The Changelog

Quincy Larson is the creator of an open source community called freeCodeCamp. We talked with Quincy about “the secret to getting good at coding”, their curriculum that spans a solid year (totaling 2,080 hours) of deliberate coding practice, plans for financial sustainability of the project, and the people behind it on the leading/teaching side and the camper side.

José Valim joined the show to talk about Elixir. We learned about the early days of José’s start as a programmer. José took us back to the beginning of Elixir and shared why Erlang got him so excited, we broke down features of the language, we talked about functional programming, concurrency, developing for multi-core systems, we talked about the Elixir community, the future of Phoenix, Ecto, and more.

Nadia Eghbal joined the show to discuss a HUGE topic that’s near and dear to our heart – funding open source! We discussed what it takes to fund open source software development, Nadia’s current investigative journalism efforts around funding open source (funded by the Ford Foundation), venture-backed open source projects, what it means for an open source project to be in good shape, some potential solutions to provide better long-term support for open source, and we tried to determine how much the open source of the world might be worth.

Ary Borenszweig and Juan Wajnerman, the folks behind Crystal, joined the show to talk about the goals of the language, how it’s the best of both worlds between Ruby and C, why if it’s so close to and inspired by Ruby why not just give their time/effort to Ruby instead, the new compiler, and we also discussed what’s left before Crystal can go 1.0.

Richard Feldman from NoRedInk joined the show to talk about Elm and Functional Programming. Elm labeled itself “the best of functional programming in your browser” and boasts “no runtime exceptions.” We talked about the language, whether or not it’s really faster than React, JavaScript fatigue, and the best ways to get started with Elm.

MacLane Wilkison and Michael Egorov, the creators of ZeroDB, joined the show to talk about ZeroDB — an end-to-end encrypted database (protocol), why it’s open source, how it’s different than other encryption techniques, performance for running encrypted queries, and an interesting topic called Proxy re-encryption.

Yehuda Katz joined the show to talk about JSON.API — where the spec came from, who’s involved, compliance, API design, the future, and more. We also finally got Yehuda on the show alone, so we were able to talk with him about his origins, how he got started as a programmer, and his thoughts on struggle vs aptitude.

We have a special doubleheader holiday show for you. Andrew Nesbitt joined the show to talk about 24 Pull Requests and Libraries.io, and Jonathan Rudenberg is back to catch us up on Flynn.

Dan Abramov, creator of Redux, joined the show to talk about his path to becoming a programmer, his introduction to open source, React, JavaScript, functional programming in JavaScript, his thoughts on looking outside of your bubble to other ecosystems and borrowing/sharing what you can.

László Monda (aka Lotsy) joined the show to talk about a keyboard for hackers — the Ultimate Hacking Keyboard. We discussed the features, the hardware design, the open source that powers it, and more.

Ahmad Nassri from Mashape joined the show to talk about Kong, an open-source management layer for APIs and Microservices.

Evan You joined the show to talk about Vue.js - his library for building web interfaces. We discussed what Vue.js offers, what makes it different, why developers should trust this project even if it’s “just a personal project” that’s not backed by an enterprise or a large team.

Tal Ater joined the show to talk about the offline first revolution, the use of service workers, how UpUp is helping on that front, speech recognition, and annyang.

Sameer Al-Sakran and Tom Robinson from Metabase joined the show to discuss Metabase - their open source tool that’s laying the foundation of their goals for open source business intelligence.

Slava Akhmechet joined the show again to catch us up on RethinkDB and the awesome progress they’ve made to power the realtime web. We talked about innovation in databases, compared and contrasted to pub/sub, Pusher, NoSQL, and even The Next Big Thing™ in databases.

Mitchell Hashimoto joined the show to talk about HashiCorp’s new tool - Otto, how it compares to and compliments Vagrant, Automation, and we even talked to Mitchell about his history with software development in the beginning of the show.

Matt Holt and Sebastian Erhart joined the show to talk about Caddy the HTTP/2 web server written in Go. It’s time to serve the web like it’s 2015!

Eran Hammer joined the show to talk about updates to Hapi.js, Node.js, OAuth, and deep discussions about Oz – Eran’s replacement for OAuth 2.0.

Ron Evans, ringleader of The Hybrid Group and creator of a fleet of open source robot libraries, joined the show to talk about open source and robotics, Cylon.js, Gobot, Artoo, teaching, KidsRuby, his programming hero, and more.

Saron Yitbarek, creator of CodeNewbie and the CodeNewbie podcast, joined the show to talk about helping more people discover software development, embarrassing moments, lessons learned along the way, and more.