The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - State of the "log" 2022 (Interview)

Episode Date: December 23, 2022

Our 5th annual year-end wrap-up episode! Sit back, relax, pour a glass of your favorite beverage and join us for listener voice mails, our favorite episodes, some must-listens, and of course the top 5 most listened to episodes of the year. Thanks for listening! 💚

Hello, Changelog World. I'm Jared, and this is The Changelog, where we feature in-depth discussions with the hackers, the leaders, and the innovators of the software world. You have arrived at our fifth annual State of the Log episode. So sit back, relax, pour a glass of your favorite beverage, and join us for some listener voicemails, highlights, and discussions around our favorite episodes, some must listens, and of course, the top five most listened to episodes of the year. Quick content warning on

this one. Adam and I discuss and use a slang word that might be explicit depending on where you live. We don't bleep it because, well, you'll find out as we go. Now you know ahead of time, just in case you care. Okay, BMC, drop that changelog theme song on us. here we are state of the log 2022 holy moly hard to believe it's been a year already, but here we are. I feel you, man. I feel like this year above all years. And isn't that something you say anyways? Like, is it ever really a surprise that it goes fast? I feel like this year really has gone fast. The slowest year ever was 2020, of course, but 2022 seems to be the absolute roller coaster. Yeah, things have been moving fast and crazily. And here we are in December ready to close things down until the new year. This has become an annual tradition of ours. This is our fifth annual State of the Log episode where we sit back, navel gaze, talk about some of our favorites, talk about some of the most popular episodes of the year. And something we started last year and was a lot of fun and we are doing again this year is listener messages.

So shout out to all nine of you who recorded a little voice memo for us and sent them in. We'll be playing those throughout the episode. That's been a cool addition to the state of the log in my opinion. Yeah, I agree. Something just about adding the listeners' voices into the mix just makes it the perfect way to end the year

and to do a true state of the law. Because, Jared, if we didn't have listeners, what would we be, man? We would just be talking into the ether, bro. Nothing would be... No one would hear us! Yes. If a podcast ships in the middle of the forest and no one's there to hear it

that's right does it make a sound jared and i are master mp3 creators basically and we ship mp3s around the world thanks to our friends at fastly and our friends at fly two plugs for our favorites there yeah that's a sponsor favorite for me at least you know like fastly and fly i really appreciate their support absolutely and uh i really ChatGPT naming us the dynamic duo. Yes. Because that strokes my ego very nicely. Yes. Of course, we were on Hacker News over the weekend.

So if you wanted to get your ego unstroked, we got some solid criticisms there. Always nice to see our friends and listeners at Hacker News. But let's not digress into that. We have a lot to do on this show. We have a bunch of favorites. We have a bunch of episodes and a bunch of listener messages. So I have put out the call two weeks in a row on Changelog News to record your voice, send it in.

Everybody who makes a show gets a free Changelog t-shirt. So sufficient motivation. And we've got a bunch of cool messages um these first two which i'll play somewhat back to back didn't listen very closely because we wanted to know what your favorite episode of the changelog was and they both submitted favorite episodes but they weren't of our show they were of our other shows which of course we we don't care we think that's awesome true okay But the first one we're going to listen to is Puneet. Here he comes. Hey, this is Puneet from India.

The Go Time episode where Matt goes to Berlin for Goffa Con has to be one of my favorite moments. Loved his witty comments in my turn. Well, I don't think the terms Matt Reier and witty comments are used in the same sentence very often, but Puneet managed to splice them together. This was episode number 250 of Go Time, and it was all Matt's doing.

So Matt went to go for Connie Yu. He actually, I think he was the emcee of the event. We did a Gophers Say live on stage, which I helped out with, but Matt had this idea of he was going to just take a microphone. I think it was just his iPhone. I'm not sure what he was talking into.

The audio quality was not our best ever, so I don't think it was a professional microphone. And he recorded his whole trip, so he would be on the airplane, on the train, walking through the airport. Okay, just arrived at the airport. Yeah, the driver's okay. I wouldn't say the driver had good breath,

but don't worry, he more than made up for it with his erratic driving. And he did suggest to, instead of bringing me to the actual airport, just drop me off at a nearby roundabout. But we both agreed in the end that that was absolutely insane. But he wanted to avoid the charges, but I decided to cover them for him. So, here we go. I'm going to now head into the airport.

I'm on my way. Getting on another train. He had a lot of stuff of him just getting there, and then some conversations while he was there, and then it was just over. So he just took all of these audio clips and he handed them to me after he got back from gopher con and he's like can you do something with this and i was like i'll do my best i appreciate the call in panit because matt asked

me later we put the show out i did my best i thought it was decent but we had uh some new music because matt had written the theme song for gop Connie U. So like we use that music instead. So it was like kind of like the least Go Time episode of Go Time ever. And Matt asked me later, he's like, I listened to it. I liked it. He's like, did anybody else like it? And I was like, I don't know. No one said a word.

There's no feedback. There was nobody talking about it on Twitter. No one said it sucked. No one said it was great. We had zero feedback. So I'm like, sorry, man. I don't know. I don't know if they liked it or not. So happy to hear somebody liked it.

Puneet, close the circle for us all. Thank you, Puneet. Yes. And I was giving Matt a hard time. There's definitely some witty banter. There was this, a common occurrence. He was going to Berlin and they kept calling him a wanker, which is like a slur over there.

I mean, it's not a nice thing to call people. It's a slur here too, I believe, isn't it? Is it? I don't know. It's not a good thing, I don't think. No, it's not nice. I don't know if it's like an actual curse word or anything. I didn't bleep it.

I was like, I don't know. And Matt acted like they were saying donka, you know, which is thank you. So there's like all these moments where he's like, oh, they're actually really nice here. And then there's this clip at the end where this woman goes, wanker. And he goes, oh, you're welcome. Well, that's it from me from berlin and from go for con eu oh i had a great time i'm off back to london now you're welcome it's classic oh it's hilarious i gotta go back and listen to that one so if for no other reason go listen to

that for that purpose and it has chapters so you can hop to the first one oh you don't have to hop there's the first chapter there's the first one and then the very hop to the first one. Oh, you don't have to hop there. It's the first chapter. There's the first one. And then the very end is the last one. You could just check out those two moments. Of course, listen to the whole thing while you're there. But for me, that was worth the price of admission. Oh my gosh. So thankful for chapters.

So thankful. Right? Yes. I wonder if we're the two people that like chapters the most. I can't stop gushing about them, and I'm sorry. It just helps me navigate our own shows better. Yeah. And maybe we're the anomaly where we actually go back and listen to our own podcast.

Maybe other people don't go back and listen to their own stuff to some degree. I'm not listening to me necessarily or you necessarily. It's just more like the things we covered. Quality control. In the moment, it's hard to really grok everything in the moment. There's like a rewatch of a movie, you get more from the second watch if it's a really good movie that you really want to watch again. Feel that way about our podcast, almost every one of them.

Yeah, I love it because I'm always there the first time. A lot of people, when they experience a podcast, they just want to listen to the conversation. I get it. You're not really necessarily going to be hopping chapters unless something gets way upstream, and then you want to listen to the conversation. I get it. You're not really necessarily going to be hopping chapters unless something gets way upstream and then you want to get back on topic and you're like, I'll skip to the next chapter.

So a lot of people don't care about chapters for that reason. They just want to listen to the conversation. But when you're there for the first time on the conversation, you actually want to go to specific points. And so I use our chapters feature all the time. And if you just want to hear Matt be called a wanker and then respond, you're welcome. I mean, chapters, just the time. And if you just want to hear Matt be called a wanker and then respond to you're welcome.

I mean, chapters just hop right to that chapter. So did he think they were for sure saying Danka or was he just like, was he? No, no, no. It's a Matt thing.

It's just Matt's humor. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. He knew what they were saying. Why in the world were they calling him a wanker? I don't know. I mean,

it's just something that happens in Berlin as you walk around. Like, like, I don't know. I don't know. I'm not sure why. Maybe he is one. We'll have to ask Adam Wiggins next time we talk to him. Yeah, totally.

All right, let's move on to our next one. So thanks, Puneet, for calling in. We'll get you a free GoTime t-shirt since you seem to like GoTime quite a bit. Next up we have Eli. Hey, Jared and Adam. How are you guys doing? I wanted to share one of my favorite episodes from Changelog. I've used the Master Feed to kind of browse through things. The news is certainly a good one.

But I got to say that my highlight is the series, basically the Ship It series with Gerhardt. And well, Kaizen has been awesome. The one that comes to mind as like the tip of the top, so to speak, is Fundamentals with Kelsey Hightower. That episode was amazing just in the sense of how much knowledge Kelsey threw out there. And I have to say, I have to re-listen and look at the transcripts, which is unusual for me. But it was really good. It was really good it was really good and I really like how Gerhard focused in and came back over and over again to different things that Kelsey said and tried really hard to crystallize in terms of a real example what Kelsey was saying but it was a super dense episode that was like really enjoyable like peanut butter no almond butter and dark chocolate mixed together and

slowly trying to eat that thing. It was just astounding. So well done. And it's really well done with all your other shows. But that was definitely a highlight. And thank you so much for that. Well, it's a one word podcast, which to me just screams amazing, right? Like when you can ship a show with just one word as a title. Fundamentals. That's the best, right? Fundamentals. One, that's courageous to do.

