The stories and people behind the code. Hear stories of software development from interesting people.
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Don and Adam discuss folds
Today we try a different format. Adam invites his neighbour, Don McKay, over to ask him questions. An interesting discussion on recursion, corecursion and the naming of the podcast unfolds. "John was saying, we conclude that since modularity is the key to successful programming, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. I think what he means by modularity is okay, we write our fold and it's like three lines long. Once that exists somewhere, we don't have to have that base case all over our code. We ended up programming a higher declarative level. The other reason is just I really like clean abstractions. There's more to learn but once you do, you're able to kind of have this language where you can talk about these things at a higher level" Why Functional Programming Matters - John Hughes Beautiful Folds - Gabriel Gonzalez Folds in Scala Recursion Training https://corecursive.com/046-don-and-adam-folds/
David Heinemeier Hansson, Software Contrarian
David Heinemeier Hansson talks to Adam about being avoiding a software monoculture. He explains why we should find a programming language that speaks to us, why ergonomics matter and why single page apps and microservices are not for him. "That is the pleasure and privilege of working with the web. No one knows what you built it. It, you could build an in basic, you can build it a Ocaml, you can build in the Haskell, you can build it in whatever Ruby. No one is going to be none the wiser you get to choose" You want to write for the web. I mean, literally every programming language that's ever been invented and known to humankind is serving a webpage somewhere." "There's just something heartwarming in that, that this idea of the monoculture that like this is all just a battle to the death and there's going to be one framework and there's going to be one programming language that lifts is left standing. Programmers are really drawn into that right into that horse race." So much of their technology choices seem to be predicated on like, is this popular? Is this going to be popular next year? Do you know what I mean?" "The crimes against programming humanities that have been done in the service of single page applications are far worse than the ones that have been done in the service of microservices. But then of course, as it is, lots of people combine the two. So it's a fleet of microservices serving a single page application, and that's just where it bam, my head explodes with like, yeah, I would rather retire and fucking, I don't know, make weaved baskets than deal with that shit." "I'm not saying that email is sort of in its base form is wonderful, but you know what is wonderful asynchronous. Write-ups of cohesive, full thoughts, people using actual goddamn paragraphs to describe ideas and proposals, and they put those paragraphs together into form entire, cohesive thoughts. And then letting someone take that in, read those several paragraphs, sit back for more than five minutes. Ponder that. And then respond." Links: The Majestic Monolith On React TDD is Dead RailsConf 2014 Podcast Page
The Business Of Developer Tools With Lee Edwards
How do you build a business around tools for software engineers? Adam talks to Lee Edwards, a VC who spends a lot of time thinking about this question. "When I think about is this a good business, I think about is there value Accruing. The question is just how much. The question about is it a venture-backed business? The very, very oversimplified answer is do you believe you can get $100 million in revenue within 10 years? And those numbers are kind of fudgy. But if you can do that, you can IPO a company and it's kind of amazing that PagerDuty and Twillio each do one thing well and they're multibillion-dollar companies. " "Another interesting thing that venture capitalists talk about behind closed doors and probably never tweet about or say publicly because it makes them look bad. But you do often wonder if the founder of a dev tool company, a lot of times they're really altruistic and you know, I feel this way too, right? But venture capitalists are like, wait, don't give your stuff away for free. And it can sometimes be kind of like a conflict. I think when you're looking for an open-source founder, you need to look for someone as a VC that actually does want to make everyone money." Show Notes: Root VC The Business Value of Developer Relations - Mary Thengvall Code Climate Particle.io FlexPort
Software in Context with Zach Tellman
Adam talks to Author and Clojure advocate Zach Tellman about how great software is built. "If we say something is over-engineered, what we mean is it's too complex or it's too robust or it handles a bunch of situations or scenarios that are not relevant to how we're using it. It's okay for us to create narrow things. It's okay for us to create Powershells instead of bash sort of environments because that narrowness gives us the ability to go and do things we might not otherwise be able to do." "Twitter are built on top of Ruby because that was a reasonable thing. And then it stopped being the reasonable thing. And again, you have this kind of, I dunno, I call it hacker news induction, which is like, well I built this thing and then I built this other thing, which is almost exactly the same thing. And it worked or it didn't work. And therefore I think that this must generalize across all possible applications of this thing, right? So I tried to rails and it was great or it was awful and therefore it is great or awful, you know, in all situations. " Zach's Personal Site Elements Of Clojure Book https://corecursive.com/042-zach-tellman-software-in-context/
