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2016-Spotlight-Transcripts

+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[00:31\] Welcome to our Spotlight series, recorded at All Things Open 2016. I am Adam Stacoviak, editor in chief of Changelog. In this episode I talk with Anna Derbakova from IBM after her jam packed talk on Blockchain and Hyperledger, about the fundamentals of blockchain, how this technology is revolutionizing finance, banking, IoT, supply chains, manufacturing, and any other applications out there that can benefit from a "smart contract". We also talked about the Hyperledger Project and the exciting opportunities that exist in the future for blockchains. Listen in!
+\* \* \*
+**Adam Stacoviak:** The way we started off, Anna, is -- and you're like me, you've got one of those names that somebody probably butchers... \[laughter\] I'm Stacoviak, and you're...
+**Anna Derbakova:** Derbakova.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Anna Derbakova.
+**Anna Derbakova:** Yeah, that's fine.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Alright, so do me a favor, tell me your name and where you're from.
+**Anna Derbakova:** My name is Anna Derbakova and I live here in Raleigh, North Carolina.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And you work at IBM - what area of IBM?
+**Anna Derbakova:** I work in IBM in the cloud group; specifically, I work in the organization called IBM Blockchain, which is a division of IBM that specifically focuses on blockchain technologies, and essentially contributing to the Hyperledger Project and advancing it. The Hyperledger Project is an open source project under the Linux Foundation. It was formed late December 2015, and it's an open source initiative to advance and support blockchain technologies, specializing and focusing on business applications; a lot of companies that have stepped forward and shown support and became partners, signature members - they're on the website, it's really big names like DTCC and DAH and Intel... They're all very interested in business applications of blockchain, such as financial trading or supply chain or any kind of document tracking that have sensitive information.
+It's gained a lot of momentum, they're growing the community now. The Technical Steering Committee is very geared toward growing the community, attracting new members, getting people excited about it. The Technical Steering Committee I believe has maybe about 12 members. The chair of the Technical Steering Committee is from IBM, and we're super excited to be a part of the project.
+Here in Raleigh we have a really big portion of the development team, so we work on actual code development and contribution to Hyperledger. Also, we have a lot of the testing here. The vast majority of the development team is essentially here. I think we do have some people at another site, that mostly focus on cryptography and cryptology, but the majority of the development is here, which is a big pride for the RTP site, I think, at this point. Hugely excited... It gets a lot of attention on us, which is cool.
+We have, obviously, a lot of other teams that are very essential to this initiative, like the Blockchain Garage or the client engagement teams that are kind of dispersed... We have one in the U.K., we have one in Austin, but core development's here...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** In Raleigh.
+**Anna Derbakova:** In Raleigh, RTP - Research Triangle Park.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's called RTP?
+**Anna Derbakova:** It's called RTP, Research Triangle Park Campus, but a lot of people say the IBM Raleigh...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Because why would you say all those words, right?
+**Anna Derbakova:** Yeah, RTP. It's just short and easy, and a lot of people associate with that, because they know where it is. So that's what we do here in Raleigh, we write code for Hyperledger.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** \[04:04\] Nice.
+**Anna Derbakova:** It's cool.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Help me demystify for those who are still catching up or don't get it or haven't gotten it yet, or haven't looked far enough into it yet, to understand what blockchain is or means.
+**Anna Derbakova:** Sure. So if you haven't had an opportunity to listen to my talk about blockchain and Hyperledger -- yesterday I gave a talk here, at All Things Open, and it's received tremendous reviews, so I've been asked to post my slides, or somehow share my slides, because it sounds like they were pretty helpful to people to demystify some of these concepts... So if there's any way to share that - once I upload it, maybe I can send you a link.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** We'll attach it to the show notes, for sure.
+**Anna Derbakova:** Yeah, so maybe you can announce that. But you know, just to explain it, Blockchain is the system that powers Bitcoin. A lot of people have probably heard of Bitcoin, and that's the one assumption I made in my talk, that that's something people know about... It's a cryptocurrency that's really widespread.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** We're cool, and actually we had a show on Ethereum, too.
+**Anna Derbakova:** This is good, yeah...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** We haven't had a Bitcoin show, but we talked to Gavin Wood from Ethereum.
+**Anna Derbakova:** This is awesome, yeah. So if people are catching on to Ethereum, Hyperledger is the next thing that you should learn about.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay.
+**Anna Derbakova:** But just to summarize Blockchain, it's a distributed ledger; essentially, you have a network of computers or devices which all share this record of transactions. When transactions are happening on the network between the different nodes, such as financial transactions or any kind of asset exchange, the nodes first have to agree on some aspect of these transactions - in this case, ordering what happens first and what happens next. So once they come to this process called consensus, they agree to commit those transactions to the ledger, and everybody gets a copy of that.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** The whole distributed...
+**Anna Derbakova:** It's distributed... So essentially it's a record that everybody owns, but nobody can really change single-handedly. Everybody has to agree to change it.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay, makes sense.
+**Anna Derbakova:** And it kind of grows, and the blocks are cryptographically linked; there is a mechanism by which they are essentially based on previous blocks, so if you modify something in the middle and you try to tamper with it, it's very easy to detect that there is some attempt to modify the data that exists. Also, it's very difficult -- it's practically impossible to do it without significant computational costs.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So like a supercomputer, basically.
+**Anna Derbakova:** Essentially, if you wanna tamper with some of the data that was previously stored in the blockchain without being noticed, it's gonna be pretty hard to do, because... In an easy way to explain, the hash of the data in a given block is included as part of the next block. So if you modify a part of a block, it changes the hash and it essentially messes up the links of all the subsequent blocks.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And they don't agree.
+**Anna Derbakova:** And they don't agree.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay.
+**Anna Derbakova:** So that's in a nutshell what blockchain is.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** You explained it so well.
+**Anna Derbakova:** Thanks, well I appreciate that; hopefully it's clear for you, too.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I mean ... I'm getting it, so it's definitely making a dent for sure.
+**Anna Derbakova:** Glad to hear it. So the point is you can't change the data that you store; if you have an account and you have X dollars in your account, it doesn't mean you can't change the value of that X dollars - you certainly can, but the point is it's another transaction that you append. You append it, you don't just go in there and you modify a record. You don't really modify anything, you append a new transaction. That's why typically people refer to it as an append-only ledger. The transactions append at the end.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Gotcha, okay.
+**Anna Derbakova:** It's becoming a really hot technology in the finance field, also in supply chains - an example I discussed yesterday - because there are so many middlemen in transaction and exchanges in a supply chain network...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** UPS, FedEx...
+**Anna Derbakova:** \[07:46\] Yeah, so many... I gave the example of supply chain of pork, in China, farm to table - how many people change hands between actually growing something and actually going through storage facilities, or some kind of processing facilities, and people who deliver the goods... Who actually has it, who tampers with it, what temperature is it under, where is it stored - all of these things... There's a big question mark, right? So by the time it gets to a table, you don't know who handled it and how. Blockchain is one of the solutions some of the bigger companies are looking to to implement something that would essentially record every time a transaction takes place, like an exchange of an asset from one party to another - you would record it as an asset transfer, and you would record the specific information that matters, like temperature, or how it's stored, or whatever is specific to the asset you're exchanging. Then you can't really tamper with it afterwards; it's kind of hard to cheat on the blockchain, right?
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Gotcha. It's very secure.
+**Anna Derbakova:** Yeah, so if somebody messes up your product, you can go and trace where exactly that happened, and then there's no questions.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Gotcha. What does this technology replace? That's what I think of when I think about blockchain. Obviously, we're evolving in the way we use technology; it's gotta be replacing something... What's currently in place now, in these areas, to do something similar?
+**Anna Derbakova:** I think there's different ways in which... Like supply chain, right?
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Or is there no framework at all, and blockchain is the new framework that will...?
+**Anna Derbakova:** Well, blockchain is almost a composition of some existing technologies. Blockchain obviously has a storage layer, like a database - you have to store your state for your transaction, or your asset or whatever.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Is the database your choice, or is it chosen by...?
+**Anna Derbakova:** It depends on your implementation. Hyperledger uses a specific type of database, but it's pluggable and you can use something else. A database essentially stores the data, but it stores it in a very unique way - it stores it in blocks, but also the hash of the block is stored in the next block. That's a very different thing from just storing key/value stores in the database, right?
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Right, right.
+**Anna Derbakova:** So that essentially allows you to store that data in a way that you're explicitly pointing to the previous block. So if any of the previous blocks have been modified, that link in the chain is now broken because you're pointing to a block who's hash has changed, so it no longer exists, essentially. Just removing a transaction from a block breaks your chain.
+That's a cool, new idea that came from the way Bitcoin was implemented, because that's the idea that they used. Then other parts of the blockchain also involve existing technologies like peer-to-peer communication, consensus for the nodes to basically agree how to commit the transactions, the ordering of the transactions... That idea of having them work together in this way - that's certainly new.
+What does it replace? It depends on the specific field. For example, supply chains work today. If you wanna argue "Are they effective?" Well, yeah, you get your meat at the store, you get your goods on the shelves...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Has someone tampered with it though?
+**Anna Derbakova:** ...but you don't really know how many irrelevant steps are happening, you don't really know how much fat you have in the process, so to speak.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Good choice of words, nice pun.
+**Anna Derbakova:** \[laughs\] You know what I mean? Like, how many steps are really necessary in solving this problem, or is it really as effective as we want it to be? The paperwork - there's gobs and gobs of paperwork every time you ship something or receive something, or deal with customs. A lot of that is just process, right? So I think blockchain offers you also a way to store your data, automate some of these things and make them more efficient, and to remove the inefficiencies that you don't really need.
+\[11:47\] Also, I think it has a lot of applications going forward to integrate with other technologies, like IoT, for example. That's like a huge use case they're exploring also at IBM - let's say for supply chain, to equip your supply chain with devices. Let's say you're shipping a container across the Atlantic, you can have temperature sensors in your container telling you if the goods are still stored properly, or container locks that tell you if the container has been tampered with; where it is, you put GPS on it, or some kind of delivery timestamps.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And those all append to the...
+**Anna Derbakova:** Those essentially communicate to some gateway, and they report. You can use that as a part of your contract on the blockchain, to essentially determine if you're being treated fairly by your supplier, let's say. And if they're not upholding their end of the deal - let's say the meat's spoiled because the temperature's too high, you would know that, because it'll be recorded.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Gotcha.
+**Anna Derbakova:** So in a way you can remove a lot of those question marks, and you can really record that and be sure that that's what's happening.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I'm sure that a lot of people who listen to this will have heard of Bitcoin before, I know that for sure. Listeners of this show, a hundred percent they know about Bitcoins.
+**Anna Derbakova:** Bitcoin is pretty popular.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I'm sure they do. They watch Mr. Robot, they know what Bitcoin is, they know about E Corp... That's the kind of audience we're talking to here for sure. But for those who may be coming to this subject from a different angle, what's the state of blockchain? Is it a spec? Who owns where it's at? Is it a protocol? How do we term what it is, and does it have versions? Is there a version one, version two...?
+**Anna Derbakova:** So if you just say "What is blockchain?", blockchain is an architectural concept almost; it's something that you build on top of, but there's different types of blockchains. The blockchain that supports Bitcoin is the first one that was out there, but then we got other types of blockchains, like the Ethereum blockchain, and that's huge now. A lot of people are very excited about it, it provides some awesome capabilities to write smart contracts, and really complex ones - so that's a blockchain too, but they are different blockchains. A lot of the underlying ideas are the same, like how you store your blocks, and things like that, but...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** The same transfer of one record point to the next is the basic concept that they all share.
+**Anna Derbakova:** Yeah, that's the basic concept; that's still there, because in Bitcoin you're exchanging essentially value, right? You would be exchanging value of Bitcoin, but in Ethereum you could be exchanging some kind of coin, but you could also be exchanging an asset, because they have the idea of a smart contract. But the idea is it's a different type of blockchain, it's a different implementation, and Hyperledger also is slightly different. But who owns it? That's a good question. I mean, there's not gonna be one blockchain to rule them all. They are gonna be different, and I think that's a very good forward-looking question, because then people will wonder, "If we have this blockchain here for this group of banks, and this blockchain here for supply chain, if they ever need to interoperate, or something of as far as transferring records from one to the other, what are we gonna do?"
+So I think that's a question that's definitely gonna need to be explored fairly soon. If you have two different blockchains with different consensus algorithms, how do you deal with that? These questions... I'm not sure if IBM, for example, is researching anything into that - at least I'm not directly involved in it - but if it doesn't come up soon, it will in the very near future.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay. So at IBM, what role do you play in regards to IBM? Is it IBM Blockchain, is that...?
+**Anna Derbakova:** IBM Blockchain is the name of our organization.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay, so it's like a department, basically.
+**Anna Derbakova:** Yeah, that's like a department in the Cloud Organization, and I'm part of that, as an employee at IBM. But we do contribute to the project, we're officially committers on the project...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And it's Hyperledger.
