oneAPI is an open standard for a unified API to be used across different computing accelerator architectures. This including GPUs, AI accelerators, and FPGAs. The goal of oneAPI is to eliminate the need for developers to maintain separate code bases, multiple programming languages, tools, and workflows for each architecture. James Reinders is an en…

When Adam Berger was at Uber, his team was responsible for ensuring that Uber Eats merchants correctly receive and fulfill orders. This required them to think hard about engineering workflows and state management systems. Six years of experience at Uber motivated Adam to create State Backed, which is an open-source backend system written in Typescr…

The open source coding philosophy has enormous appeal to many software engineers, and with good reason. Open source libraries, applications, and operating systems are now essential to the overall technology ecosystem. And the number of open source projects is only increasing. But many developers don’t know how to get involved in open source. Or, th…

There are countless real world scenarios where a workflow or process has multiple steps, and some steps must be completed before others can be started. Think of something as simple as cooking dinner. First you look up a recipe, then you write down the ingredients you need, you go shopping, and then you cook. These steps must be run in a certain ord…

Ongoing advances in generative AI are already having a huge impact on developer productivity. Tools like GitHub Copilot and ChatGPT are increasing the velocity of code development, and more advances are on the horizon. However, an ever-growing challenge for developers is how to manage their coding resources – things like code snippets, website link…

In the realm of modern software development, clear and comprehensive documentation is essential for guiding users and contributors alike. Developers often struggle to create, manage, and maintain documentation that is both user-friendly and visually appealing. In this episode, we sit down with Sebastian Lorber, the lead maintainer of Docusaurus, a …

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This episode is hosted by Alex DeBrie. Alex is the author of The DynamoDB Book, the comprehensive guide to data modeling with DynamoDB, as well as The DynamoDB Guide, a free guided introduction to DynamoDB. He runs a consulting company where he assists clients with DynamoDB data modeling, serverless architectures, and general AWS usage. You can fin…

InfluxDB is an open-source time-series database. It’s maintained by InfuxData who offers a suite of products that help organizations gain insights from time-series data. In this episode, I interview Zoe Steinkamp, Software Engineering and Developer Advocate at InfluxData. We explore some of the common use cases for time-series databases such as IoT…

When creating a website, there’s no shortage of choices for how to do it. Builders must make strategic decisions about the language or framework they want to adopt. An important first consideration for many is selecting a web application framework like React or Vue. Motivated by a low page response time and good user experience, many developers wan…

Angular is a free and open-source web application framework. It’s maintained by the Angular team at Google. It’s used by millions of web applications and has a strong ecosystem of core contributors and library builders. In this episode, I interview Minko Gechev, Developer Relations Lead at Google. We explore several aspects of open-source software …

By most accounts, the first databases came on line in the 1960s. This class of software has continued to evolve alongside the technology it runs on and the applications it supports. In the early days, databases were typically closed source commercial products. Today, databases run in the cloud on distributed systems. Increasingly, the leading tools…

ETL stands for “extract, transform, load” and refers to the process of integrating data from many different sources into one location, usually a data warehouse. This process has become especially important for companies as they use many different services to collect and manage data. The company Grouparoo provides an open source framework that helps…

In the late 1970s a printer at MIT kept jamming, resulting in regular pileups of print jobs in the printer’s queue. To solve this problem, some computer scientists wrote a software program that alerted every user in the backed up queue “The printer is jammed, please fix it.” When a man named Richard Stallmen was refused a copy of the program code, …

The term “boilerplate code” refers to code sections that are repeated across many projects with little to no variation. Every developer is familiar with boilerplate code, whether it be pom.xml files in Java or setting up React.js applications, tweaking boilerplate code for every project is inevitable. Actually, the company Wasp believes writing boi…

Many startups today begin their life as an open-source project. Open source projects allow early adopters of a technology to experiment, to contribute code and feedback, and to shape the evolution of the project in its early stages. When a “community maintainer” company emerges to provide service offerings based on that project, its early customer …

ELT, or “Extract, Load, and Transform,” is the process that modern data pipelines use to replicate data from a source and load it into a target system such as a cloud data warehouse. ELT is a more flexible evolution of the traditional “Extract, Load, Transform” workflow used in pre-cloud systems. The power of ELT relies on flexible integrations bet…

