Developer Voices

Latest Episodes:

Solving Git's Pain Points with Jujutsu (with Martin von Zweigbergk) Oct 09, 2025

Show notes

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 a fundamentally different approach. Starting from a simple idea—automatically snapshotting your working copy—Martin has built a tool that reimagines how we interact with version control. We explore the clever algebra behind Jujutsu's conflict handling that lets you store conflicts as commits and move freely through your repository even when things are broken. We discuss why there's no staging area, how the operation log gives you powerful undo/redo capabilities, and why rebasing becomes trivially easy when you can edit any commit in your history and have changes automatically propagate forward.

Whether you're a Git power user frustrated by interactive rebases, someone who's lost work to a botched merge, or just curious about how version control could work differently, this conversation offers fresh perspectives on a tool we all take for granted. And if you're working with large monorepos or game development assets, Martin's vision for the future of Jujutsu might be exactly what you've been waiting for.

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Jujutsu (JJ): https://github.com/martinvonz/jj

Jujutsu Documentation: https://martinvonz.github.io/jj/

Git: https://git-scm.com/

Mercurial: https://www.mercurial-scm.org/

Rust: https://www.rust-lang.org/

Watchman: https://facebook.github.io/watchman/

Google Piper: https://research.google/pubs/why-google-stores-billions-of-lines-of-code-in-a-single-repository/

Kris on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/krisajenkins.bsky.social

Kris on Mastodon: http://mastodon.social/@krisajenkins

Kris on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/krisjenkins/

Getting New Technology Adopted (with Dov Katz) Sep 24, 2025

Show notes

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 specializes in exactly this challenge - driving developer productivity and getting new practices adopted across thousands of developers. We explore the art of organizational change from every angle: How do you get management buy-in? How do you build grassroots developer enthusiasm? When should you use deterministic tools like OpenRewrite versus AI-powered solutions? And what role does open source play in breaking down the walls between competing financial institutions?

Whether you're trying to modernize a legacy codebase, reduce technical debt, or just get your team to try that promising new tool you've discovered, this conversation offers practical strategies for navigating the complex dynamics of enterprise software development. Because sometimes the hardest part of our job isn't writing code - it's getting permission to write better code.

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Morgan Stanley: https://www.morganstanley.com/

OpenRewrite: https://docs.openrewrite.org/

Spring Framework: https://spring.io/

Spring Integration: https://spring.io/projects/spring-integration

Apache Camel: https://camel.apache.org/

FINOS (FinTech Open Source Foundation): https://www.finos.org/

Linux Foundation: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/

Moderne (Code Remix conference organizers): https://www.moderne.io/

Code Remix Conference: https://www.moderne.io/events

Kris on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/krisajenkins.bsky.social

Kris on Mastodon: http://mastodon.social/@krisajenkins

Kris on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/krisjenkins/

From Unit Tests to Whole Universe Tests (with Will Wilson) Sep 10, 2025

Show notes

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 deep into the world of autonomous testing. They've built a deterministic hypervisor that can simulate entire distributed systems - complete with fake AWS services - and intelligently explore millions of possible states to find bugs before production. Think property-based testing, but for your entire infrastructure stack. The approach is so thorough they've even used it to find glitches in Super Mario Brothers (seriously).

We explore how deterministic simulation works at the hypervisor level, why traditional integration tests are fundamentally limited, and how you can write maintainable tests that actually find the bugs that matter. If you've ever wished you could test "what happens when everything that can go wrong does go wrong," this conversation shows you how that's finally becoming possible.

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Antithesis: https://antithesis.com/

Antithesis testing with Super Mario: https://antithesis.com/blog/sdtalk/

...and with Metroid: https://antithesis.com/blog/2025/metroid/

MongoDB: https://www.mongodb.com/

etcd (Linux Foundation): https://etcd.io/

Facebook Hermit: https://github.com/facebookexperimental/hermit

RR (Record-Replay Debugger): https://rr-project.org/

T-SAN (Thread Sanitizer): https://clang.llvm.org/docs/ThreadSanitizer.html

Toby Bell's Strange Loop Talk on JPL Testing: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=toby+bell+strange+loop+jpl

Andy Weir - Project Hail Mary: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54493401-project-hail-mary

Andy Weir - The Martian: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18007564-the-martian

Antithesis Blog (Nintendo Games Testing): https://antithesis.com/blog/

Kris on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/krisajenkins.bsky.social

Kris on Mastodon: http://mastodon.social/@krisajenkins

Kris on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/krisjenkins/

Building Render: Inside a Modern Cloud Platform (with Anurag Goel) Aug 22, 2025

Show notes

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 do you handle millions of users asking for thousands of different features? And what's the secret to building infrastructure that developers actually want to use?

