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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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