Developer Voices

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...

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...

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 softwa...

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...

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...

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...

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 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...

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...

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 Z...

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...

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/DeveloperVoices Support Developer Voices on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@DeveloperVoices/join – Lustre: https...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 co...

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...

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 wee...

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 who...

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...

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 ea...

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...

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 abou...

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 discu...