The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - CROSSOVER — Turing-Incomplete (Interview)

Episode Date: September 11, 2015

The entire crew behind Turing-Incomplete podcast joined the show to talk about the history and focus of their show, the ins and outs of technical podcasting, software industry trends, and more.

Welcome back everyone. This is The Change Log and I'm your host Adams Dekowiak. This is episode 173 and on today's show we're joined by Pam Selle, Jervon Darry, Justin Campbell and Len Smith, the folks behind Turing Incomplete. It's a new podcast which can be found on the web at Turing.cool. Great show today where we connect with fellow podcasters out there discussing open source software development, podcasting, building community, and more. We had four awesome sponsors, CodeShip, Imagix, Harvest, and also Sentry. Our first sponsor is CodeShip.

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He's going to use Codeship as a demo tool. The URL to learn more about that API training is in our show notes, so check those out. But now, on to the show. All right, everyone, we have a bit of a show lined up today. Today's show is cool. It's a crossover show where we connect with fellow podcasters out there to discuss open source, software development, podcasting, building community, and more.

And today, Jared and I are joined by the folks behind Turing Incomplete, which can be found on the web at Turing.cool. So please welcome Pam Selle, Jafon Dury, Justin Campbell, and Len Smith, and obviously, Jared Santo. Everyone say hello. Thanks for having me. Of course we do. Hey.

So I guess the easiest way to open this one up is, is this your first time being on somebody else's podcast? It is for me. This is Justin. For me, no. Pam. It is for me. Trevon. And me,

Len, as well, too. Okay. So, Pam, what show are you on? Shop Talk. Oh, awesome. show are you on? Shop Talk. Oh, awesome. Love those guys by the way. Yeah,

they're really fun to record with. That show's live, right? Mm-hmm. So is that super stressful for you or just amazing? No, it's pretty fun

and the only thing is because it can be a little distracting watching the chat flow by. Mm-hmm. So you kind of have to, I would have to just kind of minimize it because people are chatting while you're talking, which is normal

but hard when you're trying to be the one talking. We've flirted with live, haven't we, Adam? We have definitely flirted with live. We've held hands. We've gone out on several dates it just hasn't stuck honestly it's a good idea in theory but i think this kind of show typically maybe not this particular episode but this show in general just seemed to work out better when it was sort of like a a one-to-one or a one-to-a-few uh conversation so that's that way it's tighter, more intimate, less pressure to perform, I guess, for a crowd

when it's live. And then also, if you listen to Dan Benjamin or anybody else who does live shows, the numbers on live shows continue to dwindle while the subscribers and podcast listeners on the actual shows continue to go up. And so, depending upon the show type, live can work for you if it's like if it's part of the dna of the show and where it's this show was never originally live so it kind of never stuck for us i think when we start talking about live i assumed you meant like

sitting at a table in front of a crowd and that i i would be really nervous doing that that too that's tough That'd be even worse. Before we get too far into things, we're going to spend a little bit of time getting to know everyone. So a bit of an intro, a little bit of history. So we'll start from the top, which is Pam. So Pam, can you kind of introduce yourself to the audience of The Change Log and kind of give a bit about who you are? And if you want to mention

your birthday last week you're welcome to. Oh well you know since you mentioned the national holiday my birthday was last week so just in case anyone missed it you can mark it for next year. So I'm a developer in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I am known on the internet for a few things, notably for JavaScript. I speak at JavaScript conferences pretty often. My latest talk is about the stream's data structure and how awesome it is. And that's where we met when I gave that talk at Nebraska JSConf. And I also, in real life, I also run a JavaScript meetup. In Philadelphia, we have over 1,000 members.

And we also run a JavaScript conference here, two years running. And I also wrote a book. And I record with these folks on Turing and Complete. So, I do a lot of stuff. Also, I'm working on another book. Wow. What's your book about? It's Finding Your Next Job as a Developer.

How do you do it? It's a how-to guide. Can you give us a secret? We'll let people read the book to find out. Sure. I mean, the secret is that you can apply for jobs the really frustrating and inefficient way of gathering a resume and putting a cover letter together and then emailing people who don't care about you who will never call you back. Or you can approach it in a systematic way that will, with a plan, with, you know, like, because there is a way to do it. And that's really what the book is.

It's like, you know, you can disagree with the way to do it. It does involve a lot of networking. And, you know, that's like literally, so you know how everyone always says, like, most jobs are found through networking, according to BLS data, which the way that number is derived is eh. But anyway, about 70% to 80% of jobs are found through networking, but then no one tells you how to do it. So what this book is, is specifically for developers, here is how it works.

And if you follow these steps, this is how it works, and it should work for you. Very interesting. Yeah. and if you follow these steps this is how it works and it should work for you very interesting yeah quick google search didn't lead me to it with that uh finding your next job as a developer so we'll have to get the link from you uh no it's i don't have a i actually don't have a book page where i'm still very much writing it but if you go to the web of war which is my blog i i have a mailing list there and I'm sending out updates to that mailing list. So that's where the first beta will be announced. And there's a few posts leading up to that. I did find a link to burn your resume when doing that Google search, which was to the same site you just mentioned.

So I assume that's where we can send people. Yep. Fantastic. All right. Jervon, let's go with you. Oh, man, it's go with you. Oh, man, it's hard to follow up after Pam.

I'm a developer in Philadelphia and I organized PhillyRB, which is the Philadelphia Ruby user

group, and I'm on Turing Incomplete. And that's about it. That's about it, huh?

On the internet, you can find me at Jervon no books no books Pam doesn't involve me in her book writing Jervon also speaks about ClojureScript yeah I was going to mention the Clojure thing too

well we just had an episode on Clojure last week we had Karen Meyer Jervon you may know her as GigaSquid talking Clojure she spoke very episode on Clojure. Last week we had Karen Meyer. Jervon, you may know her as GigaSquid. Talking Clojure. She spoke very highly of Clojure's script. Yes, she sure did. She probably turned some heads, too, with thinking, like, I should do that. Yeah.

And she wrote a book, by the way, Jervon, if you didn't know. Living Clojure, right? Living Clojure, that's right. Pam's book is still in beta, so if you sweet talk her, maybe you can get a byline on that thing just there you go just a thought just a four word something you know prologue all right justin what do you think i've heard that if you have um sometimes if you have like a wikipedia page and you're not important enough to have wikipedia page you'll take it down but one of the things they need is a source, which is a newspaper or book.

So I guess if you write a book, you're important enough to have a Wikipedia page. That sounds like a route to take. A route to take. Is that your intro? No, I'm curious if Pat has a Wikipedia page or not. Okay. I wouldn't make my own Wikipedia page

how about a book about how to get a Wikipedia page that would be a good book how to get your own Wikipedia page and the first step is write a book and then step two is I guess I'm on Wikipedia now dot dot dot step three profit so easy so my name is Justin Campbell I'm a software developer also as all four of us are step to the profit. Yeah, exactly. So easy.

So my name is Justin Campbell. I'm a software developer also, as all four of us are. I work for a company called HashiCorp, which makes a lot of open source tools. And I work on a product called Atlas, which is trying to be GitHub for ops. It's an easy way to put it.

And I organize a software craftsmanship meetup in Philadelphia called Software as Craft. And occasionally I give conference talks, but I've been busy not doing side project things the past few months. I'm sensing a trend of Philadelphia too here. Yes. We're all from Philadelphia originally or from the past few years, except Len moved to Seattle a couple months ago. Yes. We're all from Philadelphia originally, or from the past few years, except Len moved to Seattle a couple months ago. Yes, I would say I'm a Philadelphian living in Seattle currently.

My heart's in Philly. Soon to be. I was wondering why you're not in Philly anymore. Oh, my partner moved out here for work, so I followed since I'm in software and can work wherever. Very cool. Awesome. Moved out here for work, so I followed since I'm in software and can work wherever. Very cool. Awesome.

So Turing Incomplete is a Philadelphia joint by way of Seattle. Yes. Why don't you guys tell us a little bit about the show. Let's start with kind of the genesis, and then we'll move on to the name, which I think is quite cool. And then the URL, which is literally.cool. I don't think we did a Len introduction either. Oh, we didn't? Kind of. Just said that I was currently in Seattle. Yeah, my name is Len Smith.

