The Changelog

This week we take you behind the scenes of the new infrastructure for Changelog.com and talk with Gerhard Lazu. We relaunched the new brand and site for Changelog on Phoenix/Elixir in October of 2016 and we needed a better way to reliably host and deploy the site. That’s where Gerhard came in. We cover all the details and decisions in this show.

We talked with Pam Selle at OSCON about the serverless revolution happening for JavaScript developers. This episode kicks off our mini-series from the Expo Hall floor at OSCON 2017.

On Friday, June 2, 2017 – GitHub announced the details of their Open Source Survey – an open data set on the open source community for researchers and the curious. Frannie Zlotnick, Nadia Eghbal, and Mikeal Rogers joined the show to talk through the backstory and key insights of this open data project which sheds light on the broader open source community’s attitudes, experiences, and backgrounds of those who use, build, and maintain open source software.

Matt Biilman and Chris Bach joined the show to talk about JAMstack, Netlify CMS, how open source drives standards, and 10x-ing the speed of Smashing Magazine.

Tim Hockin and Aparna Sinha joined the show to talk about the backstory of Kubernetes inside Google, how Tim and others got it funded, the infrastructure of Kubernetes, and how they’ve been able to succeed by focusing on the community.

Justin Dorfman joined us for a special BONUS episode of The Changelog to share some details about Sustain Conference with you. It’s a one day conversation for Open Source Software sustainers at GitHub HQ (SF) on June 19, 2017. No keynotes, expo halls or talks. Only discussions about how to get more resources to support digital infrastructure. Plus, we’ll be there.

Scott Hanselman joined today’s show produced in partnership with our friends at OSCON. Scott is a Program Chair of OSCON, host of the podcast Hanselminutes, and advocate for open source inside of Microsoft and the Azure Cloud team. We talked about the oldest software he wrote that’s still in production, the shift inside Microsoft to open source and why, as well as ways to make inclusion and diversity a priority in your communities.

Zeno Rocha, Principal Developer Advocate at Liferay, joined the show to talk about DevRel, his open source work (clipboard.js, Dracula Theme, jQuery Boilerplate, Browser Diet, et al), and his passion for teaching and giving talks at conferences. Zeno also shared some really interesting stories about his first contributions to open source, how that played out, and the lessons learned along the way.

Jason Laster joined the show to talk about Firefox Debugger and DevTools. We talked about the backstory of Firefox, Firebug, the new Debugger.html, why React and Redux made a good fit to develop Debugger as a standalone application, community efforts, and getting started.

Kent C. Dodds joined the show to talk about guiding and supporting first time contributors to open source. We talked about the many ways to be first-timer friendly, how to contribute to open source, the burden and balance of a maintainer, and a few of the projects Kent maintains, including his latest project at PayPal called Glamourous.

Will Norris (Engineering Manager at Google’s Open Source office) joined the show to talk about their new release of the Google Open Source website as well as the release of Google’s internal documentation on how they do open source. Nearly 70 pages of documentation have been made public under creative commons license for the world to use. We talked about the backstory of Google’s Open Source office, their philosophy on OSS, their involvement in the TODO group, and much more.

Tracy Lee joined the show to talk about bringing people together, helping people, and making an impact. We covered learning JavaScript, the ins and outs of her road to get to where she’s at today, hitting burnout and sleeping for two weeks, breaking into the JavaScript community, and the fun cruise, workshops, and conferences she’s working on for the JavaScript community.

Jacob Hoffman-Andrews, Senior Staff Technologist at the EFF and the lead developer of Let’s Encrypt, joined the show to talk about the history of SSL, the start of Let’s Encrypt, why it’s important to encrypt the web and what happens if we don’t, Certbot, and the impact Let’s Encrypt has had on securing the web.

James Long joined the show to talk about his recent post, “Why I’m Frequently Absent from Open Source”. He shared several points in his blog post that struck a chord with us, so we invited him on the show to talk through the gritty details and peel back the layers of open source — the people involved, sustainability, the responsibility, the guilt, and the balance it takes to keep it all together.

Nathan Sobo, founding member of the Atom editor team at GitHub, joined the show take us all the way back to the beginning of Atom to learn where it came from, the founding team, the problem it solves, on through to shipping 1.0 and beyond.

Ben Ubois, the creator of Feedbin (a simple, good-looking online RSS reader) joined the show to talk about the indie web and developers, how RSS usage has changed over the years – particularly since Google Reader shutdown. We also talked about RSS vs the social web that we’re in now and the idea of an RSS resurgence and taking back control over the content we choose to subscribe to.

Seth Vargo, the Director of Technical Advocacy at HashiCorp, joined the show to talk about managing secrets with their open source product called Vault which lets you centrally secure, store, and tightly control access to secrets across distributed infrastructure and applications. We talked about Seth’s back story into open source, use cases, what problem it solves, key features like Data Encryption, why they choose to write it in Go, and how they build tooling around the open core model.

Karen Sandler, Rachel Nabors, and Jono Bacon joined the show by way of some great conversations at OSCON in London, UK and All Things Open in Raleigh, NC. We talked about free software, web animation and motion in user interfaces, and how open source communities organize.

Chris Lamb joined the show to talk about his project Reproducible Builds — which is funded by The Linux Foundation’s Core Infrastructure Initiative. We talked about the importance of having a verifiable path from source code to compiled binary, what this set of software development practices is all about, what it means to have Reproducible Builds, the challenges faced when implementing these development practices, and the inherent security you gain from them.

Mark Nadal joined the show to talk about his hacker story and his venture backed open source datastore project called GunDB — a realtime, decentralized, offline-first, graph database engine. We talked about the details behind this database, how Mark secured funding, why yet another datastore, who’s using the database, how Mark plans to sustain this project through products and services, his thoughts on the RethinkDB postmortem and more.