The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - End of Year 2014 (Interview)

Episode Date: December 20, 2014

Adam and Jerod close out the year and give thanks to everyone who helps support The Changelog -- community members, listeners, readers, sponsors, as well as our various partners. We also discuss top topics from 2014, Changelog Weekly and how we use Trello as a CMS, contributing to the topics we cover through our Ping repo on GitHub, and what's to come in 2015.

all right everybody we're back this is uh this is an unusual show for us because it's just me and jared um this is i guess code name e o y for end of year 2014 because this is a pretty awesome year for for the changel log so you got me here you got jared here so jared say hello what's up man how you doing uh you know just just winding it down you know winding it down it's it's it's almost christmas time you know it's getting real close it's a friday so it's an end of a good week um you know day job wise ship some awesome stuff the whole team's doing great we're all preparing for um the christmas holiday next uh next week and just the new year and a lot of things a lot of things happen you get sort of sentimental at this time of year you get a little

thankful this time of year and not that you're not thankful other times in the year it's just you kind of reflect you yeah you know you do do a retrospective of what that year was. And there's positives. There's negatives. There's things that surprise you and people you're thankful for. So I figured it would be good for you and I to hop on the show. And just you and I because we actually had some scheduling conflicts and had some shows planned that just didn't work out. So we'll do them in the new year.

I thought it would make sense for us to come on and just say hello to all of our awesome listeners and talk about what's going on with the change law what we're doing and who we're thankful for so so do you read just random question do you read all those end of year top lists is that something that you're into or do you frown upon those things uh well i guess what do you mean do you mean mean from individuals or for – Just in general. I mean they're everywhere. The best top albums of the year, the five biggest mistakes celebrities made or whatever. It seems like we always have these year-end roundups, the favorite this, the worst that. I will say they have a place, but I would say – I read the ones that are most relevant to maybe what I'm feeling. So if it's like top worst mistakes product managers made this year, I probably might read that one. Or top ones, podcasters.

So depending on how relevant it is to me, I don't care about celebrities. I'm just not going to read that. Anything around what we're doing here at the ChangeLog or what I do professionally, so photography, video, coding, design, development, UX, mentoring. I'll probably dig into something like that. Right on. Top fonts for the year. Oh, you got a list?

UI patterns. I don't have a list myself. I know I've used Proxima Nova this year. I've dipped into Helvetic, even though it's a staple. Anybody has to use that. I've gone to, I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing it properly, but Bebas. B-E-B-A-S. New.

That's a good one. Nice slender font. How about San Francisco? That's the new one, right? I haven't seen that one. That's the new one that Apple is releasing. Is it part of iOS 8? Okay.

So there you go. I'm obviously not up on the times. I try to be. Tech moves fast, not just open source, right? No doubt, no doubt. Yeah, I like that stuff. I dig it. I dig those lists. It kind of depends on how relevant it is. So if it's relevant, then definitely I'll dig into it. Sure. What about you? actually write one usually on my own site which is a little bit sentimental uh just like the stuff

that i like the i call it beloved bits it's like the the things that i found during that year that were they have to be anatomically digital like that's my my criteria and so i'll just like my favorite movies uh video games like mac apps ios apps yeah that kind of stuff. So I do one, even though I'm kind of anti that kind of thing, so I'm very hypocritical in that way. I write one, but I don't read them. Yeah, they all suck except mine. What about the, we saw this recently in the Change Law Weekly, like the state of JavaScript or the state of Perl in 2014 or 2015.

Those are similar to that. What about those? Yeah, absolutely. I think I read the state of JavaScript in 2015. Those are similar to that. What about those? Yeah, absolutely. I think I read the state of JavaScript in 2015. And those are nice because obviously it's 2014 still, so it's looking forward and trying to project a little bit

based on what we've experienced this year. And there's lots of insights. Of course, if it's well-written, that's usually the X factor so i'll give those things a chance for sure and then if they are well written and interesting i'll just keep going if not i'll kind of move on what do you think about uh the general population of developers out there do you think it's something that is um yeah you think it's a norm for people

to read those do they attract a lot of attention because a list sort of says hey i'm a list and you can expect xyz out of me right you know yeah i mean i think most developers have a love-hate relationship with lists it's like we love to hate them um but they're also easy to write easy to read um yeah like you said you have an expectation so you know what you're getting in for and uh i don't know it seems like most you know used to be the old saying on hacker news or dig or reddit that you know to have a popular post all you need is like x you know top y right in z in z there's a formula right and that's true because yeah we kind of like reading those things even though well they're uh they're suggestive words so so they sort of bait.

They bait you into wanting, having to... Because we have to solve problems, right? We have to conclude the story. We can't just like, and the guy went here, and he didn't or did not die. We have to sort of close the ending there. Yeah, I feel you. That's kind of... We did that today, I Yeah, I feel you. That's kind of... We did that today, I guess,

to a degree. At Pure Charity, as you know, and everybody else knows, my day job is not the changelog. By day, I'm a fighter of justice, or sorry, a fighter of injustice at Pure Charity.

And we had retro today today because today we did demo we shipped so you know we all it was an epic demo today you know and then uh with any epic demo we have an epic retro which is the last retro we'll have of this year it's the last uh sprint we're going to commit to for this year so you know obviously there's a couple more weeks in the year but we're done in terms of committing to sprints and stuff. So it's kind of neat because we got to do a retrospective of the entire year, and we had a bumpy year. We had a bumpy year in its entirety and look at what happened

what changes what we did well, what we didn't do so great of and how we unified as a team it was just pretty productive and pretty emotionally charging because we saw how we had such a crappy year emotionally because our founder

passed away in April and then we unified as a team and a development team emotionally because our founder passed away in april and then we unified as a team and a development team and a product team and all that stuff for the year and you know this end of this year you sort of come out with some joy because we know we achieve some really great high achieving goals i don't think in general it's just good to be retrospective about that stuff that's what we're doing here in a sense with this show. As we said before, it's unusual for us to take this format where we don't have a guest. It's just you and I, and we're sort of just looking back at this year of the changelog.