+**Anna Derbakova:** \[15:48\] Hyperledger. Hyperledger has a couple of projects under it. If you go to hyperledger.org, and there's a tab at the top called Community and you click on that, and you click on Projects, you will see that there is a handful of projects in there. One of them is Blockchain Explore, for easier navigation of the blockchain, to see what the contents of your blocks are; then you also have Fabric, which is the main project that IBM is contributing to as far as the networking core for supporting the Fabric blockchain.
+Sawtooth Lake is a contribution that was made by Intel, so I honestly don't know a whole lot about that. I'm looking forward to learning more about it, but at this point I can't say a whole lot about it. But a lot of us contribute to Fabric, and also projects that are directly related to Fabric, like SDKs - in order to interact with the blockchain from different application-level code, like Python or Node.js or Java.
+Actually, on the team, I work on the Node.js SDK team, so we contribute a lot to the Node SDK repository underneath Hyperledger. People contribute to different parts of that code, but it's all underneath the same umbrella organization of Hyperledger.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It says here on the homepage the Hyperledger Project is a collaborative effort...
+**Anna Derbakova:** Absolutely.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So this is not a project, so to speak its own codebase; it's a project of underlying projects.
+**Anna Derbakova:** It's a collection... It's almost like an - I don't know if it would be wrong to term it an umbrella organization that supports a number of projects that are all meant to advance blockchain technologies, to get people working with them, to get more people involved and grow that community. But definitely there's more than one project under Hyperledger, and obviously this is a collaborative effort in the sense that there are some industry partners like IBM and Intel heavily involved in it, and other companies too. If you go to -- I think About would have it... It would say one of the main funding partners for Hyperledger, the Technical Steering Committee members, who are heavily vested in the direction of this project... But of course, anybody from the com-- yeah, so you've got it: some premium members, and other members if you scroll down lower. But essentially anybody from the community is welcome; this is an open source project. I think one of the main efforts right now is to grow that community, to have people who are interested to build on Hyperledger, to start committing. They don't have to be part of any of these organizations; they welcome everybody.
+I think part of the problem that's still kind of lingering is the organization is very new; it's really formed late December of last year, so there's still a big bar to entry. The concept of the project is very complex, the documentation is still a little spotty, so it's still kind of...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** In its formation.
+**Anna Derbakova:** Yeah, in its formation, and it's difficult for people to just kind of jump on that bandwagon and start contributing. We're trying... The documentation has gotten orders of magnitude better, and has tons of information. We're on Slack all the time, we're on public Slack channels... We have a Hyperledger Slack channel; people can ping me anytime.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** How do they get access to that?
+**Anna Derbakova:** Somewhere on that page there's a link to the Slack channel, and it's hyperledger.slack.com. People can just sign up and they can join one of the general channels and essentially read what's going on in the project, or they can join a specific channel like the Fabric SDK channel and they can read about what we're doing. Or they can ping one of the members directly if they see them commenting on their GitHub thread, and they can ask directly their question.
+\[19:59\] I talk to people on Slack all the time. It's a very effective way to have one of the developers respond to you, because sometimes issues kind of get opened and we do our best to keep track of the issues, and sometimes it kind of falls through the cracks... But people do speak up. On the Fabric SDK Node channel we get questions all day long, and one of us typically answers. If it's not me, it will be somebody else from my team. People do chime in; people come back and say, "Hey, this really helped. Thanks a lot!", and we try to update the docs and kind of incorporate the feedback we receive... So definitely, if people have questions, we encourage it.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** What is the future like for blockchain? You mentioned financial systems, you mentioned internet of things... I'm looking here and I also see manufacturing technology, supply chains - we talked about that. As a technology it's one thing, but what's the next step for people to adopt? Generally the project is still in motion, still in formation...
+**Anna Derbakova:** Yeah, it's definitely gaining momentum, and I think more and more people are getting interested. And not just people in the community, we're talking big companies like WalMart, who came to IBM to partner together to build a supply chain solution. So a lot of big companies are interested, and some of them have already come forward.
+As far as being open source, I think it will continue to grow and evolve. It's very public right now on the Hyperledger wiki pages and forums, they're moving toward a new architecture right now, which will be early next year... So there's been a lot of changes, and I think people are hoping to use it more, they wanna get their hands on it and they are looking for some specific features to be added, more stability...
+The adoption is increasing. I think people are very curious about it in general, whether they're individual contributors out in the community, or companies; they wanna check out what's going on and where it's going. As far as being applicable to all areas of life, shall we say, I think people will start to kind of compartmentalize and realize what they can use blockchain for and what maybe they don't really need it for. I think people are still in that exploration phase; companies hear the word 'blockchain' and they're overhyped about it. I think it's gonna take a little bit of time for people to kind of learn what blockchain really is and what it isn't, and what they need it for and what they don't need it for. I think that's still kind of a learning curve for a lot of people.
+But once people get to that point, and I think IBM has already some solutions out there for people to use; if people wanna go play around...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, people building business solutions around that, offering services...
+**Anna Derbakova:** They can go on Bluemix. We already have a Bluemix tile they can deploy, a simple network, and play around with it and start building against it. So they have a cloud offering.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Bluemix.com?
+**Anna Derbakova:** Bluemix.net. They can essentially create an account, it's very easy. Go to the Catalog, search for Blockchain, and it will explain to you what kind of network you're deploying. You can do some sample, click-click sort of thing and deploy some things to the network and learn about it, and then you can actually use that network you've deployed to write an app against it.
+The latest thing that came out - it was actually just a couple weeks ago, and I presented that at the conference yesterday... There is now a set of Docker images which is available out on Docker Hub for the network peers for Hyperledger. Essentially, people can go and download the Docker images and spin them up on their machines locally. You can create a network and you can develop against that, and that's the demo I showed.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And where are these Docker images? On Docker Hub?
+**Anna Derbakova:** They're on Docker Hub, and I actually wrote a tutorial...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Is there like a Getting Started anywhere...?
+**Anna Derbakova:** \[23:52\] Yeah, I wrote it, I can point it to you. It's bitly.com/hyperledger-basics. It is in my personal repo, because I published it, but there's links from my GitHub page to the Docker.io official page and other official documentation for Hyperledger, and people can start there. Or they can just certainly go to the docs for Hyperledger and get started there, but there's a lot of docs, get ready. It might be a tiny bit overwhelming, but people just need to have little -- if they have some background in blockchain, great. But if they don't, they just need to be a little patient; there's a lot of information, it's a very complex subject, and we're trying to make the docs better and slimmer and more applicable, so just bear with us. We don't want to scare people away by the overwhelming amount of docs, but we also don't wanna turn them away by the scarcity of the docs. We're still kind of walking that fine line. So yeah, certainly check it out.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** We'll definitely link to that Getting Started, because I know for me, I'm still catching up. Even though we did the Ethereum show, I was still playing left field; my co-host, Jerod, was definitely driving that show a lot more, and I'm still trying to catch up. That's why I asked the question, "Can you help me demystify it?", because it's the question I wanna know, not just for the listeners as well.
+Let's talk about your talk real quick then. You gave this talk yesterday... What were some of the core takeaways you were hoping this community or the community listening to this show took away from your talk? What about blockchain matters to you? What do people need to know from your talk?
+**Anna Derbakova:** Yeah, so I think the biggest assumption I made going in is I said, "I will not assume that people know a whole lot about blockchain." The only thing I decided to assume is that they have heard of Bitcoin, that was my only assumption.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Wise choice.
+**Anna Derbakova:** And I think I made a very wise choice because I've received overwhelmingly positive feedback for my talk and how helpful it was in understanding blockchain. So I essentially started with Bitcoin... I said, "Hey, here's Bitcoin, you've all heard about it. It's built on blockchain, so let's dissect that." I told people about the importance of how blockchain stores its data in terms of hashing its data to produce a fingerprint, a particular block, how blocks are linked together... I went through all of that and talked a little bit about the importance of consensus on the network and what it's for...
+I think the introduction to blockchain in my talk was solid, people very much appreciated that. Then I talked about Hyperledger and that it's a collaborative effort under the Linux Foundation, and how people can get involved, get on Hyperledger.org, check out the docs, get on Slack and learn about it... I tried to kind of put a plugin for Hyperledger and talk about differences of Hyperledger with let's say Ethereum or Bitcoin, just to kind of summarize and give people an idea of whether Hyperledger - or Hyperledger Fabric, specifically; it's what we are working on - is right for them. It may be, but maybe they don't need what Hyperledger provides, and that's okay. It just depends on what you're looking for for your application.
+I'm obviously not advocating that Hyperledger Fabric is right for everyone; it just depends on what you're building. Then I showed how to write a simple app on Hyperledger Fabric, and I pointed people to my tutorial if they want to go and get started, and where to download the Docker images to their machine and how to do that, and how to write a simple app.
+That was the synopsis of my talk. People have asked if I maybe can post some slides... I'll try to figure out how to do that; I'm not sure if the conference has any...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Is this the first time you're sharing slides?
+**Anna Derbakova:** I think there must be some official place on the conference site to share them...?
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I'm not aware... Maybe there is.
+**Anna Derbakova:** I'll ask, but otherwise I have a link to the tutorial, I'll tweet that out and people can try the tutorial. Like I said, bitly.com/hyperledger-basics. People can go and check it out...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** We'll put that in the show notes for sure.
+**Anna Derbakova:** \[27:57\] Yeah, and if they have problems, I'll try to walk them through. We're very open to people joining, and we're trying to be a welcoming community. Like I said, we're on Slack all the time, people are welcome to ask questions, and a lot of people do take advantage of that opportunity, which is cool.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Let's talk about languages, because I went ahead and navigated to Fabric on GitHub, clicked on the little tab here that shows the languages; it shows that Go is 83%... So what is the language that writes most of -- at least what you're working on? I know you mentioned Node earlier, the Node SDK... Help us understand what IBM Blockchain is doing, what languages they're primarily writing these things in...
+**Anna Derbakova:** Yeah, so the Hyperledger Fabric Project, which is the core of this permission blockchain that IBM is providing is essentially mostly composed of Go, as you noticed. Go is a big part of the core implementation, the networking, the consensus - all of that is in Go. It does have, obviously, some other bits and pieces in there.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Some Cucumber for tests, Python, Java...
+**Anna Derbakova:** That's right. So, as you can see, there's Python, Java, and there's Node.js, but we're pulling Node.js out now into a separate repo. So essentially how it started is the decision was to move away from a REST interface on the peer nodes to a model of having SDK packages for different languages to communicate to the network. So we've pulled out all the proportion that was doing Node.js, or TypeScript at that point, and it was pulled off just recently - I think less than a week ago - into its own repo, which should also now be visible on GitHub, which would be Fabric SDK Node; that's the repo that my team contributes to.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** So this is the one you camp out on.
+**Anna Derbakova:** That's the one for Node.js. Then there's obviously a Java repo; that's mostly in Java, and that's for the Java SDK to communicate to the Fabric. Then there's a Python one they're working on. Those are obviously in the specific languages, and I don't know a whole lot, again, about Sawtooth Lake, so I can't really say what their repository is composed of.
+But yeah, mostly Go inside the Fabric core, and then specific languages for the SDKs.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Very cool. Is there anything else for this audience that's listening to this that you might wanna share that I've left out, that I haven't asked you?
+**Anna Derbakova:** Well, I think we captured everything. Like I said, if you're interested in this, please go check out hyperledger.org, and if you have any questions, I really encourage you to join the Slack channel. If you just need any help and you can't figure out where the docs are, or what to clone, or how to become a contributor...
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Hyperledger.slack.com.
+**Anna Derbakova:** Yeah. just get on Slack. There should be docs that tell you how to do that, but we understand they may still be difficult to navigate; just get on Slack and ask us. We camp out on Slack all day long.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Even on the weekends?
+**Anna Derbakova:** It might not be an immediate response, but you're gonna get it that day, I promise. Somebody's gonna come and help you.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay, alright. Well, thanks, Anna. Thanks for sharing the story, I appreciate it.
+**Anna Derbakova:** Thanks for having me.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Great hearing about blockchain; I think you've definitely schooled me in terms of where it's going and what it's doing. I'm excited.
+**Anna Derbakova:** Great!
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Thank you, Anna.
+**Anna Derbakova:** Happy to talk, thank you!
+\* \* \*
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Thanks again to Todd Lewis and all our friends at All Things Open. It was a blast being there. So glad to be at such a great conference. We'll be there again next year, so look out for us in 2017 at All Things Open. If you've never been, head to allthingsopen.org, buy a ticket and we'll see you soon.

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+**Jerod Santo:** \[00:31\] Welcome to our first Spotlight series, recorded at OSCON London 2016. I'm Jerod Santo, managing editor of Changelog. Katrina Owen is an accomplished speaker, creator of the excellent coding practice and feedback site Exercism.io, and co-author of 99 Bottles of OOP.