And two, probably something you can only do with Kelsey Hightower. And I would say three, he'd mentioned the show notes and the transcript. Eli, by the way, that's my son's name. So thank you, Eli. I think that's beautiful because that means when we ship good shows like this that can last for a while, that's one that I think you can come back to a year from now, two years from now. It's almost like a book in time, and it's a resource that can be there. And what I love most about what we do, and thank you for highlighting this, is that we put so much work into the details, the show notes, the transcript,

the chapters as we just kind of gushed about, we won't go on and on about. But to me, that gives people who really can appreciate the few episodes or the several episodes a year from every podcast we do, the ability to go back and dig deeper, you know, to unravel the onion further and further and further. I think to me, that's the detail that I really appreciate about what we deliver as podcasts.

And just what Eli said there about that show in particular just highlights all those things. Yeah. So that was episode 44 of highlights all those things. Yeah. So that was episode 44 of Ship It. Check it out. ShipIt.show slash 44. Also happened to be the most popular episode of the year, which is not a huge surprise because Kelsey just spits hot fire everywhere he goes. And Gerhard really did a good job of drawing that out.

My rule has always been document the manual process first, always. Okay. Because if you go and do everything in Puppet, now I got to read Puppet code to see what you're doing. How can I suggest anything better? So if you write it down manually and you say, first get a VM, install, change log, then take this load balancer, put this certificate here, then get this credential, put it in this file, then connect to Postgres this version with these extensions. So now I can see the entire thing that you're doing. And then the next thing I do is say,

okay, now that we understand all the things that we're required to run this app, I want to see the manual steps that you're doing. All of them. We build the app using this makefile. We create a binary. We take the binary and we put it where? You're not storing the binaries anywhere?

Oh, no, we're just making this assumption that we could just push the binary to the target environment. You need to fix that. That's a bad assumption. You need to take the binary and preserve it so that way we can troubleshoot later in different environments and we can use it to propagate. Oh, okay, Kelsey. Good idea.

So we're just going to fix the manual process until it looks the best we can do for what we know at the time. Right. Now, once we have that, I'm going to give that process a version. This is one dot O of everything. We've cleaned some things up. We saw some bad security practices. Clean up the app. So now go automate that. And we're only joking about, you know, liking ShipIt and GoTime better than our podcast because we love them as well. My favorite from 2022 from ShipIt was operational simplicity is a gift to you

with Gary Bernhardt. That's episode 62. Gary's a lot like Kelsey and he's a kind of a must listen kind of guy. Everything he says is if you don't agree with it, it's at least well-reasoned and interesting and thought-provoking. So that was a surprise for me. I didn't expect to see Gary Bernhardt on a ops infra shipping it episode because I think of him so much in like the crafting software development world, but did a really good job of highlighting really the way he tries to keep things simple and how that's important with operations. Shout that one out as well. All right, listener number three, this is Jordy. Jordy hangs out on our Slack. So a shout out to Jordy. Always happy to see you

in our community. As one of the hosts of the podcast Software Engineering Daily, I can only speak in awe and with a fair bit of envy about the changelog. Its episodes are brilliantly researched, well executed, and thoroughly edited. Even swear words are edited out. I would be the editor's nightmare was I a suitable guest in the first place, which I'm not. As an individual, the only reason I'm not a changelog++ subscriber is because my creative budget is limited and already allocated. But this decision creeps up my moral judgment machine every now and then, sending regret waves

that are increasingly difficult to hold against. In essence, the changelog and all its subsidiaries is a bloody good podcast that anyone in the software industry should listen to well we're at the still that copy jordy because i i like that regret shockwaves is that right we're in the midst of some thoughts around a new website and i gotta say that's some fine good copy fine good things to say of course too yeah those are definitely some kind words and jordy was the one who was in our Slack asking about our bleeping reasoning, which I explained there in Slack, and I posted it publicly as well. But I don't think we've ever talked about our bleeping policy on the show.

No, but you can read yourself if you'd like, Jared. I was going to just summarize, but I probably... Same thing. Yeah. Let me summarize because I don't have it pulled up. But the idea here with our bleeping is all about accessibility. It's all about reaching as many people in as many circumstances as possible. And when it comes to the people that want to reach, it's not merely adults. It's not merely mature. Sometimes it's sensitive ears and we want to be

able to have people of all ages listen to our shows without fear of coming across something that they don't want to come across. And then when it comes to circumstances, because most of our listeners are adults, there's a circumstance which is quite common when you listen to a lot of podcasts and you have kids, which is that you won't listen with them in earshot. I do this all the time. And one common thing that happens, which is quite frustrating as a parent, is when you have a, which is generally speaking, safe for work, safe for sensitive ears. And then all of a sudden here comes like an F-bomb or something like right in front of your kids. And you're like, ah, you feel a little bit betrayed because like you just didn't see that coming and you would have paused

it and listen to it later. And so we don't want to betray our listeners trust so that we keep the explicit tag off of our feed and in order to do that truthfully we have to then not have explicits now uh things slip through here there you might find a wanker here i'm not sure if that's explicit or not some things are judgment calls yeah but definitely with sensitive ears and earshot is something that we think about and we want people to feel free and safe to just listen in their car with the kids around and not worry about something inappropriate so that's really the reasoning behind it and i don't know if there's any other reasons for it adam we've done it forever yeah i mean i think it's it's a version of what you said but also just simply to be

accessible the accessibility of it you know we don't want um we don't want just anything possibly inappropriate even if you're just at a cafe right and you're just hanging out there like for some reason you're that that weirdo who's playing it out loud but that's cool too if you want to share a show like that yeah you know i mean just to just to sort of make this a safe place for everybody to hang their hat you can listen or show wherever you're at by yourself where you're running or doing dishes or in the car with your family or even your mom like what if you're in the car with your mom she didn't mind you listening your favorite podcast and you're like i'm listening mom's like what are you listening to they're talking about wankers here or something like that you know what i mean hopefully that's not really a negative word because we said like 16 times we have to bleep ourselves if it's

bad we're gonna have to put a warning on this particular episode. Yeah geez. Anyways the point yeah totally as a side note here I love whenever and this is sort of not to you dear so this is more me talking to you and also the audience hearing. Okay. Is I really appreciate the moments when I have something to say and I don't have quite the words to say them yet and I need to marinate a little bit more to like figure out how best to say it then I come back and then you've said almost exactly what I would say to some degree, potentially, maybe better than I would have said it. And so it's just like, yeah, one, I'd have to do the work and then two, you know, what needed to be said was said. So in this case, that was an example of very similar thinking and very similar reasoning. And I think I've told you this before, you're a pretty great diplomat. You do a great job of diffusing

challenging situations with just, I don't know if this is a negative way to say it, but like lukewarm wording where it's not like too hot, too cold, and shocking to anybody. It's just like perfect. So that's one thing I appreciate about you. And that's a good moment where that happened. Well, thank you.

So all that being said, we totally understand it's dorky when you have somebody on the show who's like dropping truth bombs and they throw an F in there and you bleep it the show who's like dropping truth bombs and they throw an F in there and you bleep it and you're like, oh, you ruined the moment. Worth it. Worth it for us to stay accessible. One more thing on Jared's copy, by the way, listeners, something you don't get to hear behind the scenes of every episode of the changelog, because I get to hear this at least 50 times a year and over the course of my entire lifetime of all these podcasts we produce tons and tons more, is every time Jared gets to tell a listener,

you're not going to offend us, but we may bleep you in post. Right. So he's letting the guest know with a gracious heart to say, you're not going to offend us necessarily with your words, but we want to make sure our listeners are protected from these certain things. And so you may not offend us in this moment, but know that you'll be bleeped in the post-production. So they're even warned and alerted beforehand in a gracious way.

So I think that's even a great moment of copy is like, you're not going to offend us, but we're going to do this in post. So be warned. And the reason we say that is because we don't want to offend them by censoring them. Right. And in fact, one point, I think we did talk about this with Standard Out the Rapper. That episode went out explicit and I did not bleep anything because that was his art and I was featuring his art. And in that case,

I made an exception because I wanted his art to be represented as he created it. But the reason why we say that to folks is because we don't want to surprise them and all of a sudden have them be like, because the listeners are sometimes surprised and they laugh at us, but at least the guests see it coming. And you gave a warning for that one too, before the show came out,

you're like, Hey, know that this one is different. There is some, some explicit in this episode. So if you're not in a safe place to listen, you know, you might want to pause it and come back when you can be. And I learned that from listening to other podcasts that I appreciate who generally are safer work and they'll have an episode and they'll warn it up front. Like, Hey, there's like two swears in this just heads up. Like I appreciate that as a listener. And so I did that on that episode as well. Well, let's get back to listener Collins. Here's a guy that we know, Brett Cannon.

Have you heard of him? Brett? Brett Cannon? What? Yeah. Okay. Brett wrote to us. Brett talked to us. He called in. I don't know what you call it. He sent us a voicemail. Here it is. Hey, Adam and Jared, this is Bright Cannon. I wanted to say my favorite guest this year was actually a returning guest, and it was Richard Hipp in episode 454. Rich's dulcet tones and dedication to C were very interesting and fun to listen to. Although a shout out to episode 475 with Matt Ahrens and the ZFS file system for some reason.

