02:28 - Jerod Santo Introduction

02:44 - Adam Stacoviak Introduction

02:55 - The Changelog and Beyond Code (Background)

13:50 - The Corporatization of Open Source

16:00 - Sharing Stories of Fascinating People and Choosing Conferences

21:21 - Differences Between Communities

24:54 - Where are The Changelog and Beyond Code’s future plans?

31:57 - Interview Wishlist

35:43 - Origin Stories

Picks

Personality Insights (Coraline)
The Art of Empathy: A Complete Guide to Life's Most Essential Skill by Karla McLaren (Coraline)
FamilySearch (Chuck)
Snow (Chuck)
DISTRICT Roasters (Adam)
The Balvenie (Adam)
Lismore Scotch (Adam)
The Elixir Fountain (Jerod)
Robot or Not? (Jerod)
Song Exploder (Jerod)

Special Guests: Adam Stacoviak and Jerod Santo.

 

So the lesson learned is don't go on stage with professional punners. [Laughter]

That was my takeaway.

Hey everybody and welcome to episode 234 of the Ruby Rogues Podcast. This week on our panel we have Coraline Ada Ehmke.

Hello.

I'm Charles Max Wood from DevChat.TV. This week we have two guests. We have Adam Stacoviak.

Yo.

And Jerod Santo.

Hello, hello.

Can we get introductions from you gentlemen?

You go first, Jared.

Alrighty. So, my name's Jared Santo, co-host of The Changelog podcast. Also a freelance software developer for a one-man firm named Object Lateral. I write web apps.

Right, web apps. And I'm Adam Stacoviak. I've been host of The Changelog and several other podcasts for years, I guess. So, veteran chief host of The Changelog. If you listen to it, big thumbs.

Yeah, I remember when it was Adam Stacoviak and Wynn Netherland.

Yes. That was a hundred episodes ago, at least. Or more. It's a long time.

That's okay. We're happy with Jared these days. [Chuckles]

Quick shout-out to Wynn. I was a huge fan of his, which actually was how I started off getting involved, was listening to Adam and Wynn do the show. And then when Wynn went to GitHub and life gets busy and whatnot, I thought I'd help out. And so, it snowballed into where we're at today.

Yeah.

Totally.

We brought you on to talk about Beyond Code. But I think giving some background on The Changelog and what it is and what it's about will I think give us some idea of what Beyond Code is really out there for.

We started the podcast slash blog I guess back in 2009. And it wasn't long after being at a conference thinking about another podcast to do for Sass, which Rubyists are well familiar with now. I was thinking like, “Wouldn't it be really interesting to talk through a changelog? To look at software as it changes, open source software, and just talk about the nuances and differences. And as I shared that with Wynn, he was like, “That's a really cool name. We should do that as a podcast.” And I'm like, “We should totally do it as a podcast.” [Inaudible]. And so we did. [Chuckles]

And I would say we were, so this was 2009. I think I first of podcasting in 2006. The Changelog grew out of a deep, deep passion for software developers, open source software, and this swell of movement. This was right when GitHub was not even, it was only popular to early software developers. So, I think contrasting GitHub now to GitHub then was pretty different. They were only, I'd say maybe a year old. So, it was still this new swell of encouragement and I guess pursuit of open source software. Now, it's been around for a while obviously, but it was like this new reigniting for the community, making it social, making it what it is today.

So, we started the podcast around our love for software development and open source software. And we've covered all the gaps, so not just one particular camp. We cover everything we can. Whatever's interesting. Whatever is I guess new and fresh as we have said over the years, what's fresh and new in the open source world. That's what we cover. So, that's...

And is the format still mainly based around changelogs?

That's a good question, because it actually never really... that was the impetus of the idea. It wasn't... we never went and said, “Okay, Ruby or Ruby on Rails. You recently [inaudible] from this version to this version and we're actually looking at your changelog going line by line.” It never actually got to that point. It was just what spawned the idea of looking at the changes of software over time and talking to the maintainers, talking to people, influencers, in that community, in that camp, and getting a snapshot of what's happening, what's changing, how business has evolved around it. And it's never really gotten to the changelog meta, as we came from.

That's one thing...

Except for the episode with Olivier Lacan, which was very meta.

Yeah, that was so meta.

Which was when he came on to promote everybody keeping a changelog. That one was very much about changelogs.

Totally.

[Laughs] I think one thing that's really interesting about this is that you highlight the story behind it. And I think a lot of times we get focused on the technology and we forget that there's a story behind it, that there are people behind it, that there's something more to it than just, “Oh, what can it do?” or, “Why should I care?”

I would just say that that's exactly it. To tee up another podcast I've done, which [inaudible], I always try to bring some aspect of digging deeper and finding out the real story behind something. So, when we look at, like for example a pretty big show we've done recently in the last say 40 or so episodes was DHH. And it was 10 years of Rails with DHH. It was like, we really planned for that show. It was an hour and 45 minutes. And we didn't just talk about Rails. We talked about all sorts of stuff that was probably things that David may not have shared so much because maybe nobody dug deeper into the story. And so we got, if you listened back to that show you'll hear a much different side I think personally of David than you may have heard from him in the past, although you will have his things he's notorious for, which is good. But we still go to see a different side of David.

