The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - State of the “log” 2019 (Interview)

Episode Date: January 14, 2020

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

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Head to do.co.changelog to get started with a $100 credit. Again, do.co.changelog. Welcome to 2020 Officially. You are listening to the ChangeLog, a podcast featuring the hackers, the leaders, and the innovators in the world of software development. I'm Adam Stachowiak, Editor-in-Chief here at ChangeLog. On this year's State of the Log episode, Jared and I look back at our favorite moments from 2019 and forward to 2020 and beyond. We talk through our most popular episodes, our personal favorites, our 10-year anniversary, the excitement we have for Brain Science, our newest podcast. It's for the curious, and we also look forward to plans we have for 2020 and the decade to come. All right, we are here for State of the Log 2019.

It happens to be 2020, but it's 2019's State of the Log. Probably the most belated year-end wrap wrap up you're going to listen to this year but listen nonetheless because we got lots of interesting things to talk about we got a good reason we got an excuse why we're recording this mid-january because december was crazy around these parts wasn't it adam yes very very crazy we shipped a lot of episodes too even like it was a busy december for uh many in many ways it was a busy December for many in many ways. It was a busy December and you were extra busy. You want to share the good news with listeners out there?

Yes. So we had our newest son in December, December 10th. My son, Micah was born. So we're super excited, but it made an interesting holiday, I guess, break December. It's always slower anyways anyways but that made it even harder because there's so many things i'm doing in november to prepare for the slowdown in december and for us it it just sped up further in december because you know when you have a kid things get crazy like three weeks went by and i barely knew what day it was at any given day of the week. Like, is it Friday?

Is it Monday? I do not know if it's even dark outside because I haven't seen outside in like three days straight. You know, thank God for like grocery delivery and stuff like that. So we had scheduled to record this sometime in December, but plans fell by the wayside. And so here we are. Nonetheless, we wanted to get a log out there and talk about the year that has passed and some of the episodes, the popular ones, our personal favorites, maybe things happening around changelog media. Where should we start? That's an interesting perspective there, too, because we even – I'm not sure if we did this last year, but we had debated whether or not this should be stated a log for the changel or Change Log Media proper because, you know,

some people listen to this show and don't know there's other podcasts out there that we produce. And this year was one of those years where we were consistently producing, you know, five, six episodes a week, which is really hard to do to keep that up and to deliver the quality that we always aim to strive for thank god for our amazing cast of people to work with us to make all of our podcasts excellent because you and i alone would fail i think uh so thankful we have such an awesome crew to make what we do so special and so 200 episodes across all the show all the podcasts just like that's a lot yeah so 46 episodes of the changelog and last year we did 47 so we just about hit that mark i think the arrival of a new child a good excuse to maybe fall slightly short but 200 episodes across our entire catalog and it was

an interesting year it was a lot of work but we I think by the end of the year, we've been operating like a well-oiled machine, if I do say so myself. We're in the groove, we're in the flow, and we're putting out weekly episodes of Practical AI, Go Time, the Change Log, of course, Brain Science, every other week-ish, and JS Party every week.

And so lots of good podcasts in these different niches that we find so interesting. I got some stats for you here. It's just basic math, really, not really stats. But let's just conservatively say it takes about five hours of effort to produce one podcast episode, which is probably conservative. It's probably more than that.

But let's just say five hours because it's a round, and that's a conservative number. So if we shipped 200 episodes last year at five hours a clip, that's 1,000 hours of effort. And if we divide that 1,000 hours by 24, which is 24 hours in a day, that's 41.666, which I hate 666, but 41.6 whatever. For a decimal. Yeah, I mean, infinite to end at seven.

41 days, 41.6 days to produce that many effort, that much. And it's probably more than that. Yeah. Isn't that crazy? Well, you got scheduling, you got recording, you got lots of the intangibles. Yes, promotion of it uh hanging out slack talking about it i mean there's just a lot of effort that goes into producing this amount so when i i guess why i say that it's like it's a lot of work i enjoy this but man it really is a lot of work

and you know there's something you said on the episode we did with jeff myerson where you were like it's impressive i remember you saying this to Jeff. It's impressive the amount of work you do. And so, Jeff, a shout out to you for shipping five shows a week, bro. I mean, that's like we feel it. That's a lot. It's a lot of work. So I would say kudos to anybody that decides to podcast because don't just do it whimsically. Do it intentionally because this is – it is a tough thing to keep up consistently over

many years. And speaking of such, 10 years this year. That's right. So yes, we used to ship one show a week for a long time. And we feel like that was a lot of work. And Jeff has been shipping five shows, software engineering daily. He does a daily show during work days, takes the weekend off, of course, otherwise he might explode.

But he's been doing five shows a week and we worked our way to five shows a week just in a different format. So instead of doing the ChangeLog five times, we have different podcasts, which we like because there's just more voices. And so shout out to all the voices out there on ChangeLog shows.

One of the big things that happened was that GoTime came back this year in April. So after a long hiatus, almost a year maybe, coming up on nine months, I think it was May or June 2018 we hiatused GoTime, and it came back in April 2019. And six regular voices on that show now. So love seeing the expansion of that panel. And Go Time has been killing it lately.

I love that show. Yes. That's my favorite, is the model that JS Party put forward was this model of many voices that I just saw a lot of great things happening with that. And I knew that we had to do the same thing with Go Time, and we were able to, and it's turned out to be a really great show. I'm stoked about that show.

A milestone that Go Time hit this year as well as coming back in April was that they shipped their 100th episode this year. I can't remember the exact date that went out, but it was with Rob Pike and Robert Griesemer. Is that how you say his last name? Two of the Robs who are creators of the Go programming language and was a blockbuster episode and has gotten to over 20,000 listens, which is pretty good for Go time.