I just found that one really fascinating. And not to leave the backstage out on any of this, episode 23 with Parker Silbert and Oberyn Pro was really interesting to see how he's trying to turn his passion into something he can do full-time. And of course, I'd be remiss to not mention episode 18 for Tenet on backstage. Congrats on five years. Of course, he had to get the Tenet drop. For those who didn't listen, Brett was on that episode talking Tenet drop. For those who didn't listen, Brett was on that episode talking Tenet with heavy spoilers. That's episode 18 of our backstage podcast where we talk about pretty much whatever

we like. It doesn't have to be necessarily on topic. We don't do it very often, but we want to do it more. And one thing I thought was funny about this. So one thing you experience as a podcaster is that everybody listens at their own rate, at their own timing, at their own pace. Oftentimes, somebody will listen to an episode that you recorded a long time ago and they'll want to come and talk to you about it. You're like, dude, I can't remember anything. Let me go read the transcript. They'll ask you a specific question like, why did you say this or why did you ask that? The context for us is just gone.

We ship a show. We expect everybody to listen to it that day. We're like, hey, we want feedback. Brett is one of these guys in my experience. Who's always trailing behind. Like he listens, he's a listener. I think he's even a changelog plus plus member, but he's never up to date. The reason why I say all this is because that Richard hip episode was not this year. It was last year. Still a good show. His favorite episode from this year was last year, but it was a good one. Of course. Anytime you get Richard Hipp on the podcast, it's going to be interesting.

We published it August 19th, 2021, and it was a phenomenal episode. Yep. We didn't just talk about SQLite. We talked about alt HPD and also Fossil. Fossil, yeah. And then also last year, Tenet with Heavy Spoilers. That was a fun show to kind of coordinate because, I don't know, just behind the scenes I had just been like marinating deeply on Tenet.

There was just so many layers to it. And Heavy Spoilers, Paul from Heavy Spoilers on YouTube, he was just really doing a great job of like keeping me, you know, I guess informed, so to speak. He was one of many, i i was like let's get somebody who's quote unquote an expert at such and such film right in this case tenant and let's do a show about informed with the theories right right with all of the different theories of and interpretations of it and so paul of course said yeah and in good fashion brett cannon came

back on because when we do a backstage about a film, I think at this point, Brett would be offended if he wasn't part of that show, right? I think so. He didn't need a first-run refusal, at least. If we do John Wick 4, just the two of us, we'll probably lose Brett as a friend. He'd be like, dude, come on, what's going on here?

So, yeah, I'm glad he liked those, because those are good ones for sure. And then Obon Pro with Parker Sober, that was cool too. I think that was this year. So he got one out of three was in the calendar year, 2023. April, yeah. But who's counting? All right, here comes another familiar name,

a longtime listener of JS Party and one of the guys who is always listening, I think, like the day it drops because Rory O'Connor always has something to say about an episode right after we ship it, which as a publisher, you enjoy because, like I said, you move on in your head and then people want to talk about it. Yeah, you want that instant feedback. Here's Rory. keep me informed and keep me laughing too. The two episodes that I enjoyed the most this year are the insane tech hiring market and the not insane tech hiring market later in the year with Gerge Oros. I've been a web developer for 25 years, basically doing the same job, if you can believe that. And I always wonder what it's like out there in the real world of the tech hiring market and wondering what I'm missing out on and wondering what I'm protected from. And these episodes really gave me a great insight into

that and helped me appreciate my own position. So thank you. Pretty cool. Yeah, very cool. There's a lot to say there. You know, Gary Gay coming back on twice, I think now has become a staple. I think we'll have to do that. It has been annual and I think we've kind of planned it somewhat annually but he's been busy so he almost didn't make it this year but I'm like we cannot not have you on considering the massive change and then the subtle title change was just super cool to pull off but yeah Roy appreciate listening to both those episodes and even for me too like just being informed about the ins and outs of what's happening in the hiring space. And I think Gary does a great job of covering that.

I believe I even gushed a little bit on that episode because I just wanted to be, you know, thankful to him in person. And we were there talking to him in person because he does a great job of like covering the details. Like I just, that's not a bone in me to do that yeah I appreciate that hard work but that is a unique skill set that he has culminated from years in the trenches at Uber and other places and whatnot and I just think that he's got that special knack for it one to enjoy the work which I think sometimes that's like very detailed work and challenging to many. But he really thrives at, one, producing it and then really shedding the right kind of light in the right kind of areas to bring that knowledge to a lot of people.

So he's done a great job doing that. And we're happy to have him back on another year for sure. Following up to Rory is another familiar name around our Slack. It's Jarvis Yang. He also appreciated Gargay's episode. Hello, ChangeLog World. This is Jarvis from Minnesota. I wanted to say thanks for the great episode on this not insane tech hiring market.

I've been laid off as well recently, and this episode was very insightful and just what I needed. I've usually been a part of the cost center side of things, but would definitely think twice when looking for new jobs. These layoffs also want me to become more entrepreneurial, and I can see that there are lots of untapped boring markets that could use some automation or some software engineering love. Thanks again, Changelog, for an amazing year. You all rock. Very cool. Thank you, Jarvis. Thank you for saying that.

You know, writing that intro, Jared, for that show was challenging because I knew obviously what we covered, but it was such a touchy subject. And I was just like, you know what? We come to this conversation with great compassion and great understanding because of folks like Jarvis out there that are just like, I recently got laid off and I'm listening to this episode. And it's like, not only is there a relevant episode, but it hurts. Right. Because you've got a circumstance that's not desirable. Who wants to be laid off? Nobody.

Right. right? Because you've got a circumstance that's not desirable. Who wants to be laid off? Nobody, right? And even when I was doing like, this is meant to be informative, but obviously podcasts that we produce are meant to entertain to some degree because otherwise you wouldn't come back. If you don't get that dopamine hit, what are you, you know, what are you getting? And I was like, I can't just like do this intro and not talk about the, you know, to be punny, insane amount of foot out there. Like there's just a lot of fear and certainty and doubt out there. So I'm like, hopefully the show gives you a lens into what's really going on. And hopefully we covered that because I didn't get a chance to like fully listen back. I was there, obviously, as you know, but I just want to express that great compassion and great understanding we came with that show with because like it was, that's like

a challenging show to produce when you know that there's people listening that you care about and they care about you and have been following you and listening and whatever in the midst of that struggle and that challenge. Yeah, Jarvis, really sorry to hear that you got laid off, man. Jarvis has become somewhat of a friend via Wordle. So you may not know this, Adam, but Jarvis and myself and our editors, Jason and Brian, play Wordle every day. Is that right? There's a Wordle channel in our Slack. What? And you just post your results. And I talked about it months ago when we first started doing it.

I'm like, hey, anybody still playing Wordle? Here we are in this channel. Come play Wordle with us. And Jarvis was the only one that did. There was nobody else that came and played with us. And pretty religiously, we all post our Wordle results daily in there and see who gets the best one or throw emoji on each other's responses. So yeah, Jarvis has been culminating a relationship via Wordle for months now. And so

I feel like I know the guy, even though Jarvis and I have never met, although Minnesota, not too far away. Minnesota. Yeah. Maybe we could do a meetup sometime. That's so cool. I mean, this is like a, you know, that's what I love about this show, I think, and why I kind of come to it not unprepared but like in a surprise way because this is a hidden gem of changelog slack in my opinion and one of the reasons why we have this desire to have this free community for people to to hang their hat it's for things like this it's like you know it's used by internal folks and one external you know community member but that's that to me is like uh maybe this show will kick off more in there, Jared, because I can imagine there's more people playing Wordle. If you're still playing Wordle,

I know there's a lot of people that moved on. For me, it's a nice little thing to do in the morning while you're drinking your coffee. Get your brain going. Okay. And yeah, if you want to have a Wordle community, come join the Wordle channel in our Slack and just post your results alongside us.

It's a good time. Will you be doing this through the Christmas holiday? I will definitely be playing because I'm a completionist and there's a streak. I got a streak going. So I'll play. I play daily. And will I be posting during there? Maybe I will. It just kind of depends. Like, do I want to hop in Slack or not? If somebody else is sharing, maybe I'll share mine. I'll definitely be playing through the holiday. Will I be sharing my results? Time will tell. Just depends on how much I want to disconnect from everything. But yeah, probably, probably. Now this one more layer. Is there a syntax? I'm noticing is this not an image,

right? You just type Wordle and then the numbers you've done and then Slack does it for you. How's this work? So that's one of the cool things. I mean, gosh, Wordle's design was brilliant in many ways. And one of the things that's really cool about it why it was so viral is he provides those as of course it's the new york times now but the original creator did this that's a copy paste when so when you say share and you copy your results that's what it copies and they're just emoji it's like the green and white squares it's just oh yeah it's not an image it's text and those are emoji to represent your results so it shows like how many guesses it took. It shows where you got greens and yellows and blanks.

And so no one's typing that out. We just hit copy and paste. That's so cool. The other cool thing about it is you can share your results without ruining the Wordle, because it doesn't actually share the answer or anything. It just shares an image of how you did, but not the letters you guessed.

Anyways, lots of brilliant stuff built into Wordle. The most brilliant of which is the daily cadence, where you can play once a day and everybody plays the exact same puzzle. I mean, he didn't invent that, of course. The crossword puzzle. New York Times crossword puzzle is famous for such things.

