The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source

Wynn sat down with Ethan Schoonover, creator of Solarized to talk about the science and design behind the wildly popular color scheme as well as his love for Arch Linux. Join the discussionChangelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!Featuring:Wynn Netherland – GitHub, XShow Notes: Ethan Schoonover is a freelance designer, creator of Solarized. Solarized is a sixteen color palette (eight monotones, eight accent colors) designed for use with terminal and gui applications. Vimscript can be intimidating for noobs. The Solarized palette aims to maximize sixteen colors, providing contrast on both dark and light backgrounds Ethan works in the CIELAB: A Lab color space is a color-opponent space with dimension L for lightness and a and b for the color-opponent dimensions, based on nonlinearly compressed CIE XYZ color space coordinates. Achievement unlocked: First guest to mention fovea centralis on the show. “This fellow Wright” is W. David Wright, who experimented with color perception in 1930s. Ethan works out of the LAB space, mapping to other color spaces as tools require. Solarized looks great in a number of fonts as well as syntaxes. Wynn asks if Sass should support LAB. Terminus is Ethan’s favorite fixed with font, but also likes Letter Gothic Mono. Wynn’s litmus test for fixed fonts is the dashrocket alignment. Micah Rich, founder of The League of Movable Type was on Episode 0.7.4. Arch Linux is Ethan’s favorite Linux distro. xmonad is a dynamically tiling X11 window manager that is written and configured in Haskell. The tmux reference on the Arch wiki is most helpful. Check out Episode 0.7.3 for more on tmux. TotalTerminal from the talented Antonin Hildebrand. brew tap makes it easy to tap a new Homebrew formula repository from GitHub, or list existing taps. Freshmeat.net is now freecode.com. GIMP is no Photoshop replacement. Haskell is an advanced, purely-functional programming language. XMonad.Prompt.Input is similar to Quicksilver. Karthik’s terminal convinced Wynn to give Solarized a go. Wynn figured out how to do ‘transparent’ colors in the tmux status bar. TaskWarrior is Ethan’s todo manager, which is saying something since he created Kinkless GTD. Drew Neil, creator of Vimcasts, featured on Episode 0.5.6. Dr. Nic Williams, on Episode #50. Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Wynn caught up with Phil Haack to talk about NuGet and growing the .NET open source community at GitHub. Join the discussionChangelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!Featuring:Wynn Netherland – GitHub, XShow Notes: Phil Haack, GitHubber, Microsoft alumnus, .NET open source guy. NuGet is a Visual Studio extension that makes it easy to install and update third-party libraries and tools in Visual Studio. log4net is often an open source trojan horse in the proprietary enterprise. NuGet features a command line interface and also integrates with SharpDevelop. Wynn asks what impact the names .NET and C# have had on SEO and adoption of Microsoft technology. C# is the #11 most popular language on GitHub. Tiobe places C# as #3 overall. Line endings in Git are everyone’s problem. GitHub may or may not be working on (GitHub for Windows®)™. Phil likes SignalR, an async signaling library for .NET to help build real-time, multi-user interactive web applications. Jabbr is a chat client showcase for SignalR. NancyFx is a lightweight, low-ceremony, framework for building HTTP based services on .NET and Mono. OWIN defines a standard interface between .NET web servers and web applications, much like Rack for Ruby. Sammy.js was also Rat Pack-inspired. Phil thinks LINQ and Reactive Extensions (Rx) are some innovations in .NET that should influence the broader community. The await keyword in C# 5 will accelerate async adoption in .NET. Wynn <3’s Hubot and especially likes the Dude and Mustachify scripts. David Fowler, developer on the ASP.NET team and who works on NuGet and SignalR inspires Phil. Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Wynn caught up with Josh Kalderimis and Mathias Meyer from Travis CI to talk about hosted CI in the sky, scaling apps, and a little Riak. Join the discussionChangelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!Featuring:Wynn Netherland – GitHub, XShow Notes: Travis CI a hosted continuous integration service for the open source community. Josh Kalderimis is a core Travis CI team member, Rails contributor, gem developer, and general serial coder. Mathias Meyer, hacker on Travis, author of the Riak Handbook. Travis now provides first class support for Python and Perl. Travis also supports several versions of Ruby including Ruby hidHEAD. [8:15] Mathias lays out the case for Travis vs. Jenkins, namely a streamlined user interface. Travis runs almost exclusively on Heroku. AMQP powers the message queues in Travis. Keep an eye on Travis listener. The GitHub service hook makes setting up your open source project on Travis a breeze. If you’re a Travis user, show some love to keep the features coming. GitHubber Rick Olson worked on some API features to help Travis more deeply integrate with GitHub. Private repo support, aka Travis Pro™ is on its way. If you want to get in on the beta, donate to the project. Donate $500, get an hour of pairing with Aaron Patterson, Yehuda Katz, José Valim, Jon Leighton, or other Ruby pro. Mathias previously worked at Basho and The Riak Handbook is a collection of what he learned there. José Valim is Josh’s programming hero for his code and community building. Mathias is playing with Kestrel and Zookeeper. Josh and Mathias like Celluloid. Mike Perham’s Sidekiq has caught Josh and Mathias’ eye. Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Adam and Wynn caught up with Micah Rich from The League of Moveable type to talk about open source typography. Join the discussionChangelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!Featuring:Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XWynn Netherland – GitHub, XShow Notes: Micah Rich, from The League of Movable Type. Caroline Hadilaksono, co-founder of The League. League Gothic, one of Caroline’s popular faces is Wynn’s favorite. Several of League fonts are available on TypeKit. Dave Crossland, designer of Cantarell. Chunk was created by Meredith Mandel. The League fonts are forkable on GitHub. FontForge is an outline font editor that lets you create your own postscript, truetype, opentype, and more. Glyphs is a professional font editor for Mac OS X. Wynn’s slide decks make use of League Gothic and Hand of Sean. Lettering.js gives you more control over kerning on the web. The Manifesto lays out the vision for The League. Haley Fiege contributed Sniglet. Barry Schwartz has contributed several fonts. Want to help Micah introduce typographers to git? Get in touch. Wynn asks about vertical rhythm, which Compass makes easier. Lettercase is a social font manager. Adam uses FontExplorer X but wishes it did more. Micah on Dribbble. Lettercase is powered by Sinatra, Warden, and Grape. Hoefler & Co. are Micah’s heroes in typography design. Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Brian Hogan, author and trainer who wrote a practical tmux guide, and Josh Clayton, ThoughtBot developer and dotfiles maintainer, talk tmux, Vim, and dotfiles workflows. They dive into tmux use cases, tmuxinator project setups, macOS clipboard and color tricks, iTerm2 pairing, syncing dotfiles, terminal apps, and plugins that streamline editing and testing.

Wynn caught up with Mitchell Hashimoto from the Vagrant project to talk about virtualized environments, DevOps, and more. Join the discussionChangelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!Featuring:Mitchell Hashimoto – Website, GitHub, XWynn Netherland – GitHub, XShow Notes: We’re now @TheChangelog on Twitter. Mitchell Hashimoto from Vagrant. Vagrant is a tool for building and distributing virtualized development environments by providing automated creation and provisioning of virtual machines using Oracle’s VirtualBox. Vagrant is currently a Ruby gem. Mitchell uses Vagrant to test his Chef cookbooks, featured in Episode 0.3.8. Travis CI uses Vagrant extensively. Show Travis some love, tell ‘em to come on The Changelog. Mitchell just returned from FOSDEM. John Bender has helped out Mitchell with Vagrant. VeeWee: the tool to easily build vagrant base boxes or KVM, VirtualBox, and Fusion images. Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Wynn caught up with Alex MacCaw to talk about Spine, CoffeeScript, writing books, and working at Twitter. Join the discussionChangelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!Featuring:Alex MacCaw – Website, GitHub, XWynn Netherland – GitHub, XShow Notes: Alex MacCaw, O’Reilly writer and open source developer now working on the front-end for Twitter. Spine Lightweight MVC library for building JavaScript applications, inspired by Backbone. Spine is written in CoffeeScript Eco is Alex’s favorite client-side templating engine. Alex suggests trying to use the same templating engine server-side and client-side, perhaps with Mustache, is a pipe dream. Spine integrates with Rails out of the box. Hem is like Bundler but for Node.js. Juggernaut enables realtime server push with node.js, WebSockets and Comet Spine.app “Effortlessly generate Spine, CoffeeScript and Hem applications. Spine.App gives your applications structure, CommonJS modules, a development server and more.” Alex is working on The Little Book on CoffeeScript in printed form for O’Reilly. JavaScript Web Apps covers building client-side MVC apps in a framework agnostic way. Twitter is hiring! Got the chops? Get in touch. Jeremy Ashkenas is Alex’s programming hero. Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Wynn caught up with Jonathan and Matt from Zurb to talk about Foundation, their HTML5 front end scaffold and many projects from the Zurb playground. Join the discussionChangelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!Featuring:Wynn Netherland – GitHub, XShow Notes: Jonathan Smiley - Design lead at Zurb Matt Kelly is a developer at Zurb The Zurb playground showcases many Zurb’s front end experiments. Zurb foundation is an easy to use, powerful, and flexible framework for building prototypes and production code on any kind of device. Bootstrap from Twitter bakes in more style opinions and currently does not target mobile devices. Zurb Foundation ships in Rails, Compass, two WordPress, and ASP.NET MVC flavors. Flickr Bomb is a more entertaining alternative to http://placehold.it Joyride is a fun way to do feature tours. Zurb buttons are super awesome. Orbit is a lightweight image slider for jQuery. The version bundled with Foundation supports responsive layouts. Reveal is an easy way to add great looking modals to web apps. Zurb also offers a set of free apps including Axe and Strike. Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Wynn sat down with Sean and Brian from Spree to talk about ecommerce in Rails, SpreeConf, and their recent $1.5M funding round. Join the discussionChangelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!Featuring:Wynn Netherland – GitHub, XShow Notes: Sean Schofield, Spree founder and CEO of Spree Commerce, Inc. Brian Quinn, long time Spree contributor and CTO of SpreeCommerce Spree (née RailsCart) is a Rails engine that provides an out-of-the box, customizable ecommerce platform. Spree fully integrates into the Rails 3.1 Asset pipeline Rails engines have accelerated Spree adoption Spree is built on actively maintained community projects including Devise, Kaminari, Paperclip, ResourceController, State Machine, and ActiveMerchant. Spree recently closed a $1.5M funding round SpreeConf is geared to both business and developer audiences Everybody loves Sticker Mule Shoedazzle and SecondLife run highly customized versions of Spree. Spree has a growing list of community extensions. RailsDog Radio is a great showcase of Spree functionality. Grab the source on GitHub If you actually need a satellite radio, check out TSS Radio. Spree will unbox a new demo installation on Heroku just for you. Deface allows you to customize HTML ERB views in a Rails application without editing the underlying view. Ryan Bigg, Ruby Hero and co-author of Rails 3 in Action has joined Spree as community manager. Like Changelog Episodes, Spree is not SemVer compliant. Sean wants to explore using RailsAdmin into Spree Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Adam and Wynn caught up with Chris Forsythe, lead of the Growl project to talk about Growl, their App Store launch, and his work on Adium and Perian. Join the discussionChangelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!Featuring:Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XWynn Netherland – GitHub, XShow Notes: We recently launched The Sass Way so you can get your fix of all things Sass and Compass Chris Forsythe is the project lead for Growl. Growl is a popular notification system for Mac OS X. Growl is now in the App Store and on GitHub Chris was formerly the project manager for the Adium. Your $1.99 will help send Chris to his first WWDC. GrowlMail is now a separate project. Over two hundred applications support Growl notifications. Designers have created many visual Growl styles to make Growl look great. Wynn’s favorite is Hud from @Rogie. Growl now supports GNTP, allowing Linux and Windows notifications apps to share a common protocol. Wynn uses Growl for visual feedback for his test suite. Chris also is a founder of the Perian project, a free, open source QuickTime component that adds native support for many popular video formats. Chris says that the GPL prevents Perian from taking the App Store path. The OSI is a non-profit corporation with global scope formed to educate about and advocate for the benefits of open source and to build bridges among different constituencies in the open source community. Chris relates the impact Steve Jobs had on his open source work. Evan Schoenberg inspires Chris. Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!