The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - We're back and we're LIVE! (Interview)

Episode Date: April 22, 2013

Adam Stacoviak, Andrew Thorp, Steve Klabnik, Kenneth Reitz and Jerod Santo take the show live for the first time since August 8th, 2012.

This is the ChangeLog, and I'm your host, Adam Stachowiak. We're a member-supported blog and podcast that covers the intersection of software development and open source. We shine a spotlight on what's fresh and new in open source. You can tune into this show live every Tuesday at 3 p.m. Pacific, 6 p.m. Eastern at thechangelog.com slash live. And this is episode number 0.8.5, recorded April 16, 2013. We're joined by myself, Andrew Thorpe, Steve Klavnik, Kenneth Rice, and Jared Santo.

And if you found this show on iTunes, we're also on the web at thechangelog.com. If you're on Twitter, follow The Changelog, because that is us. Enjoy the show. We trade dreams for souls in California. Welcome back, everybody. This is the official relaunch of the Change Law podcast. It's been since like August of forever ago. This show will now be broadcast live every Tuesday at 5 p.m. Central Time, which is actually 3 p.m. in Steve's land because you're – where are you at, Steve? I'm in L.A. at the moment. You're in L.A. at the p.m. Central Time, which is actually 3 p.m. in Steve's land, because you're, where you at, Steve?

I'm in L.A. at the moment. You're in L.A. at the moment. So if you're in the Pacific time zone, it's 3 o'clock. If you're on the East Coast, guess what time it is? 6 o'clock. And we'll do this show live every Tuesday. We'll be having all the changeloggers on the show here and there. We'll have rotating guests.

It'll be a lot of fun. We'll talk about software development, open source, and everything in between. So we bring our opinions.'ll be a lot of fun. We'll talk about software development, open source, and everything in between. So we bring our opinions. We bring a bunch of fun, and hopefully you join us live every Tuesday. But I'm joined by a bunch of awesome people this show. It's a bunch of changeloggers, as a matter of fact. The first person in that lineup is Andrew Thorpe.

Sir, how are you? I'm doing good, Stack. How are you doing, man? I'm doing good. We also have Jared Santo on the call as well. Jared, say hello. Hello, hello. We also have Steve Klabnick. Yo.

Yo. And we also have, last but not least, Kenneth Reitz. Hello, Adam. So, are you guys excited that the changelog is back? Yes. Oh, yeah. As the first contributor contributor i am tremendously excited as a first contributor you are you were the the first weren't you it was like many many years ago many many years back in my php days wow wow so you've actually literally grown as a developers

with the changelog i mean not, not with, but over the years. Tremendously, yes. Tremendously, yeah. And you started out, where did you start out then, since we're just chatting about that quickly? You mean like what company was I working for at the time? Yeah, like what were you doing around the time when you first started working with the changelog? Well, I'd been using Python for many years and loving it, but only for like personal stuff. And then I was kind of learning web stuff with PHP. And I did this obscure framework called Groovy on Grails,

which you may have heard of. I was experimenting with that. It was a very dark time in my life. A very dark time in your life. And so, Kenneth, since you mentioned it, you mentioned the dark ages of the changelog. We actually officially started the changelog november of 2009 that uh it was kind of a happy accident i like to say because uh win and i were both kind

of in unique places in our lives and in our careers and we just happened to have some extra time and we were both geeking out on uh open source at the time you know is only i would say it was only maybe a year into GitHub being around because they launched like the year before. So a lot of the recent culture that has become the norm was still fresh and still new, to use our own phrase. But it's kind of cool. This sounds super nerdy.

I swear I just happened to run across this the other day. But Yehuda Katz is user ID number four on GitHub, and he signed up in February of 2009. So that's roughly when they went public at least. And they only – well, they have three owners or three founders. Right. So he was number one. Yep. He was number one.

Wow. That is so crazy, man. Well, what's really crazy is I got on the GitHub train pretty quickly, and my number was in the, like, thousands. I mean, those users took off fast. I signed up somewhere like October or November, and I was 35,000 or something. I mean, that was just crazy how that just took off like that, but it's cool to see. How do you find out your number, your ID? You go to api.github.com

slash users slash your username. I think. Yes. That is correct. So, for example, I will paste this in IRC. Mine is that. Oh, wow. Sweet. I'm like 2933, so I was

somewhat new or somewhat in the early adoption stage. I was really late. I'm 119,000. So I was somewhat new or somewhat in the early adoption stage. I was really late. I'm 119,000. Wow. Yeah. It's because I'm not a Ruby guy. It's crazy to look back at the last few years and just look at how much has changed.

In a lot of cases, too, how for granted, I guess, we take things. That might be a backwards way of saying that, but nowadays it seems if you find a library, if you hear about a project, nine times out of ten, it's open source. Nine times out of ten, maybe even more than that, it's actually on GitHub and not something else or somewhere else and it's just kind of crazy to be in that world now but back in those days it was still kind of catching up and i mean i even remember being um when it was like a feat for jquery to have moved over or even rails to have moved from subversion to to github and what a big deal that was it's

kind of crazy right right? Yeah. You wonder like, you know, I don't know what it was like for everyone else, but the kind of the, uh, the path for me when I came out of college and just started to get into this world, you know, which by the way, I got a computer science degree in college and didn't do version control once in college, which kind of is shocking. But, uh, for me, I got out and it's like the trend, you know,

you go to subversion and then there was this bridge, the SVN Git bridge, and then we finally went to Git. It was just kind of cool to see that a lot of people I've come across now have kind of followed that same path if you were there. And then you meet the older people, not older, but people that have been doing this for longer that come from even further back in that tree in the CVS era. So it's cool to see. One of the things that really opened my eyes about GitHub was when you'd land on the homepage of a project and you'd see the code sitting right there. Because I was always a SourceForge user, and a user as in I would download software from there,

not that I used it for version control. But I never even realized that you could get at the code for a lot of those projects. And because it's just not emphasized in the UI. And when I saw GitHub, and you'd land on the repo and you'd see the code right there, it was kind of eye-opening at the time, for me at least. Yeah, I mean, if you used SourceForge back in the day,

it's like you would get there to download whatever you needed to download, and were you ever really sure you were downloading the right version of what you needed on SourceForge? No, not at all. If everything is when you go and pick a project and you want to download it

and it gave you like a thousand different servers you could pick from all over the world and none of them worked. I'm like, I don't really care. I just want a link that will let me download this one megabyte application i don't need it to be from next door i'm going to show you ads yeah and i'm in omaha so all the servers are kind of far away from me but they're all kind of closed you know being in the middle of america everything's centralized i was always sitting there just trying to figure out like which one of these do i am i closer to chicago or st louis i don't

know time lost debating yeah exactly so since this is like the i guess the very first show since like forever ago right it kind of makes sense to maybe not so much just like paint the history of of like open source and software development how it's changed over the last few years, or even just since the inception of the change log. Um, but like also to kind of rehash what we've done since January. So we, we relaunched this blog late January. It kind of sat dormant in this hibernation mode with mainly, I would say just because we were all so busy. I mean, we all have been around and doing things and been involved, but just haven't had the time to really give the blog its attention that is needed. And I guess the easiest way to say it was just life.

