Developer Voices
Developer Voices is a podcast that features in-depth conversations with experienced developers about their current projects, innovations, and lessons learned. Host Kris Jenkins explores topics like software architecture, programming languages, and industry trends through firsthand stories and insights. The show aims to help listeners discover solutions to technical challenges and stay informed about the future of computing.
Episodes
How Would You Type-Check 30 Million Lines of PHP? (with Julien Verlaguet)
How would you manage 30 million lines of PHP? You can't rewrite it - you'd be fired long before you delivered. That was the problem facing Facebook around 2011, and their answer was to add a type system, giving birth to the Hack language. But adding types to PHP turned out to be the easy part. The hard part was building a type checker that developers used to "edit, save, refresh" would actually to
DuckDB And The Burden of Success (with Hannes Mühleisen)
Building something people actually want is supposed to be the happy ending. But it arrives with a bill attached: feature requests you didn't ask for, pull requests you'd rather not maintain forever, users demanding the one thing you swore you'd never build, and — if you're unlucky — a company where the sales team quietly starts deciding what engineering works on. DuckDB has spent the last two and
The Enterprise AI Gap (with James Brown)
My guest this week is James Brown, an engineering lead at Schroders, and that's a useful vantage point — asset managers carry all the regulation and organisational weight of a bank, mixed with the first-to-market pressure of a startup. James starts with his own "Claude mania": months of agents running around the clock, and the wave of anxiety that hit him one morning walking to the shop without on
What If Every SQL Query Could Update Incrementally? (with Lalith Suresh)
There's a problem that's bugged the database industry since the 1980s: you run an expensive query over millions of rows, cache the result, and then a single new row arrives. Logically that's one small update, but most engines throw the cached answer away and recompute everything from scratch. Some will handle changes incrementally, but only for "simple" queries - and the rules for what counts as s
What's Worth Knowing In AI Right Now? (with Henry Garner)
AI is changing the way we all build software — that much seems clear. But the landscape is moving so fast that even the people paid to keep up are struggling. MCP or skills? Fine-tune or just prompt? LangChain or let a thousand agents loose? With almost 70 competing technologies and a shelf life of maybe six months on any advice, how do you figure out what's actually worth your time?Henry Garner i
Asciinema: Terminal Recording Done Right (with Marcin Kulik)
I have a theory that only bad projects get finished — good ones keep finding new things to do. Asciinema is a case in point. What started as a way to share terminal sessions with friends has, over 14 years, grown into a full suite of tools covering recording, hosting, playback, and live streaming — and been rebuilt multiple times along the way. So what does it actually take to record and replay a
Building the SpacetimeDB Database, Game-First (with Tyler Cloutier)
Eighteen months ago, Tyler Cloutier appeared on the show with what sounded like an ambitious (some might say crazy) plan: build a new distributed database from scratch, then use it to power a massively multiplayer online game. That's two of the hardest problems in software, tackled simultaneously. But sometimes the best infrastructure comes from solving your own impossible problems.The game, Bitcr
Will Turso Be The Better SQLite? (with Glauber Costa)
SQLite is embedded everywhere - phones, browsers, IoT devices. It's reliable, battle-tested, and feature-rich. But what if you want concurrent writes? Or CDC for streaming changes? Or vector indexes for AI workloads? The SQLite codebase isn't accepting new contributors, and the test suite that makes it so reliable is proprietary. So how do you evolve an embedded database that's effectively frozen?