Alright, let's move on. Here we have another return caller, Rusty Glue, who called in last year, back with another voicemail. I just want to say big thanks to Annie Sexton from episode 480. After listening to that episode, I had finally started using Git rebase and Git reset. Although I don't really follow her Git flow strategy, I still find the interview very useful to me to get to the new level with Git. And also big thanks to you, Adam and Jared,

for doing all of the shows. Last year I got Practical AI t-shirt, and this year I'm hoping for a Changelog t-shirt. Very cool. Hopefully you get that t-shirt. And you will, because you're going to get a coupon code. I guess emailed or something to you, so too easy. Yeah, we'll email them out the coupon code. We ship globally.

Yeah. So that's episode 480. Get your reset on with Annie Sexton. Yes. That's another good episode title. The titles are amazing. I mean, I have to appreciate our titles too, because we put so much nuance and detail into them

as we produce these shows. And I laugh because get your Reset On Us is cool. That's a great one. It's a cool thing. People don't understand the pain of it when we just ship an average title, like how defeated we are when we just can't come up with something awesome

and we're like, eh, good enough, go ahead. Eventually it has to ship, right? It almost ruins the show in some ways, like, eh, bad title. We can't delay shipping because the title is bad, but we would almost want to. It's the last thing we do. We may be marinating on a few titles along the way, but like we don't,

the very last thing we do is confirm the title is correct. Right. And then ship. Sometimes you'll have a working title that is pretty stinking good. Like you came up with it as you thought about the show, but even then it's not final. Like we have to have a final decision on a title.

And sometimes we'll ship a show. I'm going to give an example of some that we maybe haven't been quite as happy with lately. Well, the anthology episodes are just listing out the topics. So that's always going to be less than the coolest. Linux myth busting and retro gaming. That's when you know we couldn't think of a title. That just describes what the two topics were of the show.

Yeah. That one. That's the classic challenge of a multi-focused podcast, though. You know, I mean, when you have multiple topics, it is tough. And they each are

first-class citizens in terms of desired listen. You want to listen to the Linux part of it, and then the retro gaming part is sort of Linux-ish, but it's not really, so it's its own topic.

Well, good for us, I guess. I can't find any other bad ones as I go down, so we've done pretty well this year. I guess from WeWork to upskilling at Wilco, it's like, okay, it's fine. It's not like... Building tiny multi-platform apps with Towery and WebTek.

Descriptive, but not going to knock your socks off. A title should actually be like, oh, that's cool. Anyways. Just because I'm here, knock your socks off like it has a title should actually be like oh that's cool yeah anyways just because I'm here I really appreciate this one too

was building reflect at sea that's a cool title it's simple but it's also at sea like you know Alex did this stuff at sea

it was cool that's right continue Jared we'll digress too far one quick comment on Rusty Glue before we move on to the next one

this for me what he said is so poignant and so why I listen to podcasts and what I think a lot of the value you provide. He even says the way Annie does her PRs and her rebases, he doesn't do it. And neither did I, if you remember that show. But he appreciated being exposed to somebody else's process, to somebody else's workflow, to their tooling, to the way they do things. Because it just expands your horizons as a developer or as a builder and allows you to have more informed decisions. Even if you're going to stick with your current workflow.

You spent an hour with us. Hopefully it was somewhat entertaining. I can't remember if we were very good on that episode. But Annie was certainly good and she had good things to say. But you don't have to go do exactly what she does to get value a lot of the stuff we come across we don't necessarily use or adopt but just having that breadth of knowledge of what's going on and what people are doing and what they're thinking about i think it's super cool so i'm happy that rusty also appreciates that even though he didn't necessarily adopt the style.

I think this brings up a question of what's the best way to collaborate at all? Is it always that you're on the same branch or, because in a situation like this, it depends on if you're touching the same files, then it can be a little bit tricky. But if you're not, I think that there's always a benefit in just having completely separate branches i've never done that before so this is like new thought process to me i don't see why it wouldn't be good i just have never done it that way when you're

when you're touching the same files it can be tricky and i would probably re-evaluate who's doing what your life because it's really trying to re-evaluate um if it's if this is better left to one person or if it really needs to be collaborated on by two people but if you're touching relatively different files then just creating different branches and merging them in separately then that also saves you a lot of the headache of what happens if I force push. I know a lot of people have opinions about force pushing and they're welcome to those opinions. My opinion is once you have more than one

person pushing to the same branch, you should be done with your force pushing. Right, exactly. Just because it's causing them more work if you're doing that. I have no problem with it if you're on your own branch. Same with me. I'll force push all the alone to my own repos anybody there to get pushing nobody around

i'm glad you said that too because that was the challenge with that show because it wasn't meant to be like this is the way it was more like any defined a way shared it through the render blog it impacted a lot of people and it made you think differently about the, I guess, amount of effort you put into each individual commit message, you know, because like in her case, she mentioned she's got ADHD and her thinking process, it actually distracts her from creating better, more useful code because she's got to stop and it cuts her flow and she's learned this. And, you know, this is also an example of like sharing what you learn too despite the uncomfortability of you know expressing something about yourself that may be different or uncomfortable whatever like she she shared this information and i think it really

impacted her and impacted others too but you may not adopt the process but it informs you on how to define your own which i think is cool absolutely here comes our next listener voicemail. Hey, everyone. Love the change log, and thanks for all the work put into it. I listen to it all the time, drive it into work. There are so many great episodes this year, from making the command line glamorous with charm to the future of building servers with Oxide and Brian. That said, my favorite episode from this year

has to be the lessons learned from auditing startups with Ken from PKC Security. There's so much there to apply within the startup that I'm helping to build. And it was also learned from the patterns of successful and less successful startups that they worked with over the years. Thanks again. That was listener Sean. This episode almost made my top five. Oh dear. Oh, really? It was so close. It was so close. I love that episode. The one reason why I go back to it and I think about it and it doesn't make my top five is because it was so st. I love that episode. The one reason why I go back to it and I think about it and it doesn't make my top five is because it was so stinking long.

Like I was exhausted by the end of that episode, which was really my doing because I said, we're going to go through all of these. Remember that? I said, we're going to make it through all of them. And it turned out there was just a lot to say about a lot of them. I'm not sure how long what the runtime is, but I remember just being like-

100 minutes. Yeah. So that's pretty long, longer than an hour and a half, half hour and 40 that's a long episode of the changelog i was exhausted i can't talk that long and and survive and so that's where that's what i think about even though the content i thought was was pretty solid and obviously sean our listener who just called in got value out of it because he's working in a similar world and learned a lot. So happy to hear that. Well, the sad part is, Jared, is this is pre-chapters. So maybe you'd like it better if you had some chapters to jump around to. So inaccessible. We need accessibility. When you're just waiting in the minutia, perceived minutia, unless you actually listen to it and

find value, it's minutia until then. You're just waiting in this sea of podcasts. You need some waypoints. That'd be an easy one to waypoint because we go number by number through his posts. Wasn't it like 20 lessons or 19 or something? There's a whole bunch of them and we went like one through the next and so it'd be easy to chapter that because you just chapter it based on the topic. Maybe somebody should go back and do that.

Open source those chapters. Maybe you should go back and do that. Put that on your to-do list, Adam. Go back and chapter that for me. I can't wait to do it, Jared. All right, here's our last call-in. This is Tilman Jex. For me, as somebody who's been starting

to learn programming properly as of a little over a year ago, really the entire past year has been invaluable. I've learned so much or my learning has been accelerated so much by listening to the podcast, simply by hearing really great people talk about excellent places to learn, things to read, ways to think, technology to use, things to look out for. And if I would have to pick one thing that I think has had the biggest effect, it's definitely been the introduction to the initially mysterious word of vim and then to

have been continuously tempted to look into it. And now every time I'm working in NeoVim, which is my main editor now, I fondly think of all those introductions. So thank you so much, guys, for the work and the continual efforts. I'm still a student, but as soon as I start earning some money, I'm definitely becoming a Plus Plus member, 100%. Thanks so much and all the best.

Lots unpacked there. Yeah. I just want to say thanks for leaving that voicemail because like that's the kind of impact that is super meaningful for me, especially somebody just getting started. I sometimes wonder how valuable we are for people like taking their first steps because so many of the conversations that we have are not beginner oriented necessarily. Doesn't mean you can't come to them as a beginner. But having been in the industry for so long, I don't have beginner's eyes anymore. And so I wonder if it helps people who

are at the beginning of their path. And so I just really appreciate hearing from somebody who's there, still a student, still getting started, rocking NeoVim now and benefited from our work. For me, that's just like the best. It makes it worth it. It really does. I mean, aside from this, you know, this annual feedback loop for State of the Log, like we don't get a lot of feedback. Now that's not saying we necessarily are asking for it,

but it is challenging when you feel alone on the road in some cases, you know, like you don't see your impact until later. And that is challenging because there are ups and downs throughout every person's life and every year. There's always new challenges. Like this year, I made a major move with my family. It's been a challenging year family-wise just with that move. A lot of change in that.

