Linux Dev Time

What it takes to sustain a medium-to-large-sized open source project.           Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes   See our contact page for ways to get in touch. Subscribe to the  RSS feed

When and how to use benchmarking in your project, why it’s hard, and why optimising your code can be even harder.   Blog post about the speed of ripgrep hyperfine: A command-line benchmarking tool Profile-guided optimization Andy benchmarking IndexedDb             Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes   See our...

How we deal with complex projects involving non-technical people as well as developers. How to manage expectations about timing, how to deal with issues, why documenting conversations is important, and more.           Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes   See our contact page for ways to get in touch. Subscribe to the  RSS f...

What are the fundamental ideas and components of development and programming?         Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes   See our contact page for ways to get in touch. Subscribe to the  RSS feed

It’s another hot questions episode. Tabs vs spaces, whether we have imposter syndrome, why software keeps getting heavier, the correct length of functions and files, and what every programmer should know.   Some things we mentioned: Interesting Characters (UTF-16, utf-8, Unicode, encodings) Software Design is Knowledge Building The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Must Know Abo...

Andy is convinced that functional programming isn’t boring. Listen to find out if he’s right!   Functional Programming & Haskell Beautiful Racket Functional Programming & Haskell – Computerphile         Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes   See our contact page for ways to get in touch. Subscribe to...

We’ve done hot takes episodes in the past but this is different, it’s hot questions . Would we rather have bad managers who can code or good managers who can’t? Too many comments or none? 80 columns or as long as you like? What editor do we use and why?   Vim for Fun  or PeerTube version       Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episod...

Joe accidentally tried vibe coding and it was as much of a disaster as you’d imagine. Amolith has also tried it, and does his best to defend the use of LLMs with development. Kevin and Andy are mostly bemused. We all have concerns about the ethics and environmental issues. This episode has a bit more bad language than usual.         Support us on Patreon and get an ad-fre...

Our advice on how to move into a career in software development including making and contributing to projects, advocating for your work, collaborating, avoiding exploitation, learning Git, and loads more.           Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes   See our contact page for ways to get in touch. Subscribe to the  RSS feed

Andy is only publishing his games on F-Droid and not the Google Play Store from now on, and he tells us why.   Rabbit Escape Box Stacker Smolpxl Games Adresilo Sepia Search             Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes   See our contact page for ways to get in touch. Subscribe to the  RSS feed

We dig into the technical details of the Linux Kernel Rust drama.       Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes   See our contact page for ways to get in touch. Subscribe to the  RSS feed

Mark from Linux Matters who’s a web developer joins us to talk about working in PHP – a language that’s mature and well established, and how that compares with working with newer “cooler” languages like Rust and Go.   Moodle Mark’s Bash text adventure Bash associative array examples       Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with...

Where is the balance between efficiency and openness when it comes to saved file formats? If everything was based on plain text it would make the files readable for years to come, but at what cost?         Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes   See our contact page for ways to get in touch. Subscribe to the  RSS feed

We dig into SQLite – an interesting and unusual project that is widely used but has an uncommon licence, a proprietary test suite, and doesn’t take external contributions. Plus printf() vs “proper” debugging.           Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes   See our contact page for ways to get in touch...

We explore the line between developer and sysadmin and come to the conclusion that despite the clear difference between the roles, there is a lot of crossover when it comes to skills and character traits.   The Six Dumbest Ideas in Computer Security       Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes   See our contact page for ways to get...

We are joined by popey from Linux Matters to talk about how software packaging has changed over the years. The tooling has improved massively, containerisation has made a huge impact, but Andy still prefers the old distro repo model.     Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes   See our contact page for ways to get in touch. Subscribe to the ...

More of our development hot takes including excessive energy use, optimising your code, the importance of licences, Matrix and Jabber being on the same side, the myth of secure code, and why self-hosting is hard. watt-wiser         1Password Extended Access Management: Secure every sign-in for every app on every device. Support the show and check it out at 1password.com/linuxde...

Some of the work-adjacent things that we do including writing code that we shouldn’t like writing Rust in Rust, fun projects that turned into paid work, and career progression. Plus some of our go to resources for learning about development.   Some resources we mentioned Andy’s videos – Rust , General Lobsters Amolith’s RSS feeds Computer inside Terraria Fasterthanlime Self-Direct...

Our development hot takes including “rewrite it in Rust”, lack of documentation, single vs multiple monitors, dependency numbers, light vs dark mode, and distro package repos.     Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes   See our contact page for ways to get in touch. Subscribe to the  RSS feed

You need to be able to write good code to be a successful developer, but how important are other “soft” skills like communication, relating to and motivating others, and time management? Kevin mentioned a blog post about burnout in the Rust project         1Password Extended Access Management: Secure every sign-in for every app on every device. Support the show and...

Campbell Barton joins us to talk about porting Blender , the hugely popular professional 3D software, to Wayland.   Wayland support in blender task Wayland Support on Linux         Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes   See our contact page for ways to get in touch. Subscribe to the  RSS feed

What is it about Linux that draws us to it as a development platform? Plus why we choose the specific distros that we use.           1Password Extended Access Management: Secure every sign-in for every app on every device. Support the show and check it out at 1password.com/linuxdevtime     Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes some...

Following on from our episode about dealing with a horrible codebase, Andy argues that completely rewriting a project is almost always a bad idea. Things You Should Never Do, Part I         Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes   See our contact page for ways to get in touch. Subscribe to the  RSS feed

Kevin and Andy talk about their project extremes: the oldest and newest projects they’ve worked on, the biggest and smallest codebases, the ugliest hack, the most elegant, the most popular, the most trivial, and the most important.   Andy’s links git-what IGCC Box Stacker Rightwaves Eat Apples Quick! Smolpxl Games Rabbit Escape Android Game element-web matrix-rust-sdk FreeGuide i-dunno...

How to deal with a horrible codebase that you’ve inherited. Getting started, breaking the problem into smaller pieces, understanding what’s actually wrong, the importance of testing (as usual), and why technical debt isn’t necessarily the best name for the problem.   git-what Working Effectively with Legacy Code         Support us on Patreon and get an ad...