Can Google's ADK Replace LangChain and MCP? (with Christina Lin)
How do you build systems with AI? Not code-generating assistants, but production systems that use LLMs as part of their processing pipeline. When should you chain multiple agent calls together versus just making one LLM request? And how do you debug, test, and deploy these things? The industry is clearly in exploration mode—we're seeing good ideas implemented badly and expensive mistakes made at s
Building Observable Systems with eBPF and Linux (with Mohammed Aboullaite)
How do you monitor distributed systems that span dozens of microservices, multiple languages, and different databases? The old approach of gathering logs from different machines and recompiling apps with profiling flags doesn't scale when you're running thousands of servers. You need a unified strategy that works everywhere, on every component, in every language—and that means tackling the problem
Solving Git's Pain Points with Jujutsu (with Martin von Zweigbergk)
Git might be the most ubiquitous tool in software development, but that doesn't mean it's perfect. What if we could keep Git compatibility while fixing its most frustrating aspects—painful merges, scary rebases, being stuck in conflict states, and the confusing staging area?This week we're joined by Martin von Zweigbergk, creator of Jujutsu (JJ), a Git-compatible version control system that takes
Getting New Technology Adopted (with Dov Katz)
Getting new technology adopted in a large organization can feel like pushing water uphill. The best tools in the world are useless if we're not allowed to use them, and as companies grow, their habits turn into inertia, then into "the way we've always done things." So how do you break through that resistance and get meaningful change to happen?This week's guest is Dov Katz from Morgan Stanley, who
From Unit Tests to Whole Universe Tests (with Will Wilson)
How confident are you when your test suite goes green? If you're honest, probably not 100% confident - because most bugs come from scenarios we never thought to test. Traditional testing only catches the problems we anticipate, but the 3am pager alerts? Those come from the unexpected interactions, timing issues, and edge cases we never imagined.In this episode, Will Wilson from Antithesis takes us
Building Render: Inside a Modern Cloud Platform (with Anurag Goel)
How would you build a Heroku-like platform from scratch? This week we're diving deep into the world of cloud platforms and infrastructure with Anurag Goel, founder and CEO of Render.Starting from the seemingly simple task of hosting a web service, we quickly discover why building a production-ready platform is far more complex than it appears. Why is hosting a Postgres database so challenging? How
InfluxDB: The Evolution of a Time Series Database (with Paul Dix)
How hard is it to write a good database engine? Hard enough that sometimes it takes several versions to get it just right. Paul Dix joins us this week to talk about his journey building InfluxDB, and he's refreshingly frank about what went right, and what went wrong. Sometimes the real database is the knowledge you pick up along the way....Paul walks us through InfluxDB's evolution from error logg
Beyond AI Hype, What Will Developers Actually Use? (with Zach Lloyd)
If AI coding tools are here to stay, what form will they take? How will we use them? Will they be just another window in our IDE, will they push their way to the centre of our development experience, displacing the editor? No one knows, but Zach Lloyd is making a very interesting bet with the latest version of Warp.In this deep dive, Zach walks us through the technical architecture behind agentic
The $500 Billion Integration Problem, And One Possible Solution (with Marty Pitt)
Ever wondered why data integration is still such a nightmare in 2025? Marty Pitt has built something that might finally solve it.TaxiQL isn't just another query language - it's a semantic layer that lets you query across any system without caring about field names, API differences, or where the data actually lives. Instead of writing endless mapping code between your microservices, databases, and
Making Software Crash Before It Breaks (with Isaac Van Doren)
At 23, Isaac is already jaded about software reliability - and frankly, he's got good reason to be. When your grandmother can't access her medical records because a username change broke the entire system, when bugs routinely make people's lives harder, you start to wonder: why do we just accept that software is broken most of the time?Isaac's answer isn't just better testing - it's a whole toolki
Making Apache Kafka Diskless (with Filip Yonov & Josep Prat)
How do you retrofit a clustered data-processing system to use cheap commodity storage? That’s the big question in this episode as we look at one of the many attempts to build a version of Kafka that uses object storage services like S3 as its main disk, sacrificing a little latency for cheap, infinitely-scalable disks.There are several companies trying to walk down that road, and it’s clearly big
Java's Cutting Edge Comeback (with Josh Long)
Java’s has been evolving faster than any 30 year old language has a right to do, and there’s probably no-one more pleased about it than my guest this week - Josh Long. He’s a Java & Kotlin programming, a JVM enthusiast in general, and an advocate for Spring, and he has chapters full of news about what’s been happening in Javaland over the past few years. Everything from new threading models to