Contrast that against episode, I believe, number three of the changelog back in 2009 with Rob Pike. You know, like during the creation process, the Buddha process, the open source Buddha process of Go the Language. Really interesting, right? Like to be episode 100 of Go Time, a whole different podcast on the same network. And to go to that depth. And instead of just talking about what could be of this language, what is of the language.

And that's pretty cool to just have that experience, to be able to be in this kind of trench that kind of length of time. Go itself celebrated its 10th birthday this year. And so we always talk about the changelog growing up alongside GitHub, which it very much did. But even more so aligned almost on top of growing up with the Go programming language. I mean, same age.

They're the same age. They would be at the same birthday party with the clowns and the balloons. They're having birthday parties. They might have more clowns and more balloons because... I think they probably would have more clowns. Deeper pockets, but whatever.

More balloons. Yeah. I love that. I mean, to be in this kind of community for 10 years, one, to be a podcast for that many years, we said that on the show we did with Quincy, Quincy Larson, our 10th, or I guess our 10-year celebration episode.

But to be podcasting or have a podcast that didn't die, I guess maybe it did die a little bit here and there. But I think we spoke to that on that episode with Quincy. It wasn't a dead dog. It was an injured dog on the side of the road. You don't stop and save a dead dog because they're dead. You can't save them. But when they're injured and they're whimpering

and you see an injured dog on the side of the road, you've got to save that dog. I'm loving this analogy. I really am. So we were an injured dog at least a couple times in our lifespan. Yes, we were. But we did last the 10 years so far. And, you know, geez, I hope we got 10 more years in us, bro.

I mean, I love this community. I love how open source has blossomed over this past 10 years. And I love how there's been so much community and so much creation, but so much good for the world, you know, from career opportunities to better products,

to more safer ways to deliver products because open source is marginally more secure than say, you know, code that isn't open to the public to scrutinize or to run security analysis on and stuff like that. And there's so much opportunity out there because of the, the way of open source. And we've been able to be a part of that and share so many stories of that. That's so awesome. Well, you were talking about how much work gets put in and we want to put that into perspective and say, I was talking with Rachel, my wife, a few days ago,

and she was just saying, could you ever have imagined when you were younger that you'd be a professional podcaster or a full-time podcaster? And I was like, no, I couldn't have because there was no such thing. When I was a kid, I wanted to be either Ken Griffey Jr. or Michael Jordan. It was like, am I going to be the best basketball player ever or the best baseball player, in my opinion, ever? I mean, okay, Babe Ruth.

But to me, Ken Griffey Jr. was the bomb. And that's what I wanted to be. But I couldn't have possibly wanted to be a professional podcaster because there just wasn't a thing. So you've been full-time on Changelog since, I think, 2015, which we even commemorated that and talked about that. And for me, it was just this last year, 2019, that we finally were able to bring me on full-time in September,

and it's been an amazing thing. So we do put work in, but we feel very blessed to be able to do this work, and it's one of the greatest things in the world. It's surreal, to be quite honest with you. It's almost as surreal to say you're a full-time open source software developer. That didn't exist many years ago either.

You couldn't aspire to be that. In the same way we couldn't aspire to be a full-time podcaster of any sort. And I think that sort of only defines or describes a sliver of what we do, but it's the easiest way to describe it. And yeah, I feel very fortunate because it's certainly so real to tell people when they say, what do you do? That classic question, right? What do you do?

What do you say? I don't have a perfect answer. I should have a better answer for it. I usually, it depends on the person, the way they ask, or what my bias might tell me about the person. I might go further, but usually I say I'm a podcaster. I produce podcasts. And then they usually say, you know, for whom? And I say, well, we own and run the company.

It's our shows, and I have to explain that too. But generally, it's, you know, a podcaster. Didn't you used to tell people you shipped MP3s around the world or something like that? I still do. I still do, yeah. The easiest way to say what I do every day is I ship an MP3 across the world. It's really weird. That is a lifeblood.

That's how podcasts get delivered. I have to tell you this, Jared, you know how this works, man. I do know how it works. Right. You wrote the actual code for our RSS feed. You know it intimately. But yeah, an RSS feed, MP3 files, globally shipped around the world. Thanks to Fastly for our studio to make that possible.

But wow, it's just so crazy to think that that is what I do generally for a living. It's profound. So I ran a contract software firm for many years and so I'm still stuck in that mode of saying, that's what I say. I boil that down to, I do software. That's just what I tell people. What do you do? I'm in software.

That's usually enough. They check their box. Most people ask what you do. They aren't super into the answer anyways. It's a formality unless they're really trying to get to know you. Now I'm so used to just saying I do software that I still kind of just say that when people ask. And then I've started to shift to like, sometimes I do podcasting.

And that actually usually generates more of a conversation than I do software because people are used to the idea of a programmer or something. Whereas a podcaster has been just a hobby for so many for so long. We're like D celebrities. Yeah, D-listcaster has been just a hobby for so many for so long. We're like D celebrities. Yeah, D-list. We're like D-list celebrities.