And so life is hard enough without major change. And whenever you're, whenever you don't have that feedback loop, it's, it's easy to sort of like let the, you know, quote unquote dark voice take over to some degree or, or, you know, have higher importance. And then you hear someone like this, like Tillman, thank you. You know, and don't apologize for being a student and only being a student and not, you know, contributing in some way or shape or form. Like we don't desire that. Like if anything, you know, we want people who subscribe to plus plus or buy t-shirts or in some way shape or form to support us because because they truly want to you know to get closer to that metal to get those bonus clips or whatever else we're going to do with plus plus we don't want people to feel bad about not being able to do that by any means that's not why we created it we created it because time and time again we would get asked by people like hey how can we support you how can we help make sure that you stick around and do more cool stuff? And we thought, well, the only way we could do that is by giving you value. We don't want you to just give us. And the majority of the way we survive as a business is through great sponsorships and great relationships with brands.

And our relationship so far hasn't really been to invite folks like Tillman and others to support us directly. And ChangeLog++ was a way for that. But it's not meant to make you feel bad, Tillman. So you'll have your time. And when that time comes around, join Plus Plus. Well said. So that concludes our listener call. And thank you to all y'all.

We'll be hooking you up with sweet threads. For those who just want some sweet threads but don't want to write in, of course, we have merch.changelog.com. That Kaizen tea is out there now. Sure is. And selling like hotcakes. So I won't be out there for very long. Of course, we could always just print more.

But the print functions, IRL, are way slower than they are inside of our editors. They are. So should we move on now to our faves or should we do the top episodes? Where do you want to head next? I think maybe our faves because we can see how

many intersect with our listeners faves. Sure. Yeah. All right. So mine are ordered by their published date not by their place in my

heart. Okay. Well then read them then by the place in your heart. Because mine are ordered by priority. I didn't put them in my

heart. Okay. I just put them on my list. Then just read them down the list and we'll go onesie twos. I'll go publish date. You can go by the amount of love you have. Sure. And it'll be just like that. So one of my top five is from the very first month of the year. I try to not have the recency bias, which we tend to have, which is

that like we think about more recent episodes and like them more because they're recent. And so I went deep and started at the beginning. And the first one for me was a solo show. Sorry, Adam, you weren't here for this one, but I still had fun anyways. All good. It was a guest, Paul Orlando, from Unintended Consequences blog. Episode 474 is called Complex Systems and Second Order Effects. I love this episode. I can go back and listen to it. These are just the kinds of things that I enjoy thinking

about. And Paul is a guy who writes about it. And so he's already thought about these things and way deeper than I have. Like I think about them at this shallow level, but to have somebody who thinks about the unintended consequences of complex systems, which are the systems that we work on, and things that happen despite our best efforts, or because we overlooked something, or as perhaps some sort of oddity in the world, what actually takes place.

And so important for us as software developers, we have so much leverage in our work. We can make small changes that have huge consequences. And, uh, well, those are just enjoyable conversations to have the what ifs and the whys and the how these things happen. The story behind the Cobra effect is something that as far as we know, never happened, but the story is during colonial India, so when the British were in India, some British administrator decided that they wanted to reduce or eliminate the number of cobras. Maybe this is in Delhi. I'm not sure where. And so to try to achieve

that goal, they put up a bounty and they say, okay, I'm going to pay a bounty. If you show up with a Cobra skin and that's going to get rid of the Cobras. Right. And then the story of course is, well, people discovered, oh, so I should just raise Cobras and, you know, turn them in for like the bounty and raise more Cobras and turn them in. And then the British realized what's happening. They eliminate the bounty and raise more cobras and turn them in and then the british realize what's happening they eliminate the bounty and then everybody you know releases the cobras you know and so you have a worse problem than you had before i thought that episode was really good i think it would have been better with you there i'm not sure why you weren't there it was back in january but i think i know why um i think this is recorded December 30th.

Thankfully, we record the recorded date, not just the published date. Right. And it's December 30th, 2021. And I think we got COVID over Christmas. Oh. That year. So I think I may have still been recovering potentially. I don't know.

Yeah. I'm blaming COVID. It's easy to blame COVID, right? Yeah. COVID causing all our problems. Fair enough. So that would be one of my top five was the Unantended Consequences, episode 474. Your turn.

Yeah, I enjoyed that show. Bummed to not be there. But these laws shows, I think they're reoccurring. I'd love to make them more frequent. So I know that's a desire of yours as well. So I guess i'm suffering from the recency bias then because this one's pretty recent it's the story of heroku with adam miggins i i guess i was just a big fan and have been and you are too jared i'm sure because

we said that on the show and we're not liars we're big fans of heroku and you know by nature big fans of adam miggins and his two co-founders uh that they were a part of that with him um i'm trying to see if i can recall their names quickly and it was orion and someone else but they're not in my orion henry yeah bummer they're not my show notes here so whatever sorry about that orion henry and uh the other person's gapping me. But that was a great show because James. Yes. James something. James something.

Look it up now. We'll edit it. Got to get it right. I'll come back in then. Let me see. Or we'll leave this part in and just show people how much we care to get things right. Right. Depends on who's editing.

Oh, yes. Gene. We'll keep it all in because I had to look it up. It's a challenging last name. James Lindenbaum. Okay. And Orion Henry. So those are the two fellas he created Heroku with.

And I just appreciate his relationship with them. I appreciate all the thought, it seems, they put into Heroku. And in many ways, like the somewhat accident. Like they obviously had a direction to go towards. But like Heroku was almost ahead of its time. And just hearing that story from Adam's perspective and you know he also said he never does podcasts like this and he said he would never come back to this topic but he broke that rule for us and gave us an exclusive which i love not just the exclusive but just the the breaking of that rule because i think

that there's a lot of people who care deeply about the story of heroku and i wanted to make sure we can get that out there and obviously there's been some change with Heroku this year with their free tier and a lot of, I don't know how many times for you, Jer, but I've gone to links that I've had of old or from old blog posts and I'm researching things or whatever. And it links to a Heroku site that is now dead because of this change, which I think is part of that unintended consequence, right? To go back to your favorite that is an unintended consequence by heroku i'm sure there's a lot of resources that are out there

that are not there anymore and just that whole story arc of heroku i think was something that i desired for many years to tell and finally got to so that's why it's yeah recency bias but also true bias true bias True Bias Well we have our first crossover episode Because that one also Was in my top 5 favorite episodes Of the year, huge respect for Adam Wiggins I think he's a super smart guy

And the opportunity to pick his brain And ask him all my nagging questions Was a blast Breaking from that Now I have one that's a little bit selfish. I'll tell you why this is one of my favorites. A song encoder, Forest Brazil. So I've done a couple of these song encoder episodes.

I have two more in my mind. This is where we do a special feature of a specific person who is creating things at the intersection of music and code. Forest Brazil calls himself a code bard, or a cloud bard. Excuse me, not a code bard, because he's in the clouds. And he does just amazing different kinds of music and all that. And so I featured an episode 477 on Forrest Brazil. Here's why it's one of my favorites of the year.

It's because there's very few changelog episodes that I can unabashedly tell my mom to listen to. You know? Yeah. And that's the one, you know, like if I'm going to like, like a normie, like here, listen to this, something that I created that you can hear and then be like, oh, that's what he does. Even though it's not always what I do.

There's just not very many, like the story of Heroku with Adam Wiggins, like, you know, it's going to be completely lost on most people, but a guide singing and, you know, talking about the cloud and you know the production value and all that is one that i can definitely just give to my mom and say here's what your son does and she can she can be proud of me so that's why it made my list is because it's just kind of a standout in that way as it appeals to more people than what are most of our shows appeal to it also goes like a couple layers deeper than, I guess, just your expectation of a podcast like this

because it showcases that, I wouldn't say true art, but it's art beyond art. Creating code and creating software and building companies around software tech and all that good stuff, that's a true art for sure. But then to create art on top of that art, like singing like Forrest does, I think that's meta. It is. is super cool and he's so talented i mean he's classically trained musician and he has all these different styles that he can apply and he's

singing about software and aws and azure and all of these things and it's like i love things that operate at this unique intersection where it's like there's probably nobody else that can do that right like there's nobody else who has both of those skill sets and can bring them together and so those people are like pure gold pure gold my day was going great just pushed a code update but then the pager started humming oops did i just delete half the production fleet that sinking feeling's coming from deep within my plumbing Now my life is flashing Hope my boss will show compassion And I really, really need someone to say Hey, hey, it's gonna be okay You didn't just set fire to your resume

This happens to the best Try not to get too stressed It'll be an awesome story someday. I tweaked a small config. Turns out that it was big. And now my app has been beheaded. Whoa. When I do something wrong, I fear I don't belong. How can the world forget it?

We're trending now on Reddit. Oh, mistakes will find you. But you've got a team behind you. Oh, so fix the process. yes, but don't dismay Hey, hey, it's gonna be okay We'll do a full post-mortem some other day It was a swing and miss, but we will learn from this And we'll all be better engineers

Like, look, here's what you need to know when something gets destroyed If there's negligence or malice, then you shouldn't be employed But if a human is assuming, then the problem is the system. It's gut-wrenching, butt-clenching, but you work with them. It can happen to a junior or to a senior. Just because you caused a little pause doesn't mean you're incompetent. It means you're doing work with real effect. It's a scarabattle, baby. That'll earn you some respect.