I'm a Rails developer, which means I write JavaScript all day. And yeah, currently in Seattle. There you go. There you go. Sorry about that, Len. I guess the start of Turning Complete, Jervon and I had talked about doing a podcast for about a year. And we were wondering who else we would want to be on the podcast. And Pam instantly came to mind as a friend of ours

and somebody who is well-known in the Philadelphia community. And we both worked with Len. And I didn't actually know that Len was interested in podcasting until we were mentioning it one day. And he said, oh, I tried to make a podcast before. both worked with uh len and i didn't actually know that len was interested in podcasting until we were mentioning it one day and he said oh i tried to make a podcast before and he already had like a logo and other things uh well no i didn't try i was always planning on it i'm just very bad at procrastinating okay commissioned artwork and always plan to do it so the four of us got just an approach me yes good sorry uh yeah i the four of us got together

and picked a date and just decided to record and the first one was pam was pam was an indian yeah i forgot about that a little description on how it got started huh well yeah that was okay though this one was absolutely awful uh we didn't but it was good it was a good practice run and yeah when justin approached me like i said i've been procrastinating for literally years and i'm like sure i'd be interested and he's like okay we're gonna record tomorrow so that was good and Episode one, TDD is dead? Yeah, that was right on the time that DHH gave his TDD is dead keynote. In which you guys mourn the death of TDD.

And then episode two, TDD is alive again. Absolutely. There's actually an episode zero that we recorded with another co-worker in front of ours, Dan McClory. That was episode zero, and that was never published oh not nice well that's what zero is for is you don't put it out there yeah that's the test run although in reality the first five are probably bad well you know that's the that's the fun thing with podcasting you kind of have to grow into it a little bit you know and it it takes i mean geez jared if we tell our history our first few are not bad but i think audio quality wise just in general from a podcast what what people know of a podcast today they think a little bit more higher quality a bit more put together whereas in 2009 it was just like if you got

audio on the internet that's audible it's a podcast what was that service that did the phone thing uh talk shoe remember a lot of podcasts in like 2009 2010 were recorded over like telephone yeah huh i don't know that one of our actually our first podcast had uh nat Natalie Weisenbaum in it. And at the time, the call had to be done via a phone, not from us, but for she. So that's how it worked out. Seems like podcasting is kind of like TV shows where certain ones have to kind of get their legs. If you judge it by the pilot, so to speak, you're not going to find too many shows that you like.

But you wait until like six episodes in or you wait even until season two sometimes in a traditional TV format and that's when things usually start to get interesting. Did you find it took just a handful for you guys to really gel? I think it took a handful for us to nail down the format.

I think we still do go back and forth on do we need a topic or should we do a topic? Should we go topic less? What is the format then? So right now, we mostly just talk for an hour or so on a call, the four of us, and we record and then we cut it together and do a show. Um, the first, I would say 20, 25 episodes, we tried to do a topic every episode if we weren't doing a guest. And for me personally, that ended up being really stressful trying to like pick a topic before we recorded. We have a lot of uh tension and anxiety about if we didn't have a topic yet like should we record and i i found like a lot of podcasts i listened to i really

enjoy the conversational style and just just kind of a friends hanging out uh style recording and it's really hard also to pick a topic every week and have it be a different topic when, you know, the four of us have, you know, at least apart from software development, have a diverse set of skills in software development now, but we're not an expert in that many things. When you have a guest, it's really easy to, you know, that guest is usually very qualified to talk on that subject and you can have different subjects every week. But for the four of us, I found it kind of hard to pick a topic and start talking about things we didn't know that much about but i know other people on the podcast really like to have a topic so when we talked before though pam you

said that y'all don't have a topic and you just sort of wing it is that still the case yeah i mean that's the case now yeah that's what we evolved into. I liked the topics, but so also our pattern for topics was kind of picking a noun. And then that would be the topic. And eventually we kind of, the well was starting to get thin on nouns that we felt like talking about. Or that we felt qualified to talk about. Yeah, I mean, there were, but now we just talk about things that were unqualified to talk about, so it all works out. Mostly Elixir.

Mostly, you know, Elixir and JavaScript frameworks. I guess that's sort of a part we kind of missed a little bit. Not so much a full-on deep, deep history of each of you, but I guess to get an idea of any show, like, for example, here at the Change Log, our roots are in Ruby. Jared and I are both in the Ruby community. We've been doing that for a very long time. What would each of you say to kind of the kind of program you are, or maybe even what your specialties are, what you love doing most? Does that play into the role you play

in the podcast? And i guess if you want to take turns here we can start with pam uh could you restate the question well just like just like uh you know what kind of software developer are you what and is that the same role each of you kind of play in you know i think i i'm a gryffindor but but sometimes people think I'm a Ravenclaw. Okay. And that's okay because, you know, I'm really clever. No, I don't really, I don't. So because I've done a lot of JavaScript development, I feel like when I get asked this question, I might be misinterpreting it, but I often read it as a subtext of someone saying,

okay, so you're a front-end developer. And that's all you'll ever be, and that's all you ever want to know. We're not trying to put you in a box here. No, no, no. Not at all. Generally speaking. What kind of stuff do you work on? I switched to a team where I'm doing something totally different.

I'm not really doing website development anymore, or working on things that end in a website. I'm working on the layer that supports other development platforms. Middleware. No, I don't think it would be called middleware, actually. It might be. Services. Let's just put it at that. Services, yeah.

Because other people write middleware that then uses this so it's the where in between the middle but I do think that like when we do have

a JavaScript question we go to either Len or Pam because they're more knowledgeable about JavaScript than

I mean Pam wrote a book on JavaScript yeah and getting hired now too obviously as a developer They're more knowledgeable about JavaScript then. I mean, Pam wrote a book on JavaScript. Yeah. Yeah. I'm getting hired now too, obviously, as a developer. So I guess what we're trying to do, we can go quickly through this,

but just trying to get a heartbeat of like a little bit about your background and how does that play into the overall aspect of like how you each and every week, you know, define what Turing and Complete is and what an episode is, whether it's a guested show or it's a winged show. Right, and also not just your programming background, but what your individual interests are and how that comes together. It's cool, you have some shows where it's interview style, it's topical. You have other shows where it's like, hey, it's for people who love programming and we talk about it, which sounds like that's the kind of show that Turing Incomplete is. Absolutely. And just to give our listeners a bit of an idea,

not like how the show goes, but just the people that they would be hanging out with, like what are your guys' interests and what are the kind of things that are talked about? We know that JavaScript is one of them, but I'm sure there's plenty of things that you guys dive into. We're interested in functional programming.

I think that's a bend that we're all interested in talking more about. Yeah, I listened to a show, I think it was number 59, Evil Leader, where there was a lot of Elixir talk going on. You guys have mentioned Elixir, I think by name, I think Jervon or Justin did. Who's the Elixir fans? And, you know, give us some information on why you're into that. I mean, yeah, for me, it's weird because we tend to talk about

what we're excited about, which isn't necessarily what we do all day. You know, what we do for our day jobs I think starts to get a little boring after a while and then we play around with something for a couple hours at night and that's what we're most excited about. I think for a bunch of us, that's been a really good summary of it. We do our day jobs, but we end up talking about

so we each have our own fence, which might be what you meant in your original question. I'm into JavaScript stuff and math stuff and new research that comes out. I'm into JavaScript stuff and math stuff and new research that comes out. I'm not good at security, but I'm trying to learn more about it. So that's something that always fascinates me. So any practical steps or even just tips you can give our listeners, anybody who else is interested in learning security? Have you made any progress or found any good resources?

You know, I try and I kind of, I follow a few more people on Twitter that I do, and I read their blog posts. I also joined the, so Simply Secure is a nonprofit that focuses, I would say they focus on usable security because the biggest hole in security is humans. And so by fixing user, well, by improving, if you've ever downloaded GPG tools, you will deeply understand

why such a nonprofit needs to exist to improve user experience. So if GPG tools is supposed to be a tool, so GPG tools is a downloadable suite of things that enables you to use PGP encryption technology, pretty good privacy, which is generally a good idea

because everything on the internet is like, all your emails are basically postcards flying over the internet. So if you want them to not be postcards, maybe you should learn a little bit about encryption or at least learn how to use it. And so Simply Secure is a Slack that a lot of people I think are really interesting are on.

So like BeCrypt is someone on Twitter who I think their stuff is really cool and they just joined the Slack. And so I'm like, oh my gosh, they're going to, you know, I can see what they're talking about. And there's different rooms on research and design and crypto. So you can kind of keep track of what people who I would think are experts think of this kind of stuff. Very cool. Javon, how about yourself? Interest either inside of work or outside of work, things that you dabble with in the development world?