I mean, because podcasts, they think of like popular celebrity-esque podcasts because the mainstream has popularized for that. There's no other way to say it the way podcasting is. And so we almost get lumped into like celebrity celebrity ism if that's a thing right well like but very low on the list yeah like we only get recognized at oscon and uh javascript conferences they're usually disappointed when i they say well what kind of what kind of podcast can i listen to them yeah but you probably wouldn't like it i'm just assuming this because we target software developers right which is why i kind'm kind of happy about brain science because it does reach beyond just the developer niche

where it's interesting for a more casual or mainstream audience than any of our other shows. Practically, I as well to a different subset, definitely an overlapping subset, but brain science is one that I can point my wife's friends to and say, you might be interested in this, and they would actually be able to get something out of it. Whereas the changelog, I'm just like, yeah,

you can go subscribe if you want to give us one more download every week, but that would just be a favor, because you're not going to enjoy the show unless you are actively in software or open source or those kind of things. Speaking of brain science, this is how far out our norm of listenership we've gone. There's a field training officer in Chicago, Chicago Police Department, greater Chicago area. He reached out to me and Marielle via LinkedIn individually but said the same thing to both of us pretty much

and he says hey adam i love this episode speaking to one of the more recent ones on respect empathy and compassion he says i love this episode respect empathy and compassion on brain science you and mario do a great job really explaining the how of compassion and so like it was interesting to see a field training officer of a police department in chicago reach out and say that to us because like that's not our typical audience that is cool yeah and i'm sure there's more examples of that out there what's fastly linode and roll bar what are these things right right yes what's bandwidth is bandwidth? Is that like time? Which actually, I mean, inside baseball, but it is a bit of a challenge for us now with a more casual audience.

I don't know what you say, a more expanded audience show is like all of our sponsorships are high quality because they're handpicked and targeted at our audience, at ourselves. And Brain Sciences kind of brings a new audience. And so it's like, well, how do you navigate that relationship where you're not going to throw in a roll bar ad or a digital ocean ad to a police officer in Chicago, right?

It's not going to help that person. Yeah, exactly. And that's been the challenge. And that's one of the reasons why we've chosen to actually run that show non-sponsored right now. So, you know, it kind of does lose money in the economics of the show and production of it. But, you know, I'm a big fan of like, I guess, developing an audience before you sort of find a way to monetize. I hate that word. You know, find a way to sustain it. I hate that word. You know, find a way to sustain it.

I hate that word too. I'm just kidding. What word can we use? But the way you can actually enable, what would David Greiner say? That's what I think. You know, how can we get money into this thing to make it go?

That's what he would say. You know, once you, you got to figure out your audience and the show and the rhythms and things like that. Now you don't have to, but that's the way we've chosen to do it because of that chasm, because the majority of our sponsors, while they would love to be on that show and support us to do it, in fact, many have even said, can we be on it?

And for the reasons that we have of like relevancy, like let's choose to work with and develop partnerships and relationships with brands that are relevant to our audience. I feel like we've sort of had to say no for now so we can kind of find out what the audience truly is and we can get much more relevant sponsors for that show. Yep. It'd be interesting to see where that goes over the next year or so. Let's talk about the changelog because that's the show that we're on and that's the show that our listeners are subscribed to here in 2019. 46 episodes, as I said,

most popular episodes of the year. We had a lot of great ones as I was going through the list. I was not patting myself on the back or us on the back. I'm like, sometimes you look back and you're like, meh. Another time, you're like,

that was a good show. And I feel like as I look through the list, I was pretty proud of what we did last year. The most popular of which was episode 331, GitHub Actions is the Next Big Thing, with Kyle Daigle, of course

the lead of the Actions team. This was back early last year, I think February or March timeframe. But no surprise that GitHub Actions and a show about it was popular amongst our audiences. As we said, we grew up with GitHub and people have been waiting for a lot of these automation tools and a lot of the things that Actions is

or has become since the announcement for a while now. And I think there's excitement around this show because there's excitement around GitHub Actions. Yeah. I wonder, too, if – no, I'm sure GitHub Actions is super awesome. And the draw to listen to learn more from Kyle and others about this super cool thing is there. But I'm wondering if maybe calling it the next big thing in the title wasn't part of it too. Good clickbait on that one.

Yeah, I mean, that really draws you in. Like, is it the next big thing? Let me find out. Not even is it, because that would be clickbait if we had it with a question mark. We're actually declaring that it is. I think this is your title. You titled this one, didn't you?

I think, like all things, they're collaborative. Sure, I'll take the credit. Sure. Yeah yeah yeah i titled it it's a good title it's a good title i think it was even said to some degree i think we said it in off air in a funny way is this the next big thing you know like and so we often will like reach into the content of a show to kind of find what the title might be, but stay on point. You know, don't go and Dan Benjamin it like the way, you know, you do some sort of like crazy title that doesn't make any sense that like, what is this show about? Well, that's what I do with JS Party all the time. Yes.

And that's so, that's cool too. I love that. We should make sure we earmark that because i like that about our network is that they're not all they don't all take themselves so seriously that it has to be this serious title and make perfect relevant sense for what you will get it doesn't make a promise titles don't always make a promise especially for the s party i like that yeah it's fun allowing each of our shows to have their own personality yeah and have them represent the people on the show and really even the community that they represent. I mean, the

JS and web community have so much interesting, weird, zany things in them and people that it's fun to kind of lean into that, so to speak, with that show. But then you get on the AI show and it's definitely more serious. One of the things that's happened behind the scenes this year is I've begun to edit more of our

shows and get more involved in the post-production. And I actually put out on Twitter a while back when I was editing both Jazz Party and Practical AI one week the difference in the audio files. And the cuts, yeah. I recall seeing that. Yeah, because Daniel and Chris, they have kind of an every other episode cadence, or they have two kinds of shows.

