Prodromou has been involved in open source since the mid ‘90s. His open source travel guide – Wikitravel – grew up alongside Wikipedia and the web itself. In this episode, we hear Evan’s history, try to solve open social networking once and for all, and learn how sprinkling a little artificial intelligence on to our products can yield big wins without having to shoot the moon.

We talked with Dustin Kirkland (Head of Ubuntu Product and Strategy at Canonical) at OSCON about 12.04’s end of life, the death of the Ubuntu phone, Snaps and snapd, and Bash on Ubuntu on Windows Server. This is the second installment of our mini-series from the expo hall floor of OSCON 2017. Special thanks to our friends at O’Reilly for inviting us to OSCON.

Johannes Schickling (Founder of Graphcool) joined the show to talk about GraphQL — an application layer query language from Facebook. We talked about what it is, where it makes sense to use it, its role in serverless architectures, getting docs for free via Schemas and Types, and the community that’s rallying around this new way to think about APIs.