Regular Programming

What is functional programming?Andreas grabs his whiteboard and his Turing machine, and starts from laziness, while Lars thinks of immutability, functions, and data.Is syntax important for being functional or not?The functionalness of various languages are delved into, from Haskell to Rust via Python, Go, and Ruby. And, of course, the evil version of Elixir.A good pipeline can be really nice.Oh, and you shouldn't use witchcraft anymore.LinksFunctional programmingHaskellLazy evaluationLambda calculusTuring machinesAlonzo ChurchGödel - "A German guy" who formalized the definition general recursive functionsImmutabilityPure functionsWitchcraftContinuation passingPartial applicationCurryingThe ML language familyWhy the lucky stiffSam AaronSonic piRocClojureAST - abstract syntax treeUVThe UV company: AstralMemoizationSingleton

09-30

37:54

Lars wants a less demanding way to prepare for giving talks, but he doesn't have the time right now.Andreas knows a cheat code for public speaking. Lars uses slides like a blunt instrument.How should you wield your slides? How do you weigh information content against entertainment value? Should you try to reach precisely everyone with your talk? Many slides, or few? Lars has the questions, and some of the answers, at least for himself.Last but not least, Lars reveals his current way of preparing for talks. It ideally involves getting quite bored.LinksProof of Andreas speaking in publicSverokBeamer - write your slides in LaTeXLars' Gigcity Elixir talkJosé ValimChris McCordØredevLars' Øredev talkLars Lisbon talk - Lively LiveViewCode BEAM BerlinJon CarstensNull modemErlang clustersWireguardOpen source summitAnother brick in the wall

09-02

27:47

What are people talking about when they talk about developer experience? Pretty colors in the terminal?What is worth improving, what is not? Lars has thoughts about all of developer experience, not least the one of Nerves. How flaky do you accept, for how fast?Revealed: why all Andreas' Elm programs are one line long.Also: Why not attend the Øredev developer conference in Malmö this November? LinksDX - developer experienceElmLanguage serverElixir's brand new official language server team unifies the work of the previous separate teamsThe Elm language serverMix - Elixir build toolNervesNervesHubNerves CloudBuildrootVintage - network configuration and management for Nerves devicesREPL - Read-evaluate-print loopCcacheIEx - Elixir's interactive shellHyllieØredevYoctoSKFBredbandsbolagetNervesHubLinkOTPSmalltalkLisp machinesBeam RadioBryan HunterRebar3

08-19

34:48

Andreas' place of work ceased to exist.It was mostly a relief.The main worry is about resting and recovering enough before whatever comes next begins. All the learnings about how not to do certain things live on.The right way of doing those things still remains to be learned.Lars is on the other end of the spectrum: beginning completely new things. Figuring out where exactly Delaware is, finding a Nerves-shaped Elixir hole, wading through Python scripts, and so much more.Also: Why not attend the Øredev developer conference in Malmö this November? LinksLönegaranti - wage guaranteeUppsägningstid - notice periodAriaHyllieØredevFrank Hunleth talking about NervesNervesRaspbianRaspberry pi 3Raspberry pi zeroAdafruitInky pHAT e-ink displayLars' ported Inky libraryBuildrootYoctoNervesHubJosh KalderimisTravis CINerves CloudMilwaukeeDelawareStripe AtlasHeartbleedShellshockStagefrightRow hammerCrowdStrikeFlickswitchSmartRent

08-05

28:31

CRUD - a classic term among supposedly simple web apps. But, not always the right move? Not always all that mappable to the actual problem?Discussed: picking spicy architectures, non-CRUD data storage needs, slovely solutions, dirty refunds, and doing the OAuth dance.Hey, thing happened!Finally: a story where pubsub was reasonable, and some telemetry.LinksCRUD - Create, read, update, deleteDjangoRuby on railsPhoenixAshRethinkDBMnesiaPlausible analyticsTimescaleClickhouseNervesconfAlex McLainNervesCubDBRocksDBDynamoDBThe DynamoDB paperEctoOAuth

07-08

29:49

Embedded is a weird thing. Lars is all Nerves and tries to explain and report from a world where people know part numbers off the top of their heads. The physical device missing is rarely a thing that happens in web development.Embedded-style work can sneak into other areas as well. Without a root file system, everything is a lot more secure. Security is a deep topic in general, and WPA is not just for wifi.Andreas shares his view of what "embedded" means, plus the story of building a really bad audio cable.LinksRaspberry piNervesFrank HunlethThreadripperCoral TPUTensor processing unitsAI kit for Raspberry pi 5Lars' Nervesconf talk is not out yetTI AM625ZephyrReal-time operating systemHAL - hardware abstraction layerHAL 9000OxideArm TrustzoneBuildrootLinux from scratchAlpineWolfiVintagenetwpa_supplicantEduroam802.1xPAP MS-CHAPEAPEAP-TLSOrangepiGet secrets by shooting lasers at security chipsNonceHMAC

