The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - State of the “log” 2020 (Interview)

Episode Date: December 21, 2020

It's the end of 2020 and on this year’s "State of the log" episode Adam and Jerod carry on the tradition of looking back at our favorite moments of the year -- we talk through our most popular episodes, our personal favorites and must listen episodes, top posts from Changelog Posts, and what we have in the works for 2021 and beyond.

So we did ship some shows this year, and many that were quite enjoyed by the audience. So with the state of the log, we like to review some of the happenings around the ChangeLog podcast, what's going on in the written world, the ChangeLog posts, and then also the greater ChangeLog network, what we've been up to, what's happened this year, what might be happening in the future stuff like that and so

we tend to go over some of the top episodes of the year and then a few of our favorites and then a new category that adam added must listens oh yeah which he can describe what's difference between a favorite of mine and a must listen very nuanced it very, very slight. I mean, it's like I like this episode, but you don't have to listen to it if you don't want to. But this one, this one's a must listen. Well, it's a way to get more on my list, really. That's all. That's my resolve for it.

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the leaders, and the innovators in the world of software. And today is our annual State of Log episode. It's our final show of the year. Jared and I dig deep into all the happenings of the year, all the content we delivered, all the fun stuff we got to do, and we dig deep into those details. This is our final show of the year. So if you're new here, thanks for tuning in. If you're old here, thanks for sticking around. And if you're somewhere in the middle there, just keep sticking around.

Enjoy this final episode, and we'll see you next year. Thanks for tuning in. If you're old here, thanks for sticking around. And if you're somewhere in the middle there, just keep sticking around. Enjoy this final episode and we'll see you next year. We're here. It's the end of 2020 and we're doing a State of the Log. This is something we do kind of every single year now. It's our tradition. Yeah, it's our tradition. We started in 2018 and it is now an annual thing.

Yep. And here we are. It's another year. This has been the most unique year i would say good years and bad years yeah boring years and exciting years it's been exciting sure but not in the good ways generally yeah i'd like to reduce the particular excitingness or whatever a boring 2021 i'm looking forward to 2021 i think so well but one thing that happened this year is you know the best laid plans of mice and men kind of fell by the wayside so for those those of us who are big planners you know there's lots of disappointment out there but thankfully i don't make very many plans so i was just kind of rolling with the punches what about you yeah i, I mean.

Conference plans. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I think the one thing that happened this year that was different for us was just less travel. And I suppose a few less hugs, a few less high fives, a few less actual faces being met. Because we love doing that. We love doing conference attendance and hanging out and doing live shows there and producing podcasts from the expo hall floor and creating those partnerships. But it didn't change our content, I would say, in terms of a consistency. Maybe more consistent because less travel to plan around.

And I would say one thing that seems to be the case is maybe podcasting, interviewing via these tools have become a little more normalized because people are generally more available to just hop on a call and talk and their microphone setups are better than they used to be. That's true, yeah. Cameras are better than they used to be and people's true. Cameras are better than they used to be.

People are used to doing double-enders and stuff like that. Kind of nice in that regard. Yeah, that's certainly one thing that's come from this year. Better cameras, better mics, better availability. And I suppose, like you said, it's just more normal now to

have a conversation in this regard rather than like, hey, when you're in San Francisco next time, can we just hang out? Sure, but we're here right now. Why not just have this conversation and record it? Yeah, so we recorded a lot of shows this year. In fact, 34 more episodes than last year. So if you're going on pure episode count,

we're killing ourselves. Past Us is losing the battle. 234 episodes shipped across our network in 2020. 47 of those, excuse me, 49 by the time the year is out of the changelog, which is up three from 46. And in fact, we tell ourselves we ship 50 shows a year, so we're only slightly lying this year. I think this might be the first year we're that close to 50.

Probably. Because we've been doing the changelog for over a decade, and we reached episode 400 this year. But if you're doing 50 a year for a decade, that's more than 400. Even I can do that math. So we strive for 50, that's for sure. Right.

And we're getting there. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, the thing I think happens is summer gets busy for everyone. We over-promise and under-deliver for ourselves. We have great desires. It's not because we're bad people. We just have great ambitions and we sometimes just don't get to deliver as much as we wanted to.

Right. So we did ship some shows this year, and many that were quite enjoyed by the audience. So with the state of the log, we like to review some of the happenings around the ChangeLog podcast, what's going on in the written world, the ChangeLog posts, and then also the greater ChangeLog network, what we've been up to, what's happened this year, what might be happening in the future, stuff like that.

And so we tend to go over some of the top episodes of the year and then a few of our favorites and then a new category that Adam added, must listens. Oh yeah. Which he can describe what's the difference between a favorite of mine and a must-listen. Very nuanced. It's a very slight distinction.

It's like, I like this episode, but you don't have to listen to it if you don't want to. But this one, this one's a must-listen. Well, it's a way to get more on my list, really. That's my resolve for it. So it's a brain hack for yourself. In that regard, though, with more shows, one thing I see more this year is tweets that don't just say, listen to the changelog

or listen to Go Thomas. Now it's like, listen to anything from at changelog, which is kind of cool. I've seen that more and more this year, which I like a lot. It's definitely a nice change, of course. And always happy to see those. We put all the TLC into all of the and always happy to see those uh we put all the tlc into all

of the shows on our network and so we are happy to hear that somebody likes our shows enough that they could just say hey anything from changelog is going to be good and that's kind of the goal so when we hear that we are happy because we are accomplishing our goals so let's let's turn to the most popular shall we all right can't see why we wouldn't do it let. So let's turn to the most popular, shall we? All right, can't see why we wouldn't do it. Let's do it. All right, top five most popular episodes of The Change Log in 2020.

Number one, congratulations to, wait, it's always us. So congratulations to John Thornton from Squarespace, Good Tech Debt. The most listened to episode of the year. Adam, this was your show. This was your baby. You set this one up, so tell us about it.

You know, I think I saw something from John around Good Tech Debt, and I was like, I've got to log this to news. So it began as a news post, and it was just more or less linking out like we do to news, what's out there that's good that people are writing about. And I linked that up, and I reached out to John, and I was like, this is a good post. We should talk about this at length on the show. And I didn't hear from him for a month maybe or two.

And then he responded to me, and I think we were really busy, and I didn't get a chance to respond to him right away either. I think it might have been around March. Who the heck knows what time this was. When was this post out there or this show out there? When was it out there? I dropped that data point from February. Okay, February. Hold on.

Okay, so it was just before then. Just before. So I can't even blame the pandemic. Thank you. That's sad. But it took me a little bit to get back to John. And I was like, you know, it would make sense to talk through this concept of good tech debt.

Because everybody hears about this, like, you know, that it's bad or it's negative and let's be honest most of the time tech tech is a bad thing right it's debt right and you're taking on water so to speak to move faster and that is oftentimes right ill-advised and so that's one of the reasons probably why his post resonated as well as probably the episode resonated is because it's contrarian right well that and then i also had this conversation with travis kimmel was the prior CEO of GitPrime, who was acquired by Pluralsight. And we had a conversation on Founders Talk, episode 60, talking about leading data-driven software teams and products. And in one part there, Travis really laid down some wisdom. And I'm pretty sure I mentioned this in that show with John, but talked so much i'm not sure if i did or not but you know we talked a lot about tech debt there

and how you know how it actually correlated with actual debt like money debt and how you can think of it that way and how people take on debt in good good ways and bad ways and so right there was some i suppose early interest in the subject matter and then then John was actually an engineer talking about it. I was like, we can go deeper. So it made a lot of sense to kind of, how can you leverage financial debt in the same way you, or tech debt in the same way you leverage financial debt? Conceptually.

Yeah, conceptually. Right. To your advantage, right? Yeah. In a way that's strategic and intentional so that it is not taking on water. Yeah. Right?

