The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Going fulltime on The Changelog (Interview)

Episode Date: February 11, 2015

BIG news! This is the episode where we discuss Adam going fulltime on The Changelog.

what's up everybody we are here for a very special changelog i'm here with adam stack what's up adam stack that's me how you doing man it's a good day it's a good day it's a good day well not not your typical show no this is a bit of an announcement show yes so adam has a pretty big announcement that uh we'd like to share with y'all adam go ahead and let him have it let him have it all right well for a long time um if you've been listening to the show i guess since 2009 we started the show and it's had its uh adventures i guess you know we've had lots of different nuances of the changelog, and so it's morphed over time, but it's always been a side project.

It's always been something that we've been working towards. It's just been, you know, if we do it, we do it, and we have fun at it. And over this last two years, started to build it in a way where we can actually make it sustainable, and I'm happy to announce that it's reached the sustainability for me to go full-time, which is a huge, huge deal. So I'll be the first official employee of this company.

And pretty excited, man. Pretty excited. So as of today, you are Monday, February 9th 2015 adam is put again self-employed changelogging it man changelogging it you know and uh it was a tough call too i mean just a little shout out to pure charity too on that note because some of you have heard me talk about my work there at a non-profit called pure charity still a great-profit still love all those people there it was just time for me to step away and do the change a little full time so nothing against whatsoever Pure Charity what they're doing because their hearts are pure

and what they're doing no pun intended of course pure hearts doing great work there so that continues without me but I'm here now doing the change a little full time and I'm excited about it because we got so many things in the pipe. And I think the,

the easiest way to probably to start off some of that would be to, to thank some people. Cause it's not, you know, this isn't the Grammys like it was last night to put some timestamp to this. The Grammys is on last night. And you get people up there accepting awards,

nothing like that. We're not accepting awards here, but there's some people to thank. And Jared, I'm going gonna put you at at not so much the top list but in the top two there's two top two people and you're one of them because you've been encouraging me for a while and just coming on as the managing editor and co-hosting the show and i mean there's y'all there's so much around the change well you don't

even know how much Jared does around here. He's so awesome. And he's a full-time, you know, full-time dad and runs his own company, his own software company. And it's, you know, it's just, it's amazing to have your support. And then my wife, obviously she's super awesome without her support. I would have never done this. So, you know, fellows out there who might be thinking about it or ladies out there who are thinking about doing it, get your spouse's approval first. Long story short.

Yeah, no doubt. You know, so and I got that. So that was that was good. It was because of her support that I actually decided to take the leap and do it again. But the members of of the changelog. So every one of you out there who are in the Slack room, there's a new Slack room now that's just for members. And anyone who's supported the changelog over the years, my heart goes out to you to thank you for what the future of the changelog will be. And it's – in the coming weeks and months, you'll find that if you think the changelog is just a podcast or just an email or just a blog, we're going to show you that it's not.

We have a lot of fun things in store. So the members have made that possible and as well the sponsors. We've got sponsors and partners who just absolutely love what we do the open source community. Some partners that come to mind, CodeShip, TopTal, DigitalOcean, in no particular order, I'm just reading down the list here, MaxCDN, Ninefold, Noditsu, PagerDuty, Pluralsight, Rackspace, RunScope, Scout,

StatusPage.io, love those guys over there thought works stunning mentioned top already travis ci version i and a ton of others let's see one other one that was a good support as well uh code climate balanced and of course five by five dan benjamin and his team uh we're on the five by five network i mean just so many people to thank you know i feel like uh rattling off record labels or something like that but just a ton of people to thank and making the change all possible i mean you think about it jared right i mean it's a it is a podcast but there's a lot of moving components and you can attest to this i mean how many movie components do you think we have the fine component uh i mean you got the blog you got 42 i don't know

that's a magic number and i don't have the answer i'll just throw that one in there we got boards we got github issues we got all sorts of things that are emotional all the time that kind of requires some attention and and whatnot and it's uh you know we're gonna have a conversation soon with DHH. And one of the things I want to talk to him about is this thing he's got an issue with, which is people getting paid full time to do open source. Like it's their full time job to maintain an open source project. And he has some, you know, there's some things he has to say about that.