Life happens. But we relaunched the blog in January, and one of the coolest things, I think, and hopefully listeners, you feel the same way, and readers of the coolest things I think, and, you know, hopefully listeners, you, you feel the same way and readers of the blog, you feel the same way as well. But, uh, for a while there, and I even hear this too, I might be jumping around a little bit, but, uh, for a while there, we, you know, somehow we had to make some level of money to make the change log, uh, possible to do. Cause we always wanted to get to a point where we can pay the people involved and everyone here that is writing for the change log.

It may not be a ton of money, but we're all at least getting paid. And that's become a good thing for us because it gives us some reason, I guess, to do it beyond just our open source contributions. But one cool thing we did was launch a membership. So if you care about the ChangeLog, you want to be involved in the ChangeLog and see it keep going, then you can go to thechangelog.com

slash membership and sign up. It's like four bucks a month. It's not very expensive, but it helps us keep the lights on. It helps us produce more content. It helps us produce this podcast and grow. So we're all kind of doing that. But one thing we did that was, It helps us produce more content. It helps us produce this podcast and grow. So we're all kind of doing that.

But one thing we did that was maybe not unique to us, but we just like – and we're not even mad at advertisers. We just didn't like to advertise for good softwares and services out there, but just because I wanted to truly focus on the content. And when it came down to the membership, I wanted the customer – because if you look at it from a revenue standpoint, if the advertiser is the one that's always paying you to do whatever, they're really the customer. And I really wanted to flip that on its head and totally make content the king that it should have been in this situation and get everyone back involved in the changelog and focused on creating great content. And that's been the key. So to make you the customer, we created memberships, which is pretty neat. Yeah, and it's been a – so I came on the changelog. Shoot, I don't know. I guess it was about a year ago now, maybe a little less than a year ago.

And it's a work of love or I don't know. What's the phrase? A gift of love or whatever. A labor of love. A labor of love. Labor of love. Yeah, yeah. It's a work of love or I don't know what that what's the phrase, a gift of love or whatever. A labor of love. A labor of love. Yeah, yeah. It was a labor of love. Kind of a gift of love. Yeah, a gift of love with Andrew Thorpe.

No, it was a labor of love for me. And I started doing it and, you know, I never got, you know, I never got sick of writing, you know, for a while there. But towards the end of last year, I was kind of really the only one writing. Not that I got sick of it or anything, but you get a little bit burnt out. You get a little bit tired because this is not our full-time job. You work, you're a full-time job. You come home, or for me, you walk to the kitchen and you sit down and you think like, do I want to write right now? And so being a labor love, being something that we weren't being paid for, something that we weren't,

you know, collecting any kind of revenue on, it's even for people that have the best of intentions, it will wear on you for after a while. So, you know, this is just an attempt to kind of intentions it will wear on you for after a while so um you know this is just an attempt to kind of keep it hot and fresh and uh you know keep everyone excited about what we're doing um you know i'm working with stack to just figure out how we can keep the who's the most important which is the readers excited and uh you know through that we want to keep all of our writers excited and happy to be doing what they're doing so It's just a nice little incentive to keep it moving. That's what we want to do. We want to avoid what happened from November to January.

We don't want it to go dark. You'd be surprised or I guess November to January. And we don't want it to go dark because, you know, you'd be surprised. Just, you know, I recently moved to Nashville. I went to the Ruby Group here the second day I was here, and I was talking to a few of the people. And one of the guys' name was Jeff. And, you know, he was just telling me, like, it's sad that the changelog went dark. Like, I love the podcast. I love the blog.

It's sad to me that it went dark. And it was like, I told him, you know, yeah, we really want to avoid that because I've heard that over and over again from people at conferences, at meetups, at all this stuff. So, you know, we want to avoid that. We want to keep this thing moving as far as we can. Most important part of any open source project is sustainability. Yeah, absolutely.

Sustainability. You know, and Andrew, you mentioned just like getting back into the groove. Like, Kenneth, you mentioned you were one of the very first contributors to the changelog. And then, Steve, I don't know when you came on, but I just remember reading something about you and Hackity Hack and Shoes. And it wasn't too, too long after uh disappeared and you took on one of his projects and you were blogging about how you really had a passion for writing i'm like i gotta get this guy on the hook man i'm like we gotta we gotta get him i didn't even know who you were when i reached out to you it's kind of serendipitous really i don't think i was anyone but that's that's another

thing altogether but um yeah i thought i thought i was first, to be honest. But it doesn't matter who's the first. But it was cool. It was sweet to be able to have another place to write all the time. So it's not always the most writing-intensive stuff. Sometimes I spend two or three days on a blog post. And I don't always do that for the Chained Dog because covering software is easier than writing really in-depth, cited things. But it's good to – I love being abreast of what's going on and being able to tell other people, like, oh, yeah, there's a sweet library that does this thing.

Right. Yeah, Steve, I don't know if you know this. I think this is kind of funny. But when you started to do Rust and to just get into it, which I'd love for you to share with us a little bit. I don't know if you even know this. This is going to sound awkward. I don't know how to phrase this, but I'm the one that reached out to you to help you with that. Do you know that?

Sweet. I don't think that I know that. I'm the one that you gave access to the repo on GitHub. Oh, yeah. And all that. Yeah, yeah. I remember that part of it. Yes, totally. It's so many.

So right now I've been doing pair with me's all this week. And so I've been getting emails from tons of people who I, like, tangentially know. It's like, hey, this person I follow on Twitter a little bit, like, wants to hang out and pair. And so I started forgetting, like, who wanted to work on what. So my brain has been in pair with me emails mode. But, yeah, I totally remember you giving me a hand briefly with the rust verubius stuff um which is very helpful so yeah and i definitely want to want to keep going with that uh i work you know my my day job is with stack so we've been super slammed lately but um you know i definitely want to keep going with that

and uh it's exciting that rust is something that just just kind of watching it from the fringes been real something to keep an eye on it's been real exciting yeah i have some i have some good stuff planned for rust for rubius uh well i should say not necessarily for rust for rubius but another project based on it so we can absolutely talk about that i'll just leave a teaser in this podcast right now since i'm not really ready to talk about what i'm doing with it yet but what were you is that uh he was saying something i talked over them i'm sorry uh it was uh me uh kenneth uh i was wondering if you could tell us more about pair with me i've never heard of it before it looks pretty cool okay so i'm super obsessed with twitter and by obsessed i mean i don't think about it it's just like part of my consciousness and so uh i was at a conference uh the other day there were three ruby conferences

over the last two weeks or something. And they were all at almost the same time. And I saw a bunch of tweets that went out with this pair with me hashtag. And basically, I saw some people tweet about it. So I tweeted like, yeah, I'd love someone to help out with Rails or Rescue if you want to pair with me, whatever. And I sort of put in the back of my head, like, figure out what that is later. And so it turns out that Avdi Grim gave a talk at one of those conferences and had given a talk about pairing and then said, I wanted to start this initiative called Pair With Me, where I get random people to program on the internet. So basically, I don't remember what the website is exactly,

but there's some sort of Pair With Me and Avdi. And so basically, it's just like you tweet with the Pair With Me hashtag, and people get back to you, and then you prepare a program in some capacity. So I did like 10 of them this week, something along those lines. Wow. For an hour or two. Is there a repo for this then? Yeah, I'll find it while we're talking.