In no particular order, we've got some things we want to talk about. We've got some kind of high-level topics that we've seen happen in the open source world. It's not conclusive by any means. It's just sort of like from the cuff to a to a degree and that's sort of what we're doing with this show here so it's the top five stories of the year yes no no no no um i guess maybe we could take some turns here i i think i got a little rundown of a list here but so when we relaunched the changelog in

2013 we established a membership and that's grown and so I think first I want to thank the members who pay yearly to support the changelog we do have some advertisers we call sponsors that support

the show and those are really great relationships, not just people who give us money. We'll dig into that in a bit. I wanted to say thanks to the members. That list and whatnot has grown and your support is greatly appreciated because you help keep me and Jared

excited about doing the changelog and covering the breadth and width of open source as best we possibly can. I know we went out to Keep Ruby Weird this year together to that conference, and members helped make that possible by going out and being at a conference and doing some cool stuff and meeting people and stuff. And just kind of neat too, that a sidetrack to that was that that was the first time you and I actually met.

So that was like what? September, October. You mean IRL? Yeah. In real life. Oh, we've,

we've had like video chat, video chat and stuff, but not like in real life, you know, shake hands kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah. Brothers don't shake hands.

Brothers got a hug. Yeah. Brothers hug. We hugged yeah so which kind of uh speaks to the fact that you know i'm kind of the new kid on the block in the sense of i've been involved for just a couple years now but um you talk about the the members and the listeners over time and the amount of support that we receive uh on a daily basis nowadays i'm sure it wasn't always like that. Maybe give a,

give a quick rundown of kind of where the show came from and maybe not like a huge history or anything, but I'm talking about retrospectives. Like your, your, your arc has gone a long ways, right? Yeah.

Well, way back in the day, you know, it's not that many years ago, but it feels like so many years ago, 2009. Myself and Winn Netherland, whom most know from the show, of course, and his great work at GitHub on the API and just his contributions to open source and writing books and just giving talks at conferences. He's a great guy. He and I were kicking around some ideas together. I said it would be really neat to have a podcast called Change Log. I really like the name Change Log.

For a podcast, I said it would be really neat to sort of look at Open Source and look at the different versions and talk about what changed and what was interesting about that. We sort of morphed and evolved that idea and we really didn't have a clue that it would be what it is today i guess maybe he did maybe i did and i don't know but it seemed like it was sort of a happy accident to a degree and you know we did a couple shows and sort of figured out our format we got um rob pike on the show early from from the Go team, one of the founders of and creators of the Go language, which has turned five this year. So, I mean, that sort of shows you how long we've been in this business. It's been kind of crazy. And we've just tried to do our best to shine a spotlight on what's fresh and new and open source.

It's been a tagline of ours since the beginning. And we just try to do our best, however we can, with whomever is on the team at the time. And that team has changed over the years to serve the open source community. And that's just sort of been our mission. And you've been on board for a couple years now. Time flies, man. I can't even remember when you joined or how long it's been.

But, you know, it's been great having you on this team and, and now, uh, co-hosting the show now that Andrew's, uh, stepped into the role at Stripe and he's got less time to do it. So, um, having a co-host is sort of paramount to this show. I think it requires to a degree, um, uh, good co-host. And so it's just been great having you, of course. And that's, that's sort of where the change law came from. Thanks, man.

Happy to be here for sure. It seems like one thing that we have, which I've never experienced the other side of this, is we have a great group of supporters, as you said, members, listeners, people that ping us. Did it take off immediately or was it a slow burn as far as getting to the place that we are now of people who like the show and like the website? I would say some history that may not be known by everybody is that we were originally, as a site, as an entity on the web, we were on Tumblr for the longest time. And it was a love-hate relationship for anybody who's ever done anything significant on Tumblr. After a while, we definitely outgrew it. And Wynn and I both knew that we had outgrown it.

We had conjured up several different iterations of it. And obviously stuff we've never shipped. And when Wynn parted ways with the changelog after he was at GitHub for a bit, he just wanted to focus on his work there and family and stuff. So after he parted ways, I figured it was time for either to kill the changelog and move on or rebirth it with, I wouldn't say much a better plan, but just maybe some structure. And so I got to tear down and rebuild to a degree but you know the teardown wasn't like throw away it was sort of tear down what the idea was and what it what it could be and rebuild it from there and so rebuilt the site on wordpress multi-author platform and the membership was crucial at the first at first and you asked if it took off quickly.

At first, the membership took off really fast, and then it sort of tailed off, and then it was sort of nonexistent for a while, getting new members. The members were there, and then we were still trying to figure out how we can best make the membership really work to, one, be financial um gain for us so we can keep doing this thing because it does cost money you know going to conferences and buying this awesome podcast equipment we have and serving the files all these things cost money are you know everything um that was that was that's been a battle it's been been tough to give value back when we give everything away for free already. So members, in a sense, was sort of a donation. And then it dawned on me that we can actually leverage our sponsors and turn them into partners and have them give an exclusive offer to paying members. So DigitalOcean gave $20 for new accounts.