The State & Future of Apache Kafka (with Anatoly Zelenin)
I’m joined this week by one of the authors of Apache Kafka In Action, to take a look at the state of Kafka, event systems & stream-processing technology. It’s an approach (and a whole market) that’s had at least a decade to mature, so how has it done? What does Kafka offer to developers and businesses, and which parts do they actually care about? What have streaming data systems promised and w
DataFusion - The Database Building Toolkit (with Andrew Lamb)
Building a database is a serious undertaking. There are just so many parts that you have to implement before you even get to a decent prototype, and so many hours of work before you could begin working on the ideas that would make your database unique. Apache DataFusion is a project that hopes to change all that, but building an extensible, composable toolkit of database pieces, which could let yo
Jupyter's Architecture Unpacked (with Afshin Darian & Sylvain Corlay)
Jupyter’s become an incredibly popular programming and data science tool, but how does it actually work? How have they built an interactive language execution engine? And if we understand the architecture, what else could it be used for?Joining me to look inside the Jupyter toolbox are Afshin Darian and Sylvain Corlay, two of Jupyters long-standing contributors and project-steerers. They’ve going
Nix, The Build-Everything Language (with Julian Arni)
Ever since we invented makefiles, the programming world has been wrestling with the problem of building software stacks reliably. This week we’re going to look at one of the most ambitious solutions available - Nix. Nix tries to do everything from invoking your compiler to installing your language, and even providing your operating system. But how does it work in theory, and how well does it work
Graphite: Image Editing as a Syntax Tree (with Keavon Chambers & Dennis Kobert)
Graphite is a new image editor with an interesting architecture - it’s a classic UI-driven app, an image-manipulation language, and a library of programmable graphics primitives that any Rust coder could use, extend or add to. The result is something that you can use like Photoshop or Inkscape, or make use of in batch pipelines, a bit like ImageMagick.Joining me to discuss it are Keavon Chambers &
ReScript: A Better Typed JavaScript? (with Gabriel Nordeborn)
ReScript is a strongly-typed programming language that compiles to JavaScript, and that puts it squarely in competition with TypeScript. So why would a JavaScript developer choose to learn it next? What does it offer that makes it a tempting proposition? And how are the ReScript developers making life easier for anyone who wants to make the switch?To answer all these questions and more, I’m joined
A universal query engine in Rust (with Predrag Gruevski)
Trustfall is a library based on a simple question - what happens if we can query absolutely anything? If you could join REST APIs and databases with filesystems and dockerfiles? It’s possible in theory because those are all just datasources. Predrag Gruevski is trying to make it easy by building a universal query engine, with pluggable datasources, all in Rust.This week we dive into Trustfall to f
Raspberry Pi Hardware & A Lisp Brain (with Dimitris Kyriakoudis)
Dimitris Kyriakoudis is a researcher, programmer and musician who's combining all three talents to build dedicated music hardware. Specifically a device called the µseq, which reads Lisp programs and uses them to drive synthesizers to make music. In this episode we go through the full platform that he's building, from soldering resistors to an RPi chip, up through writing a Lisp interpreter, to th
Software Systems Aren't Just Software (with Diana Montalion)
If you want to build really large software systems well, you have to stop thinking of them as just software systems. Beyond a certain size, everything your software touches becomes part of the wider system. You’re part of the system, your users are part of the system, and every other employee & department & priority eventually forms part of that system. And that can make it incredibly diff
Building Fyrox: A Rust Game Engine (with Dmitry Stepanov)
To kick off 2025 we’re looking at Fyrox a game engine built in Rust, largely by one person - Dmitry Stepanov. For an individual project, it’s covered an incredible amount of ground, covering the rendering and animation features you’d expect from a game engine, with some features that might surprise you - like Rust scripting support with hot-reloading.As we dive into Fyrox, Dmitry explains what it
Testing TVs At Scale With Elixir (with Dave Lucia)
Integration testing is always a tricky thing, fraught with problems setting up the right environment and attempting to control the system’s state. That’s particularly true when you’re dealing with a mix of software and hardware, and even worse when you don’t have control of what the hardware can do.This week I’m joined by Dave Lucia of TVLab’s, who’s building systems for testing television softwar
Programming As An Expressive Instrument (with Sam Aaron)
Sam Aaron is the creator of Sonic Pi, one of the most unusual software platforms you’ll encounter. It’s a live-coding playground for making music. A tool that lets you write code that defines sounds and musical phrases, and build up a hole program that plays anything from a short bleep to a whole nightclub set. And Sam’s creator has been using it live for years, weaving drum & bass nights out
Elm & The Future of Open Source (with Evan Czaplicki)