06-24

37:06

Andreas is a man of many hobbies. Interviewing for example. But sometimes, you get strange questions from strange people, end up feeling scared, or start lying just a bit. Then, perhaps, you tell the story of a bug. Perhaps we shouldn't work during the winter?Lars doesn't have interviews. More like sales calls. H§e shares his experiences of how to recruitment, both as part of interviews and as a more straightforward recruiter.Finally: the secret to everything Lars does.LinksPercy NilegårdHiring Processes with Gergely Orosz - Oxide and Friends (podcast)The Indiana Jones switchGigcity ElixirLars' conference reportChattanoogaNervesAmazon AuroraRewriting the Technical Interview

05-27

31:10

Stories about Ecto quickly redeeming itself, and of what it takes to introduce foreign keys.Some of us are super comfortable referencing the ID. Lars dislikes that Ecto needs to be more complicated because of SQL, but the abstractions do hold.Also: the biggest reason to ever use a ORM! It can be reallynice to come back to one after a tour of plain SQL-land.Some people have just been bitten so hard by cowboys.LinksEctoForeign keysRethinkDBReferential integrityAXALantmännenModelForm in DjangoCowboy and PlugDSLUpsertsFragmentsHaxl - DSL for creating queriesSQLAlchemyets

03-25

36:43

Fredrik wants to think about long-lived code. Lars is offended, Andreas only a little bit so.Are there other good software development practices out there? Other than the ones focusing on building something quickly? Practices for building software which lives on and is maintained for much longer than we seem to care to admit? Should we remove dependencies over time? The swamp of dependency management and vendoring is probed, gradually shifting into firmware, the horrors of floating point (proper excuses are made), small language models.Finally, of course, indecent cups of tea.LinksLagomReactFlux architectureReduxChangelog episode with Justin Searls about dependencies as liabilitiesKent Beck talking about managing risks in software developmentKent Beck drawing on a whiteboard and staring at the audienceMithril.jsInteract.jsVendoringWorking effectively with legacy code - the book about legacy systemsDelphi 5FlaskDynamic linkingSAMLPOSIXLibcGlibcMuslH.264MicrocodeOxide and friendsCoral TPU:sTensorflow lite286PentiumCUDAROCmQuantizationLLaMA

03-04

42:08

The Saint Valentine's peak passed without issue. Andreas had time for semlor.Lars has opinions on semlor, and can imagine many possible improvements. Like having an apple. Or a pizza.Lars has had a nice influx of work, including hardware work using Nerves. Testing and very hackish hot code reloading are both included.Finally, some thoughts on Linux audio, and musings about the possibility of creating really nice audio tools for the platform.LinksSaint ValentineThe strangler fig patternThe strangler patternPhoenixCowboySemlaMudcakeThe Swedish chef making chocolate mooseFinnish fastlagsbulle with jamOne of Lars' blog posts about NervesFrank Hunleth - also hot code reloads the way Lars has doneLars' Stream deck library for ElixirStream deckElgato key lightPulseAudioPipeWireRogue amoeba's audio tools for MacJACKCustom APT repositoryQuotesThe Nordics go all awkward and weirdIn my heart, it was a catastrophyHad time for semlorAn unimpressive pastryIt's less messy to have an appleProfessional nervesBuilding with nervesA reasonable enough abstractionThe Rogue Amoeba for Linux

02-19

31:08

Andreas tells the story of a old system which suddenly exhibited a new and frightening bug. Lars shares similar experiences of things going wrong in new and novel ways.When things do go wrong, it is so nice to have supervision trees or other things which allow you to hear about problems, not to mention recover from them.Also covered are some stories about TCP, networks, and timeouts. And a realization that testing the frameworks upon which you build could have saved some bacon, had it just been done a long time ago.LinksDjangoModel-view-controllerDrupalUnicode collationSupervision treesOxide and friends - episode 27TCP_NODELAYQUIC and HTTP/3UDPNyqvist-Shannon sampling theoremHexagonal designQuotesGaming convention management systemWhen I say view, I mean controllerView is a better wordIf I ignore it, it will go awayDestructive favouritesAlternative class hierarchiesFailed in new and novel waysBoth a mistake, and interestingAaah, circumflex!TCP the good parts

