Rock the Code
A podcast about interesting programming topics for the curious software engineer. You will learn about programming languages, tools, libraries, and combinations thereof, from the best in the field.
Episodes
Martin Odersky on the Future of Scala, Learning, Teaching and the Quest for the Perfect Language
A long-form conversation with Martin Odersky about everything Scala: the evolution of the language, the future, learning, teaching, good library and code design, and more.
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0:00 Intro
2:30 Teaching Scala to kids and beginners
6:55 Why recursion trips up new programmers
11:51 Scala as a first language: the evidence from Lund University
13:38 How Martin's students at EPFL learn debugging via th
James Ward on Effect Oriented Programming, Writing Code in the Age of AI, Curiosity and Exploration
James Ward is a professional software developer since 1997, with much of that time spent helping developers build software that doesn't suck. He describes himself as a typed pure functional programming zealot who often compromises on his ideals to just get stuff done. He is the author of several programming books, the latest being Effect Oriented Programming. James hosts the Happy Path Programming
Paul Snively on Programming Languages, Reliable Code and Good Taste in Software Engineering
Paul Snively is a software architect and engineer with 40 years of programming experience. He's worked professionally with a variety of languages, tools and mental models, including Lisp, C, Java, Scala and Haskell, and has held various positions at Apple, Intel, VMWare, Verizon and others. He is also a frequent conference speaker, talking about type systems, functional programming, formal logic a
Rúnar Bjarnason on Unison, Scala, Distributed Systems and Delightful Programming
Rúnar Bjarnason is a cofounder of Unison Computing, a programming language and environment for distributed systems and applications on the cloud. He's also a coauthor of the famous "red book", aka Functional Programming in Scala (and more recently in Kotlin as well).
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0:00 Intro
1:26 Unison's origin and the content-addressed code idea
5:03 Why a new language instead of a Scala framework
8:28
Jonas Bonér on Akka, Distributed Systems, Open-Source Sustainability and the Backbone of Agentic AI
Jonas Bonér is the founder and CTO of Akka Inc. and creator of the Akka project and the Reactive Manifesto. He's also a Java Champion.
You can find Jonas at http://jonasboner.com
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0:00 Intro
2:30 Akka's origin story: 2009 consultancy to open source
9:30 The actor model: message passing, isolation, and fault tolerance
24:10 Supervision hierarchies and location transparency
37:00 Akka modules
Robert Martin on Clojure, AI, Programming Languages and the Craft of Good Code
Robert Martin aka "Uncle Bob" is a software engineer for more than 50 years, and the author of many influential programming books, including Clean Code and Clean Architecture, and one of the founders of the Agile methodology.
He teaches principles of software craftsmanship at https://cleancoders.com/
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0:00 Intro
1:04 Uncle Bob's journey into Clojure
5:05 Why Uncle Bob prefers Clojure over Ja
John De Goes on API Design, Effect Systems, Entrepreneurship and The Ultimate Coder
John De Goes is a software engineer recognized in the Scala ecosystem for the ZIO effect system. He's the founder of multiple companies, including Ziverge and Golem Cloud, and the producer of the show The Ultimate Coder. He's also a frequent conference speaker, writer and mentor.
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0:00 Intro
1:45 The Ultimate Coder: humans vs AI in API design
6:26 Judging criteria: expressiveness, type safety
Grady Booch on Software Architecture, Effective Communication, and Computing as a Human Experience
Grady Booch is one of the pioneers of modern software architecture as a distinct discipline of software engineering. He has 50+ years of experience and has developed software for every conceivable domain, has authored 7 books and is the co-creator of the UML design language.
His latest ongoing work is a documentary called Computing - The Human Experience:
https://computingthehumanexperience.com/
Haoyi Li on Mill, Scala at Scale, Conference Touring and Moving Up the Stack
Haoyi Li is a software engineer and a core contributor to the Scala ecosystem. He's built a whole suite of Scala libraries under the com.lihaoyi banner, focusing on simplicity and productivity, as well as the Mill build tool, which he has since expanded beyond Scala to support other JVM tools like Java and Kotlin and experimental support for other things like TypeScript and Android, and promises b
Richard Feldman on Roc, AI, Teaching, and Avoiding Fancy Functional Programming
Richard Feldman is a software engineer with more than 20 years of experience, a frequent conference speaker, teacher and author of Elm in Action. He's the author of the Roc programming language and is currently working on Zed, the AI-enabled code editor.