We all have been there, made a slip or two or ten there. So we try to do a blameless RCA. Hey, hey, it's gonna be okay, you will still be here when this blows away, we've all screwed something up, so welcome to the club, we would love to hear your story. Hey, hey, it's gonna be okay, you will still be here when this blows away, we've all screwed something up so welcome to the club we would love to hear your story someday what else you got well i'm gonna concur with brett cannon ah because uh you know i'm a fan of zfs i've been thinking a lot about like my linux story arc too because i've dove deeper into lin this year. I want to say thanks to 45 Drives. We have

some work coming up in 2023 with them. I'm a big fan of 45drives.com and all the hardware they put out there. Amazing, amazing. I mean, you can go build any one of their machines. That's what I love about their stuff is that you can go build a 45 Drive system on your own if you wanted to, but it's just best just to buy because they built it anyways that's what got me into zfs because it is the first time that i had a a backplane that was suitable for an array of 15 drives and i was like okay let's learn zfs and so i learned zfs and i got deeper into it and then i kind of got bored because zfs is just so good. There's not much administration, really. I mean, you can scrub once a month or twice a month like I do just to make sure that

your data is truly good to go, but it's pretty easy to run. And so I was like, let me talk to Matt. Matt Ahrens is one of the co-creators of the original ZFS project. And not only am I gushing about ZFS, but also its history in some microsystems. There's a lot of scrutiny around licensing, which I'm not really super clear on, but as a technology, I love ZFS. I think it's super awesome for managing RAID arrays, et cetera. It's super cool. So anyways, talking to Matt was awesome. And then digging into that with him and one thing that i hope comes out of next year 2023 is getting to work with matt on expanding the the rate array we have a bit more potentially doing a sef cluster with a zfs send and receive to have a backup you know an on-site you know

duplication backup of our ZFS array, and then some other fun stuff. So let's just tease that for a bit. So I love Matt, I love the work he put into it, and then I'm looking forward to some cool stuff coming out of this year with digging further into ZFS. Definitely a solid episode. Tons of listens on that episode.

It was very popular. And the main thing that I remember from it that I was like, okay, this is cool, was near the end when you guys were talking about how they're trying to, I mean, ZFS is old, right? It's like 20 years old. And keep up with the Joneses. So SSDs was a big shift from spinning disks and now cloud storage, specifically object storage.

And where does ZFS fit into an object storage world? And this big new features written in Rust, some of the conversation around Rust was really interesting. So maybe the perception or the danger of a show about something like that that's old is like, it's all old. What's new and interesting? It's like, well, it's been around a long time,

but that doesn't mean it's not also still new and interesting because things change and either a project slowly bit, rots and dies, or it also changes to keep up. And so Matt's been working with the team to do new things as new things arrive. So that was interesting for me. All right, back to me. Let's go for another crossover here because I'm now looking at both lists. I didn't have access to your list until you pasted it into the shared doc. But now I can see both of our lists. So I can see that we both have wisdom from 50 plus years in software with Brian Kernaghan, episode 484. And if I was absolutely forced to just pick one episode from this year, that's the one that I would have picked. Guy's a living legend.

Yeah. this year that's the one that i would have picked guy's a living legend yeah well when you can get that kind of depth and wisdom and i would say just history in a single episode and they're willing to talk to you and and share all that as if they were seeing it for the first time i'm sure he had to share that story a couple times right yeah he's writing a book on it i bought his book on unix systems yeah i think unix, Linux is just super cool. And it's just taken me a long time to really fully grasp it to just the depths of it, you know? Yeah. The distros.

It's easy to be overwhelmed by the world of Linux, you know? Because it's a lot of moving targets. But really, when you dumb it down or when you simplify it, so to speak, it's pretty simple. But you've got to have that wisdom. 50 plus years, where it came from, Bell Labs, et cetera. I mean, that's super cool history to go into. Yeah. And so Brian, a couple of things about Brian.

First of all, he's a very accessible guy. Usually when you get up to that age, of course, he's still teaching. But when you get to that age, there's a certain point where you're just like not interested anymore. Somebody who we've tried to get on GoTime over and over in different ways is Ken Thompson, of course. And to no avail. Now maybe he'll do a podcast but he's not going to do

GoTime anytime soon, unfortunately. Brian does podcasts. He talks to people. He's still mixing it up with people in the industry, which is so cool. Now having said that, he had been on a few other shows prior to ours. This was not a changelog exclusive. And so what I like about our particular episode, I listened to

a couple of his other episodes, co-recursive he was on, and he was on Lex Friedman as well. And so I went out and listened, just because we don't want to create the exact same show that they create. We don't want to ask kind of tired questions and stuff. So you want to kind of have your own spin or your own angle on it. And I will say, and this could have been like the day of the week. It could have been, he just had a great meal. Who knows? Was it us? Was it him?

Was it? He was genuinely enjoying himself. Yeah. Talking to us. Like he was lit up, eyes bright. He was laughing. He would have kept going. We talked to him for a long time.

That was cool. Cause that's kind of your fear with a guy who's talked to everybody and had all the same questions before and told the history of Unix. And he wrote it all in a book. And it's like, you're going to ask me questions out of my book, you know, like go read this. Like you don't want to bore somebody. You don't want them to be like feeling like, ah, here I go again, you know? And that was my fear going into that show. It was like, gosh, I really don't want him to be bored or disappointed or whatever.

And so what I really like about that show, and you can hear it in his voice throughout. I've listened to it back. You could really see it in the video clips. He was leaning in. He was laughing. He was smiling. I think he really enjoyed himself. And that, for me, made for a really, really good show.

I concur. Yeah, I think I agree with that. And then I think when you're with hosts who truly enjoy, you know, that conversation and the ability to sort of dig deep into certain topics like this in particular, that it's received well and they get sort of hyped and vibed about it, you know. Then we bring it. I do think we bring it. I'm not patting ourselves on the back too much, but I think we do bring it. you know, having conversations with us because. I will say that we definitely try to. Yeah. I'll give us that. We try to bring it. There are days. Well, bring your next one. Bring your next favorite here.

Let's keep rolling. So for me, just Frank Krueger, Practical Ways to Solve Hard Problems. That was awesome. Episode 486. I just really appreciate all of the history he has around creating software. It seems like he's hit all the hard problems and he's found practical ways to solve them. I mean, it really was a good title for the show.

I think he wrote the blog post very similarly, Practical Guide to Solving Hard Problems. I think we just, we took it. We took away guidance and ways. Yeah, we said ways. Yeah, we munged it. Yeah, it was just a good show. I mean, it was a good show in every single way.

And I enjoyed Frank a lot. I kind of wish we can have him back on more often, honestly. Some sort of recurring show with him. We probably could. He has his own podcast. He's definitely a conversationalist. And that always makes it easier when you have somebody who just naturally converses well. Some of us are better at that than others. And Frank is a master of just conversation so that one was definitely high on my list I almost threw it in the top five I paused and looked at it and kept going but really really fun show I brought it in for you lots of laughs I'm happy that you did yeah I mean the Windows history there I mean there's just a lot of rich history in there that you just don't

think about and now working on iOS stuff I just think like it's the juxtaposition of where he began and the security and the government stuff I mean, he's been all over the map in terms of what his history was. What's the biggest learning you've learned from or continue to learn from when it comes to reliability? What are some of the cardinal sins or cardinal rules? You have to test the error path just as much as you test the positive path, the functioning path. It's always an edge case in the error handling where you mess things up. It's so easy to write code that, you know, when it's working correctly, it works correctly. That's the easiest code to write. What happens if this line fails? What happens if that line fails? What happens if the machinery fails? What if the connection fails?

Handling all those error conditions. And the best way to do that is to just assume anything can error any time. And that sounds like a terrible way to program. But programming systems like Erlang have showed us the correct way to do that. And so I fell in love with isolated processes that were expected to fail. And you just handle those failure conditions. Every message pass, every function call can fail, and you better have a good smart plan for how to handle that.

So to answer your question in general, the answer is assume everything can fail and make sure that, you know, just in my own code, I'll just put random throw exception here just to see what happens. Like while you're working, just to see what happens. It's like your own little chaos monkey, but inside your own local code base. That's a cool idea. Especially if you're trying to solve a hard problem that you really don't know how to work on.

It's much more fun to pop up an error dialogue. You're like, oh, that took down the whole process. I wasn't expecting that. All right, last one for me. Stable Diffusion Breaks the Internet with Simon Willison. This is one of those episodes that I was just jazzed afterwards. Like, I just had so much fun. Simon's energy was contagious.

Yeah. Like, his excitement level. The only bummer about that show is kind of his setup wasn't ideal. Yeah. He kept bumping his microphone, or there was something wrong with the audio where it just didn't sound as good as it could have. He had to have an earphone in and it kind of rubbed his shrubbery.

Yeah, so we had a couple of different setups that might've worked and we ended up with him with AirPods, like the wired ones. Who knows what they're called? Yeah, whatever they're called anymore. The wired Apple headphones. The wired Apple headphones with the microphone on it.

And he was aware of this, but he couldn't help himself. And he had longer hair, so it was rubbing against. And he managed it for the most part. Those particular things, you have to hold it. Otherwise, it's going to rub against your shirt. It's going to rub against your chin, your beard if you have one, your long hair if you have long hair. And we warned him, like, that's the only problem.

And he held it together for the most part. As it gets near the end, there's way more of those, where it just like sound ruffles. And you're like, doggone it, this was like a perfect episode if it weren't for that. So that sucks, but I can set that aside because the information that he spat,

the excitement level, the timing of the episode was really good. Just pure fun. I just loved it. I would have him back on anytime. Simon's awesome. Met Simon years ago. And we didn't even talk about what he's most known for.

