CoRecursive: Coding Stories

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Tech Talk: Software as a Reflection of Values With Bryan Cantrill Dec 18, 2018

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Which operating system is the best? Which programming language is the best? What text editor?

Bryan Cantrill, CTO of Joyent says that is the wrong question. Languages, operating systems and communities have to make trade offs and they do that based on their values. So the right language is the one who's values align with you and your projects goals.

This simple idea carries a lot of weight and I think has the potential to lift up technical discussions to a higher level of discourse. You will find it to be a helpful frame next time you need to make a technical decision. Bryan is also pretty excited about how the values of the rust community align with his values for system software.

Also we cover Oberon, Clean and Simula 4, none of which I've never heard of and how IBM System/370 's Global Trace Facility doesn't hold a candle to Dtrace.

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Tech Talk: The Little Typer With Daniel Friedman and David Thrane Christiansen Dec 01, 2018

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Tech Talks are in-depth technical discussions.

When it comes to type systems "I am, so far, only in the dependent types camp" - Daniel P. Friedman

You can write more correct software and even rigorous mathematical proofs. Prepare for some mind stretching.

Previous guests like Edwin Brady and Stephanie Weirich have discussed some of the exciting things a dependent type system can do Miles Sabin said dependent types are surely the future. This interview is to get us ready for the future.

Daniel P. Friedman is famous for his "Little" series of books. Little Schemer, Little prover, Little MLer and so on. These books are held in high regard.

Here is a quote from Doug Crockford: "Little Schemer teaches one thing, a thing that is very difficult to teach, a thing that every profession programmer should know, and it does it really well. These are lessons that stick with you." The latest one is the little typer and its about types. Specifically dependent types.

Dan's coauthor is David Thrane Christiansen, Idris contributor, and host of a podcast about type theory that is way over my head.

Together they are going to teach us how the programming skills we already have can be used to develop rigourus mathematical proofs.

Stay tuned to the end for my guide to working thru the book.

Originally published at CoRecursive here

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Tech Talk: Big Ball Of Mud Nov 14, 2018

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Tech Talks are in-depth technical discussions.

Evolving software under constrained resources is a challenge, and I think we kid ourselves when we don't admit this. Software that is providing value often grows in scope until it is a mess. Today I talk to Wade Waldron about how avoid this situation or recover from it.

Big ball of mud is the title of a paper presented at the 1997 Patterns Languages of Programs conference and I think it is super interesting.

The researchers went out into the field to see what architectures software in industry were following. Big Ball of mud is what they found, along with other 6 other patterns with names like "sweep it under the rug" and reconstruction, which is the throw it away and start again pattern.

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Check out other episodes like this Philip Wadler:

https://corecursive.com/021-gods-programming-language-with-philip-wadler/

This podcast originally published here :

https://corecursive.com/22-big-ball-of-mud-architecture-and-services-with-wade-waldron/

Tech Talk: God's Programming Language - Philip Wadler on Haskell Oct 22, 2018

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Tech Talks are in-depth technical discussions.

Today I talk to Professor Philip Wadler, a very accomplished programming language researcher. Phil walks us through a principle that has guided his career. That principle is that typed lambda calculus is not invented but a discovery of a deep truth. It is something connected to the mathematical underpinning of the universe itself.

It follows from this that functional programming languages are therefore more correct or more deeply justified and fundamental than other languages. I am probably stating things in a stronger fashion than Phil is comfortable with, but I like fp, so I can be a little hyperbolic.

While explaining this principle, that has guided his career, Phil takes us through the history of computer science. We start with Turing and Alonzo Church. Eventually we get to what the movie Independence Day got wrong and what language a theoretical creator deity would program in.

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Tech Talk: Test in Production and being On-Call with Charity Majors Aug 31, 2018

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Tech Talks are in-depth technical discussions.

"Metrics and Dashboards can die in a fire and every software engineer should be on-call" - Charity Majors

Today's Interview is with Charity Majors. We talk about how to make it easier to debug production issues in today's world of complicated distributed systems. A warning, There is some explicit language in this interview.

I originally saw a talk by Charity where she said something like fuck your metrics and dashboards, you should test in production more. It was a pretty hyperbolic statement, but backed up with a lot of great insights. I think you'll find this interview similarly insightful.

Charity and her company are probably best known for popularizing the concept that observability in the key to being able to debug issues in production.

Also if you are a talented developer with functional programming skills, I've got a job offer for you. My employer Tenable is hiring. Tenable is a pretty great place to work. Here is a job link.

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Tech Talk: Domain Driven Design And Microservices Aug 17, 2018

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Tech Talks are in-depth technical discussions.

Today I talk to Vaughn Vernon about how Domain Driven Design can help with designing microservices. The guidelines that Vaughn has developed in his work on DDD can provide guidance for where service and consistency boundaries should be drawn. We also talk about the platform he is developing for applying these DDD concepts using the actor model, Vlingo.

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Tech Talk: Http4s and Functional Web Development With Ross Baker Jul 27, 2018

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Tech Talks are in-depth technical discussions.

The promise of functional programming is code that is easier to reason about, test and maintain. Referential transparency means there is no extra context to worry about, we can just focus on inputs and outputs. Examples of functional programming in the small are plentiful. Fibonacci is easy to write as a function but what about fp in the large?

Http4s is a web framework written in scala that takes a pure functional approach to building http services. Ross Baker is a contributor to http4s and he explains the benefits of this approach. We also touch on the benefits of working remotely, since he and I have both been doing it for some time.

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Today I talk with @rossabaker about http4s and the benefits of a pure functional approach to building http services

Tech Talk: Moves and Borrowing In Rust With Jim Blandy Jul 03, 2018

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Tech Talks are in-depth technical discussions.

The surprising thing about rust is how memory management works. Rust has the concepts of moves and borrowing. If you have heard about Rust, you may have heard people talking about the borrow checker and trying to make it happy. In this interview, Jim Blandy walks us through what these concepts mean and how they work. We also talk about how to avoid fighting with the borrow checker at all and why the conceptual model that Rust adopts, though it may seem unusual at first, is actually more representative of how computers work and therefore an easier programming model.

Tech Talk: Dependent Types in Haskell with Stephanie Weirich Jun 13, 2018

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Tech Talks are in-depth technical discussions.

At Strange loop 2017, a wandered into a talk where I saw some code that deeply surprised me. The code could have been python if you squinted, passing dictionaries around, no type annotations anywhere.

Yet key look up in the dictionary was validated at compile time. It was a compile time error to access elements that didn't exist. Also the dictionary was heterogeneous, the elements had different types, and it was all inferred and validated at compile time.

What I was seeing was Dependent types in Haskell. In today's interview Stephanie Weirich explains her efforts to add dependent types to haskell and how that example worked.

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Tech Talk: Micro Services vs Monoliths With Jan Machacek Jun 06, 2018

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Tech Talks are in-depth technical discussions.

I don't know a lot about micro services. Like how to design them and what the various caveats and anti-patterns are. I'm currently working on a project that involves decomposing a monolithic application into separate parts, integrated together using Kafka and http.

Today I talk to coauthor of upcoming book, Reactive Systems Architecture : Designing and Implementing an Entire Distributed System. If you want to learn some of the hows and whys of building a distributed system, I think you'll really enjoy this interview. The insights from this conversation are already helping me.