It's planned for and then paid down necessarily. Any debt that does not have a plan for payment paying down is bad debt. So yeah, good stuff. Number two, Jessica Kerr. The one thing every dev should know. This one was a June episode with Jessica. Her idea on the title, well, her idea on the subject matter,

I guess it was our idea on naming it after the subject matter. One of the very few times we went for the YouTube style, all caps on a word, titling, which may have played into its strengths. The one thing, of course, there's many things that devs should know, but do you remember what it was? The one thing every dev should know many things that devs should know but do you remember what it was the one thing every dev should know it was me like i told us we dropped them not when it was do you know what the one thing was oh in the show you mean yeah what was her one thing

do you remember no i don't on the spot boom i don't even know that. Well, that's funny. I think you titled this and I was like, that sounds good. And I moved on. What was the one thing? I believe it was, I mean, it was kind of a, I think she even said it was kind of a cheap shot answer. And by the way, the title was a bit of a baity title. The conversation was spectacular. She's full of insights.

She's very entertaining and just fun to talk to. And it might even be a must listen. But the one thing was like, you should know the system. You should know the system that you're working on. Yes. In like a holistic understanding, like in a conceptual understandable way. Yeah.

And not just be siloed or not siloed, but focused in on a particular aspect without understanding what you're trying to build. And so this history of sort of the code monkey, grab a ticket, crank out the code, grab the next ticket, crank out the code, is not a good way of going about software development. And so every dev should know the system

and what they're trying to build. I believe that was her. That's a summary of what she was saying there. I'll quote her. Here you go. Okay. She says, but the single most important thing to understand

is how your system works. Not just any system, not any abstract architecture, the specific system that you work on. Your system. Why does it work? And what impact does it have on the world? And how does it accomplish that?

You know what I said in response to that? What? Could you use a well-known example out there to be less abstract sometimes you like read yourself back or listen back and like how dense can you be why did you say that but anyways maybe that was a good response i don't know it was kind of so you asked her for an example i think she pulled out uber at that point yeah yeah she pulled out Uber, which I don't think she's worked on personally, but she did a wonderful job of bringing it down to the bottom shelf so you could have a nibble. And yeah, that's funny. And I think that was a good show.

And so did everybody else because it was top in the charts this year. I think having looked back at our list of shows this year and, you know, this, I would have put this in my list anyways, but it was one of the favorites, so I didn't have a chance. It was naturally there by, just by nature. Right. It's a popular.

I would definitely want to have Jessica back, I think, more often. A couple times a year. At least once a year. And kind of hear more of her wisdom. I want to hear more from Jessica, basically. See what else she has to say. Mm-hmm. Absolutely. Number three most popular episode of 2020 on the changelog

was the 10X developer myth with William Nichols. This is you. This is me. In all the ways. In all the ways, I suppose. Not in all the ways. You were also on this episode. Well, I mean, you teed this up.

I did. You worked with Bill to get him on the ways. You were also on this episode. Well, I mean, you teed this up. I did. You worked with Bill to get him on the show. Yep, this was my idea. I thought it was a great little piece of research that he did that came up. I don't know if it's the word longitudinal applies here in terms of the duration. I think it was like five years of data he went back upon

of his instruction data. At least five, maybe even ten. Yeah. And so the premise is that we all talk about this mythical unicorn, not a billion dollar startup, a unicorn developer, right? The one who is full stack and knows everything inside and out, knows the entire system, right?

Could write Uber by themselves or whatever the mythos is. The less mystical mythos is the person who is 10 times more productive than a typical developer, the person sitting next to them. And while there are certainly more or less productive people and more or less productive developers, the myth of the 10x developer has been out there and it's been argued for and against for years.

And this is the first time I saw anybody do a study on it, a research study, like an academic thing. Now his wasn't the first study. It was the first time I saw someone do a study and his seemed to be better because of the view that it took, the holistic and long-term view

of this data that wasn't, the holistic and long-term view of this data that wasn't actually created for the hypothesis. It was extracted from a course. Yeah, exactly. He actually says he has 20 years of data and he only used 10 years of it for the study. There you go. So thank you to our transcripts for pulling these words out of our shows

just so easily to quote them back to you all. But we do have transcripts. You should check them out. They're really awesome. But yeah, we taught the course for 20 years and I had essentially 20 years worth of data and the study used about 10 years of it. And the findings from this were very interesting

because it wasn't that you won't find more or less production, right? According even to the exact goal set and forth, it's that the variance of productive between one person on any given day or task is much larger than the variance between two people in the same circumstances. So in other words, I might be 10x on Monday and 5x on Tuesday and 3x on Wednesday and back to 5, etc. And that productivity level varies greatly according to what they found, but the one where I sustain this 10x speed over somebody else in any demonstrable, repeatable fashion seems to be a myth. That's what we discussed in that episode, and I thought it was very interesting.

Well, you have to think about it from logical terms, too. And thankfully, we have a study to prove it. But, you know, if you just started to run as fast as you could right now, you're not Jason Bourne. No. Right? He can, like, there's one where he, he's got a quote where he says, I know I could run for 10 miles or some sort of number.

I forget what the quote is. If you're out there, comment about this. But, you know, you can't run for 10 miles straight at your fastest speed, which is what a career is. Like if you align the two, your career versus 10 miles and the analogies, you can't sprint the whole career. That's what 10Xing is, is sprinting essentially. Yeah, I guess Jason Bourne doesn't really exist.

I guess he's just a fictional character after all. Number four, and a late entrance. So all of these were spring shows, right? We have March, we have February, we have June for Jessica's episode. But number four is actually a recent episode, which means it's flying up the charts faster than the others. October 23rd, we shipped What's So Exciting About Postgres with Craig Kirstens or Kirsteens.

I can't remember how to say his last name, Craig. Sorry about that. But you are number four, my friend. This one resonated with folks more than we thought. I don't know. I thought it was going to be pretty popular, but you admitted that you didn't think it was going to be this popular. Well, I think it's probably less about, well, I think more so it's an October entry,

not a January, February, March entry into the log, so to speak. And popular, yes, but that popular so quickly doesn't happen often. And so it was of the top, and it's only two months ago, barely. Actually, yesterday was two months ago. Today is one month. As I record this, yes. So why wouldn't it be that popular? Well, it is a singular database in a sea of databases and data stores, right?

We could do what's so exciting about MySQL, what's so exciting about Mongo, what's so exciting about Cockroach, what's so exciting about SQLite. I can't remember how we go. SQLite. SQLite. SQLite. What's so exciting about Firebase?

You know, you could just do all of these. But there's something about Postgres. I mean, we talked about it on that episode, Craig and I, how it has mainstream penetration amongst web developers, amongst open-sourcey, webby kind of developers, which is a lot of us, right? The Rails folks, the Phoenix folks, the Django folks,

a lot of Node people. The Mongo is very popular in the Node space. So it has a mainstream appeal amongst web developers. Also, title what's so exciting about postgres and we fulfill that title in the episode like craig did a great job of laying out the cool stuff in postgres and this one also i believe did spend some a weekend on hacker news homepage people discussing it so that drums up interest, and somebody who may have not listened to it ended up listening to it because of a debate about this particular feature and that.

And there's also, I think, a shorter episode. 68 minutes, total runtime. Which may lead into, oh, 68? Total runtime. Okay, I take it back, it wasn't shorter. That's intro, outro, ads, you know. Right, so roughly an hour. Yeah. Which is not, I wouldn't shorter that's uh intro outro ads you know right so roughly an hour yeah which is not i wouldn't call that shorter i'd say i'd say it's probably like the the shorter third of our episodes we go 60 to 80 minutes generally for the changelog

so number four what's so exciting about postgres on that note though i think that the thing we do often is play sleuth in terms of like what made this show stand out. Yeah. And so my response, like what made this one – like my surprise wasn't it didn't deserve it or it was just unfounded. It was more like literally what – and I suppose spending a day on Hacker News or the weekend on Hacker News does impact that. Being in Postgres Weekly, the newsletter for it impacts that as well. And so I think for us and listeners, hey, you want to help us promote your favorite show? If you're listening to this show and you're like, this is my favorite show of the year so far and that's what you do when you listen to the show, find a way to share with others.

