Lauren Tan joined us to talk about her blog post titled “Does it spark joy?” In this post Lauren shared the news of her resignation as an engineering manager at Netflix to return to being a software engineer. We examine the career trajectory of a software engineer and the seemingly inevitable draw to management for continued career growth. The idea of understanding “What are you optimizing for?” and whether or not what you’re doing truly brings you joy.

The Changelog

Engineer to manager and back again

We sit down with Tobias Koppers of webpack fame to talk about his life as a full-time maintainer of one of the most highly used (4 million+ dependent repos!) and influential tools in all of the web. Things we ask Tobias include: how he got here, how he pays himself, has he ever gotten a raise, what his typical day is like, how he decides what to work on, if he pays attention to the competition, and if he’s ever suffered from burnout.

Pushing webpack forward

We partnered with Red Hat to promote Season 4 of Command Line Heroes — a podcast about the people who transform technology from the command line up. Season 4 is all about hardware that changed the game. We’re featuring episode 3 from season 4 — called “Personal Computers: The Altair 8800 and the Dawn of a Revolution.” This is the story of personal computers and the revolution that took place in the PC era. Learn more and subscribe at redhat.com/commandlineheroes.

Altair 8800 and the dawn of a revolution

Matthew Hodgson (technical co-founder) joined us to talk about Matrix - an open source project and open standard for secure, decentralized, real-time communication. It’s open source, it’s decentralized, it’s end-to-end-encrypted, and it’s also self-sovereign. Matrix also provides a bridge feature to bridge existing platforms and communication silos into a global open matrix of communication. A recent big win for Matrix was Mozilla’s announcement of switching off its IRC network that it had been using for 22 years and now uses Matrix instead.

Enter the Matrix

Frank Karlitschek joined us to talk about Nextcloud - a self-hosted free & open source community-driven productivity platform that’s safe home for all your data. We talk about how Nextcloud was forked from ownCloud, successful ways to run community-driven open source projects, open core vs open source, aligned incentives, and the challenges Nextcloud is facing to increase adoption and grow.

From open core to open source

Stephanie Morillo (content strategist and previously editor-in-chief of DigitalOcean and GitHub’s company blogs) wrote a book titled The Developer’s Guide to Content Creation — it’s a book for developers who want to consistently and confidently generate new ideas and publish high-quality technical content. We talked with Stephanie about why developers should be writing and sharing their ideas, crafting a mission statement for your blog and thoughts on personal brand, her 4 step recipe for generating content ideas, as well as promotional and syndication strategies to consider for your developer blog.

The developer's guide to content creation

Caleb Porzio is the creator & maintainer of Livewire, AlpineJS, and more. His latest open source endeavor was announced as “sponsorware”, which means it lived in a private repo (only available to Caleb’s GitHub Sponsors) until he hit a set sponsorship threshold, at which point it was open sourced. On this episode, we talk through this sponsorware experiment in-depth. We learn how he dreamt it up, how it went (spoiler: very well), and how he had to change his mindset on 2 things in order to make sustainability possible.

The dawn of sponsorware

Yetunde Dada from QuantumBlack joins Jerod for a deep dive on Kedro, a workflow tool that helps structure reproducible, scaleable, deployable, robust, and versioned data pipelines. They discuss what Kedro’s all about and how it’s “changing the landscape of data pipelines in Python”, the ins/outs of open sourcing Kedro, and how they found early success by sweating the details. Finally, Jerod asks Yetunde about her passion project: a virtual reality film which debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in January.

Productionising real-world ML data pipelines

Jon Thornton (Engineering Manager at Squarespace) joined the show to talk about tech debt by way of his post to the Squarespace engineering blog titled “3 Kinds of Good Tech Debt”. We talked through the concept of “good tech debt,” how to leverage it, how to manage it, who’s in charge of it, how it’s similar to ways we leverage financial debt, and how Squarespace uses tech debt to drive product development.

Good tech debt

We partnered with Red Hat to promote Season 4 of Command Line Heroes — a podcast about the people who transform technology from the command line up. Season 4 is all about hardware that changed the game. We’re featuring episode 1 from season 4 — called “Minicomputers: The soul of an old machine.” This is the story of Minicomputers and how they paved the way for the personal computers that could fit in a bag and, eventually, the phones in our pockets. Learn more and subscribe at redhat.com/commandlineheroes.

The soul of an old machine

Anders Damsgaard is a climate science researcher working on cryosphere processes at the Department of Geophysics at Stanford University. He joined the show to talk with us about the intersection of open source and climate science. Specifically, we discuss a set of shell tools he created called The Scholarref Tools which allow you to perform most of the tasks required to gather the references needed during the writing phase of an academic paper. We also discuss climate science, physics, self hosting Git, and why Anders isn’t present on any “social” networks.

Open source meets climate science

We teamed up with some friends of ours at Heroku to promote the Code-ish podcast so we’re sharing a full-length episode right here in The Changelog’s feed. This episode features Chris Castle with special guests Carol Nichols and Jake Goulding talking about the strengths of the Rust programming language. Learn more and subscribe at heroku.com/podcasts/codeish.

Intro to Rust programming

The commercial VPN industry is a minefield to navigate and many open source solutions are a pain to use or ill-suited for the task. Algo VPN, on the other hand, is a self-hosted personal VPN designed for ease of deployment and security. It uses the securest industry standards, builds on rock-solid solutions like WireGuard and Ansible, and runs on an ever-growing list of cloud hosting providers. On this episode Dan Guido –CEO of security firm Trail of Bits and Algo’s creator– joins Jerod to discuss the project in depth.

Meet Algo, your personal VPN in the cloud

Welcome to 2020 — on this year’s “State of the ‘log’” episode Jerod and I look back at our favorite moments from 2019 and forward to 2020 and beyond. We talk through our most popular episodes, our personal favorites, our 10-year anniversary, the excitement we have for Brain Science our newest podcast, it’s for the curious! And we also look forward to plans we have for 2020 and the decade to come…

State of the “log” 2019

Gerhard is back for part two of our interviews at KubeCon 2019. Join him as he goes deep on Prometheus with Björn Rabenstein, Ben Kochie, and Frederic Branczyk… Grafana with Tom Wilkie and Ed Welch… and Crossplane with Jared Watts, Marques Johansson, and Dan Mangum. Don’t miss part one with Bryan Liles, Priyanka Sharma, Natasha Woods, & Alexis Richardson.

Gerhard goes to KubeCon (part 2)

Conversations with the hackers, leaders, and innovators of software development. Hosts Adam Stacoviak and Jerod Santo face their imposter syndrome so you don’t have to. We do in-depth interviews with the best and brightest software engineers, hackers, leaders, and innovators. This is a polyglot podcast. All programming languages, platforms, and communities are welcome. Open source moves fast. Keep up.

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The Changelog

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