The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - We're flipping the script (Interview)

Episode Date: March 27, 2024

Script flipped! Today we're sharing two interviews of us on Other People's Podcasts (OPP): Kathrine Druckman from the Open at Intel podcast invited us on the show at KubeCon NA in November and Den Delimarsky hosted Jerod on The Work Item podcast in February.

Welcome, friends. You are listening to The Change Log, conversations with the hackers, the leaders, and the innovators of the software world. I'm Jared Santo. On this episode, we are flipping the script and sharing two interviews of us on other people's podcasts. Yes, we are down with OPP. Big shout out to our partners at Fly.io, the home of changelog.com.

Launch your app as close to your users as possible all around the world for peak performance. Fly makes it easy. Learn how at fly.io. Hey friends, this episode is brought to you by our friends at Sanedia. Sanedia is helping teams take Nats to the next level via a global multi-cloud, multi-geo, and extensible service fully managed by Sanedia. They take care of all the infrastructure, management, monitoring, and maintenance for you

so you can focus on building exceptional distributed applications. And I'm here with VP of Product and Engineering, Byron Ruth, and David Gee, Director of product strategy. So when you think about connectivity being the first thing to consider, someone pushed back on this and say, we'll think about it later. What competes with a mindshare of connectivity? Just like an HTTP developer, you actually just download and run the NAT server. Whereas an HTTP developer, if you're building an HTTP set of endpoints, you typically have to implement or use an HTTP

library. And then whether it's a Go standard library, Python, whatever it is, and you're actually implementing endpoints that register into the HTTP server. And then now you have to go deploy this HTTP server and ensure that it's performant. So it's a slightly different model, but like you download the NAT server, it's a standalone binary. It runs on, you know, the majority of platforms. And then you have a handful of client SDKs across all the major languages. You download that. And we even have a higher level API that is akin to what HTTP developers have of like

defining a handler, for example. We just call it our services API. And you basically have a few boilerplate things that you register your handler in the NATS context. And out of the box, it actually supports sort of a general request reply setup. And then you get all of these other benefits out of the gate. But the experience and like the onboarding is arguably just as simple as any other HTTP onboarding, with the exception that you're technically deploying a client application that implements

these NAT services in addition to the NAT server. But that's where the Sunini Cloud, it's already a managed instance. And we even have the demo server for you to just try it out. It's a public endpoint that you can literally connect to. So you can still build a simple client application, use the demo server as the endpoint, and then you can play with that and use that as sort of the server deployment. Well, if we talk about it just from, you know, the central view of applications, forget networking, all that kind of packet-based stuff, you were calling them HTTP developers, which kind of stalk instead of API devs. I mean,

what do people do? They either glue it together at a primitive level. So the primitive being HTTP, they move up the stack in their mind's eye and they go, oh, we're going to do some gRPC, which is kind of still point to point. So it's a lot of point to point stuff versus broker assisted connectivity, which is way simpler. You connect to an endpoint, you get told about all their endpoints. It's like connecting to a hive mind. What we're trying to do is move people away from coordinated point-to-point connectivity to easy connect to anything securely and connect to your other stuff securely. Instead of having to coordinate the whole rat's nest of where to connect to them, then you've got to negotiate, well, what do we do then? Now we've got to go and get the schema information. Can we even connect

to this thing? And does it even work? you know what version is it and all this stuff and what we're trying to do is transform that and flip that to unify to make it much simpler so i think we're trying to go from a rat's nest of point-to-point connectivity in the application space to making everything on net and it's like connecting to a hive mind and what we're kind of asking people to do is think about applications the same way you would video conferencing so if me and barman are going to have a chat we might do a huddle on Slack or jump on a Zoom or something. But if we want a colleague to join, we ask them to join the same course. We can have a point-to-point conversation by the same medium, or we can have a party line by the same medium.

So it's request, reply, or pubs up, but it's on the same platform. We don't care about what Zoom server we connect to. We connect to the service and we coordinate our communications over the fabric. There you go. Yesterday's tech is not cutting it. NAT's powered by the global multi-cloud, multi-geo and extensible service. Fully managed by Synedia is the way of the future. Learn more at synedia.com

slash changelog. That's S-Y-N-A-D-I-A dot com slash changelog. First up, Adam and I joined Catherine Druckmann on the Open at Intel podcast. Catherine was kind enough to invite us into their snazzy recording booth at KubeCon North America last fall, and we had a blast fielding all of our questions about the early days of podcasting, what interests each of us, how we do what we do, and more. Hey, Adam and Jared, thank you for joining. Thank you for, you know, taking a little time out of KubeCon because Oh, yeah. Because everyone's super busy. And there's too much to see here and do and listen to. It's a circus out there. There are a lot of people.

It is very people-y. We wanted to see every booth, but then we saw how many booths there are. Yeah. And how many talks and how many everything. And we realized we're probably not going to see every booth. That's a challenge, yes. Yeah. So tell me, what are you all doing here?

You're recording podcasts too, right? This is very meta, this episode. Yeah, we're doing podcasts. Normally we get a booth and we record from our booth, but we are mobile this year. And we are walking around, talking to people, seeing what's going on. Cool. Getting a lay of the land. Trying to win some socks and some...

Yeah, there are a lot of socks. Lego. Trying to win some Lego. Somebody's giving away coffee. A couple PS5s. Stuff like that. So far, I haven't won anything. Really? I got coffee. Anyway,

for the people who are listening to this someday, somewhere, tell us a little bit about your podcast network. And I would really like to know your story. I'd like to know how did you get started in this crazy world that is talking into microphones? How far back should we go? Go all the way. All the way back. All the way. Tell me where were you born? A small town in Pennsylvania. So podcasting,

I was working in software on the front end and was working with a couple people that actually produced a podcast. Okay. And this is back in 2005. Ah, early days. Earliest days, yeah. And, uh... When it was but a little RSS feed. Yes. It was a little enclosure. And you had to drag your files out of iTunes.

Did you? Oh, yeah. I mean, early, early days, if you were going to do it actually podcasting, like on an iPod, you had to actually drag the files into iTunes. I mean, in the early, early days, if you were going to do it actually podcasting, like on an iPod, you had to actually drag the files into iTunes. I'm sorry, you had to sync iTunes to your iPod. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I said it wrong. You had to, like, subscribe.

Plug it in. Plug it in. Yeah, it wasn't a drag and drop, but it was a drag. I forget. Yeah. It's been a while. It's been a while. It got better.

Yeah. But the co-host of that show couldn't be a host anymore. And so he's like, hey, I got an opening for a host. Do you want to work with me? I'm like, sure. And the rest is history in a way. Eventually, we started a consultancy together, and that podcast became an asset of the business. And through some change, essentially, he had to leave the business and so the asset stayed with me and I'm like well

I gotta keep doing this kept doing it and eventually evolve the idea into more things and so that show was called the web 2.0 show oh my that takes me back. That's how far back it goes. But, you know, we talked to lots of people. Mint.com at the earliest of days. So did I. But not for a podcast, for a Linux journal, actually. The GitHub founders were on that show three months after GitHub's inception. Wild. So we talked to Tom Preston Warner and Chris Wadstroth in the offices of Pivotal Labs,

I want to say May 2008. And I think it was incepted like January, February maybe. So like legit right after GitHub was GitHub. Wild. So, but you've evolved into, how many shows do you have? How many shows we got, Jared? Well, we have the Change Log. The Change Log is a big one, right?