That's the best way you can help us. Yeah. There's also a Postgres community. I mean, it was in Postgres Weekly, like you said, which Craig helps to curate. And the Postgres community, folks are passionate. It's their database. And I say that third person plural, but I don't have the

passion for it, but I do also love Postgres. And when I see Postgres out there getting its comeuppance, its due credit, I'm likely to listen to that or share that link. In fact, I find myself sharing Postgres things on ChangeLog News more than other databases, and I start to question myself. Am I just being biased here?

You're obviously biased. Are you exploring your bias by doing so? Is it detrimental to the feed? I'd be curious on the your bias by doing so? Is it detrimental to the feed? Yeah. Anyways. I'd be curious on the note of what's so exciting about blah. If there's a blah out there like MySQL or Mongo or others, I'd be curious if the listeners want to hear us do another variant of that with a different database or make it a thing. Yeah, if I think about other databases we've covered,

like we've done Elasticsearch, not in that format, but we've had a show on that. We've had a show now on Postgres. We've had shows on up-and-coming databases over the years, but not really the established tried-and-true ones

as much. What was that database? Gun database, wasn't it? Gun.js? Gun.db. Gun.db, yeah. Yeah. And then Bolt.db, a couple like we did some key value stores. I might be mixing GoTime with the changelog a little bit,

but we've definitely done DBs. We do DBs. But generally like going back to something that's been around for 25 years or plus, don't do that quite as often. Maybe MariaDB deserves its moment on the changelog number five was meet algo your personal vpn in the cloud this was an early show this was january 20th with dan guido from trail of bits i think you were sick that day or you had some sort of problem where you weren't on that episode but you were planning to be do you were sick that day or you had some sort of problem where you weren't on that episode, but you were planning on a B.

Do you remember what that was about? Probably doesn't matter. Don't know. It was in January. Maybe I was still getting over January 1st. I'm just kidding. I'll do that. January 20th.

Three weeks later, the guy's still struggling. I do know that January is our busiest time of the year in terms of sales and partnerships and stuff like that. So that's always my excuse in January and December and November. So I get three months where I can, you know, claim too busy essentially, but that is one of our busiest times might've been around that. I don't think so though. Yeah. Doesn't matter. The interesting thing here is that, you know, it's an open source VPN and a lot of people have, like how many content creators out there do you hear and their ad is of some VPN? Oh. So many, right?

Lots of them. Let's not advertise them because they're not paying us to. Almost did. But there's just so many. And I think, you know, from the consumer side, a non-techie consumer side, you think, oh, it's just a service, you know?

And you sign up for it, and all the data you're already trying to keep safe by using a VPN in the first place is not safe. And so that's really about the premise of Algo, is it's something you can self-host in your own cloud, you can set it up yourself. In fact, you even did a deep dive after the episode shipped doing such a thing. That's right. And we talk about some of the hype train

that I generally will hop on and then hop off as soon as the next show comes around. I'm running Algo in the cloud to this day. Is that right? Absolutely. In fact, it bit me in the butt, and I'll tell you why. Because I upgraded to iOS 14 on my phone, and I have my VPN configuration in there.

And then you have it set up to automatically turn off or on depending on which network you're on. So if I'm on my home network, I don't want Algo on, obviously. And if I'm on LTE, I want it on. I can't remember if I want it on or off on LTE. I think it's off on LTE, but when I join a Wi-Fi, that's when I want it to turn on. So after upgrading to iOS 14,

I don't know if something didn't transfer correctly or what it was, but I would go to church where I normally would be on their Wi-Fi but have Algo turned on and have my you know my VPN connection back to my virtual private network and it was broken like I could not use

Wi-Fi there but I had forgotten that I had it set up because it is kind of a set it or forget it thing it just turns itself off or on at the appropriate time and I'm walking around all my friends. I'm like, hey, can you get on the Wi-Fi? Hey, can you get on the Wi-Fi? They're like, yeah, it's fine.

It's totally, I'm like, I think I was, yeah, something's wrong. So I was like using, I'd flip my Wi-Fi off and use LTE at church for like three weeks until I finally saw at one point the VPN thing trying to turn on and it like couldn't connect anymore. Anyways, I figured out it was me the whole time i was like blaming the wi-fi i'm like something's wrong with this wi-fi so it came back to bite me but yeah i'm still running it and uh i do have a video out there on youtube setting up algo from scratch it is dead simple and dan did a great job explaining on the show he also did a great job since he's the show. He also did a great job, since he's an InfoSec guy,

been around a long time and understands these things very well, laying out some of the problems with a lot of the commercial services, the logging, the lack of anonymization, the middleman, all that kind of stuff. Why those things are popular, which is mostly because people want to access content that's regionally restricted. Yeah, good episode for sure.

I'm kind of bummed I missed it, honestly. I love VPNs. We need a round two. You can quote me on that. I love VPNs, Adam Sokowiak. That would be good. We need a VPN sponsor, and that can just be our quote. It won't say the actual name of the service.

Just, I love VPNs. That's right. I promote all VPNs, okay? I actually work for the VPN conglomerate, the folks behind all the sugar and stuff. Big VPN. Big VPN. That'd be cool.

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Equinix metal bill freely. okay that's our top five popular episodes according to listeners now it's time for some personal faves you want to get us started crack one off i think the hey episode was was first on my list but only i guess there's not a reason really why it was first it was just first after having that conversation with gosh what's his name i gotta look this up i'm the jonas well i know it's jonas but uh the other person shaping i'm just gonna let you hang right there. Thank you. Shipping works.

Gosh, how did I forget his name? Ryan Singer. How can I forget Ryan Singer's name? But after having that conversation with Ryan. Drilled it. And kind of we were talking a lot about ShapeUp and them using ShapeUp. And they talked a lot about Hay coming out. And we couldn't go into it. I'm like, well, the only way to close this loop is to talk to somebody leading product behind the scenes for Basecamp on this.

And that was Jonas. And so we got Jonas on, talked about that. I thought we'd go more into how they use ShapeUp with building out. Hey, but we really didn't talk a lot about that. We really talked a lot about product design and choices and architecture and you know the psychology even behind this revolutionary way to do email and that was an awesome episode i mean so cool absolutely for the uninitiated hey.com is base camp's new privacy oriented email service and jonas downey hayes designer, joined us for that episode.

I agree. He had lots of deep things to say about product design, an area that I dabble in, but am no expert. So I learned a lot from him and a lot of decisions. And really,

you don't want to use the word courage too much, but they make bold decisions. In product design, it's kind of like highfalutin to say it's courageous to do a thing. Phil Schiller famously called removing the microphone jack courage. I can't remember what it was. Something that Apple removed, he called it courage.

In their case, it might be courageous because they could be attacked. So that might actually be more in line with courage. That might be attacked by making slightly less money. But bold, I'll just call them bold you know base camp is not afraid to make bold decisions and there's a lot of things about hay that are designed you know with very intentional opinionated bold ways and those are hard decisions to make that's why courage is kind of like an okay word it's somewhat highfalutin in this context because there's courage against actual danger. But yeah, the decision-making process and the ability to

stick through with your convictions was really, I think, on display there. Yeah. I wonder how they, I think too, you get a behind-the-scenes look at this and you wonder how they make the decisions they do. And you can see how closely David and Jason played a role in this particular product. And you even saw in the rollout and, you know, you can you can sort of be on the outside of the announcements of, hey, or the, you know, I want to be on the invite list or all the hoopla between them and Apple with, you know, the app store and stuff like that.