So I don't remember specifically what. Here's the repo. I'll paste this in the chat. But for those of you listening, it's avdi.ppwm. PairProgramWith.me is also the actual website. Yeah. And so hopefully there will be more stuff at this website later. Right now it's mostly just a list of resources

and, like, a little badge that we can, like, share to say, like, I'm open with pairing on open source stuff. So that's different than the pairwith.me site? Yeah. There's been a bunch of things like this that have all sort of died out, so let's hope this one doesn't. It seems like it'd be a almost a opportunity to get in uh integrated with get tip or something like that yeah that's exactly

what i was gonna say i just had a chat um man why can't i remember his name chad whitaker yeah i had a chat with him because i mean he's got so much passion for get tip and uh kenneth i mean you could probably even speak to this because you're like in like the top echelon of people making money on i mean not making money but getting paid for your open source contributions like what's your what's your take home nowadays weekly oh and get tip i'm i think it's like 70 but i give a lot of it away too to help sustain other projects that's awesome yeah it's amazing it's amazing. It's really like, I think, one of the most important. I do a lot of experiments with sustainability and open source. So like requests, I have a thing called Request Pro,

where if a company wants to financially contribute to the project, they can. There's no difference. It's like the exact same code that they receive. And I've gotten some things through that. But this, by far, is the most sustainable thing I've ever seen. And it's really exciting. I'm trying to see here.

And just this week at Heroku, I decided to start sponsoring some projects as Heroku. And hopefully we should start getting more companies involved. So just today, like an hour ago, I found out that MaxCDN is also contributing $72 a week, which is super exciting to developers that are making open source. It's extremely exciting. So what's the unique thing about GetTip? Is it just the recurring payments? Yeah, basically you say, I want to give this much money to this person every single week.

And its maximum is $24 per person. Usually you give like $1 or $2. And then over time that really adds up, because it's weekly. If you're giving someone $5 a week, that adds up to $250 in a year. So if 100 people are doing

that to you, that's a big difference. So you give it directly to people and not specific projects? Correct. It's to the developers. And ideally, it doesn't have to even be about developers. It can be about anyone that's creating anything. Cool.

It's a Twitter account or a GitHub account. Yeah. Yeah, or a Twitter handle. I'll paste the link in. Yeah. And we should get Chad in here. We should interview him.

That'd be good. Yeah, Chad is a friend of mine, so that would be super awesome. He's a great dude. Yeah, I think Chad's got a really unique thing that he's doing there, and he's learned a lot. You know, he also needs some – I guess maybe he can come on the show and say this, but he also needs some help too. He can't do it all on his own. I think he's looking for some help here and there. So if you're out there and you're like really, you know,

down to help out with Github, it's, and he doesn't call it Githip. He calls it Githip. Anybody know that? Yeah. He had a great tweet recently. He said that he's not trying to create, you know, he's not trying, he's not creating Github. He's creating the community that's creating Github, he's creating the community that's creating

Github, basically. Yeah. And he's trying to run like the world's first open source company, so all this stuff is public information. Yeah. And there's a GitHub issue for literally every decision that needs to be made. It's pretty amazing. Yeah.

I've got one issue, maybe two issues in there, and they're not actually issues. I think that's kind of a misnomer when it comes to GitHub. And they're not actually issues. I think that's kind of a misnomer when it comes to GitHub issues because they're not all issues. They're some of our actually helpful things. It's kind of like a little off topic, but it's kind of like in Facebook where the nomenclature is like,

and somebody's grandmother dies. You don't like that, right? You kind of frown that. That's a bummer. Yeah, I think GitHub kind of has embraced that because you know the categories and stuff when you're when you create an issue um doesn't just have to be like it can be a feature request it doesn't just have to be like a bug so yeah man yeah so i guess we've talked about github we've talked about pair with me um i know you know this this year for the

changelog has been pretty pretty amazing to me because um i think before the move from tumblr to wordpress we had like maybe 750 posts roughly and that's like since 2009 and since this year's launch, I think we've, we've bypassed, I think we've gone past like 110 or 120 new posts since the new year. So like, we're already like cruising. So we keep at this pace, you know, we're,

we're, it's not so much about even more content either. I think what I always hear from people, at least like I just came back from less confident, um, a couple other conferences. And the thing I always hear about the change, and this is definitely something we've always tried to push into the editorial stream, is not so much more. It's all about quality versus quantity. But this year has been pretty amazing in terms of y'all stepping up and, uh,

I call it scanning your sectors, right? Like, so Steve, you're, you're posting more things about, you know, the,

the recent thing with Postgres, uh, you know, changes to rails and, uh, some new, you know, Uber new stuff around rust. Um,

you know, Andrew, you've been posting things around JavaScript. You post this stuff about Twitter's flight, Jared, you've been posting all sorts JavaScript you post this stuff about Twitter's flight Jared you've been posting all sorts of things about unique JavaScript things as well but I kind of call it like us scanning our sectors and like reporting back to this community

of software developers about like what is unique and what is kind of I guess is the word cool or is the word useful I think magical is a word cool or is the word useful? Magical is a good word. Magical, yeah.

Like a little magical thing there. Whimsical. Whimsical. So who wants to take the next lead in terms of what we've covered recently that's been pretty unique and fascinating to you? Don't raise your hand all at once. You guys said you want to talk about the Rust stuff, so we have to talk about it at some point. So if nobody else wants to go first, then...

Do it. Take it over. Go ahead, Steve. I mean, so basically, Rust is awesome, and you all should use it, so I post about it. Done. Did you see Armin's talk at in uh at ruppi on rust uh no i think i was out of the room for that one um but i heard some stuff about that talk i'm trying to remember that was like so

long ago um but um you know so if you don't know and for everyone who's listening rust is a new programming language from mozilla it's been around for a couple years now, but it's only started to have been a real project in Mozilla for the last year or two. It's currently had its 0.6 release relatively recently, which is an awesome release because it has eliminated most of the things that are not going to be in the 1.0 version of the language. So this should be the last release where code will actually change significantly between the releases.

And basically the elevator pitch for Rust is the speed of C++, the concurrency with Erlang, and the type safety of ML. Safety in general, but part of that sort of being types

with that. And semicolons. Although they're optional, they mean something. So you don't always And semicolons. And semicolons. Although they're optional, they mean something. So you don't always need semicolons, actually. But, yes. So I'm super psyched about it. They're writing a browser engine in it called Servo.