That's the big one. And that has three flavors. So it's one show, but there's a news component on Mondays. There's our interviews on Wednesdays. And then on Friday, we have a talk show, which is recurring guests, topical conversations. And so that's all. That's three different flavors of that show. Then we have other podcasts.

There's more. I know you have Practical AI. That's right. Practical AI is a big hit. We have JS Party. That's all about web development. We have Go Time, which is about the Go programming language, systems programming, etc.

We have Founders Talk, which is Adam's show. It's one-on-one conversations with founders, CEOs, and makers. Is that all of them? We have ShipIt. Did you say JS Party? I said JS Party. ShipIt is our cloud DevOps getting things into production and seeing what happens

show. Is that all of our shows? for commits is on it's retired okay it was uh 20 episodes 20 episodes mini series yeah kind of like that it had a plan for longer but it just um the hosts were done with the topic basically fair and they wanted to move on to new things. How many hosts do you have under your umbrella? It's not like you can't possibly all do this by yourself. No. So we have a couple of panel shows. So JS Party and Go Time are both community-oriented panel discussions,

of which I'm one of the panelists on JS Party, but neither one of us are on Go Time. Go Time has about six rotating hosts, and JS Party has eight. but neither one of us are on GoTime. GoTime has about six rotating hosts, and JS Party has eight, and any show has anywhere between one and three of those people on it with guests and stuff. So there's a group there, and then Practically AI is Chris Benson and Daniel Whitenack.

They've, since day one, have been the Practically AI co-hosts, and so we work with them to produce that show. Ship It was with Gerhard Lazo now we're in the process we put that on hold because he got a uh a very busy life at Dagger and we said okay let's set that aside now we're thinking about picking it back up again with a new host so there's one there who else do we work with that's it that's our that's about right that's our posse so that's probably like 12-ish. Awesome.

So people don't realize, I think, sometimes how much work a podcast is. Preach it, sister. There's a little bit of a trend in tech organizations. Yes. Companies, hey, let's start a podcast. That shouldn't be too difficult. But those of us who have done it even a little bit, even for a handful of years like me, are painfully aware that it is quite a bit of work. There's a lot of research.

There's a lot of post-production. It's not just hanging out and having conversations, right? Right. Tell us a little bit. Tell the world. For all of the people out there thinking they want to start a podcast, how much time would you say you spend researching topics, recruiting guests and all of that? That's a good question.

I mean, we've had the pleasure to be able to turn it into a business, and so it's easier now to do that work. We have support. We have support. We also don't have other things to do, so we can put a lot of work into it. Right, this is your actual job but the answer is constant i mean it's you're constantly scheduling you're constantly trying to see what's interesting you know because one of the things that we do is we help people realize

and know what's interesting right now and why i mean that's why a lot of white people come to us and so we have to keep up with all that stuff stuff. It's a lot. It's a lot. I don't know exact hours on research and scheduling, but I mean, scheduling out a podcast is a constant thing. When you have five podcasts a week, it's just one of the things that you're always doing. And you have to have a broad, you don't have to have deep knowledge,

but you have to have incredibly broad knowledge. You have to know a little bit about every single thing there is, practically. And that's a tough place to be. And I wonder, how do you pray? I mean, I assume you're always reading, like I am. Just humbleness, honestly. Is it humble to say you're humble?

I don't know. No. It's not. Because we approach things in the lens of being an imposter. So we tend to be the imposter for our audience in a way. Well, you're an audience proxy, yeah. Yeah, exactly. And we can't, because our show is so broad,

we can't know everything about everything, obviously. But what we can do is we can use our experience from here and from there to understand areas where we're not that deep. And just ask questions, obviously. Learn their story. In most cases, it's them sharing their story, not us knowing what their story is.

And as they begin to share it, obvious patterns begin to emerge that you can pattern match towards and apply to pretty much every conversation. You pick a CEO out here or a lead dev or a CTO and sit us down and talk to them. We could probably have a good conversation with pretty much anybody here with almost no research. It helps that open source people especially are very interesting. They just happen to be interesting people. Thankfully. You're attracted to the culture in a way.

The culture's different than non-open source tech. And so I think it attracts an interesting group of people. So that's half the battle, right? Is finding somebody who's interesting. But I wonder also, as you say, you know, you approach everything from the, from the lens of an imposter. Again, you talk to so many people and I feel the same way. I'm,

we're in a privileged position that you get, you get to gather information constantly. You're constantly talking about the next cool thing or, and, thing. And you get people who are incredibly excited about their topics and their areas of expertise. Does that kind of influence what you get excited about? It must at some point kind of narrow it down. And I'm kind of curious to know what you are most excited about, given that you've had all of these conversations. What's interesting to you in the open source world right now? So, gosh, that's a big question. I have asked myself this over time.

Like, what is a typical Jared interest? You know, because a lot of times we're serving our audience. We're listener first. We want to serve our audience. So I'm often thinking, like, what does our listener want to learn about, need to know about, et cetera, and not so much what I am. But what I've realized about myself, at least personally over time, is, A, I really geek out on open source licensing stuff. Okay. And I just, I think more so than our audience, I just enjoy the thought processes that go into it.

Still being a layman in the area, right? Like, still bringing on the experts to talk to us. But I enjoy those conversations because they just fascinate me. But then specifically in the craft of software, I don't really subscribe to like the craftsmanship movement. Because I know that was like a proper noun at one point. But I do really enjoy discussing with people who've been in the trenches writing code for many years, like how they do what they do and the way they go about making decisions, designing their software. Like, that's really where I end up camping out. So those kind of topics myself.

What about you, Adam? Well, I want to answer one question for Jared because there was many times after a show he would be like I gotta play with this right now like the excitement it was just too real yeah yeah but I would say for me I just like people I came for the software but I stay for the people and for me in many cases like I just get so excited about somebody else's story learning about it helping them realize where they could go and should go sometimes dreaming with them and giving them a path because they're just so close to their problem set they can't quite see the holistic picture and I feel like that's kind of like a a skill I have in a way and I enjoy

hearing people's stories so I think that's what brings it to me. I like open source licensing, of course. I love business. I love the journey of zero to one, what it takes to get there. And then from one to two. Getting anything started is hard. Yeah. How do you not only have the idea, but incept it, build a story around it, build a company around it, build a team around it, get people to invest into it, and then actually provide product market fit and value to customers and then profit. I like the profit side more than that.

Like, I'm all for startups and, you know, what it takes to get to profit. But, you know, I like sustainable things. Yeah. So a lot of respect for people who get there. What about you? What do you get out of that? Oh, yeah. So it's funny you mentioned licensing because I really enjoy those conversations, too.

I've been in, especially in the, you know, in the past several years, you could say, there have been a lot of controversies around software licensing. Absolutely. And I love getting into those conversations. I love hearing both sides. You know, here, we were in this tough spot, and here's the, we made this call. Maybe it was the right one, maybe it was the wrong one. And those are very interesting.

I love hearing from experts on licensing. I work with several of them, and that's really interesting, too. But, you know, I'm really excited about security. Maybe I'm a little paranoid, but right now I'm the most excited about how the open source community is reacting to heightened scrutiny on open source software in particular. I also really like, kind of along the lines of what Adam was saying, not so much the business side and the profitability side, but I really enjoy observing the life cycle of an open source project. What it takes to create something, release it into the world, which is a little bit of a scary thing,

and then build a community around it, and get people to actually contribute. Get people to actually want to help you build something and make it better. And, you know, that's really cool. And getting other people excited about what you're excited about is also a skill. And I think that's really fun to kind of watch and talk to people about.

