The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source

Adam and Wynn caught up with Carl Tashian from Open Government to talk about OpenGovernment.org, OpenCongress.org, and the rise of the Citizen Coder. 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: Carl Tashian is Director of Technology at Open Government OpenGovernment: Empower individuals and organizations to track government at every level OpenCongress.org - open source Rails app to track the goings on in the US Congress Library of Congress THOMAS site is the source for federal legislative information OpenGovernment.org, a public resource for government transparency at the state, city, and local levels. Free and open-source. Open States API The Sunlight Foundation aims to make government transparent and accountable Wynn helped create TweetCongress.org winner of a SXSW 2009 Web award for activism, making use of Sunlight APIs Follow the money and connect the dots between bills, key votes, and campaign donations. Transparency Data is a central source for federal lobbying disclosure, federal grants and contracts, earmarks and federal and state campaign contributions, complete with it’s own API GovKit Luigi Montanez and Wynn wrote a wrapper for Transparency Data Fog, the Ruby cloud services library Carl worked at ZipCar prior to joining Open Government Syncing large datasets from different providers is a big challenge PostgreSQL and PostGIS power the backend of OpenGovernment GeoServer is an open source software server written in Java that allows users to share and edit geospatial data. MongoDB and Rack provide a fast way to track page views in the app Sunlight, Code for America, and Open Government - rise of the Citizen Coder? Oakland Crimespotting is a case study on developers having an impact on government DocumentCloud, featured in Episode 0.0.5 Jammit, Industrial Strength Asset Packaging for Rails Pythonistas, why not help out by creating a scraper for your state? Kenneth and Wynn debate the best terminal font Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Adam and Wynn caught up with Adam Moore and Satyen Desai from the YUI team to talk about YUI 3, Node.js, and working with Douglas Crockford. Join the discussionChangelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!Show Notes: YUI is the Yahoo! User Interface library, a collection of front end code goodies for JavaScript and CSS Follow the YUI Blog for the latest developments, such as the new 3.3.0 release Adam Moore and Satyen Desai are engineers on the YUI team. The Autocomplete widget provides a flexible, configurable, and accessible implementation of the AutoComplete design pattern. The DataTable widget renders columnar data into a highly customizable and fully accessible HTML table The Dial widget is an alternative to sliders The YUI Charts recently moved from Flash to JavaScript in YUI 3 The Community developed the drag/move component YUI is on GitHub, fueling community involvement YUI Theater is a great source for JavaScript talks and all things YUI Douglas Crockford is the author of JSLint, the JSON spec, featured on Episode 0.2.6 from TXJS Nicholas C. Zakas aka @slicknet is the author of a number of JavaScript books Eric Miraglia is the Engineering Manager for the YUI team JSLint improves your JavaScript but will not spare your feelings Dave Glass - has a great talk about YUI + Node “I love async, but I can’t code like this” Many of the additional Node.js modules deal with parallel execution Adam suggests targeting features, not platform since features like touch will be on the desktop eventually. Satyen’s talk on YUI’s mobile strategy The module pattern in JavaScript The YUI Gallery lists discoverable components contributed by the community Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Wynn caught up with Salvatore Sanfilippo to talk about Redis, the super hot key value store. Join the discussionChangelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!Featuring:Salvatore Sanfilippo – Website, GitHub, XWynn Netherland – GitHub, XShow Notes: VMware signs the paychecks for Salvatore and Pieter Noordhuis Redis is an open source, advanced key-value store and data structure server wherein keys can contain strings, hashes, lists, sets and sorted sets Redis internals consist of ANSI C with an evented model Non-blocking replication has always been a Redis design goal Replication in Redis is async Salvatore’s Redis toolbox includes the Redis Ruby gem and Sinatra Chances are you can find a Redis library in your favorite language The C client is the only officially supported wrapper Salvatore thinks the NoSQL moniker isn’t perfect, focusing too much on performance, but it frames a discussion Redis Pub/Sub is perfect for real-time apps GitHub’s adoption of Redis in Resque helped fuel the growth of the project Redis users