That's sort of the Rust compiler is written in Rust and Servo is written in Rust. So those are the two big projects that are making sure that the language evolves to meet actual needs as opposed to like fantasy dreams. And it's pretty cool. So I read somewhere about something Mozilla wanted to roll Rust into something. Do you know what I'm talking about? I don't know if it was with Firefox or there was something they wanted to eventually roll Rust into? Well, yeah.

So basically Mozilla has sort of been saying that, oh, Servo is just an experiment. We just happened to make a web browser and we happen to be rewriting a new browser engine in this new programming language we're writing. No, our C++ isn't terrible and unmaintainable. We're not making a new programming language so we can rewrite everything. So, you know, but basically, yeah, they announced a partnership with Samsung to, Samsung contributed an ARM backend for Rust. And so the idea is that Servo

is sort of becoming a more real project. It's still very much research, but basically that might be the core of new Firefox someday on the five-year timescale. Right, right. For anyone that is hearing about it, I highly recommend reading Rust for Rubius. That is an active work with Steve Klabnick.

So that's kind of how I got introduced to Rust. And it's a real short, easy read, and it's available on GitHub. And just check it out, and we'll post a link to it in the show notes. Let's stack. We're doing show notes, right? I would assume. 100%, man. Yeah, absolutely.

Just making sure. I don't want to just say, yeah, I'll post a link to it in the show notes, and then we don't do it. uh highly recommend rust for rubyist uh it's kind of my little intro into rust and it was a very very easy read well written um but definitely kind of shows you some cool conceptual ideas and uh you know you kind of i don't know if you're like me like i i read the first couple chapters and i was like uh, this is kind of everything that I that seemed to, you know, make me angry in the sea world. This kind of like it doesn't feel like that. So definitely cool. Check it out.

I should mention that for Ruby, this basically means that you're not a system programmer. If you don't know Ruby, there is like five lines of Ruby in the book or whatever. So it's like, you need to be explained what pointers and memory are, um, is sort of the point of for Rubyists. Um, so, you know, anyway, if you're not a Rubyist, you should still read it. That's what I'm trying to say. I have this new theory that Python 2.7 is going to become the new C because it's, it's, it's the, you know, cause right now everyone's on Python three or not. No one's on Python 2.7 is going to become the new C. Because right now, everyone's on Python 3. No one's on Python 3 yet. Everyone's moving to it.

And Python 2.7 will be the most modern, unchanged language. Because it's never going to change. There's never going to be another release of it, ever. It'll be interesting to see what happens. When was Python 3's official release date? It's been out for five years. But it's been slowly getting better and getting more usable and 3.3 which just came out uh this year is the first one that is like marked as ready for production basically wow so it'll be really interesting

because i feel like if you want to build something for true longevity like this is a modern language that will literally never change in any way so it'll be kind of cool if it works. We'll see. So Kenneth, what do you recommend for people who maybe have some experience in Ruby? On the changelog, a lot of the people that we have are kind of Ruby-ish. So where do you recommend people kind of jump into Python and get started with it? You mean like what version or just in general?

Like how to learn it in general. What are some projects to kind of keep an eye on, that kind of thing? So I have a project called Python-Guide.org, The Hitchhiker's Guide to Python. I'll paste the link in. That's an awesome name. Thank you. I'm a big fan of Douglas Adams. I think you had – I've got my towel in your Twitter bio for a while there too, didn't you?

Oh, I forgot about that. Yeah, I never – I'm a fruit who always knows where my towel is. That's it, yeah. Yeah, I forgot about that. That was a long time ago. Yeah, man. So the project aims to be like a guide, basically to become a good Python developer,

and it's the same with most languages. You know, we're really good about documentation, but there's all this tribal knowledge that you kind of build over time and what is best practice and what isn't. So the goal of this project is to, like, serialize all that mental knowledge that people acquire and try to get it written down. So it's like, if you want to do web development, here are the two frameworks you should look at, not here are the 20.

You know, here are the two ones that people actually use, that type of thing. Gotcha. Yeah, it seems like every, I don't know like every language kind of has its quirks like that. It's something you definitely learn. I was just sharing about Ruby specifically with some friends of mine that come from more of a PHP background. And it's like, yeah, Ruby's great because the conventions and all this and that, but you've got to kind of learn them.

Oh, don't do that. That sucks. Don't try and do anything like that. And you kind of learn it as you go, and that's the frustrating thing. I wish there was an easier way for me to share all my knowledge with everyone that I've picked up over the years, but I think tribal knowledge is probably the best way to put it. You follow the people on Twitter that are sharing the knowledge and you just try and pick up as much of it as you can. That's what this book is doing.

It's doing a little bit what Andrew's talking about where you can just step in and share a little bit of wisdom and it lives throughout the book. It's not really in book form yet. It's just a big like documentation site yeah uh the goal eventually is to get it printed and have it printed at cost because i know a lot of people like to learn from books yeah one of those people

might be a fun kickstarter to do i don't want to jump that horse or not but that'd be kind of like it seems like that would be a perfect candidate for something like kickstarter yeah i think oh maybe yeah or yeah let's see What were you going to say, Steve? Because you've been experimenting with this, right? Yeah. So, I mean, I only read physical books, basically. So I'm a super big fan of the physical book world. I'm currently writing three self-published books and one for a publisher. So, you know, there's sort of advantages and disadvantages to both sides of those things. But I do really like physical books. I've not gotten any of my self-published books printed

in physical paper yet because they're not ready for it. They're all sort of like pre-release in, you know, being worked on. So like, Rust for Rubius is like 52 pages, right? So it's still a little too small for like a real physical book, although it would be okay. Um, same thing with the, the hypermedia book is currently around 70 pages. So, uh, you know, I want to bump, you know, make it a little thicker before I, uh, bother to submit it somewhere. But, um, you know, yeah. Yeah. I've talked to O'Reilly and a few other companies too, and they actually do consider like, even if you have a book that is like creative commons, they can still publish it. There's ways to do that, which is pretty interesting. Yeah. I've talked to the couple of publishers, um,

about that kind of thing too. So yeah, totally. They're, they're open to it at least. Yeah. Which surprised me. Totally surprising. Totally surprising. It's one of those awkward moments where there's a transition in the topics. Jared, why don't you, Jared, why don't you step up and lead the next one? I know you've been pretty active. So Jared's one of our most newest contributors to the changelog, and he's come out of the gun just shooting, man. He's got guns blazing.