Beautiful and Useless Coding with Allison Parrish
Generative Art involves using the tools of computation to creative ends. Adam talks to Allison Parrish about how she uses word vectors to create unique poetry. Word vectors represent a fundamentally new tool for working with text. Adam and Allison also talk about creative computer programming and building twitter bots and what makes something art. "Computer programming is beautiful and useless. That's the reason that you should want to do it is not because it's going to get you a job, because it has a particular utility, but simply for the same reasons that you would pick up oil paints or do origami or something. It's something that has like an inherent beauty to it that is worthy of studying." "For my purpose as an artist and as like someone who teaches programming to artists and designers, I want to emphasize that it's not only a vocational thing, it's not only a way for building things like to do apps for that matter. It's not only a way to, you know, write useful applications that help to organize communities or help to do scientific work and other like good applications of programming and software engineering. But there is this like very essential, very core part of computer programming that is just joyful. Um, that's about understanding your own mind in different ways and understanding the world in different lands." Experimental Creative Writing with the Vectorized Word Every Icon Word2Vect Allison Parrish's Website Tracery Articulations Every Word
Tech Evangelism and Open source With Gabriel Gonzalez
What makes some pieces of technology take off? Why is java popular and not small talk or Haskell. Gabe is a popular blogger, a former Haskell cheerleader, and creator of the Dhal configuration language. Today we talk about marketing and tech evangelism. "One common mistake I see a lot of new open source developers make is they tried to build what I call the hype train. Where they have started a new project that has a lot of poTech Evangelism with Gabriel Gonzalez tential and they advertise on hacker news hoping that, okay, we're gonna generate a lot of hype, maybe get a lot of influx of new contributors, new contributes, new features, generate more hype and so forth." "They hope that there'll be that virtuous cycle that will get them to the mainstream in practice, that never happens. Usually, the thing about contributors is that their needs are always going to be fragmented, right? If you have eight new contributors, they're going to be taking you in eight different directions. You should focus on one direction and sometimes that means not only doing a lot of work yourself, but it's explicitly saying no to something and saying this is not where I want to take the product right now." Links: Crossing the Chasm Dhall Lang Adam's SE Radio Interview with Gabe Haskell For All - Gabe's Blog
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs with Hal Abelson
Adam talks to Hal Abelson about the textbook he coauthored in 1984, SICP and why it is still popular and influential today. "If you pick up almost any computing book it starts out 'here are these datatypes, these operations that you do' and somewhere around 20 or 30% through the book, they show you how to define a function or a procedure. Whereas we really take the opposite approach. We say the key thing is abstraction. So we kind of start there." "The axe [the book] is grinding is that people write programs to do one particular thing. And then the price of that is that a whole lot of software engineering ends up being trying to get out of the hole you dug yourself into because you made a program that was too specific." SICP Lectures The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs Hal Interview https://corecursive.com/039-hal-abelson-sicp/
Open Source Health and Diversity with Heather C Miller
Heather C Miller is an Assistant Processor at CMU. She is concerned that key open source projects are at risk of failure and no one is paying attention. Adam talks to her about open source, how it grows, the diversity problems it has and much more. Heather also shares some interesting stories about the early days of Scala and her ideas for increasing diversity in tech. Heather's JuliaCon keynote Digital Infrastructure Scala Center https://corecursive.com/038-heather-miller-open-source/
Compiling to Bytecode with Thorsten Ball
What do compilers do? What is the runtime of a language? What does it mean to compile something down to bytecode and what executes the byte code. Throsten Ball Answers these questions in this interview with Adam. "A virtual machine is a computer built-in software, a CPU built-in software" "Compilers can be slow. You know, I grew up running Linux and I had Gentoo running, so I basically let my computer run for the whole night to compile my window manager. So I do know how slow compilers can be and the reason they're slow is because you're paying the upfront costs that an interpreter pays at runtime. You're paying a little bit more because you're doing additional optimizations. You're shifting the cost to a point in time where you're happy to pay it." Writing a compiler in GO GCC Codebase Mirror LLVM Codebase TCC Compiler C in 4 functions 8CC - small self hosting compiler https://corecursive.com/037-thorsten-ball-compilers/