You get on a list. Rackspace, Digital new accounts, and you get on a list. Rackspace, DigitalOcean, I can get on a list. I don't have it right in front of me right now. TopTiles is a partner as well, and that's sort of been the catalyst to make, I think, our benefits to the membership be really awesome. CodeShip, MaxCDN, HoneyBadger, RunScope, Travis CI, Codebase, Deploy, VersionEye. Those are all partners with the changelog. We've got some kind of unusual partners too. I guess not really unusual.

They're just not corporate sponsors like Ruby Tapas. Everybody watches that or at least any Rubyists possibly. And we're Ruby heavy around here. Ruby Off Rails, so not Ruby on-rails. Good friend here in Houston runs that. Motion in motion for those who are doing Ruby motion, so you want to learn that. Those are partners of ours.

Elixir SIPs, learning the Unix command line, scaling PHP, and that's what we've done so far to sort of give back in a way to those members who have given us financial abilities to move forward. Not to mention 20% off a changelog T. in a way to those members who have given us financial abilities to move forward. Not to mention, 20% off a changelog tee. That's true. Who doesn't want a changelog t-shirt, right? Throw that in there.

I was actually thinking about making that $50. I feel like $50 would be a better deal. Make no money at all on it. Why make $30? Just make $0. You get more people wearing changelog tees that way. That's right. That's what I was thinking. We'll probably do that now that we've said that. If you're a member,

expect if you haven't ordered it yet, expect it to be 50% off instead of 20. I think that's better. And full access to our archives too. Our front page changed a little bit. Our front page used to have pagination and you used to be able to page through as far back as you ever wanted to go.

And now we restrict that. I never wanted the change to have any sort of paywalls, but I figured that our front page didn't have to have pagination anymore. And I figured if you were a member, you can have pagination. And if you're not, then you get prompted to become a member and support us. And I like the thing right near the button, not to linger on this membership stuff too much, but I thought it was funny, that right near the button where it says, yes, I want to support the changelog,

and that's becoming a member, right beneath that is a link that says, no, I don't want to support open source, which I think that's what our mission is, right, to support open source. And it links to this cat that has the perfect sad face. Oh, I'm seeing that right now. I don't know if anybody's ever seen that, but I like it.

I think it's kind of funny. It's like, yeah. That's a sad cat, man. That's a sad cat. Don't make the cat sad. That's what we say around here. There you go. So you mentioned a love-hate relationship with Tumblr.

We traded that in. Now we have a love-hate relationship with WordPress., and we traded that in. Now we have a love-hate relationship with WordPress. I think anything, you eventually outgrow. Or there's better ways. WordPress is good. I love WordPress. It's got a lot of great support. It's open source.

It's helped open source become more visible to so many people. But I think... It's also provided a marketplace for people who can do open source and sell some of their wares as well and make a living. There's people that make a living doing either themes or plugin development. That's true, yeah. I think it's... I will never say anything bad about WordPress.

It's great. I love it. But as for building the chang change log on top of it, I think we sort of keep hitting our limits with platforms, and we have bigger and better. I wouldn't say bigger and better. I would just say grander ideas that may fit better on different languages or different language platforms and that kind of thing. We've thrown around the possibility of building our own uh member you know platform for the cms and the

membership site yeah quite a bit and uh you know i think to make it better that's what's required we could do it on wordpress but you're not a wordpress developer i'm not a wordpress developer we sort of use we could build it on wordpress but we might be able to build it even better on something else the problem is whatever we build like right now it's love hate with wordpress but whatever we build it's gonna be a love hate with that thing yeah and then we won't have some other guy to blame you know we can always blame matt mullenweg and his team but when it's our own code and then there's just no one to point the finger at, man. Yeah, then it's our own bugs. That's right. And all bugs have software.

That's right. So sponsors, thanks also to the sponsors. I mean, not only the members and listeners. When we say members, we mean those who are paying members. But outside of that realm of members, we've got umpteen thousand people who listen to the show globally it always blows my mind to um to hear from somebody from like russia or somewhere in europe or somewhere in asia or india or just south africa uh chile brazil i mean worldwide it's it you know the internet is big obviously but it's still just mind-blowing that we get the honor and privilege to be a part of something that touches so many lives that I never even knew of.

And it reminds you of how small the world can be. And that's sort of wild. So definitely thanks to everyone who supports us. And that's sponsors too so one way we we do things around here is by having awesome sponsors like digital ocean rackspace top towel code ship um it's not an exhaustive list uh run scope um just thinking off the top of my head who else has recently sponsored the show. Blanking. But, yeah, lots of great people support us.

If I didn't name your name, it's not for any sort of reason. It's just that they help us in so many ways. We've got some cool stuff that's happening in the future, the change law that we're talking about, that we've got support coming from those sponsors that make it possible. Expensive equipment like video gear and stuff like that has been able to get acquired. So some hints on what's coming in the future has been gotten because we have their support. And so that's really awesome. Yeah, just looping back around to the world being small now and all the support we get around the world.

Excuse me. One thing that we did this year, which has worked out really well, is we started a specific repository on GitHub called Ping. So, github.com slash the changelog slash ping, I believe, is the URL. That's right.

And that is a centralized place for listeners, readers, what have you, friends of the show can come and let us know about stuff. So whether it's your own stuff, whether it's an idea for the show, a project that you just started or something you need help on, looking for a new maintainer, whatever it is, you can open up a new issue on ping and um we will look at that and we will possibly promote it whether it be on the blog or uh in weekly or uh on twitter or all three possibly even end up on the podcast yeah and people have really been using that in fact we got kind of backlogged there for a few months to the point where we needed to start working down the backlog.

