Changelog Master Feed

Divya leads a deep discussion with Jerod, KBall, and Nick on what’s stagnating in browsers. What has remained the same in browser tech over the last 20 years that remains a pain point in working with browsers? For example - Focus in browsers hasn’t changed much in 20 years. Why is that and how do we go about making all the stale things in browser tech better?

Stephanie Morillo (content strategist and previously editor-in-chief of DigitalOcean and GitHub’s company blogs) wrote a book titled The Developer’s Guide to Content Creation — it’s a book for developers who want to consistently and confidently generate new ideas and publish high-quality technical content. We talked with Stephanie about why developers should be writing and sharing their ideas, crafting a mission statement for your blog and thoughts on personal brand, her 4 step recipe for generating content ideas, as well as promotional and syndication strategies to consider for your developer blog.

Interfaces are everywhere in Go. The basic error type is an interface, writing with the fmt package means you are probably using an interface, and there are countless other instances where they pop up. In this episode Mark, Mat, Johnny, and Jon discuss interfaces at length, exploring what they are, how they are using them in their own projects, as well as tips for how you can leverage them in your own code.

Mireille and Adam discuss the mechanism of attention as an allocation of one’s resources. If we can think of attention as that of a lens, we can practice choosing what we give our attention to recognizing that multiple things, both externally and internally, routinely compete for our attention. Distraction can also be useful when we utilize it intentionally to manage the focus of our attention.

Caleb Porzio is the creator & maintainer of Livewire, AlpineJS, and more. His latest open source endeavor was announced as “sponsorware”, which means it lived in a private repo (only available to Caleb’s GitHub Sponsors) until he hit a set sponsorship threshold, at which point it was open sourced. On this episode, we talk through this sponsorware experiment in-depth. We learn how he dreamt it up, how it went (spoiler: very well), and how he had to change his mindset on 2 things in order to make sustainability possible.

Daniel and Chris hang out with Mike McCourt from Invoca to learn about the natural language processing model architectures underlying Signal AI. Mike shares how they process conversational data, the challenges they have to overcome, and the types of insights that can be harvested.

Yetunde Dada from QuantumBlack joins Jerod for a deep dive on Kedro, a workflow tool that helps structure reproducible, scaleable, deployable, robust, and versioned data pipelines. They discuss what Kedro’s all about and how it’s “changing the landscape of data pipelines in Python”, the ins/outs of open sourcing Kedro, and how they found early success by sweating the details. Finally, Jerod asks Yetunde about her passion project: a virtual reality film which debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in January.

KBall and Nick dive deep with Chris Manson and Jen Weber from the Ember core team. They talk about Ember.js: What it is, why it’s different, what’s new in the Ember Octane release, and what’s exciting in the future of the project.

Telemetry is tricky to get started with. What metrics should you be tracking? Which metrics are important? Will they help you predict and avoid potential issues? When is a good time to start? Should you put it off until later? In this episode we discuss some common metrics to collect, how to get started with telemetry, and more with guest Dave Blakey of Snapt.

We teamed up with some friends of ours at Heroku to promote the Code-ish podcast so we’re sharing a full-length episode right here in the JS Party feed. This episode features Owen Ou, who is joined by Tanmai Gopal (CEO of Hasura) talking about the pros and cons of using GraphQL in your application. Learn more and subscribe at heroku.com/podcasts/codeish.

Daniel and Chris explore Semantic Scholar with Doug Raymond of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Semantic Scholar is an AI-backed search engine that uses machine learning, natural language processing, and machine vision to surface relevant information from scientific papers.

The State of JS 2019 survey left many in awe of the beautifully rendered line graph created by Amelia Wattenberger. So we’ve brought her on JS Party to discuss how she built it! We’ll chat about all things D3, a JavaScript library for creating data visualizations, and even learn a bit about the CSS cascade.

Johnny and Jon are joined by Andy Williams to talk about some of the unusual ways developers are using Go. In this particular episode they deep dive into building GUIs and discuss all of the challenges imposed by trying to build a UI that is both cross platform and functional. How do you create buttons that work on both mobile and a desktop app? Should you even be designing both apps at the same time? Tune in to find out!

Jon Thornton (Engineering Manager at Squarespace) joined the show to talk about tech debt by way of his post to the Squarespace engineering blog titled “3 Kinds of Good Tech Debt”. We talked through the concept of “good tech debt,” how to leverage it, how to manage it, who’s in charge of it, how it’s similar to ways we leverage financial debt, and how Squarespace uses tech debt to drive product development.

Mireille and Adam discuss shame as an emotional and experiential construct. We dive into the neural structures involved in processing this emotion as well as the factors and implications of our experience of shame. Shame is a natural response to the threat of vulnerability and perception of oneself as defective or inherently “not enough.”

We partnered with Red Hat to promote Season 4 of Command Line Heroes — a podcast about the people who transform technology from the command line up. Season 4 is all about hardware that changed the game. We’re featuring episode 1 from season 4 — called “Minicomputers: The soul of an old machine.” This is the story of Minicomputers and how they paved the way for the personal computers that could fit in a bag and, eventually, the phones in our pockets. Learn more and subscribe at redhat.com/commandlineheroes.

Daniel and Chris do a deep dive into The AI Index 2019 Annual Report, which provides unbiased rigorously-vetted data that one can use “to develop intuitions about the complex field of AI”. Analyzing everything from R&D and technical advancements to education, the economy, and societal considerations, Chris and Daniel lay out this comprehensive report’s key insights about artificial intelligence.

Anders Damsgaard is a climate science researcher working on cryosphere processes at the Department of Geophysics at Stanford University. He joined the show to talk with us about the intersection of open source and climate science. Specifically, we discuss a set of shell tools he created called The Scholarref Tools which allow you to perform most of the tasks required to gather the references needed during the writing phase of an academic paper. We also discuss climate science, physics, self hosting Git, and why Anders isn’t present on any “social” networks.

It’s a new year which means companies are hiring and developers are interviewing. So we thought it would be fun to host a fun game of technical Jeopardy.

Carmen, Mat, and Jon are joined by Steve Francia and Julie Qiu to discuss the new Go.dev website. What was the motivation behind it? What technology was used to build it? How are they working to make package discovery better? And what resources are there to help you convince your manager to use Go on that upcoming project?