+Have you ever heard the story of how Katrina went from anonymous developer to sharing a byline with Sandi Metz? She shared all the details during this face-to-face chat. Listen in.
+\* \* \*
+**Jerod Santo:** As I told you, we had Sandi Metz on the show recently, which was kind of like a checkbox, like a bucket list for us. We always have to act like we're cool about it... You know, we had Matz on a year ago, sweatin' bullets... Like, it's Matz! And he was nervous, which made us nervous... But on that one we just were like, "You know what? We're just gonna grovel. \[laughter\] We don't have to play it cool, we're gonna just tell you how awesome you are over and over again."
+**Kristina Owen:** Yeah, because that's not awkward...
+**Jerod Santo:** I know, right? He was very gracious, and a great guest, and amazing story... Do you know his story...? He never had access to compute power, so he just read about programming languages.
+**Kristina Owen:** No, I didn't know this.
+**Jerod Santo:** He had one computer, but it could only do - and I'm gonna botch the details - Turbo Pascal, or something...
+**Kristina Owen:** Right.
+**Jerod Santo:** So he would just do that. But then he would go to the library and he'd buy books about Lisp and about these other languages...
+**Kristina Owen:** That's amazing.
+**Jerod Santo:** I don't think Perl was a thing back then, but probably SmallTalk and these things... And he would just read books about programming languages, and then he would kind of have this wanderlust, or this desire... He thought they were so beautiful, but he never used them. So by the time he was adult and doing things, he had this super knowledge of all these different design constructs and decisions, because he read the decision-making process and he thought about it, but he never got to use the practical ramifications of the decisions, and that kind of inspired him to create Ruby.
+So he told us that story, and it was just amazing. But with Sandi we tried to play it cool, and even she seemed a little bit nervous, even though she talks now for a living. Then a few minutes later she was over it, and everything was good.
+**Kristina Owen:** Yeah, Sandi's an amazing speaker. I first heard about her -- well, I stumbled across a video that she did, a conference... This is way before her book, so nobody knew... Basically, she knew whoever was at the local meetups; that's the thing that you do when you work as a minion at some university or whatever. So she had done a talk at Gotham Ruby or something like that, and I stumbled across it on the internet and it was amazing. At the very end, someone was asking, "So, do you blog? Do you write?"
+**Jerod Santo:** She's like, "I don't do anything."
+**Kristina Owen:** And she was like, "Oh, I know I should, but I don't... But I'm working on this book, but it's not gonna be ready for a long time."
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] Did you meet her then?
+**Kristina Owen:** No, so the timestamp on this video was a year earlier, and she said "Oh, the book won't be ready for at least a year", and I was like "Where's the book!? It must be ready!" So I found it in beta on Safari Books Online; I tried to buy it and there was a bug on the website that they wouldn't take my money...
+**Jerod Santo:** So you couldn't get it...?
+**Kristina Owen:** I complained on Twitter, I was like "Safari Books Online, you need to take my money because I need this book", and then Sandi came across it and she was like, "Um, let's figure out how we can make this happen." So I got to read the beta.
+**Jerod Santo:** You really wanted that book.
+**Kristina Owen:** \[04:03\] Oh, my goodness! It was really exactly what I needed at that time. I had been struggling with refactoring and trying to figure out on my own, like "How do you make code better? How do you remove dependencies? How do you make it more readable? How do you make it less painful?" The talk was all about that; it was like exactly that, and this book was gonna be life changing.
+**Jerod Santo:** You just knew it.
+**Kristina Owen:** It had to be. And then I was right too, because it was amazing.
+**Jerod Santo:** That's awesome. You were right. So you kind of busted onto the scene giving a talk, and then you got on Ruby Rogues because of the talk, kind of...
+**Kristina Owen:** Very much because of it. I lived in Oslo, I knew 12 people; we'd go to the same meetup every month. I worked at a product company that was really cool there; small, like there were seven or eight engineers. And there was a conference that was announced in Sweden for the summer, and I hadn't really been to a conference before, and I wanted to do that. So I was like, "Hey, CEO person, who has money and control, can I go to this conference?" He was like, "That sounds like a great idea, you should go to this."
+**Jerod Santo:** Ask and you shall receive.
+**Kristina Owen:** Yeah, and a couple of my colleagues came along as well. I met all of these amazing people in the Ruby conference (it was a Ruby conference)... These fantastic people, who were welcoming and friendly and interesting and interested... I was a nobody and I was still having these fantastic conversations with people.
+At one point, a couple other guys were like, "You should give a talk." I was like, "No... Hah, that's not gonna..."
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, that's what everybody thinks at first.
+**Kristina Owen:** That's not even gonna happen. Like, when would I do that? How would I do that? What would I talk about? Nothing, right? And then a year later I applied to give a talk at that same conference.
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, what changed your mind, though? Because you said, "No, no, no", and now later you're doing it.
+**Kristina Owen:** So one of the guys said, "It's really challenging, and it's really worth it." And I was like, first of all the fact that he acknowledged that fact that this is really hard - that was a relief. That made me think, "Okay, so he's not pretending it's easy." Hard things - I know how to do hard things: you practice. You work really hard and you figure our what the rules are, and then you practice.
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, you put in the effort, and...
+**Kristina Owen:** So I was like, "Um, maybe I could do that", but I put it away... I kept going to these meetups in Oslo, and every meetup I'd bring a little refactoring that I had done; I wouldn't show it upfront, but when most of the people had left, I'd pull it up and then say, "Oh, look what I did! This was a fun refactoring."
+**Jerod Santo:** And people liked it.
+**Kristina Owen:** Yeah, somebody said, "I would watch a whole talk of this." I was like, "Oh, I could do a talk."
+**Jerod Santo:** Nice! So that was like a little bit of a confidence boost. You have to try. Was this the talk that shocked the Ruby world?
+**Kristina Owen:** Yeah, totally. \[laughter\] It brought down Twitt-- no...
+**Jerod Santo:** Twitter was going down pretty easily back then.
+**Kristina Owen:** That's true, there was a fail well going on...
+**Jerod Santo:** It was a low bar.
+**Kristina Owen:** The bar was very low... No, so I did this talk, and James Edward Gray of the Ruby Rogues saw a video of it, and was like, "You should all see this talk, it's really good", and then they invited me on the show to just talk about refactoring. Then later they brought me back on as a panelist.
+**Jerod Santo:** I recall that, because I used to listen to Rogues back then, and James was so effusive about this talk that I was like, "I should just pause this and go watch, I guess."
+**Kristina Owen:** It's fascinating... I was so terrified when I was gonna give this talk. I thought I was gonna throw up, because I was just so scared. I had no idea what the reception would be.
+**Jerod Santo:** What do you think that -- first, for the audience's sake, let's lay out what the talk was, but then tell me what you think really resonated about it. Because it did. Everybody loved it - why?
+**Kristina Owen:** \[07:53\] Yeah, so the title was Therapeutic Refactoring. The CFP was blind; first of all, I was given a chance, even though I had no experience speaking, nobody knew anything about who I was. The abstract spoke for itself, and the title I think was alluring. This conference was also at a spa...
+**Jerod Santo:** It was at a spa?
+**Kristina Owen:** It was at a Japanese spa in Sweden?
+**Jerod Santo:** Talk about therapeutic, right? You were so on theme.
+**Kristina Owen:** Right, so I think I totally lucked out, in some ways. The talk itself was a very straightforward, simple story... But it really was a story. I formed it as "There's this horrible code and it's untested. How do you deal with it?" So it was the process, step-by-step, of adding characterization tests, and then the process (step-by-step) of refactoring. And it was using one of the recipes from Martin Fowler's Refactoring book; I hadn't made anything up.
+**Jerod Santo:** Right, you were just applying something that you read.
+**Kristina Owen:** Yeah, and applying it sort of gently and carefully. And the whole point of the talk was that refactoring is something that can make you smarter, because it offloads a lot of the irrelevant details out into your tests, and this process, which is like lots of tiny steps, so you don't have to hold as much in your head; you're freeing up cognitive resources, and it makes you feel better and happier... So it's worth doing.
+**Jerod Santo:** So it was therapeutic, yeah. So that happened, that was a thing...
+**Kristina Owen:** Yeah, and I think the thing that resonated was that it was told as a story. It's not a readme; I'm not reciting a readme. They could go read a blog post, but it might not feel the same.
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. So I'm just now thinking about your journey a little bit, because here you were, kind of stalking Sandi Metz's Safari page, trying to get her book...
+**Kristina Owen:** No kidding, yeah... Sandi Metz, who at the time was completely unknown, which is almost ridiculous to think about now...
+**Jerod Santo:** And then your internet fame explodes because of the talk, Sandi's does because of the book...
+**Kristina Owen:** Yeah, and she's way more famous than I am.
+**Jerod Santo:** ...and then she starts giving talks.
+**Kristina Owen:** Her fame - she can't even go to the restroom if she goes to a conference, because she's being mobbed by the hoards who want to talk to her.
+**Jerod Santo:** But you wanted to read her book so bad, and then a few years later you're writing a book with her. That's kind of a cool reversal...
+**Kristina Owen:** Yeah, it is a cool reversal. I'm trying to think what were the steps in that. So the first thing was I gave her a ton of feedback about the book. After reading the first chapter, I was so excited that I sent her feedback, and she was like, "Oh, could you do that more? Could you just put your stream of consciousness in the margins?" I was like, "Yeah, I could totally do that."
+**Jerod Santo:** Nice.
+**Kristina Owen:** So I did, and when I finished doing that, we got on a call and talked about...
+**Jerod Santo:** And a friendship probably spawned, or a relationship spawned.
+**Kristina Owen:** Yeah, in some way... We had things to talk about, and it was an interesting -- I think we both got something out of that. And this is just about the time where my talk got accepted (Therapeutic Refactoring), so...
+**Jerod Santo:** Okay, so it was pre-Therapeutic Refactoring.
+**Kristina Owen:** She gave me feedback on the early versions of the talk, and the most important feedback - there were a couple of really important things that she... My talk would have been worse than mediocre is she had not had given me some pointers.
+**Jerod Santo:** And they were...?
+**Kristina Owen:** The first bit of feedback was I showed her the before and after shot of the first refactoring -- I had like seven examples that I was gonna put in this talk, and she was like "That's enough for ten talks. Let's just go with one example."
+**Jerod Santo:** I see... So focus it in, and don't try to do too much.
+**Kristina Owen:** Don't try to do too much. And then I showed her the before and after and sort of explained, and she was like, "Okay, so now you look smart and I feel dumb..." I was like, "Oh, that's not good..."
+**Jerod Santo:** \[11:54\] That's not the goal, right?
+**Kristina Owen:** That's not what I was trying to go for, so I worked really hard to try to figure out how do I carry the audience along with me in this discovery, so that it really feels like this is... I mean, this is not hard, right? But I want you to understand when watching it that this is simple and it's approachable and it's something that you can do, and it's not magical; I'm in no way special for doing this. So that was really important.
+Then she said, "You've gotta tell a story", and I was like "How do you do that?" She was like, "You just do..." \[laughter\] This is something that some people have been doing all their lives, they tell stories, and that's never been something that I had done, so I started reading books about storytelling; The Anatomy of a Story is a book that is written by a screenwriter, and it's pulled in Hollywood films where the script isn't going to the right place... They bring him in to save a project.
+**Jerod Santo:** Nice, that's a good one.
+**Kristina Owen:** Yeah, so I just started reading as much as I could to try to understand how do you structure a talk in order for it to be compelling, and stuff like that. Over time we just had things to talk about.
+**Jerod Santo:** Right. Then POODR got released, and she continued to give talks.
+**Kristina Owen:** And I continued to give talks...
+**Jerod Santo:** Rinse and repeat...
+**Kristina Owen:** Rinse and repeat... I launched Exercism.
+**Jerod Santo:** That got on Wired.
+**Kristina Owen:** That got on Wired, I was terrified.
+**Jerod Santo:** It took you to a new level.
+**Kristina Owen:** Oh, my goodness. Yeah, so the thing about Exercism that's important here is that Sandi in the very beginning did some of the exercises, sort of just for her own edification, and one of those exercises was the 99 bottle of beer problem...
+**Jerod Santo:** Oh, no way!
+**Kristina Owen:** ...which kicked off this whole thing where we went off, each to our own side, to do a bunch of refactoring, and we'd get on a call and say, "Why did you do this? I hate that/I love that. That's interesting. Hm... I'm not sure I understand where you're going with that..."
+**Jerod Santo:** Right. To round that out a little bit... So the book is 99 Bottles, that you guys worked on together, and it's all about a specific problem. When we had Sandi on the Changelog we talked to her like "Why is that problem so profound? Why is it perfect for this style of teaching and all those things?", and she gave a lot of reasons. But what I didn't ask is where did it come from?
+After the call, I was like "I should have found out..." -- like, "Did you think of this? Were you just like, 'No, it's gonna be good', or did you stumble upon it?" It turns out it was a part of Exercism.
+**Kristina Owen:** It was a part of Exercism...