And, you know, whatever came from that. But then you see the inside. How did you make decisions? How do you even approach redesigning email? And I think for me that was one of the things to dive deeper into that was super interesting because they take a unique approach, dare I say it in your case, courageous approach towards changing things. I think it does take some boldness, as you said,

to change the way email works and to even attack that. But if there's a company who I could think that would think intentionally about that change, it would be Basecamp. It would be people like Jason and David and the team they have at Basecamp.

That's what I thought was most interesting. Not just what architecture you use, but in a lot of ways, how do they attack such a widely used problem? Everybody has email. Everybody has opinions about email. And many people have particular workflows with email and how they do email. Am I a hey user?

No, I'm not. But that's not because I don't like it. I can appreciate it and still not use it, but I think it was good then to really try and do in many cases. I know a lot of people who use Hey. We have a lot of people in our email list that use Hey. Absolutely. So a favorite

for mine, sorry you weren't there Adam, it's just me and Dave Care. And Dave is in Singapore, I believe. So it was an early morning show, which is different for us. I was having my morning coffee, I remember. It was super early, like 9 in the morning. Yeah, man, it had even been 8 a.m.

I can't remember exactly. It was super early. But it was like a get up and get ready kind of a thing, which maybe made the show good. I don't know. I think Dave probably made the show good. I don't know. I think Dave probably made the show good. This was episode 403. It's called Laws for Hackers to Live By.

And it might be one of the most timeless episodes that we put out this year. I think there would be a few others we could throw in the mix there. Which probably we'll hear from as well. Code Vicious. Yeah, Code Vicious. In a similar vein

at least but this is focusing in on dave's repo on github called hacker laws where he has collected and explained and and really done a good job of laying out all these different idioms and sayings, credos, laws, whatever they are, guidelines, that we say to ourselves while we're writing software. We say to each other, or sometimes we remind somebody of. And the fun thing about that episode was really just a quick hitting. Like, I would do a law, he would do a law. We just picked the ones we wanted to talk about.

And he has a lot of interesting things to say. i felt like there are in that space because it is general knowledge it's not like specific to a language or a philosophy it's not fp it's not oop those are in the hacker laws but we skipped a lot of those and a lot of them applied it to just networked systems. Yeah, I had a lot to say too. So we had a great chemistry, and it was a nice quick show. And man, it was a lot of fun. I listened to it back, and I learned some stuff from Dave the second time around that I missed the first time just because you're in the mix the first time. And the second time, you can kind of sit back

and think about what he's saying, and he's got tons of interesting things to say. So another person who I think we can come back and do more hacker laws down the road, because we definitely didn't cover them all. We probably covered like half a dozen. Episode 403, I think it was one of my favorites of the year.

So you're saying it's a re-listen show. We hear a lot of people say I listened to that one twice, or three times, or in your case, like you said, I've listened to it twice and I got more on the second time. You're saying this is a re-listen. Yeah, in fact, one of the comments that we had, I can't remember where they put the comment.

It was either on changelog.com, which it might have been, or maybe it was on Breaker. I remember getting an email from a listener who said, this is the only tech podcast I've ever listened to twice. But I went back and listened to this one a second time.

It was that good. And I was like, dang, that's a pretty high praise. So that was pretty awesome. Yeah, I recall. I like those emails from Breaker. We get those emails not too often, a couple times a month maybe. But I always appreciate them. Like, it's something about Breaker listeners.

They want to comment, and I love that. One cool thing I think in terms of coming back and having them on again is are the hacker laws something where they're, I suppose, expanding over time? Or are they sort of locked in there? Or is it sort of like accumulated wisdom? It's accumulated wisdom, yeah. They are expanding. It's not like every time you go back

there's going to be five more laws. But he is adding them over time. And one of the ones we talked about at the end, he was like considering adding it or not. Because a lot of them kind of move boundaries, right? They're not specifically necessarily about software development. Some can be a little bit more like

the way that systems work, which can be used to explain things like economics, etc. There's one of the laws he brought up where it's like once a system of observation is known, it ceases to be a good system of observation. I can't remember which law that was. Maybe Gall's law? Kernighan's law kernogan's law i don't know there's a bunch of them and i'm too far back to remember now but something like that can be used to

describe like economic systems relationship systems not just in the workplace but then also it can be used to describe software yeah so they are being added but it's not like at a high speed pace kind of reminds me of like maybe the Guinness Book of World Records, too, where you can submit a law. It's an unknown law out there. Can you submit a law that you maybe have coined yourself? You've derived it through your own wisdom and your own team and your career. I believe this should be a law, and you name it.

This is Stokowiak law or Santo law whatever right yeah you gotta be pretty smart to coin one of those but you could submit it and see if Dave will let it go in or not

what are you trying to say dude now that we know him I got a personal in I'm not very smart no I'm saying you and I are not gonna hit that hit that threshold so I looked up real time follow up

and Kernighan's law is the one that states that since debugging is twice as hard as writing code, if you write the most clever code you can, you by definition cannot debug it. That's kind of a fun one. And then Gall's Law is, I'm paraphrasing, it says that a complex system that works

is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. So you can't start with a complex system. You have to build it out of a simple system. So neither of those two that I went off the top of my head are the one that I'm thinking of that he was considering adding. But definitely go listen to the episode if you want more on that. I enjoyed that show.

It was a fun show. Good. What's your other favorite? Or are you moving on to must-listens? I'll just say I consider that one a must-listen's your other favorite or are you moving on to muscle muscles i'll just say i consider that one a must listen it's also one of my favorites i don't know how to differentiate the two but uh there you go you're doing well like i said i'm just trying to pad the system here my my idea for must listen really is just to get more on my list okay i can go quick so i mentioned shipping worth it matters uh tangentially by mentioning the hey

episode with jonas i think that's a must listen i mean i think there's so much mentioned shipping work that matters uh tangentially by mentioning the hey episode with jonas i think that's a must listen i mean i think there's so much wisdom in there that like that's why i love having ryan on the show i feel like every time especially that last segment with ryan like we didn't even kind of fun story a fun aside about shipping work that matters that episode what episode was that jerry what's the number for that one 399 when we uh when we recorded that we were actually so we take breaks and we do the number for that one 399 when we uh when we recorded that we were actually so we take breaks and we do the breaks for post-production produced ads to to sort of slot those in in the uh the mastering process and we hit break number two which is the segment

between you know segment two and segment three we actually didn't record technically a segment three we just sort of like just kept talking so long that we didn't have any more time to talk with ryan so we were like i think we've talked about enough cool stuff that we can make that a segment three and i've went back and listened to it i think it's some of the best stuff we've laid down with ryan ever i mean i think it was really good stuff so for me it's a must listen because uh i think ryan just just oozes wisdom you like that ryan absolutely yeah that was a fun moment because we were kind of like well we're out of time but we haven't done the third part of the show yet and we had talked for probably an hour maybe 90 minutes at least in the break

and we recorded the And we record the breaks because you don't stop and start. And we're just kind of like, well, can we just turn that? We asked his permission. We're like, can we just turn this chit chat into a segment? And he was all about it

because it was an interesting conversation for him as well. So yeah, that was fun. So faves for me, it's okay to make money from open source because I think there's a lot of good stuff in that show, but just the title alone gives you permission. So many people out there in open source feel like you can't make money from open source. And I think that that episode in particular really just says you should, and there's nice ways and good ways you can actually profit from open source in

in ways that don't that aren't a detriment to the community that it serves i think zeno roger does a great job of of sharing that he seems to be you know i've never met zeno in person but i feel like i feel like we're really good friends i feel like if i saw him i'd give him a big old hug you know like but i've never met him. So I really appreciate Zeno's outlook on things. But in terms of more must-listens, I'll breeze through them. Securing the Web with

Josh O's. I'm getting stuck on his last name. It's A-A-S. Doesn't sound like it should be Josh O's, but it is. That's a lot of wisdom in there, too, especially the ending where he's talking about securing the web by rewriting a lot of it. And he really has a bone to pick with C and C++ as it relates to Rust and network software and

securing the web. So he's got a big mission there, but Let's Encrypt obviously is a huge project. It's done so much for the internet. And you may just be simply a casual or an everyday user of Let's Encrypt, maybe just on setup since it's sort of set it and forget it to some degree. And you forget. But I think that there's a lot of stuff that Josh shares in that episode around securing the web that we need to be reminded of. And so I think it's a must listen.