Yeah, I've been writing for the changelog for a couple months now, and I can't really spot a trend in my own projects that I submit. I mostly do JavaScript and Ruby development. I also do a little bit of Python here and there and some Objective-C. But most of the stuff that I've found that I've been submitting is tools, things that make whatever you're working on easier. And just looking through my list of recent postings, a couple that are cool that I posted. I think the GitGutter project, I don't know if you guys saw that, which started off as a Sublime Text 2 plugin that basically puts Git diffs in the gutter of your editor, which is a pretty cool project. I thought the really interesting piece about that

was the old My Browser can do that two wars. Does it do that as you're typing, basically? You can do it as you type, and I found that that starts to have performance issues. Yeah, I highly don't recommend that. Yeah, on save, on save works. And so it's cool. But what's really cool is, like, right after that, there was a Vim port.

Then there was an Emacs port. Then there was a, I don't know, was it like a Notepad++ port? Might have been. Yeah, I've been using the Vim port of it. And it's cool. Like, I really think it's neat. And it's actually, there's a lot of tools that you can get where it's like, hey, this is cool because I can do it, not because it actually helps me accomplish a goal. And I kind of felt maybe GitGutter would kind of be that.

But as I've used it, like, I've actually found myself – my eyes can jump to where I'm editing a lot easier in Vim when I see those little diffs. Now, I've actually experienced some performance problems more than just on save. Like if I have, let's say I have a file, a copy or something, and I swap out tons of copy, like the more and more diffs that I get in one particular file, it starts to drag pretty heavily. And I haven't quite figured out what it is because some big files don't do it, some do. But there's something that's happening where it'll start to drag and I have to turn it off. And it's, you know, that's kind of annoying. But it's a really cool project. Like I found myself actually thinking, you know, the Vim one specifically, this is actually useful. And it's

actually helping me accomplish a goal, not just a like, you know, you put it Jared, hey, my browser can do that too type of a thing. So that's kind of cool. Like, like, you know, you put it, Jared, hey, my browser can do that too, type of a thing. So that's kind of cool. Like, I really, I was glad you brought that one up. That was a neat one. Yeah, the thing that I found out, my concern right away was, you know, is this just going to become annoying over time and I'll just turn it off? And I've actually found that what it does is it kind of prompts me to commit more often

and to make smaller commits, which was always a goal for me when collaborating is to have your commit be as small and concise as possible. So just seeing those annoying little pluses and minuses in the gutter reminds you that, okay, maybe it's time to get this stage clean. So it's cool stuff. Right. So one thing I wanted to bring up about Jared is, you know, him and I have been talking. I guess, you know, Jared, you're one of the first people that we've brought on to write that, like, you knew you had come to know when or somehow you knew when. But, you know, neither Stack nor I really knew you. And so you're kind of the guinea pig for a lot of the stuff that we're doing new. And it's been kind of fun. Like, we're changing, you know, some of how the changelog works.

We're changing, obviously, it's not on Tumblr anymore. It's a WordPress blog. So we're having to figure out how can we let authors write? What are we going to do? So Jared gets to be the guinea pig that has to kind of play along and kind of learn with us. And just to kind of say publicly, along and kind of learn with us and uh you know just to kind of say publicly man you've been doing a great job at it and it's been uh

we're kind of glad that uh we don't have somebody that you know is kind of fighting us and it feels like you're working with us on it and so that's something that i know stacks uh glad for i'm glad for too oh thanks i'm having fun i mean uh one of the reasons why i wanted to write for the changelog was a lot of a longtime listener of the podcast. I think – in fact, Adam, wasn't it just a podcast and then there wasn't really a blog like there is now? It was just kind of like – Yeah, it's – the blog kind of grew over the years, honestly. I think that's why it was – yeah, exactly. Because if I talk about the Change Log to people that know the Change log, they're like, oh, yeah, I listen to it. And I'm like, well, what about read it?

Do you read it? Right, right. And they're like, I don't know. Should I read it? How can I read your podcast? I'm like, it's a blog too. The whole reason why – it's kind of funny the way the name even come about because I was like the name changeog is really neat just in general. And I'm like, it would be really cool to have a podcast where we just looked at something open source and just talked about its ChangeLog.

From version to version, you see things change, and you wonder why. Why did that code move here? Why did they totally rip out this feature? Why did they add this feature? And all this has evolved since 2009 too but um yeah for a long time it was just a podcast and we didn't really i think we blogged but it didn't really have the direction that i think it has now and you know with that's why you know kenneth and steve and jared and andrew you guys stepping up and the other writers that are uh that we're working on to come on board it's why it's so important to to like you know truly scan your sectors and and report the things back because

y'all have fans out there that look up to you and and and whatnot in in programming and in in software development and you know it's kind of like uh an honor to like help them learn and help the help lead them in the right directions yeah absolutely and it's uh it's you know i was a long time uh reader and just getting you know finding new projects through the changelog and when it started to get a little bit quiet i got concerned and i thought well i can pitch in if you know if they need help. So it's been exciting and it's been a good time. I was reading those comments there. I'm not sure how you pronounce it, but it's OIF underscore vet. Whenever I type in TH to my browser, the changelog and the industry are my top suggestions.

Nice. Wow. Nice. The changelog is mine. Nice. He's using the changelog nightly build So apparently all American Airlines flights Are grounded right now They have a nationwide computer outage They're supposed to be back I saw

Yeah they're supposed to be back up by 5 eastern That's crazy I didn't even hear about it. See, that's why I never fly them. There you go. I just flew with Southwest, and I loved it. One of the first few times I've flown Southwest, if I flew it before, I don't remember it. Well, you would remember.

They're very chill compared to most airlines. Oh, yeah. They treat you like a human being. Andrew, you also mentioned a comment in the IRC. I almost want to call it a chat room. But IRC that we did have the handle changelogshow on Twitter for a very long time. And then Alex Dunne, who if you don't know Alex Dunne, he is most famous for his, what's it called again, pre-mailer. It's a Ruby gem, but basically it'll take HTML and CSS and munch it together to kind of set it up for email, which is really neat if you have a – and I think we use it at pure charity still don't we Andrew I don't know that we're actually using

it anymore in production but you know it's horrible practice but the gem is still there horrible practice like we're we still have the gem there

even though I don't think we're using horrible practice on our part I see I thought we still used it because we keep a separate style sheet and a separate

HTML document for the email that goes out and pre-mail it basically takes those two and puts them together. It inlines all those styles so you don't have to be a – Yes, we are using PreMailer. Yeah, you're right. So Alex Dunne, he had the changelog for a long time, and he had it in all caps too. So if every once in a while you see anybody tweet to the changelog in all caps,

it's like one of his old friends thinking that we're still him. So we used to be changelog in all caps. It's like one of his old friends thinking that we're still him. So we used to be changelogshow because you're right, Jerry, when you said we started out as a podcast. It's like the very first domain we registered to start the changelog was changelogshow.com. And then we smartened up and we're like, eh, the changelog's better. The opposite of what Facebook did. We added the... Who's going to get changelog.com? I wonder what it is.

What is it? Let's find out. Houseofdistraction.net it says when you go there. You guys are braver than me. Oh my gosh. I know, Steve. This seems like a little bit of a hyper-media API here. It's just links to follow.