And it was always important to pursue the story, pursue the heart behind someone. So, not just the software, and it's Rails which was, Coraline, your question about changelogs and covering those, that was important. But I think what's really important to this community is to realize there's real people behind the software, real lives at stake, real families, wives, kids, moms, dads, whatever. And what we do to those people and how we treat those people and how we love those people is super impactful to their lives. And how we actually use their software can also change our lives.

I think it's really interesting especially in the case of DHH who's such a public figure and so polarizing in a lot of ways, in the way that he communicates. But in my personal interactions with him which granted have been very limited, he shows humanity that his public persona doesn't necessarily portray.

Yeah. David's definitely a unique, awesome dude.

Yeah.

I think another good example of us doing that, which actually Adam I have to give it to you, you spearheaded this string of shows more so than I did, was last year the IO.js and Node.js split and merger where we really talked with the players involved in that and really tried to dig down deep and tell that story from both sides. We had, was it Mikeal Rogers from IO as well as, what's the CEO of Joyent, Adam?

Scott Hammond.

Scott Hammond. So, they told the story from both sides and actually tracked that as the split happened and, the happy story.

And the interesting thing about Scott too, Jerod, is that that was actually not the easiest show to get a hold of. Not because Scott is hard to get a hold of, but because at the time things were so tumultuous I guess about Node and what was happening that journalists weren't really being nice to him. And I was like, “Hey dude. I'm not bringing you on this show to corner you. I want to have a real conversation about what's happening. I think it's a really important thing for you to share back with the community. And I'm not out to get you. So, please come on the show. Feel free. You're not going to walk out with bloody eyes or black eyes or whatever. [chuckles] I'm going to be nice to you. I might ask you hard questions and not let you off the hook. But I'm not asking you on the show to beat you up.”

Yeah. One other thing that was interesting about that particular thing was we had the IO.js guys on JavaScript Jabber pretty soon after the split. And what was really interesting was that the things that they were saying about the Node.js team and the way that things had gone, they were actually very highly complimentary of them and just saying, “These are just some other things that we feel like we need. And so, we hemmed and hawed and finally decided we had to fork the project.” And it turned out to be a good thing in the sense that it inspired some people to do some things. And they eventually figured out how to make it all work the way that everybody wanted it to go. But at the same time, yeah it was really interesting to see that side of things. And then at the same time see everybody else attacking the Node team or see other people basically yeah, going in and going after some of these people. And anyway...

Wow.

Well, at the same time, Scott was a new CEO to Joyent. And so, as voyeurs I guess from the outside so to speak, into a community or into a [split] like that, you assume the worst. You assume the split was because some company was evil, right?

Yeah.

Somebody was controlling Node and they wouldn't let the software developers or the people that actually maintain this awesome beast do what they got to do so they split. They assume the worst. And it's our jobs as podcasters, our jobs as journalists and people who I think is, if you ask what the secret sauce is of us, is that we care. If you care about the community, you will help find the right story. And I feel like if you go listen to the one that Jerod was referencing with Mikeal Rogers about the split or just right after the split or when IO first split off, he helped share the story of why, like you said with your show. And then with Scott, you see this different side of a compassionate CEO who's barely a year old into Joyent who wants to solve a community problem in a good way that helps the enterprises who've invested in it and the software developers who love the software.

To me, it's the best thing to have that kind of job.

Well, and you get to have those conversations, right? Because not everybody can sit down with the CEO of Joyent or the team lead on IO.js or Node.js or you don't get a chance to sit down and pick Matt's brain about why he's adding certain things to MRI. And that's where we come in, I think.

Yeah.

And I think this is something that The Changelog does very well, is that you do, you have that conversation. And you dig in and figure out, “Okay, what's going on here and what makes this tick? Why is this person the way that they are? And why are they making the decisions that they are?” And then all of a sudden, you get this whole other aspect of the technology that you're picking up.

Yeah.

I think it comes back to the fact that all software problems end up being people problems.

Yup.

Totally true.

Yeah.

Another interesting aspect of that, that Scott Hammond show just from a perspective of somebody who's been involved in open source and watched it grow over the last five or ten years, is you're dealing with PR firms. Even to get to Scoot, we're dealing with PR firms now in the open source world. And of course we still do shows where it's just you at, mention somebody on GitHub and then they email you.

Right.

And then you're on the phone half an hour later. But...

Yeah.

There's a lot more seriousness, big money here now. There's large corporations. There's PR. And I think now more so than ever, it's important that we get past those facades and talk to people.

On the note of PR, that show almost didn't happen because of PR. Because when Scott was originally, and no discredit to him, but when he was originally trying to plan the show with me, I think because of his defenses it was like, “Hey, I don't want to come on here and have Adam beat me up,” he wanted to bring on other people to support him to share this message. And I was like, “Hey, I don't really think it makes sense to have people who I don't think really represent you and your company come on. I'm not having you on here to beat you up. So, just be a little bit vulnerable. I promise you that I'm not out to get you. And just trust me.” And it almost didn't happen because of that. We had four or five marketing people, two PR people, and Scott. And I was like, “That's not the show I want to produce.”

Yeah.

I'm curious. You guys have seen, you talk about the corporatization over the last... what do you think we've gained and lost through that process that you've been witness to?

That's a good question. I think what we've gained is a lot more open source code and a lot of... the nice thing about large financially successful corporations contributing to open source is, we talk about building on the shoulders of giants. And it's just taller giants, right? So, Facebook can sync thousands of man hours into libraries like React and React Native. And if they kept those to themselves, then I think we can all agree that the software world is a less rich place. So, we definitely have gained that. I'm not against it by any means.

