Regular Programming

Lars went to ElixirConf EU. Going to a conference can be a credibly incredible experience. Elixir has more clarity than Erlang. Lars also gave a talk, a fact he was comfortably uncomfortable with. Giving a talk also comes with benefits such as being able to talk to fish in a barrel. But why did he choose to make the whole talk a demo? What is the goal of it all? Gotta build things! Dive in, make s...

Text editors - which ones do we enjoy, which ones have we used, and what do we actually want and need in them? Andreas has read about vim, sed and awk. Lars is quite comfortable in vim, but finds Visual studio code more than acceptable enough.  Andreas is excited to show Lars how to use Vim properly. Lars considers advanced setups something of a hellscape. Lars has held a lecture about functional...

How do we feel about working remotely? Pretty good, on the whole. Chairs and other basics are of course important, as is making your way of remote work a nice way of doing remote work for you. It is also nice to need to wear your work face less. The challenges are more around the social sides - communicating differently, but generally replacing and rebuilding ways of being social with people both...

Lars is thinking about distributed systems, and Andreas kind of fears them. The best thing to do for most cases might be to avoid distributing things at all. But if you do end up needing to distribute, you may run into one of the places in the world where worse is better is not necessarily better? Adding distribution on top of something not really built for it is one of the hard problems. There ar...

About Hackers Thinking about the term "hacker". Time to take it back to mean something rather down to earth, rather than a pedistal requiring years of C and a black hoodie? What do airlines have against Erlang anyway? There's also the mindset angle: the hacking mindset can be when exploring, versus when needing to solve a specific problem. The discussion goes into labels one feels comfortable with...

About Being Wrong Wherein polite gentlemen at gaming conventions explain how people didn't have their variables separate enough with regard to the Dunning-Kruger effect . Lars thinks Andreas has drawn the wrong learnings from this. It's a good idea to be humble … but strong opinions loosely held may not be the perfect thing, either? Also discussed is the curse of the expert - teaching across a lar...

About Estimates Estimates are a nasty subject, Andreas doesn't know how to handle it. Fortunately, Lars has one weird trick, which doctors hate. When you have plenty of control, estimates can be useful. Not useful: unexplained deadlines. Finally: when things get stuck. (Lars is usually available to blame.) (In an alternate timeline, Andreas' tells us everything his relatives taught him about quark...

Passing pandemics make it possible to meet developers in real life again. Elixir-Lars makes a splash, and tells about recent and coming real-life events he's enjoyed. Things learned from real-life events and the need - or not - of constant learning are mentioned. (It's not bit rot, it's data composting!) Finally, a deep dive into the art of arranging good events, including preparatory pre-event ev...

The continued cratering of Twitter, and the joy of discovering open alternatives. Lars and many others find themselves on the open and federated Mastodon instead of Twitter, having a great time, and feeling more excited about open systems than in a long time. On the level of individuals, owning and controlling your own data feels back in fashion, but there is even more to dig into on the level of...

How to teach functional programming? What are the proper steps, beyond the first ones? Especially when you can't or don't want to point to a framework and say "we do it this way!" Lars outlines his ideas for teaching Elixir to someone without requiring any prior programming experience. There is also discussion of mapping, reducing, and representing one in terms of the other. Also things which are...

Archives are cool. How do you keep your digital things in order and, hopefully, backed up? We need more archivists. Andreas has re-read Snowcrash, and while it isn't the manual for the world to adopt it doesn't seem to stop the megacorps from thinking it is and trying. Where did Google go wrong, and why? And why aren't we jealous of their recruiting? Linkable matter The library of Alexandria - ove...

There are good things in programming, many of which are enumerated in this episode. Among other nice things: the best features in Elixir. Lars won open source? Bots and realtime-y stuff. Not to mention a type system that screams at you. Also: Lists in lists, in lists (in lists). Code made by other people is not one of the things, however. Code made by other people is always upsetting. CSS does not...

The hardware woes episode. But first: the joy and wonder of ID3v2.3. Implementing the specification of a binary format as a library. Lars' next laptop. Then Lars' gear situation. Power bricks and cable capabilities are … a labyrinth. The trials and tribulations of getting and setting up a Steam deck. Linkable matter * The ID3v2.3 spec * EXIF * Fold left and fold right * Lars' blog post about worki...

Elon Musk wanting to buy Twitter leads naturally into the topic of cyberdecks and jacking in, which in turn naturally leads one to talk about audio on Linux. But what is a cyberdeck? How do you build one? And when would you use it? The sad state of video calls compared to Star Trek - why don't they have to install Teams to hail the Microsoft ship? Lamenting the sad state of the current crop of dys...

Notes will improve when beatings continue.

Hopefully some day :)

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Show notes may show up again some day. But right now we wouldn't be on it :)

Thanks to the listener who chimed in and wanted our thoughts on microservices. That wasn't what put it on the topic list but I think we still get credit for responding to input right?

We apologize for any discomfort in the audio. We lost the original Ekeroot recording and had to use the backup cloud recording. The people responsible have been sacked.

This episode was a bit delayed, sorry about that. Poor planning on our part :)