But some really cool stuff has come from there. Obviously, we're out there keeping our thumb on the pulse, but there's so much open source. And one of the common comments that we get is that our content is too specifically focused around either Ruby or JavaScript or the web. And I think that's a completely valid criticism and something that we're striving to make better.

But one of the ways to help us make that better is by sending us content into the ping repo. Yeah, absolutely. Because we look at all of those things, and we may ask for more information or may not feel like we're necessarily you know experts in a specific domain but we've had a lot of good interactions there on ping this year and so just want to say thanks to everybody who reached out and shared their stuff with us i know specifically we've had show topics coming in through there. Not even people that want to be on themselves, we get those. But someone that says, hey, this would

be cool. Specifically, our show on Pearl happened just completely because somebody came in on ping and said, let's talk about Pearl. And then mentioned two different people that would be great guests. We contacted one of those and put up a show, and I think in the last few months, I think that's been one of our best shows. Yeah, and even Ovid, who was the guest on the show, of that recommendation, he's become a friend of the show. I wouldn't even mind dropping some more hints. I wouldn't mind helping him sort of podcast of some sort

because I was intrigued by and impressed by his relationship with pearl over the years and just sort of his history with it and there's an audience there there's there's people who really you know love pearl and it kind of enlightened me to to this new aspect of the that language yeah i think what it did was it opened us to a whole new community inside open source that we never really touched. And we had a little bit of help with Gabor here for a little while, posting some Perl stuff. But myself personally had never actually seen how much was out there. And yeah, Ovid, super interesting guy. I'd love to talk him into starting the show.

Maybe not even, maybe Perl and poetry. Listeners may not know offline after the call ended you know he went and talked about poetry and writing with us and he loves it i could just sit there and listen to him talk about this stuff for hours yeah he's got he's likable for sure definitely like well you couldn't go into politics i wouldn't doubt that right um so that's that's uh yeah ping i think we started ping this year it was funny because originally we had ping at the changelog.com was an email so if you're sending email to that don't do that go to the ping repo instead um and if you know anybody who thought about doing it or might do it tell them don't do that. Go to the ping repo instead. Because we're trying to put a lot of this sort of, I guess,

inspired by GitHub, which is now not called GitHub anymore, Chad Whitaker, of being open, just sort of inspired by that, of not so much being an open company, but we thought that it would be best to have those kinds of conversations in the open versus closed email where we can at, like, for example, one of the more recent shows we might have in the future on Angular, I can't recall the issue of the names,

but we might have a show in the future with a previous person who was in the Angular community, and they've recently departed, and we were able to at that person and bring them into the conversation. So you can't really do that with email. It's kind of weird. Whereas GitHub issues sort of are the open playing ground. And it's not just me or Jared or anyone else who's a part of the team here at the Change Log. It can be anyone to step in and help us fine-tune the conversation that might come from it.

So I love that repo and what it's done for us. So I encourage anybody who wants to help us cover open source better, use that repo and those issues to help us do that. Yeah, just to give an example of that. So this, the one you referred to, this is Kevin McGee, who's just a listener of the show,

opened up a new issue that says, guest idea, Rob Eisenberg, keeper of Durandal. I never had to say that. Durandal JS? I don't know. I'll have to ask him that. An open source JavaScript project

and his comment just says, seriously, who leaves Google's Angular project especially now with version 2 being breathlessly debated maybe get this guy on the line and he links to a specific blog post by this fella who is leaving Angular and has apparently had a previous project called

Durandal I don't know what it's called, man, Durandal? I don't know, Durandal? Durandal apparently had a previous project called Durandol. I don't know. Durandol? Durandol. Durandol. Let's go with Durandol. And he went from that to Angular, Angular 2.0 stuff,

went back to Durandol. Interesting story, interesting thing that's happening in open source. And like you said, we looped that guy in. I keep calling him that guy. Let's get his actual name. His name's Rob. Yeah, Rob Eisenberg, the Eisenberg effect. And we were able to just app message him.

He came in, talked back and forth, and hopefully we'll be able to line up something. In fact, Kevin went on to give a list of how he would like the show to go like yeah which was pretty cool he framed the show for us yeah because that show needs framing because we don't want to turn it into just some sort of drama you know thing it needs to be very and we don't want to turn it into a wine fest as he says um so really cool and uh hopefully we can put that together for him. I'll go on record here while this is maybe part of the topic, is that the changelog has never been about serving the trolls.

That's not what we are. It's not the kind of show we are. We will never be about serving the trolls. So just that's out there. If we had Rob on the show, it wouldn't be about having him on to Bash Angler. It would be about getting to the root of some of the problems.

And I think that's good. That might even lead us into the conversation we recently had with Yehuda and Tom Dale about Ember because their path and their roadmap to Ember 2.0, I think is a beacon of light of looking at what is good happening in other communities of open source and other software communities and implementing it in theirs. And so when you identify a problem, it's easier to solve that problem. the show, Rob Eisenberg, to talk about his concerns with Angular and why he departed or whatever

wouldn't be about to spread drama, would be about to figure out, you know, what's the problem here? What's the problem here? What did he see as an issue and how can that community possibly rebound and solve those problems? Yeah, for sure. And just inform the community because some people are thinking like,

should I use Angular? Should I use this? Should I use that? And then it's like, should I use Ember versus Angular? And that helps you make a more informed decision as a developer and possibly even save your job. Absolutely, man. Let's see what else we got on the list here. Who else do you want to thank?