+**Jerod Santo:** Mind = blown.
+**Kristina Owen:** ...and people had been submitting solutions to this problem and they were all kind of terrible, and at some point...
+**Jerod Santo:** So where did you get it?
+**Kristina Owen:** Let's see... I probably -- I mean, there's a whole website of 99 Bottle of Beer in all the programming languages.
+**Jerod Santo:** Oh, there is? It's kind of like Fizz-Buzz, or something.
+**Kristina Owen:** Right, yeah. I think it was also used as one of the exercises in Chris Pine's Learn To Program book, so it's been out there. It's one of those common things that's got just enough algorithmic complexity to be useful.
+**Jerod Santo:** But it looks simple.
+**Kristina Owen:** Ridiculously simple.
+**Jerod Santo:** Everybody thinks immediately, "Oh, I can do that in like ten minutes." And you can...
+**Kristina Owen:** And you can...
+**Jerod Santo:** But not well. \[laughs\]
+**Kristina Owen:** Well, you can do a simple version, but nobody wants to do a simple version. They all wanna do a clever version.
+**Jerod Santo:** They want people to think, "You're smart and I'm dumb." \[laughter\] Okay, so you introduced her to that problem via Exercism, and you both would kind of solve it in your own ways...
+**Kristina Owen:** Well, in particular Sandi was solving it in really interesting ways. When most people submit a solution to Exercism, they'll submit one solution and then you talk about that. She submitted one solution that had four solutions in it; four completely different approaches with this long commentary of like, "Well, if this were the tradeoffs I was making, then this solution... But if this other thing, then this other solution." It was the most interesting approach that I'd ever seen in terms of not what the actual solutions were, but in terms of thinking deeply about the design tradeoffs here. Like, in what situations would one approach/design work, and in what situation would another?
+\[15:58\] Also, this sort of lead to me asking, "There are these abstractions in this problem - how did you know?" and she was like, "Well, I just did." And I couldn't see it.
+Eventually, over time, we used my refactoring practice and skill to figure out how can we go step by step from the simple solution to these abstractions that she just knew were there, because of her experience.
+**Jerod Santo:** She had the expert intuition, or the experience, where you just don't.
+**Kristina Owen:** Yeah.
+**Jerod Santo:** That's an awesome skill, but it's not a helpful skill for other people.
+**Kristina Owen:** It's really hard to teach...
+**Jerod Santo:** And you had the refactoring history and practice of going step-by-step, so together you helped her kind of unfold how she got there. She would jump from step one to seven, but you were like, "Let's document two, three, four, five and six."
+**Kristina Owen:** Yeah, and I didn't quite understand the process that I used. It's lots of tiny steps, but I didn't necessarily understand -- there, as well, was this element of like "I just did it in a way that I couldn't really articulate the value of." And of course, when she first saw it, she was kind of horrified, because it was like "Why would you do such a thing? Why don't you just do the thing that's kind of obvious?" I was like, "Well, it's not obvious to me..."
+**Jerod Santo:** It's only obvious to a certain eye. Tell me about the book writing process now... What was that like? She sends you stuff, you send her stuff? How did that work?
+**Kristina Owen:** So we worked on the problem back and forth for a long time, until we started realizing what the actual lessons in it were - both refactoring and design lessons - and then people were hounding her to give courses, to teach classes... Privately, in businesses, publicly as well, but mostly private. So we got together and worked out sort of an early version of some curriculum that we could go teach together, and we would prep in the morning, debrief in the evenings...
+Of course, our first plans were nothing like reality, but over time things settled into a rhythm. We understood what the curriculum was... After a while, we had seen and heard every single version of every single...
+**Jerod Santo:** There's not a solution that could possibly surprise you guys, right?
+**Kristina Owen:** Right, after a while...
+**Jerod Santo:** ...for the 99 Bottles.
+**Kristina Owen:** Yeah, I'm pretty sure we've seen it all. So the curriculum got tightened up, and after a while - I don't even know at what point we've decided this, but this kind of has to be a book. We understand the content, we understand the problem really well, we've taught it, we've seen all of the objections, we've seen all of the solutions, we should be able to turn this into a book.
+At that point, we worked a lot on the structure of the book. We had all of the code examples step by step by step, and it was like, "Okay, what is the structure in terms of chapters and sections? In which order do we put all of these ideas?", and then finally, there's like a final actual writing pass which Sandi does for having a very consistent voice in the whole book. And then several rounds of editing.
+**Jerod Santo:** So is it out there? Is it done?
+**Kristina Owen:** No...
+**Jerod Santo:** It's out there, but it's not done...?
+**Kristina Owen:** Yeah, so it's in beta. It's six long chapters, so it's a proper-sized book, like hundreds of pages; I don't know what the size is right now, but that number is probably available on our website.
+**Jerod Santo:** She said there was like 45,000 words at one point.
+**Kristina Owen:** Yeah, I think that was the four chapters.
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, that's a lot of words.
+**Kristina Owen:** So the first five chapters out of six are out. We didn't want to release it -- we released the first four chapters in beta this summer (early June, early July, something like that). We didn't wanna release it before those four chapters -- before we had something that you could actually read and get something out of it. We didn't want to sell you a promise, we wanted to sell you something concrete, that has valuable, that will be more valuable, but that you can already enjoy.
+**Jerod Santo:** \[20:05\] That's a great story. I hope it's a really good book. I was able to sit in a little bit on one of your trainings, so I understand the problem and I have a feeling that it's gonna be a really good book, because just walking through the refactorings of that specific problem... I was there working for the Changelog, not taking the class, just observing, but I wanted to bust out my editor...
+**Kristina Owen:** Oh, it's so tempting...
+**Jerod Santo:** It was compelling. It was very compelling. And even as a person who's done object-oriented for ten years, I was just like, "This is a somewhat transformative way of applying thought to code."
+**Kristina Owen:** Yeah, the actual ideas in the book are very simple, but it's hard to -- that simplicity that's at the other side of complexity that some people talk about... You have simple that's kind of naive, and then you have this complexity that feels very satisfying, and getting beyond that complexity is really hard, but once you do, you get to these deeper, simpler truths, and I think that that's something we've managed to do with this book.
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, very cool. Let's talk about conferences a little bit, because it's kind of been a launchpad for you, at least in your public career. Here we are at a conference, OSCON... You used to be scared and had to step out on the ledge to give a talk; over time, you've probably now done talks many times, you've been to all the conferences all over the world... I'm sure conferences are different now than they were before. I know you're here with GitHub so you're kind of working as well, but you're speaking... What do you try to get out of conferences nowadays?
+**Kristina Owen:** The most important thing is meeting people, having real conversations. Not those fleeting, "Oh, hey... What do you do? I program. Me too! We have so much in common!", but to actually be able to say, "Oh yeah, you work on this project - what's hard about it? What's interesting about it?" Those conversations are really valuable. They don't always, but they often grow into something that's a little bit more durable. Now there's this face that I recognize, this voice that I know, this person that I have some/very little idea of what they care about, so suddenly on the internet when I see tweets from them or blog posts from them I have this bigger idea of who this person is.
+**Jerod Santo:** Right, a more round picture of people.
+**Kristina Owen:** Yeah, and I think that's a valuable thing, because suddenly these tenuous relationships become important in other ways. It's like, "Oh, we suddenly are going to be working on a very similar thing, and I have experiences and you have experiences, and we can trade, and it's gonna be useful."
+**Jerod Santo:** There's a lot of people that go to conferences and they find that getting past the shallow, "Hi, how are you?"/shake the hand, it's very difficult. You're a quiet person, you're kind of shy, and yet you seem to have relationships with conferences - maybe because just because you do it so much, and because you've been to so many... But do you have any tips? How do you bust out of that awkwardness, that fear, or whatever it is that keeps us from even engaging in conversations and conferences? You just go to the talks, and then go back to your hotel room.
+**Kristina Owen:** Well, going to the talks is good, but it's kind of the least valuable part of a conference.
+**Jerod Santo:** Especially when they record them and put them online... You can watch it later.
+**Kristina Owen:** That, too. So the talks are interesting in particular because they can work as a conversation starter; you meet someone at the coffee stand and you're like, "Wow, what have you seen?"
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, it's a shared experience.
+**Kristina Owen:** Yeah, and then that's a launching point for trying to find that common ground where you can actually have a real conversation. Often, those real conversations happen in that edge of where technology meets human fear.
+**Jerod Santo:** I like that.
+**Kristina Owen:** \[24:03\] You're now talking about the vulnerability of being human and not being perfect, and not figuring this all out, and that's often where we can help each other in just having insights and sharing experiences.
+**Jerod Santo:** I would say it's worth it. It's worth stepping out a little bit. I have a tendency where if I have a lot of knowns in the place, I will just cling to them.
+**Kristina Owen:** Yeah...
+**Jerod Santo:** I always had friends in high-school or college, we'll go to a party, and if I have three buddies with me I'll just hang out with them the whole time.
+**Kristina Owen:** Yeah, I see people do that at conferences. I think it's a shame.
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, I kind of do, too. I kind of like coming to this conference by myself, because I don't really have a choice - I'm either the awkward one, standing by himself, or I go talk to somebody. So it kind of pushes me over my tendency to cling to the known, because there's no known here to cling to, which is kind of cool.
+Well, this has been a lot of fun. Closing thoughts, words of wisdom?
+**Kristina Owen:** No, I'm not wise.
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] You heard it here first - Katrina Owen, not wise. Check out 99 Books -- I keep calling it 99 Books...
+**Kristina Owen:** 99 Bottles of OOP.
+**Jerod Santo:** I call it 99 Problems, I called it 99 Books... 99 Bottles of OOP - check that out. Thanks for stopping by here at OSCON.
+**Kristina Owen:** Thanks for having me!
+\* \* \*
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Thanks again to our friends at O'Reilly for the awesome working partnership at OSCON London 2016. We'll see you again, OSCON, in 2017 in Austin, Texas. If you want to save some money on that ticket, if you're going, use the code "changelog20" to save 20% off your registration to OSCON 2017 in Austin, Texas.
+For more episodes like this head to changelog.com/spotlight, click Subscribe, don't miss a show, and thanks for listening!

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+**Jerod Santo:** \[00:31\] Welcome to our first Spotlight series, recorded at OSCON London 2016. I'm Jerod Santo, managing editor at Changelog. Coby Chapple has been a product designer at GitHub since 2012. This conversation took place shortly after GitHub Universe, where they launched projects, transactional code reviews and GraphQL, all of which we discussed in depth.
+Coby drops a lot of knowledge bombs in this interview, so take a listen.
+\* \* \*
+**Jerod Santo:** So just tell us your name and where you hail from - like not from GitHub, but where you're from.
+**Coby Chapple:** Sure, so my name is Coby Chapple. I hail from New Zealand originally, but I also lived in Australia for a long time too, before moving to the U.K. I've lived around a few places in the U.K., I've lived in Northern Ireland and Scotland, and now I live in London.
+**Jerod Santo:** Oh boy, you're a world traveler. How does London measure up?
+**Coby Chapple:** It's a big city.
+**Jerod Santo:** I walked around yesterday with a friend who's local, and we just walked and walked and walked, four or five hours, and just kept seeing more London.
+**Coby Chapple:** Yeah. The crazy thing about London is coming to terms with the fact that even if you had a full lifetime, you could never see it all. It's just so big and there's so much history, and it's constantly changing; you never can see it all. Once you do accept though and you relax a little bit, it can kind of make it a little bit more enjoyable. It takes the pressure off.
+**Jerod Santo:** Cool. So you're a product designer at GitHub - tell me about that.
+**Coby Chapple:** Sure, so a product designer at GitHub basically means I'm focused a lot on the interactions and the workflows within the products; we have a fairly well-established visual style, so most of my work isn't visual design as such. There's some of that, but most of it is looking at the workflows that we have and the things that people are trying to achieve with the product, and as we add new features or change features - or sometimes remove features - making sure that all the workflows still make sense, that they're as obvious as possible and as clear as possible... So it's focused much more on the interactions and the workflows than the visual design.
+**Jerod Santo:** What's the biggest single change that you've made, that has had the most impact across the product? Even if it's just a refinement.
+**Coby Chapple:** Probably the thing that I've worked on directly that I think has had the biggest impact was a lot of the workflows around doing web-based edits to files on GitHub. From the very early days at GitHub, from very early on in the product, it was possible to edit files in the web, but you couldn't create them, you couldn't rename them, you couldn't delete them...
+**Jerod Santo:** Right, it was very limited.
+**Coby Chapple:** You could only edit them. If you wanted to create a file, you had to create it in your editor locally, commit it and push it, then you could edit it online. So we had Ace just embedded in the website for a long time. So one of the things that I worked on a while ago was making it so that you could create files online from scratch, and then looking at moving them and renaming them and deleting them... Basically doing the basic, quick edits.