Evan Czaplicki—the creator of the Elm programming language —joins me to discuss the state and future of Elm, the friendly, type-safe functional programming language. On many fronts Elm has been a huge success: it’s been popular with new and seasoned programmers alike; it’s helped push several language ideas into the mainstream; it’s been a key part of several successful software businesses and he
Programmers, ADHD, And How To Manage Them Both (with Chris Ferdinandi)
This week we’re going to look at the most essential piece of firmware in a programmer’s toolkit - the brain. I’m joined by Chris Ferdinandi to explore what it’s like to be a programmer with ADHD. It’s an unusual topic for the channel, but the more I spoke to him, the more I wanted to know what coding is like when your brain is wired differently, how we can work more effectively with people with AD
MicroServices For Better And Worse (with Ian Cooper and James Lewis)
What have we learned from more than a decade of deploying microservices? Was it a good idea? Are we any better at figuring out what a microservice is, or where its boundaries lie? Does splitting things up create fragmentation problems? And is it too late to put the genie back in the bottle? This week we’re going to look at all these questions and more as we reflect on the lessons learnt from this
Pony: High-Performance, Memory-Safe Actors (with Sean Allen)
Pony is a language born out of what should be a simple need - actor-style programming with C performance. On the face of it, that shouldn’t be too hard to do. Writing an actor framework isn’t trivial, but it’s well-trodden ground. The hard part is balancing performance and memory management. When your actors start passing hundreds of thousands of complex messages around, either you need some compl
Architecting a Rust Game Engine (with Alice Cecile)
This week we take a look at Bevy, a new game engine written in Rust. And in particular, we look at a core component of Bevy that has something to teach you even if you never write a game: its Entity Component System, or ECS. An ECS is an approach to managing complex systems with large numbers of moving parts, that takes some inspiration from the Relational Database world, and a little from Functio
Writing a CAD Language in Rust (with Adam Chalmers)
Given how many languages have been written in C over the years, it’s not surprising to see new languages being written in Rust. What is surprising about this week’s guest is the domain he’s writing for: Computer Aided Design (CAD). Could Rust be sneaking its way into the CAD world too?Joining me to discuss the design and implementation of a CAD programming language is Adam Chalmers. He works at Zo
Text User Interfaces in Rust (with Orhun Parmaksız)
For some kinds of application, there is no faster or cheaper way to build a user interface than in the terminal. Sure, it’s not going to suit every kind of user out there, but for those of us that are happy on the command line, rich Text User Interfaces (or TUIs) open all the exploration and discoverability benefits of a GUI are a fraction of the development time.This week we’re looking at a Rust
Designing The Lustre Web Framework (with Hayleigh Thompson)
Lustre is a web framework that takes a lot of inspiration from Elm, some from React, and a surprising amount from Erlang’s actor model, to provide a library that blurs the lines between executing on the client, or on the server.Support Developer Voices on Patreon: https://patreon.com/DeveloperVoicesSupport Developer Voices on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@DeveloperVoices/join–Lustre: https://h
Faust: A Programming Language For Sound (with Romain Michon)
I’m always interested in what factors shape the design of a programming language. This week we’re taking a look at a language that’s wholly shaped by its need to support a very specific kind of program - audio processing. Anything from creating a simple echo sound effect, to building an entire digital instrument based on a 17th-century harpsichord.The language in question is Faust, and this week w
GPUs, from Simulation to Encryption (with Agnès Leroy)
This week we take a look at what you can do with a GPU when you get away from just using it to draw polygons. Agnès Leroy has spent most of her career programming, optimizing and converting programs to run on that oh-so-curious piece of specialised processing hardware, and we go through all the places that journey has taken her. From simulating the flow of fluids in hydroelectric powerstations, to
The State of Full-Stack OCaml (with António Monteiro)
OCaml has one of the best-loved compilers available, and parts of it are surprisingly pluggable, so it’s not surprising that someone would eventually try to wed OCaml with JavaScript and the web browser. In fact, the ecosystem has gone further, and there are now a bevvy of options for people who want to write OCaml and run it in the browser, or want to write OCaml in the browser, or want to write
Multiplatform Maps Built As Layers on Rust (with Ian Wagner)
Mapping is a hugely complex task to take on. Even if you moved as much of the data-management as you can out to 3rd-party services, you’d still have a tonne of work to do weaving together map tiles, routing information, GPS data, points of interest, search and more. And as if that wasn’t enough, you’d probably want that software to work on a whole range of platforms, so you have to build something
Building a New Terminal App (with Zach Lloyd)