They have an interview show on Practical AI, and then they also have what they call Fully Connected, which is really a news and resources and commentary, just the two of them discussing what's going on in the space. And those shows in particular, they're just very measured, metered, like Daniel talks for a minute and a half, and then Chris talks for 90 seconds,

and then Daniel for 60, and then Chris. And it's just so easy to edit, and it's just back and forth and very smooth. And then you go to a JS party edit where there's five of us, and we're all laughing or trying to get quick jabs in here or there. You have to interject to have your turn, and it's very frantic and messy,

so it's interesting just seeing. You can see it visually inside of the editor. The show style, yeah. You can see the way a show plays out differently in the edits by the cuts. Yep. For sure. But anyways, back to GitHub Actions.

So since that show came out, of course, back in October, GitHub had Universe and really their GitHub Actions sort of V2 release, which I think makes it even more exciting, which is they've integrated now CI and CD, which is really kind of when it comes time to automate and do actions around your repos, pretty much everybody wanted CI. And so it was a very obvious thing.

In fact, so much demand that they integrated it into GitHub proper. So lots moving there. I'm not sure if a lot of people are adopting that or not maybe let us know if you've started to use github actions for your ci moved off of something else or if you still see a value in a different service why that is we'd love to hear from you all. Number two, most popular episode of last year, Why Smart Engineers Write Bad Code. This is episode 339 with Adam Barr. And again, maybe it was the title that got so many listens,

or maybe it was the topic. I don't know. What do you think? Well, it's interesting how that one framed out, because it was from a book. I can't recall how you discovered the book. And it was a popular book and can't recall how you discovered the book and it was a popular book and had a great title obviously so it made sense i think we just titled it with the exact same book i think that is the book's title or at least the subtitle of the book yeah and so

it would make sense to borrow it because that's the brand of the book i do agree that uh sure that's that's one of those things like, do they write bad code? Why? Why are they smart and write bad code? Must find out. You know, I'm just. So intriguing. Yeah. It kind of does read like a YouTube title.

Yeah, it kind of does. It's a fun show. I was actually quite surprised by that show, though, because I think that was one of the first in a while where we had actually taken like a book and tried to like dive deeper into it. And there was some science behind this, some research from Adam behind this. And, you know, we really got into some of the nuts and bolts of the whys behind this, this why smart engineers write bad code. And it's actually quite profound. So I would encourage you to listen to it for one, if you're listening to this, if you haven't yet. So to me, it's not a surprise that that one is a popular one in retrospect but uh with my pre-site prior to the episode i wasn't expecting it or thinking it'd be like oh this really awesome show but lo and behold it was like

number two of the year so yep all that to say too i guess more advice for podcasts out there take some shots you know uh try something different this was different for us this year to do that kind of show we did a couple more around books i think there's one more in this uh list that is two more in this list there's two more in the top five that's right and then another one of your favorites was also around a book so that is interesting because i wouldn't say historically we've done that very much. But last year, I mean, five of our biggest shows were all with authors. Yeah. And a lot of times specifically covering the book that they either are releasing or have released. Which is why I didn't expect that.

And I think this one here was the first of the several we did this past year that was around authors and books. Yep, that was the first one. Well, the next one doesn't have a flashy title, but sometimes you just get the right guest and that's all you need. So number three, most popular episode of last year, The Pragmatic Programmers. That was a great episode. Probably, in terms

of nuggets of wisdom per second, I think probably that's the highest value ChangeLog episode of last year. listen to that and you know read their new 20th uh annual or 20 year edition or don't read it but listen to that and you can just learn so much from these two and i sure did yeah they they have great chemistry too and so i've spent my entire career knowing who Dave Thomas is and Andy Hunt is from a name perspective. I've never met them, never spoken to them. I'm not even sure if I've seen, I may have seen Dave, probably both, speak at Lone Star Ruby Conference, considering their roots.

But never met them before and so it was really cool to like finally like put a face and personality behind these really famous people in the industry have written you know the pickaxe like what ruby programmer doesn't know you just say the pickaxe and immediately the book comes to mind right and the era of ruby at that time and uh ruby on rails and the inertia behind the language and framework and building for the web like this whole new lifeblood into building for the web had had come because of like this era that these two camped around not to mention the agile manifesto yeah and And like you said, they had great, they're both charismatic people and interesting.

You could talk to them individually and have a great conversation. But together, I was surprised and delighted by their chemistry and how much they seem to enjoy razzing one another and they bounce off one another's ideas. And when you get four people onto a podcast, especially in an interview, it's more

complicated, it's more difficult to have an interview, first of all, with two interviewers, which we do that week by week, so we're pretty used to it. But it is difficult to have two people interview one person. It's much more difficult to have two people interview two people, because there's conversational logistics, there's all these different things. And with those two, I felt like the four of us had a great rapport. And I think it comes through on that episode. So definitely one of the better ones.

354, episode 354, which is the number four most popular episode of last year, was recorded live from OzCon, was it not? It was. It was Ron Evans of the Tiny Go Project. The title is Go is Eating the World of Software. Another one of those click-baity get-em titles. You have to complete that.

This was something that he actually said. This is like a quote out of the episode. Can you say that? Yes. If software is eating the world, then Go is eating the world of software. That's right. And he's very good at, like, what's it called?

When you say a phrase for the first time. Sound bite. Yeah, sound bites and coining phrases. Like he can create a phrase. And Ron is one of those, talk about charisma. He's one of these guests that, and I say this in the most gracious way,

you kind of wind him up and let him go because he's got so much to say. He says it was such enthusiasm and he's so smart that really as interviewers, we don't have much work to do. We just kind of like lead him in a direction and just let Ron talk. And that's what he does.