+The other thing following on from that workflow-wise was the quick pull request feature. So it's one thing to be able to be on a branch and quickly create a file, but that's a direct commit, and if you do that just directly on master, there's no review, there's no cycle. But if you wanna make a quick change and also have review happen, what we did was at the bottom with the commit we also allowed you to - at the time that you were about to commit - create a new branch and a pull request to have that commit go to.
+That's the kind of stuff that I like trying to identify in a product - a shortcut to an existing process that otherwise would be difficult to do or not obvious that you should have this reviewed, but actually making it possible for people to opt in easily to a process that should happen.
+**Jerod Santo:** \[04:12\] I love when a product that you use or a website that you use a lot slowly gets better -- maybe even quickly gets better, it's better than slowly, but you just notice over time... You're talking about shortcuts, and as a user, because you have such a technical product and people use it all day long, we're more likely to notice those small things. Like, "Oh, this is easier now." Those little delight moments... I like to build those myself, but also just even as a GitHub user, I've experienced over the years where it's like, "I'm not the only one who thought this was too hard", right? Now it's easier, and you're not gonna write a blog post about it, but overall it's like polishing things up. I think that's probably very rewarding/satisfactory -- or what's the word? It gives you satisfaction... What's that word? Satisfying. \[laughs\]
+**Coby Chapple:** It is satisfying, and that's one of the reasons I enjoy product design. Before GitHub, I worked for a long time as a freelancer, so I was still doing design work. Sometimes it was on products, but at the end of the day it was client-focused work, and I got sick of that. I kind of realized that what I really wanted was long-term responsibility for...
+**Jerod Santo:** A single thing.
+**Coby Chapple:** ...not necessarily a complete product, something as giant as GitHub, because there's so many different parts of it, but what I like is the responsibility for the things that I build. If I build something, I like being able to see how that's used over time, use it myself, and if something isn't as good as it originally should be, or if I realize that there are other things that need improvement, I like to be able to go back to that and actually have long-term responsibility for a product. I like that.
+**Jerod Santo:** I'm not sure if you mentioned on air or not, but you mentioned that the aesthetic, the feature set, the general interface had been established for a long time, and that you're working on specific workflows, specific aspects, refinements... As a product person, do you strongly differentiate between interface and experience, the whole UI versus UX? Do you think about these things in the silos? Is it all one big blob to you? How do you think about it?
+**Coby Chapple:** That's a good question. I think that I don't get too caught up in the labels; I think a better question to ask is what do you actually do on a day-to-day basis.
+**Jerod Santo:** Okay, let me ask you a question... What do you actually do on a day-to-day basis?
+**Coby Chapple:** So there are some people who class themselves as UX designers that do a lot of coding; there are some people that class themselves as UI designers that don't touch code at all. And I think it doesn't matter. If you care about someone's experience, you might design UI. If you care about interfaces, you might focus on wireframes. It doesn't really matter...
+**Jerod Santo:** Why do we give each other these labels?
+**Coby Chapple:** I don't care as much about the labels, I just look at "Okay, here's a product, here is something that could be better about the product. What physically needs to happen on it...? Who needs to sit down at the computer and talk to who else? How much brainstorming do they need to do? Do they need to just jump straight to code, or they need to do prototypes first?" It'll depend on the project, it'll depend on the change, it'll depend on the product. There's so many things that it depends on that... I don't know...
+**Jerod Santo:** Ultimately, isn't it all user experience?
+**Coby Chapple:** Yeah, at the end of the day you're creating a product. It's probably a business, it's probably for achieving a certain set of tasks... If they could do that better, then cool, make the change.
+**Jerod Santo:** As Steve Jobs said, "The design IS how it works", it's not like one versus the other. Form follows function...
+**Coby Chapple:** It doesn't matter what the job title is of the person who made the change, what matters is that the change needs to happen.
+**Jerod Santo:** \[07:53\] Yeah. So you guys have been doing refinements for a long time - those small shortcuts, those tweaks... I love all that, but recently at GitHub Universe you had some major new features. One that I love is the code review feature... Mostly because now I can create a bunch of comments and send a single email, which was like my biggest gripe. Because we use GitHub a lot for editing prose, blog posts, and now we're gonna give -- it's not code review, but it's prose review.
+**Coby Chapple:** You're drafting...
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, grammar, and we're helping and we're giving advice and thoughts... So I may review a 3,000-word document for somebody, and I may send them 17 emails to do so. And I actually apologize afterwards. Like, "I apologize that you just got 17 emails, but I have line notes", you know? So that ability is amazing.
+The other big one is the Projects feature. Tell me about both of those in summary first.
+**Coby Chapple:** Sure. With the code review thing, we have the exact same problem ourselves. For a lot of the blog posts you write or press releases or internal documentation, we use pull requests ourselves and we have the exact same problem of like, okay, not only do we just get a lot of emails, but sometimes the first email will be "Hey, I noticed this...". Second email, same deal. Three emails later, "Oh, I see this other line, which makes all of these previous comments redundant." So that's what's great about the code review feature - you can actually batch it, and if you discover before you send the review that you wanna go back and change your earlier comments, it actually improves the quality of feedback. So it's not just improving the code, it's also improving the conversation.
+**Jerod Santo:** Right.
+**Coby Chapple:** That's kind of one of the goals we had, because we had this problem and that's what we wanted to solve.
+**Jerod Santo:** One thing about that problem is like, even though it annoyed me, I was empathetic to it because I knew that it was hard to solve. There's a lot that goes into actually batching that up and providing it as a single thing... The user interface itself has a lot of concerns, there's a lot of ways you could build it, make it hard to use.
+**Coby Chapple:** The reason it's complicated is as soon as you go from, okay, "Here is a pull request that you can comment on", to "Here is a process that you can go into", it creates this state where something can be unfinished, but still saved in the product, and that creates a whole set of interface problems of like, "Okay, what it someone starts a review but the browser crashes? How do you get back to it? How do you represent that there is an incomplete thing that has been started?"
+**Jerod Santo:** Do you remember what happens in that case? This hasn't happened to me, so I don't know.
+**Coby Chapple:** Right, so I haven't used that part of the product enough and had things go wrong yet to kind of be able to say...
+**Jerod Santo:** I haven't, either... There's so many things to think about.
+**Coby Chapple:** Yeah, there's a lot to think about, and it's a technical product to start with. That's one of the challenges of being a product designer: "How do you take something that is deliberately technical, deliberately complex - because it's a technical product for technical people - and make it approachable?" It's not about making it simple - it's a distinction we've always had internally at GitHub... We don't wanna simplify it for people?
+**Jerod Santo:** Why not?
+**Coby Chapple:** We don't wanna dumb it down, because the people that use our product are highly intelligent people, doing complex work that requires...
+**Jerod Santo:** Nuance...
+**Coby Chapple:** Nuance, and a lot of...
+**Jerod Santo:** Faculties...?
+**Coby Chapple:** They might wanna use lots of different tools at different times, so you don't wanna remove it and say, "Just use this hammer for everything." There should be a lot of options to use, and it's a case of making them approachable and...
+**Jerod Santo:** Usable? \[laughs\]
+**Coby Chapple:** Approachable is probably the best word for it, because it can still be very complex and it can still be very technical...
+**Jerod Santo:** What about "discoverable"? I think that's maybe a little bit different angle, but...
+**Coby Chapple:** Yeah, discoverability is a huge thing, and that's a big pet peeve of mine I have...
+**Jerod Santo:** Let's hear it.
+**Coby Chapple:** A pet peeve of mine that a lot of people do in product design or in interaction design is things that show up on hover. There's a bunch of things that I personally get --
+**Jerod Santo:** \[12:01\] Because people will never know that that exists.
+**Coby Chapple:** The analogy that I use to explain how frustrating this can be is imagine you're in a room where the doors only show up when you're close enough to them. \[laughter\] How do you get out?
+**Jerod Santo:** Stand near a wall...
+**Coby Chapple:** Like, just walk around the perimeter of the room until something turns up? Or a door handle that unless you reach for it won't show up.
+**Jerod Santo:** It's tough though, because you're fighting against clutter.
+**Coby Chapple:** You're fighting against clutter, but that also begs the question, "Why is there clutter?"
+**Jerod Santo:** It's a complex tool. \[laughs\]
+**Coby Chapple:** Yeah, it's a tough set of problems.
+**Jerod Santo:** So even this... We're talking about the code review aspect - you can argue it's a refinement to a thing that existed... It's a big change to a thing that existed, but Projects is like a brand new tab. So tell us about Projects.
+**Coby Chapple:** Projects is something that we have wanted internally for a long time, because we like simple workflows and simple, basic building blocks of functionality that are flexible. We don't wanna dictate workflow to people, because what works in one company or in one open source organization or in one personal project is gonna be vastly different from what one of those other things needs.
+So we're building a product that a huge variety of people and situations -- it needs to fit into a lot of different things, and so we don't wanna get heavy-handed about process. That's a philosophy we try and take in lots of different places in our product. For example in the code review, we don't dictate...
+**Jerod Santo:** How you do it...
+**Coby Chapple:** ...we wanna provide options like, "Okay, if you wanna protect this branch and don't allow other people to commit to it", we should have that as an option, but we don't tend to get opinionated about that.
+So with Projects, we wanted to start with something very simple. It's a fairly basic set of functionality, but the goal is to create something that, similar to our issue tracking -- like, our issue tracking is fairly simple, but that means it's flexible, and people can build on it; as a platform too, we want this to be something that people can build their business on, or build integrations with, and we wanna provide that functionality going forward.
+Projects is interesting, it's the first time we've expanded our product functionality in terms of like having a new tab...
+**Jerod Santo:** Right, or a new page...
+**Coby Chapple:** It's the first time we've done that in a while, and hopefully it's something that's gonna be a big part of our product going forward.
+**Jerod Santo:** I have lots of questions about Projects, and I realize that you may not have all the answers, but one aspect of it is, is it loosely tied to Issues but it's not a hundred percent tied to Issues? That seems, like it was a tough spot - again tradeoffs... But how do Issues relate to Projects and what were the decisions there?
+**Coby Chapple:** Sure. The thing with Issues and Projects... Projects - there are lots of things that are involved in a project. Sometimes it's an issue, sometimes it's a pull request, sometimes it's a comment that's on a commit, or it's just a general observation that someone has, so we don't wanna force people to create an issue for that, we want it to be somewhat flexible, so that's why this idea of notes or cards...
+We're looking at ways that we can bring in some functionality of like issues and pull requests, or improving what can be part of a project in terms of the functionality, but at the end of the day the problems you're solving with a project are not technical problems; they're people problems, they're project management concerns, so we want it to stay as flexible as possible. There will be improvements to this part of the product going forward for sure, but we wanna make sure that we're not building a bunch of stuff to solve problems we don't know people are gonna have yet in terms of using functionality.
+**Jerod Santo:** \[16:02\] Yeah, that makes sense. Another question, and this one seems more fundamental to me - you guys decided to make a project at the repo layer of abstraction, right? Like, you attach a project on this repository, right? A lot of projects span repos...
+**Coby Chapple:** Yep.
+**Jerod Santo:** I mean, I could think of -- even inside the Changelog we have a couple different... We have our website codebase, then we have Nightly's codebase, and we may have a redesign of a certain aspect that's gonna touch multiple things, and that's a small change. I think Ethereum has like 16 Go projects, and it's all one thing. The bigger you get, the more you're breaking these down into simple repos. What was the decision behind putting it at the repo level and not this layer above where you could pull in things from everywhere?
+**Coby Chapple:** Yeah, that's a great question. That's a question that we've asked ourselves a lot, and we have the same problem, too.
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] I'm sure you do.
+**Coby Chapple:** GitHub is a 600-person company; there are so many things that we want to happen that span multiple repos, there are so many things that maybe are not even related to code, but our organizational concern is that they don't have a repo... But that's one of the other things that we have always done at the company - we create a lot of repos internally, ourselves, and we use them in a way that is very liberal. We liberally apply repositories to problems. Even if there's no code attached to them, maybe it's just a couple of markdown files that represents a team or maybe it's a loose organization of people separate from the organizational structure that might have a repo with some information about it; that's why a project associated with a repo can be quite flexible. At the organizational level there's still a need for this.
+One of the problems that we haven't really found a satisfying way to solve is how to have things live at different levels and still make sense, because we don't wanna just create projects within projects within projects, and have this infinite nesting thing, because then we're potentially creating all kinds of other informational architecture issues that people can run into very quickly.
+**Jerod Santo:** You also end up with a junk drawer often times, where everything goes in this one big thing.
+**Coby Chapple:** Right. Whereas with some of the changes we've made recently to the pricing mode as well -- because for a long time at GitHub we had unlimited repos ourselves...
+**Jerod Santo:** But I didn't! \[laughs\]
+**Coby Chapple:** Right, exactly. So that was one of the main motivators for some of the pricing changes - we want people to be able to create as many repos as they want, so that they can use repos in a flexible way that we've seen work internally.