And I love hearing project maintainers talk about how they get more people to open those pull requests, you know, because people are taking time out of their very, you know, very packed schedule again to write code for you and documentation or tweet for you or whatever it is that people are doing with any open source project. I think that's pretty cool. Yeah, it's amazing how some people have the ability to inspire others. Like, I'm giving my labor away to the world, open source. Yeah. And what I'm doing is so valuable and interesting that other people are like, you know what? I'm going to give mine away too. I'm going to actually make yours better. Just give you this gift on top of that other gift.

What's the fellow's name? Georgi Gerganov, the Lama.cpp. Yeah. I mean, just in terms of people who just seem like they have that ability, like if you watch his repos recently, a lot of it's like bringing ML model usage to the masses via open source tooling.

I mean, the PRs he gets are like huge features, really technical, really interesting. He's just inspired all these very smart, skilled developers to work on his projects with him. And that's just incredibly fascinating. Yeah. And, you know, you talk about the word imposter, which, you know, well, it's real. Getting people to contribute is not just about getting them excited. It's also getting them over the hurdle of being terrified to open the pull request.

Yeah. Because, you know, being on the other end of it and being somebody who has opened many a pull request, it took me years to work up the courage to do that. Because you have this sense that, well, the people who are maintaining, who have actual commit access, well, they must know way more than I do, right? Those are the experts. I couldn't possibly have anything to contribute there. I'll leave that to people who know what they're doing. But eventually you work up the courage and you go,

oh, wait, I actually do know some things. I can help fix this issue and that issue. Yeah. But it takes a lot of courage, I think, to get there. Kind of, if I could segue a bit, kind of like the courage it takes to stand in front of a microphone and hit record, which is a whole other thing. Yeah.

And I wondered if y'all could speak to that. Like, again, you've been doing this for so many years, it probably comes pretty naturally to you, but it doesn't necessarily come naturally to your guests. And I wonder, you know, how you help people through that. Because again, it can be intimidating. Again, if you're talking to people who are startup founders and they've pitched their idea to VCs and they're maybe more comfortable speaking, but when you talk to developers

and people who are immersed in code and IDEs all day, they don't necessarily have that level of confidence in speaking. And I wonder how you help those people along. I feel like our answer is logical. We're just people being people with people. We don't treat them. We come to conversation. When we talk to them, the pre-conversation, so to speak, before we're actually recording, but it's prior to what will actually be the show.

We're like, this is the show. We're just like this. And they're like, oh, cool. Okay, that's cool. And they relax. Yeah. Because it's not us throwing questions at them and us grilling them on X, Y, or Z. It's just listening.

It's just a conversation between people who are geeking out about software and what it takes to create good software and good community and to show up and to give and to, you know, I don't know, all the things that are involved in open source and being a maintainer, a contributor, a community member. And we just have a conversation. And that to me seems like a logical answer, but not everybody's like, that should be the answer. Like it should be somehow different. I think that that's true. And I know what you're saying, but at a more practical level, like we do have a process that we take people through that's intentional. Sure. And maybe we take it for granted now because we do it so often. That's probably true.

Most likely. It starts with a, we have a guest guide. Yeah, okay. And we send that to them and we've written it and we've rewritten it and we've updated it and it's very much like setting expectations. So that's the first thing is like making sure they know exactly what to expect and how they can prepare themselves.

If they're a person who wants to be very prepared, sometimes some people do. Just being prepared is relaxing. For me, I get more anxious the more prepared I get. So I just don't. But for them, sometimes it does. And so here's a way that you prepare. And then, you know, when the conversation starts, he's talking about, you know, we say certain things to help relax them. Like, for instance, this is not live.

This is going to be professionally edited. Oh, unless it is live. And if you screw up, no big deal. You can start over. Our editor is amazing. He listens to every word that we say. He takes good care of you. He's going to make all of us sound way smarter than we are.

And we say stuff like that, which I think helps people relax and realize that they're in good hands and also we are you know like adam says we start talking to them about things that have nothing to do with the show usually what you have for breakfast is where we start because anybody can talk about that and it's a good thing to ask for a sound check it's a great icebreaker and then you start talking about food now we're talking about food for a while. And then we get into it. We ask them if there's anything in particular that they want to make sure we talk about, anything that's off-limits,

just the standard kind of stuff to make people feel at ease and hopefully forget that they're being recorded. That being said, I mean, we've done this for many, many years, and I'll tell you, oftentimes, and I haven't been able to fix this. Maybe you can give me advice.

Oftentimes, the second half of our show is better than the first half always not just often almost always it's like can i invert that somehow warm it up i don't know it's a thing but there's so much foundation laid that you can't just edit out the first half and start with the second half struggle but man i'm like once we get rolling with somebody it's like this is good this is interesting like this is the goal then you can clip out the teaser from the second half. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Uh, yeah, I find that exact.

It's just, you know, human nature. That's the way we are conversationally. So when we hit record, it's the same. Ideally anyway. Yeah. You know, it's funny. You just think you talk, you talk about breakfast. My, my, uh, soundcheck intro is tell me your worst travel story.

Somebody gave me that advice a while ago about soundchecks because people get very animated when they're ranting about their luggage being lost or something like that. And so you can check different levels. Personally, the way I speak, and I struggle with this editing myself, my volume tends to vary tremendously, which is irritating for that core editor which is me but it's true because you can get very upset I guess if I was being a a uh a psychologist for

a second which I'm not on that is that breakfast is generally positive, whereas travel stories can be somewhat negative, and it may switch their psyche to be, like, angst or upset. They just get louder. Yeah. But how do you get them out of that mode? Right. It's like, now I'm upset about this travel adventure going wrong. Although the backfire on breakfast is lots of people haven't had it.

Right. Or they're in Berlin, and so they're like, I just had dinner, you know, and they're not thinking about breakfast. And so then you're kind of like, I knew that, but still. I don't find that people get into kind of a negative or angry mindset. They actually, they usually laugh about it because, you know, it usually wasn't that recent. We'll have to try that. I think that's a good question.

A good plan B. We should give it a shot and see if. Because when people talk about, again, we talk to tech people. Yeah. And they're talking about projects and they get really excited about whatever they're working on, or they're changing the world. And again, the volume goes up, and that's the fun part. But you do want to account for that, I think. Anyway, I think that's a fun little anecdote.

So tell me something else. I think we're kind of running out of time here. But I want to hear, what did you want to share with me, maybe, that I didn't get to? Keep doing it. Podcasting is awesome. It's fun, right? Tell stories. Find stories.

Share them. Get people to listen. Do what you can to find somebody who is less known and help them become more known. Or has a story that can't quite articulate it and help them articulate it. There's so much power in that as indie media. I suppose you work at Intel and that's less indie. Right. But the format is still indie.

We have a lot of power, right? We don't have to ask for the permission to publish to an RSS feed. Right. Yeah, yeah. It is empowering. It's absolutely empowering though. Yeah, yeah. But the process of producing a podcast or this kind of thing is just like you have the power to help people find new people across the globe.

Yeah. We can connect anywhere. And thanks to CDNs and things like that, people can download our show fast in Japan. You know? Like it's not somewhere in like Virginia, for example. Yeah. You know, it's everywhere. Everywhere you can listen to an English show show which is the primary language we do we have transcripts

we probably should think about transcribing to other languages but we haven't cracked that nut of like different languages but keep podcasting keep doing it don't stop yeah I like it it's an open source well again I'm completely focused on open source software but open source is about people it's about community podcasting is too get to know other podcasters grab a microphone hit record see what happens I like it yeah cool thanks y'all thank you thank you Well, friends, April is here, and that means that CloudFlares Developer Week is also here, happening April 1st through April 5th virtually.