Bartosz Milewski on Category Theory
Today Adam talks to Bartosz Milewski. He is the author of a famous blog series, lecture series and now book on Category Theory for programmers. The world of functional programming is rife with terminology imported from abstract algebra and Category Theory. In fact, it may be one of the most valid criticisms of functional programming is the use of Category-Theoretic terminology that can be unwelcoming to newcomers. Category theory can also be a tool to teach us to see software development in a different light and it can teach us to build better software. Bartosz is also just an interesting person, if you haven't heard of him yet, you are in for a treat. Bartosz's Website Blog Series Book Lecture Series https://corecursive.com/035-bartosz-milewski-category-theory/
Jimmy Koppel on Advanced Software Design
How do we create great software? What are the important skills need to properly review a PR? How do you identify assumptions of a code base and the stable contracts of a software module? Jimmy Koppel is working on his Ph.D. in the field of program synthesis at MIT. He was previously paid 100 thousand dollars to drop out of university by Peter Thiel, but yet still graduated with two degrees. The most interesting, however, about Jimmy is he is working hard to teach the world how to design better software. Due to his time working on program synthesis, he developed some unique insights into what makes software good, and what makes it bad, and he spends time teaching people his insights. Three Level of Software Peter Thiel 20 under 20 Benjamin Franklin Method You are a Program Synthesizer Jimmy's Coaching Program Episode Page: https://corecursive.com/036-jimmy-koppel-advanced-software-design/
Typescript
How do we make javascript easier to work with? Chris Krycho has been using typescript to add types to javascript since 2016. Chris is a software developer at LinkedIn who, at his previous gig, worked on converting one of the largest Ember apps in the world to TypeScript. I was shocked by the size. Chris also loves Rust and types and is a former C and FORTRAN programmers. He hosted a podcast called the New Rustacean, which he has retired from. Today we talk about TypeScript and when you should use it. We also talk about Language Server Protocols, Rust, working with large codebases, Structural types, row polymorphism and talking code over audio. Chris's Blog TypeScript New Rustacean Chris's Typescript Refinement types in TypeScript Winning Slowly Podcast https://corecursive.com/034-chris-krycho-typescript/
Rethinking Technological Positivism with Cory Doctorow
Self-driving cars or armed autonomous military robots may make use of the same technologies. In a certain sense, we as software developers are helping to build and shape the future. What does the future look like and are we helping build the right one? Is technology a force for liberty or oppression. Cory Doctorow is one of my favorite authors and also a public intellectual with a keen insight into the dangers we face a society. In this interview, I ask him how to avoid ending up in a techno-totalitarian society. We also talk about Turing, DRM, data mining and monopolies. The coming war on general computation Cory's Personal Site Radicalized (and other books) EFF Website for Page
Crafting Interpreters With Bob Nystrom
Bob Nystrom is the author of Crafting Interpreters. I speak with Nystrom about building a programming language and an interpreter implementation for it. We talk about parsing, the difference between compiler and interpreters and a lot more. If you are wondering why many languages have hand-rolled parser implementations yet much work on build language implementations focuses on parser and tokenizer generators then Bob's insights will be eye-opening. Also, if you've ever used regexes to pull strings apart into structured data, and I sure have, then Bob's perspective on the simplicity of hand-rolled parsers will certainly open up some new possibilities for you. Links: http://craftinginterpreters.com/ http://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/ http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/
Rethinking databases and Noria with Jon Gjengset
Can we make databases faster and remove the need for caching reads in an external cache? Can we make a distributed SQL based relational database that outperforms memcached? Jon Gjengset and the PDOS team at MIT CSAIL have done just that with Noria. Today I talk to Jon about Noria, about building a database in rust and his efforts to teach people intermediate rust via live coding sessions. Jon was great to talk to. He really was able to explain to me how Noria is able to do what it does and where it is in terms of maturity. The key, besides Rust and evmaps, is that Noria uses materialized views to do query optimization ahead of time, on write. The devil is in the details though, of course. And the details, in this case, are turning declarative SQL into a dataflow program that handles cache updates on new writes. http://corecursive.com/030-rethinking-databases-with-jon-gjengset/ Show notes: Noria Project pdos group at MIT Noria Paper Noria Article Jon's Rust Streaming