The complexity of building web applications seems to have grown exponentially in the last several years. This added complexity may bring power, but it can also make applications brittle, costly, and difficult to maintain. Suborbital is an open-source project with a goal of making web application development simple. Its flagship project is Atmo, a p…

Observability is a key feature of a well-architected application. Because building an observability system for a cloud application can be challenging, especially at scale, many organizations elect to use third-party observability platforms rather than build internal tools. But these third-party provider contracts often charge by volume of data coll…

As the volume and scope of data collected by an organization grow, tasks such as data discovery and data management grow in complexity. Simply put, the more data there is, the harder it is for users such as data analysts to find what they’re looking for. A metadata hub helps manage Big Data by providing metadata search and discovery tools, and a ce…

The shift to microservices architectures and distributed systems has been a challenge for systems using conventional security practices, such filtering IP addresses using network policies. In addition, the increasing intersection of development and operations exemplified by the DevOps methodology has expanded the scope responsibilities in implement…

A data warehouse is a centralized repository that an enterprise may use to store selected data from production systems. Data is transformed into a structured form that makes it easily accessible for business intelligence or other operational users. SQL-compliant databases are frequently used for data warehouses due to the popularity of SQL as a too…

Open source software is software distributed along with its source code, using a permissive license that allows anyone to view, use, or modify it. The term “open source” also refers more broadly to a philosophy of technology development which prioritizes transparency and community development of a project. Typically, development is managed by a gov…

Originally published October 18, 2019 Apache Kafka was created at LinkedIn. Kafka was open sourced in 2011, when the company was eight years old. By that time, LinkedIn had developed a social network with millions of users. LinkedIn’s engineering team was building a range of externally facing products and internal tools, and many of these tools req…

Originally published September 17, 2019 Ever since Apache Kafka was open sourced from LinkedIn, it has been used to solve a wide variety of problems in distributed systems and data engineering. Kafka is a distributed messaging queue that is used by developers to publish messages and subscribe to topics with a certain message type. Kafka allows info…

Originally published May 16, 2019 React is a set of open source tools for building user interfaces. React was open sourced by Facebook, and includes libraries for creating interfaces on the web (ReactJS) and on mobile devices (React Native). React was released during a time when there was not a dominant frontend JavaScript library. Backbone, Angula…

Business intelligence is crucial for both internal and external applications at any company. There is a wide array of proprietary BI tools. Today, there is an increasing number of options for open source business intelligence, one of which is CubeJS. CubeJS is an open source analytical API platform for building BI. Artyom and Pavel from CubeJS join…

Infrastructure at Spotify runs at high speeds. Developers work autonomously, building and deploying services all the time. Backstage is an open source platform built at Spotify that allows developers to build portals for making sense of their infrastructure. Backstage developer portals are powered by a central service catalog, with centralized serv…

Firebase is well-known as a platform that makes it easy to build real-time applications quickly and easily. Firebase was acquired by Google, and has been turned into a large platform that runs on top of Google Cloud. Firebase is closed-source, which leads to a different ecosystem than open source platforms. Supabase is a new open source alternative…

Business intelligence tooling allows analysts to see large quantities of data presented to them in a flexible interface including charts, graphs, and other visualizations. BI tools have been around for decades, and as the world moves towards increased open source software, the business intelligence tools are following that trend. Metabase is an ope…

Dev.to has become one of the most popular places for developers to write about engineering, programming languages, and everyday life. For those who have not seen it, DEV is like a cross between Twitter and Medium, but targeted at developers. The content on DEV ranges from serious to humorous to technically useful. DEV contains a set of features whi…

WordPress has been a dominant force in the world of online publishing for many years because of how battle-tested it is. WordPress is the definitive leader in CMS technology. But there have always been alternatives. Drupal, Ghost, and other open source CMSes. More recently, there has been an emergence of the headless CMS, such as Contentful, which …

Originally published July 25, 2019. We are taking a few weeks off. We’ll be back soon with new episodes. Envoy is an open source edge and service proxy that was originally developed at Lyft. Envoy is often deployed as a sidecar application that runs alongside a service and helps that service by providing features such as routing, rate limiting, tel…