They also have a meetup here in Austin that I'll be at on Wednesday, April 3rd in their ATX office. Check for a link in the show notes to register for that. Spots are limited, so secure your place right now. And I'm here with Matt Silverlock, Senior Director of Product at Cloudflare. So Matt, what is this week for you? Launching for developers, a bunch of new tooling, a bunch of new things that gets the next year

or the next several months revived and a resurgence for new things happening. What is that to you internally we call them innovation weeks which is kind of the way we think about it which is how do we ship a bunch of stuff that is meaningful to developers both getting some things over the line getting some early things out sharing some ideas some things that maybe aren't actually fully baked but kind of getting that out there and talking about it so that we get earlier feedback but it kind of comes back to like, how do we think about innovating?

And I think candidly, what's really, really helpful is kind of setting those deadlines, setting that week to kind of rally the team and get things out actually helps us get things done, right? There's always that tweaking for perfection, you know, another week here, another month there. It's nice when you set an immutable date, you get things out, gets it into the hands of the developers much faster. How do you then take that kind of, I suppose, approach and excitement to the bigger echelon that has become Cloudflare? Because I know DDoS, CDN, like pretty common things that

has been the building blocks of the, you know, behemoth that Cloudflare is today, but it's gone beyond that. Can you expand on like the breadth and depth of Cloudflare today and the excitement happening? Yeah, I mean, obviously we do a tremendous amount. And I think, as you said, most folks really know us for what we consider kind of the act one of Cloudflare, which is CDN, DDoS, DNS, web security. Since then, obviously we've done a lot in terms of zero trust and protecting companies and networks and obviously the developer platform as well. But although a lot of what our teams work on is developer platform, still a lot of the other things

that the rest of Cloudflare works on, like a web application firewall, like CDN, those are still developer products, right? You still need those as a developer to go in front of your website to protect what you're actually building. We're diehard R2 users. We had an insane S3 build

that just sent us absolutely on fire. It kept growing and growing and I was like, this can't happen anymore. We've had an affinity and a love for Cloudflare from afar in really a lot of cases until we're like, you know what? R2's pretty cool. We should use R2. And so we did

and I think I tweeted about it about a year ago and then over time, a relationship between us and Cloudflare has budded, which I'm excited about. But why are developers, we're opting for it, but for R2 in those cases, but why are developers opting for Cloudflare products over Amazon Web Services or other providers out there? There's a lot of answers to this, but I think the one that I find kind of connects a lot

of folks is we're building a platform that makes it easy to deploy, you know, reliable distributed services without being a distributed systems engineer. Because it turns out if I want to go and build something really reliable on sort of an existing cloud, I want to build it across regions. When I've got to egress across regions, got to pay for that. I need to make sure I'm spinning up shadow resources, right?

When you deploy to workers, for example, we just call that region earth, right? We take care of actually deploying all of those instances, keeping them reliable, spinning them up where they need to be spun up. If you've got users in Australia, then we spin one up there for you without asking you to think about it, without charging you extra to kind of do that. That ends up being really, really powerful. You get to compute closer to users. You don't have to think about that kind

of coordination. In practice, it's just really, really hard to do that on existing providers. So we find a lot of teams coming to us so they can build applications at scale like that. There you go. Celebrate live in Austin with us on Wednesday, April 3rd. Again, check for a link in the show notes for registering to that. Spots are limited and I'll be there. Otherwise, enjoy Cloudflare's Developer Week all week long from April 1st through April 5th. Go to cloudflare.com slash developer week.

Again, cloudflare.com slash developer week. Again, cloudflare.com slash developer week. Next up, this is me being interviewed by Dan Delamarski for his work item podcast. The work item is conversations on careers in tech and tech adjacent fields. So this one is more personal to me, how I got here, my priorities, the business of podcasting, not going viral, community building, stuff like that. I also give some career advice at the end that I think is pretty good, but of course I do. That's why it's my advice. Jared Santo, welcome to The Work Item. Great chatting with you. Hey, Dan. Thanks for having me.

I want to right off the bat start with ChangeLog because you're the co-founder of changelog and i myself ran into changelog and i want to say 2021 when one of my blog posts on user hostile software got aggregated on changelog at the time and i looked at my refers and i was like what the heck is changelog and then i started digging through them then i went down the rabbit hole of a bunch of podcasts and posts. And I saw that this guy, Jared, was running a bunch of things and was popping up on all these podcasts and shows. So tell us more. What is ChangeLog and how did you start it? Cool. So ChangeLog is, I guess we call it a media company now. It's a network.

We have a portfolio of weekly developer-focused shows that we do. And there's a news component, which we call ChangeLog News. And so we are all about the software world, helping people keep up, find interesting things, talk about interesting things, and talk to interesting people about, hopefully, interesting things. We've been doing that for a long time. I am a co-owner of the business, not a little trivia, not actual co-founder because I joined, I've been with ChangeLog for over 10 years now. My business partner, Adam Stachowiak, founded it back in 2009 with another guy named Wynne Netherland. Wynne went on to get a job at

GitHub. And of course, back then, it was podcasting was just a hobby for everybody. So it was not a business then. And I was a freelance consultant doing software development under my own business name and loved listening to the show, loved reading the blog, keeping up with open source software through it, saw it start to fade a little bit and thought I could help out as I was a business owner. So I had free time that I could just allocate towards getting involved. And I began blogging for ChangeLog and about a year later began co-hosting the show with Adam. And then eventually it grew into what it was. It's the two of us. So very much

a co-owner, just not a co-founder. So it was very much a serendipitous kind of transition to becoming the co-owner. It's not just out of nowhere. That's right. So I definitely saw value in it early on because I was a consumer that a lot of people didn't see. And Adam, my partner, had a really hard time getting other people to see the vision that he saw of how valuable this could be for people. But I saw it because I was one of those people who was like, I loved listening and hearing the lives of software developers, their decision-making processes, what they invest their time in. And then also just keeping up with new tools and techniques as a developer

who is really out on an Island in Nebraska, working by myself, four small clients, felt very much out on my own. It really made me feel connected to a larger community. And so I decided to invest in small ways over time. And I could see some value that I guess other people couldn't see. Adam saw it, obviously. And I guess that proved out to be good

because over time it's grown, grown, and grown. And eventually he began to go full-time. And then eventually I began to go full-time as we scaled down my consulting business. So yeah, it's gone really well. It's been kind of organic and slow and steady. That's one of our monikers. But we enjoy it.

And thankfully other folks seem to enjoy it as well. Yeah. And you had a blog post recently that was talking about this. The changelog has never gone viral. Right. I think that kind of resonated with me because you were talking about how, you know, if you think about your common podcast and shows, the virality factor of it comes from, you know, as you called out on the blog post, coming in like jeff bays is going to be talking on the show and everybody wants to share that but that's you know one in a million and then all the other podcasts and blogs and communities have to kind of do this steady long game and i think that's uncommon because a lot of folks nowadays

in the age of you know tiktok and YouTube and everybody wants to have like the one viral video that's going to propel me to fame. And then that rarely works. And you're taking the approach of saying, you know what? The long game is what it's all about. We're going to take the steady stream of high quality content and go from there. So talk to me more about kind of the motivations that you have for that. Yeah. So I'll be lying if I said I wouldn't take the viral moments as well. Of course, I would be happy to. We've had some viral moments with some of our content. It's just not our podcast content.