And finally, I think the leading GitHub episode we did man I mean with Jason Werner you can't get as of Jason this is a quote from him you can't get this subject matter anywhere else so the show we did with Jason was the only place you can hear that story

of him and the GitHub acquisition so if you're at all a fan of, I suppose, GitHub, that storyline, then you're going to want to listen to that show. So it's a must listen. Agreed. I will add a few more to the list and we can move on here. Another favorite of mine was talking with Lauren Tan

about her transition from engineer to manager and then back again to engineer. She's very self-reflective and insightful. She has a lot of insights about the decision-making process. And it's somewhat of a must listen because we all have to make those kinds of decisions as we advance in our career, right? What am I going to do next? Am I going to take that seemingly only route to promotion, which is to move out of my comfort zone of being an individual contributor and move into a world of managerial things or leadership where maybe I'll thrive and maybe I'll fail.

Maybe I'll love it. Maybe I'll hate it. And then once you make that decision now what and really having the courage to keep using the word to go back if it's not something that you like and really asking yourself what am i optimizing for and those kind of questions right what's important to me i think we had we we didn't plumb the full depths of that but we went pretty deep on it and that one is a favorite of mine and I think a must listen as well last one I have for the list is Stephanie Murillo the developer's guide to content creation I think this is a must listen right here because

because I'm now learning the difference between the two. Not only did I enjoy talking with Stephanie because she's awesome, but she does a really good job of providing guardrails, guide rails, and inspiration to let you know that as developers, we're all creating content all the time. We are writing emails to people. We are writing documentation. We are giving talks and demos and how we need to take that seriously

and use it to our advantage. She has a lot of actionable stuff. In fact, the ChangeLog post came out of that for four sources for infinite content ideas, which is something that I think back out a lot when I'm thinking about how I can create some content. Where can I get that content, right? What can I do that's fresh and new?

Yeah. And I refer back to her wisdom on that. So that one's called The Developer's Guide to Content Creation with Stephanie Murillo, and it's episode 382. I highly recommend her newsletter as well. I don't know how to tell you to subscribe to it except for maybe go to the podcast and link out from there, but you'll find it.

You should definitely listen to it or read it, sorry, not listen. You can't listen to our newsletter unless she speaks it, but hey, maybe she will in the future. Who knows? There's probably a startup that'll do that, right? Something like that.

Take your newsletter and read it to you. I think there are startups that take written things and turn them into podcasts. And there are startups that take podcasts and turn them into written. And there are startups that take podcasts and turn them into written things. Or just individuals. So if you could just feed those two to each other, right? That's up.

Pipe the input of one to the output of the other, you could really be onto something. And before we move on to posts and happenings and other things going on, I think this is the longest we've done a state of the Log and talked at this length about our favorites from just this one podcast of ours.

This is probably at least 40 minutes, maybe more. Just guessing. What are you trying to say? Just guessing. I like it. We love our stuff. We're getting better at it or worse at it.

We love our stuff. We really appreciate it. It is tough to go back and pick favorites because we set up all these episodes had all these conversations and so we think you know

of course some things go better than others but yeah we tend to think they're all pretty good otherwise we would have done them in the first place it's a very hard

process to whittle it down to what we've shared here go listen to all what 49 go listen to all what 49. Go listen all 49.

That's right. All right. Are you done with that? We'll move on to change like posts. Do it. So we don't just podcast newsflash

do do do. That's my newsflash noise. All right. I like that. We do other things and people are often surprised.

They say wait a second. You guys have an awesome weekly newsletter. No. Do you guys actually have a website. You guys have a website. There wait no do you guys actually have a website you

guys have a website there are other podcasts besides the changelog no i ask i say that facetiously but we get that a lot in fact people have been listening forever and what's funny is some people are subscribed to our master feed which is all of our shows in one place and which means you get instead of one show a week you get maybe five shows a week and they don't realize that there are different shows i've had people that just think it's just a changelog and we just have these different theme songs you know so some people pay close attention other people listen casually nothing wrong with that but we do have other podcasts we are not mentioning them here very much, but we have a podcast about JavaScript and the web called JS Party. We have a podcast all about founders, CEOs, and makers called Founders Talk.

There's a podcast all about Go and that community called Go Time. There's a podcast all about machine learning and AI and data science. It's called Practical AI. There's a podcast all about the brain and exploring it and learning about it and using that knowledge to, what is it, Adam, make ourselves better? Improve your life. There you go. It's called Brain Science.

And there's a podcast called Backstage, which is just us chit-chatting. That's right. Am I missing any? Did I miss a podcast? No, that's it. All right. So we have other podcasts. We also have a newsfeed.

And we've had a newsfeed for many, many years. In fact, my first contribution to ChangeLog was on the newsfeed. I was logging news. And we like to point at things that are interesting. We like to contextualize the news, say why we think it's interesting, throw a random joke or two in there, a pop culture reference, just to make it not boring.

And ship that out on a weekly basis. It's also on our website, which is changelog.com. On the homepage there, you can keep up with the news. It's not going to overwhelm you. It's not an aggregate based on upvotes and comments and blah, blah, blah. It's us curating the news, which you can submit for us to cover. We ask you to do so at changelog.com slash submit. Submit other people's stuff, submit your stuff, all good, as long as it's interesting. And we'd be happy to share it it so we do news and we also do

changelog posts which is more like a blog and we don't do that quite as often we don't haven't shipped 234 blog posts this year but we do do it from time to time and we do want to do it more and we're working on a not a submission process but a pitch process to write for changelog.com slash posts coming at you in 2021. But we've been doing that as well. So some of those are real hits and have made waves and have been pretty exciting. And we're going to talk about a few things that published this year on changelog posts

that have been big and interesting. So I've been talking too much, Adam, your turn. I think the one thing I'll say is just we're selective. It's not so much that the frequency would be more if I think we, one, had more time, and two, we weren't as selective. We want to feature not so much the best of the best in terms of like, oh, this is bad content and this is good content, but really good ideas. Not just your run-of-the-mill tutorial, which those are great.

It's just not what we're trying to optimize for. We're trying to optimize for sharing big ideas. And I think we lead off with a controversial subject, a big idea. And some might say an unpopular opinion. What did you say, Jared? Some would say. On go time, Kelsey H kelsey hightower well known in the cloud space well known in the kubernetes space uh came from core os did a bunch of cool

stuff there has been really well known in the kubernetes space doing a lot of cool stuff around containers a lot of things around docker a lot of things around go uh he's been an mc many times at many conferences a chair at many conferences i've seen him recently at least a couple years ago at gopher con but he wrote a post for us called monoliths of the future but technically he didn't write it but technically he did so i mean maybe he can sort of like give a peep behind the veil to the process there but on go time uh kelsey shared an unpopular opinion called Monoliths are the future And he laid it all out there

And we turned that into a post via the transcript And shared that Because hey, what happens often is content will get stuck In a podcast And we've had Alex doing great transcripts for us Since episode 200 of the changelog. And we're now at, what, 400 and something now? I don't know what number we're at.