The transcript shows that because it's mostly one-liners from you and I and paragraphs from Ron. So the transcript alone is a visual representation of that effect. Yeah, and he speaks in such coherent... I can string together two or three sentences without just brain farting,

but Ron can string together minutes upon minutes of prose. Yeah. And they're all coherent. In fact, so much so that I took one of his segments, which he just said off the top of his head about Grace Hopper and what she really meant when she said ask for forgiveness and not for permission. And I just took that transcript and turned it into a post,

a changelog post by the same name. And it reads like a blog like he wrote you know it reads like something i would have written and edited and he just said it off the top of his head so very talented in that way and we should add that blog post to the show notes of this episode because it's a great quick read and some insights on grace hopper and ron I think even prior to that, he was sort of sheltering himself temporarily from the community, not like for reasons, but to focus. And so he like come out of the woodwork with like a lot of profound findings

and he was just like chomping. I think that, I think Oscon was like the first time he'd been out into the community in like months or something like that from what I recall. And so like, he was like super amped he was and that for ron to be super amped is like like double triple super amped so the fifth and the last one we'll talk about most popular episodes of the year came later it came this fall back to agile's basics with Uncle Bob Martin. Of course, this was another one that's focused around a book release and another one focused around somebody who was involved in the Agile manifesto.

And so maybe the theme there of these top five and another strong episode with a guy who has a lot of opinions as well. Yeah, like Bob, love him or hate him and he definitely is wise about uh the way we should could and do make software and that's uh that's why he wrote the book of course yeah this is one of those ones i didn't i wasn't sure even back to you know facing you know a face, a personality to a name. Bob Martin, Uncle Bob had been, you know, this figure in our community for many years. And I never really followed him well enough to know anything really about him other than he's beloved to some degree and respected quite well and knows what he's talking about. And to finally meet up with him and talk through this book he's written,

the most profound thing was really the doubling and the inertia of our community and how the hockey stick and the growth curve of software developers from, say, the 1950s to today and this idea that every five years, and this is paraphrasing from some of the stuff he said in the show, so definitely go listen to it, episode 367. He was talking about how every five years we double. And correct me if I'm off on the stats here. Yeah, fuzzy math, rough math. Yeah, it was not 100% based on just pure statistics that he had,

but round numbers based on what we do know about the community and its size. So there was some assumptions and there could be some corrections there in order, but nonetheless, the size of our community and then how fast people come in and how long they've been in has just been like this idea of so many more people coming in each year or every five years that are still learning new or to software development and this idea that there's so much educational need and so much i guess wisdom sharing need that was a really really interesting perspective from that show and i think at one point i even joked and said so agile is really here to save the world and you guys both laughed either pandering to me or being true one of the two

well it it invokes perhaps some delusions of grandeur but it was it was well timed and and well meant so that's the top five most popular episodes of last year let's turn now to our personal favorites so yes don't always one-to-one with popularity. And most of what we do with the show is kind of follow our own personal interests and hope that our audience is interested as well. And so we've both documented a couple of our favorite episodes from last year. For me, it starts with really the show of the summer for me

and one that probably resonated the most and maybe was referenced back the most as we moved into the fall and winter, which was Adam Jacobs' The War for the Soul of Open Source, episode 353, which was in the run-up to OzCon and was really an unpacked version of his OzCon keynote, which you can now watch the OzCon keynote on YouTube.

And I think it's like a tight 12 minutes, those keynotes. I like how OzCon does their keynotes. They don't do long ones. They stack up a bunch of people and they'll do four 15-minute ones or something like that. Whereas our episode with him was over an hour. I think it was 80 minutes, roughly. We couldn't stop talking.

So it's kind of the director's cut, so to speak. Yeah, we couldn't stop talking. That's the nice thing about a conversation. You can hear a keynote and it's prepared so it's kind of the director's cut so to speak yeah we couldn't stop talking that's the nice thing about a conversation you know you can hear a keynote and it's prepared it's packaged it has a message and it's powerful in that way but usually these kinds of

speeches are meant to start a conversation whereas on the show we actually had the conversation with him before he did the keynote. So it's not really a teaser for a keynote. It's almost like the director's cut, the deep cut. Yeah. It's almost an either or too. I mean, I don't even know if you'd want to watch the, just watch the keynote for his charisma on stage and his conviction, not so much,

because it's almost shared the exact information to some degree yeah yeah in fact if i had known the exact content in the keynote i would say like the order to do it is to go to youtube watch the 12 minute keynote and then come listen to the show afterwards yeah i think you get the most out of it that way but he's really has a lot to say uh around open source and and why you know why it is what it is what it means to him, where is it going, licensing, like all these kind of big picture things. And it was a fascinating conversation and a great title, The War for the Soul. Yes. Yes. And we made it a little easier too for you listeners. So if you go to the episode, the show notes do have an updated link to his keynote so

don't feel like you have to go to youtube and search for it we've already done that for you it's in the show notes so go to episode 353 on the changelog and you will see that's the very first link to adam's oscon keynote so This episode is brought to you by Algolia, search technology to power your business. Trusted by Twitch, Stripe, Adobe, and many more. Even us. Yes, we use them to power our search, and we love the way they obsess over that developer experience.