It's just links to follow. Yeah. It's a puzzle. And it's a, when you were asking what happens if you play the feed live while you're recording, I think that was Jared that asked that. Houseofdistraction.net is that thing. It relinks you to houseofdistraction.net. Weird. I'm looking up the who is now it'll probably be like a fielding guy

church of fielding nevermind nevermind so is there any trends I mean let's pick up the conversation again is there any trends out there that's been I guess going on maybe even just here in 2013 that's kind of I guess, going on, maybe even just here in 2013, that's kind

of like across the entire landscape, not language specific, you know, just kind of agnostic across the whole entire landscape of software. I'm pretty excited about a new project that DocCloud's been doing called Docker. Oh, yes. Have you seen that? Yeah. It's kind of like what Heroku does. Basically, Heroku is built on LXC containers for isolation,

and Docker is a way to do that yourself, basically. They kind of package up all the hard work of making your own LXC containers. Cool. Pretty awesome. We want to get him actually on a future show to talk about that project because it was really unique to just see what they're doing. We did cover that. I mean, I covered it, but it's so beyond my minuscule brain to even truly cover Linux containers and all that good stuff. It's a bit beyond me, but I could definitely tell it was bleeding-edge technology.

Yeah, and then the Canonical team is also working on a project called Juju, which allows you to – they're going to try to kind of compete with, I compete with Chef and Puppet and things like that. And the really cool part about it is that it will allow you to deploy locally to LXC containers, basically. So there's a lot of really cool stuff happening in that space. It seems like a lot of these companies that traditionally are i don't that traditionally are in the area that you know would have been more about enterprise technology and stuff are embracing the open source and uh it's it's been really cool to kind of you know with even with like the get-ups of the world and things like that to see companies you know trying to figure out what you were saying

kind of like sustainability with open source and how do we as a company you know kind of make money and do open source and this and that. So that's something that I've been kind of, I guess, excited about and just kind of a trend that seems like a very positive one. That's, that's cool to watch. Steve, I recall you blogging about, and I can't recall if it was a true rant or not, but it seemed like the tone of your blog post back in the day was a little

ranty and a little bit of anger but you were talking about burnout oh uh yeah i mean i don't know if that was a blog post but i definitely have been more and more um interested in the idea of burnout um there's a one of the guys who's been around rails for a very long time michael cause some last name i don't we call him Kaz, has a tweet where he basically says, in order to be an open source for multiple years, you need to become a misanthrope or get burned out. And

I think it's very true. You can see a lot of people that are big name contributors getting burned out by abuse from users, among other things. And so that's something I'm seeing that we're possibly going to see more of, or we at least need to have a conversation about the scalability of open source maintainers. There's a comment on, let's see, what is it?

It's Jeremy Ashkenaz's copy scripts. There was a specific comment and an issue where someone brought up a new feature and Jeremy sort of closed it sort of tersely and this person got mad and he sort of wrote this big comment. I'll paste it into the IRC

and we'll have it in the show links about like how people that are, because of the asymmetry involved with maintaining a popular open source project and then using a popular open source project, the communication gets a little mixed up. And sometimes users can feel like they're being ignored and maintainers can feel like they're being abused. So nobody wins. And it's something that we're, as open source sort of scales up and out, we're going to need to figure out how to manage this problem.

So, yeah. It's funny you mention this because when I was, like, this past weekend, we went out to Panama City at the gracious invite of Alan Branch and Stephen Bristol. Bumper missed it. Yeah, and great conference. I mean, the best, absolutely best conference of any conference, of any conference. But Robbie Russell happened to be there, who's, I guess he's famous for Planet Argon and his work with Postgres and a bunch of other stuff. But he's even more famous, potentially, from OMI ZSH and his uh you know widespread adoption of zsh and whatnot but i happen to have a quick chat with him as we were standing in line for the doom buggies

because at less conf you don't just hear people speak you actually ride doom buggies which is super awesome um but he's like yeah the changelog really just jacked up my life i'm like what do you mean and he's like well you know i released oh my really just jacked up my life. I'm like, what do you mean? And he's like, well, I released on my ZSH, and I came on the show, and Kenneth, it was me and you on that show, actually, that talked to Robbie. And he's like, yeah, I went into that show with almost no issues, and I came out of that show with like 100, and I couldn't keep it less. I think the big takeaway from that show for him was that he was trying to keep the pull requests under 125. Yeah, yeah.

And then it sprawled up to one of the most popular repositories on GitHub for a while there, and it might still be there. I don't watch that. I don't really care about those stats. But he was like, yeah, he's like, you know what? I want to come back on the changelog, and I want to talk about how open source – I can't remember exactly what he said, but he was very passionate about coming on the show and talking about just basically what you said, Steve, which is this burnout. And even back to what you were talking about, Andrew, with sustainability of a project. You get this maintainer and no one else wants to step up and help out, or they just expect to just spat out feature requests and not actually get a chance to like step in and sling some goat the hardest part when you're working on a project is using it

yeah i've uh i don't have any major projects like on my zsh but i've got a couple smaller ones that are like in the you know hundreds range of of watchers anders and forks and stuff like that. And I've become a bad maintainer. I don't watch them anymore because I'm just too busy. But thank God my software is not quite as critical as some of these other softwares out there because people would be flying in my house and breaking in and taking me out. Rescue has... Sorry, go ahead.

I guess it's like the double-edged sword of open source. You tend to work on it on the side, and you're trying to do something that you want it to be successful. You want it to be something that is useful, but the more useful it becomes, the more people use it, the higher the demand to improve it gets. And if you're doing it on the side, it's kind of a struggle to keep maintaining it, the higher the demand to improve it gets. And if you're doing it on the side, it's kind of a struggle to keep maintaining

it. But that's where we encourage people. That's the beauty of open source is if you find something wrong or if you want a feature, there's nothing to stop you from implementing that feature. And so it's kind of like you get both sides of it. Did we lose somebody on the call? Looks like we may have lost Kenneth. Kenneth, you might be able to Did we lose somebody on the call?

Looks like we may have lost Kenneth. Kenneth, you might be able to come right back in if you're listening. I don't think you're listening because you were talking. But let me see if I can pull Kenneth back in. And that's what happens with Skype. Oh, it could be his internets. So if you hear some screeching or squawking in the background, that's kind of trying to come back in with his flaky internet.

Anyone interested in this topic of burnout should also watch this amazing talk by Phat, one of the guys who started Bootstrap. He wrote a blog post and gave a talk at.js called What is Open Source and Why Do I Feel So Guilty about Bootstrap and its issues. And so it is also very relevant on this maintainer burnout situation. Dude, what a URL, too. He's got a.xxx URL. Yeah, don't type fat.xxx.