What are you into? These days I'm really into Emacs and Clojure. Clojure Script seems easier for me to use at work or at my old job. But maybe Clojure will be easier now. I'm just having a lot of fun these days improving my toolchain, which is where Emacs comes in. We've been considering this show.

There's a little behind the scenes here at the changelog. We've had a show we've been considering, which is Editor Wars. It's a play on the fact that everybody gets so excited and passionate about their editor. But the idea is to get, you know, kind of three or four, not experts, but people who are kind of outspoken in specific camps of Vim and Emacs and so on, Adam.

And I have a short list of people that I like to have on, except for in the Emacs area, I'm not really sure who is a prominent Emacs user that people look to as a source of information or aid. Could you help me out with that? Is there somebody in the Emacs world that we should have on the show? Hmm, me? No, just kidding.

Tee that one up for you. I'm not sure. I'd have to look into that. I think who's the person who wrote Closure, Brave and True? I forget his name. But Technomancy, he wrote the line tool. He's really helpful on the Emacs channel. I think he also is involved with the ErgoDocs

keyboards. What are those? It's a very ergonomic keyboard that Len has. Okay. Len, you want to explain that? What's the... Yeah, it's just to basically make yourself

look really elite. It's like a split keyboard. Mine has no keycaps, and you can program it to do all kinds of things. It's like a split keyboard. Mine has no keycaps, and you can program it to do all kinds of things. So it's nice and ergonomic, and it has less keys than a normal keyboard, and you can basically switch layers. So basically, your arrow keys, your H, J, K, L, and Vim,

you can switch a layer and make those actual arrow keys, and then you can pop back up to a different layer. And there's all kinds of hacks that I haven't dived that deep into yet. That's amazing. You're so elite that you need less keys than everybody else. But I did want to mention about Emacs. I think the editor kind of making waves,

or the configuration making waves now, and what brought me on board to Emacs is SpaceMax, which is highly controversial in its world because it basically ships with complete Vim key bindings. And I was very skeptical of that because normally that means some movement keys work and a couple macros work and that's it. But it is like a very complete Vim

implementation. I was hacking around and absentmindedly because I just forgot that I was not in Vim. I used one of the plugins in Vim, a popular plugin called surround.vim and I did like change surrounding parentheses and it worked and that

just blew my mind. So it's a weird shift because a lot of people are coming to Emacs through SpaceMax, but it's basically Vim. And I think I even said recently that Vim is still my favorite. SpaceMax is just a better Vim than Vim is. So that's interesting. I'm an old time Vim user, but I'm one of the, by old time, I mean like 2001, 2002.

So I'm sure there's neckbeards who are way older than that. So I'm not that elite, but I'm one of the Vim users who doesn't like Vim. I have it ingrained in my fingers but I don't think it's that awesome. I mean, it's good. But I prefer, I actually use Sublime quite often and

as my main editor mostly I use Vim as kind of a secondary editor on servers. But one thing Sublime ships with is Vim mode, where you can use some of the Vim keybindings. So it kind of seems like it's a little bit similar to SpaceMax in the sense of it's like this merging of the two worlds. And at first I thought, that's amazing, I can use my Vim keybindings inside of Sublime.

But in reality, it didn't really work out so well. It was kind of like the Uncanny Valley, where it's so close to Vim without actually being Vim that it actually frustrated me nonstop. So I wonder how SpaceMax avoids that problem, or if you've actually felt the Uncanny Valley at all?

No, and I did feel the same thing. I tried to use Vim mode in Sublime and RubyMine, and you'll do something and it doesn't work, and then that's just the most frustrating thing. And I've found next to nothing that doesn't work in SpaceMax. Awesome. Yeah, we might need to get the SpaceMax developer on the show.

We actually had somebody ping us, Adam, about having SpaceMax on the show, and that kind of was what got me the idea of the Editor Wars show that would be a really awesome panel show too I think that I mean obviously everybody can bring their own rage and their own thoughts and walk away with nothing of course because that's how it always works

it's just like a tear up battle and everybody leaves and nobody gets really to a new side it's just sort of like everybody fights and nobody gets really, you know, to a new side. It's just sort of like everybody fights and that's really how it works out. But a lot of good conversation. We can avoid that.

I mean, there can definitely be good that come out of that. Well, for example, you just mentioned the Vim mode in Sublime and I'm sure there's tons of Sublime users out there that are listening to the show right now. They're like, what? It has that? Right. So now they're going to go check it out and sort of do the space max, you know, best of both sides kind of thing.

Mm-hmm. Well, we've definitely gotten a chance to learn a little bit more about each of you touring folks and see the backgrounds and the influences you bring to your show. We're going to take a quick break, and when we come back, I want to dive a little deeper into the parts of your show. Jared, I'm not sure if we got the full complete answer on what turning complete means. No. So maybe we can cover that and then love to dive into some of your goals. So let's take a break.

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about who the leader of this show might be. And there's some controversy. I'm not sure. Justin, you say it's Len. Len, you say it's Justin. Pam saying, I'm not going to do that. I'll just be on the show. Who's taken ownership of being the leader of Turing and Complete? Definitely Len.

He's the host. He edits the podcast. He cares a lot about, like, audio quality and editing, cross-talk out. He does a great job about that. It was Justin's idea and Justin's production, so I vote Justin. Although we do argue about it. Pam finds a lot of our guests.

Javon used to pick a lot of topics. So it's a team effort then. Yeah. It is. All right, well, let's team effort the if you want opinions you should get a justin okay now we're starting to get into the good stuff let's figure out the name of this show so the name of the show is touring incomplete and we all understand what touring is and the touring tests and things like that or maybe some

listeners do but if it goes back as far as to explain that, can we talk about where the name came from, and we'll dive into some deeper questions around the podcast itself and goals and things like that. Yeah, we were just throwing names around, and we thought it was funny. I think I might have suggested it. But yeah, Turing Completeness is a language that can essentially implement another language is Turing complete. Or more formally, anything that is effectively computable can be computed by a Turing machine or anything that is Turing complete.

So being incomplete means what for your show? What should your listeners and guests? We are not universally computable, I guess. I mean, it was just a really means nothing. It's just a play on words. Although the main thing is pretty awesome. Len picked that out that he found a Turing dot cool. Yes, that is a cool.

No pun intended. Well, actually, it is. That is cool. I like that. It's not as cool as ABC dot XYZ. Well, we're not up there. It's not as cool as ABC.xyz, but it's right up there. We're not all alphabet. So what are, I think when our listeners and any listener of any podcast, some come to this show for the technical content,

some come to it because of the person that's on the show. It's just really a mixed bash of why people listen to podcasts. But I know at some point in the back of everyone's minds, they're thinking, like, what's the point of the show? What are your goals for the show? Is it to get rich? What is it that drives you all to do this show for a year, once a week, accumulate 60 episodes, do a great job at producing the show and all that good stuff. What is it that drives you and what are some of your, do you have any goals?

Well, I would say probably half of our listeners are Philadelphia-based and they just know about us because we are a Philadelphia podcast. And there's only, I think, a few technical podcasts in Philadelphia. Yeah, my goals are just, I just enjoy recording with the other three people. And I just like talking about, I work remotely, so I don't get a lot

of face-to-face interaction. And just general chatting about technology. So I just really like every week just talking about whatever is on our minds. Same for me. I mean, I want to talk about software anyway, so why not just record it and make a podcast out of it? Well, it takes more time, more effort, more coordination,

just for a few reasons. It seems like I agree with that being a remote worker myself. One of the reasons I got involved in the ChangeLog was so I could talk to people about what I do. And being an independent contractor as well, I tend to work on projects by myself or in very small teams. And so I was excited to not just talk to people in the community, but also to get a chance to pick the brains of people who are smarter and way better at programming than I am.