The terminal might be the most used development tool in history. So it’s a little odd that it hasn’t changed that much in the decades since the terminal first came into being. Is the terminal a “completed” project? Or are there new ways to look at it that might make it even more useful?This week’s guest—Zach Lloyd—is convinced the terminal is ripe for a new approach that’s more than just a new coa
Building A Programming Language From Its Core (with Peter Saxton)
A language’s AST—it’s abstract syntax tree—is nearly always a hidden implementation detail. It’s not treated as part of the language, but merely the intermediate step between parsing and compiling. But this week’s guest aims to flip that relationship on its head... Peter Saxton joins me to talk about EYG - an AST-first language that defines the fundamental capabilities first, and then stretches ou
Practical Applications for DuckDB (with Simon Aubury & Ned Letcher)
DuckDB’s become a favourite data-handling tool of mine, simply because it does so many small things well. It can read and write a huge number of data formats; it can infer schemas automatically when you just want to move quickly; and it can interface with most languages, run like lightning on the desktop or be embedded into a webpage. I’m a huge fan.But I’m not nearly as knowledgeable as this week
Recording and Replaying the Browser (with Justin Halsall)
RRWeb is based on a simple idea: If you capture all the DOM events in a browser session, and when they happened, you could play it back later. Play it back for diagnosing error conditions, for understanding your user’s journey, or for creating demo videos that can be edited element-by-element instead of frame-by-frame.Unfortunately, the simple idea gets tricky when you try to implement, for a whol
Zig as a Multi-OS Build System (with Loris Cro)
The ZigLang team have put an astonishing amount of effort into making Zig work an effective tool for compiling C across different architectures. Work that benefits the Zig language, but also has a chance to benefit languages like Python and Rust. Or indeed, any language that uses native C libraries somewhere in its stack.So this week we’re joined by Loris Cro of the Zig team to dive into how you m
Creating and Evolving Elixir (with José Valim)
Back in 2012, José Valim started building Elixir to as a way to have his ideal programming language running on the same platform as Erlang. Fast-forward 12 years and it’s become build anything from distributed infrastructure to notebooks and websites.In this week’s Developer Voices, José joins us to tell the history of Elixir in a series of design choices. Which features mattered to him in the ear
PyO3: From Python to Rust and Back Again (with David Hewitt)
There’s huge pressure on Python at the moment to get faster, ideally without changing at all. One increasingly–popular way of achieving that impossible task is to push the performance critical code down into C, C++, or Rust. And this week we’re focussing on the Python route, as we take a look at PyO3.David Hewitt’s the principal committer to PyO3, and he joins us to go through the easy parts, the
NATS & Jetstream: The System Communication Toolkit (with Jeremy Saenz)
Most message systems have an opinion on the right way to do inter-systems communication. Whether it’s actors, queues, message logs or just plain ol’ request response, nearly every tool has decided on The Right Way to do messaging, and it optimises heavily for that specific approach. But NATS is absolutely running against that trend. In this week’s episode, Jeremey Saenz joins us to talk about
Cuis Smalltalk and the History of Computing's Future (with Juan Vuletich)
Smalltalk is one of those programming languages that’s lived out of the mainstream, but often referenced as an influence and an important part of programming history. It’s the cornerstone of object-oriented programming, it was into message passing before actors were cool, and it blurs the line between operating system, programming language and personal notebook. But what is it?Joining us to discus
The Inko Programming Language, and Life as a Language Designer (with Yorick Peterse)
This week we take a close look at the language Inko from two perspectives: The language design features that make it special, and the realities of being a language developer.Yorick Peterse joins us to discuss why he’s building Inko, and which design sweetspots he’s looking for. We begin with memory management, aiming for the kind of developer who wants control, but without the complexities of Rust
Building the Zed Text Editor (with Nathan Sobo)
I’ve often wondered how you build a text editor. Like many software projects, it’s a simple idea at the core with an almost infinite scope for features. How do you build a solid foundation to expand on? Which features matter for launch? And how do you hope to satisfy the needs of every programmer, working in every language?My guest for this episode is Nathan Sobo. He’s tackled this problem once be
Reimplementing Apache Kafka with Golang and S3
This week on Developer Voices we’re talking to Ryan Worl, whose career in big data engineering has taken him from DataDog to Co-Founding WarpStream, an Apache Kafka-compatible streaming system that uses Golang for the brains and S3 for the storage. Ryan tells us about his time at DataDog, along with the things he learnt from doing large-scale systems migration bit-by-bit, before we discuss how and
Extending Postgres for High-Performance Analytics (with Philippe Noël)