Originally published April 14, 2017. We are taking a few weeks off. We’ll be back soon with new episodes. Facebook’s open source projects include React, GraphQL, and Cassandra. These projects are key pieces of infrastructure used by thousands of developers–including engineers at Facebook itself. These projects are able to gain traction because Face…

Grafana is an open source visualization and monitoring tool that is used for creating dashboards and charting time series data. Grafana is used by thousands of companies to monitor their infrastructure. It is a popular component in monitoring stacks, and is often used together with Prometheus, ElasticSearch, MySQL, and other data sources. The engin…

Facebook applications use maps for showing users where to go. These maps can display businesses, roads, and event locations. Understanding the geographical world is also important for performing search queries that take into account a user’s location. For all of these different purposes, Facebook needs up-to-date, reliable mapping data. OpenStreetM…

Building a game is not easy. The development team needs to figure out a unique design and gameplay mechanics that will attract players. There is a great deal of creative work that goes into making a game successful, and these games are often built with low budgets by people who are driven by the art and passion of game creation. A game engine is a …

The Changelog is a podcast about the world of open source. As open source has become closely tied with the entire software development lifecycle, The Changelog has expanded its coverage to the broader software industry. Since starting the podcast ten years ago, Adam Stacoviak and Jerod Santo have become full-time podcasters, and they have started s…

Originally published January 4, 2019 When a user makes a request to product like The New York Times, that request hits an API gateway. An API gateway is the entry point for an external request. An API gateway serves several purposes: authentication, security, routing, load balancing, and logging. API gateways have grown in popularity as application…

Every company has a software supply chain. A company builds its products from custom code, paid APIs, paid proprietary binaries, and open source software libraries. As the types of software available have increased, the management of the software supply chain has become complex. Large software companies have always needed to ensure the security of …

Apache Kafka was created at LinkedIn. Kafka was open sourced in 2011, when the company was eight years old. By that time, LinkedIn had developed a social network with millions of users. LinkedIn’s engineering team was building a range of externally facing products and internal tools, and many of these tools required a high-throughput system for pub…

Open source software is very new. Open source has existed for less than 30-40 years, depending on who you ask. The idea of open source was popularized by Linux, and open source software started to get heavily commercialized in the 1990s. By the early 2000s, open source was used by nearly every large software company. In recent years, most of the ne…

Ever since Apache Kafka was open sourced from LinkedIn, it has been used to solve a wide variety of problems in distributed systems and data engineering. Kafka is a distributed messaging queue that is used by developers to publish messages and subscribe to topics with a certain message type. Kafka allows information to flow throughout a company suc…

Open source plays a key role in today’s world of technology businesses. Today, the impact of open source seems obvious. From Kubernetes to distributed databases to cloud providers, so much of our software is powered by open source. But it was not always this way. Bruce Perens was one of the earliest figures in the world of open source. He collabora…

Cryptocurrencies are decentralized monetary systems built on open source software. The open source software movement has evolved from the world of Linux, MySQL, and Apache to a thriving ecosystem of commercial enterprises built around open source software. This ecosystem includes projects such as Kubernetes, MongoDB, and ReactJS. It includes large …

Open source software has evolved into a thriving, multifaceted ecosystem. Open source encompasses operating systems and databases. Open source embodies both altruism and self-interest. And open source enables thriving businesses from WordPress blogs to hundred billion dollar cloud providers. There is a large set of business models that can be built…

During 2015, Uber was going through rapid scalability. The internal engineering systems were constantly tested by the growing user base. Over the next two years, the number of internal services at Uber would grow from 500 to 2000, and standardizing the monitoring of all these different services became a priority. After working with a variety of ava…

Envoy is an open source edge and service proxy that was originally developed at Lyft. Envoy is often deployed as a sidecar application that runs alongside a service and helps that service by providing features such as routing, rate limiting, telemetry, and security policy. Envoy has gained significant traction in the open source community, and has …

Facebook has released open source software projects that have changed the industry. The most impactful projects to date are the React frontend user interface tools: ReactJS and React Native. Before React became popular, there were multiple competing solutions for the dominant frontend JavaScript framework. React became the most prominent because of…

Open source software allows developers to take code from the Internet and modify it for their own use. Open source has allowed innovation to occur on a massive scale. Today, open source software powers our consumer client applications and our backend cloud server infrastructure. Linux powers single node operating systems and Kubernetes is the found…