I kind of feel a little bit of that burden because it's like, you know, we couldn't really do this part time project true justice unless somebody came on full-time to really do what we thought we could do with it. We could probably keep living along as a side project, and it did well. There's nothing wrong with what we've done, but to get to where we want to go, it's going to require more commitment, more dedication, and just more focus. It's probably the easiest way to sum that up is focus. Well, let's talk about the members because I think they're a big aspect of even making it. I know you already thanked them for helping you be able to step away, but I think specifically over the next few months, I think the members will be benefiting from this, which they've made this possible, of course, the sponsors as well.

And what they're making possible is now going to be coming back to them in a bigger way just because of your reinforced efforts at improving the membership experience. So maybe speak a little bit to that, tease if you can or if you want to, and let everybody know you know who's not a member why they should be a member and how they do that yeah absolutely so the the first benefit so let me just summarize what the membership is um think of it like i guess most out there are hackers so they don't really know dribble well but dribble has this pro thing and it's sort of this you know lightweight inexpensive way to support uh dribble so they don't have to do things like ads and stuff like that. Well, one thing we thought about when we relaunched back in 2012, I believe it was, or 2013, two years ago, so that was 2013, was a way to bring the people who are diehard ChangeLog fans, people who want to see us do good stuff, find a way to, one, directly support us, and two, get deeper into the mix. And this membership was born.

It's $20 a year, so it's extremely inexpensive. It's like less than $2 a month. So it's like buying us coffee to make this podcast and email and everything we do possible and everything we're going to do possible. So it's like less than $2 a month 20 bucks a year you get half of half off our t-shirt and we got tons of awesome benefits from partners like uh like we mentioned earlier code ship digital ocean rack space we've got discounted especially discount especially negotiated discounts for our members that will save you 20 bucks a year on a new digital account or getting code ship for like two thousand dollars less a year you know it's really awesome features we've worked out with these partners who love us and want to give back

to our members so that's that's one thing that we're doing there one of the newest benefits we've just launched though is the members only slack room So we thought about making this open because realistically, I think that it would be awesome to talk to everybody who loves the changelog. Then I thought it really makes sense to focus on the members because they're helping this initiative

of me being full time and sustainable and eventually doing a lot more like going to conferences and just being able to do a lot more that we will talk about in this show to give those benefits directly back to members. So we just opened up a members-only Slack room. Everybody who's a member got an email.

Every new member within the day, they get an email to them to invite them into that Slack room. And we're in there chatting about everything from open source to what's going on with the change. It's like a behind-the-scenes look. So if you're not a member today and you want to enjoy awesome benefits, like a special discounts on digital ocean, code ship and others,

uh, 20 bucks a year, go to the change law.com slash membership, or just go to the homepage. And in the sidebar, there's a navigation area. We'll get you there if you need to, but 20 bucks a year,

super easy. We use stripe, you you know we use industry standard awesome ways to to make charging you possible yeah and it's just we appreciate the support so yeah absolutely and now even more than ever you know it's putting like it's as close as you get to be putting food on this guy's plate, right? Because I was about to say literally putting food on his plate, but that's just because we bastardized the word literally in our society. But via a proxy of your cash, the money's going straight to supporting Adam and our efforts.

So if you're not a member, why not? We also have an audio editor for the podcast we have to pay every month. We have overhead. Even though we got lots of expenses every month. These mics we're speaking into, we're not cheap. So you mentioned conferences. Let's talk a little bit more about that and a little bit about this video initiative, which is very fledgling at the moment.

What does your full-time mean for the conference scene, A little bit about this video initiative, which is very fledgling at the moment. Yes. Kind of teased. What does your full-time mean for the conference scene, and what does it mean for video? Okay. Well, we both have families. When I say we, I mean you and I. But even just me, I have a family as well. So going to 16 conferences a year isn't feasible. But we'd like to go to one a quarter.

That's something that we think we can achieve. And when we go, we don't want to just go and be like, hey, everybody, how are you? We want to come and do our best to sort of get a snapshot, to cover the scene, to talk to the people that are there, not just those who are known, but those who are, in quotes, unknown. The people that just make open source happen, make the developer community happen.