We would be remiss to not mention a few other people that helped us out this year, especially our new editor. Yes. Aaron. Aaron, who's listening to this now by the way as he's editing this so aaron thank you uh aaron it's funny uh the story behind aaron so i used to host a show with uh for those who are into design or on the design side of uh of web development or development in general probably know a name drew wilson drew wilson is famous for creating pictos uh and about a zillion other projects i can't even name off because he's crazy like that um and jared uh um or rondu was the the person who started this blog called the industry um and then we did a

podcast called the industry radio show and when we did that we got an email from a guy named aaron and so i went back to that same person was like hey aaron i run a different show now called the changelog we could really use some help because if you all noticed those who listen to the show religiously over the years, the times we've ebbed and flowed has been whenever me, Jared, or any other co-host or any other person that was working with me, like Andrew, we were just too busy in our lives to do the changelog every week and edit it. And it's a lot of work. It's a lot of work it's a lot of time commitment and unless we have sponsors and stuff like that it's just really hard to always say yes to it even though we love it so much um so having aaron on on on the team helps us make sure that i'm not the bottleneck on editing so for the duration of all the change log i've edited every single show and so i've been on the show i've

edited the show or i've you know helped edit edit the show or helped create the show to a degree because there are lots of shows where just Wynn was the host. But, yeah, it's a time suck. But Aaron is great at it. So the last five shows, if you've not heard a difference, it's because he's that awesome. There you go. And so thank you, Aaron, for your support and making the show awesome and making it sound awesome.

And we look forward to a deeper relationship with Aaron in the future with whatever else we come up with here because we're crazy. And then I guess maybe the other person to thank would be 5x5 and Dan Benjamin for their support. I think, what was it? Was it this year or was it 2013 it was 2013 trying to get my my my years correct here because 2013 was a crazy year uh 2013 about midway through we decided to um move from just being just the changelog on the changelog.com to syndicate through 5x5 so we joined the 5x5 team we moved all of our shows over there we stopped numbering with versions some old

school drama there we decided to actually just call them episode 85 versus 0.8.5 and that means you never hit 1.0 yeah we never hit 1.0 that's a shame some projects never hit 1.0 it's just a shame. Some projects never hit 1.0.

Yeah, it's just face-aware. Was that semantic versioning or what kind of versioning were you guys doing? Well, you know, we got – yeah, it wasn't semantic versioning. No, it wasn't. No, it was definitely not. And that was the whole thing. Like when we did the versioning, the hardcore developers were like, well, that's not semantic versioning. And then we're like, well –

Seriously? People actually said that? I'm not even kidding you. We've gotten hate mail about that. Not bad definitely yeah you know haters gonna hate kind of thing um i can pull up the email and quote directly if you want but i don't think that would serve the audience any any better but yeah so five by five has been great working with dan has been great uh he and had in the team over there have just definitely uh helped helped us over the years be a better show and and reach a larger bigger audience and you know so their support has been great uh we've had

tons of great guests all this year i didn't i didn't write a list of all of our guests this year maybe you might uh jared have the the list in front of you um but i know we've had so many great shows this year i think we've done i'm gonna try and guess at how many shows we've had so many great shows this year I think we've done I'm going to try and guess at how many shows we've done this year Let me scan the list real quick We've probably done Well that was no Black Friday We've done

From episode 117 To episode 34 So we've done roughly 20-some shows this year, which is not weekly. We are a weekly podcast that does not broadcast weekly. We try. As I said, we've had some ebbs and flows, and we're not going to digress to that.

But a lot of great shows this year. So this year started out with Jeremy Sands talking about Gopher Cass and Go and martini um i didn't really plan to go down all the people that have been on the show this year but just lots of great guests this year we got thankful for as well so pretty pretty cool yeah chad whitaker uh tim caswell justin searles olivier lacan yeah i'll say that one right i'll say that one for you yes olivier of course the epic keep a change log episode of the change log that was an epic show a lot of people love that show that was a great one so if you're listening go back and listen to 127 that was great well

that guy's just a character yeah super enjoyable and uh had a very uplifting message which is to keep a change log yes that's as easy as it can be. Keep a changelog. Some other good names, I guess. I enjoyed talking to Parker Moore. I did that one alone. Parker runs and took over the Jekyll project.

If you use Jekyll to blog, then you know Parker. You're definitely using his code, of course. He's a cool guy as well i think he now works at uh visco which is uh runs the app it's the ios app called visco visco cam okay um so he went to work there i believe i think he was um like an intern of some sort at github i can't recall what his title was, but he was working with GitHub on Jekyll and GitHub page, and he probably still does that. I just haven't caught up with him in a while. But that was a cool show too.

Jekyll's cool. Yeah, I missed out on that show. I remember Parker very specifically because I used to watch Jekyll on GitHub very closely. Because back, I'm sure you guys talked about all this, but it was slowly rotting for a long time it was bad um and i watched i watched this guy swoop in and just take save the day over and i'm like who is this guy at first because he just commented on every single issue just like hopped in there is like someone decided, I'm going to save this thing. Just really gave it

a 180. It was pretty amazing to watch. I wonder where he got that bravado. I don't know where he got it, but what I will say is that we definitely talked about that on that show. If you're listening and you want to know more about what Jared's talking about with Parker

and how he swooped in and took over from TP Dubs or Tom Preston Warner, as you know him from being a co-founder at GitHub. He talks about that there. He talks a little bit about his bravado, too, where he gets that kind of character. I believe he's German, so he's got that going for him. And I know he speaks German. Not that that gives you any reason to have bravado but that's

he's got some oomph behind him he's a character for sure, great guy and great in open source too I think he's all green on his github, he's all green sure so maybe another thing we can talk about before we sign off here is something I believe weekly started this year

did it not? weekly, did it start this year um did it start this year i don't know i know we did uh 29 issues i'm thinking that's less than half of it let's see less than a year okay we started shipping the change law weekly which is our weekly email august 15 2013 so it didn't really begin this year And The reason why we don't have as many issues As we should is because On April 5th In or around that space I ran out of gas

And you came in And saved the day That's a good conversation too Because it sort of revived this newsletter I loved doing it But it was like Just a ton of work because I need help, and you provided that help. We'll dig into what that means here in a bit. But yeah, April 5th, I ran out of gas.