What he's most known for, at least back in the day, was his contribution to open source through the Django Web Framework, which he was one of the co-creators of the Django Web Framework, which is huge. We didn't even which is, you know, huge. You know, we didn't even talk about that at all, really. No, I don't think he's all that interested in that compared to generative AI. I think it was 2019, the summer of 2019, for Zite Day in San Francisco. I went out there solo, shot photos for Zite, was then Zite, now Vercel.

Vercel. Covered their Zite Day, didite now Vercel cover their Zite day did a couple episodes from there we have a episode with Simon from then talking about Dataset and if you know Simon if you've seen him speak or you've seen him on stage it's no wonder why we had the audio ruffling because he's very animated

when he's on stage he's pointing and moving you'd think he's doing gymnastics or something like that stage he's pointing and moving like i mean you think he's doing gymnastics or something like that like are you giving a talk are you doing gymnastics i'm because you are on fire man but simon is a lot of fun and i've had a couple conversations with simon too and he's really into sqlite and i've encouraged him a couple times i think we talked about after the show to talk to richard hip. And I think I made an introduction. And anyways, you know, he's just a deep thinker about this kind of tech. And I like his insights because he thinks deeply about them. And he's also very committed to writing about them.

So he's just, he's got this workflow of like learn, write, rinse, repeat, et cetera. And he's just like, that's the kind of person you want to follow. And so you said timing was right. I think timing was right. But that, that title is a banger. Stable diffusion breaks the internet. That's a banger. That is a great title. You know me, I do, I do appreciate a pop culture reference here or there. So yeah, I loved it. All right. Last one. Jack Dorsey. Jack Dorsey.

This name may upset some folks, especially given current climates, right? I mean, there's a lot of, you know, back and forth and controversy between him and Elon on Twitter and, you know, just stuff, man. Like, I mean, that aside, which is not why I claim this is my, you know, fifth favorite in my list of faves. By the way, I have three must listens as well. So, Jared, I have to cheat a little bit, which gets me three extras on my list you always cheat call it cheating i just call it playing the system okay okay so uh last year square unboxed 2022 happened and uh we've

been working with square for quite a while they're a sponsor of ours and behind the scenes shannon skipper whom we met years ago as as you know, at All Things Open. No, not All Things Open. OzCon. OzCon. Sorry about that. We met in 2017 way back there. And I got his card.

I took a picture of it recently. I shared it with him. I'm like, dude, I got your card from so many years ago. It's just cool how things work out. Anyways, I had been asking him, you know what? We've got to get Jack on Founders Talk at some point. Let's make that happen. And obviously Jack is, you know, an A-list type, you know, if you want to ABC list folks, which I don't necessarily do, but just to give, you know, Jack is a major player in tech from Twitter to Square to now Block and cryptocurrency and

decentralized thinking like he's a big thinker and he's a the moves he often makes are larger moves with large waves and so jack dorsey sat down with him for the main stage at square unboxed because my friends at square helped make that happen he's like hey you know what we can make a fireside chat happen at square unboxed and so we took that conversation knowing that that was meant to be for square unboxeded, but also for Founders Talk. So this is like three layers later. Then it also appeared on The Change Log, which is where this list comes from, right? And got even more, you know, listens. I mean, it was great. So that's one of my favorites, just as a bucket list kind of thing. Like it was a great conversation. I didn't get to ask Jack every single thing I wanted to, because it was kind of bridled in the fact that it was meant for the main stage of Square Unboxed. So it had its guardrail, so to speak, of the direction of topic.

If Jack is listening, Jack, or anybody else from Square or Block want to get him back on Finder, someone have a different conversation, a deeper conversation. Although the conversation did open up with his hacker heart, which I think was super interesting. Just because, you know, when you get to that level, you know, you often get removed from the code and get often removed from the things that matter. Maybe he shouldn't be writing production code, but at the same time, he still tinkers with Rust and fun things around, you know, crypto wallets and whatnot,

horrible wallets and fun things like that. So that was one of my favorites just because Jack Dorsey. All right, let's hear your must listens, which we all know is just another way of saying also your favorites. I think I like these two. So you see the list. Don't get mad. Okay.

So the reason why I'm saying this is the most listens because this first one is the anthology advocating for and supporting open source. And it's less just about the content, but more about the ambiance of this episode. So listeners of this show, especially listeners of this particular episode, given how much you probably enjoy this podcast, hopefully you do, this is the kind of episode that's fun for Jared and I to do. One, we get out there face-to-face with folks and get to see people in the real.

We did this at All Things Open 2022 just recently, but the setup we did there was a little bit different this year. We did the mic situation in a standing scenario where we were sort of standing in a standing scenario where we were sort of standing in a circle where Jared was to my right, the guest was to Jared's right, and I was to the guest's right. So it was like a little triangle circle sort of formation. But we're standing up to keep the conversations short, hopefully. In some cases, they went long, but that's, I digress. But I think we got the sound right on this one. And so that's why I'm putting

in the must listen. So if you listen to the show like this, when Jared is in his home studio and I'm in my office studio or whatever you might call it, and we have a guest, it's a little bit different because, you know, it's meant to be studio quality, sound good, that kind of thing. Whereas here we got the mix of the hallway. It truly is the hallway track. And to me, I think this year we nailed it in terms of great sound, great hallway track, and great conversation. I think it was like all the things that comes together that make that kind of show, an in-person IRL at a conference hallway track show come together. That is an example.

That and its counterpart, the other anthologies. I'd actually link them both up, but linking one up. So episode 515 is an example of how I want to sound when we go to conferences. I do like the way you describe the difference between technical and non-technical skills in a way that's easy to understand. The technical skills are what we know, and the non-technical skills are who we are. We have tried and true methods for changing what we know, right? Like you put your head in a book and you read it or you go get some experience. Changing who you are can be a more difficult matter. Do you have any advice on changing yourself so that you improve your skills?

I think, unfortunately, over the last three, four years is where there are courses coming up where they talk about these non-technical skills, why they are critical. But there is not a whole lot of material over there i would say my personality has changed evolved over the last few years as i have started listening to these podcasts so i would really encourage people to find to start reading about it right and sometimes you don't realize how consciously or subconsciously it starts impacting you. The second one, a guided tour through ID3 Esoterica with Lars Wickman. You can say his name.

I'm going to Americanize it. I'm from Texas. I can't be bothered with enunciations. I'm sorry, Lars. That was a good show. I mean, I thoroughly enjoyed it. I thought like, I mean, how entertaining and enjoyable can we make this show right but thankfully he wrote a lot about it he was just as encouraged by all the research he had done and to me like if you care about this show in particular

state of the law then that's the show you should go back it's a must listen for those reasons it's a it's a naval gaze but it's a technological naval gaze yes because. Because we just look at ID3s and who else should care besides people who create MP3s like we do? Almost nobody else. But if you enjoy the Annie Sexton show and you just enjoy the osmosis of the conversation that you get to hear,

then you'll love that show. And then I think the last one for me just was the icing on the cake. The legacy of CSS Tricks with Chris Coyier. That was awesome. Getting to go back and talk through the digital ocean acquisition and creating CSS Tricks and his journey as a creator, etc. It was super cool.

So that was it. All right, I got some must listens. Oh my gosh. If you can do it, I can do it. Do it. I'm going to grab a must listen from our other podcasts. So one from each. I already mentioned Ship It.

I think the show with Gary Bernhardt is a must listen, even if you don't listen to Ship It. From JS Party, episode 244. So we have one of our formats on JS Party is called YepNope, which is a nod to YepNope.js, an old feature detection library by one of our retired JS Party panelists. And it's a debate show. And we had a great one this year called the Spicy React Debate Show. And this was based on a blog post by Josh Collinsworth called The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy of React, in which he says React isn't great at anything except being popular. See how spicy that is? Very spicy. And so we invited Josh on, we made the premise is react only great at being popular and we teamed him up with a few of our panelists and had a good old-fashioned yep nope debate hilarity

ensues a lot of interesting insight ensue that's a must listen for js party episode 244 you know why react is so high in satisfaction? Because it's so complicated to use, it makes you feel like you're a total ninja when you're using it. You're called out. When really all you're doing is using 10 lines to solve a two-line problem. It makes you jump through so many hoops that you feel like you're on American Ninja Warrior, reaching the top of that giant thing just for writing a little bit of code, when really they made you do this. This was just solving a web problem.

On go time this year, just recently, maybe some recency bias by me. This one went out in November, an episode with John and Johnny hosting Akshay Shah talking about gRPC and protocol buffers. Now we've done shows over the years that touched on these technologies. I've largely ignored GRPC because it just seems like it's not for me. It's for like big, important orgs with lots of big, important things to do.

And yet listening to this one, I think Akshay has some of the best explainers of why protobuf is interesting, what it's useful for, when you'd want to use it, when you wouldn't, why gRPC is interesting, similar things. It's like I finally grokked it

listening to that episode. So if gRPC is on your radar, but you don't know much about it, or protobuf, of course these are related technologies, definitely check out GoTime episode 256 with the lame name of gRPC and protocol buffers.