Some clips, some blog posts have gotten very popular from time to time. But yeah, those are kind of like when you close your eyes and swing the bat, and then you happen to just crack a home run. And then you think, well, that was awesome, but it's not a strategy. I can't just close my eyes and swing the bat every time. I'm not going to hit a home run again. And so chasing that is kind of in vain. But again, going back to being a listener of podcasts and a person who has been profoundly impacted by other people's podcasts, I know that there's an intimacy in a conversation. There's a trust that you gain over time with people. And you can rely upon independent podcasters, I've found,

to really have deep impacts. Maybe with a much smaller audience than what you're going to find on TikTok. But what kind of impact do you want to make? Do you want to make a broad impact or a deep impact or maybe both? Of course, we would all take both if we could. But given the choice, I will take the deep impact. And that's kind of what that post was about. It wasn't complaining that we've never gone viral.

It's just kind of factual and saying, actually, it's OK, because here we are. We are both happy people who can raise our families and do work that we're enjoying, and we can have an impact on people. And it may not be a million people all at once, but maybe it's a few thousand people in a deep way. And I think that podcasting really does afford that because of the medium, but it's hard and it takes time and there's no shortcuts really, unless you already have an established audience or, you know, some other medium. And so because of that, it's toil, like, you know, you're doing podcasts now, like you just got to show up and put out a show every week or whatever your cadence is

and you got to edit it and you got to name it and you got to promote it and you got to just keep on doing that hamster wheel of content creation as we come to know it by and it's hard to do that over the long term if you don't have any sort of like positive feedback loops so in your case you are running quite a few shows like i'm the most familiar with js party uh but you have a few others in the kind of the network yeah how do you scale it in a way that doesn't burn you out? Because you're an active participant in a lot of them. You're not just somebody that kind of sits on the sidelines and says, you know what, I'm just the manager of it. I arrange things and you all go and film it.

You actually do this. Yeah, that's a hard question. And that's one that we've tried to do and failed and tried other things. How do we scale it? Well, the and tried other things how do we scale it well the first question is like do we scale it you know and that's the first thing that we had to talk to ourselves like okay do we want to scale it because bigger isn't always better what kind of lifestyle do we want to have and how much do we want to work and how much stress do we want to have and so we did at some point decide that The Change Log,

which is the oldest show, it's our main show, it's what the network's named after, didn't have enough, I don't know, inventory for what we liked. You know, you think about you got 50 shows a year with a weekly interview, take a couple weeks off, that's 50 interviews a year. And we had listeners who wanted a bunch of different types of content that that show just could not serve.

And so we did want to scale beyond one show. And so how do we scale it? Well, we first of all, scale the voices. We don't want to just be the two of us on every podcast because A, that's pretty boring to have the same two voices all the time. B, we're not experts in many arenas, so we can be curious, but we can't have really good takes. And C, we get burnt out.

And so we decided to go out and find like-minded people who are interesting and want a podcast, but don't have all of the infrastructure and all of the stuff figured out, the workflows that we've just developed over time, and enable them to do, you know, shows that we then produce. I do participate in a lot of those just because I enjoy it. Adam does as well. And so we end up being on those shows like JS Party. I'm a regular

on there, but there's a whole bunch of people involved. And then you just scale things the way you scale business things. You know, you hire editors, you, you know, you figure out more productive ways of doing the same thing. So you're spending 30 minutes versus four hours, that kind of stuff. And then at a certain point, we stopped. We are pretty much maxed out right now. We do five or six weekly podcasts. And I could not add a seventh right now without significantly impacting my life, which I don't really want to do. So it sounds like you're taking the approach that, I think Rob Walling coined the term of like,

start small, stay small. Intentionally so. Like there is not every company and business needs to be that billion dollar, you know, like massive. Like you can reach a point of like, this is actually good enough in both terms of revenue and both terms of kind of the balance with the rest of your life. Yeah. You have to decide what you want in life, you know, and if you find

yourself in a privileged position to be able to make those kinds of choices, then you decide what matters most. And if more money and more power and more fame or whatever comes out of building the business bigger is what you want, then that's what you go after. But I've always desired freedom and liberty more than money. And so I could make more money with this, but I would be giving up freedom and liberty and time to do other things. And Adam feels the same way. So we're both on the same page there.

Of course, we have shiny object syndrome and we have moments where you're like, here's a huge opportunity. Should we seize it? And we have to talk you're like, here's a huge opportunity, should we seize it? And we have to talk to each other and make those decisions. But ultimately we've always come back to, we're really happy to do this work and it's satisfying work and we just haven't decided to go ahead and scale it to the hilt

and chase the dollars. I think that's paid off. There's been times where, of course, opportunities come by and you think, maybe we took some investment, we could hire more people, we could do more. There's so much we could be doing that we aren't. And that's really the problem is like, we could have a whole news wing.

We could have way more written content. We've always wanted to have more of those posts like the one I wrote about the change log not going viral. Our whole written side of our business is pretty weak. And I know we could just make that better with money and people. But ultimately we've chosen kind of freedom and lifestyle so far.

And I think that's been a pretty good decision for where we are. Was there any point in your life where that kind of pivotal light bulb went off about the choice of freedom and liberty versus money? Because I'm listening to you talk about this. And again, it's a very uncommon kind of mental model. Because if you talk to folks that are starting off in their careers in tech or entrepreneurs, a lot of them are motivated. But like, I want to grab just as much money as I can as fast as I can.

Yes. So my first boss out of college also happened to be a pastor at my church. So we had a very close relationship. And I'm a Christian guy, and I read the Bible and stuff. And the Bible says, like, if you can achieve liberty, seek liberty. I think one of the principles is like, be happy where you are, but if you can be more free, take more free. And he impressed that upon me at a young age. And I thought, yeah, that sounds about right. And then I started trying to live by that just a little bit in certain ways. And I found it very satisfying to trade that for

other things. And a lot of times that's money often it's time you know it's commitments and then i've had times where i went and chased the money and then i've asked myself like am i better off now because i've got the money but now i've got less freedom yeah or less time and more responsibilities i'm always like actually because i'm taking care of financially you know my base needs my family's base needs, this extra money isn't adding that much and I traded in something that was worth more. And so I think it just kind of proved itself out to be true a few times.

And so that's when I really started doubling down and saying, okay, I got to be very careful about saying yes to things that reduce my freedom. Yeah, and that's a very intentional decision that it sounds like also it did not come out of nowhere. Like it's not one of those things that it's like, oh, you know, it's good enough. It's a, like there's a mental shift coming with it.

Yeah, absolutely. And so far, I think it's proven itself to be true and I'm sticking with it, at least for now. Yeah, as with any part of life, it comes in waves, so things can change. But I find it, at least for now. Yeah. As with any part of life, it comes in waves. So things can change, but I find it an admirable mental model. Now, in terms of the community that you're running, so ChangeLog is pretty big.