+For the moment, with those changes that we've made, and then introducing things like Projects, now people can create as many repos as they want, and have projects attached to them. That's something that we've seen work really well in our company - liberally creating repositories and using them in whatever ways make sense for that team or individual.
+That's why Projects are at a repo level at the moment, but we're definitely looking into ways that we can have it span multiple repos, organization-level stuff... It's something we're thinking a lot about, but it's a non-trivial problem to solve...
+**Jerod Santo:** I definitely can see where that would be difficult to do.
+**Coby Chapple:** Another interesting facet to that is our product is also an enterprise product. We have an on-premise version, and in that situation you actually have a third level of hierarchy. It's not just teams and organizations. They have a dedicated instance... In many enterprise organizations, the Organization feature of GitHub is actually their department, so there's like a third tier of things you need to consider, which...
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, that's interesting. I've never thought about that.
+**Coby Chapple:** \[20:01\] So there's other things that we need to consider in terms of how our product decisions are gonna affect our product in different ways.
+**Jerod Santo:** That leads me into this next thought... Looking at Projects - you guys just launched it; was it November 2016? No, it was November, because right now it's October. When was that? August, September? I don't know... Fall of 2016. It feels very, very 1.0. Here's where the question is - you can interpret a feature like this in two ways, as a person who has no idea, an outsider: one way is "They're just getting started, and this is a minimum viable Projects, and this is a huge new thing, and they just wanted to launch it." The other one is, "Yeah, this is a checklist feature. It's gonna stay this way forever. They just wanted to have Projects so they could have Projects and move on." Can you say which one of those it is? Are you guys working on this? Is it ongoing?
+**Coby Chapple:** We are actively working on this as something that's gonna be improved a lot in the future.
+**Jerod Santo:** Awesome.
+**Coby Chapple:** This is very much the simplest thing that could possibly work, but that's not how it's gonna stay.
+**Jerod Santo:** Cool.
+**Coby Chapple:** That's something I'm very confident in saying. We built early versions of it ourselves and started using it internally, and we want this to be something that we can depend on internally ourselves, and that means it's gonna get improved.
+I think also the biggest thing, like I said before - we want other people to build on this too, so that's why we're spending a lot of time getting the basics right, before we start adding complexity to this part of the project. Because if we don't get the basics right, it'll make it hard for our integrators, for all kinds of open source projects to integrate with GitHub, and the GitHub platform and ecosystem is hugely important to us. Whenever we make a product decision, we have to factor in how that's gonna affect the people that are building their businesses or they're building interesting projects... Even universities and educational institutions that are building stuff using our data, like our publicly available API - there's so many things that we need to factor into our product decisions; we need to get the basics right, and that's what we are gonna spend the first little while doing with Projects.
+**Jerod Santo:** That reminds me of an old term about Apple called "sherlocking" - do you know that term?
+**Coby Chapple:** I do.
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, the idea being that the platform provider or the big dog in the room sees a feature that looks nice and says - this is the cynical viewpoint, right?
+**Coby Chapple:** Right.
+**Jerod Santo:** Sees a feature and says that a third-party created on top of the platform to provide value... So a lot of times these people see gaps, and they say "Oh, I'm gonna fill that need. This helps me", and they turn it into a product or a business, and famously -- I think Watson was the name of the product that Apple copied...?
+**Coby Chapple:** Yeah, a classic example...
+**Jerod Santo:** ...and they got sherlocked, because now Apple just built that into the OS, and now that guy's out of business. So like you said, you have a lot of platform builders, and there's an ecosystem around it, so thoughts on this sherlocking potentially some of your loyal developers...
+**Coby Chapple:** Yeah, and there's a lot of integrators that have built project management functionality on top of our Issues API. Our approach to this is we wanna save them some of the work, but still create opportunities for them to create value for people. Because, like I said before, we don't wanna dictate workflow, we don't wanna dictate the functionality that people SHOULD use to manage a project, because that's gonna depend. I think that's where our integrators come in. We wanna create a basic layer of functionality that we know is flexible and we know is adaptable to different workflows. Integrators should be able to take that, run with it, and build something for a specific audience that wants it a certain way.
+We wanna create a platform that allows for plenty of those opportunities for people to create value. We don't want to take business away from people. We actually would rather there be -- we would rather be the platform on which an ecosystem is built, than try and earn money ourselves--
+**Jerod Santo:** \[24:15\] Take all their ideas and...
+**Coby Chapple:** Right, our endgame is not to be the project management solution; our aim is to create a platform where that discussion around project management, there can be lots of different options that you can use, to pick from when you are starting a new project. Maybe within one company you're gonna use three different project management products or plugins or integrations, depending on the different department, depending on the different project...
+**Jerod Santo:** So does Projects have full API support? Can you get at everything that you need to in order to build on top of the Projects feature?
+**Coby Chapple:** At the moment there are... So this is another thing that we announced at the Universe, and that is we are kicking off an Alpha for GraphQL API. This is a big change that we're making in general in terms of our ability to support API access to the product changes we make out of the box when we announce stuff. Historically, we have announced features and then later released the API, but one of the cool things about GraphQL is that when we moved to use GraphQL internally ourselves, we will build the API for it and consume it internally - as the way we build these changes to our product, so as soon as we release a feature in the future, it's gonna be released at the exact same time at the API level.
+This is something that we've started to actually do with Projects. I would need to clarify online if it's available right now, but certainly within the GraphQL alpha -- it's still pretty alpha... And it's gonna change a lot, too. There's a couple of product features that we've built from the outset using GraphQL internally ourselves, and Projects, I'm fairly confident, is one of them. The other one was reactions - emoji reactions on comments; that was the first feature that we actually built internally using the GraphQL API.
+**Jerod Santo:** So GraphQL is the way of the future...
+**Coby Chapple:** We spent a lot of attention on our API. We understand how important it is to have an API be usable and enjoyable to use, and...
+**Jerod Santo:** Approachable, and discoverable... \[laughs\]
+**Coby Chapple:** Right, exactly. So we've looked at a lot of the things that people have built, like hypermedia... There's a lot of principles that we've explored a lot in terms of how to best do this, and when we stumbled across the GraphQL stuff it was very interesting to us. There's a lot of people at GitHub that spent a lot of time looking at the different solutions here, and there's a lot of reasons that we think this is something that we wanna invest in, because we actually think this is gonna bring us a lot of value, but also it's gonna bring our customers a lot of value, especially integrators and people using our API, because at the end of the day that's who the API is for, and we want them to have the best experience possible. That means things like getting access to product features as soon as they're released, rather than having to wait; it means being able to query the API itself for functionality. Does this version of the API support this feature?
+**Jerod Santo:** That's cool.
+**Coby Chapple:** There's a lot of stuff that comes for free with GraphQL that is very interesting to us. We've spoken a lot with the people at Facebook, we're worked very closely with them about this, and we've seen them use it in production for a very long time. I think they've been using it in production since 2012, or something...
+**Jerod Santo:** Wow.
+**Coby Chapple:** They've been using it internally there with a huge amount of success, and we think this is technology that a lot of other people should look at as well. It's not gonna be something that suits everybody...
+**Jerod Santo:** \[27:58\] Yeah, there are a lot of detractors, a lot of naysayers. I think GitHub is probably the second major adopter of GraphQL, outside of Facebook -- the first one outside of Facebook. So there's people that are super excited... You can say this with anything, right? There's people who are super excited, then you have the cautious ones who are like, "Well, I'll watch it for a while..." Then you have the naysayers. I think for us, cautious types - I tend to be cautious - knowing that the REST APIs aren't necessarily gonna disappear soon is helpful, but it's an interesting... I think it's a risky, but perhaps very rewarding move by you guys.
+**Coby Chapple:** Right. For me, I look at it as APIs need to be dependable. So this is a decision that I think will actually reduce the amount of risk involved, because it means that if you build something on the GraphQL API, unless you change what your querying, the functionality will continue to work.
+**Jerod Santo:** It's not like an endpoint's gonna disappear on you.
+**Coby Chapple:** Right. So there's a lot of things about GraphQL in terms of versioning clients that actually reduces a bunch of complexity. You no longer have to think about a versioned API as you sure initially might. It actually takes a lot of those concerns away and allows you to build and iterate on clients in a way that's much more predictable. I think there's always gonna be -- especially when it was just Facebook using this, it was like "Okay, cool... But I'm gonna stay cautious until I'm gonna see wider adoption", and I think especially for integrators building on this, that's a smart approach to take.
+I think now that we are kind of putting our name out there and saying, "Okay, we're gonna double down on this too", I think that's gonna make a lot of other people prick their ears up and say, "Okay, maybe I should take a more serious look into this", and I think that's gonna start to see more people investing in this as a way of providing API functionality.
+**Jerod Santo:** It seems like a boon for the client-side, but harder on the server side, just from my very - what's the word for newb? - newb understanding of GraphQL. It seems like implementation, from you guys' perspective and from anybody else's as potential adopters of API provider, it seems like a lot goes into that.
+**Coby Chapple:** I think one of the benefits in that side of things though with GraphQL is it doesn't actually dictate anything about your implementation. It's literally just like a DSL between your implementation and the client-side. It's just saying that "For the API, here is a schema that works", and you can...
+**Jerod Santo:** You can munge it into that form however you want.
+**Coby Chapple:** Right. So that allows you to actually iterate on the implementation from a performance perspective in ways that you can't do with something where the implementation of the API is the implementation, if that makes sense.
+For example, one problem that we have a lot at GitHub is performance stuff. A lot of API queries... Someone asked for a bunch of information, but they might not actually need all of it. The response that we provide may include properties which are actually very expensive for us to compute...
+**Jerod Santo:** And they're gonna throw them away anyways...
+**Coby Chapple:** And they're not gonna use them anyway. So that's one of the huge benefits in terms of implementation - you can actually speed up your responses a huge amount if you're sure that they're only requesting information that they're actually gonna use, which actually allows you to provide something a lot more performant.
+**Jerod Santo:** How could you cache anything ever though if it's always a very specific, customized response?
+**Coby Chapple:** I'm a designer, I don't know the specifics of how that works...
+**Jerod Santo:** You're speaking very fluently as a developer, so I just forgot that you're a designer... \[laughs\]
+**Coby Chapple:** \[31:59\] So I don't know from a cacheing perspective how that would work, but I think we're gonna see a lot more documentation and best practices start to become publicly available about how to do this stuff as we see more adoption.
+As we put our name out there and say "We're banking on this", I think a lot of other people are gonna start looking at it as an option, and I think that's gonna mean that people are gonna start talking a lot about the edge cases where it does get complex, like cacheing and performance...
+**Jerod Santo:** We got sidetracked on GraphQL... One last question, back to Projects, because I wanted to ask this earlier and I forgot to... You mentioned that you don't want to be like a project management tool, and as a designer you're probably very familiar with the idea of like-- not "keep it simple", because it needs to be usable, but focus, core competencies, those ideas... And there's a lot of people that do project management - better or worse - but one that is very popular amongst developers is Trello. Projects is very much a Trello-esque tool in terms of you have lists of cards, right?
+**Coby Chapple:** Yeah.
+**Jerod Santo:** Why not just punt all the way and be like, "We don't wanna be a project management suite. Trello is great... We're just gonna tell people to go use Trello. Maybe we'll even provide some hooks to Trello..." Why not do that?
+**Coby Chapple:** That's a great question. My take on that is that just encouraging people to use third-party tools like Trello is an option for a lot of people. There's a lot of people though that would like to do that, but maybe it's not an option; maybe there's a security concern... Where maybe a larger company...
+**Jerod Santo:** So for your on-premise stuff...
+**Coby Chapple:** Yeah, how do we also control the access to this information? If we're suddenly then forcing people to also have Trello accounts, how do we make sure that the people seeing information are seeing information they should have access to?
+I think also Trello is a very general-purpose tool. We wanted to create something that's very basic, that's basic for people who build software - not just developers, but very basic for software project managers... There's a whole bunch of people around developers that also build software even if they're not directly coding, and Trello is flexible to that; you can create all kinds of things in Trello. We want people to be able to create all kinds of things with GitHub Projects as well, but we wanna make sure that the decisions we make are focused on people who build software.
+As we iterate on this functionality and as we improve it, it's gonna keep coming back to, "Okay, what makes sense for people who build software?", and that's something that Trello has a much wider audience, so they may make other decisions that don't always make sense for people who are building software.
+**Jerod Santo:** Good answer. Okay, is there anything that I missed, like "I can't wait till he asks me this question" and I just never asked it? What else should I ask here?
+**Coby Chapple:** I don't think so. I don't have any questions at the top of mind that I...
+**Jerod Santo:** Do you have any questions for me?
+**Coby Chapple:** What surprized you the most about what you asked me so far?