People that are not the rock stars, so to speak. You know, just everybody, be a part of the community and show love to everyone. And one thing that we did most recently at Keeper Be Weird was we took our video camera, which was a Canon 6D shooting HD video. We took our ring light. We took some gear.

We took an awesome mic, a Rode NTG3. So for those who are audio geeks out there, you can go ahead and put your hands up in the air for that one because the Rode NTG is an awesome boom or an awesome shotgun mic. And we took all this gear and we went there and we shot this new series, this new video series we're producing called Beyond Code. And maybe, Jerry, we can pause there for a second and maybe you can shuffle some papers around and find the questions we asked. Maybe tease out some of the questions we've talked about.

But some amazing answers from some amazing developers. to what Jerry was saying was that working full-time at Pure Charity, working part-time at the Change Log, basically having a job and a half, having a wife, having family, having things that balance out life, I just couldn't get to the video as much as I wanted to. Even though I really, really wanted to, it was really, really tough to focus on all this stuff. So now that we're sustainable enough and I've stepped away, we can start focusing a lot more on that. So maybe you can mention a couple of the questions we asked.

Yeah, so we had a set of seven questions. Well, the first one, say your name, so that one doesn't count too much. A few questions here. The old saw, who's your programming hero? Fans of the Change Logger, fans of that question. What advice would you give yourself if you had to learn to program all over again? We asked people which open source project has had the largest impact on their life what's the most exciting thing in software right now is there something else that you'd rather be

doing and then finally because we're at keeper be weird we asked everybody to make a weird face for us yeah that was awesome so just questions that are focused on the people, a little bit on open source and what they find exciting. Had some great answers. Yeah. Super excited to get that video out there and let the people see it. And a throwback to the members-only room is that we've been sharing some stuff like that, like what we're doing day-to-day, updates even. I shared some artwork we're using for promotions for the future

openings up of beyond code and you know that's where we're going to start teasing out you know things like that we'd obviously like to share it on twitter but people just start to say you know when will this be out there and things like that it's just we like to share that with a a closer tighter knit group and what better group to share it with than those who are supporting you so that's why we have members that's why we opened up the members in the slack room we're in there all day long so we you know you have full access to

those for the changelog to answer your questions to riff on open source to mention a new project or whatever so super excited about going full time being able to do video and doing this this this mini series i guess you'd say so like each conference would be its own little mini series you know maybe 10 maybe 12 people on and those questions are awesome questions it was like a

a mixture of you and i come up those those questions. Mostly you. Somewhat me. It was a mix. Not much of me at all. So we have a couple conferences that we're looking at. Space City JS this spring. OSCON or OSCON if you will. Yeah. However the heck you say that.

There's a conference in August that we got. A look at Strangeloop perhaps. We'd like some more suggestions. Some place that y'all think we absolutely have to go. I know we've been advised that GopherCon. which is happening in Denver in July, is a must. I think that'd be kind of a cool one. So because of that, we did open up a separate issue on Ping. This is our Ping repository on GitHub, github.com slash the changelog slash ping,

issue 129, where you can come in and tell us where we ought to be and take this roadshow. Yeah. We'd love to have your participation there as well. Like I said, you know, we'd like to do as many as one a quarter. So obviously we have to, we don't want to make it where we're choosing really on the greatness of the,

of it. But I think, you know, one thing that's going to make it easier for us is when we start, you know, willing this list down to an actual list we want to go to, we'll start reaching out to the conference organizers. And having the organizers' support at Keep Review Weird was perfect for us because Schneems and the rest of the crew there, I mean, if it weren't for their support, we wouldn't have been able to do what we did with Beyond Code. So having the conference organizers' support and sort of playing a part is going to be perfect for us.

And so we'll need some time to flesh that out. And, you know, obviously OSCon or OSCon, however you want to say it, may be a harder one because they're bigger. But, you know, we really enjoy the regional scene. It's been really great. We also want to kind of go more polyglot and be a little less focused on Ruby and JavaScript.