I had issue 30 started and never shipped it. And that bummed me out uh we got lots of good feedback from the change all weekly so we've got you know several thousand subscribers that read this thing every week and it's just we share headlines we share repos we share the most recent issue or sorry recent episode of the show and we share a couple videos and now we all we also share some some uh projects or mentions from the ping repo we talked about earlier. So we're plugging things that happened there. So we're sort of given a way to have everybody sort of have a say of what's being mentioned on there.

Not a huge degree, but at least enough. Sure. And ping is a big source of incoming awareness of what's happening open source for us and obviously we watch Twitter and the known hashtags out there carefully and sort of curate to a degree headlines and projects and what's going on so it's been fun shipping the ChangeLog Weekly, it's been great

Well let me provide a little context around this burnout around this burnout of yours because uh you shipped 29 episodes of weekly in a row which is a newsletter that ships on saturday morning first of all uh secondly you were hand coding everything pretty much in html i mean it's an ERB template. But you're inside your... What do you use to write? You use Sublime Text? Sublime Text, yeah. Okay, so you've got your text editor open, and you're hand-coding these things out all by yourself

for roughly half of... I mean, 29 weeks, that's about half a year. Yeah. On Friday nights, right? Yeah, I would collect... I had this philosophy of capture always. So I would, in all sorts of different ways. Which we still use that, right.

Yeah, I would email myself essentially a link I thought was interesting, and then later in the week, I would sit down and go through this entire repository of interesting links and just kind of comb through them and create this newsletter based on that. And nobody can keep that pace going. No,

no, it's not one person. No, it was, and I would write, you know, I would write the, you know,

detail. I didn't just a copy and paste. It was, you know, I took some intentions with that, not pat myself on the back, but I really wanted to make sure that the point of, of it was to give a clear curated voice of what's happening so

almost a summary of what happened that week in open source it wasn't comprehensive but it was sort of curated based on a perspective so you sort of have that going for you but it was personal it wasn't just robotic and that was the intention of it and after a while i sort of burned out on on being able to keep that up. And then I got bummed out, couldn't automate it fast enough, and then took a, I don't know, like five-month break. And then you came in and saved the day for me. Well, let me just say the readers came in because we get pinged all the time, not just on ping but also via the contact form and on Twitter. And we just became slowly – it's kind of like – what's that Chinese water torture where it just keeps dripping the water dripping on your forehead yeah and eventually you just can't stand it

and uh so many people loved you know weekly that they just kept saying where is it what happened you guys you know some people are mad some people are just bummed out and i also was a weekly reader so like you said you did the entire thing yourself so i would just read it on saturday mornings so um i was like we got to fix this somehow and there's just no way that what you're currently doing would scale right um so i said well i'll get involved and i'll help bring the content in but now all of a sudden you need collaboration tools right you can't just i mean i guess we could have had a repo. I mean, it is a repo on GitHub, but we could have just hand-coded that same file and then just pushed and stuff.

But we needed more high-fidelity collaboration tools, and we were already using Trello for pretty much everything else um we use it for managing the podcast like you said the radar where adam emails in his uh links that he finds go into a radar it's our open source radar yeah right um the podcast uh we were doing some of the editorial for a while in trello um and so i'm not sure if it was you or me that said why don't we just manage weekly inside of trello it was you it was not me it sure if it was you or me that said, why don't we just manage weekly inside of Trello? It was you. It was not me. It was me?

It was totally your idea. Like, this is not at all my idea. I didn't even, I mean, I knew Trello had an API, and I knew we could do something with it. I just never thought to do what we did with it. And the whole thing was totally your idea. I'm not taking any credit for it at all. I'm a user of it.

That's it. I was trying to share some credit with you. No, I don't want any credit. It's all you, man. I mean, that was totally that was totally i was like really that's a great idea and like you let you outlayed the idea of how you know trello is basically based on cards and uh titles they support markdown you know obviously it's it's column based anybody who uses trello knows we can make our own process in it and like you laid out this idea and i'm like we could do that and you're like yeah and you made it happen well i think i think it's a good idea the code is is trivial it's probably less than 200 lines of total code to get it all going and we still have middleman

in the process so it's not it's not rendering html it's actually kind of dorky because it renders erb which renders html but that was just the fastest way I could get it working. Because I was already doing it. Middleman. I was using Middleman and I was using ERB templates, not Haml templates, to create the front-end view, which ends up becoming the HTML for the newsletter.

So Middleman was in there. Not just the Middleman. It was actually Middleman. Ruby Middleman. Yeah, and so the wins are huge here so if you think about what our content is it's a series of of posts um grouped grouped posts and they're ordered and they have titles and links and content right copy yeah and that's basically what a trello card or trello is it's a list of lists that cards, each of which has a title and a description, which can support Markdown.

Yeah. The big wins were like, you can now comment around a specific card and that comment, those comments are just meta, right? They don't actually go into the issue, but we can discuss certain stories inside of the issue. We can post from anywhere.