What we've lost is, I don't know, a bit of personality or this one-on-one aspect, this hacker individuality. Which is still there, but it sometimes gets shrouded. I think... one thing we try to do is shine a light on open source projects that matter. And more and more we're having to do that for the little guy, because there's so many big guys. And any time Google releases an open source project, like I think yesterday they just released a neural networks thing, TensorFlow or something like that, and it's top of Hacker News all day long, all these comments. Google's going to make a splash. But there are a lot of little players out there like you and I who have skills and have something to give. And it's just harder for them to have a voice now because there's just a lot more louder voices.

Yup.

Which we'll say again, when we talk about Beyond Code, but that's exactly it. We wanted to showcase the real people behind communities. And so, as we get into that conversation, we might try and tee it off right now, but at the same time we almost felt like we were in a way marketing open source as a podcast and as a blog. And in a way, it's frustrating because it's up to [inaudible] that we have this bearer, this line. Like we are the final line to producing something, whether audio or in text. But it was always about focusing on people who were doing awesome stuff that may not be getting the notoriety they deserve or getting the light they deserve or the promotion they deserve. And that's definitely in The Changelog roots.

Well, that's one thing when I got on and actually looked at what Beyond Code was. It is. It's the stories of these fascinating people. You've got Richard Schneeman from Heroku and Terence Lee and Nola Stowe who I've talked to several times. And just all these people that do all these awesome stuff in the community. And yeah, just to get five minutes to say, “Oh, this is a part of who we are. This is a part of what we do,” it's just really, really cool.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Yes, thank you for that comment. I appreciate it.

Maybe that'd be a good time Adam, to tee up what Beyond Code exactly is.

What I want to know first is, how did this come to be a thing that you decided you wanted to do?

Well, we did audio. And video isn't that much different. It's a bit more immersive and we thought, “Why not?” So, that's how it came to be. And then the deeper story is that we love telling stories. And what better way to tell a story than with video and audio. So, we've always been in the audio world and producing podcasts. The Changelog isn't the only podcast I've done. I've done several others over my history and career in podcasting. But it was really about, I guess several ways. We wanted to get out actually of our home offices. Jerod works from home. I work from home. So, we don't have this community we go and see every day when we go to work. So, we desperately need that community.

And as podcasters for The Changelog, it's part of who we are to go out and meet people and introduce ourselves to others and get exposed to new camps, new languages, new ways of thinking. And so for us, it was like, this is going to help us get out and meet people, serve the community even better, help tell stories in a way that's never been done before, and take an artistic approach to it, not just, “Let's get a camera and shoot raw video and just cut it at the ends and there you go, world.” We actually have a professional editor with 15+ experiences. He's edited documentaries, feature films, music videos. And so, we brought this person on to help us with the final mile of this, not just the idea of it, but to actually produce something that's visually appealing to watch and also just really great stories of people.

So, what made you decide to pick these particular conferences?

Well, I live in Houston. Austin is a stone's throw away. That one made sense. Plus we love Ruby. Ruby is in our roots at The Changelog. I would actually say for a while we were bashed a bit because we were more Ruby focused than we were open source focused. But we've always been the kind of publication and the kind of podcast that was okay with, not so much serving our own needs, but going where we're comfortable. But I think over time, Jerod, we've definitely broken out of our skin and gone places we weren't very comfortable. So, it was naturally easy to camp out in Ruby for us. So, going to Keep Ruby Weird was pretty easy. We reached out to the organizers. They were gracious to us. They worked with us to come over and support that conference. And we chose Keep Ruby Weird because it was in our backyard. It was like, if we can do this in our backyard, we can do it anywhere.

Yeah, and since then we've been to another place in Adam's backyard, Space City JS, which will be our season two which is launching today and/or tomorrow, as soon as possible.

[Chuckles] I know how that goes. [Laughter]

I've got these videos and I don't have time to put them up.

By the time this show goes live, unless you all are publishing it in 3 minutes, we're going to have season two up there. That was Space City JS. So, we've switched languages, from a Ruby conference to a JavaScript conference. Probably a natural progress for Adam and I as we go from our most comfort to probably our second most comfortable programming language. And it was also right in Adam's backyard.

And then season three will be, we filmed it last summer in Denver at GopherCon. So, that will be season three. And then season four which we wrapped up just in August, is at NEJS Conf. So, back to JavaScript but this time in my hometown of Omaha.

Yeah.

So, it was kind of locality. We also put an issue up on our ping repo which is an open inbox that we have, asking people where we should go. And letting the listeners and the community of The Changelog influence which conferences we're going to go to, because we can only pick maybe four or six a year that Adam and I can reliably get to, just because of family and whatnot. And so, I think GopherCon came specifically out of that issue on the repo.

Yeah.

Where one of the organizers of GopherCon said, “Hey, come to GopherCon. It's awesome.” And we said, “Alright.”

Yeah, Brian Ketelsen. He was like, “You have to come to Gopher.” And he wasn't even like, “Will you?” It was more like, “You have to. You must be here.” And before you know it, we're talking to Erik and Brian, the organizers of GopherCon and also the organizers of GopherAcademy which I believe, I might be incorrect about this, but I'm almost certain it's a non-profit. Or it makes no profit because it pours all the money it does make back into the community. So, it's not really a for-profit venture from my understanding. But working with those guys was really awesome. And that issue, Jerod, was what opened up I think a direction for this year. We didn't say, “Hey, these...” I guess we put some mile markers in place and said, “This is where we think we should go.” But between Brian and some others, we were adding other conferences to the list.