Make sure you type byfat.xxx. That's all it will say on that URL. That's crazy right there. But his blog is awesome, and you should read every single post in it because they're amazing. But that one's relevant to the topic at hand. I've been meaning to actually listen to that. I got through the first little bit of it only to the point where he was talking about how he was jet-lagged getting there and how he wasn't, like, he didn't really care, I guess, how he said this talk or whatever, but I was like, you know,

I got to go back and listen to this. So thanks for reminding me to do that. Totally. I totally recall hearing about this, but never got a chance to actually sit through the whole thing. But just add that to my watch later or read later or something later. And I don't know if we lost Kenneth totally. I think we may have completely lost Kenneth.

I will invite him again. It seems like we may have lost him. So when Kenneth comes back, we're about to close up the show here in a few seconds. So one thing that's kind of neat, one thing that I think might work well is just if we can kind of go around the proverbial room and just plug something before we close the show. So we'll start with Andrew. Andrew, why don't you plug something cool that you found recently that is not on the changelog yet and i put yet in parentheses for you uh so one thing that i intend to put on the changelog and we've we've actually mentioned it in briefly is the uh is it called discourse it's the it's the project by um uh coding horror what is his name yes from

stack over atwood jeff atwood uh. Jeff Atwood. And it's discourse. And it's really like a project that's aimed at making community engagement, community conversations, community Q&A kind of like more than just a threaded environment. And it's a really cool open source project that it's still in beta, and there's not a ton on it, but I used it a little bit. And it's something that I think will grow, and I would like to see it grow. So it's called Discourse, and I think you should check it out. We did cover that quickly. I think we had even a side chat about that, Andrew, where we were like, discourse was kind of like a cameo in that blog post because it was the same fella, obviously, but his post was on why Ruby because he was coming from.NET, or not coming from.NET,

I guess he's most fluent in.NET, but he was stating the case of why he chose Ruby for coding discourse with that rather than something.NET. I mentioned it in passing once or twice too because they have done a lot of good open source work. I specifically wrote a post for the changelog about one of their tech leads being

a hero, I think was the phrasing that I used, by doing some really awesome performance analytics and then submitting patches upstream based on performance stuff um so yeah discourse has been around once or twice but i don't think we've ever done a real post on it yeah so we're looking forward to that future post there andrew no pressure no pressure all right so let's turn it over to jared jared what what's uh what's something you want to plug that you haven't posted yet?

Yeah, so I've been doing a lot of JavaScript work. I've been getting deeper into the client-side frameworks and most recently working on a project with AngularJS and just really, really enjoying that framework. So I'm hoping to cover some pieces related to that. If you're interested in learning, there's some tricky bits if you're just getting started. So there's a great site that has videos, tutorials called egghead.io, very short little videos, screencasts, that kind of uncover a lot of the tricky bits of Angular.

So definitely worth checking out. I will. I have not, but I will. You know, I'm actually in the – speaking of that, I'm kind of in this limbo state. Like I've always been a very diverse, I guess, technological person, but never a – like a a superhero in one niche. I kind of play a lot of different positions. So I've been trying for a couple years not to really learn JavaScript. But when I say try, I mean here and there I'll read a book and kind of get started, and then it'll fizzle out.

And then I kind of get busy with a different project that totally has nothing to do with coding. And I do a lot of podcasting and right like it if you're a product manager so it's like i i've kind of lifted myself up from a lot of the different things at the bare metal that i used to do and i just never get a chance to like truly pour into it but um i think one thing i'll plug is that uh i i actually i'm kind of breaking the rules I guess because I did post this but it was Derek Sivers he had, and I like the guy speaking of Les Conf, he spoke at the original Les Conf back in 2009 and I was

just floored with how cool that dude is, I mean he is so freaking humble and you wouldn't even think, I mean not that he is any better than any of us in this room here but you know he's just such a cool dude and i've always just really respected the i guess his point of view and perspective on on things because he's just like a a true life hacker i guess you know he doesn't like he doesn't let a wall stand in front of him he finds a way to knock it down

or go around it or get over it he doesn't let anything stop him from trying to pursue his dreams. So when he posted that about how to better learn JavaScript, he mentioned those few books, which we'll post a link in the show notes, but if you're listening live, I'll add the link here in a couple seconds to IRC. But that was a really cool thing. He did a blog post called There's No Speed Limit to Life that changed my life. Is that right? Yeah.

Some really cool stuff in there. Wow. And he wrote a really good book. I recommend too. I can't remember what it's called. I think it's called anything you want. And so I guess that's Kenneth Reese back, dude.

I didn't even know you got back. Yeah. Sorry about that. That's so, I thought we launched it and I'm like, it sounded like Steve for a second there, but no, that's Kenneth.

I blame Microsoft. That's awesome. That's awesome, man. So we'll make sure we link that in the show notes too. So, Kenneth, make sure you post that link in IRC so we can scoop up that link and add it to the show notes. But who wants to go next? Who wants to add something next? Kenneth, I guess since you're speaking, you can?

In your back? Sure. I assume we're talking about just the takeaways for the things that we're interested in this week. Yeah, plug something that you haven't posted at the changelog yet or you want to that maybe you haven't yet. I can tell you about a project I'm interested in that I'm working on. I'm trying to create a project that is going to be the opposite of um the 410 gone situation basically so you have like uh y and uh mark pilgrim and these people that decide to like bridge quit from the internet which is totally fine and that's i completely respect that decision but it made me start thinking about like you know

what happens when you're no longer there right that? That's a, it's a really important topic that people don't consider a lot. So I was trying to think, you know, if the, if the content I'm like publishing, I'm making code, I'm making projects, blog posts, I'm a photographer, you know, and all these things live on the internet. What happens when I'm gone and the hosting bills aren't paid anymore? Right. So I'm working on this project that kind of sucks everything in puts it all into S3 as like this flat file type thing and then automatically puts everything on archive.org that I'm really excited about

it's called Blackbox and I'm hoping to start working on that more soon I was really into it and I was going to start blogging about it and then the Aaron Swartz incident happened so I wanted to wait a while but yeah I'm really interested in those things right now and it's been

a lot on my mind lately that's really neat yeah I mean I remember when a camera his was it Mike no not who was it that a couple years ago like just disappeared not why but somebody else mark mark program yeah and so is it stemming from that is that what you're talking about? Basically. I mean, it's not the reaction to that. That's just a good example of what I don't want to happen, basically. Right.

But you know, his was intentional. But if you think about it, there aren't that many developers who have naturally passed, I guess. Yeah. It's a touchy subject, but basically, you know, I'm not going to be around in 80 years. What happened to all the things I've created? You know?

It's like a preservation. Exactly. A museum of sorts. Yeah, I also do a lot of work with the archive team, which is in association with archive.org. We have a, it's called the preservation of, uh, what is it? I can't remember.

Distributed, uh, attack of preservation or something like that. We have a lot of fun. So like we're backing up posterous right now because they're, they're going to shut

off 9.3 million blogs. Wow. Um, and it's, I have like, I think a week left or something like that. And that's,

I mean, that's a lot, a lot of people poured, you know, years and years into their posterous blogs. They're just going to turn it all off. It's, I mean, that's a lot. A lot of people poured, you know, years and years into their Posterous blogs and they're just going to turn it all off. It's crazy.