We explore the technical challenges of building enterprise-grade services—from implementing reliable backups and high availability to managing private networking and service discovery. Anurag shares insights on choosing between infrastructure-as-code versus configuration, why they built on Go, and how they handle 100 billion requests per month.

Plus, we discuss the impact of AI on platform adoption: Are LLMs already influencing which platforms developers choose? Will hosting platforms need to actively support agentic workflows? And what does the future hold for automated debugging?

Whether you're curious about building your own platform, want to understand what really happens behind your cloud provider's dashboard, or just enjoy hearing war stories from the infrastructure trenches, this episode has something for you.

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Render: https://render.com/

Render’s MCP Server (Early Access): https://render.com/docs/mcp-server

Pulumi: https://www.pulumi.com/

Victoria Metrics: https://victoriametrics.com

Loki: https://vector.dev/docs/reference/configuration/sinks/loki/

Vector: https://vector.dev/

Kris on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/krisajenkins.bsky.social

Kris on Mastodon: http://mastodon.social/@krisajenkins

Kris on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/krisjenkins/

InfluxDB: The Evolution of a Time Series Database (with Paul Dix) Jul 30, 2025

Show notes

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 logging system to time-series datasbase, and from Go to Rust, with unflinching honesty about the major lessons they learnt along the way. We cover technical details like Time-Structure Merge Trees, to business issues like what happens when your database works but your pricing model is broken.

If you're interested in how databases work, this is full of interesting details, and if you're interested in how projects evolve from good idea to functioning business, it's a treat.

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InfluxData: https://www.influxdata.com/

InfluxDB: https://www.influxdata.com/products/influxdb/

DataFusion: https://datafusion.apache.org/

DataFusion Episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QNNCr8WfDM

Apache Arrow: https://arrow.apache.org/

Apache Parquet: https://parquet.apache.org/

BoltDB: https://github.com/boltdb/bolt

LevelDB: https://github.com/google/leveldb

RocksDB: https://rocksdb.org/

Gorilla: A Fast, Scalable, In-Memory Time Series Database (Facebook paper): https://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol8/p1816-teller.pdf

Paul on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pauldix/

Kris on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/krisajenkins.bsky.social

Kris on Mastodon: http://mastodon.social/@krisajenkins

Kris on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/krisjenkins/

Beyond AI Hype, What Will Developers Actually Use? (with Zach Lloyd) Jul 17, 2025

Show notes

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 development, and how it's completely changed what he & his team have been building. Warp has gone from a terminal built from scratch, to what they're calling an "agentic development environment" - a tool that weaves AI agents, a development, a shell and a conversation into a single, unified experience. This may be the future or just one possible path; regardless it's a fascinating glimpse into how our tools might reshape not just how we code, but how we experience programming itself.

Whether you're all-in on agentic coding, a skeptic, or somewhere in between, AI is here to stay. Now's the time to figure out what form it's going to take.

# Support Developer Voices

- Patreon: https://patreon.com/DeveloperVoices

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-- Episode Links

- Warp Homepage: https://warp.dev/

- Warp Pro Free Month (promo code WARPDEVS25): https://warp.dev/

- Previous Warp Episode: https://youtu.be/bLAJvxUpAcg

- SWE-bench: https://www.swebench.com/

- TerminalBench: https://github.com/microsoft/TerminalBench

- Model Context Protocol (MCP): https://modelcontextprotocol.io/

- Claude Code: https://claude.ai/code

- Anthropic Claude: https://claude.ai/

- VS Code: https://code.visualstudio.com/

- Cursor: https://cursor.sh/

- Language Server Protocol (LSP): https://microsoft.github.io/language-server-protocol/

# Connect

- Zach on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zachlloyd/

- Kris on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/krisajenkins.bsky.social

- Kris on Mastodon: http://mastodon.social/@krisajenkins

- Kris on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/krisjenkins/

The $500 Billion Integration Problem, And One Possible Solution (with Marty Pitt) Jul 04, 2025

Show notes

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 APIs, you describe what your data *means* and let TaxiQL figure out how to get it.