So I definitely agree with that motivation. Yeah, and I think that... There's got to be more to it, right? Well, so for me personally, when I first had the idea of I wanted to record a podcast, a lot of podcasts I listened to were more surface-level software engineering and community and didn't really get into like technical details of things. And I don't know if we've succeeded on that goal of mine to a more technical podcast,

but that's one of the reasons I wanted to make a new podcast originally. So let's dive a little deeper into the topic then. And then one thing you guys said earlier, which is something, Jared, we sort of deal with this as a symptom of us is we're not experts in every subject matter that we cover here at the changelog so do you all feel the same pressure to somehow perform or be a subject matter expert or is it that is that what you lean on guests for yeah i think leaning on guests for that definitely helps we We've definitely had a lot of episodes where we just blabber about

whether it's JavaScript frameworks or languages we're trying or editors. Like, I don't think any of us have been using Emacs for more than a few months. Maybe Jervon's been using it for more than a few months. We talk about that a lot. We talk about JavaScript frameworks and things that we're just trying out

we talk about elixir a lot recently and i don't think any of us would consider ourselves experts in any of those topics so yeah we don't want to have any fear of just chatting about what we're trying do you think it's fair to say that to that you're all practitioners in said fields that you represent obviously and you're sort of coming together and just sharing notes to a degree and maybe diving a bit deeper into the unknowns of the knowns? Yeah, that's one way to put it, I suppose. Somebody else can maybe elaborate on that. Yeah, I think having guests is a good way for me to kind of get to talk to that person or give that person a reason to talk to me

and for me to pick their brains about whatever we both have interest in. And then originally I had said to Justin, we have all these interesting conversations. It would be nice to record them and go back to listen to them in case I forget or to share them. And then it's just a good opportunity to catch up or get valued friends' opinions on certain things.

What's the sequence of it? Is it weekly? Is it semi-weekly? Does it say it's weekly what's uh what's your frequency it's semi-weekly and we're still gonna see if we can schedule time that we record this week so we we aim for every week okay so that was jared that's kind of like us i mean we can lament a little bit with that because we did aim to be weekly. And I would probably say that we aimed to be weekly mainly because there was no one doing it full-time. And as of February this year, I stepped away from my full-time job at Pure Charity

where I was a product manager to finally step away to do the change all full-time. So I guess since then, Jerry, we've been pretty good at being consistent, wouldn't you say? Yeah, I mean, I think the game changes when a show is sustainable financially for somebody to put a full-time effort into it. And so I think that has really stabilized us and allowed us to ship an episode each and every Friday, which has been awesome. It's a good point about the financials too. Yeah, up until then, it's been awesome. It's a good point about the financials, too. Yeah, up until then, it's a struggle.

There's scheduling conflicts, especially with guests. It's difficult because you have guest scheduling conflicts. But I think with Turing Incomplete, probably your guys' scheduling is difficult because you have four regulars, right? It's more people to line up every week. Yeah, we just recently decided on a time that we're just going to record every week. And then we're going to ship the same day every week yeah we just recently decided on a time that we're just going to record every week um and then we're going to ship the same day every week so we've been doing that for a few weeks now and i think we've missed probably half of them or have to reschedule uh so we're still trying that trying to adjust to that well guidelines is what it takes though you don't

always have to like hit those marks but it's good to at least have them so you know what the expectation is of where you're trying to go you you know, some goals in place. So, Jared, you mentioned financials for us and that sort of allowed me to step away. Let's talk a bit about, I guess, financial matters for you all. When it comes to goals, is part of your goal to be sponsored? Will you ever be sponsored? Do you care about sponsors? Do you care about making money at this? We actually had I guess debates over whether or not we should be sponsored when we were trying to get stickers and sometimes we

debate editing if we should pay someone to edit and if we should get sponsorship for that. I don't think our goal is to make money from it. Maybe have it sustain itself eventually. But yeah, any other thoughts on that? I think right now we don't have the listenership

to really make that sustainable. And I don't think we, like, our show is much less edited than your guys' show. Like, talking about the time we put into it, basically my workflow is to take our Skype call and just run some filters on it and put it on S3. So our costs are very minimal. So we're not super worried about it.

If we did move to a sponsorship model, we would need to put a lot more production into it. I mean, this isn't the podcast method. We love Dan Benjamin around here. We're on 5x5, syndicated through 5x5. We've got a good relationship with them, and he shares tons of good advice. But I think at the same time, and Jared, maybe help me with digging deeper into this, but I feel like there's something that, not something good or bad, but something changes when it

does make money. It has to, or it needs to sustain itself. You know, there's some services to pay for, whether it's an editor, whether it's, you know, hosting services, whatever you can think of. I know S3 bills are really small when it comes to, you know, podcast weight, but there's something that shifts

when it becomes like a paid thing. Like you gotta get not so much more serious, but like an edge of professionalism that not so much y'all don't have but that you are required to have whereas now y'all can walk to it and say this is fun i enjoyed doing it had fun at the end of the day or if it you know got to the point where you all have said that you don't really want to go which is getting it sponsored it might make it too serious and take the fun or joy out of it what do you think i think that's where like len and i think justin are both kind of coming from i'm on team get money get paid but nice but like that's generally a life motto but i mean i respect the rest of the podcast decision

the Joker said it best if you're good at something don't give it away for free who said that? the Joker okay so okay I prefer to take my quotes from like Oprah or something you know maybe not

you know a deranged character well you know maybe not you know a deranged character well you know he did stab he did take the pencil and put it in the guy's eye and explain why that made sense because he made it disappear unless he's very logical is what you're yeah very very logical i'm with you though pan so take me deeper there so why are you on team make money team get paid what is it for you and and can we sway everyone else on this show now to to be on that same team yeah i mean it's that if so i mean it's the the question of can you take money and not compromise your integrity and i think that that that is kind of a personal level.

I mean, I would be, I guess the only contingency for being able to take money and keep your integrity is the ability to walk away if the money has to stop. And so as long as you're willing to walk away if the money has to stop. And so, I mean, we deal with this with the JavaScript meetup. Like if we, you know, we get sponsors and if ever a sponsor said, well, you know, we're, I don't know, we're terrible people and we want to discriminate against this person because of something about them that they can't change or something. And we're going to pull our money and we would say, okay, great. Take your money and leave.

Bye. That's what we would do. And that's how we would say, okay, great, take your money and leave, bye. That's what we would do and that's how we would maintain our integrity. And I think that that just goes for, I would apply that to every context. So I don't see a problem with taking money so long as, and it's a negotiation. You say, like when someone says, hey, we want to sponsor your meetup and we want to come and do a sales pitch to your people and we want to get their emails and their names and their phone numbers afterward, we say

no, because that doesn't jive with integrity for us. And so I don't see a problem with taking money in the podcast. Len doesn't think we could get money in the podcast. I think that we could get money in the podcast. I think we could, but I don't think it would be significant. The way the discussion was solved, I want to share this, is that I was like, alright,

I'm sure I can go get money and then we can pay for the stickers and stuff, and then Justin just put in an order for stickers. And that was how it was resolved. And it was fine. Because then we had stickers. And now we actually have a link where people can order their own sticker. That's true.

Very nice. What's the link? Yeah, what is that link? It's on the website, so it's right on the first page. Awesome. Turing.cool. Turing.cool. Let's just keep saying that domain as many times as we can because it's so.cool.

Very cool. Well, I think I like that you guys have thought through this. You know kind of where you stand. It sounds like if money or sponsorship presented itself to you, maybe it wouldn't be something you're antagonistic to, but not necessarily a goal. I'm not opposed to it, personally. Not too many people who are diametrically opposed to getting paid to do something they already are doing for fun. But have you guys ever heard the term pod fading?

Pod fading? I don't even know if this is still around. There is an urban dictionary for this. Is that what happens when we stop publishing? Yeah, so it's kind of this phenomenon where podcasts will fade away. And I saw some statistics a while back, completely unsubstantiated. I won't link them up

because I don't even know if they're 100% true, but the majority of podcasts will fade out before they hit double-digit episodes. You're either going to fail right away or you're usually going to stick around for a while. So we do have to take a... Speaking of sponsorships, we do have to take a break

to hear from one of our awesome sponsors. But when we get back, I want to talk about pod fading with you guys and maybe give tips and tricks on how not to fade out because you've made it to 60, which means you're statistically better than a lot of other podcasts out there. Yeah. So you're going to share all your secrets

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We are back with our good friends from Turing Incomplete talking about their podcast. And I mentioned before the break that many podcasts fade into oblivion. In fact, Adam, some controversy during the break. Yeah. Change log on the fringe of pod fading. What's your take? Man, we were so close. We were so close.