And I see a lot of focus on JavaScript, which is arguably, or JavaScript and the web, I'll put it this way. Which is arguably a very fast-evolving space. Like the meme about there's a new JS framework coming out every day on Hacker News somewhere, like it's happening. How do you keep up with things

that are truly important for developers to know that you bring up on your shows versus the noise? Because there's a lot of noise. Right. Okay, so that's a hard question because you spend years and years developing what I'll just call taste because I can't have a better word for it. And then you have some taste and you're not sure why you have it, but just because you put the time in. And then someone says like,

how did you develop that taste? And it's like, I just spent a lot of time looking at projects. I mean, I've been doing software development for 20 years. I've been in the open source world for a very long time. I've seen so many things come and go. I've seen things come and stay. And I just, I don't want to say I have a knack for it. I just think I have a trained sense of what's good and what's maybe not so good, what's worth paying attention to and what you can probably skip that I just use that knack because I've just developed it over time. Also, of course, we have feedback loops. We have other people who are smart. You know what your friends are into.

JS Party is a good example. That's a show with eight people on it. I'm just one of the eight and I have a very specific purview of the world. I have my own tastes. I have what interests me and they all have that exact same thing. And so I listened to them and I say, what's interesting to you right now? Or I'll take a link and I'll send it over to Nick Nisi and say, Hey, is this something that you think is worth us talking about on the show? And he may be like, yeah, let's get them on the show. And so that's like a positive reinforcement of, okay, this was a good decision. Or he'd be like, maybe, maybe not. And you're like, okay, maybe that's not so interesting. So it's being plugged into other people who are doing the same thing, caring,

and then just also just putting the time in and trying a lot of stuff. I mean, I've played with so many software projects over the course of my career that I've just have developed the skill of kind of spotting what's, what's worth paying attention to and what's not. And of course I still screw it up sometimes and I chase a shiny object and then it's like, you know, it turns out that wasn't sustainable or something like that, but that's as best as I can explain it. Yeah. You're still actively developing, right? Like you're're an engineer like it's not just you reading the news it's you're actually using things absolutely and that's a really been another principle of mine is like i can't i cannot simply become a talking head i had a teacher in college who was

an adjunct professor and he taught databases and he and it was a night class because during the day, he worked on databases. And he was my best teacher in college. And he was an adjunct professor who was just doing it as his day job. And the full-time professors who their entire job was just to teach C++ or whatever, they were very unplugged. They were behind the times. They didn't teach me very much. And so that guy was a good example of

me of like you know what learn from people who are still doing it because they just have the real world experience and so I always want to be still doing it and not just talking about it not just teaching it and so yeah I actively write code as often as I possibly can and play with the things myself and get my hands into the mud. What you're about to hear are real reactions from PagerDuty users in response to seeing signals from FireHydrant for the first time. PagerDuty, I don't want to say they're evil, but they're an evil that we've had to maintain. I know all of our engineering teams as well as myself are interested in getting this moving the correct direction as right now just managing and maintaining our user seats has become

problematic. That's really good, actually. This is a consistent problem for us and teams, is that covering these sorts of ad hoc timeframes is very difficult. You know, putting in like overrides and specific days and different new shifts is quite onerous. And you did the most important piece, which is didn't tie them together, because that's half the problem with PagerDuty, right? Is I get all these alerts and then I get an incident per alert.

And generally speaking, when you go sideways, you get lots of alerts because lots of things are broken, but you only have one incident. Yeah, I'm super impressed with that because being able to assign to different teams is an issue for us because like the one the one alert fires for one team and then it seems like to have to bounce around and it never does. Which then means that we have tons of communication issues because like people aren't updated. No, I mean, to be open and honest, when can we switch? So you're probably tired of alerting tools that feel more like a headache than a solution, right? Well, Signals from Fire Hydrant is the alerting and on-call tool designed for humans, not systems. Signals puts teams at the center, giving you the ultimate control over rules, policies, and schedules. No need to configure your services or do wonky workarounds. Ingest data seamlessly from any source using webhooks

and watch as Signals filters out the noise, alerting you only on what matters. Manage tasks like coverage requests and on-call notifications effortlessly within Slack. You can even acknowledge alerts right there. But here's the game changer. Signals natively integrates with Fire Hydrant's full incident management suite.

So as soon as you're alerted, you can seamlessly kick off and manage your entire incident inside a single platform. Learn more or switch today at firehydrant.com slash signals. Again, firehydrant.com slash signals. How do you find the time for all this? As a podcast host, entrepreneur, an engineer, that sounds like it's a lot. It would eat out of 24 hours on a given day easily 23 hours. Well, that's a good question. I guess on top of that, I also have six children

that we homeschool and other things going on. I coach basketball at night. I got lots of things. So not much time. I don't really have a great answer of how I do it. I have to be judicious with where I invest my time. I have to not do things that waste my time. I have to set aside time for certain things, right?

But I'm always prioritizing what has to happen today, what has to happen right now. There's a show that goes out by 5 p.m., that's got to happen. And then after that, I can do those other things. And so it's just a constant battle, but just always asking yourself what's the most important thing right now and realizing that actually trying the stuff, coding the stuff, building stuff has to be in that list of most important things

and keeping it there. That's probably the best way I can say that. And once again, the theme of being very intentional about how you spend your time. It's also hard to prioritize things because I'm assuming if you're running that many podcasts, I'm sure the business evolves quickly as well and you need to catch up with a lot of things

and jumping in between kind of business mode versus software engineer mode versus I'm a father, I have to deal with this. It's a lot of context switching. It is. Have you heard of Paul Graham's

maker schedule, manager schedule? Yes, very classic post. That really did help me be able to know what mode I'm in. So as a small business owner, you know, I'm both a maker and a manager. And as a podcaster and an editor, I'm constantly in communications with people about scheduling and rescheduling and when does this have to happen? And this goes out this day. And so like,

there's very much this manager scheduler thing where I'm like emailing, I'm calendaring, I'm doing all these things. And then I have to be able to also just like sit down and edit and master and produce a show, which could take three hours or add a feature to our website, which could take four hours. And so you really have to switch into maker schedule and just like go deep work focus mode and be able to block those times. And that's a struggle too, because one thing can pull you out of maker mode and back into manager mode. And I struggle to keep those things away from me,

but I try my best, you know, it's tough. Yeah. And especially in the tech space where you kind of have to jump between a calendar invite, you have a meeting and then after a meeting, you have half an hour empty before the next meeting. How do you fill that half hour? Do you actually jump into the zen focus mode? Because that's hard. I don't know if half an hour is enough. It's not for me. Yeah, I don't think so. If it's not two hours, I'm pretty much got to stay in manager mode. I don't even know if this is embarrassing. I don't even know if this is actually in the GTD book. But somebody else who read the GTD book told me this

and so I assume it's in there, which is if you can get it done in two minutes, just do it right now. And I think that's in there, but I have never actually confirmed it myself, so I don't want to spread it. I think it is. I read it a long time ago. I think it is, yeah. It's basically get it done now. I use that constantly. Like, is it less than two minutes? Just do it.

And especially when I have a half an hour, because think about how much you can get done on the manager mode in a half an hour if you're like, okay, what are all the things I can just get done right now? Mostly it's emails, it's calendaring, it's a few decisions here or there. Maybe it's fix a bug real quick.

