Dan Abramov’s excellent Goodbye, Clean Code post (wherein he learned it was wise to walk back an overzealous refactoring) reminded me of something Dave Thomas said when we interviewed him and Andy Hunt about the Pragmatic Programmer’s 20th edition: We’ve also looked at the reaction to various parts ...

This is a fancified excerpt of John Graham-Cumming’s amazing story from Go Time #113. To get the full experience you should listen while you read. 🎧  Click here to play the episode starting where John's story begins  🎧 I had lived abroad for a long time, as I am now doing again. But in 2009 I came b...

What you’re about to read is an excerpt from Go Time #114. You should read the original transcript or listen to the entire conversation for more context. To set the stage, this is the 2nd of Kelsey Hightower’s unpopular opinions (our new segment which people seem to be enjoying.) Monoliths are the f...

Results are in for the 2019 State of JS survey1. I’ve been digging through charts to see what I can see. Here are 7 insights that jumped off the page to me. 1. TypeScript is winning developer hearts 💚 Travel back to 2016 and developer awareness of TypeScript was already at 97%, but interest was bare...

Gone are the days when we developers were too shy/humble/introverted to promote our warez with the confidence and vigor necessary to draw a crowd. In fact, we may be experiencing an over-correction. Some of us are selling a bit too hard at times. With that in mind, here’s some help translating betwe...

Nat Friedman, GitHub CEO @ GitHub Universe 2019 — "Open source has won." Did you miss GitHub Universe this year? We did too, but we have an insider giving us all the details to share with you so you can stay productive and still keep up. This is a summary of what was announced at GitHub Universe 201...

As the saying goes… history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes. If you want to create a successful programming language (or at least understand how you might), it’s immensely valuable to learn from others who have done just that. On Go Time #100, Rob Pike and Robert Griesemer (two of Go’s cr...

I’m excited to announce our newest podcast — Brain Science! Brain Science is a podcast for the curious. Are you curious?! We’re exploring the inner-workings of the human brain to understand behavior change, habit formation, mental health, and being human. It’s Brain Science applied — not just how do...

We’re stoked about All Things Open in October! Never heard of it? Here’s the big picture: All Things Open is the largest open source/open tech/open web conference on the east coast of the United States.  It regularly hosts some of the most well-known experts in the world as well as nearly every majo...

What you’re about to read is an excerpt from The Changelog #354. Read the original transcript or listen to the entire conversation for more context. To set the stage, we were talking about the ethical concerns around synthetic biology… If all we do is restrict biohacking completely, like “No man’s l...

A generative engineering culture is one where nothing seems to fall through the cracks, “we should” gets prioritized and becomes reality, and original ideas and value come primarily from engineers, rather than management. A culture like this is an engine for building capacity, quality, innovation, a...

The only thing that you can reliably do to validate an email address is to send it an email. YOU SEND IT AN EMAIL! That’s the only way you can do it. I know what you’re thinking, “I have the best regular expression for this!” Any sufficiently advanced regular expression is indistinguishable from mag...

Having spent the better part of the last decade as a work-from-home developer, I have discovered or adopted a few LIFE HACKS which I am going to share with you now. In no way am I claiming that these WEIRD TRICKS will work for everyone; however, they work for me. I want to also be clear: unless I’m ...

Divya, Emma, and I had a gab session on BOOKS during the final segment of JS Party #73. The list of recommended reads from that convo was too good to only exist buried in the episode’s show notes, so here they are: some must-read books for aspiring JS devs! 1. Refactoring UI The pitch: Learn how to ...

If there’s one thing successful community projects have in common, it’s that they all provide something valuable to the developers who use them. However, the way that value is delivered varies widely from project to project. Some community projects educate developers on new technologies. Some are op...

This morning I stumbled across Griffith – a React-based web video player. That’s cool and all, but you know what’d be even cooler? A web video player that we all can use. There’s a recurring theme in open source where TECHNOLOGY_X gets popular and then a bunch of libraries and tools get created spec...

Two new terms have recently emerged around software delivery: Software Defined Delivery and Progressive Delivery. Why? How do they relate to Continuous Delivery? Several forces today make delivery increasingly complex. Notably, proliferation of repositories, with hundreds of small projects replacing...

We recently covered a post on Tidelift’s blog1, where Havoc Pennington makes the argument that open source has a working-for-free problem. The narrative around open source is that it’s completely OK—even an expectation—that we’re all doing this for fun and exposure; and that giant companies should g...

At Stuff we don’t have a bunch of principles and structures, except for one very important one… Everyone in the company is reading our incoming support emails. The past 20 years as a Project Manager, Product Owner, Digital Product Developer, Head of Blah Blah and Founder has taught me the importance...

In late 2016 we relaunched changelog.com as a new Phoenix application and improved the deployment process. Last year we open-sourced the infrastructure code, and now we are doing one better: we will go over the new changelog.com setup for 2019. The new features are so good that we cannot keep to our...

We’ve been fans of Kent C. Dodds’ All Contributors spec since he told us about it on The Changelog #246. The basic idea is this: Use the project README (or another prominent public documentation page in the project) to recognize the contributions of members of the project community. This is a great ...

Building an open source business is hard. There are so many variables. First you have to solve a problem for software developers that's worth adopting. Then you have to create a good enough product around that open source worth paying for. You have to care about the open source community, the mainta...

If you’ve been watching the news, you know that the latest data breach involved Marriott exposing 500 million guest reservations from its Starwood database. The kicker is that the unauthorized access to the Starwood guest database stretches back to 2014. That’s FOUR YEARS of unfettered access to thi...

Dgraph founder Manish R Jain gave us an excellent explanation of graph databases on episode 322 of The Changelog. (Thanks to listener Evan Genest for highlighting this fact on Twitter.) I extracted that section from our trusty episode transcript for your reading pleasure: I think graphs are probably...

Little bits of appreciation can make big differences in maintainers’ lives. Here’s one way you can show appreciation that will take less than five minutes out of your day and just might make someone else’s. 🙌 The one weird trick Think of an open source project that you use often. Open your browser t...

Hacktoberfest is here once again, and we devs will do just about anything for a free shirt. However, there’s a war inside us. The Acquire Free Swag inclination is at odds with the Be Super Lazy inclination, leaving many wondering… “What’s the absolute easiest route to that sweet, sweet swag?!” We ha...

Here’s the deal. Overcast’s feed crawler has a small feature that adds tremendous value to podcasters like us: it reports your subscriber count in its user agent string: Overcast/1.0 Podcast Sync (8462 subscribers; feed-id=484679; +http://overcast.fm/) We extract this count and store it locally so w...

Those of you who’ve been following along on Twitch know we’ve been working towards open sourcing our podcast show notes so the community can help improve them. I’m happy to announce that THIS is now a thing! 🎉🎉🎉 The backstory It all began when Horst Rutter 1 caught a typo in our show notes and wonde...

Kevin Ball and Tim Smith spent the last few days on location at O’Reilly’s Fluent Conference and Velocity Conference. Here’s a quick video recap from the conferences.

In 2016 we open-sourced the code behind the new changelog.com, and we spoke about the related infrastructure work in Episode #254, but never open-sourced this code. The primary reason was that making it open source friendly was low in the backlog and never made the cut. While good commit messages we...