So if you do Google search for pod fading or pod fade, you'll inevitably find an urban dictionary definition of this and in part of that definition it says many podcasts deny their pod fade until it's too late and so part of the break was me i guess i don't deny the pod fade i but i i know i was denying it until it was too late. Like that really resonates with me because in 2012, August, 2012, uh, around mid month, um,

we stopped producing shows for our own reasons. And I, that's not the, the, the name of this show, but nonetheless, and we didn't resume until, you know,

who was it? What, which guest was that? Was it Justin or was it len that said we uh we rebooted that was oh yeah i missed oh yeah it was justin i agreed with it okay justin so justin said the change got rebooted right and i'm like i don't know about that so then there's that there lies the rub of me denying the fact that it was too late like to me we're just on a break you know it's kind of like boyfriend girlfriend it's okay

we're still together and we're gonna come back so well i haven't listened to the changelog before the break in quotation marks before it paid out yeah and then it and then it pod faded right and then uh and then i heard some news about oh the changelog is starting up again so that that implied to me like a reboot. So I don't deny it as a reboot. Internally, it doesn't feel like a reboot. It feels like just a change, you know, just a resumption of it, I guess.

So we're definitely in the pod fade definition there, Jerry, for sure. Well, what I was saying before the break is that, you know, even the changelog, when it began to fade, had been going for sure. Well, what I was saying before the break is that, you know, even the changelog when it began to fade had been going for years. And most podcasts don't last that long. They usually last... We were 84, episode 84 when we faded. Yeah, single-digit episodes in less than a year.

And, you know, the hosts decide that it's not priority, or they can't get it going, or it's not as fun as they thought it would. But Turning Complete lasted 60 episodes. And you guys haven't faded yet. Doesn't sound like you're planning on it.

So what I was asking before was maybe some tips and tricks. How do you guys keep it going? Always be recording. Always be recording. That's pretty much it. Yeah, that's a good going. I think we're on. Go ahead. Always be recording. That's pretty much a, yeah, that's a good going. I think we're on. Go ahead.

Oh, yeah. I mean, we had a rough patch when Len moved to Seattle. Okay. So dealing with time zone change and, you know. Time zones are hard. Time zones are hard. Very hard. Amen.

Why does the sun got to be sun? So did it fade a little bit? Did it fade at all? We definitely had, you know, non... I mean, Len does most of our editing, so yeah, we fade a bit. What if Len drops out? Are you guys done

dealing? I mean, would somebody else pick up the editing torch? I would hope if anybody else dropped out that somebody else would continue to record and work on it so i've i've edited a little bit too um i'm sure jervon and pam could definitely be capable of doing that not about timing but technology wise they could um yeah justin often offers to edit and then i get very disgruntled about how his process lens very protective And he gets disgruntled about mine too.

So my editing process is I write down timestamps when we're recording and then I work backwards and I just cut in the end and I cut out anything that I wanted to cut out and then I cut in the beginning and then I just run it

through a couple filters and I ship it. Len listens to the entire thing and takes out like ums and thes and much better final product but I have to imagine listens to the entire thing and takes out like ums and the and much better final product but I have to imagine it's also much more time

intensive. But even I don't spend that much time. My editing time is probably an hour or so. So I think that's the thing that helped us keep putting out shows because it's pretty low time commitment every week. It's an hour to record

maybe a half hour to plan uh then an hour to to edit the show and put up the events and justin uh bill middleman's site so it's a pretty quick process to deploy so all of our website is open source it's also on github at github.com slash Turing and Complete. And you can see the process. So it runs Travis. So we basically just post a new show. It goes to like our secret beta site.

And then if everything looks good, we can make a pull request and merge it. And then it just automatically goes live. That's an interesting process to be powered essentially by GitHub and Travis because we haven't gone that route. We sort of do it old school, I guess. We're still database-backed and all that good stuff. And I guess while we're on the subject of process, what exactly if someone was trying to replicate or follow in your footsteps,

what are some of the things that you've learned as part of your process that make it easier for four people in different time zones, some of the things that you've learned as part of your process that make it easier for four people in different time zones some in the same uh gather once per week and produce a show like what is the process y'all follow i would say pick a pick a time and show up every week so like for example uh recording that's probably the biggest question on some people's minds i mean like we have our own recording process and some people don't get it, some people do. Not so much the exact software, but what is, does one person record everybody, somebody edits it, and then maybe even some of the gear you all use, Skype,

what is it that powers your podcast? Yeah, so a lot of the things that I do are based solely on reducing the time involved to do it. So we use a Skype plugin called Call Recorder to record the podcast. So Len records

on his end and then I also record as a backup. Okay, that makes sense. And that has all of our voices in it and we just put it into Audacity and edit there and combine it all. And call recorder will automatically start recording when we start a Skype call so there's really no fear of like are we recording yet or not.

It just starts recording as soon as you start the call. What about like naming your file? Do you have some sort of special convention? Is it part of your system? Is it all detailed in your GitHub readme? Oh yeah, it's just the episode number. So we do Turing-incomplete-123. And then the episodes are all numbered in middleman blog format.

So we just have like 55, let's say, dot markdown. And then there's a YAML front matter on that, which has all the data about the podcast. Like, where is the MP3 located? How big is it? How long is it? What were all of our picks? So we generate all those from that file.

We also recently started using Etherpad. Oh, yeah, that's a good one. Do you want to talk about that? So Etherpad is a collaborative editing app from Mozilla and we have the standard format for a post in it as a default and then we just fill it in as the episode goes on and fill out the pics at the end of the episode. And then I guess we just copy it over to the file, right? We just create a file from the contents of it.

Yeah. So when we're recording and we're mentioning links, we're just copying and moving the links into there. So we're almost writing the show notes as we're recording. Very interesting. So because that, is it Ethopad? Is that what it is? Etherpad.

E-T-H-E-R-P-A-D. Okay. We use a, it's a, I forget what the actual open source product is called. It might be Etherpad. But there's a bunch of different installations you can use. And we use the one on Mozilla. So Etherpad.mozilla.org. Okay.

I just grabbed the.org one. I'll grab the other link and put it in our show notes. It's essentially like a Google Wave. Amazing. You guys should set up your own Wave instance for this. Don't you think? Does everyone get a chance to

log these links or is it sort of you and Justin, it sounds like you and Lynn doing this? No, everybody records them. And it saves time for whoever is doing the editing to have everything already in the show notes. What about file size?

How do you get that? Is it just a simple thing in the command line and then you copy and paste? Or is it like, do you run a command like a rake task, for example, and it looks at the file and generates this front matter and middleman yeah i've we should automate that i've had my to-do list for like i don't know since we started recording that it'd be really cool if i could just like put the mp3 in the right place and run a command and it would fill in the size and length and upload it um interesting so i mean that jared some of this reminds me a little bit of

of how we evolve weekly because when we talk about pod fading there's also there should be like newsletter fading because that's what happened there we almost did that too yeah we've been down all roads we ship a weekly email called change law weekly it's such a novel name um and for it was also built on middleman so we we have kindred spirits in that regard um i was using erb i was doing it alone at the time uh it was all get based obviously each issue was basically an entire each commit was an entire issue because i didn't think it was enough to be autonomous or atomic and just like put you know a one-liner as a commit just to make

any sense but similar in the fact that i was like handwriting erb at least not so much straight html but pretty dang close and it uh you know i would use ruby to you know to automate some things but it just wasn't quite the case and then uh in comes Jared and saves the day and says, hey, we can actually use Trello to act as our CMS. I've got this idea. Let me poke around with it. And before you know it, we're using Trello as a CMS to generate our newsletter, which could be very similar to how you all do your podcast or anybody could do a podcast.

Because if you're using Middleman, Jared, you could probably speak to the ruby behind this but it's a rake task that gets ran ruby behind it hits the trello api uh pulls back uh the json good jared you talk about that part no you drilled it man that's basically what happens is just you know maybe 150 200 lines of ruby using the Trello API that just transforms our lists and cards in Trello into the appropriate HTML for Markdown to serve. We ship that off to Campaign Monitor.

Trello is basically a title, a description, so it's much like a blog post. You can gather some of that and we use labels to add a sponsor flag or a draft flag, for example, if it'll want to go into the issue. But we also had to iterate there because we had some issues there that Jared was like, what?

You got sponsors and you got drafts. Okay, we'll have to fine-tune that. So back to the drawing board and more commits later. It supports it, but that was a really interesting turn for us to newsletter fade and then bring that back. Because it was away six months, wouldn't you say, Jared? It seems like six months is the magic number for us to let something fade and come back. Yeah.

And I think there was just so much friction and there was no collaboration. I mean, I couldn't even help. I could just send Adam links and be like, here's a good one. Hopefully you put it in there, buddy. Right. No team. Trello has built-in users. It has built-in collaboration tools, app messaging.

