Book Overflow

In this very special episode of Book Overflow, Dr. Brian Kernighan, the author of "The Practice of Programming" joins us to discuss his experience writing the book! Tune in as he talks about his experience at Bell Labs, what it was like co-authoring the book with Rob Pike, his thoughts on LLMs and the future of programming, and more!

00:00 - Intro

02:38 - Why write this book?

12:23 - Working at Bell Labs

16:29 - Life Learning Process

22:33 - What motivates you to write a book? 

28:13 - AI and LLMs

35:48 - Layers of Abstraction

37:50 - What excites you about the future?

41:34 - Programmatic Thinking in Humanities

50:13 - Favorite Books

57:39 - Closing Thoughts

This week Carter Morgan and Nathan Toups finished reading "Fundamentals of Software Architecture" by Mark Richards and Neal Ford. They provide an overview of their favorite architectures from the book as well as discuss the importance of soft skills in selling your technical vision!

This week Carter Morgan and Nathan Toups read the first half of "Fundamentals of Software Architecture" by Mark Richards and Neal Ford. They discuss what exactly software architecture is, how everything is a trade-off, and how we can keep our architectural skills sharp as software engineers. You don't want to miss this great discussion!

Carter Morgan and Nathan Toups discuss Stephen Wolfram's excellent primer on ChatGPT! An incredibly dense work, they briefly summarize its key takeaways, talk about whether or ChatGPT is truly intelligent, and reflect on how their views of the current AI landscape have changed after reading this book. Enjoy!

Carter Morgan and Nathan Toups discuss "Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code" by Martin Fowler. Join them as they talk about the importance of automated testing when refactoring, how to play nice, and how refactoring can be justified as a business consideration!

Carter Morgan and Nathan Toups discuss "A Philosophy of Software Design" by John Ousterhout. Join them as they talk about pulling complexity downward, the importance of code clarity, and the book's subtle rebuttals to Uncle Bob's Clean Code!

In this inaugural episode of Book Overflow, Carter Morgan and Nathan Toups discuss "The Practice of Programming" by Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike. Written in 1999, Carter and Nathan discuss its timeless advice around style guides, interfaces, and debugging, as well as reflecting on how the software engineering industry has changed in the 25 years since it's been written.