So, you've interacted with a lot of different open source communities that are centered around languages. What are some of the major differences you see between these communities?

I don't think I see that many differences. I think the biggest difference is maybe how far a long they are in certain technologies or certain adoptions and maybe how much they've copied from others to move theirs along. What I do see as a consistency is real humans who care. And so, there's always software and there's always going to be software. There's always going to be humans behind that software. And I think that's the similarity between them all for me.

I always joke that we're prettier over here.

But 'over here' could mean anything, right?

Right. What do you think, Jerod?

Yeah. Well, I think mostly you find differences in technical interests more than you would find in diversity or the types of things that they do. All the communities that we've been involved with at these conferences have been very accepting and open. So, there's really no differences there. But generally you find, like at GopherCon we saw a lot more interest in dev ops and infrastructure. And it makes sense, right?

Systems, yeah.

Yeah, systems language, systems people. In Ruby and JavaScript conferences you just find more web developers. We find people at JavaScript conferences very interested in hardware and drones and robots and whatnot. But you find that in Go as well. So, there's slight nuances. But at the end of the day, it's just all people.

I think too, it seems like it's a logical thing you would observe. But I think what's always been encouraging to me is to find how passionate people are in their niches. You go, like for example we, his name is blocking me Jerod, so help me out on this one. But [inaudible] did with robots. His name's [inaudible] me.

Ron.

But he did a... what's his name?

Ron Evans with Hybrid Group.

Yes, that guy.

He's been on Rogues.

He is so passionate about the interaction between humans, robots, and software. And it's just so encouraging to me to go out and meet people that are just so passionate about things. And then also to find all the ways they give back, all the time they serve. Sure it's for their company to a degree. But they don't have to go to every single hackathon, every single robot-based hackathon, and be there and take the patient time to go through people getting started with getting Go up on their system or whatever it takes to get to a point where they can actually do something with it. Ron was so encouraging to me. And you could take that with that observant thing with Ron and copy and paste it across lots of different places and just see people who are so patient, so passionate about just the innovation of software development, the innovation and sharing of open source, and the community around it, that they just continually give. And that's what's encouraging to me, is you always find love in this community. And I think it's important to really see that.

I think, Chuck didn't you guys have Ron on Ruby Rogues at some point talking about education?

Yeah, I believe so.

Yeah. That was a really good show. He's an interesting guy for sure.

Ron is.

Yup. Yeah, he was fun to talk to. And yeah, he's been on the show. I don't remember if it was education or something else. But yeah, we definitely had a good talk about something. And he's fun to hang out with at the conferences, too.

We met. I guess we met up with Ron at the pre-party at GopherCon. And man, does he just have so much energy. He's hard to contain, like the genie in Aladdin almost.

Yeah.

[Laughs] Yeah, that's a good analogy actually.

So, where are you hoping that The Changelog and Beyond Code wind up going from here?

I would say that OSCON would be the next awesome destination for us. So, specifically to a couple of conferences. We'd love to make it to Strange Loop. We'd love to make it to OSCON, just because those are two conferences. Well one, Jerod loves Strange Loop and he turned me on to that conference. And I was like, wow that's such a diverse polyglot focused conference that totally fits our DNA or serving the entire open source community. And for OSCON, it's like the mothership of open source to a degree. I think they've been doing that conference for 17 years. So, to become a part of or document a part of such a staple conference would be phenomenal.

At the same time, we'd love regional conferences, too. We love 150, 200 people .Those are really intimate, small. We love those kinds of conferences as well because we actually get to meet [different] people. With a larger conference it's a little harder. I think we got lucky at GopherCon because there was thirteen, fourteen hundred people there. And we actually met a lot, more than I expected, a lot of listeners of The Changelog. So, that was pretty encouraging. We gave out 120 tshirts. We took men's and women's so everybody got a shirt.

Thank you.

Nice.

Yes. [Chuckles]

Although I will say I was sad about American Apparel's sizing of the women's. I think that they could actually be a little bit more generous with garment, because the small was baby small and the extra large which you would think...

Maybe I don't wear an extra large. I think where mediums were actually larges and extra larges. So, it was a bummer in that case. We basically just took extra larges and larges because mediums and smalls were just way too small for most people So, that was a bummer on that part. So, we won't be... their bankruptcy makes that a truth, too. But we won't be using American Apparel on the next run of our t-shirts. So, we like to give out t-shirts to... we will mail, if we go to a conference and we don't have enough, we're going to take down an address and we're going to ship off a t-shirt, no charge. Like if we meet you face-to-face that's how you get a free t-shirt. Otherwise, we do sell them on-site. We don't really sell them for a profit. We just put it out there because who doesn't want to have a t-shirt out there with our podcast logo on it? And allow the community to represent what they want to represent. But we love giving away free t-shirts at conferences.