We can put comments in there. I can put a link in and tell Adam, I don't have time to write the blurb, but make sure you mention this. And then the comments just get dropped out when we ship the thing. So there's all sorts of mobile access. You can email and stuff to a board. So tons of tools that are there to be had. And it really helped us out in that regard. Yeah, I never thought about building the podcast

and the show notes around it, but I'm sure you could definitely get that done. It was just the tools we knew. There seems to be some pretty nice hosted podcast services now. I don't know the names of any of them, but it seems like it's a lot easier to get started now. The barrier to entry for podcasting today as compared to when I very first started podcasting, which was

2007 to even 2009 when the change law began is night and day. Like there's services, there's hosting, just like, you know, with our worlds as developers, like the, the world's flattened quite a bit. There's things that were very costly five years ago that are almost free or basically fear or free mostly. And it's just not, it's crazy how things have progressed that way so it's interesting to kind of get a peek behind your process not so much just the technical side of like uh we use

xyz mic but no like how you actually host your site and ship your shows and gather notes and make it collaborative and make it you know ultimately fun even though Pam is in the make money, get rich camp. Don't put her in a box, Adam. No, no boxes for Pam. No boxes. One last question on process before we move on. Curious how you guys get your download stats out of your S3 bucket. Just turn on logging and write your own little parser? Or is there a service you use for that?

We don't. No, yeah, I have parsed. Len actually texted me before recording this episode and asked me to get the most recent stats because last time i got them was maybe in april or march of this year okay um but yeah so we have feed burner stats that len looks at um itunes as as most people know like does not provide any analytics. Right. And, yeah, so we do have logging on the bucket. I haven't looked at it recently. Feeber says, what, 500 LIM? I haven't looked at it in a while, but it's been like, yeah.

The downloads are like way more than Feeber. Yeah, downloads say like about like 2,000, I think, on average now. Which is not a ton, but we're happy with it. So yeah, podcast analytics is really tough. Yeah. No joke. How do you get numbers out? Well, right now we leverage, well, prior to being syndicated by 5x5 and moving there, we were using Buzzsprout, which is a great service we love those guys they're from florida uh really great software developers awesome service that's been stable

for years uh it's affordable uh really easy to use and it gave stats but they weren't always fully accurate and then we saw a pretty big shift um i guess for the negative we went to five by five because we were seeing like 60 70 000 80 000 listens on shows and buzzsprout and we go to five by five and it's it kind of normalized at like 25 000 plus per show on on a good average and i don't know how dan does it but i know dan uh is a rubyist at, and that's where he kind of lies. And he's a software developer as well as a voice on the radio. So he was able to build FeetLayer, which is the back-end stats app that tracks all of 5x5. And so we have access to a dashboard that lets us look at every single episode and look at a few graphs that sort of give us more insight.

And I know Dan's currently working more and more on that. I won't release any secrets because I don't know any, but I know he's doing something more in that space that is interesting. So that's a hard subject. The hard, I mean, the hardest part about it, I think, and the reason why 5x5's stats tend to be lower and probably more accurate is that the way that podcast clients do downloads, it's not like a one-to-one. You can't just count a request as a download because they have these range requests

where they're basically splitting the file up into sections and downloading it in sections. And you got to be able to stitch those all back together in order to actually count a download. And it seems like a lot of services out there don't have that quite figured out. And Dan says that he's put time into getting that, you know, 100% accurate or as accurate as he can. So it goes back to what you all said, too, about taking money and being obligated.

Right. Five by five is a forprofit venture. So Dan wants to be conservative when it comes to those numbers so that when he tells sponsors or we tell sponsors, ourselves as well as independent, hey, this is what our listenership is. It's conservatively accurate. It's probably more than that, but Dan's conservative, so I think that it's a good number to, it's a safe number to easily tell publicly that isn't boasting or over-inflating the number yeah there's a lot of request types that we get on s3 um some are range requests some are the full file some are uh head requests just asking for metadata out of the file we also noticed that our website the mp3

player actually downloads it looks like a download even though the play button wasn't pressed oh uh so we have a hard time time actually parsing all that. So if we were to go to an advertiser, we would probably need a more accurate number than we have now. Right. Even if you have downloads too, it's not really guaranteed that people are actually listening to the podcast. That's the problem, right? There's this discrepancy between their client downloading it and an actual listen. And there's one nice thing that iTunes, or I guess the Podcasts app now does, or at least it used to.

I don't use it personally, but it will stop downloading new episodes if you haven't listened to the last three or something. So it actually won't just continue to perpetuate that subscription. Yeah, the iOS app does that. Yeah, which is better than the alternative of once they subscribe, it's just continually going to download all your episodes but but like you said you cannot actually um derive a listen from a download which is unfortunate so even if you get those download numbers really well you're still ballparking it you know though on the importance of it though unless it's it has to be spot on accurate right it's more or less just information to make better choices. That's all metrics are in the first place, right?

Like it's data driven. It's not like you're going to live or die by two or three listens or a hundred or a thousand listens. It's just like it's better informing you of the quality of each show. And you can go back and look at those shows and say, well, we had this topic. Or in your case here, these are the five shows you won it and this is the five shows we had guests and those guest shows perform better. Maybe we should lead more towards guest-based shows and, you know, less wing it shows. And so it's just better information for you as hosts and organizers of this podcast, just like conferences have an obligation to do a good job,

you, to a degree, have an obligation to do a good job as a podcaster, and that helps inform you and everyone else involved. Yeah, we knew that our analytics were way off when we had Corey Haynes on, and the week before Corey Haynes was on, we had a large spike, and then Corey Haynes was like a dip. He had retweeted that he was on the podcast. I don't know. Something's wrong there, yeah. Something's definitely wrong. We still never figured that mystery out.

But I'm sure the spike was Corey's episode. Yeah. I was going to give a quick shout-out to a service that I found which has helped me a little bit get just analytics out of S3, which is called CloudStat. It's spelled with a Q.

Q-L-O-D-Stat. It is a paid service, and this is not a sponsored mention or anything, but I was able to turn on logs, point this at my S3 account, and even on their free tier, they allowed for some a little bit easier browsing of the history of downloads and stuff and sorting and filtering, so you don't have to resort to programming. Just throwing that out there. It might help you guys get your stats without having to ask. You have to ask Justin, or Lynn has to ask Justin,

or Justin has to ask Lynn, or one of those two. Our first few months, we were really obsessed with our listeners when we had 60 or 70. And now, it's probably been months since we looked. like a few months we were really obsessed with our listeners when we had like 60 or 70 and now i mean it's probably been months since we looked so without sponsors without anyone wanting to know those numbers we basically stopped looking and yeah i've been comfortable with where we're at that's people at conferences all the time and they come up to me and say you know i listen to the podcast and i'm always blown away by that so yeah it's a it's some significant number. Well, we've gotten to hear from a few of you this last 25 minutes or so.

When we come back from this break, because we do have one more sponsor. We love our sponsors, by the way. And if you want to support us, the best way to support us is by supporting our sponsors. So let's take this break real quick. We're going to come back for our closing questions and a couple other we have up our sleeve. So we'll break now. Be right back century is logging the way it should be a brand new sponsor here at the change log we met these guys at gopher con love what they're doing they're dogfooding their own product and

they're doing some awesome stuff well century is a real-time error logging platform that gives you the insight you need into the errors that affect your customers. It surveys your errors, helps you gauge severity and frequency, and then gives you the information you need to get them fixed. It works on nearly every platform, including JavaScript, Ruby, iOS, Go, Python, and many more. And the best part is Sentry is open source. You can install and host it yourself, or you can make your life easier

and start a hosted plan at GetSentry.com. Once again, that's GetSentry.com. All right, we are back. This is the closing of the show, pretty much. We got the last 15 or so minutes here. A lot of great questions. Some of our fan favorite questions that we ask here on the changelog but we also got a couple other ones and in your show turning complete you have what's known as pics and i

thought we'd reverse that here on the show today and instead instead of doing pics what's your favorite episodes of your own show and so pam let's start with you and figure out what your favorite show is that you all did. Okay, so I'm going to pick one, but I reserve the right to mention other ones at the end if people don't pick my other favorites. Okay. So I'm going to pick number 37 with Propositions as Types with Brian McKenna. And so that is where, so I've met Brian McKenna a few times at conferences. And he's also Australian, which always surprises me when I talk to him

because I forget and then he sounds Australian. But so what we did is he was talking about the Proposition as Types paper, which is, now I forgot the author. But it's a really cool paper. Philip Wadler. And so it's a paper that covers this interesting idea. And basically, I brought Brian McKenna on the show to explain it to us.

