Category Archives: Three Devs and a Maybe

154: Why all the Curly Braces? with Scott Wlaschin

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In this weeks episode we are lucky to have Scott Wlaschin back on the show to discuss his most recent talk ‘Four Languages from Forty Years Ago’. We start off by talking about why the 1970’s was such an influential decade for language design. This leads us on to highlight what a programming language fundamentally is, and explain the many different paradigms that are present. From here, we explain the issue with throwing out the design phase completely when building software, and the interesting points made in Richard Gabriel’s ‘Worse is Better’ essay. Finally, we try to make sense of why all popular programming languages today follow a very similar style, and what is with all the curly braces?!

153: The Mouse in the House

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In this weeks episode we start off discussion around testing in a Continuous Integration pipeline, and setting up a personal Bamboo CI system. We then move on to separating domain logic from the delivery, and how a Package-Bridge-Delivery split works. After a small mouse related intermission, we touch upon experiences building custom Babel plugins and testing using Jest, Travis CI and Docker. Finally, we highlight creating small CLI applications with Go, Serverless Offline and Logic-Gates/8-bit computers.

152: New Jobs, Engagements and Marathons

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In this weeks episode Mick and Edd have a long overdue catchup! We start off the show by discussing Mick’s new job, the new stack he is using, and the benefits of working in a team. From here we highlight how his company uses Scrum (Sprints, Planning Poker and Story Points), handling event-sourced models with the introduction of GDPR, and logic within annotations. Finally, we touch upon Edd’s recent engagement and marathon, a new Serverless/React blog series he is working on, developing applications for the Ethereum blockchain, and how to manage application secrets.

151: AWS, Golang and iOS Development with Alex Bilbie

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In this weeks episode we are lucky to be joined by Alex Bilbie to discuss all things AWS, Golang and iOS development. We start off the show by exploring how he got into programming, the stack he currently uses, and moving from a Monolith Laravel application to Golang microservices (deployed using ECS). From here, we move on to highlight his time developing the popular PHP OAuth 2.0 Server package, and how he first got interested in the AWS platform. We then discuss the power of composing services offered by AWS together, the concept of being ‘cloud-proof’ and the AWS certification system. Finally, we talk about his upcoming S3 master-class video series, use of Terraform for IaC and experiences building/shipping an iOS application.

150: PHP was not designed for that?! with Joe Watkins

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In this weeks episode we catch-up with Joe Watkins. We start off discussion with a recent blog post he wrote about the unhelpful ‘just because you can, doesn’t mean you should’ response he sees surrounding some of his PHP extensions. From here we move on to highlight a debugger you can ‘composer require’, reasons behind creating such a tool and how it works. This leads us on to mention some updates to uopz for PHP 7 support, a weak references RFC he has recently published and future plans for PHP. Finally, we wrap up by talking about a CommonMark extension he has published, and how CQL provides the ability to efficiently traverse a document.

149: Software Design with Scott Wlaschin

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In this weeks episode we are lucky to have Scott Wlaschin back on the show to discuss design within software. We start off by highlighting leaky abstractions, adopted tool-chains and transpiling languages into JavaScript. From here we move on to talk about what makes ‘good code’, and how evaluating this is heavily reliant on the requirements and context you are in. Finally, we discuss how OO and FP software architectures differ, advantages of being explicit over implicit and information-hiding at API boundaries.

148: Site Reliability Engineering with Niall Murphy

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In this week’s episode we are lucky to be joined by Niall Murphy to discuss the discipline of Site Reliability Engineering. We start off by speaking about how he got into computing, how the SRE role came to be and what drew him to it. From here, we highlight the position of an SRE within a company/group, what SLA’s are, the positives of having 50% operations work caps and blameless postmortems. This leads us to talk about the reasoning behind striving for 100% uptime is actually detrimental to the product, and the benefits of having an Error Budget. Finally, we discuss how the role has evolved since its inception, the Wheel of Misfortune and what drew him to contribute to the seminal SRE book.

147: Proof of Everything with Jay Smith

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In this week’s episode we are lucky to have Jay Smith back on the show to talk all things cryptocurrency. We start off the podcast by briefly recapping what’s been happening within the space since we last spoke. This leads us to discuss the Lighting Network running on the Bitcoin Mainnet, CryptoKitties, ERC-721 tokens and Ethereum Casper. From here we chat about Proof of Work, the environmental impacts of the protocol and how Proof of Stake differs. Finally, we chat about Web3, experiences using PIVX, Steemit and IPFS.

146: EconoNAS and HTPC System Builds with Brian Moses

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In this weeks episode we are joined again by Brian Moses to discuss several of his recent system builds. We start off the show delving into his recent EconoNAS, highlighting the goals behind the build and how he goes about selecting the hardware parts. We then discuss his experience using White-label HDD’s for the first time. From here, we move on to discuss his HTPC - again highlighting the goals and the experience of live-streaming the build. This leads us on to highlight the AMD Ryzen Threadripper/Intel Coffee Lake i9 series of CPU’s, Graphics card pricing and the Steam Link Box. Finally, we look at what’s in store for his upcoming DIY NAS 2018 build, FreeNAS AMD support and the different available SSD connectors.

145: The Power of Composition with Scott Wlaschin

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In this weeks episode we are lucky to have Scott Wlaschin back on the show. We start of discussion by highlighting his most recent talk on composition and some useful analogies to Lego, Brio and Unix. From here we move on to investigate function and type composition, the difference between a paradigm shift compared to simply a syntax one and the advantages of an opinionated language. This leads us on to mention how within application design pushing the side-effects to the edge and keeping the core domain pure is beneficial. Finally, we touch upon testing in functional languages, experiences whilst consulting and Rich Hickey’s ‘Effective Programs’ talk.