You can email in stuff. They have apps, so you can do it on your iPhone or on your tablet or whatever. You can just drag and drop, reorder things. It just actually makes a whole lot of sense. It changed the world of it. Let's take, for for example issue 34 which will ship tomorrow um and when we first got on this call uh jared was like hey we're gonna ship weekly steve tomorrow and i was like ah i think we might take a break he's like well it's mostly done

because jared went in here and took care of projects and repos there's a video link in there and a couple from the ping repo and i'll go in there and add some headlines and some preview text for the editor's note and call it pretty much a day and ship it. And if it weren't for the collaboration that Trello offers us to make this happen, I would be behind the eight ball. It's Friday. We're recording this on a Friday at 4 p.m. Central Standard Time, and it's gotiday we're recording this on a friday at 4 p.m central standard time and it's got to ship tomorrow morning you know if i had to put together what is the change law weekly myself tonight you know it would be back to april 5th again and i'd be upset yeah it's just not good right and for me i mean i'll just say that using Trello in this capacity almost makes it more fun.

Like, it just makes so much sense that it, like, reinvigorates you to want to do it because it's so stinking easy compared to anything else. Like I said, I'm a big Jekyll fan, so I've been using Jekyll for my blog for years. And there is still something about, like, I don't know. I live in my text editor all day as a developer. So, you know, writing inside of a text editor, I like Markdown. But I don't know, there's still this barrier of like publishing and all that that happens with Jekyll with me. I know there's a lot of tools that are out there that are trying to, you know, like remove that friction and provide web-based tools or mobile tools. Most of the time I get ideas for my writing on the go or I'm on the go and I want to write a little something. And the fact that I

can just throw open, in the case of weekly, just throw open the Trello app and just write a description real quick or rearrange a thing just makes me do it more often. It's really cool. So we have had some people who are interested in that process and i have a blog post that's at least it's outline it's an outline format right now i'll be filling in the details and we'll publish that here sometime hopefully in january yeah we'll share uh i think we talked about at some point open sourcing the code too it's not that we want to keep it or anything like that it's just not shareable uh i don't know how to describe that. Shareable in a good way. At this point,

it's sort of just hodgepodge. It's not going to make any sense to anybody else, but we want to open up that process and share that code and share the process that you came up with and share some screenshots of what we do. I think, like I said, the code is

pretty trivial. You're just using the Trello API and it's just a few hard lines. It's very specific to what we're and right i think i think i said the code is is pretty trivial you're just using the the trello api and it's just a few hard lines it's very specific to what we're doing but i think the process itself is novel yeah and so that would be even more beneficial to share that exactly very novel i think it brilliant brilliant brilliant idea honestly and what i love most about it too is that whenever and if ever we – you and I begin to invite others in to help curate and create what is the Change Law Weekly or maybe even other newsletters in the future, we can just invite them to that Trello board. And boom, they're an editor of what's there. And that to me is amazing. They're commenting. We use labels like a draft and a sponsor labels

to help generate markup. There's so much infrastructure already there that it's like, I just feel like we're cheating almost. Yeah, I do. I feel like we're cheating too because it's so easy now. And everybody who's listening to this is probably like, I want to see what you're talking about. Well, you're going to have to wait until 2015 because that's where we're going.

We're wrapping up 2014. We'll blog about it. Jared's got a draft in place. Please, when you write that, Jared, don't give me any credit. I want to just be a consumer of it. You're the creator of it. It was such an awesome idea. And I'm so thankful too for that because, like you said,

it sort of liberated us because now the process is fun. We can drag and drop things. We can comment back and forth. Before, the process was totally behind the scenes. It was totally sort of in my inbox and I was my own enemy. I was my own bottleneck and it was non-collaborative and now it's collaborative and that's really great. So I think it's just turned out really awesome. Yeah, I think the credit needs to go to Fog Creek because they created such a versatile tool.

I mean, I use this thing for so many different use cases. Who would have thought that a list of lists would be so stinking useful? Yeah. It really is. Yeah. It really is. We did have some of the topics to mention. Do you think we should even just do a quick read of those and then call it a show or what? That's too teasing. I don't know, man. Your call.

All right. I'll read them all real quick. This is just some topics we planned on maybe because this was totally an off-the-cuff show. So if you're listening this far, thank you. It was just an end-of-year thanks show from us. We love doing this show. We love the fact that you all listen to this show. We love doing this show for you and for the community. And so when we had some scheduling conflicts happen,

we couldn't not ship an issue or another episode before the year ended, and we figured it made just just a lot of sense to come back and just say thanks to everyone along the way that have helped us supported us you the listeners you the members sponsors and everyone else who've made this show possible just to say some thanks but some topics we did write down we weren't sure where to go through but I'll read them real quick here. And feel free to stop me, Jared, if anything tickles your fancy. So you got Go on GitHub.