So it's my favorite episode. I thought it was really fun to read a paper. I know the other podcast members might disagree with me, but I really liked that episode. So number 37. And you can get it to any episode. It's touring.cool slash the episode number. And we'll link it up in the show notes too,

just so everyone's listening to that. And y'all know when you listen to the show, you got show notes to go with it and links as well. But Jervon, what do you think? Are you with Pam on that one? Or you got a different one? I have a different one.

I think I'll go with episode 28, uh, with Kelsey Gilmore. I think I was going to be mine. Oh my gosh. That was totally, that was one of the ones I was torn about. So good.

So universally, I guess, uh the ones I was torn about. So good. Moonlots are metal. So universally, I guess. That one was really funny. It was really good. I don't know what we talked about, but I had to go. Dog farts. It's a winner. Alright, Justin, what do you think?

You got your own? I was going to pick Kelsey Gilmore in this, and I got to find something else. I had a really good time. I'm going to pick a Gilmore-Innes, and I got to find something else. I had a really good time. I'm going to pick a few and possibly screw one over. I had a good time talking to Mudit Ameta on episode 57. And also, recently, we talked to Raquel Velez from the Reactive podcast. Your latest show, right?

62? No, 61. And that was really cool too um but i would suggest if you want to get a like a typical podcast for us pick one any of them without a guest read my recommendation all right i guess uh bring it home len what do you think yeah so i think my favorite topic in general to get out of people is kind of their origin stories, what makes them the type of developer they are. And for us, that was episode three. Yeah, it's really bad.

We were really bad at this. Is it good or bad? I like origin. I think the stories are good, but we were obviously new to podcasting and could have used a little more editing. What episode number was that? Number three. Number three, okay.

Origin stories. Origin stories, okay. I like that. And then I'd probably say the Corey Haynes episode, especially since I was the only one on video watching him run around his apartment the whole episode. And he's also talking about my favorite topic, which is also the four rules of simple design. Very cool.

Is that episode three, too? Is that a different one? I don't see him in a list of... That's episode 22. 22. Okay, let me log that one then. Okay, 22. Corey Haynes.

Okay, cool. Simple design. Nice. All right. that one then so okay 22 cory haynes okay cool simple design nice all right well one of my back pocket ones was is another one without a guest is the number 34 the 2014 retrospective because i i like i like end of year retros i was we're kind of in a little bit of a synergy there because my favorite was 55 the it's not a retrospective it's a recap it's the gopher con recap in a way it wasn't the only

thing y'all mentioned on that show but it was it was something that I didn't were any of you at that conference I was yeah okay so we were there too and we didn't meet and that's a bummer I was uh yeah very anti-social did you see us at least i did see you over on the side recording okay we're hard to miss and you didn't come say hi now i'm really bummed i was in my laptop the entire oh man week actually all of hashi corp was uh that's true in denver uh well we did talk to mitchell we got him on camera as a matter of fact when we we're so close to getting – we're waiting for the GopherCon peeps, Eric and Brian,

to approve everything we've produced for them. But we got several interviews, and one of those interviews is with Mitchell that might be released along with it. I don't know if they'll approve it or not, but great info from Mitchell. Jared, did you enjoy chatting with Mitchell? Yeah, absolutely. And we've had Mitchell on the podcast a couple of times in the past. So we're a big fan of him and HashiCorp and all that good stuff

you guys are doing over there. We were working there the entire week, even though the conference was only two days. So it felt more just like a work meetup than a typical conference for me. You had a big, I guess, attendance there. It was like 10 or so people, 15 people? Yeah, we were I think 14 people at the time, 15 maybe.

So everybody was there. Yes. Because the company was fully invested in Go. Yes. There you go. I believe one was having a child and another one was busy. So I lost track. Did we all answer the picks question?

Except for you. Oh, me? Yeah, you got to have a favorite show yeah okay very good so my favorite show is like 75 accurate no it's evil leader number 59 because well we got a Nebraska JS shout out in there nice y'all know I'm one of the organizers of that conference. So that's how Pam and I met back in August. And an evil leader, I think it was right before she left for it.

So it was kind of like a fly on the wall as she prepared to come to our conference. Which is kind of strange. But I enjoyed that one. I love the laid back, kind of like relaxed,

just chilling with friends atmosphere of your guys' show. And Emacs, it's preparing you for our editor war show. I like it when anybody talks about editors. Right. Absolutely. Cool. Let's move on to our next awesome question. And Pam, you may have answered this one at the conference

if we got you on Beyond Code, because this is one of our Beyond Code questions. And so that is, who is your programming hero and why? And we will start with Pam. I might have said Brian McKenna and Michael Ficarra. They're also really good friends. But yeah, they're kind of my functional programming mentors. And so I don't, I think I also, yeah, I did.

I responded to this then. That's right. I'm remembering. You don't like programming heroes. Yeah, because I don't really like heroes because everyone can be a superhero and we just all need to share knowledge and be nice to each other.

So. Amen. Yeah. All right, Jervon, how about you? I'm going to say Aaron Patterson, also known as Tenderlove, because he's just really funny and doesn't take life seriously. Or maybe he does. He's just really funny.

He's good with jokes, and he just seems like a really smart person. And he's punny. Yes, very punny. But I met him in person and he's also like that in person. So, good guy all around. We saw him at Keeper Be Weird last fall and they actually had a pun-off as one of the events of the night. I heard about this. last fall and they actually had a pun off as one of the events, which was, they had brought in some professional pun or pun makers.

I don't know. People would like one national competitions for puns, pun and haters, pun and haters. And, uh, you can get paid for that. No,

they're getting, they're getting paid. I did say professional, didn't I? I think they're like champions, but I still don't think they're professional. As professional as you can get. Yeah, like the winners of competitions and punning.

But I'm pretty sure they may have won a prize, but I'm not sure that they're getting paid full time to write puns. Although I probably wish they were. Anyway, the point being, Aaron was a part of that. And it was pretty awesome. Let's move on now. I think Justin's next. Justin, who's your programming hero and why? I don't know.

I guess also Aaron Patterson and Corey Haynes and the late Jim Weirich. I really like people in the Ruby community that were not only, I guess, I guess, leaders of, you know, open source and the technology side, but also kind of emanate, you know, positivity. Also, José Valim. And I guess I really like the stuff that Kyle Kingsbury is doing with distributed systems. Can you go into detail on that?

I'm not familiar with him or what he's up to. Oh, yeah, he's at Afir, A-P-H-Y-R on Twitter. Definitely check out his Twitter feed. He does a lot of things that are related to... He has this series of blog posts called Call Me Maybe, where he uses a piece of software he wrote called Jepson to break distributed systems, where you write a value to one node and then cause a network partition. Partition.

Yeah. And then rejoin the network together and then try to read from a different node. So in systems such as HashiCorp's console, where you write a value in one node, you expect to be able to read it from all other nodes. It's a really hard problem to solve. So he has a lot of really great detailed posts about how different systems behave under network partitions. And also some great conference talks.

Awesome, definitely have to check him out. Len, on to you. Who is your programming hero and why? Yeah, I was going to pick Uncle Bob Martin kind of for the opposite reason of Justin. He can definitely be angry and crotchety about professionals being not professional. And I think we need more of that in our industry

because we are still often really bad at software. And I love when Uncle Bob goes on riffs about being more professional. Uncle Bob is also a podcaster too, right? Or vlogger, something-er? He does have a video series. Yeah, okay. I knew it was something for his other series. Yeah, he also appears on many podcasts.

There you go. As a guest. Definitely some great answers to the hero question, Jared. There you go. As a guest. Definitely some great answers to the hero question, Jared. I like that. Some of those synergize with what we get back from Beyond Code

and also past shows too. So there's definitely some synergy amongst software developers that come on the show. Another fan favorite show or question we ask on the show is

what is on your open source radar? It could be a project. It could be a paradigm. it could be a project it could be a paradigm it could be a topic just something that's out there in the software development open source world that that if you had a weekend and you can hack on it or hack with it what would it be and and why so we'll start with pam again we'll go back down the same list so my favorite first open source thing I'm watching. Is that the question?