Zed: https://zed.dev/
Roc: https://www.roc-lang.org/
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0:00 Intro
1:38 Why Rust's borrow checker didn't help Roc's compiler
6:02 Zig vs Rust
José Valim on Elixir, AI Tools, Gradual Type Systems, and Being a Prolific Open-Source Contributor
José Valim is the creator of the Elixir programming language and cofounder of Dashbit, where he focuses on growing the Elixir ecosystem, the Tidewave web AI agent, and Livebook, a Jupyter-style notebook for Elixir. Before creating Elixir, he cofounded Plataformatec (acquired by Nubank) and was a core Ruby contributor.
Elixir language: https://elixir-lang.org/
Dashbit: https://dashbit.co/
Tidewav
Jon Gjengset on Rust Internals, Vibe Coding, and Teaching by Streaming
Jon Gjengset is a long-time Rust programmer and educator and the author of Rust for Rustaceans, a book on idiomatic Rust programming for experienced developers.
You can find Jon and his work at https://thesquareplanet.com/
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0:00 Intro
1:00 Vibe coding in Rust: safer or more dangerous?
3:54 Jon's two-week LLM immersion experiment
6:55 When LLMs save time vs. waste it
10:10 Avro IDL transpile
Simon Peyton Jones on Haskell, Verse, Strong Type Systems and Tasteful Abstractions
Simon Peyton Jones is a computer scientist in the true sense of the word, and the lead designer of the Haskell programming language and the GHC. He's a fellow of the Royal Society and the ACM and has won many awards (including the SIGPLAN award) for his contributions to programming language design. Simon is currently working for Epic Games with the CEO Tim Sweeney on Verse, a programming language
Sam Newman on Microservices, Monoliths, and Building Resilient Distributed Systems
Sam Newman is an engineer and consultant, specialized in service architecture. He's the author of the books Building Microservices and Monolith to Microservices, and has helped many companies make informed choices about their service architecture. His forthcoming book is Building Resilient Distributed Systems.
You can find Sam on his website https://samnewman.io/.
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0:00 Intro
0:57 The distri
Richard Eisenberg on OCaml, Effective AI, Teaching FP and Hiring for Fundamentals
Richard Eisenberg is a language designer and compiler engineer for OCaml at Jane Street and a core contributor to the Haskell language. He focuses on static type systems and functional programming to make software more reliable, while maintaining ease of use and runtime efficiency. Richard has also taught various computer science topics to both university and high school students, and he holds a P
Magnus Madsen on Flix, Scala Inspiration, AI, and the Relevance of Programming Languages
Magnus Madsen is an associate computer science professor at Aarhus University and the creator of the Flix programming language.
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0:00 Intro
1:37 Flix fundamentals and design philosophy
3:57 Effect systems in the language vs. as a library
6:30 Effects as checked exceptions
10:57 Type inference and effect propagation
15:53 LLMs and Flix code generation
22:47 Datalog inside Flix
32:13 Research
Venkat Subramaniam on System Design, a Rich Career, and Responsibility in the Age of AI
Dr. Venkat Subramaniam is an engineer, a professor at University of Houston, an author of more than 10 programming books, and a prolific speaker at technical conferences. He's trained tens of thousands of software engineers all across the world, consulted dozens of companies, and he's recognized as a Java Champion since 2013.
You can find Venkat's work at https://agiledeveloper.com/
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0:00 In
Daniel Spiewak on Cats Effect, Underrated Scala, and Becoming a Distinguished Engineer
Daniel Spiewak is known for spearheading Cats Effect, one of the major effect systems in the Scala ecosystem, and for leading Typelevel, a mini-ecosystem of libraries and tools for functional programming in Scala. He's held various senior engineering roles and is currently working for NVidia as a distinguished engineer.
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0:00 Intro
1:00 Cats Effect 3.7 and Scala Native multithreading
6:30 Bui
Trisha Gee on the Software Job Market, Skill Atrophy, and the Death of Stack Overflow
Trisha Gee is a software engineer with more than 20 yeras of experience, a Java Champion and author of several books on Java and developer productivity. She is a frequent conference and keynote speaker and has held many roles around developer advocacy, training, consulting, and now managing an open-source project (the Aeron messaging protocol).
You can find Trisha's work at https://trishagee.com/
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