+**Jerod Santo:** What surprised me about your responses? Good question... You should do this job. I mean, I think your take on Projects was refreshing -- the answer about on-prem was a surprise, because I had never looked at it from that perspective. I think I see GitHub very much from my lens, and my lens is a typical user who's a member of orgs, but no GitHub Enterprise lens. So now let me back into my answer -- because I'm starting to reveal what it is, which is like the single org, the god org inside enterprise and how that affects your product decisions was surprizing and interesting, and then also why not just say "Use Trello" or "Use Pivotal Tracker" for instance - because you have customers who that's actually not an option for them, and they need something; so a baseline features a platform that then other people can add value on. Like I said, I think that was a good answer.
+**Coby Chapple:** \[36:10\] Cool. I think what that points to though is there's a lot of ways you can use GitHub, and what's gonna work for one company is gonna be completely different to what works for another organization, like a university or an open source organization. What works for different individuals and groups of people is gonna change. It's also gonna change within companies. Like I said, with the enterprise stuff, orgs might just be departments;  but that's also the case on github.com, too. You see this with Microsoft and with Google... Some of the organizations that they have on github.com are literally just one department from Microsoft, like Azure, or...
+**Jerod Santo:** Research.
+**Coby Chapple:** Right. So you're seeing this on github.com as well, where what works for one organization...
+**Jerod Santo:** Doesn't work for...
+**Coby Chapple:** Right, and that sure also happened at a smaller scale, too; within a repo, maybe that one repo might wanna use one project management plugin, and the other one just uses the vanilla one that we provide, and another one has an additional integration included in it, and that's all within one company.
+**Jerod Santo:** Right.
+**Coby Chapple:** We want people to be able to pick and choose, and that's why we wanna build things that are simple, and that's why we wanna make it a platform that other people can also build their business on, whether they're an integrator or whether they're someone who's investing in us to build software.
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. Cool, man. Great job, this was fun!
+**Coby Chapple:** Cool.
+**Jerod Santo:** You had great answers.
+**Coby Chapple:** It was great talking to you.
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, you too. Thanks for coming on!
+\* \* \*
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Thanks again to our friends at O'Reilly for the awesome working partnership at OSCON London 2016. We'll see you again, OSCON, in 2017 in Austin, Texas. If you want to save some money on that ticket, if you're going, use the code "changelog20" to save 20% off your registration to OSCON 2017 in Austin, Texas.
+For more episodes like this head to changelog.com/spotlight, click Subscribe, don't miss a show, and thanks for listening!

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+**Jerod Santo:** \[00:31\] Welcome to our first Spotlight series, recorded at OSCON London 2016. I'm Jerod Santo, managing editor at Changelog. OSCON London's biggest news by far was the launch of the JS Foundation, and I sat down with Kris Borchers, who's the executive director of the foundation, right after the big announcement, to learn all about it. Listen in!
+\* \* \*
+**Kris Borchers:** I am Kris Borchers, I am the executive director of the JS Foundation. Did you wanna know where I'm from, or like...?
+**Jerod Santo:** Sure, yeah. Where are you from?
+**Kris Borchers:** I live in Dallas, Texas. I just moved there recently, a couple years ago.
+**Jerod Santo:** Do you like Dallas?
+**Kris Borchers:** Yeah, I love Dallas. I lived most of my life in Chicago, I got sick of being cold...
+**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] You're not gonna be cold in Dallas.
+**Kris Borchers:** No, no.
+**Jerod Santo:** You're gonna get hot, though.
+**Kris Borchers:** We get really hot, but I can jump in a pool when it's hot, right? When it's 15 below, you're just stuck in the house.
+**Jerod Santo:** ...there's nowhere to jump.
+**Kris Borchers:** Yeah.
+**Jerod Santo:** Chris, we've been trying to work with you for a long time and put a show together; you've been kind of heads down... We thought you were working on the jQuery Foundation, but the big news of OSCON - so far, this has been THE news - is the launching of a new foundation, which appears to be an umbrella (you can tell me all the details)... Not just the jQuery foundation now, but as you said, the JS Foundation. Tell us about that.
+**Kris Borchers:** Sure, yeah. It's been about a year and a half effort to, on the surface, rebrand, rename the jQuery Foundation as the JS Foundation. The jQuery Foundation was actually an umbrella as well; we had a number of other projects alongside of jQuery (about 16, actually), but then, with the launch of the JS Foundation we've changed governance, we've changed our membership structure; we're implementing a new technical structure in collaboration with the projects, so that's not final yet, because, like I said, since we just announced, we brought in seven new projects. We wanna work with those 23 projects to kind of finalize that technical structure, technical side of the house.
+**Jerod Santo:** Tell us the overarching goal, the mission of the JS Foundation. What's the big picture? What's it trying to accomplish?
+**Kris Borchers:** Sure. This tagline that we've come up with is "Innovate together." In working through a lot of the messaging just in the last few days we came up with that. What we're trying to do is create this focal point or center of gravity for open source JavaScript. What we're trying to do is become the place where if you're looking for open source projects in the JavaScript space, or you have a project that either you as an individual need some help, it's kind of grown beyond what you expected and now you need help adding contributors and you're approaching that dreaded burnout... Or if you're an organization that has a project that you wanna get other organizations involved in, we sort of provide that neutral ground for companies to come and work together and contribute to projects.
+\[03:54\] Like I said, the overarching mission is to be this center point for open source JavaScript and provide a way to bring that innovating spirit that's in the JavaScript space; we see new projects coming up all the time in different areas, from client, to cloud, to IoT. We try to encourage that innovation, but in a place where it's more visible to the entire community, so that rather than reinventing the wheel all the time, maybe we find ways to contribute to the projects that are there and make them better, and make it a little bit more stable and sustainable, so that these projects that companies are building products on top of, or developers are depending on to be there, will be there for the long-term.
+**Jerod Santo:** The JS Foundation has a lot of large sponsors, undoubtedly putting in lots of money to support these projects and all of the ones that the foundation deems suitable for membership... What is the disbursement -- is it basically like, the foundation receives funding and then the foundation just pushes that funding as it sees fit? Or is the funding and support -- we're not talking about cash for people working on it, or are we talking about that?
+**Kris Borchers:** No, so we don't typically invest directly in development on our projects. For the most part what this money goes toward are a number of things... We provide a lot of infrastructure and support for the project; some of that is donated. We'll provide server instances, things like that for projects, whether they need to stand up a website, or their CI etc. We provide testing devices; if a project needs a big mobile device testing facility we'll procure devices and things like that for them.
+We throw events... We'll be doing JS Foundation-wide events, and we've been talking about a few different ideas around trying to do a little bit more individualized options as well, so maybe alongside a JS Foundation event there will be a JavaScript in IoT event or things like that, to give a little bit more focus on a subset of the projects as well.
+We provide travel assistance, so we will get a project's committer team together in the same place and give them some time to maybe knock out a big release that's coming up, things like that. So that's where a lot of the funds go. Obviously, funds go to support, like myself and other people that are working for us, and all of the stuff that you need to run a business (accounting, legal), and that's another thing we do: we provide a lot of legal assistance to these projects. We make sure that they're properly licensing contributions, so that both the developer that's contributing to our projects, as well as the projects themselves and the people that consume them are properly protected in terms of licensing, patents etc.
+**Jerod Santo:** Is that the scope of the foundation as it stands now, or is that moving forward? Because it seems like with the foundation's (I don't know if you wanna call it) clout, or what you guys can do, the efforts put into, and the money coming in from the companies who are benefitting greatly from projects like jQuery, like Webpack -- what are some of your other big ones?
+**Kris Borchers:** We have Mocha, Moment.js...
+**Jerod Santo:** Oh, I love Moment.js. Shout out to that guy.
+**Kris Borchers:** Yeah, and we have a few... The seven new ones that we were highlighting... So there was Mocha, Moment, Webpack (which you mentioned), we also have Node-RED, which is...
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, which is an IoT thing, right?
+**Kris Borchers:** \[07:51\] Yeah, so it's an interesting orchestration tool. It's a way to map out your APIs within your application. It's really popular in the IoT space, but it has applications beyond IoT, as well. Then we also brought in a project called Interledger.js - that's an interesting new one... There's this Interledger protocol which is being worked on and promoted by Ripple, and it's the idea of being able to do payments and micropayments no matter the currency and across any providers.
+**Jerod Santo:** That's cool.
+**Kris Borchers:** It's like a common protocol. So Interledger.js is like the JS implementation of that; it's an open source implementation of that.
+**Jerod Santo:** What do you look at for membership? What's the common bond amongst all these tools? I was gonna say because they're very popular and relied upon, but some of these newer ones probably aren't quite that relied upon yet.
+**Kris Borchers:** Right, absolutely. We're looking to support as much as we can, and there's not necessary a relationship between our projects. We're very much an umbrella like the Linux Foundation is. I like to compare us to the Linux Foundation, just focused on JavaScript. We have all of these independent projects that we support, that can work together. There are crossovers in places, some of them do very similar things, and that's okay, because we're also not really interested in picking winners; we just wanna support the projects that both people depend upon now, or things that seem innovative or are looking to push new standards and things like that, that we can support, that we think will be good for the web and for application developers in the future.
+**Jerod Santo:** Back to the funding, what I'm stuck on is it seems like we have a lot of these projects that are popular and relied upon, and we have a lot of these companies who are forward with their capital or they're very interested in supporting said things, and there's a lot that goes around it, but wouldn't money directly to developers be a great way to maintain sustainability for somebody's projects? Maybe not all of them...
+I keep thinking about Webpack, because I'm partial to Webpack I have a friend that's involved, Sean Larkin - shout out, Omaha, Nebraska...
+**Kris Borchers:** Sean's the one that I worked with to make this happen, because he wanted it to come in...
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, so I think about Sean because he's very much trying to find ways that he can continue to work on Webpack a lot and find sustainability in that, if possible. He's looking at -- I think they joined OpenCollect... We have Kickstarter models, we have Patreon people... Developers are trying different ways of funding themselves directly, and it seems like we have a history of corporates sometimes sponsoring a person directly - you think of like Aaron Patterson working on Rails for so long under the employ of AT&T Interactive, and now GitHub, which is great... But at the same time with that you have... You know, they could put the thumb down - because that person's their employee - if they wanted to, or they could use that as a way of influencing the direction of a project, which is sub-optimal in many situations... But it seems like through a middleman of a foundation, where you have all these different interested parties helping out and donating, providing funds, and you have a foundation that's the umbrella, and then you have the funding going, you could still have some autonomy... It just seems like a great way of going about it. I'm just curious - is that completely outside of your guys' scope, or is it a possibility? What are your thoughts?
+**Kris Borchers:** You've got a couple of really good points there, and we've thought a lot about this. Where we fall on this right now... So we have done some direct funding of developers in the past, and it works... What we found though, is that sometimes when we start paying a developer - especially if we're paying them full-time - there is less incentive to build out a broader committer base and contributor base...
+**Jerod Santo:** Oh, that's interesting...
+**Kris Borchers:** \[12:01\] ...because then there's less for them to do, so then we may not need to pay them anymore.
+**Jerod Santo:** I never saw it from that angle, that's interesting.
+**Kris Borchers:** And that's not to say that that always happens, but it's a possibility, so we try to avoid that. We really like the model of some of these member organizations - or other companies that maybe aren't our members yet - funding developers that are working on projects. Your point about them potentially having influence over that is valid; what we try to do as the foundation is be the middleman, in a sense, in that process by ensuring that the way decisions are made within a project. The foundation doesn't make technical decisions for a project, but we help them structure how they make those decisions and who's involved in those decisions.
+One of the things that we launched when we launched the JS Foundation is this mentorship program. What we focus on in that mentorship program are those policies, and making sure that a project implements policies like "We don't allow more than one third of our committers to be from the same company." So even if one company has a third of your committers, as long as your decision process doesn't let them just do what they want if that's not what's best for the project, the other two thirds are going to be able to overrule them.
+**Jerod Santo:** I see.
+**Kris Borchers:** That kind of keeps that in check. Obviously, if there's enough pressure from the organization and they can convince the team to do those things, then it's gonna get in. Again, we don't get in the way of that either, because it's up to the project to make those decisions. But I think if they're able to make the argument, then it's probably a valid change to be making.
+I don't worry too much about overinfluence from companies on a project, as long as we get those policies in place and they follow those policies.
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, a lot of nuance...
+**Kris Borchers:** Absolutely.
+**Jerod Santo:** ...and a lot of careful thinking it seems like that you're going through in order to not create false incentives, and create the middleman in a way that's right, and there's a lot of things to think about, so I appreciate your efforts in that regard.
+**Kris Borchers:** Yeah, for sure.
+**Jerod Santo:** Let's talk about membership real quick, and then we'll talk about your sponsors. So let's say I have a JS project and I'm thinking, "Oh, that sounds perfect for me." What does the membership process look like? How do I become the next Webpack or the next jQuery, to become a JS Foundation member?
+**Kris Borchers:** Just to clarify terms... So we call those our projects. The supporting companies, we call them members. It's also very much not a "pay to play" model either; I like to make sure that that's clear, as well.
+**Jerod Santo:** Let's talk about both sides, then. Let's talk about projects, first.