PostgreSQL is an incredible general-purpose database, but it can’t do everything. Every design decision is a tradeoff, and inevitably some of those tradeoffs get fundamentally baked into the way it’s built. Take storage for instance - Postgres tables are row-oriented; great for row-by-row access, but when it comes to analytics, it can’t compete with a dedicated OLAP database that uses column-orien
Designing Actor-Based Software (with Hugh McKee)
The actor model is a popular approach to building scalable software systems. And isn’t hard to understand when you’re just reading about the beginner’s examples. But how do you architect a complex design using the actor model? Which patterns work well? How do you think through it?Joining me to take us through it is Hugh McKee. Hugh’s a total actor-model fan, and a Developer Advocate for Lightbend
ByteWax: Rust's Research Meets Python's Practicalities (with Dan Herrera)
Bytewax is a curious stream processing tool that blends a Python surface with a Rust core to produce something that’s in a similar vein to Kafka Streams or Apache Flink, but with a fundamentally different implementation. This week we’re going to take a look at what it does, how it works in theory, and how the marriage of Python and Rust works in practice…–The original Naiad Paper: https://dl.acm.o
Mojo Lang - Tomorrow's High Performance Python? (with Chris Lattner)
Mojo is the latest language from the creator of Swift and LLVM. It’s an attempt to take some of the best techniques from CPU/GPU-level programming and package them up in a Python-compatible syntax.In this episode we explore why Mojo was created, and what it offers to Python programmers and non-Python programmers alike. How is it built for performance, and which performance features matter? What’s
Batch Data & Streaming Data in one Atom (with Jove Zhong)
Every database has to juggle the need to process new data and to query old data. That task falls to any system that “does stuff and remembers stuff”. But it’s quite hard to really optimise one system for both use cases. There are different constraints on new and old data, and as a system gets larger and larger, those differences multiply to breaking point. That’s something Twitter’s engineers were
Advanced Memory Management in Vale (with Evan Ovadia)
Rust changed the discussion around memory management - this week's guest hopes to push that discussion even further.This week we're joined by Evan Ovadia, creator of the Vale programming language and collector of memory management techniques from far and wide. He takes us through his most important ones, including linear types, generation references and regions, to see what Evan hopes the future o
Bringing Pure Python to Apache Kafka (with Tomáš Neubauer)
The “big data infrastructure” world is dominated by Java, but the data-analysis world is dominated by Python. So if you need to analyse and process huge amounts of data, chances are you’re in for a less-than-ideal time. The impedance mismatch will probably make your life hard somehow. So there are a lot of projects and companies trying to solve that problem. To bridge those two worlds seamles
Taking Erlang to OCaml 5 (with Leandro Ostera)
Erlang wears three hats - it’s a language, it’s a platform, and it’s an approach to making software run reliably once it’s in production. Those last two are so interesting I sometimes wonder why those ideas haven’t been ported to every language going. How much work would it be?This week we’re going to dig right down into that question with Leandro Ostera. He’s been working on Riot - a projec
How Apache Pinot Achieves 200,000 Queries per Second (with Tim Berglund)
The likes of LinkedIn and Uber use Pinot to power some astonishingly high-scale queries against realtime data. The numbers alone would make an impressive case-study. But behind the headline lies a fascinating set of architectural decisions and constraints to get there. So how does Pinot work? How does it process queries? How are the various roles split across a cluster? And equally important - wha
Neovim: Creating, Curating and Customising your Ideal Editor (with TJ DeVries)
TJ DeVries is a core contributor to Neovim and several of its most interesting sub-projects, and he joins us this week to go in depth into how Neovim got started, how it’s structured, and what a truly programmable editor has to offer programmers who want the perfect environment.Along the way we look at what we can learn from Neovim’s successful fork of the 30-year old codebase from Vim, how it sti
Creating Hackathons that Work (with Jon Gottfried)
Done right, a Hackathon can be a fantastic place to be a programmer - you get time and space to build and learn, in a room full of like-minded people, with swag and prizes to sweeten the deal. It’s a great way to pick up new ideas and run with them. But done wrong it can be a waste of time. What’s the difference between a good hackathon and a bad one? What do the good ones do right, and what can w
Automate Your Way to Better Code: Advanced Property Testing (with Oskar Wickström)
One of the most promising techniques for software reliability is property testing. The idea that, instead of writing unit tests we describe some property of our code that ought to always be true, then have the computer figure out thousands of unit tests that try to break that rule.For example, you might say, “No matter which page you visit on my website, there should always be a login button or a
Bridging the Gap Between Languages (with Martin Johansen)