That's recently. Go is now open source on GitHub. It's always been out there, but it hasn't always been on GitHub. And they turned five this year, so that's kind of neat. And that sort of shows the history of the changelog too because the third show of the changelog had Rob Pike on it, and that was when we first started, so that's five years old. .NET Core is open source now, which is kind of neat. We just had a show on that. Also moved to GitHub, so it seems like-V-E-D to GitHub,

you'll find all sorts of cool projects moving from XYZ to GitHub, Gatorias, whatever. Just follow that little search term on Twitter. You'll find some cool stuff. Node.js has had tons of changes. We started out the end of last year with aaron hammer talking about black friday and um node doing really awesome for walmart we ended that pretty much 2013 talking about that and here in 2014 it's you know become you know one of the most used uh programming languages out there and then here at the end of the year we've had some uh i guess the last six months we've had some drama

happen we've had some corporate weirdness happen, some corporate weird sponsorship happening that we don't want to sort of – that's not what this show is about. But we plan to dig into some of that if at all possible. And then here most recently it was forked, and now there's a fork of it called IO.js, and that's sort of crazy there. We talked about Ember, the roadmap to 2.0. We talked a little bit about something unique that Yehuda and Tom shared which was learning from others

in the community and focusing on community was some things they've done there. Rust, they're planning on a 1.0 soon. We hope to do a show soon with their team, Steve Klabnik who is sort of I guess part of the changelog, he doesn't really contribute too

often but he's sort of like an alumni for many years now he plays a feature here and there on shows, we plan to have a show with him back talking to Yehuda about JSON API and some cool stuff they're doing there but some other news about them was to Yehuda about JSON API and some cool stuff they're doing there. But some other news about them was Stephen Yehuda joined as core with the Rust team.

Docker versus CoreOS, there's some drama there, some missteps there. We'd like to dig into and we plan to. As we mentioned earlier with Angular, there's 2.0 concerns with backward compatibility and just some some unique things that are happening in the in the in the community there sadly we had some people pass away i don't know if it's a it's definitely not a comprehensive list of people passing away but no uh jim warwick and uh ezra zimatovich both highly impacted the community those are two that we particularly uh particularly covered and earmarked to a degree and definitely sad about their passing.

Wish their family nothing but blessings of peace and comfort in this time, especially going into holidays. It's never easy having a loved one be lost. Me and my family, we personally have someone who's a loved one who's lost, and so we're going into this holiday season with a lot of mourning but also some joy of this new year, but some tough times for sure. I would say the PHP spec one, that was pretty neat. Having Sarah Goldman on the show, she's got such a huge, deep knowledge of PHP. What she does on Facebook and keeping it fast and hhvm and i mean amazing amazing work so having her on the show we plan to have more of her and her

cohorts at facebook on the show to talk about hack and other stuff and you know kudos to facebook too to step in and help unify the community there too. In addition, Facebook, they're not my favorite company out there, but these guys have been really killing it with open source lately. The Flux stuff they did this year, React, which is growing more and more popular. The PHP stuff, Hack, it's just like one thing after the next, Facebook just keeps releasing more and more high quality open source stuff and you know you say there's a couple of names and we haven't had shows on those right and i'll say you know from my point of view i wish we could cover more i it's

not that we don't because we don't want to it's because we just don't have all the time in the world this is uh to a degree a hobby for us you know for both of us even and neither of us are doing this full time so we are covering as much as we can as well as we can and that's that's been our goal so just to kind of hang on that comment there um debian was forked i don't have any more details about that but that was news for everyone else we did talk about it in the change law weekly so if you don't subscribe to that we've talked about it lots of this show you should go to the change.com slash weekly and subscribe we had shows on pearl which is a first for us and dot net microsoft has never been on this show they've been mentioned as far as new get and and whatnot but

that's about it we had core team members from the.NET core team on the show. We had Ovid on talking about Pearl. So we'd like to expand more on that. And let me go to Twitter real quick because I wanted to pull up this person's name. Andy, I don't know how to see your last name. I won't try, but he's at and S-H-S-C-H-W-A on Twitter. uh gave us a comment which i think is is nice that will help us frame some new stuff we'll work on for 2015 which is to better cover emacs linux rust c++

other um functional programming languages like closure we'd love to do that and like you said earlier jared ping is one way to help us do that so we're we're a two-man and some army around here we got beverly on the team as well but our team has grown and it's shrunk um actually because it's you know it's it's hard to keep everybody keeping a changelog you know what i mean it's tough work man this is what you did there you see what i did there. You see what I did there. Yeah, for sure. I mean, we'd love to cover more system-level stuff. We've seen specifically Go and Rust have really exploded in the last couple years.

Go has become really established. Rust still hasn't hit 1.0, but there's so much excitement around the possibilities there. C and C++, those are things that you and I just do not come across very often, at least in a way that we can know for sure, like, this is cool, this is noteworthy. We're doing our best, but we need your help if we're going to cover those things. And if anybody out there is super passionate about these particular topics and want to see shows on these, want to see more coverage it's in the newsletter on the website reach out to us and definitely get in touch yeah let's uh we got the ping repo you can email us directly the although ping is probably the best way to do it just get in touch if you've got ideas we're we're an open

book we might not be always always be able to deliver on everything we would like to. And like I said, we try our best. But as I said, that topic list there we just rattled off was not a comprehensive list. It was just something that's been roughly pulled together from recent issues of the weekly and the blog and the podcast itself. But I'll just say it's been great serving the open source community um this year just doing whatever we can we want to do more of it and whatever you can do the listener whatever you can do as as a listener and as a as a reader of the changelog you know become a member that's the easiest way to support us um subscribe to weekly tell people about weekly that's the easiest way you can support us we would do something like a patreon or

get up or something like that but honestly our membership is our patreon our membership is our get up that's the way we do it we do it through stripe it's totally secure you support us directly we don't got to share that money with anybody else it directly benefits and supports jared and i making sure that we can keep a changelog and keep supporting open source. Maybe even go to more conferences and do some cool stuff like we will release here in the first part of 2015.

So I won't say what that is just yet but it involves video. That's about it. So what's the best way to close the show? What do you think? Just say bye? I think I'll just say see you in 2015 see you in 2015 that's it see you in 2015 that's it see you in 2015 so if you've listened this far thank you very much uh we appreciate your support and we'll see you next time.