Yes. So I'm RxJS Next. So RxJS is a reactive programming library that is, I think, the best reactive programming library for JavaScript, but it is really hairy

in its current form rxjs next is going to be a lot lighter uh and hopefully more performant and lots of other fantastic things and so that's the one i'm checking out very cool is this something that you've played with so far or you just haven't even touched it yet you're just're just like, I can't wait until I can. Oh, no. I mean, I actually am contributing a little to it. Okay. Very cool. All right. Next, I think we have Jervon. Jervon, so just to ask the question again, what's on your open source radar?

If you had a free weekend and you can hack on it, what would it be? Open source radar. So I think I'm in two spaces right now. Programming-wise, I would say Clojure. Just toying with whatever libraries that I come across. I've been trying to get back into the kind of Ops-y operational world. So I've been playing with Docker again and just seeing what's new with it. So Docker. Yeah, Docker and CoreOS are things I want to play with.

Anything in particular with Docker or CoreOS? I know there's lots of nuances and facets. So what's got you excited? So I have not used CoreOS, but recently I spun up something on DigitalOcean and CoreOS was one of the options to pick from. So just figuring out the use cases for that or my way around it. And Docker is just catching up. So I used to be really into Docker when it came out

and some things have changed or ways of doing things. So I'm just catching up on that now. So yeah. have changed or ways of doing things so i'm just catching up on that now um so yeah so back in episode 138 of this very show changelog.com slash 138 we talked to alex we talked this is kind of early so this was january of this year and uh a lot of not so much a lot has changed i mean at least they wait the way they spell rocket has changed and other things and the new alliance with Docker and all that with the Open Container spec and runtime. So we did have a show there. So if you haven't listened to that one, go back and listen just to hear a bit about Alex.

He's always fun to have on the show. We've actually had a couple other smaller chats with him just about different announcements since then because we love kind of keeping our ear to the ground of that space a lot of changing happens so it feels good to kind of keep in touch with it all right uh justin what about you uh programming or not programming hero uh we did that already my bad almost almost yeah open source radar uh if you had a free weekend what's what's got you excited uh if i had a free weekend, what's got you excited? If I had a free weekend or a lot of free weekends, which I have no free weekends because I'm a parent,

I would love to play with robotics a little more. We recently had Raquel Velez, who was part of the NodeBots project, I believe. In her past life, she was a roboticist. And now she works for NPM, which, you know, then NodeBots are a natural crossover. Right. Yeah, listen to that episode where we talked about, like, autonomous, you know, robots and all kinds of, like, really cool stuff and, like, AI. So that stuff's really interesting to me.

I don't know much about it. And I've not programmed many things other than like blinking a light on a raspberry pie, uh, for like hardware hacking. So I've had this idea I've been obsessing over for the past week or so where I want to build a autonomous lawnmower because, uh, who wants to cut their grass? Exactly. And the commercial options, uh, are all have like really terrible reviews and they're really expensive. And I figure cost-wise, it probably wouldn't be too expensive.

And it seems like a really fun problem to code. How do you know when to turn around? How do you know when to go back to charging? How do you not drive into the street and actually stay on my lawn? I've always wanted that. Yeah. It just sounds so dangerous. You live in an apartment. Well, I used to have a lawn before.

At one point in time, I did have a lawn. So, Justin, you were at Go4Con, right? Yes. And did you do the Hack Day portion, or did you bail? I did not. I flew home Friday, so I missed that. But I was considering most likely writing

whatever I write for a lawnmower in Go. Seems like a nice language for that. Other things I like that... What makes you a good fit? Yeah, yeah. Kind of more friendlier embedded systems language.

Okay. The other thing I'd like to do if I had free time is rewrite all my Rails projects in Elixir and Phoenix. Ooh. But I will never have time to do that. Definitely starting new projects in those languages, in Elixir and with Phoenix. But probably not worth rewriting everything I already have.

So is it safe to say when you start a new project that you would have done in Rails, it's going to be in Elixir? From now on, definitely. Okay. Interesting. I have a suggestion for you, Justin. You should find a high school or a middle school that does US-first robotics

and you can kill two birds with one stone by helping younger kids and robotics. Ooh. That's not a bad idea. And with his lawnmower, his robotic lawnmower, he probably will grow two birds.

Yes. Yes, he will. Good one, Javon. It's always really intimidating for me to approach a school and try to set up some kind of teaching. I've been mildly involved with an organization in Philadelphia called Tech Girls with a Z who tries to do teaching for, I think, middle school age girls and trying to get them excited about programming.

I definitely want to get involved, but it's like hard to, you know, I don't have any kids of that age in school yet. So it's hard to like approach a, I don't have any kids of that age in school yet, so it's hard to approach a school locally and try to... So it's usually like an after-school club, and there's already teachers and programs and money and a curriculum,

and you just have to provide your expertise or help drilling holes. Exactly. Just show up. Alright, Len, you're last on the list here. So if you had a free weekend and you can hack on something in the open source community, what would it be on? So for me, I think I mentioned most of these before,

but I currently have three E's, Learning, Ember, Elixir, and Emacs all at the same time. I never have a free weekend, but I found that when I want to hack and all these things I'm excited on, I've been thrashing a lot because I never know, like, am I writing really stupid elixir? Probably. And I just thrash on it. So actually last night I signed up for livecoding.tv and started streaming, which is oddly a lot of pressure, even though there's like eight people watching you.

But I had eight people watching me and I had so much pressure and I had no idea what I was doing. It was good for me because it stopped me from bike shedding and I just tried to make progress and wrote a crappy elixir code. Well, that's really all we had on our docket for the show. Is there anything that we might have missed that was on any of your plays? You're like, we had to talk about this and we just missed it? I would say one thing that we missed about the pod fading is we all kind of push each other. So if some of us don't want to record that week, one person is always like, we should record.

So if you have a teammate, podcasting yeah encourage each other okay peer pressure yeah yeah i always good peer pressure i'll announce this i always feel like i have to like um because once we're done with the show it's pretty much in my court right jared like if it doesn't go out it's because i didn't do it right it's only recently because aaron took a full-time position with sean west uh new podcasting network it's seanwest.com doing great work over there we miss him did a great job helping us with this show but the the show's now back in my court to sort of deal with i like doing it it's a lot of fun and if we don't deliver it i I feel like I'm letting Jared down. I can't let Jared down. I'll throw sad face emojis at you.

Sad face, man. Super sad faces. Pod fading is a real thing. I will admit it now. It's true. It does happen. We've made progress in this show. During this show, yeah. The next step is, I don't know what the next step is.

Recovery. Consistency is the next step, which we are achieving. We've been consistent this entire year. We talked to you guys about being sponsored, and we are sponsored. So this is not boasting. It's just saying, like, to go with Pam here, I'm in the, you know, make money camp. I think if you're doing something, you should find a way to make money Pam here. I'm in the make money camp. I think if you're doing something, you should find a way to make money from it.

But at the same time, don't feel like you have to. So there is a fine line there and do what is most comfortable for you. For us, we knew we wanted to take things to the next level and do different things. We have a lot more fun things that ChangeLog is doing. So we're doing ChangeLog Films. We're working with conferences. We're working with different partners and brands we're working with on the films

perspective like doing marketing videos and like we're going into engineering teams and learning more about them and their process and their community and the the stack they're working with a lot of fun stuff so it's getting us a chance to dive even further and even deeper with the people already already loving on in this community and we're here to serve the upstart community so we had to be sustainable and that is the name of the game when it comes to contributing is how can you do it in a sustainable way and for us we had to go the route of sponsorships and we don't think of it just like somebody giving us money we think of it like partners every every sponsor we have that you've

seen listed so code ship imagix harvest and all the other that you've seen listed, so CodeShip, Imagix, Harvest, and all the other sponsors you've heard on this show before are all partners of ours. They want to see the changelog do well and do what we do every single day, changelog weekly, changelog nightly, all that fun stuff. That's essentially my close to the show,

but I do want to tip the hat to our next guest for next week, Saron, the host of Code Newbie. She's also the manager of a new tech training program at Microsoft called Tech Jobs Academy. That is next week. So if you love Saran and you want to hear more about what she's doing at Code Newbie and at Microsoft and leading education for those out there in tech, listen to that show. Subscribe to ChangeLog Weekly, ChangeLog Nightly, and of course, go to Turing.co and subscribe.

And with that, everybody, let's say goodbye. Goodbye, guys. Thanks so much for coming. Bye. Thanks for having us on. Yeah, thank you. Thanks. Bye. you