But where I think we want to take this podcast and that video show, I think Jerod you can back me up on this, I think the questions we ask are pretty interesting. But having done four seasons, we think we need to do more questions. So, the basics of the show is it's a brief interview series. We shoot it at conferences only, at least so far. We may change that tune. I'm not against it. But it's just not something we've thought about. But we shoot it at the conference's afterparty. So, that's a chance for people to get comfortable and get relaxed. Like if you're at the conference asking people to do an interview like this, I don't think we'd get the same response because you're thinking about the next talk or the next break. Or you're hungry. You want to go to the bathroom. You want to get some coffee, whatever it might be. Your coworkers, you're trying to keep up, trying to meet people. You don't want to do interviews.

And so, the afterparty is a place where people get relaxed. And we get a chance to take down their guard, so to speak. So, that's the premise of the show. It's not very long. About five, I would say five to ten minutes per person. We ask five questions. Well, I'll say Jerod directs it so he asks five questions. Jerod, do you want to share the questions? Any question that you ask?

Sure. So, the staple question which we get directly off the show is 'Who is your programming hero?' You know, start up with that one. We try to ask questions that open people up and get them to talk. So, we'll then ask, if you had to relearn how to code all over again, what would you tell yourself? That gets a lot of people just to stand there. And we let them think for as long as necessary before answering. But that's one of those, “Oh man, how am I going to answer that?” kind of questions.

I don't want to reveal all of my [inaudible] except to say that we also have one that tries to pin a place and a time, which is what's the most exciting thing in software right now? Which is very focused on, it's 2014 in the fall and I'm at a Ruby conference. And so, those answers tend to be very specific to the group of people that we're with and the time that we're talking to them. So, that's a few of them. There's a couple more. But yeah, we've definitely thought about regrouping now that people know these five questions and are used to them, especially if we revisit the same conferences.

Yeah.

Just getting a new set out there, the hard part is coming up with the questions I guess.

Our aim though with it is to step into a community with their invitation obviously and pull back the veil, actually see real people, not just... and nothing against speakers and keynoters. They're awesome. And it takes such courage to do that anyway. But sometimes that's all the community sees. Our aim is to help pull back that veil and invite people who are not the heroes, not the known people, so to speak. Obviously the invitation is for everybody so we're not saying, “Well, speakers you've already had your light.” No, it's not like that. But our hope is to show the real people behind the community. Real answers. Sometimes very open about their past maybe even. Or even open about their aspirations, a bit more human side to who they are. And so, our aim is always that.

So, if someone out there is listening to this and you know of a conference or you run a conference and you want that kind of thing at your conference, we would gladly go. So, we don't have a list and say, “Well, we're only going to these conferences.” Our aim is to help share the real people behind open source software. That's our aim.

Ooh, I just had an idea for our next version. We could take six people, developers, put them in a house and film them. And then we can see what happens when they...

What could possibly go wrong? [Laughter]

Is that like an MTV spin-off?

When they stop getting real... well, how does it go? When they start getting real. Sorry, I just had flashbacks to the real world when you talked about seeing the real people.

Real World: Ruby.

One thing that's funny that we did a couple of years ago is we had a retreat for the Ruby Rogues. And...

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, we actually set up an audio recorder just in one of the corners and just left it running. And then we pulled clips out of that for our show. And that was really, really interesting. And I think it would be interesting just to see what kinds of conversations come up and...

Yeah.

Figure out what gets people going and how they connect and what they connect over and all of those kinds of things. I think it would be really interesting just to see what happens there.

I think you'd get different answers too, when they're not in front of a mic.

Yeah.

When you don't feel the pressure of, “I've got to give a noteworthy answer here,” when you can just take the guard down.

Yeah.

Well, it started off as a joke, but I think we should just do it, then.

Yeah. [Laughs] Could be an interesting episode.

So, I'm curious. You guys have interviewed a lot of different kinds of people. Is there someone you've always wanted to interview that you haven't been able to get to yet?

You want to hear our wish list, huh?

Definitely.

Let me see here.

I can help you out. I'd totally come on your show. I'm just kidding.

Oh, there's one. There's one.

Yeah, that's one. So, that's an easy one.

[Inaudible] podcast backlog here.

So, Matz if you're listening, we would love to produce the show 20 of Ruby with Matz. We'd love to do it this year, because this is Ruby's 20th year anniversary. Brendan Eich, if you're listening to this show, maybe you're a fan of JavaScript Jabber. Maybe you're a fan of The Changelog. I don't know. But we'd also like to produce the show called 20 years of JavaScript with Brendan Eich. Those are two huge heroes I think we would love to talk to.

I wouldn't mind talking to Bill O'Reilly. While we'd love to Linus on the show, I don't think that he is maybe open to podcasts. But Junio Hamano, I believe that's how you say his name. But that's Japanese. So, totally butchered I'm sure. It's 10 years of Git with him. He took over maintainer-ship a year after Git was open sourced. I'm sure Linus is still involved. But Junio took over the main maintainers, so we'd love to get him on the show. Those are some of the ones that I think we have in our backlog that's wishes.

And then let's say, if anybody at all from ResearchKit from Apple is listening, come on The Changelog.

Yes.

Tell the story of how Apple is open sourcing ResearchKit. We'd love to hear the deeper story behind it, what the plans are for the API, and as much as you can share. So, that's a big show we'd love to do. Jerod, what about you? What's on your list?

Yeah, I was just going to say ResearchKit is actually probably my number one just because it's a white whale or something. Talk about PR firms. Getting anybody from Apple to come on a show and talk about open source would be pretty epic, I think. And then tons of stories to tell there. So, that would be mine.