tend to use it as a database, as a messaging bus, or as a cache Salvatore thinks hosted solutions like Redis-to-Go need to add more value like more frequent backups and seamless upgrades. Blizzard uses an 8-node Redis install in serving avatars for WoW Justin Campbell asks will VMWare feature Redis in any upcoming projects? Ezra Zygmuntowicz and GitHub were among the first “few brave users” After a few months Salvatore noticed a dip in adoption , but he trusted his gut and stuck with it Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Wynn caught up with Aaron Patterson, aka @tenderlove, to talk about Ruby 1.9, Nokogiri, and muscle cars. Join the discussionChangelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!Show Notes: RubyCommitters.org lists all the folks who hack on the Ruby language Nokogiri is a library for parsing XML and HTML The origins of tenderlove, Aaron’s online persona Hot linking, check it and see. Got a page rank of a hundred and three., to the tune of Hot Blooded Mechanize adds an API to any website Being a Ruby committer is ‘alright’ Yugui, release manager for Ruby 1.9 The current state of rubycommitters.org reminds us of CSS Naked Day REXML is a pure Ruby XML processor MiniTest is Aaron’s favorite testing framework His favorite Ruby 1.9.2 feature is speed texticle is a wrapper around Postgress T-Search APIs Aaron will be keynoting at Red Dirt Ruby Conf FasterCSV from JEG2, one of the organizers for Red Dirt Ruby Conf. El Camino, IROC-Z, or Firebird with T-tops are Aaron’s top three dream cars For those who have never shaved a Yak and otherwise did not know it. Arel is at the heart of Rails 3 ActiveRecord improvements Debian’s Ruby maintainer says he’s out Ruby Kaigi, the C conference disguised as a Ruby conference In addition to Japanese, Aaron also speaks Scheme and Haskell Wynn ? CoffeeScript Aaron wants to pair program with Jim Weirich Wynn suggests Aaron capitalize on Tenderlovemaking by organizing promiscuous pair programming Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Steve Klabnik joined the show to talk about learning to program with Hackety Hack and why the lucky stiff. Join the discussionChangelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!Featuring:Steve Klabnik – Website, GitHub, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XWynn Netherland – GitHub, XShow Notes: Steve Klabnik, maintainer of Hackety Hack, newest contributor to The Changelog Hackety Hack will teach you the absolute basics of programming from the ground up. _why, creator of Hackety Hack. Help keep his memory alive. Abbott and Costello’s classic “Who’s on first?” Yakety Yak is a song written, produced, and arranged by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller for The Coasters and released on Atlantic Records in 1958 Shoes is a tiny graphical app kit for ruby GTK is a highly usable, feature rich toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces which boasts cross platform compatibility and an easy to use API. MacRuby is an implementation of Ruby 1.9 directly on top of Mac OS X core technologies such as the Objective-C runtime and garbage collector, the LLVM compiler infrastructure and the Foundation and ICU frameworks. The Shoebox is a gallery of Shoes apps. Mad props to Heroku, Sinatra, and MongoMapper for handling a LifeHacker traffic spike Ruby is a great language to teach programming _why’s Poignant Guide to Ruby ChunkFive is a nice bold free and open source typeface Steve is intrigued by projects like cool.io and node.js and the evented style of programming. Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Adam and Wynn caught up with Yehuda Katz to talk about upcoming changes in Rails 3.1, SproutCore, and his growing list of open source projects. Join the discussionChangelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!Featuring:Yehuda Katz – Website, GitHub, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XWynn Netherland – GitHub, XShow Notes: Wynn’s deck from ‘07 pays tribute to Yehuda Merb influenced and later merged with Rails SproutCore is an HTML5 application framework for building responsive, desktop-caliber apps in any modern web browser, without plugins. Carl Lerche is the other half of carlhuda Desktop MVC != Server MVC Handlebars.js is Yehuda’s optimization of Mustache.js Backbone.js is a lightweight MVC framework from DocumentCloud Bundler manages an application’s dependencies through its entire life across many machines systematically and repeatably. One of the biggest changes in Rails 3 is The Great Decoupling Railtie is the core of the Rails Framework and provides several hooks to extend Rails and/or modify the initialization process Asset handling is coming in Rails 3.1, meaning better support for Sass, Compass, and CoffeeScript Do you modify your Nginx setup? Yehuda prefers Sass