430-something, I think, if I can recall correctly. But, you know, so for many years now, basically. And so this post from Kelsey, I mean, I think it got 150,000 uniques, maybe more, I don't know, what was the number? 200,000? It was ridiculous. And it's because Kelsey is incredibly eloquent and, as DHH said, drops hot fire.

And he actually speaks, it's almost like he speaks in a way as if somebody had written it. You know what I'm saying? When you write something, you craft what you're going to say and you can craft a sentence. And Kelsey just talks that way. Naturally. In a way

that's coherent and natural. Yeah, it's a skill. It's a talent. Yeah, when people say very interesting things on our shows, and that's buried in a 60, 80 minute podcast episode, we like to get those things featured. And sometimes they stand on their own.

And so we've been with the actual person, so we didn't do this without Kelsey Hightower's permission or participation. Take the transcript, repurpose it into a blog post, make it readable. We rewrite parts of it just to make it more like a written piece and less like a stream of consciousness, and turn that into a change log post and monoliths are the future. Back in January was an epic change log post by Kelsey Hightower. Our friends at digital ocean launched the app platform, get apps to market faster.

Now build, deploy and scale apps quickly using a simple, fully managed solution. They handle everything. The infrastructure, the app runtimes, and dependencies. So all you have to do is push code to production with the click of a button. It's that easy. Learn more. Check it out at do.co.changelog. Again, do.co.changelog and get $100 in free credit. It certainly gave us more fuel to our fire because like I said, with the time and the selectiveness to see a way as opposed to put more effort since you mentioned we're less known for posts and more known for podcasts to, you know, we obviously value written content, but we're not known for being a place to house it.

But it gave us more motivation to put more effort into it because we saw such great response from that. And it's less about, hey, popularity. It's more about sharing big ideas. That's why I think we're selected because we want to share really big ideas with people and be a platform you can do it with. So if you've got a big idea, hey, reach out. Absolutely. And until we have an actual official pitch form, just email editors at changelog.com

and say, hey, I'd love to write a changelog post. Here's what it would be about. And give us your big idea. We'd be happy to work with you. Give you feedback on why or why not. That's a good fit for us. Trying to figure it out yet, I actually just wrote the metadata title the other day because I realized that slash posts didn't have one, so it just said

changelog. And what I wrote was, solid takes from changelog contributors. There you go. I don't know. How do you like that, Adam? Yeah, I like it. Solid takes. You got a solid take. Yeah. Put it on changelog.

I think that's the thing where we're even selective with it too because there's so many people that will reach we get a lot of people who email us. And that's a good thing and a bad thing but the bad part of it is that there's just so much noise and really strive to hear the signal. And I think that's what that says. Solid takes is signal.

Which doesn't mean that we agree with your take. It means that it's a solid take. Like it's well thought out, it's reasoned, it's well written, and it's worth sharing. I mean, maybe the take isn't even so solid. I've written a few takes on there myself, and they've had varied degrees of

solid it's a mushy take solidity I thought it was solid when I started writing but when I published it I didn't

I wasn't so sure well there's been a couple other cool posts that we wanted to share here on the show by the way of course we have lots of

references in this episode we'll link to all of them in the notes so model of the future we talked about that one. Owen Bickford wrote a great post for us called Slaying Changelog's Compilation Beast.

And this is kind of a multifaceted story that came out of me live streaming some of the coding we do on the platform. I was streaming with the Elixir because that's what our platform was built with. And on my underpowered little laptop which I can't wait to replace with an M1 or maybe M2. M1X.

Rumors of the M2 have already rumors of faster Macs have already dropped like weeks after the M1s came out. I'm about ready to upgrade my coding machine. Anyways what was happening was I would be doing some work and it's a compiled

language and compilation times were just taking forever and it really killed my groove and I'd feel weird because I'm on a live stream and I'm like feeling dead air as the thing compiles. And Owen was watching the live stream on YouTube, feeling the pain right alongside me and decided to take action. So he figured out a way by basically changing the way we do some aliases versus some imports in our code to cut way down on the required files to recompile when i'm editing other files and he went ahead and made a pr and there was some back and forth with a few of the elixir team on it.

And it was such a cool thing that we had him write a change dog post. Then we brought him on backstage as well. And I had a fun conversation with Owen on backstage, just all about that process and really what he's up to and what he likes about YouTube and watching people stream and stuff like that. So the post is called slaying change logs, compilation beast, the episode of backstage

I think it's called YouTube made me do it that's right YouTube made me do it that's a sweet title that's a sweet title it's half the fun of podcasting

that's choosing a title yeah it is kind of fun yeah so shout out to Owen Bickford awesome contributions to our code and to

changelog posts as well as to our backstage podcast it was pretty cool and he was pretty cool. And he was a cool guy that I enjoyed meeting and hanging out with. That just shows that we're approachable, too. I mean, our code base is approachable in terms of being open source.

Elixir is maybe less utilized out there as a language, but definitely gaining steam and definitely becoming more popular. But approachable. I think that's kind of cool that you can feel the pain of Jared on a show, on a live stream, and solve that pain, and then write about it and podcast about it. I mean, that's pretty cool. You can share your ideas. I think more than anything.

It's a trifecta. Yeah, the trifecta. More than anything, it's a place to belong. That's what I think we've done. You can come here and hang out. This is a place to belong. And this with Owen is proof of that. Yeah.

By the way, that reminds me. Do you remember on the Code Vicious show where GNN said, you're not going to go off and learn Elixir and then a couple of years be not using it again? Do you remember that? Vaguely, yes. Our listeners remember that? Vaguely, yes. Our listeners might remember.

Vaguely, yes. It was funny because we talked about Elixir being not that well-known language. And he was talking about like, I asked him how many language transitions. So this is for those who didn't listen to that episode, Code Vicious is a guy who's been coding C, C++, and assembly for 20 years. And he's talking about transitions through different languages. i asked him how many languages he'd made the difference and like what was interesting to him he's actually interested in rust after all these years but he made this offhanded remark which was funny i don't know if he picked on elixir because he knew that

i write elixir or if it was just like he had to think of a somewhat obscure language that has been on a hype cycle recently, and he just came up with that one. But he mentioned how he wasn't going to just go pick up Elixir and then use it for a few years and then have no use for it and go back to what he was doing. And Adam, at the time, kind of gave me this grin like I was getting called out on the show because I was like, hmm, I might do that. He was answering essentially how to become or remain relevant.

Yeah, that's right. And I can quote this. He says, the only way I think to really remain relevant is to study the topic of computer science. Not every day. I don't expect everyone to be sitting around reading algorithms, but to realize that that's the thing you should be studying, in this case, computer science.