That's our wish list. If you're listening to this and you have connections to Matz, Brendan Eich, anybody from ResearchKit. Well we've been emailing ResearchKit and they have been communicating in the issues on GitHub which is a neat hack to get attached to people. But we haven't made any headway on actually getting some confirmation to the shows. But those are the shows that we'd love to produce. Those are the actual titles. Much like we did with DHH with 10 years of Rails we thought it would be really interesting to visit some of the larger camps like Ruby, JavaScript, Git. Who doesn't use Git? And camp out in those areas and talk to the people behind it. It would be such an awesome thing to have that conversation.

Yeah. I'll do what I can with Brendan Eich, because we exchange emails periodically after he came on JavaScript Jabber. We've also tried to get Matz on the show. And generally the impression that I've gotten is that he's not completely comfortable having an off-the-cuff conversation in English for a half hour or an hour, even though... I don't know if he completely understands either that the Ruby community would rally around that show and they would be happy to hear him say “I like gruel. I like cereal.” He could say anything he wanted and we'd all be happy to have him on the show. But yeah. I would love to hear that show, too, the Matz show. [Laughter]

I thought gruel was an open source library that I wasn't aware of at first.

[Laughs] Yeah.

I was thinking Game of Thrones with Hodor. That's all he says.

My pick. Save it for the picks. Save it for the picks.

I'll see what I can do to help you out with some of those.

I'm sure we got more heroes behind the scenes. So, don't take that as a limited list. We've got a huge backlog of ideas. Those are just some of the ones that jumped out at me quite quickly. Sara Chipps too. She, I love what she's doing with jewelbots. I'm so fascinated by that.

Oh, yeah.

And Jerod, you wanted to have her keynote NEJS Conf. That didn't happen. I'm not sure what happened there. But she's another person that we look up to and would love to have on the show.

Absolutely.

Alright.

So, you've heard a lot of origin stories for open source projects. What's the most surprising origin story you've heard?

Origin stories.

For a specific project? Or for a person to get into it?

Either, I guess.

Okay. I'll just broaden your question a bit so I have an answer. I think Mitchell Hashimoto's origin into software in general was very interesting.

Yeah.

He's the creator of Vagrant and now Otto. HashiCorp, I'm sure many Rogues listeners are familiar with Mitchell. Just had him on recently and he just told us how he got into software and really starting his first company while in college, was he was just playing, what was it called Adam?

Neopets? Basically...

Neopets, yeah.

Yeah, an online game. And he wanted to hack it and automate it and basically cheat.

And so, [chuckles] that's what he did. He started cheating at Neopets. What's amazing about that is not only did he get into software and start writing software at that time, he also managed to parley that into a thriving business [chuckles] while he was in college, Neopets cheats.

That's how my daughter is learning HTML, is by playing on Neopets and some other game sites like that where you can have a custom storefront.

See?

So, that's an entryway for a lot of, especially girls.

Yeah.

That's the thing [inaudible], too. I was like, “Wow, you make things in that game.” And I don't know what language it is, but it's some sort of scripting language. And before you know it you're fiddling with the terminal and you're getting more and more courage to step into the next thing. And then the next thing, you're reading documentation for some sort of framework. And before you know it, you're a full-blown developer and you didn't even really, not so much try but you were just following this small gap in the door, opening an interest. I think that as leaders, so if there are some leaders out there listening to the show, you should find ways to make more of those cracks available to younger folks, boys and girls, that are really interested and have a mind for and a curiosity for just following their passion. Make more of those open.

Yeah.

I'm a little bit older and I got online in the early 90's. But I know MUSHs which are MMORPGs without graphics, for those who are too young to remember MUSHs. They were a big part of me learning and mastering the craft of software development. That's actually how I learned about object-oriented programming, was through programming on mushes.

Hmm.

Hmm. I think nowadays, Minecraft has become influential.

True.

In getting kids into programming, which is seeing a bit of a resurgence in Java interest, interestingly. Because that's how you write Minecraft mods. And so, there's tons of opportunities with kids who just love Minecraft to death on hacking on it. And so, they're learning Java to do so, which is awesome.

Yeah. I've been looking at actually getting my son into LEGO League, because he loves Legos, and doing some of the programming with the Mindstorms. And so, I'm excited about the opportunities there to get him into thinking about processes and solving problems and things like that, with programming.

And the visual software development kit for Mindstorms is pretty cool and pretty approachable.

Well, there's a Boeing factory out here. I went to lunch yesterday with a fellow who works for FamilySearch, which is part of my pick today. But he basically, he said that yeah, one of the LEGO League coaches works for Boeing at a warehouse/assembly line up near Salt Lake. And they use the exact same visual interface. I forgot what it's called.

LiveView.

Yeah, LiveView. They use the exact same thing to run their robots to build 787s jets.

JPL, JPL also uses LiveView for a lot of the space program stuff. Actually, my first tech job was at a company called National Instruments which is where LiveView originates. So, I got to work on some of the Mars stuff in LiveView which was really, really cool.

To go back to the origin story, I didn't have any right on the top of my head at the time. But a recent guest, episode 172, Pierre-Olivier Latour, if anybody has ever used, let's see what it's called. It is, I'm looking at our show notes and why is it not just jumping out at me... He wrote something for Apple. I'm going to go to his Wikipedia page because that's...