You can't always have an awesome name. Can't win them all, Jared. That's one of those ones you're like, man, missed the mark on that title. But you can get clever sometimes. I mean, sometimes you have to be on the point, right? You can't get clever every time. Sometimes you just call it what it is. That's right. Well, the

Spicy React Debait Show. Yes. I enjoyed listening to that live for the most part. I was listening live almost all the way through Add to Bail at some point. I think it was like mid part two. Uh-huh. Nick had a hard time emceeing that show. It was very, very challenging to emcee and sort of moderate that because it was just a challenge.

But it wasn't challenging to listen to, but it was challenging I could see for him. He struggled to maintain the peace and maintain the control, so to speak. But what do you expect when it's spicy? I think that was his first time moderating. I usually moderate, and Nick stepped in and moderated that one.

It is not an easy task to moderate a debate, especially one that's like virtual, you know, via the interwebs. What is it that the bone skull says? It was the, it was the, what was the sound effect to say you were done? What? What? That's right.

What? Bone skull would just say, what? Because we don't have an official sound for the time is up. What? And so, yes, what you often have is you say time's up and then the people just keep on talking and you're like, I mean, even the very first time that we did a debate show, I was a moderator and I lost complete control of the panel. At one point, Firas was just reading quotes off of Hacker News. And I'm like, what is going on right here? So, I mean, it gets crazy. And I think that's kind

of part of the charm. Of course, the debate is kind of just a front to talk about a thing and have some fun with it. We have three segments. The first two segments is the informal debate. And then on the third segment of the show, we actually talk about what they really think because you don't debate what you believe. You debate what we assign you to, right? So like you have to represent the premise or be against the premise based on assignment,

not based on your actual feelings. And so that's always just fun. Like, can i debate this even if i disagree with it but thankfully the third segment's there for us to actually talk about what people really think and that's usually a much more nuanced and interesting but less funny and crazy conversation i appreciate the assignment from a listener's perspective because i know it puts the person who's debating the opposite of how they feel out of their norm. And it almost shows their depth even more so for like, you know, what they know and what they don't know and what they know about their positives. Because it's almost, it's hard, but also kind of easy in some ways to flip the script and say, okay, I know the reasons why this is not good.

So just reverse it. Right? There you go. And take all the negatives you think and turn them into positives. But I really appreciate that, that assignment process. And then the third segment being sort of free for all, so to speak, you know, say what you really feel. Right. That's cool. We always have much more agreement and much more nuance in the third segment. A lot of slaps, man. A lot of verbal slaps too, you know, it's like a lot of mic drops

in some cases. Kevin yeah in that particular one like he you could tell kevin cabal that he he kind of like does a lot of prep or it seems like he does a lot of prep not that it's scripted but you could tell he's prepared yeah words because he doesn't want to like come too heavy-handed and offend but he does want to get his point across and when he's right he knows he feels like he's right you know what i mean like right that's the that's the his how he is so yeah when you show up for a yep nope you should have arguments it doesn't have to be written out or like super deep but like you're gonna get two minutes on a clock to talk on a podcast and you better have something to say and cable always he came prepared has arguments uh ready to go a lot of times you can just react to what other people

have said as well pun not intended okay let's move on so those are my must listens let's get now to not just our faves but let's talk about popularity so a few numbers first of all we've published 274 episodes across our network this year that's a pretty good number that doesn't include this episode so we'll definitely be at 275 the dot includes swix episode we have at 276 we got actually all of our podcasts have shows going out this week so we'll have even more by the time this one about 280 goes live call it 280 69 episodes of the changelog thus far 45 of those are interview shows 24 of those are news episodes from those 45 here are the top five most listened to episodes of 2022. Number five, Making the Command Line Glamorous with Toby Padilla from Charm.

That was also mentioned by one of our listeners as a fave. I like that show. And I think we ended up rebroadcasting it into the GoTime feed. We did, yes. Which means it got probably, I mean, way more even listens than this number. So good for it, I guess. I have tried out some of the tools from Charm and they are cool. I've kind of put that whole command line change log client on the sideline as I work on other things, but I do want to return to

it at some point. Number four, principles for hiring engineers with Jacob Kaplan Moss. This one almost made my top five faves. Me too. I think this is the one that engineering leader, the most like people who are in management, leadership, those kind of roles

have reached out to us and said like, this is a must listen for me and for my peers. So that's cool. Number three, securing the open source supply chain.

Good, Farras. Our good friend F us yeah socket high hopes high hopes for socket high hopes for frost what they're doing here yep and it's no surprise it's top three and that would almost be my list too but i mean it was so hard jared like in the pre-call we're we have to give a little nod to this because like in the pre-call jared and i are trying so hard to like take all of the episodes we created this year and then turn into five of our top five it's just so challenging so it's like choosing your favorite child it's just impossible number two no surprise here wisdom from 50 plus years in software with Brian Kernaghan this one reached uh 50,000 listens uh excluding Spotify so we want you to add Spotify

in there it's probably closer to 60,000, maybe 55, 60,000 listens. And so, yeah, that one's not a surprise. Number one, though. This might be number one two years in a row. I think it is. I think it is. Was Jessica Kerr our number one episode of 2021? I'm pretty sure she was.

I don't have, I was actually just wishing we did a slightly better job of these did a lot of behind the scenes notes because then we can have like comparing top five this year to last year's. Right. Maybe a bit more organization. Maybe this year can be the year we do that. Maybe next year.

I know we documented it, but is it comparatively the same? Yeah, I don't know about that. I think, I mean, she definitely was in the top five. Anyways, this is called One More Thing Every Dev Should Know, which is a funny name considering our last episode was called One Thing Every Dev Should Know, which is a funny name considering our last episode was called One Thing Every Dev Should Know. And so we got her back on to do One More Thing. I think we're probably going to do Jessica annually.

At this point, hey, she's such a big draw. And of course, well-deserved. She's entertaining, exciting, controversial, smart, always brings interesting things to the show. Over 53,000 listens on our platform. Not sure about Spotify on that one. So all of our stats are excluding Spotify and excluding Google Podcasts.

Because they re-host. And they then have their own stats. And we're kind of big on Spotify. We're not big on Google Podcasts. I'm not sure how many people listen on Google Podcasts. But Spotify has has substantial enough audience that all of our numbers would be better if we were able to suck them in.

But regardless of all that, Jessica Kerr is the number one most listened to guest of the year. So congrats to her. That's episode 483 called One More Thing Every Dev Should Know. Our job as developers, I don't want to think of it as writing software.

I think of it as changing software. Because that extends forever into the future. So step one, get it out there. Step two, change it. Step three through infinity, change it. So I went back into our history a little bit. And we have our wires crossed. So state of the log 2020 okay the

one thing every dev should know yes in 2020 with her was second most popular okay so last year i overshot a little bit i think we didn't have her on last year so that's why she wasn't a list okay so she was not in the most popular list last year because she wasn't on the show last year right it was in 2020 so what was last year's uh well number one why we love them was top oh yeah second woman after that was nick janetakis modern unix tools that was fun that was fun oauth is complicated was number three why neo of m right trilling at number four and then lessons from 10 000 hours of programming was number five yeah that's a good one that's a good top five right there if he he asked me. It is.

Now we're not just navel gazing. We're just complimenting ourselves. What a fun year, Jared. 2022. It's been a good one. It has been a good one. Very, very excited. Got a lot of fun stuff happening for 2023. Very excited about this next year. You know, wow. So excited. Well, we can wrap up by saying thanks to everybody for hanging out with us, for listening to our shows, for hanging in our Slack and talking to us. Everybody who comes on the shows, everybody who talks to us, we appreciate.

Yes. We hope everybody has an awesome end to their 2022, regardless of where you are. And we hope that you have an awesome start to your 23. We'll see you all on the flip side. We'll see you on the flippity flop. That's Michael Scott. Catch you guys on the flippity flip. See you guys. And if you don't know, changelog.com slash community.

Too easy. Free to join. Hang with us on Slack. Say hello. Lots of people in there. You're welcome. And you're welcome. And thank you. And you're welcome. Kaizen. Oh no, that's a different show. That's not how we end this one that's it SOTL

yeah bye y'all you have now arrived at the end of our fifth annual State of the Log episode we hope you enjoyed it and if not

why are you still listening to this? it's kind of weird right? anyways I want to personally thank each of you who took time out of your busy lives to leave us a voicemail and for all the kind words you had to say. It truly does mean a lot to us.

Oh, and on the show, I said we had nine people leave voicemails, but a tenth asked if he could get in on it. And I told him I'd work him in somewhere. How about right here? My favorite moment of the changelog this last year has to have been being featured on changelog news with the lessons learned after posting my salary history last year and all the things that I've learned since then. As well as getting some really interesting community thoughts of how it's been useful, whether people could also see doing it themselves. And yeah, I just want to say thanks to changangelog for featuring that and getting me loads of hits. That is cool, Jamie. You're welcome. And thank you for helping make the Changelog community

so awesome. Adam thanked our two biggest partners during the show, but here's a mention for me as well. Fastly ships all of our pods super fast all around the world. Check them out at fastly.com. And Fly.io hosts our app servers and database. We love Fly because they help us keep things simple. Learn more about what they're up to at Fly.io hosts our app servers and database. We love Fly because they help us keep things simple.

Learn more about what they're up to at Fly.io. One last mention before we go. You too can directly support our work with a Changelog++ membership. As a thank you, we provide you with an ad-free feed, extended episodes with bonus content, and more. If that interests you, check it out at changedog.com slash plus plus. Okay, that's it.

I'm done. But we'll talk to you again next year. Game on.