They let us fine-tune the index for the best results and report back what people are searching for, even servicing search terms that get zero results, which we love. Check the show notes for a link to get started for free or head to Algolia.com to learn more. How about you? Let's go back and forth on these. Hit us with a favorite. Well, I think I'm basing mine on one. The dude's awesome. Every time I've spoken to Ryan Singer, and I've spoken to him three times personally

in my career history, and every time I've spoken to him three times, like personally, in like my career history. And every time I've spoken to him, I've learned something very profound. Like it's changed my direction in career, or at least my outlook, my vision, I suppose. Some on interface design, how I used to like think through interface flows. So in my prior life, you mentioned you were a recent software consultant, ran your own consultancy. Well, in my prior career was also in software, but on a different side of it, I was more in the product side, the product development side, user interface, design, user experience,

how to make money from it, maybe even. So there's some economics in there too. So I'd actually paid attention to what Ryan was doing around different interface design how to make money from it maybe even so the there's some economics in there too so i i'd actually paid attention to what ryan was doing around different interface design styles and workflows for user flows and stuff so that's where i'd first learn about ryan obviously he's famous because of base camp and all the work he's done and the team has done there but every time i've spoken to him it's i've learned something and shaping, bedding and building that episode we did with him and his book, again, a book that we were very fortunate to have spoken with him like really early on of the life of that book being released. You know, like barely was the website out, barely was the book out.

And I believe it was free to read on the web even like it wasn't even like they were trying to like turn this into a a paper book i i think i might have had a paper component but the point was to share this knowledge and what's really kind of interesting is that you'd mentioned the agile manifesto well a lot of shaping betting a building is about this idea that ryan had called shape up it's this methodology which is not agile but it's agile like and so we even see people on twitter arguing whether or not it is or isn't agile or agile-like, but it's akin to what we know as agile, but has this whole other spectrum that is not agile at all, based on what Ryan has said. So it's kind of interesting to see Bob Martin, you know, back to agile basics.

You've got the pragmatic programmers, you know, kind of in this agile world. And then Ryan Singer with ShapeUp and then the side component to that one with David Kaplan on generative engineering cultures, which I'm always a fan of having deep conversations, methodic conversations with people who really know about leading engineering teams. And these two, Ryan Singer and David Kaplan are definitely those kinds of people. They're leaders in their field. They know how to help reshape and fine-tune the thinking of cultures

and how teams operate to create great products. And that's why they're my favorites for this year. So I picked two. Well, I picked three. Oh, boy. I just had to beat you. Zing. Or maybe I lost because I couldn't actually pick.

So I picked three. Let me interrupt you real quick. I actually have a third one, too. Oh, okay. But go ahead. All's fair. Continue. I can name five if you want me to.

So these last two are paired inso far as I met both of these people at OpenCore Summit this fall in San Francisco, Devin Zugel and Chris Anderson. And so I loved the episodes we made just recently with the two of them. With Devin, we talked about the making of GitHub Sponsors, episode 370. GitHub Sponsors, I think, is a big deal. Maybe it's the next big thing. That one had been used, so we had to go with the making of.

Didn't quite get the same audience that the GitHub Actions one did, so either people are less interested, or it's just a younger episode, or it's all about that title. We'll see. Devin's a fascinating person. I think she's the exact correct person to be working on this problem. Not that there should be just one, but let me say she's a great choice

as somebody, very thoughtful, deep thinker. I love her views into city design and governance and how you can bring those thoughts over into the software community and use them to our advantage. Just an excellent deep dive into how she came to work on that problem at GitHub, and then also kind of how her and the team came to where they are and where it's headed.

So that's 370. Love that episode. And then the other one which I was quite fond of uh was chris anderson the old uh editor-in-chief i don't know the old head of wired magazine and the uh creator of diy drones and what's the name of his company was it 3dr maybe 3d robotics yeah 3dr yeah is that right it's not it's i get all these drone companies mixed together i'm forgetting which one it is 3DR, maybe? 3D Robotics? Yeah, 3DR. Is that right? I get all these drone companies mixed together. I'm forgetting which one it is. I think that's correct.

Anyways, the story about how they pioneered open source drones, which is just a fascinating story, episode 366. And then what Chris was actually more excited about to talk about than we realized, which is his DIY RoboCars and the proxy war that is RoboCars. Proxying for the autonomous car industry and these different methodologies of how we can get cars to drive themselves. Well, a nice playground for that are these real cheap little robo cars and chris and his friends are going about building them and trying out these different uh autonomous strategies and he is super stoked about it and that conversation got me excited about it as well that was another one of those interesting ones almost surreal one wired is huge And to have been come to fruition for some

unforeseen circumstance yep but that's not the case obviously somebody I believe in Mexico wasn't it was really excited

to work with him and like we had told some of that story we're going deep into yeah his co-founder was a was a young man in Mexico

who he met on the internet and multi-million dollar company yeah they built this huge company out of it and they had never met just some crazy stuff Mexico, who he met on the internet. Multi-million dollar company. Yeah, they built this huge company out of it and they never met. Just some crazy stuff that happened there and super interesting. It almost listened and heard his story in disbelief. Like, what?

How did that happen? Yeah. It is so hard to believe. It's so amazing. The other named company was DroneCode. No, that wasn't, that was the open source. DroneCode was the open source project that came out of it. And it's used now by the federal government.

I think the name of his talk at OpenCore Summit was something like how he convinced the federal government to use open source drones or something like that. Fascinating stuff. So those are my favorites. A couple of honorable mentions. I love when we get super nerdy. I thought the new shell episode with Yehuda,

Andres, and Jonathan Turner was awesome. I really enjoyed the text. Text mode was this year, right? Yes. Yes, all things text mode was awesome talking about your terminal and the shell I nerded out

with the elixir talk folks to talk elixir as well which was a lot of fun and so I always love when we get the super technical and we did that quite a bit as well yeah you read for my final favorite yes I'm gonna say one word Baba Yaga We did that quite a bit as well. Yeah. You ready for my final favorite?