It was actually, it was a GDC server or something like that, that then Apple eventually took in. And it's the Quartz Composer. And so, when I stumbled on this fella and looked into it, so he had a recent project called GitUp, so G-I-T up. And it's a new I guess client for Git, is probably the easiest way to describe it. So, when we found that project, I was like, “That's pretty interesting. We should have him on the show.” But as I dug deeper into this fella's story, I couldn't help, to coin the term, I couldn't help but Founders Talk this particular show.

So, Founders Talk is another podcast I've done where I just talk to founders and essentially share their origin story, like where they came from, what got them into building a company or a product, or software or whatever it might be they've built. And what are the fails, what are the successes, why do they get into it? And with Pierre, I was like, “Wow, this is so interesting. Quartz Composer.” So, he created that, worked at Apple for a number of years, worked at Apple while they created the iPhone. So, that's the epic time to be there. And then his new Project, GitUp which is adding to the user experience of Git which we all know at the command line, Git can be pretty difficult and not always make the most sense, like reverting a commit. That's not the easiest thing to remember. And that's why we have things like Git Oops. So, thanks Carlisia for that. That's an inside thing. But Carlisia Campos, she's in the Go community, works on Go Bridge and volunteers there. But she shared in our Slack room this shorthand to revert a Git commit.

But long story short, this guy's story was so unique because he'd started in an age when the internet wasn't even really around. And they distributed software via CD in the back of a magazine. And so, he was really excited that he was writing software that was like, just little scripts, nothing really huge. But he was sharing it, he was excited because his software was one day on a CD in some sort of magazine that he was talking about. And it was just really interesting to see that kind of progression of in a day and age when it wasn't really easy to communicate, it wasn't really easy to find communities, there wasn't a lot of documentation. So, a lot of it was totally shoot in the dark. And yet he found a way to create software that people liked and eventually create Quartz Composer which was ultimately sold to Apple and he worked there and all that cool stuff. So, that was a pretty cool story.

Alright. Anything else we should dig into before we go to the picks?

Well, the website for Beyond Code is BeyondCode.tv. The website for The Changelog is Changlog.com. And make sure you go to those places.

The Changelog is part of the 5by5 network, isn't it?

So, I would say, yes.

And I would say no. and it's no discredit to Dan, because I love Dan. I love 5by5. But I would say our relationship is more like syndication.

Okay.

Because we don't produce more than one show. We're not, again nothing wrong with Dan whatsoever, but we don't have an affinity to stay at 5by5. So, as we begin to expand, which we didn't really talk about on this show, we have expansion plans and lots of plans that make us tap our fingers together and whisper in secret, stuff like that. Just kidding. [chuckles] But we have plans. So, we're not tied to 5by5 and Dan knows that. So, I love Dan, love 5by5, love Haddie, love all the work they've done with us. But I would say it's more of a syndication partnership rather than a part of the family. Although I do feel like we're part of the family. So, yes and no. That's a long explanation to that yes and no answer.

Cool. Alright. Well, let's go ahead and get to the picks.

Before we get to picks, I want to take some time to thank our silver sponsor.

Coraline, do you have some picks for us?

I do. My first pick is something that a friend of mine turned me on to. Ernie Miller actually. It's Personality Insights from IBM Watson. So, it's a service that uses linguistic analytics to extract social and cognitive characteristics from data that you give it. You're supposed to put in personally generated content like your blog, your tweets, forum posts and so on. And you put in at least 3500 words and you get a personality evaluation. There's an API and it's open source so you can dig into it if you're intrested. My personal profile, I put in a few articles that I wrote, say that I'm shrewd and skeptical and that I consider helping others a large part of what I do. And I think it's important to take care of the people around me, which I think is pretty accurate. So, it's kind of creepy in a way. But I'll put a link to the demo in the show notes.

empathy is not a mystical phenomenon but it's an innate ability that we can strengthen and develop, we can get stronger with. She talks about the fact that emotions are neurological programs that require action to satisfy, which I found really interesting. And she has specific chapters on improving family relationships and workplace relationships. And just overall it's a really interesting book. It's more of a handbook to getting a hold on your emotions and developing a natural empathy than an academic study. So, it's very hands-on and it's been very useful to me so far. So, I'd like to share that as well.

Alright. I'm going to throw a couple of picks out there. The first one is FamilySearch. That's FamilySearch.org. Now that is a genealogy or a family history website. It's run by the LDS church but it has, it's free and it's got a whole bunch of resources of people, census data, all that kind of stuff. I don't think their collection is quite as extensive as say Ancestry.com. But they definitely have quite a bit of stuff. And the thing that's really interesting about it is that they have an API that's been extended by another website called RelativeFinder.org which was put together at Brigham Young University. And what that does is you can create groups in there and it will tell you how you're related to the people in your groups, provided they have their genealogical information in FamilySearch.

The other thing that's interesting is that it also tells you who you're related to from historic stuff. Now, because FamilySearch is run by the LDS church, there are a lot of LDS people that it'll tell you you're related to if you're related to them, which in my case I have Mormon pioneers and stuff. So, that's all in there. But for example Roger Sherman who signed the constitution is my first cousin nine times removed. I've got two relatives that are my tenth grade uncle and tenth grade aunt who were part of the Salem witch trials, I am related to Richard Warren who came over on the Mayflower. He's my 12th great-grandfather. So, you can get all this information. It's really awesome, about who you're related to and things like that. And so yeah, I have Myles Standish who was the military leader of the Mayflower group. He's my 12th grade uncle. And it'll actually tell you how you're related. So, it'll trace back your line all the way back to your common ancestor and then trace back down the line to whoever you're related to. Anyway, it's a lot of fun. It's been really fun to put together. I'll create a group for the DevChat.tv podcasts. I'll just call it DevChat. And if you want to join the group, then the password will also be DevChat. So, if you want to just jump in there and then you can see maybe how you're related to me or to other listeners of the shows. But anyway, it's really fun. And I've really been enjoying it.