Bob's latest language, not like, oh, there's a book on Elixir. So this, what Jared's talking about, let's become an expert on Elixir and then three years from now, not be using it. I think that's the way to remain relevant over a lifetime in our industry is to basically keep studying computer science. I agree with him 100%. I just thought it was funny that he's like, I'm not going to be like, hey, there's a book

on Elixir, which is pretty much what I did okay but i'm still using it i'm not i didn't discard it three years later so he wasn't picking too much on me let's talk real quick about a couple more chain dog posts we're getting a bit long-winded mislav so you may know mislav marinich from github recently on go time talking about the transition of the GitHub CLI, which was previously called Hub and was a Ruby program for many years, that he began, I think before he, or actually Chris Wanstroth began it

and Mislav hopped on it and contributed to it for many years, I think before he was even at GitHub, but definitely while he was at GitHub doing other things. And he has recently taken up the CLI as one of his main projects there at GitHub, rewrote it in Go, and launched it as an official CLI. And he shared this post called,

Git is simply too hard. You may have seen this one recently as it just came out a couple weeks back, October, November timeframe. And yeah, this one resonated with people quite a bit it made the rounds on all the typical dev twitter hacker news reddit you know change dog news ecosystem the blogosphere is as we've once called it because hearing that from mislov from like a git fanatic and expert and he even admits in the post like he he's known the cli for all these years and even though it's like intuitive to him now and the many of us we just memorized the magic incantations yes i can delete a remote branch you know from the cl. I have no idea why I have to push with a colon

in front of the branch name or whatever it is. That despite how powerful the technology is and how useful it is and how much it's enabled, it's just too hard to learn. And his big thrust of that post is that whatever comes next needs to be more human oriented and not computer oriented yeah pretty fascinating stuff coming from mizlav well you have to take

i suppose the origins of get into mind when thinking about you know machines versus humans you know linus torvalds. And the complex domain, right? Like how complex it is. Exactly. It's trying to solve. But yeah, you would think, I mean, so anytime you're doing anything when it comes to software development,

you know, when a human is doing the work, it should be human friendly, I suppose, right? That would make sense. But unfortunately, that's not the case for Git. And yet it's ubiquitous amongst us, right? Like it basically won the battle with Mercurial, which was more user-friendly in its API and its command line syntax and stuff than Git was.

But I think GitHub really gave Git that killer feature, killer app, killer place. The network that built around Git because of GitHub really made it beat Mercurial, whereas Mercurial had some very serious advantages in the things that Mislav is talking about in this. And the context is really like the next 10 million GitHub users or Git users or whatever it is.

He says it could be Git that reinvents itself, right? Or a layer on Git. Whatever it is that He says it could be Git that reinvents itself, right? Or a layer on Git. Whatever it is that comes next should be designed for not just coders, but authors, journalists, research scientists, et cetera, et cetera. And these people shouldn't have to go through the pain that we've all been through, if you know Git like I do,

to learn Git. It's just too hard. Good post, read that one. The last one's written by me. Hey, we can cover this one real fast. Where I write, there's a good reason why experienced devs say it depends so often. And the subtitle is,

we're all sick of it, but we're not going to stop saying it. I was inspired to write this post after reading a post by Chris Coyier on CSS Tricks about Jamstack. And to summarize, Chris says, Jamstack, it depends, right? And there's a big war in Jamstack world, in front-end world right now, between Jamstack things or completely pre-rendered things and what you consider traditional or old-school server-side rendering. There's been debates between

WordPress's Matt Mullenweg and Netlify's Matt Billman about Jamstack versus SSR. And while Chris Coyier at CSS Tricks is very bullish on Jamstack he's writing very reasoned about it and I was impressed by that and I thought this is interesting because this is a guy who

has experience and knows that there is no panacea there's no silver bullet these things really do depend and while Jamstack has its virtues and they are many I'll admit that it also has its draw, and they are many, I'll admit that, it also has its drawbacks.

And so I thought, why not turn that into a solid take on changestalk.com. I love it. So that one's out there as well. There was also, you know, on that front too, in terms of Jamstack, and I suppose The War, for lack of better terms. The War. It was Matt Mollweg and Matt from was it

Netlify Netlify essentially the keynote I believe was a Netlify's keynote recently for Jamstack I'm lost on exactly what it was like

Netlify's conference or if it was Jamstack's conference I'm not sure yeah it's Jamstack Conf put on by Netlify right and there was a keynote

They had a debate Yeah the keynote was a debate Between the two Which we logged And it was good And I think that's You know If it's a panacea or not

You always wonder Of course There's lots of good things too Most things are good But they're not always all good That's right And it really does depend And so

It's ultimately the least satisfying answer. But actually I think it's one of the reasons why podcasts are so valuable to our community. True, yeah. Because the details matter and blog posts,

even the most solid take can be written from a perspective that focuses on all of the virtues of a thing and ignores all of the detrimental aspects or the other way around. Like it can be a takedown piece, why we switched off of Mongo or whatever. And you can just focus on all the things.

And we tend to write in superlatives because those are the things that gain attention. They are, you know, if I tell you, you might think Jamstack is cool, then you'd be like, okay, but I'm not going to read that. But you're like, Jamstack is the next big thing. You're gonna be like, oh, really? And I have to then convince you that in my post. But the reality in the real world is that we have to make trade-offs and decisions based on our contexts, and we can't just adopt what everybody else is doing. That's not smart software engineering. And so podcasts allow us to have those conversations,

those debates, with all the nuance that is necessary. And oftentimes, I've actually seen this as a trend, on GoTime, they have an unpopular opinion segment on the show every week. And we take their unpopular opinions and we put them on the GoTime FM Twitter and we actually take a poll to see if they're really unpopular. And what I've found is, I've listened to a lot of these over the course of the year since I started doing it, a lot of times the one-liner is very unpopular or very popular. But it's bombastic and opinionated but then the actual thing they say afterwards because you'd say something like you know crunchy peanut butter is better than smooth peanut butter and like that's your opinion

right but on a podcast you can't just say that and drop the mic and walk out you have to say why right and since this is a panel there's usually four people there the person will give their unpopular opinion and then they'll give their reasoning and the reasoning is always way more soft and qualified

and you'll say and I realize that in this context it rounds it out and it's actually a very enjoyable thing to hear because it's like here's a strong opinion, but it's kind of held loosely. Yeah. Well, there's always a story behind every opinion, and the story is the inroad to empathy. And so they can say the bombastic, unpopular opinion, and their reasoning for having that take is weave with their story which leads to empathy and gives you a chance to at least see and understand their perspective may not agree with it but you can say well i can

see why you would say that you may not adopt the belief but you can agree that they have it and it's okay right and that's enjoyable i think we all kind of move forward together even if we disagree at the end of the day, versus the wars, right? The actual, like, I hate you and your ideas, which tends to happen in the written world and on the online world. So anyway, it's just another plug for why I love podcasts and why I think these things are valuable.

Well, where else can you hear those at-length conversations between people you admire, look up to, follow follow use their code whatever you know in our right at least it it's uh you can go to a conference talk but that's still pretty one-sided you can maybe go to a birds of a feather you might get some of your points and you might hear different perspectives that's similar ish to a podcast but accessibility to a podcast, but accessibility to a podcast, frequency, highly produced, thought, you know, we intentionally produce these every single week on multi-show layers. So, I mean, you can't really get it anywhere else. That's why you should go to teamstyle.com.

Slash plus plus. Good segue. Yeah, there you go. So let's talk about some of the goings on. We need to wrap this up because we are getting a little bit longer winded. We're long winded this year. I think we just like we're doing more. We like what we're doing.

I don't know what it is, but I don't know. We're longer winded. That's for sure. We haven't hung out as much this week either. So maybe we're just catching up a little bit too between the two of us. But let's just talk real quick about things that we did this year. We didn't launch any new podcasts. No.

Right. We've been keeping on keeping on. The pandemic hit. things have been difficult like we mentioned at the top life has been more difficult than work for us we had of course concerns and uh negative consequences of the initial lockdown and so it hasn't been all roses here but speaking, everything's going well. That being said, we did launch our membership program over the summer, changelog.com slash plus plus. The coolest URL ever.

I think so. That's right. I love it. You can get closer to the metal, as we say. You can make the ads disappear. And you can support us directly so that when the tides of change rise into our sea, I don't know, I'm losing it,

whatever that metaphor that is, when things get rough, we have direct support to fall back on in the case of other means of making money go away so that these shows can continue and thrive. And so we launched that over the summer, warm reception. We're thankful to everybody who's signed up so far.

It's just a beginning. We kind of of launched it let it be its thing we continue to you know ship ad free shows alongside our ad full shows all of those not full but you know what i mean each and every episode and people who join uh get the warm fuzzy to support us and they also appreciate that feed ironically a lot of people still sign up and then don't use the ad-free feed because they like the ads. So that makes us feel good, but also kind of feel weird.