Yes. I'm going to say one word. Bubba Yaga. I'm going backstage. I've jumped the shark. I'm going to a different podcast because, hey, why not, right? But, yeah, I mean, the backstage we did, and this is kind of like maybe some past. I know the last time we did this,

the episode we did with brett cannon was one of our favorites so i can honorably say the john wick trilogy on backstage is worth a listen that was so wild even preparing for that episode because like it had been months where we were talking about what like watching the john wick trilogy and catching up and we call ourselves three die hard fans we talked through basically the this this uh storyline of john wick and keanu reeves and the way that became actually does have roots in the teams like it was in a break long ago where we dove into and haphazardly became really good friends with brett during a break we realized he was a cool dude. What a thought. We just couldn't help but riff

on Keanu Reeves and just our thoughts on different movies he's been in. That started this idea of, have you seen John Wick? And there you go. Backstage, episode number seven, the John Wick trilogy with a special guest, Brett Cannon.

Let's talk about backstage real quick here, as you mentioned it. So this is our podcast, which is not a podcast. So it only lives on the Master Feed. If you don't subscribe to the Master Feed, what's wrong with you? It's all of our shows in one place. It's our majestic monolith.

And Backstage only exists there. Of course, it's on changelog.com slash Backstage, but who listens to podcasts at a website? You want to listen in your app. So subscribe to Master, you get Backstage only exists there. Of course, it's on changelog.com slash Backstage, but who listens to podcasts at a website? You want to listen in your app. So subscribe to Master, you get Backstage. It's not on a schedule. It doesn't have an agenda. I don't remember what we describe it as,

like the inner workings of Changelog and other things or something. Behind the scenes of Changelog and surrounding communities. There you go. So we've just started to- Which is still bland. It's not, still doesn't even describe it. I mean, it's, it's.

Well, not bland. There is no aim. Vague. It provides us the opportunity to pretty much record whatever we want. That's right. Guilt free. Guilt free. And so we did about one, two, three, four, five.

We did seven episodes last year of backstage. Everything from, hey, is that Burt Reynolds? Which I don't remember what it's about oh yeah hot takes from apple's march 2019 keynote so some keynote hot takes i brought nick janitakis backstage to talk about changelog platform and elixir and such things um we were live at oscon just the two of us kind of shooting the poop. That's Dwayne Johnson's movies are actually really educational. Which is true. That's a true statement. Which is a phrase that you uttered, and I can't believe you ever said it out loud.

The John Wick show, like you mentioned, and then I also have had Matt Reier come backstage to talk about ChangeLog API. Should we use GraphQL to build it? Should we not? Him and I go into kind of the pros and cons of the Go programming language. Matt is one of the panelists on GoTime and a fascinating guy. So if you aren't listening to Backstage

and you're not overwhelmed by podcasts, I would put that in your list because it's just fun. Yeah, it is fun. And it's infrequent. You're not going to have to make it a regular listen. It's a bonus listen it's a it's a bonus you know it's a bonus to get these extra special things that you can only get in the master feed right you know and they're not like weekly they're just every once in a while and then

the ones we've talked like you know this honorable you know third special show for me this year favorite show for this year was the john wick, one we did with Rick Cannon. Which was a blast. It's a long read. One hour, 47 minutes. Yeah, that's our longest episode ever. 107 minutes. Yeah, that's a long time. That's a long time right there.

And then of course, because we had nowhere else to put it and we weren't sure if it would make sense to put on the changelog proper. We put our 10 years of changelog with Quincy in backstage as well. Oh yeah, that's even longer. That's like three hours.

Two and a half hours. If you want a deep, deep dive into the history of the changelog, Adam's history, some of my history, first of all, if you don't want that, we totally get it. That's why it's on backstage. It's a little navel-gazy, but

there's some tidbits in there. Quincy did a great job of diving into our past and really sussing out a changelog story as a commemorative thing for our 10-year anniversary or birthday. That's episode 9 of backstage yeah for those interested we also flipped the script on quincy too so we didn't just ask him to interview us we

interviewed him because he was celebrating five years of free code camp which was actually the title of episode 369 where we talked to quincy about which which is really profound to see his perspective of software education and what he's doing to enable, you know, a global, literally a global community, not just like here in the US or what would be the typical or stereotypical places you would try to plant software education, places like in China are booming for him. So we talked through a lot of his choices, both personally, economically, etc. around Free Code Camp and how it's a non-profit and what they do to sustain themselves and thrive and plans for the future. That was quite fun, too, to go through.

So we've been really fortunate this year, Jared. I like these retrospectives to look back and just see where we've been to know where we should go. And then I guess pause for a moment of gratitude because I felt so grateful to, you know, work with you so much and so closely as one thing, and then have the opportunity to serve alongside you through such a cool community that is just infinitely, infinitely multifaceted. It's just so crazy how dynamic this community is and how much love there is out there and how much awesomeness there is out there. And to celebrate those positive things and lift people up and not put them down. I love that about what we do is that we help people see the positive sides of things and detract from and reduce the negative side of things and not be pulled down by them.

Well, let's wrap this baby up by maybe casting forward not too far, just 2020. Here we are, January 2020. What can folks expect from the changelog or from changelog the network over this year? Pick one or two things that we either are thinking about trying or definitely going to do, things that are in the works or that you would love to see this year for us to go out there and do. What are you thinking? Well, I'll say the easiest one. This is the easy goal for us us for me and mario at least

is to bring brain science to a weekly cadence versus uh bi-weekly ish and somewhat inconsistent so that's that's easy expectation i like that one some harder ones, which are still undefined internally, but should I mention change law plus plus? Or did I already do that? Well, let's just mention it as a thing that we're actively pursuing, but we're not

going to put a promise on it. We're shaping it up. We're not going to ETA it. We're shaping it, as Ryan would say. We're going to put some bets out there soon. We're not going to ETA it. Yeah, we're shaping it up. We're shaping it, as Ryan would say. That's right. We're going to put some bets out there soon. We're shaping it.