But if you don't have two hours, I mean, what can you really get done that's intense? Yeah, especially like the calendar slice and like 30 to 15 minute slices, like not very efficient for anyone. Yeah. Now, in terms of building developer communities, so arguably you've built a very successful community

with kind of a podcast network around it. What do you think kind of sets ChangeLog and the work that you've done apart from the myriad of other developer communities that also might have a podcast or two, right? Sure. It seems to be the yearly trend where new things are popping up, but ChangeLog kind of has stood the test of time. What sets it apart? You might have to ask our community for that. I think from my perspective, we really do care. And I think a lot of people are community building,

but they're doing it because they want to have a community. And like the community is not like a toy that you have or like a thing that you acquire, like you'd buy a car. Like it's a bunch of people that enjoy the same things or rally around a common cause. And again, it goes, some of it goes back to the time. Like we've just been doing this a very long time. And how do you build a community? Well, you do the same stuff over and over and over again. And then people see you doing that stuff

and they're like, Hey, I like that stuff too. And then you're like, all right, come do it with us, you know, come hang out. And so I think we have a, there's a sincerity. Like we really do care about the people that we talk to and talk with and hang out with in our community. We don't have a huge community. I mean, there's bigger ones out there, but we've just kind of, again, slow and steady, rolling down the road together.

You just pick up people, and then they become... There's people in our Slack community that have been hanging out with me for years. And we know them very well just community that have been hanging out with me for years. And we know them very well just because that's what happens over time. So a little bit of sincerity, a little bit of just sticking to it and providing a place that people actually want to hang out. Are there any aspects of the community building process that you're undertaking that you'd say are unique to changelog because you kind of alluded to the fact that like this community in slack and there's so many of them that keep popping up and i get invites and then like all the times like oh join this product manager community the slack with like 12 people right and there's just a lot of them and it all at some point devolves into community members

sharing you know links to blog spam and blog posts and it just becomes like all right this is not a community this is just like a like a link aggregation service that is kind of useful yeah yeah and we've definitely had people that pop in and want to use our community like that and that's been the main moderation move i mean because we have i don't even count you know there's thousands of people that hang out yeah together but probably like regulars that are like regularly chatting it's probably like a hundred count, you know, there's thousands of people that hang out together, but probably like regulars that are like regularly chatting. It's probably like a hundred of us, you know, with, with thousands lurking, which is totally cool. Cause I also lurk in other communities as well. But the main moderation I've had to do is like, Hey, you know, don't come here and just

spam us with your stuff because people want to use communities for exactly that. Like act like they've been here for a while and like, hey, I'm just running a survey. It's like, you can't just come in here and pop your survey in, sorry. So we are pretty quick on the delete button for that kind of stuff. I don't think there's anything,

and I don't think I have any tips or tricks or anything unique to us. You know, we've been putting out shows for a long time. So people that like our shows like to hang out together and that's kind of just the way it is were there any moments in since kind of you started working on changelog that kind of looking back you'd say are your biggest lessons it sounds a little cliche but effectively maybe things that you'd say like wow that was a a teaching moment like a moment that I learned something or a moment that I... Probably for you.

Yeah. Yeah. So this wasn't a moment, but I think that it's taken time, but it has been profound to me learning the power of just consistently showing up, like just the consistency and how compounding consistency is when you're building something. I think that we've had times where we've been less consistent with it, even with just production. So I don't know if you listen to podcasts like I do, but I'm also a podcast listener to this day. And I have podcasts that I love and they become a part of

my life. I integrate them into my life and, you life and I expect them to be there for me at certain times. So if a show that usually publishes on a Friday morning doesn't publish that week or it's like Saturday afternoon, maybe I've just moved on and it doesn't fit anymore. So like podcast listeners, they're hard to find and acquire as like somebody who's gonna be there.

But once they listen, if you give them good stuff consistently, they're going to listen for years. And I'm one of them. I will listen to a show for years. Um, but it has to like fit into where I fit it into my life. And so that habitual listener, which I don't think many people think about, but we definitely think about is the one who can't wait for your show to drop because they're used to it dropping at this time or day. And it's already, it's their Friday afternoon jog, you know, or it's their commute on Monday morning or whatever it is. And during times of inconsistency, we had a really hard time

building anything, even though I think the quality was there of our shows and we were putting all the effort in, but we were just inconsistent and those shows just stagnate. But just the consistency, whatever cadence you decide, whether it's weekly, daily, bi-weekly, monthly. And I think weekly is the best balance of all of that, which is why most of our shows are, are weekly, just staying consistent and just like being there for people is really something that I learned. It's just very effective and it makes things grow. And that took a while. That took a while to figure out.

What's interesting about this is specifically into kind of the domain of podcasts. I think that consistency is especially discouraging to newer entrants because podcasts kind of blew up. You know, we saw like a few years back, like Spotify got into it and there's this kind of flood of new people coming in and saying, I will have a podcast too.

And then two episodes in four episodes and five episodes. And they still don't see like the thousands of followers coming in. Right. And people just kind of like, ah, you know what? Like I'll skip this week. I'll skip next week. Oh, we'll do it next month. And it just never grows and people just kind of like oh you know what like i'll skip this week i'll skip next week oh we'll do it next month and it just never grows and it kind of struck me that there was some stat shared recently uh there was like the median podcast length is seven

episodes after which people just drop off they're like they just completely lose desire to continue it's like wow and then the podcasts that do survive like js party like focus on your network are the ones that kind of keep on pushing despite the fact that like maybe the growth is not as astronomical initially as you hoped it would be yeah that rings true and i definitely we've been doing it long enough that we've seen so many people come in and start throwing podcasts and some are scary, you know, from like, okay, they're going to take some of our audience away, you know, or they're big names or they have a big budgets and large organizations behind them. Of course, at a certain point, all enterprises need to have a podcast. And, you know, we're sitting here thinking like, is anybody going to have time

to listen to our shows when they're going to be listening to, you know, some Fang members show some large entity that has a huge budget and can put out all this stuff. And most of those are gone now. I mean, so many podcasts are just gone. Even the good ones, sadly, don't survive. We have in our portfolio shows that are like, we've had trouble keeping all of our shows alive

and we're trying really hard because they have to be sustainable. And yeah consistent ones the ones who are dedicated which really does require you to have some sort of i don't know if extrinsic is the right word but like some sort of other motivation that's feeding it in order for you to continue like there's some shows where it's friends getting together and talking yeah and like they'll do that forever right because they just enjoy getting together and talking and maybe it's their excuse yeah to talk once a week or once a month and those shows are awesome and those people tend to survive because they just love to get together and talk about whatever the hobby is um and so that's just one example of like that's

their motivation it's not the audience it's not the listens it's not the audience. It's not the listens. It's not the money. It's that opportunity to get together. And so if you have something like that, in a lot of cases, it's your own learning. Like, well, I'm just learning. I want to keep learning. It's a good excuse to talk to smart people on a microphone who otherwise wouldn't spend an hour with you. But now they're going to teach you stuff.