and Compass to Less since the introduction of the SCSS syntax. Haml is the templating language of choice for sophisticated web devs. Yehuda likes JavaScript on the server but thinks evented frameworks like Node are more for edge cases than for the heart of the web. The Ruby Racer is a Ruby binding to V8 and is great for testing your JavaScripts without a browser Charles Lowell wrapped Handlebars.js as Handlebars.rb Yehuda loves CoffeeScript wants a runtime debugger before taking the plunge. libgit2 is a portable, pure C implementation of the Git core methods provided as a re-entrant linkable library with a solid API, allowing you to write native speed custom Git applications in any language which supports C bindings. Adam really loves Thor, a scripting framework that replaces rake and sake and is used by the new Rails 3 generators. There is no shortage of thor tasks from users on GitHub. Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Wynn caught up with Chris Matthieu of Voxeo Labs to talk about Phono, Tropo, Adhearsion, and building telephony apps with open source tools. 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: We’re excited to team up with GitHub Jobs! To have your job posting read on air, just check “Advertise this listing on The Changelog Podcast for an additional $100” when you post your job. Chris Matthieu founder of Teleku, now with Voxeo Labs, the company behind Tropo, Teleku, and Phono. Tropo’s GitHub projects Adhearsion uses Ruby to create voice-enabled applications on top of Asterisk Asterisk turns an ordinary computer into a communications server Phono, a jQuery plugin that lets you make phone calls right from your browser. Jay Phillips orginally created Adhearsion Jason Goecke VP of Innovation at Voxeo AGI protocol is at the core of Asterisk Wynn and Chris go way back with TAPI, MAPI, and SAPI Google Voice transcriptions gone bad The SIP protocol allows multimedia communication sessions such as voice and video calls over Internet Protocol The Jingle protocol extends XMPP and powers Google Talk Wynn asks how Tropo stacks up against Twilio Tropo does TTS in nine languages Tropo’s Scripting Environment supports Ruby, Python, PHP, Groovy, and Javascript Tropo’s REST API offers a more traditional API approach Facebook Telephone lets you call your Facebook friends via Phono. Twelephone, if Twitter is more your bag Michael Bleigh from Intridea makes Twitter apps easier for Rubyists Facebook’s OpenGraph API makes building Facebook apps much easier than previous APIs Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Wynn sat down with Andy Gross and Mark Phillips of Basho and John Nunemaker of Ordered List to talk about Riak, Riak Search, and moving an open source community to GitHub. Join the discussionChangelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!Featuring:John Nunemaker – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XWynn Netherland – GitHub, XShow Notes: NoSQL smackdown, live from SXSW 2010. Are you web scale? Drop us a ping@thechangelog.com and let us know who you want to get on The Changelog Andy Gross VP of Engineering at Basho, the company behind Riak. Mark Phillips Community Manager at Basho AKA * @pharkmillups John Nunemaker of Ordered List and MongoMapper fame Riak is now available as a binary download Bitcask, the new backend for Riak Riak key value store, decentralized datastore from Basho Technologies Riak Search, full-text search engine based on Riak Riak buckets, container and keyspace for data stored in Riak Riak KVS buckets can be automatically searchable by installing the Search pre-commit hook Riak supports an Apache SOLR interface Sean Cribbs made some waves with Ripple Ruby, Python, Node.js are the biggest adopters of Riak Riak aims to scale both up and down. Adding a node adds a linear increase in throughput and storage capacity. 50 nodes run easily on a laptop. Riak nodes are truly decentralized, no node is special Riak compares to Cassandra and Voldemort Riak has built-in JavaScript map reduce but unlike Couch, it’s more an ad hoc approach. Andy explains Riak’s link walking or bucket-key-tag relationships between objects. Riak now has two interfaces, the original REST HTTP interface, and a new protocol buffers interface, a faster binary interface Eric Brewer, a Basho board member, and his cap theorem Bitcask is an append-only file format where the keys are stored in memory for ultra fast lookups. InnoStore, the original Riak backend John Muellerleile, author of the popular NoSQL cartoon about distributed map reduce in Erlang Apache Lucene query syntax a growing standard for search The move from BitBucket to GitHub was ultimately about community, not about DVCS The THANKS file lists many Riak community contributors Harmony - the MongoDB-powered hosted CMS from Ordered List Mozilla runs several Riak clusters to log data from their Test Pilot project Francisco Treacy uses Riak in WideScript, “an innovative app that helps you focus and interact with your texts — on your desktop, your couch or on the go.” Inagist recently moved from Cassandra to Riak Riak has partnered with Joyent and Node creator Ryan Dahl to create Riak SmartMachines Mark also is a fan of Redis Scala and Clojure have Andy excited, too. Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Wynn caught up with Thomas Fuchs to talk about script.aculo.us, Scripty2, Zepto.js and the future of Prototype. Join the discussionChangelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!Show Notes: The Magic Roundabout is crazy Wynn got his UK badge on Gowalla script.aculo.us JavaScript effects framework built on top of Prototype Prototype - JavaScript Framework that aims to ease development of dynamic web applications. Thomas is one of many talented RoR core team alumni Scripty2 - completely rewritten version of script.aculo.us RaphaelJS - JavaScript vector graphics library featured in Episode 0.2.5 Johnson Page asks “What’s the future of Prototype.js?” Underscore.js utility library for jQuery, inspired by Prototype, featured in Episode 0.0.5 Zepto.js minimalist inlinable framework for mobile WebKit browsers, with a jQuery-like chaining syntax EveryTimeZone.com - handy tool to pick a time to meet across time zones. A promotional site for Freckle, chock full of JavaScript best practices. Thomas’ blog post on approaches taken with EveryTimeZone.com Gury Chainable syntax wrapper for the <canvas> element Vapor.js “The only JS framework compatible with every browser.” MadRobby gives mad props to @janl, @hblank, @cramforce and other JSConf.eu organizers. FabJS - modular async framework for Node.js Chris Williams’ talk on PromoteJS, an effort The Changelog supports. Eyeballs.js - A lightweight MVC framework for building fast, tidy JavaScript web apps CoffeeScript, featured in Episode 0.2.9 Amy Hoy, Thomas’ wife, product proponent, and usability diva. Freckle helps you manage your time JavaScript Performance Rocks - three books on ultimate web app performance Charm Desk - Thomas and Amy tackle customer support PeepCode’s Smashing into Vim with the soothing voice of Dan Benjamin Mensch and Meslo, the latest stops on Thomas’ journey to find the ultimate Terminal.app font Thomas likes to fly his AR.Drone around the office He’s also building the Lego Milennium Falcon SchnitzelConf a 1-day, full-contact conference in Vienna, Austria focusing on creating products, launching businesses, and charging real money. Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Wynn sat down with Corey Donohoe from GitHub and Seth Chisamore from Opscode to talk about DevOps, Chef, agile infrastructure and innovation in the datacenter. Join the discussionChangelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!Show Notes: Corey Donahoe aka @atmos, DevOps dude at GitHub Seth Chisamore aka @schisamo, evangelist at Opscode, makers of Chef Chef, an open source systems integration framework built to bring the benefits of configuration management to your entire infrastructure. DevOps is defined as a set of processes, methods and systems for communication, collaboration and integration between departments for Development (Applications/Software Engineering), Technology Operations and Quality Assurance (QA) Puppet, an open source data center automation and configuration management framework. Cfengine, continuous datacenter automation and repair Knife, the Chef command line interface Chef Hosted platform is an instant hosted, highly scalabe Chef Server Chef solo lets you run Chef without a Chef server Chef was architected to be multi-tenant The Opscode Team members have impressive resumes. Chef includes impressive role-based authorities Cookbooks are like Rubygems for Chef Cinderella née Cider = apple + homebrew + chef + rvm Homebrew as the most forked project is GitHub’s stress test. Be sure to catch Max on Episode 0.3.5 Wynn makes the case that the Swedish Chef be the face of the DevOps movement Silverline from Librato does complex systems management and monitoring EY or EngineYard, Corey’s former employer uses VMs in their architecture Simon Wardley’s OSCon keynote OpenStack is an effort to standardize the cloud DevOps version of the account that got Shatner back on TV DevOps Borat tweets from the datacenter Fog, Wesley Beary’s excellent Ruby abstraction layer for popular cloud providers Knife, donated by 37 Signals Wynn digs infinity_test to test against multiple versions of Ruby at the same time collectd, system statistics collection daemon Using Visage to graph collectd stats Sign up for the Opscode platform free beta Look up Seth as schisamo in #chef and #chef-hacking on IRC Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!