Uh, we've been told that, you know, throughout the history of the change log is just be a bit more widespread. And we've, we've given our own reasons and excuses for that. But, uh,

yeah, local issue if we can too, because the closer it is to us, like obviously we don't live in Europe. So going to a Europe conference is going to take a lot more logistics and costs to to get there so right pretty pretty uh harder to get those but we we don't want to not go there either but maybe that'd be more like a year two goal you know year one focus on us-based conferences you year two kind of spread out and be able to to go to europe-based or any other based conferences because we'll have some experience under our belt

doing a bit more travel. Yeah, absolutely. So I'd say especially anybody out there who's a conference organizer and is excited about having the changelog come and shoot some video and be involved as an aspect of your conference, definitely reach out to us.

And when you see, I'm going to give you a teaser on this, when you see what we're going to do with Beyond Code, you're going to do backflips, you're going to do 150 push-ups, I'm going to give you a teaser on this. When you see what we're going to do with Beyond Code, you're going to do backflips. You're going to do 150 pushups. You're going to run a mile and you're going to come back and say, oh my Lord,

that's awesome. I want you at my conference. So we're hoping to get lots of conferences to support. We're hoping to have a list we can't even go to just because it's going to be that awesome.

So I'm going to pump it up like that. What do you think, Jared? Is that some hype? You lost me at 150. How many can you do? 10? 15 mean you could probably squeeze 15 out of me you know if you you got enough on the line maybe i could do 15 there you go that's you know developers you know i can type real fast but push-ups come on push-ups um not for me i'll agree there i'll agree there all right man what

else you got anything else so i think we probably talked a bit about this but i think sustainability is great consistency so if you've seen uh in the past the change log has kind of gone up and gone down a little bit in terms of its frequency and i would say over the last three months four months we've been a lot more consistent yep and that's really the name of the game for us meaning the show the weekly email we just started that back up we talked about how we started using trello as a cms we'll link to that in the show notes for the show uh that was paramount too so shout out to trello for making that possible and jerry writing the ruby code back to the API and pulling all that. I mean, that was phenomenal.

It made it so much easier and fun. It made it, writing it and making it fun. Yeah, we haven't missed an issue since we switched our publishing flow. And the issues are, the list is growing. The issues are great. People get, you know, people are loving it. And just to kind of,

if this is the first time you're hearing about the ChangeLog Weekly, it's a weekly email we ship on saturdays that covers everything that hits our open source radar it's highly editorialized it's highly curated so we're not just like throwing links in there and saying enjoy them we're really right going in and finding the details and why you should read some of the things we're finding we're not comprehensive across every niche and cranny of open source. We're doing our best, but there's some real good stuff in there.

And we do have some sponsors that fall in there, and we've found that even our sponsors have – our take on sponsorships for that are make them as native and relevant as possible. And so rather than just doing an ad for so-and-so and some sort of discount code, we're working with CodeShip and TopTal and Rackspace and we're featuring particular blog posts

in their archive of their blog, which are phenomenal blogs. And we're pulling out those great articles they have in their blogs and help them promote their blogs a bit more because that's how you best get to know who they are as a company and trust them like we do and so we've taken that unique approach towards advertising in in weekly as well so it's not even just like you won't see any jobs in there we'll never i mean top towel is is about getting hired and and you know becoming

an elite engineer but you'll never see us do ever and i mean capitalized you'll never see us do, ever. And I mean capitalized. You'll never see us promote a job. We'll never do that again. Ever. It's not cool. We're not recruiters. Didn't we used to do that? Yeah, we used to promote GitHub jobs. We used to do that. We were doing an ad on this podcast saying

so-and-so's got a Java job or a JavaScript job or whatever and talk about the details of what they expect from you. That was just like the lame days of the change law. We're never doing that again. We'll never promote jobs. Just had to get that out there. But consistency.

You're on the hook now. I'm on the hook. We're never going to do it. And I will say better ad spots in the podcast. Podcast in general, we've got Aaron on the team. Aaron Dowd, if you don't know him, the podcast dude, he's editing for us. I think he's been editing, what what six shows now for us jared something like that yeah so mid-december yeah he's doing a phenomenal job for us every new show is getting better we're doing better with getting our ads done and just in general we're just improving the quality

