Changelog Master Feed

This week on The Changelog we’re joined by Adam Wiggins, co-founder and former CTO of Heroku, for an exclusive trip down Heroku memory lane. Adam and Jerod are both tremendous fans of Heroku and believe (to this day) they represent the apex in developer experience for delivering code to production. We talk through the beginnings of Heroku, the v1 most people have forgotten about, the era of web hosting back in 2008-2010, the serendipity of Silicon Vally in those days, pitching to Y Combinator, the makings of git push heroku, the Heroku style and name, the sale of Heroku to Salesforce, potential regrets — and we tee up part 2 coming next week with Adam going beyond Heroku and the story of Muse.

Maggie Johnson-Pint from Stanza sits down with Amal & Divya for a deep-dive in to the production side of the development world. If you’re at all curious (and/or intimidated) by terms like Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), Service Level Objective (SLO), OpenTelemetry, distributed tracing, and the like… this episode’s for you!

Today we’re talking about uses for Go in the medical industry. Tim Stiles develops and maintains a Go package for synthetic biology and molecular biology called Poly. It has broad applications for biotech R&D, but also has very direct applications to medicine.

15 years ago, Gerhard discovered magic in the form of Ruby on Rails. It was intuitive and it just worked. That is the context in which Gerhard fell in love with infrastructure and operations. Today, for special episode 77, we start at Seven Shipping Principles, and, in the true spirit of Ship It, we’ll see what happens next. Our guest is David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Ruby on Rails, co-founder of Basecamp & HEY, and a lot more - check out dhh.dk.

Recently Chris and Daniel briefly discussed the Open RAIL-M licensing and model releases on Hugging Face. In this episode, Daniel follows up on this topic based on some recent practical experience. Also included is a discussion about graph neural networks, message passing, and tweaking synthesized voices!

This week we’re doing some Linux mythbusting and talking retro gaming with Jay LaCroix from Learn Linux TV. This is a preview of what’s to come from our trip to All Things Open next week. By the way, make sure you come and check us out at booth 60. We’ll be recording podcasts, shaking hands, giving out t-shirts and stickers…and speaking of gaming, you can go head-to-head with us on Mario Kart or Rocket League on the Nintendo Switch. We’re giving that Switch away to a lucky winner at the conference, but you have to play to win. If you’re there, make sure you come see us because we want to see you.

Nick & Amelia welcome the co-authors of Tiny CSS Projects to discuss their awesome new (and still in-progress) Manning book all about CSS! Use code podjsparty20 when checking out to save 40% (good for all products in all formats!) and join the JS Party community chat for a chance to win a free ebook copy!

Mat Ryer gathers a gang of ghouls and ghosts to tell spooky developer stories! Join us to hear tales of Mat’s $1k nightmare, Dee’s infinite loop of horror, Natalie’s haunted time as a junior dev & many, many more.

In today’s episode, we talk about distroless, ko, apko, melange, musl and glibc. The context is Wolfi OS, a community Linux OS designed for the container and cloud-native era. If you are looking for the lightest possible container base image with 0 CVEs and both glibc and musl support, Wolfi OS & the related chainguard-images are worth checking out. Ariadne Conill is an Alpine Linux TSC member & Software Engineer at Chainguard.

This panel discussion was recorded at a recent event hosted by a company, Aryballe, that we previously featured on the podcast (#120). We got a chance to discuss the AI-driven technology transforming the order/fragrance industries, and we went down the rabbit hole discussing how this technology is being adopted at large, well-established companies.

Valerian Saliou’s Sonic search backend, Brandon Willett on how to build software like an SRE, DHH on why they’re leaving the cloud, Amos’ HTTP crash course nobody asked for & Sam Magura tells why he and the Spot team are breaking up with CSS-in-JS.

This week we’re talking with Will McGugan about using the terminal to not just build software, but also to deliver software. Will is a few months into his journey of building Textualize, a company he started around his open source projects Textual and Rich. When combined Textual and Rich give you a Python framework to build beautiful full-featured TUIs for the Terminal. We talk with Will about his big idea of the terminal as a platform, how he got here from first principles, what it takes to build Textual apps and whether or not they can replace not so good web admins, building, launching, and distributing Textual apps, why Python was his choiice of language, the big picture and business model behind Textualize, and why he’s building this as open source and in public.

What do Story of the Week, HeadLIES & Pro Tip Time have in common? They’re all games we play on this seriously ridiculous episode of JS Party!

In this episode, we’re joined by tech Lawyer Luis Villa to explore the question, who owns code? The company, the engineer, the team? What about when you’re using AI, Machine learning, GitHub Copilot… is that still your code?

Few genuinely need a multi-cloud setup. There is plenty of advice out there which mostly boils down to don’t do it, you will be worse off. Vex.dev is a startup that provides APIs for video and audio streaming. The hard part is real-time combined with massive scale - think hundreds of thousands of concurrent connections. They achieve this by using a combination of Fly.io, AWS and GCP. Jason Carter, founder of Vex Communications, is joining us today to talk about the multi-cloud setup that vex.dev runs.

The Open Podcast Prefix Project is a free and open source podcast prefix analytics service committed to open data and listener privacy. This hits close to home for us in a couple ways, so we invited the project’s creator, John Spurlock, Backstage to learn more about it.

People are starting to wake up to the fact that they have control and ownership over their data, and governments are moving quickly to legislate these rights. John K. Thomson has written a new book on the topic that is a must read! We talk about the new book in this episode along with how practitioners should be thinking about data exchanges, privacy, trust, and synthetic data.

We revisit our Harmonai story from last week, Jamie Tanna reviews posting his salary history publicly, Sid Sijbrandij’s new (open core) venture fund, Zed Shaw thinks Stripe is like Paypal in 2010 & Helix is a new Rust-based terminal.

Docusaurus maintainer Sébastien Lorber joins Jerod & Amal for a deep-dive on everybody’s favorite documentation generator. It’s back with a big 2.0 release, boasts some big users, and has a big set of new features such as document versioning, a plugin architecture, and more.

This week we’re talking about serverless Postgres! We’re joined by Nikita Shamgunov, co-founder and CEO of Neon. With Neon, truly serverless PostgreSQL is finally here. Neon isn’t Postgres compatible…it actually is Postgres! Neon is also open source under the Apache License 2.0. We talk about what a cloud native serverless Postgres looks like, why developers want Postgres and why of the top 5 databases only Postgres is growing (according to DB-Engines Ranking), we talk about how they separated storage and compute to offer autoscaling, branching, and bottomless storage, we also talk about their focus on DX — where they’re getting it right and where they need to improve. Neon is invite only as of the recording and release of this episode, but near the end of the show Nikita shares a few ways to get an invite and early access.