That's a great motivation that keeps podcasters going. And eventually those podcasts do grow it's an interesting balance though because you kind of talked about the example of friends talking and this was another thing that especially in the past few years like since the pandemic you saw people kind of jump on the mic and there's like oh yeah two friends talking right it's like it's just kind of rambling for like an hour and then you start listening to that show it's like well but nothing useful for the audience was actually like, it's just kind of rambling for like an hour. And then you start listening to that show. It's like, well, but nothing useful for the audience was actually there. It's just two people talking. So it's kind of the balance of like, sure, they're not maybe

motivated by growing a large following, but at least the content is somewhat useful. Yeah. Which I mean, to a certain extent, I was contradicting what we do because we don't really do any of the just friends talking stuff. Like we do joke around. And we've added a talk show to our lineup, which is more chill and more conversational than our other shows. But we're about education, really. And so if we're not exposing you to new things or new ideas or new people, what are we really doing? We're not going to talk about the weather or our, our food or that kind of stuff and just waste people's time. Because I got very frustrated with podcasts

where I'd show up for the topic, but the topic would be buried 20 minutes into small talk between the two hosts. And it's like, let's not be those people. So there's definitely a time and a place in certain, I mean, if it's a show about movies and friends are getting together to talk about a movie, but they're talking about what they had for breakfast the whole time, it's like, exactly. This goes to another one of our mottos, which is give the people what they came for. Yeah. We very much believe in giving them what they came for and not something else. And so, yeah, there's a balance there. I just saying that like, if you get together, you're friends and you enjoy that,

you're more likely to do it ongoing, but maybe your show just stinks anyways i don't know oh it totally makes sense and so in the context of the work that you're doing with changelog one of the things that you do sometimes i see these like very interesting like off like takes that you get and these takes are so you know some things like wasted time if you're spending a lot of time building your editor configuration and all these things. But the other piece was something that stood out to me recently where I ran into one of your clips that was soft skills. And the focus on importance of soft skills for developers. And this is something that a lot of developers neglect. And as a podcast host yourself, as somebody that runs a community, I'm sure you are the one that appreciates kind of the value of soft skills the most.

How do you see kind of developers in the modern tech space evolving those soft skills? Because I see it so, so commonly where folks have a hard time kind of communicating their ideas. They have a hard time soliciting feedback and reacting to said feedback. They have a hard time putting things in writing. There's a lot of these things that are not implicitly kind of technology related, but are key to success. And something that, again, you

said it and it just went out for me. It's like, oh my gosh, this is exactly that that I wish more people knew about. Yes. Well, I can't speak for all of the developers out there, the engineers or the programmers, whatever they want to call yourselves this time of year. And maybe I'm in a bubble

because we do tend to speak with developers who like to speak on podcasts and they're very much, they're polished with some of their, at least communication skills, which for me, communication skills are the cross-cutting most valuable skill you can have in your life, the ability to communicate.

It helps you in your career. It helps you in your relationships. It helps you get what you want. It helps you not get what you don't want. I mean, to be able to communicate, which is a very hard thing, and one that I think all of us are still constantly learning how to get better at or

or not, is a superpower, especially for software engineers, where you already have a power, but you can't necessarily wield it to its full strength without being able to convince somebody that this is a good idea or defend a decision that you made, or show your manager that you are very productive. And here's how you went about solving problems. I mean, it's so valuable. And I think that the people who are plugged, at least the people who are plugged into our community, know that and they seek ways of improving that.

And so they're reading the books, they're listening to the podcasts, they're trying to improve not just their engineering skills. Because at the end of the day, yes, programming is hard, but it's nowhere near the hardest thing that we have to do in our jobs. And the people who realize that are the ones who transcend. And they get the promotions, and they get the raises, and they start their own businesses, and they just have success.

And the rest of them, we just stay writing code. And some people are happy to do that, and that's fine. But there just isn't really a path to progress if you're not willing to round out you know make yourself a full-fleshed human being do you think that you being a podcast host and kind of running your podcast network helped you hone that skill communication oh absolutely absolutely just the ability to listen which is really hard for a lot of people because, and, and for young Jared as well was more difficult because I was more waiting for my turn to talk when I was younger,

you know, because I was going to show you what I know. Like you show me what you know, now I'll show you what I know. I wasn't ever listening. I was just waiting for my turn. And I see that, especially in young people, but I see that in lots of people where I can tell, oh, you're not listening to me. You're just waiting. You're waiting for your turn. And as an interviewer, of course, the main thing that you do, the main thing that you have to do is listen, which is hard because life is distracting and my thoughts are very entertaining to me. And maybe yours aren't quite as entertaining to me right now because you just keep talking. And I'm trying to, you know, it's hard. And of course, just by interviewing people hundreds of times, you're going to get better at it. You're going to start listening more and reacting to what they say and not just

reading the next question that you've written down. And I was terrible at that, you know, but then I did it a hundred thousand times and now I'm just a little bit less terrible than I used to be. It comes with experience. Yeah, absolutely. And consistency. That's right. That's how you get the experience. You keep showing up. I love this. I feel like this show was packed with a lot of gems that are honestly like reusable in a lot of domains, not necessarily tech, but I always wrap up the episode with a question for my guest. That is, if you think of a piece of unconventional advice that stems from your experience, that you would advise somebody younger that is early in their career, maybe they're contemplating

of starting a company similar to the one that you're working on right now, what would that be? I don't know if this is unconventional, but I think it's perhaps so obvious that people don't say it. And so I'll just say the obvious. And I'll say that if you do this one thing, regardless of your career path, you will find success. It's not complicated. It is hard.

And it's this. When you tell somebody that you're going to do something, then you do it. No matter what, do it. That's it. That's the tip. And that applies in any career. And that's so rare to find somebody who consistently does what they say they're going to do. They follow up afterwards. They send that email. They deliver the message. Whatever it is, they finish the chore. They do the backup.

Whatever it is, if you just do the things that you said you were going to do, you will be so valuable to so many people, not just in the workplace, but especially in the workplace. And everybody will want to have you around and they're going to want to give you things to do and they're going to invest in you because that's a very hard thing to accomplish.

But if you just set your mind to it, like, oh, I said I was going to do this, I better do it. And then you do it, you'll find success. I love it. Especially given that it's very easy to slip out of that mode. And what you just described

as it's being very common in young people, you definitely see a lot of that. Like, oh yeah, I'll give you that review by tomorrow. And tomorrow comes, review is never there. Like, oh, it slipped my mind. I'll do it later next week. The next week comes and it's still not there. Like, oh, it slipped my mind. I'll do it later next week. The next week comes and it's still not there. There's a thousand and one reasons why you might not get something done.

But if you're the person that does get the thing done they said they're going to do, people will just bring you more and more of work, more and more business, more and more raises. Because that's so valuable. It's just reliable and a finisher. You know, it's easy to start things. It's hard to finish them. So if you become a finisher, then you're on the right path. Unstoppable.

What a way to wrap up this episode. Jared, thank you so much for being here. Where can folks learn more about the things that you build, the things that you do? Pretty much all of my work in this domain is found at changelog.com. And we'll make sure to include the links to all the podcasts.

Changelog, it's all in the show notes, so make sure to check it out. Jared, thank you again for being here. Thank you, this was awesome. Thanks once again to both Catherine and Den for inviting us on their pods. It's fun being on the other side of the interview

every once in a while. Speaking of, Adam and I will be on Joe Reese's podcast next week. Oh, and if you're a podcaster and would like us to join you on your show, don't hesitate to ask. Who knows? If it turns out well enough,

we might even feature it on a future episode of The Change Log. You heard Dan asking me about our awesome community, but have you joined our awesome community? And if no, why not? It's totally free. Come hang with us. We play games together. We home lab together. We talk about shows we're watching. We discuss software news and more. Sign up today at changelog.com slash community. Again, it's free. What are you waiting for?

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when you sign up and they'll give you a hundred bucks off the team plan. That also helps us show our value to them, so please, do use code CHANGELOG when you create your Sentry account. give you a hundred bucks off the team plan. That also helps us show our value to them. So please do use code changelog when you create your Sentry account. That's all for today, but come back for

changelog and friends on Friday for our third installment of It Depends. I'm joined by Adolfo Ochagavia and we'll be It Depends-ing whether or not you should specialize or generalize in your software career. That's a good one. I'm looking forward to it. We'll talk to you then. Thank you. Outro Music