We're shaping. Go listen to that episode if you want some of these insider baseball terms. We might build it. So what is ChangeLog++? Well, it is our take on a ChangeLog membership. Maybe we just leave it at that. Yeah, no promises out there on what it will be because we're still working it out. But one thing is just, I guess, finding more ways to – because I'll throw a couple more things out there.

We get a lot of people asking us how can they support us personally and not just through a sponsorship, through a company or something like that, which is traditionally how we generate revenue to sustain our company. And a lot of people are, in this day and age, we talk about a little bit with Quincy, they're okay with and desiring to personally support the things they love. And right now, we don't have an answer to that. And we'd like to find a way, not for us to profit, but for them to take that next deeper step into this community, to call it home, to hang their hat, to be welcomed. They're already welcomed, but it's something with that exchange, that via exchange, that truly lets somebody call some place a home. And I think that's what we're trying to camp around and drive around.

And what that actually is, we're not really sure yet, but it's this idea of giving people a place to call home. Absolutely. And then for content-wise on the changelog itself, I am excited to continue to go to weird places to find the extra nerdy. We have some cool shows planned. In fact, next week is a great show all about Algo,

which is an Ansible-based personal VPN. So get nerdy on VPNs. We have an episode lined up all about ScholarRef tools, which I'll just leave it at that. What the heck is a ScholarRef tool? Very nerdy with a guy who's super interesting and is completely not on social media, hosts his own Git. So looking forward to that.

We have a show lined up all about laws for hackers to live by. So a lot of the, the credos and the idioms and the different laws that we talk about and reference all these times are, have been curated and collected and put into a list. And we're going to talk about some of those. I would love to do more shows that are listener requested. So we haven't been using ping as much.

We did move requests onto changelog proper, just a better for the workflow. So you can request episodes at changelog.com slash request. You can let us know what you want to hear about. You can let us know why you want to hear about it. And we love doing shows that are requested by you, the listener, because that way we know we're serving directly at least one person out there versus trying to guess what you all want to hear.

So more like that. I want to get nerdier. I want to get more obscure. And then, of course, we're always going to be discussing the big picture and the community things going on in the open source and software worlds. So expect that as always. But I definitely want to get into some more technical nitty gritties over the coming year. That sounds awesome.

I'm stoked for 2020. I'm not sure if I'll hear one more 2020 you know the joke going into this new decade but it is a new decade and that's kind of interesting too the fact that like it's opened up a whole new 10 years like we'll look back at you know 2029 and say well what do we do in 2020 and you know we'll we'll have this decade-ish retrospective similar to what we've done here. Not quite exactly back 10 years, a little bit. Only the entire thing will be in VR.

There'll be a virtual software world that we'll be navigating, and you can really make it your home because you can hang out virtually while listening to, I don't know what's going to happen 10 years from now. But I think by then VR will be back for its third iteration maybe. I don't know what's going to happen 10 years from now. But I think by then VR will be back for its third iteration maybe. I don't know.

I think it's fallen a little bit by the wayside again. Well, I think as technology, I'm not even remotely in VR, but I think as technology keeps evolving, it sort of pops up again and says, am I good enough? No, not yet. Evolves a bit more. Am I good enough? No, not quite. Well, hey, you

can use it for real estate. No, I mean, that's limited. You can tour a home? Okay, that's kind of interesting, but anyways. It seems to bubble up and ask if it's interesting enough yet, and it's usually kind of, no, not really, and then it goes back.

In some cases, it's really interesting. Yeah. I mean, do we really need virtual reality when you actually have reality? not really right goes back and there's some some cases really the mainstream yeah yeah i mean do we really need virtual reality when you actually have reality well do you want to visit the louvre you know without actually going there i i wouldn't mind i suppose yeah i guess uh vr tourism should be the next big thing oh wait you're marked that title i think they've already been talking about that coming to a future change. We just invented a whole industry. VR tourism.

Yes, that would be cool. I'm sure they haven't thought of that one yet. Yeah. Well, anyways. To the listeners, thank you for tuning in. If you've been a decade-long listener with us, if I ever get to meet you, you will get a hug. Hopefully you're a hugger because I will hug you for listening for 10 years.

And if you're not a hugger, maybe a VR hug. That's right. Maybe just hop in VR just for the hug. A VR hug. Or just the hugging face emoji. If that's what you want, that's what you'll get. Well, pick your hug style. I'll give it to you. How about that? An emoji hug or a physical hug, a high five,

whatever. The point is, thank you. Thank you for listening to the show. Thank you for allowing us to somewhat entertain your ears, to navigate this crazy world of software, the peculiar, super awesome, amazing people in it. It's just been an honor to do it, and I can't wait to keep doing it.

So 2020 is about taking it to the next level, you know, doing it. The next big thing. The next big thing is in 2020. All right. Thank you for tuning into The Change Log. Welcome to 2020. We are here. We are back.

We are going fast as ever. Many shows in the network now, many episodes coming out each and every week. And the way that you can keep up is easy. Subscribe to Master. It's our majestic monolith. Get this show, Brain Science, Founders Talk, and everything we produce in one single podcast feed. You got nothing to lose. Head to changelove.com slash master and subscribe or search in your favorite podcast app for Master. You'll find it. Special thanks goes out from us to everyone. And I mean,

everyone who has helped us along the way, a few names on that list. You can find at changelog.com slash 10, help us celebrate 10 years of being a thing and 10 more years to come and more. Hopefully our music of course is produced by the beat freak break master cylinder. And we're sponsored by some amazing companies support them because Hey,

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