+**Kris Borchers:** Okay, so in terms of projects, we are in the process of finalizing a charter for what we call our Technical Advisory Committee. I think I mentioned this earlier, but we were waiting until we were launched and we had our projects set, at least for now, to involve them in sort of the final details and finalizing that charter. Once that's in place - or even before... I mean, right now it's out of GitHub; we have a JS Foundation Org on GitHub, and that's the TAC repo (Technical Advisory Committee).
+Within there there is a project lifecycle document, and there is an application in there. It's literally just, "Tell us about your project. Here's what we wanna know, and then send a pull request."
+**Jerod Santo:** Is there a certain look and feel that you're looking for? What increases my odds, in terms of the way my project looks? Nothing?
+**Kris Borchers:** No... One of the things we haven't finalized - because we specifically wanted to leave this to the technical side of the house - are the general metrics they're going to follow when they admit a project. We didn't want that coming from the business side.
+**Jerod Santo:** \[16:10\] Gotcha.
+**Kris Borchers:** So we don't have those metrics, but it's going to be, I would say, a pretty low bar, because we wanna support as much as we can. The real limiting factor will be mentors, and actually having boots on the ground that can go help a project work through the mentorship program.
+**Jerod Santo:** Okay.
+**Kris Borchers:** We'll be building those as we go as well, so our hope is that it will become this cycle of once we've gotten a few projects through - because we do have some that we've already assigned mentors, and once they've gone through that process, we can start pulling from those projects as new mentors. That will exponentially increase our number of mentors, and then we can increase the number of projects we can start bringing in.
+**Jerod Santo:** Makes sense.
+**Kris Borchers:** In terms of what we're looking for - nothing in particular, because we have everything from low-level utility libraries like Lodash to full applications like Node-RED to JerryScript (a JavaScript engine for IoT devices).
+**Jerod Santo:** Cool. Tell me about membership now. You said it's not a pay-to-play model. (Now these are your sponsors?)
+**Kris Borchers:** Yeah, so what I was trying to make sure I separated there was to bring a project in or to use any of our projects or contribute to any of our projects, you do not need to be a member, you do not need to give us any money.
+**Jerod Santo:** Okay. How do you do that?
+**Kris Borchers:** The projects can come from anywhere. Anybody can come jump in on our projects. You can go to js.foundation/projects, see all of our projects and find one that interests you. Another part of that mentorship process - which we're just starting, so most of the projects won't have it yet - is we will encourage them to have an exact roadmap of "How do I get involved? How do I become a committer? How do I work my way up in the project?" Because that's something that's usually missing from projects; you just kind of have to be around for a while and figure it out, and we found that if you map that out for people it's a much more encouraging environment where they want to stay involved, because they know they have something they're working toward.
+So anyone can get involved in a project, contribute to it, use it; you don't have to be a member. Obviously, we do encourage - especially companies bringing projects in, that they're going to be supporting anyways, it would be great if they also become members, because we do need funding to provide a lot of the things we do and work on these initiatives I've been talking about.
+In terms of membership, we're open to any organization as well. If you are a large enterprise organization that has interests in a bunch of our projects, and you've got people working on them and you wanna support the foundation, make sure it's around so that those projects are supported, then memberships are a great way to do that.
+Same thing for smaller companies. If you have a smaller organization and you're looking to have a bigger voice in things like standards - we have representatives at W3C, we have representatives in ECMA/TC39, so that's a great way to get involved that way, as well.
+There's different pricing structures and different benefits that come along with that. Our top-level members get a seat on our board of directors; the middle level, it's kind of a one board seat for every five, so that group of members just kind of decides amongst themselves who will represent them.
+\[20:02\] The top level has a flat fee, the middle level is kind of a tiered fee based on your employee size; we try to make it a little bit fairer, so that smaller companies can pay less, larger companies pay a little more.
+Then we also have an associate level membership, and that's free. It's for non-profits and academic institutions, just to give them some recognition for teaching curriculum that involves our projects, or getting their students involved in open source, things like that.
+**Jerod Santo:** Let's close with some shout outs, because I think these companies that support open source are very important. We like to praise anybody who puts their money where their source is, so that they are contributing to the sustainability of what we're all trying to do. I think that whatever good will is coming to them, I think they should have it. Name some of your big members, some of the people that have supported the jQuery Foundation first, and now the JS Foundation, who helped you guys reform it into what it is.
+**Kris Borchers:** Sure. I think I have to start with IBM. They've been with us for a long time at the jQuery Foundation, and now they're also still supporting us in the JS Foundation. Our other platinum, top-level member that just came in is Samsung. They've been a really great partner; they brought in the JerryScript projects, so that JavaScript engine for IoT. They want that under open governance, they want other companies getting involved in kind of driving the direction of that project. So those are our two top-level members at this time.
+Then we have seven silver members, and you're gonna make me remember them...
+**Jerod Santo:** You don't have to...
+**Kris Borchers:** No, but I should. So Boku - a lot of people in the JavaScript world should know Boku. They've been with us at the jQuery Foundation and have also come along to the JS Foundation. SitePen as well. SitePen is another company that supports a lot of JavaScript; they still support Dojo, and they were in essence running the Dojo Foundation, which the jQuery Foundation absorbed about a year back.
+**Jerod Santo:** I don't even recall that.
+**Kris Borchers:** Yeah, so SitePen is still on board. Then we have SauceLabs, and they also brought in the Appium project, which is really cool for mobile device automation and testing.
+**Jerod Santo:** Is that a cross-platform thing?
+**Kris Borchers:** Yeah, it'll do web apps, and then it will do native, iOS, Android and universal Windows platform apps as well. I actually saw a really cool demo a while back where they were actually automating the calculator on a Windows 10 laptop.
+**Jerod Santo:** Really?
+**Kris Borchers:** Just watching it do it... It was really cool.
+**Jerod Santo:** That is cool.
+**Kris Borchers:** Who else? We also have Sense Tecnic. That's a company that is, I believe - I don't wanna misquote their product, but I believe they do a cloud-hosted version of Node-RED, which is that project I mentioned earlier that IBM brought in.
+We also have StackPath. I don't know if you're familiar with them...
+**Jerod Santo:** I've seen their name, but I'm not sure what they do.
+**Kris Borchers:** Our CDN provider was MaxCDN. MaxCDN was acquired by StackPath. They're working on a whole suite of products. Their first product is what they're calling SecureCDN, which is MaxCDN with some other security things added on top. They're still providing our CDN, and they're also funding us, as well.
+**Jerod Santo:** \[24:01\] Awesome. I'll stop you there, I'm sure there are plenty more that you could mention, as you're taxing your brain. It's too bad you can't see the booth from over here, they're all on the wall over there, and we're getting drowned down in some music... Closing thoughts, JS Foundation, into the future...?
+**Kris Borchers:** Like I said earlier, when you think of open source JavaScript, we want you to think of JS Foundation. The other thing I really wanna mention that I hadn't gotten a chance to is that in this process -- I think I mentioned we are a Linux Foundation collaborative project; we will be partnering with the Node JS Foundation, which is also a Linux Foundation collaborative project. So between the Node Foundation and ourselves, the goal there is to have sort of a single voice for JavaScript in those web standards processes, project mentorship, things like that. With that partnership, we wanna be the home for open source JavaScript.
+Hopefully by having that central point, we can continue the amazing innovation that's going on, but also make sure that people are aware that that innovation is happening, and how they can get involved and how they can be a part of it, and then sort of keep pushing JavaScript into new places, maybe in a way that there's a little less burnout.
+**Jerod Santo:** I think we're all for a little less burnout, right?
+**Kris Borchers:** Exactly. So hopefully, if things are happening in one place, it's a lot easier for people to get involved, to keep those project going.
+**Jerod Santo:** Well, Kris, thanks so much for sitting down with us, and enjoy the rest of OSCON!
+**Kris Borchers:** Awesome, thank you!
+\* \* \*
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Thanks again to our friends at O'Reilly for the awesome working partnership at OSCON London 2016. We'll see you again, OSCON, in 2017 in Austin, Texas. If you want to save some money on that ticket, if you're going, use the code "changelog20" to save 20% off your registration to OSCON 2017 in Austin, Texas.
+For more episodes like this head to changelog.com/spotlight, click Subscribe, don't miss a show, and thanks for listening!

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+**Adam Stacoviak:** Hey everyone, welcome to the first episode of Spotlight. You may know me as Adam Stacoviak, the editor in chief here at Changelog...
+**Jerod Santo:** ...and you may know me as Jerod Santo, managing editor at Changelog.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Jerod, one thing we love doing is going out in the community.
+**Jerod Santo:** That's right.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And we're launching this new show called Spotlight. It's been a labor of love for a while now. We've wanted to do this for at least a year.
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, we've been attending conferences, getting out there in the trenches, as we like to call it, having conversations, and we just started recently recording those audio chats for this special show called Spotlight.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It's going out into the community, revolving around big announcements, hallway track... The kind of conversations you tend to have in a conference, just not in front of a microphone, basically, and we get to share that with this awesome community who loves what we do. We get to have great conversations at places like OSCON, All Things Open, Node Interactive, and maybe even your favorite conference out there, so let us know where we can go.
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, there's something special about the hallway tracks at conferences and the conversations that you have there. I don't know about you, Adam, but when I was at OSCON London, having these sit-downs with different people - Katrina Owen, Kris Borchers, Sid Sijbrandij among others... You know, we're used to interviewing people over the internet, and maybe seeing their face, maybe not, but there's something about sitting in front of somebody, having a conversation - it feels more real, it feels like things come out that wouldn't come out otherwise. Have you had that experience at All Things Open?
+**Adam Stacoviak:** That exact experience, and my connection was so deep that I got a hug. Sandi Metz...
+**Jerod Santo:** Really?
+**Adam Stacoviak:** I sat down with Sandi... She loves us, she's a sweetheart to us, but when we were done talking, it was such a joy to have a face-to-face conversation, a real conversation. Not that the conversations we have through the internet and through Skype and the wonders of the internet aren't real, but it was face-to-face, and when we were done it wasn't a handshake, it was a hug. She's like, "Bring it in, I need a hug."
+**Jerod Santo:** That's awesome. One thing that makes this show unique - not just the style it is - is the way that we're producing it in batches. So it's not gonna be a weekly Spotlight episode; it's going to be us at an event having a bunch of conversations, and then we'll produce a series from that event, that hopefully captures the essence of what the people and the things going at that event were, and then we'll release those as a bit of a series.
+So a little bit different in its cadence, Adam, than we're used to. We'll have batches, and that might be interesting, as well.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** It also gives us a chance to meet fans, too. I can't tell you how many people I met that love The Changelog, love Request for Commits, love GoTime. On the note of being a series - I like that because we don't have to feel like we have to keep up. It's more like when we get a chance - you and I are both family men, so we weigh our time away from our family very wisely, and so we get out there, we have some fun, we meet people in the community, we have conversations with speakers at the conference, and they're very real conversations. We bring those back, do some production around it and release it for the world. That's a lot of fun, and it also gives us a chance to make some new partners out there too, like O'Reilly. Great partners out there.
+**Jerod Santo:** Absolutely. Maybe let's end with this - if you're an organizer of a conference or you're going to a conference that you love and you want us to come record Spotlight there in 2017 and beyond, get in touch with us editors at Changelog.com. And if you're a listener of our other shows and you're just finding Spotlight, make sure you go to Changelog.com/spotlight, hit subscribe there in your favorite podcast app, and you will get all those interviews when they're ready for you.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** And you could even go into iTunes and search for Changelog Spotlight; it will come up, and just click the button Subscribe, and you'll get all this goodness when we release new series. Before we tail off, what are some of the upcoming ones we have going on? We've mentioned OSCON, All Things Open... What else have we got?
+**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, so just a few interviews that are coming down the pipeline - I mentioned Katrina Owen, Kris Borcher is talking about JS Foundation, Coby Chapple, who's an interesting guy from GitHub, he's a product designer there and has lots of insights into the recent product announcements; like I mentioned, Sid Sijbrandij... These are all OSCON, so this will be our first series, and Giovanni Caligaris, who's told me the awesome story about how he went to extreme lengths to translate LibreOffice into Guarani, which is the native language of Paraguay. Interesting stuff.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** Very cool stories. Then All Things Open was in Raleigh, North Carolina - that's like the other OSCON, basically... So we hit both open source conferences, talked about Ethereum, talked about Blockchain, talked about Mozilla (a lot of fun stuff happening there), talked about animation in web design, and then more recently Node Interactive - a lot of fun conversations coming out at Node Interactive. Basically, that series was the future of Node, and that was sponsored by IBM.
+Very unique opportunities for us to get out there in the community, make new friends, meet new people, and even the occasional hug.
+**Jerod Santo:** Gotta get a hug.
+**Adam Stacoviak:** With that, we'll leave it there. Once again, [changelog.com/spotlight](https://changelog.com/spotlight), or go to your favorite podcast app and search for Changelog Spotlight, hit subscribe and we'll see you soon.