So that's the biggest new thing for us is ChangeLog++. And it is new and not at all what it's going to be in terms of like in its final state, but it is out there. And what else? What else is new this year?

We've had some new people involved around our parts. Well, I think if you're curious more about Plus Plus, there's some backstage episodes that go deeper in that. So if we've piqued your curiosity, go there. You mentioned the pandemic, of course. We did a show on Brain Science that sort of covered we've peaked your curiosity, go there. You'd mentioned the pandemic. Of course, we did a show on brain science that sort of covered a lot of that stuff too,

which was really just embracing turbulence, as we said. That was coined actually from an investment capital firm. I'm not sure that was the best source for the phrase, but brace for turbulence

was said then. I think it's been a pretty turbulent world since then. And I've been bracing, so there you go. I think it's been a pretty turbulent world since then. And I've been bracing, so there you go. I took my own advice. I think shipping 400 episodes of The Changes Log is a feat, even though we say 50 a year, and it's been 10 years,

and those numbers don't match up in terms of the math, the multiplication. Still happy about that um i think practically eye turning 100 episodes out there is a big feat for chris and daniel they're doing an awesome job with that show they care really deeply about keeping you know the the discussions around data science and artificial intelligence very practical you know to to go back to the name of it accessible you know available i suppose in some cases and not just simply out in the you know uh skynet kind of scenarios but practical real world applications use it today that you can use today that's

that are good uses for artificial intelligence and the way it can evolve technology for humans and potentially cats and dogs because I know Chris loves cats and dogs and animals, so maybe he turns to that side as well. But new people on shows, which is always awesome, new contributors. We've done some cool stuff with the infrastructure this year. I know that Gearheart has been working really hard on that.

We did a show recently about that, another blog post about that. We have great partnerships making that happen. Linna great partner, FASTA's a great partner I mean just so much And back to what you said before I'm thankful for the community Who supported us via Plus Plus And it's not just simply a hey

Support us that the rug gets pulled out But more if you want to directly support What we do That's why we put that there. And as Jared mentioned, it is the beginning of it. We have more that will come to it. So be an early subscriber. Directly support us.

If that's what you want to do, that's what we want you to do. Absolutely. A couple more shout-outs to people new and old who are involved in ChangeLog this year. We've had some new panelists added to a couple of our shows amel hussein which you probably heard on the changelog if you're a long time listener she had an awesome episode last year called something about asts what's it called adam uh it has to do with refactoring using asts it's very very interesting and she has joined js party as a regular panelist,

and she's been an awesome addition to the panel. So we're welcoming Amel. And then on GoTime, we've had three new panelists just this month. So Chris Brando, Angelica Hill, and Natalie Pistunovic will be on GoTime episodes coming near your ears real soon right now. We actually had them on an episode, the three of them, on a live show at GopherCon and enjoyed

it so much and enjoyed them so much that we just said, hey, why don't you all just stick around and be panelists? And they said yes. Always happy to have more and new voices on our podcast. And so that's happening. And then with the platform, there's a lot of regulars

hanging around the dev channel on our Slack. Of course, the Slack is completely free and everyone is welcome. Changewell.com slash community. Come hang out in Slack. It's not super noisy, but it is good signal and good conversations. So everybody who's hanging out in dev,

we've had some new contributors this year. Lars Wickman, or as they say it over there, Losh Wickman. I think that's close to correct. I call him Lars Wickman because that's how a honky would say it, a Midwestern honky like myself might say it. Lars has been hacking on the code base.

He's been contributing to news, logging news, hanging out, Really been an enjoyable addition to our Chainedog family the last year or so. So we're happy to have Lars hanging out, of course, Gerhard. And we have Alex, who does all of our transcripts. Still rocking it.

Years later. Years later. And getting better and better. And then Tom. What's Tom's last name? I just call him Tom all the time. Crow. Tom O'Barsky. I know a different Tom Crow.

Tom Crow? I know a Tom Crow. Now you're thinking of the actor. Russell Crow. Russell. That's a different, that's a whole different Crow. Yeah,

this is a whole different Tom. Tom O'Barsky. Tom O'Barsky,arski has been helping us produce some of the awesome clips and promotional materials and some video stuff. And Tom has been awesome to have around. So just a few folks on the periphery. You probably don't see them or hear them

unless they're a panelist on our shows, but they're definitely helping make ChangeLog awesome. So shout outs to them and best of 2021 to them as well anything else before we call it i mean i just in mention in regards to slack i would say a channel to sign up for alone would be apple nerds i mean there's so much chatter especially around the events if you're into apple of course if you're into apple I mean, I think stats and statistics say that a majority of our audience are Apple fans. And we call them Apple nerds lovingly, of course, because we are also Apple nerds. And we're in there.

Can't wait to actually make that t-shirt. Apple nerds. You know, come hang out in Apple nerds. And that's why you should join the community. Jared mentioned it's free. Slack may not eventually be free to us. It's free now, but it's free for you, for sure. Forever.

We'll be off Slack if it starts charging us. The acquisition may turn bad, who knows what. Anyways, you can join us in Apple Nerds. There's always conversation in there, even the latest the AirPods Max. I get my Apple news from Apple Nerds, basically. That's awesome.

There you go. It's not even by design. It was funny because Apple just announced the AirPods Max, which is basically there over the ear. And actually, when someone pasted the link in our Apple nerds channel, I thought it was a joke because there was, I think I previously did a tweet with this giant thing that looked like an AirPod. Remember that tweet, Adam, back in the day?

And it was like breaking. looked like an AirPod. Remember that tweet, Adam, back today? And it was like, breaking. Apple announces AirPod Max. And I was being completely dorky, and it was a joke. But it was like this gigantic, like, two-foot AirPod. I should retweet that now that it's real news. I can't remember if I used the exact term, AirPod Max, but it was close.

I like that you call it real news. So I didn't think it was real. I thought it was a satire post But So close to being Satire The price might be a satire 550 dollars

But Time will tell We'll tell I think that's pretty much it I mean we got Some great teams Behind the scenes Helping us edit our shows

Which My gosh Podcast for Alan Adam Clark And his team Helping us I mean There's so much If you're listening to this show And you listen to any of our shows, there's really a lot behind the scenes that make this happen.

It's a two-person operation, but primarily, but there's a lot of people that go into and a lot of effort that goes into producing these podcasts. We do it as not as in quotes, a labor of love, but very much. We love doing this. So we do it for money. Of course, we're running a company around this, but it's not a labor of love in terms of we don't get paid very much we love doing this. So we do it for money, of course, because we're running a company around this, but it's not a labor of love in terms of we don't get paid. But we do love doing this, and we love all the people that are involved

with us. Jared mentioned earlier, join the family. We literally mean that. The people that work with us are like family to us. And a lot of people say that is just sort of, I don't know, signal, what's it called? Signal virtuane? What's that term? Virtual signaling?

That's how unfamiliar I am with that term. But, you know, we really do love the people that work with us and our listeners, too, and our readers, too. So, if you're listening to this to this point, as us about to say goodbye, we love you. Thank you for listening.

Ditto. And goodbye. That is it love you. Thank you for listening. Tato. Goodbye. That is it for 2020. Thank you so much for tuning in. For many of us, we're so much looking forward to the end of this year and the beginning of a new year. And we appreciate you listening to this show. We appreciate you tuning in. We appreciate all the people in the community. As a matter of fact, go to changelog.com slash community and subscribe so you can get into the community totally free. Hang with us in Slack or upgrade your experience by going to changelog.com slash plus plus and supporting us directly if you'd like to. That is not necessary.

It is totally optional. But I'm getting ready to go hang with some family right now. So have a happy holiday. Be safe. Be well. We'll see you in 2021. Thank you. Bye.