In this conversation, Marty walks through the “All Powerful Spreadsheet” moment that sparked TaxiQL, how semantic types work in practice, and why this approach might finally decouple producers from consumers in large organizations. We dive deep into query execution, data lineage, streaming integration, and the technical challenges of building a system that can connect anything to anything.

If you've ever spent months mapping fields between systems or maintaining brittle integration code, this one's for you.

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TaxiLang Homepage: https://taxilang.org/

TaxiLang Playground: https://playground.taxilang.org/examples/message-queue-and-database

Taxi Lang GitHub repository: https://github.com/taxilang/taxilang

OpenAPI Specification (formerly Swagger): https://swagger.io/specification/

YOW! Conference - Australian software conference series: https://yowconference.com/

Spring Framework Kotlin support: https://spring.io/guides/tutorials/spring-boot-kotlin/

Ubiquitous Language (DDD Concept): https://martinfowler.com/bliki/UbiquitousLanguage.html

Kris on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/krisajenkins.bsky.social

Kris on Mastodon: http://mastodon.social/@krisajenkins

Kris on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/krisjenkins/

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0:00 Intro

Making Software Crash Before It Breaks (with Isaac Van Doren) Jun 19, 2025

Show notes

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 toolkit of techniques working together. He's advocating for scattering "little bombs" throughout your code via runtime assertions, adding in the right amount of static typing, building feedback loops that page you when invariants break, and running nightly SQL queries to catch the bugs that slip through everything else. All building what he sees as a pyramid of software reliability.

Weaving into that, we also dive into the Roc programming language, its unique platform architecture that tailors development to specific domains. Software reliability isn’t just about the end user experience - Roc feeds in the idea we can make reliability easier by tailoring the language domain to the problem at hand.

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Isaac’s Homepage: https://isaacvando.com/

Episode on Property Testing: https://youtu.be/wHJZ0icwSkc

Property Testing Walkthrough: https://youtu.be/4bpc8NpNHRc

Support Developer Voices on Patreon: https://patreon.com/DeveloperVoices

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Isaac on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/isaacvando/

Kris on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/krisajenkins.bsky.social

Kris on Mastodon: http://mastodon.social/@krisajenkins

Kris on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/krisjenkins/

Making Apache Kafka Diskless (with Filip Yonov & Josep Prat) Jun 05, 2025

Show notes

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 business - one of them recently got bought out for a rumoured $250m. But one of them is actively trying to get those changes back into the community, as are pushing to make Apache Kafka speak object storage natively.

Joining me to explain why and how are Josep Prat and Filip Yonov of Aiven. We break down what it takes to make Kafka’s storage layer optional on a per-topic basis, how they’re making sure it’s not a breaking change, and how they plan to get such a foundational feature merged.

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Announcement Post: https://aiven.io/blog/guide-diskless-apache-kafka-kip-1150

Aiven’s (Temporary) Fork, Project Inkless: https://github.com/aiven/inkless/blob/main/docs/inkless/README.md

Kafka Improvement Process (KIP) Articles:

KIP-1150: https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/KAFKA/KIP-1150%3A+Diskless+Topics
KIP-1163: Diskless Core: https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/KAFKA/KIP-1163%3A+Diskless+Core
KIP-1164: Topic Based Batch Coordinator: https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/KAFKA/KIP-1164%3A+Topic+Based+Batch+Coordinator
KIP-1165: Object Compaction for Diskless: https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/KAFKA/KIP-1165%3A+Object+Compaction+for+Diskless

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Filip on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/filipyonov

Josep on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jlprat/

Kris on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/krisajenkins.bsky.social

Kris on Mastodon: http://mastodon.social/@krisajenkins

Kris on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/krisjenkins/

Java's Cutting Edge Comeback (with Josh Long) May 23, 2025

Show notes

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 C interop changes, custom primitives to high performance computing and all the ways in which Java is modernising for age of AI workloads.

If you’re out of touch with the latest in the JVM, or don’t know how much its changed, Josh’s brain is full of all the news you need to catch up.

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Project Valhalla (Value Objects): https://openjdk.org/projects/valhalla/

Project Panama (JVM’s new native code support): https://openjdk.org/projects/panama/

Jextract: https://github.com/openjdk/jextract

Spring Initializer: http://start.spring.io/

Support Developer Voices on Patreon: https://patreon.com/DeveloperVoices

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Kris on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/krisajenkins.bsky.social

Kris on Mastodon: http://mastodon.social/@krisajenkins

Kris on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/krisjenkins/