If you ever feel overwhelmed by the number of different programming languages, this week’s episode might just offer you some solace, as we talk about an attempt to reunify many of the most popular languages by focussing on the bread & butter things that every language supports.I’m joined by Martin Johansen, who’s been working on a new tool called Progsbase. With it, he’s created a spec based o
If You Want Better Code, Do It For Me (with Jonathan Schneider)
A lot of programming is split into the mechanical work of writing what you know, and the creative work of figuring out what you don’t know. Wouldn’t it be nice to automate the mechanical stuff away?Well the good news is we’re already automating a lot of it. Every time you run a refactoring tool or a pretty-printer, you’re handing boring work off to the computer. But how does that magic work, and h
Implementing Hardware-Friendly Databases (with DuckDB co-creator, Hannes Mühleisen)
SQLite could do with a little competition, so when I invited the co-creator of DuckDB in to talk, I thought we'd be discussing the perils of trying to build a new in-process database engine. I quickly realised things went much deeper than just a tech refresh.Hannes Mühleisen joins me this week to blend his academic credentials as a database researcher with his vehement need to make that research p
Verse, Haskell & Core Language Design (with Simon Peyton Jones)
This week we talk to Simon Peyton Jones, a veteran language designer and researcher, and key figure in the development of Haskell. Haskell. Simon has made countless contributions to advancement of functional programming, and computer programming in general, and is currently working at Epic Games, working on the foundations of their new programming language, Verse.We discuss how programming languag
Shouldn't Data Connections Be Easier? (with Ashley Jeffs)
Benthos wants to be part of your Data Engineering toolkit - it’s there as a quick and easy way to set up data pipelines and start streaming data out of A and into B. In contrast to a lot of the tools we’ve talked about on Developer Voices, Benthos seems focussed on cutting development time down to a minimum, so you can quickly configure a new pipeline and test it out, without making a whole sprint
What can game programming teach us about databases? (with Tyler Cloutier)
The world of game programming might seem a million miles away from 'regular' programming. But they still have to deal with the same kinds of data, scale and concurrency problems that we’re all familiar with in the software world. And that makes the gaming world an interesting place for new ideas - under the hood they’re solving those same problems we face, but often with some novel ideas about the
Is Odin, "programming done right"? (with 'Ginger' Bill Hall)
Odin’s creator, Bill Hall, makes some bold claims about the language, including that it’s “programming done right”. Before that starts a war on the internet, we’d best ask him to explain what that means, and how Odin tries to achieve it. And while we get deep into the details, overall his answer seems to be, “By gathering masses of feedback and then refining C until it feels joyous again.Of all th
Can Event-Driven Architecture make Software Design Easier? (with Bobby Calderwood)
This week’s guest describes Event Sourcing as, “all I’m going to use for the rest of my career.” But what is Event Sourcing? How should we think about it, and how does it encourage us to think about writing software?In this episode we take a close look at systems designed around the idea of Events, with guest Bobby Calderwood. Bobby’s been designing (and helping others design) event based architec
How Lisp is designing Nanotechnology (with Prof. Christian Schafmeister)
One of our oldest languages meets one of our newest sciences in this episode, as we talk with Professor Christian Schafmeister, an award-winning nanotech researcher who's been developing a language and a design suite to help research the future molecular machines.In this episode Christian gives us a quick chemistry lesson to explain what his research is trying to achieve, then we get into the soft
Roc - A Functional Language looking for those Software Sweetspots (with Richard Feldman)
Sometimes, what a programming language makes harder is just as important as what it makes easier. For a simple example, think of GOTO. We’ve been wisely avoiding it for decades because it makes confusing control flow desperately easy. Types and tests are other examples - they’re as much about specifying what shouldn’t work as what should. And perspective is what makes this week’s topic particularl
If Kafka has a UX problem, does UNIX have the answer? (with Luca Pette)
One of the recurring themes in the big data & data streaming worlds at the moment is developer experience. It seems like every major tool is trying to answer this question: how do we make large-scale data processing feel trivial?In some places the answer is any library you like as long as it’s Python. In other realms, a mixture of Java and SQL shows promise. But as this week’s guest—Luca Pette
Will we be writing Hare in 2099? (with Drew DeVault)
This week we're back on systems programming with Hare. A C-like language for the ages. We talk to its creator, Drew DeVault, about what he thinks we can learn from the past 50 years of programming, and how we can build that hindsight into a new language that will last for the next 100. In among all that long-term ambition we talk cover everything from error handling, typed unions and linear t
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