The last pick I have is it's snowing. It's snowing right now outside. So, I'm pretty excited about that.

Really?

I love the snow. I hate shoveling it. But I love playing in it. So...

That was awesome. My pick is actually snow.

He just picked it. You can't pick snow.

I can go to snow.com and see it. No, I'm just kidding.

Who here drinks coffee?

I do.

I've been known to drink a cup or two.

I don't.

Okay. So, there's this awesome coffee roaster, good friend of mine. And it's interesting to know a coffee roaster and to know that origin story. So, to go back to your question earlier Coraline about origin stories, it's interesting to see where this came from. But he started roasting coffee and learning how to roast coffee on his stove in his kitchen in his house. And started to research beans and all these different things. And really got into it. He's also a pastor at a church. So, he has a dual job in a way. He's part-time missionary and then full-time coffee roaster. But the coffee roasting company is called DISTRICT Roasters. You can go to DistrictRoasters.com. They do ship. They have some of the best coffees out there.

And what's interesting too is they coupled this with actually serving back to the places they get beans. So, in a lot of places the beans, we actually get and use and grind and make our coffee and we drink every day, most times those are from areas of the world where they're not really financially well off or they have poor living conditions or just, I don't know all the details. But it just turns out to be places where you actually want to invest back into people. And some of these people are just so passionate about doing their job, they've never even drank coffee before. They just make the beans. They just produce the cherry that makes the bean. And so, DISTRICT Roasters is interesting because they actually give back to the places they get beans. So, they run mission trips. They build schools. They build orphanages back there. And it's just really interesting how they approach their business model. So, that's one pick.

I'm told that Avdi likes to mention bourbons and different drinks he does. So, sadly he's not on the show so we can't lament together on my favorites.

But my favorite single malt scotch is Balvenie. Pick any year. I'll drink anything from Balvenie. I don't care what blend it is. Google search that. B-A-L-V-E-N-I-E. I'm sure, maybe Avdi mentioned it once or twice. But there is a new one I just recently found that's a single malt. So, it's not often you can find a single malt scotch at $15. And if you do, it's usually gray market or stolen. I'm just kidding. I don't know if it's stolen or not. But nonetheless, it's never $25. Well, I found the best single malt scotch $25 at my local distributor, MNR liquors. And it's L-I, my dog's barking so Toby's going to [inaudible] me on the [inaudible]. I don't know who's at the door. But L-I-S-M-O-R-E is the name of it. So, it's Lismore. So, single malt scotch, $25. Anyway, so Lismore Scotch. I don't know what the website is for that one. I had a hard time finding it. So, if you just search the internet for LI-S-M-O-R-E single malt scotch, you'll find it.

Alright, my turn. I'm going to stick with podcasts. I'm a huge podcast junkie. And probably a good chance Chuck that all your listeners are also podcast fans. So, I have one technical podcast and a couple of fun ones.

The technical one is Elixir Fountain. It's a weekly show that is Elixir news and interviews. I've been interested in Elixir more and more lately. And looking for an Elixir related podcast, found Elixir Fountain. Very good show. A couple of recent episodes that are worth checking out. Rogue Jessica Kerr was on recently. She keynoted at ElixirConf I believe. And as you all know, she's a very interesting and insightful person. So, they had Jessica on. There's also an episode with Rob Connery, which is worth checking out.

A non-technical, well I guess it's kind of technical but it's for fun podcast, is called Robot or Not? Which is a very brief, I'm talking sometimes less than three-minute show where John Siracusa of the OS 10 reviews fame and Jason Snell argue about whether or not certain things are or are not robots. And it's just a fun show. Some interesting ones for you there, robots.txt. They argued about whether or not that text file [chuckles] on so many web servers is actually a robot. The Terminator, that's episode 17. And they also argued about whether or not Cylons are robots in episode 26. [Chuckles]

Oh, my.

Yeah. Third and final pick is a show I love called Song Exploder, which is a podcast where the musicians take apart their songs and then they tell the story of how they were made. And then at the very final end, it plays the entire song back for you. Really cool. Usually about 10 or 15 minute shows, so not a huge commitment. Some episodes that I've loved of Song Exploder, episode 29, The Imitation Game with Alexandre Desplat. He's one of those guys with a great accent and talks about how he composed that, which is amazing. Episode 37 with John Lunn and Downton Abbey. You're probably familiar with that song. And then the last one which I definitely recommend is episode 39 which is Avengers: Age of Ultron. I like the ones that talk about movie soundtracks and how they come up with those songs. So, check out Song Exploder.

Alright. Well, thanks for coming gentlemen. Is there a good place for people to go find out more about what the two of you are up to? I'm assuming Changelog.com?

Yeah, that'll do it. Changelog.com, BeyondCode.tv for the film series, and of course we're on Twitter as Changelog, all the social medias as Changelog.

That's right.

Alright, well thanks for coming. We'll wrap this one up and we'll catch you all next week.