of everything we're doing and we've been doing that before i went full-time but now that we're here we're going to do a lot more of that and you know beyond code stay tuned for that we may throw up a mailing list to announce it but i would say the easiest to to get subscribed to that would be just subscribe to weekly because we sure we share yeah everything that matters to us in weekly and that's really it we also have a little bit of different uh mailing list a newsletter that we're working on nightly nightly which is kind of our nightly build if you will yes it's kind of if it we won't talk too much about it because we're going to be talking to it on an upcoming show uh we're having ilia is it grigoric or gregoric that's my first question gregoric so we're having Ilya on who did the GitHub archive

and had a nightly newsletter that he was sending out on all the hot, freshest, newest GitHub repos. Yes. He wound that down and we'll talk more about it on the show but needless to say, we're going to have a nightly email as well

that we're pretty excited about. For the hardest of the course, people. The hardest of the course. I like that. There's the kind of people who get GitHub Explore every morning, but that's just not enough. It's like, come on, man, give me some more. I really don't want to frame it like that, but to be honest, that's probably a good description. It's the GitHub Explore++, so yeah so to speak yeah a little bit you know well it's it's like for those

of you who read that and want more this is what you subscribe to people like me because i i loved that newsletter so yeah we got that coming hottest repos on github before they blow up is is our tagline for that yep so that's in the pipeline as well. And some unique things about that, like Jared said, we will talk to Ilya this Friday. So today is Monday to date this. We're February 9th. And on Friday the 13th this week, we're talking to Ilya.

That show will actually air out on the 20th. So February 20th is when that show will be aired we'll record it on 13th we'll be talking to ilia about github archive what started that project and then it's i don't know what the state of it was but long story short we talked to ilia about taking over that project renaming it to change all nightly yeah and that show's all about that so to tease that show out a bit and one unique thing we're going to do to it is make it have a night theme so I'm excited about that everyone we showed it to so far has been like that's awesome

so for those of you who like well designed well crafted emails that keep you up to date on the awesomest open source out there Gino and Knightley I think it's a nice compliment to weekly as well. So you have your once a week curated,

like we put our thoughts into this and then we have our nightly build, which is just like stuff coming out, you know? Yeah, absolutely. I think it's a nice compliment. All right, man. I think that was pretty good coverage of your announcement. I'm super excited.

I'm sure all of our listeners are super excited. Yeah, it's our announcement. It's definitely, it's mine, but it's ours. I'm super excited. I'm sure all of our listeners are super excited. It isn't just supporting just the changelog anymore. It's going much further than that, than directly supporting me and my family to be able to keep this show on the road, so to speak. So hearts out to you if you're a member. If you're not a member and you're on the fence about it, it's $20 a year. $20 a year is all it takes to help make sure that we stay around, keep doing what we're doing.

And we have plans to do a lot more, and your support will only make that even more possible. So changelog, it's thechangelog.com. I almost said our future potential URL. Thechangelog.com slash membership. Go there. You'll find out all you need to know. Yeah, man, that's it.

So anything else we want to cover? Jarrett, before we say goodbye to everybody? I don't think so. Anything for you in particular? Nothing personal for you? How excited are you? I'm super excited. Like I said, this has been something that I've been building to.

I've wanted to see you go full-time for a long time. I see a lot of potential in what we're doing and just kind of like untapped because we just, you know, like you said, we're, we both have families. This is not something that I can do full time at the moment. I got a lot of other businesses going on, but you know, the fact that we got somebody who's just doing changelog like all day, every day means we can do a lot more stuff. We can do better, you more better more often more faster awesome yeah yeah it'll be fun i guess a way to good way to close out would be to say that jared was you know my

wife definitely was huge encouraged me for it but one of jared's list like if you took a list and said this was jared's checklist for the change law number one it was to just i don't know what your first checklist was but one of your biggest most most brightest, bold to-dos on your list for the change level was to get me to go full-time. Yep. And so I know for you it's got to be a bit of personal gratitude to be just like, yeah, that's done. So you've definitely been a part of helping make sure that's possible.

So without Jared's support, y'all, I would be a lost little puppy out here in this open source land. Long story short. With that, we'll say goodbye. Thanks for tuning in for this special edition of the Cheney's Log to kind of catch up on what's going on. We greatly appreciate your support. Cheney'sLog.com. Cheney'sLog.com slash memberships.

Membership. Membership. Bye, y'all. Bye. you