02-05

28:21

Lars dove into data pipelines, and emerged bearing arrows and wishing for a lot fewer copies.What is there to think about regarding data pipelines, what is interesting about them?Which tools are out there, and why might you want to use them?Why all this talk about making fewer copies of data?What does Lars' current ideal pipeline look like, and where does Elixir fit in?LinksMatt TopolApache ArrowLarge language modelsVector searchBigQuerysedAWKjqReplacing Hadoop with bash - "Command-line Tools can be 235x Faster than your Hadoop Cluster"HadoopMapReduceUnix pipesDirected acyclic graphtee - to "materialize inbetween states"Apache BeamApache SparkApache FlinkApache PulsarAirbyte - shoves data between systems using connectorsCronjobFivetran - Airbyte competitorApache AirflowETL - Extract, transform, loadDesigning data-intensive applicationsStream processingEphemeralityData lakeData warehouseThe people's front of JudeaDBT - SQL-SQL batch-work-thingySQL with Jinja templatesSnowflake - data warehouse thingScalaBroadwayOban - "robust job processing for Elixir"Dashbitpandas - Python data libraryAPLArrow flightGRPCDataFusion - query execution enginePolars - "DataFrames in Rust"Explorer - built on top of PolarsVoltron dataThe Composable CodexPyarrow - Arrow bindings for PythonQuotesI've been reading a lot about data pipelinesWhat's so special about data pipelines?There's a lot of special toolingThere's a lot of bad, bad toolingLess than optimal toolingConverging on something biggerlkHe got me eventuallyAll of your steps in one bucketWhat tools do you associate with data?I inherited a data pipelineBashReduceIterate on the L and the TThe modern data stackAnd then you demand more workNo unnecessary copiesBarely a copyReconnecting with my Python roots

01-01

43:36

GenServers are fun! Andreas gives all the context. Things were learned, knowledge was aquired. You can do so much with GenServers, but make sure you have a good reason.If you don't watch out, this is where concurrency goes to die.Dynamic supervisors, and their children, are thoroughly considered.Also delved into is the mess other ecosystems make of doing things at the same time, waiting, and so on.The strange worlds of C and other unusual languages are considered.Finally, an interesting bug.LinksAlan TuringTuring machineGenServerCowboyPlugUmbrellaETS - Erlang Term StorageØredevThe actor modelVirding's first rule of programmingRegistryDynamicSupervisorThe Goth library - Google auth library for ElixirThe GIL - the global interpreter lockFriday afternoon deployPromisesEsbuildUiua - "A stack-based array programming language"Prefix treePackmatic library, by Evadne Wu - streaming zip archivesQuotesWhere the system grows horizontallyThe kind of thing that starts happening when you hire developersIt was missing a hatI have become nothing, the simplifier of thingsWhere all the concurrency goes to dieA whole dance party of sad, dark peopleThe children of the dynamic supervisorHomes can be nodesHundreds of interested partiesTurns life into promisesPoking some C programmers

11-20

01:06:17

Every web app starts out fine, the tabula rasa of an unwritten BODY. But sooner or later you need users. And a million other things which live in trees.Also: email.And that layer between the controller and the database where things like fine-grained access control goes.I'd like to have an admin, please.Eventually, web apps grows up. And while a larger framework with solutions and conventions for all those grown-up features may not necessarily be fun, it can certainly be useful.LinksAPM - Application Performance ManagementDjangoTeams should be an MVP feature!Bullet Train - a "Ruby on Rails SaaS framework"FlaskExpressSinatraScottyPhoenixAuth0OktaPostfixPostmarkDjango AnymailSwooshModel-view-templateACL:s - access-control listsEctoMultitenancyZack Daniel on Beam RadioZack's Elixirconf talkAsh frameworkPlugDSL - domain-specific languageBigquerygRPCHIPPAPostgrestFunction based viewsDjango RESTLaravelTitlesCheck in on your applicationDo you want details?The view is the controllerBecause namesI'd like to have an admin, pleaseThe admin is kind of roughAll the data is introspectableEndgame applicationNot another user management systemA very special can of worms

10-23

30:31

The software development industry is very much built for code nerds. It shouldn’t be.Many of us know many people who are really into coding. Not every working developer can, or even should, be though. Doesn't that create kind of a weird gap between professionals who live and breathe code both on and off work, and those who have a more balanced life?Being passionate about your job shouldn't be an expectation or requirement for anyone or anything.Is there too little space for learning - are we assumed to know too much, and assumed to spend our own time figuring out things we don't?Your path into coding is not, can not, and should not be the only path possible.LinksThe Python 2 to 3 transitionRobert A. Heinlein in 999 Words: What Every Human Should KnowGhost in the shellHarvest moon4x - Explore, expand, exploit, exterminateTDD - test-driven developmentBDD - behavior-driven developmentCharity Majors 2017 blog post about career paths for developers. (Bonus: 2019 follow-up about engineering managers)Late-stage capitalismQuotesI think that's perfectly healthySurrounded by themDelving into softwareSurrounded by nerdsMuch more reasonable answersWhere the nerd doesn't go so deepComputers are troublesomeWhy should you be passionate about your job?Squeeze the passion juiceToo passionate to defend themselvesExperience or scar tissue?Many developers have livesPopping out for the big pictureDoing good work takes all kinds