Were you involved with the guys who backed up GeoCities? Yeah, that's the archive team. That's the archive team. Yeah. And MobileMe, a bunch of stuff like that. So right now we're working on FormSpring because they're shutting down

and Posterous is the biggest one. It's a lot of fun. If you go to, I think archive team dot org, uh, there's a bunch of information on the projects and a lot of the stuff is written in Python. It's pretty cool. It's about, uh, cause you know, this, this stuff is really historical and it was important because you have people that, uh, like their geo city sites, like they, you know, maybe their son passed away or something. And like they had photos from a from a photographer that were on GeoCities or on MobileMe, and those are, like, the only thing they have left, and then they go one day and they're gone. You know, so having these things recorded is extremely important. There is a downside, though, in that if you did dumb stuff in your childhood, it is still up there and now is being archived instead of going away. That's true.

So it's not a universal good thing to save everything that's ever hit the Internet. That's all I'm saying. Agreed. So don't go search for Steve Klabnick on the Internet. Definitely don't do that. Well, that's why I can never say this word. Animity. Animity.

Yes, that word. It's extremely important, which is why, you know, because, you know, if you've had a certain situation, it can often be very dangerous to have your name associated with things online. So, I don't know. It's kind of funny how everybody stepped in to say the word, too, for you. Can you say it again? I really can't do it. Anonymity.

Anonymity. there we go kind of sounds like it reminds me of uh of nemo yeah an enemy all right speaking of speaking of nemo uh steve last but not least what's uh what's been on your mind man i'm pasting this link into the irc and and we'll put it in the show notes, I'm sure. But me and a friend started a mailing group called Philosophy in a Time of Software, specifically to discuss the intersection of philosophy and technology at whatever level of understanding you have of philosophy. So we have about 200 people, and it's like a relatively low traffic mailing list, but sometimes we get good discussions going.

So if those things interest people at all, that's my pitch slash pick for a thing that might be interesting to people. And did you post a link? I put one in the IRC. It's a Google group. Oh, okay. Gotcha. I was responding to somebody else quickly. It is all good. Philosophy in a time of software.

Yeah, it's a Derrida reference. But there's a lot of really cool, really smart people, and we're sort of like in that startup stage where like I don't want to run over the list, but I'm trying to generate some content. So we have some reasonable posts that have had some discussion and some that have less, and we're working on it. Is this the only place this exists, or is there a website or anything like that? It's the only place that it currently exists. If it continues to build,

maybe we'll make a website or do some other stuff with it. But, you know, it's always hard to bootstrap a project, right? So even when you have a bunch of 100 people reading, everyone's busy, and it can take a while sometimes. So, like you know it's it's slow going but uh it's been useful so far so what's this one that you uh that you posted the meme hustler uh that is an article there is a 25 000 word article on tim o'reilly actually read that yeah um it's very interesting uh mostly because the fact i enjoy the fact that it makes me viscerally uncomfortable since I love Tim O'Reilly and it is critical of Tim O'Reilly.

And so I always like to read things that directly challenge my initial understanding of things. So I found it very enlightening on a number of things. What's this? I want to write software that helps kill people. I read that that is a grabby title but it actually is but it's totally legitimate like software that i have open source is used by a number of organizations that are terrible so like if you have ever gotten a patch into ruby or python for example your software is being used by in this particular instance your software is being used by a palantir and the government is using Palantir to decide who to kill.

So you have contributed to software that has killed a human being. I see. Which is a very complicated ethical discussion, basically, about what the ethics involved. One of the interesting things is that the free software definition does not allow for use restrictions. So you're actually not allowed to say that software cannot be used to kill people. And in fact, it's funny. So JSLint is a linting program for JavaScript, right? And JSLint's license says JSLint may not be used for evil. And IBM wanted to distribute JSLint with something that it gave evil. And IBM wanted to distribute JSLint with something that it gave out.

And so IBM had to actually contact the author and ask to pay for a license that did not include that cause. And so the author wrote this blog post that said, like, I am giving IBM the license to use JSLint for evil. Because, you know, that's not legally defined, so they could be liable if someone

decided and IBM has collaborated with the Nazis before so arguably they have done evil things even with software so they got to get that clause out of there or whatever so it's very complicated and this is one of the examples of the intersection between the two fields is like what is ethics like what research

in the field of ethics can we apply to our current situation to know that what we're doing feels good, et cetera? And just for me, from my perspective, following Steve on – Steve Klabnick on Twitter. It's at Steve Klabnick. He will be very open to entertain these discussions if you want to talk further about him with him. Totally. It's funny. What's the guy's name?

And I feel like I'm even an idiot for not even remembering it. But last name Crawford. Douglas. Douglas Crawford. Totally got this first name. But back in the day when Wynn and I went to like, I think it was the original Texas JS actually. We got a chance to chat with him, and that's one thing that Douglas talked quite a bit about

was just software being used for evil. I'm pretty sure that it's in that episode. He talks quite heavily about it. Just FYI. Well, it's just one of those things that you don't think about. You live in a bubble. You live in a little, like those things that you don't think about. You live in a bubble, you live in a little capsule that you don't really realize what an

impact you could be doing would have. Not just the intended audience, but everyone in the world has access to this, so what might it be being used for? I today got a Nazi's website removed from the internet because his hosting provider does not allow for hate speech.

And so they wrote a Rails app or whatever that allows you to set up political drives to collect campaign money. And so they don't audit every single customer they have, right? And so I just sent them an email and was like, yo, by the way, one of your customers is a Nazi. You should know that. And this totally happens. We build software that's used software is just a tool you can use it for any end and lots of people use it for bad ends so do not use software for evil long story short tldr yes sir so that that's uh so the change lot was back You guys excited? I'm excited.

I feel like we've officially launched the blog now that the podcast is officially back. For a while there, I wanted to get it out right away, but I knew we kind of had to have this time frame. So Andrew got a nice little mic set up, plus he's moved, and he had to get settled in a bit. And life's been kind of chaotic for me as well. But if you're listening now, every Tuesday, live at 3 p.m. Pacific, 6 p.m. Eastern, every Tuesday at that time, you can hopefully bet your life on it. If not, we'll be really sad. And you can make it happen by becoming a member. That'd be really awesome to help us out, keep this train rolling. And if you happen to want to become

a writer for the changelog, you can reach out to us. You do have to get a personal invite right now from somebody who's already a writer for the changelog. So that's kind of like the only caveat right now.

We do accept bribes. Yeah, bribes can happen. And the only reason for that is just to keep the initial writing staff kind of tight-knit. It's also heavily tied to membership, so the more members we have, the more writers we can bring on to cover more awesome open-source software. So that's the easiest way I can say it, but that has been the first the first new change log. So everybody want to say goodbye? Goodbye.

Goodbye. Peace. I'm out of here. I see it in my eyes So how could I forget when