The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source Changelog Media

This week we’re joined by Gergely Orosz and we’re talking about the insane tech hiring market we’re in right now. Gergely was on the show a year ago talking about growing as a software engineer and his book The Tech Resume Inside Out. Now he’s laser focused on Substack with actionable advice for engineering managers and engineers, with a focus on big tech and high-growth startups. On today’s show we dig into his recent coverage of “the perfect storm” that’s causing this insane tech hiring market.

Today we’re talking to Matt Rickard about his blog post, Reflections on 10,000 Hours of Programming. Matt was clear to mention that these reflections are purely about coding, not career advice or other soft skills. These reflections are just about deliberately writing code for 10,000 hours, which also correlates with the number of hours needed to master a skill. If you count the reflections we cover on the show and be the first to comment on this episode, we’ll get in touch and send you a coupon code to use for a 100% free t-shirt in the merch store. Good luck…

This week we’re joined by Brittany Dionigi, Director of Platform Engineering at Articulate, and we’re talking about how organizations can take a more intentional approach to supporting the growth of their engineers through learning-focused engineering. Brittany has been a software engineer for more than 10 years, and learned formal educational and classroom-based learning strategies as a Technical Lead & Senior Instructor at Turing School of Software & Design. We talk through a ton of great topics; getting mentorship right, common coaching opportunities, classroom-based learning strategies like backwards planning, and ways to identify and maximize the learning opportunities for teams and org.

This week we’re talking with Evan Weaver about Fauna — the database for a new generation of applications. Fauna is a transactional database delivered as a secure and scalable cloud API with native GraphQL. It’s the first implementation of its kind based on the Calvin paper as opposed to Spanner. We cover Evan’s history leading up to Fauna, deep details on the Calvin algorithm, the CAP theorem for databases, what it means for Fauna to be temporal native, applications well suited for Fauna, and what’s to come in the near future.

This week we’re joined by Adam Jacob, CEO of System Initiative and Co-Founder of Chef, about open source business models and the model he thinks is the right one to choose, his graceful exit from Chef and some of the details behind Chef’s acquisition in 2020 for $220 million…in cash, and how his perspective on open source has or has not changed as a result. Adam also shared as much stealth mode details as he could about System Initiative.

On this special edition of The Changelog, we’re talking with Cory Wilkerson, Senior Director of Engineering at GitHub, about GitHub Codespaces. For years now, the possibility of coding in the cloud seemed so close, yet so far away for a number of reasons. According to Cory, the raw ingredients to make coding in the cloud a reality have been there for years. The challenge has really been how the industry thinks, and we are now at a place where the skepticism in cloud based workflows is “non-existent.” After 15 months in preview, GitHub not only announced the availability of Codespaces for Teams and Enterprise — they also showcased their internal adoption, with 600 of their 1,000 engineers using it daily to develop GitHub.com. On this episode, Cory shares the full backstory of that journey and a peek into the future where we’re all coding in the cloud.