In this episode of Book Overflow, Carter Morgan and Nathan Toups finish up their discussion of "Web Scalability for Startup Engineers" by Artur Ejsmont. Join them as they discuss caching strategies, async messaging, and managing burnout in your career!

In this special episode of Book Overflow, Michael Feathers joins Carter Morgan and Nathan Toups to reflect on his book "Working Effectively with Legacy Code." Join them as they discuss the pros and cons of TDD, the dangers of AI hallucination, and why Michael became a software engineer!

In this episode of Book Overflow, Carter Morgan and Nathan Toups discuss "Web Scalability for Startup Engineers" by Artur Ejsmont. Join them as they discuss how to build a stateless front-end, the benefits of microservices, and the differences between SQL and NoSQL!

In this special episode of Book Overflow, Dr. John Ousterhout joins Carter and Nathan to discuss his book "A Philosophy of Software Design." He reflects on why he wrote the book, how he teaches the principles in it to his Stanford students, and what we can learn from our mistakes.

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00:00 Intro

01:18 Motivation for writing this book

06:17 Why No TAs for Stanford Class

08:55 Thoughts on TDD

14:24 Design it Twice

20:30 Most Surprising Feedback

31:46 Taking suggestions with a grain of salt

33:20 Curiosity and Humility

36:13 Misunderstandings from the book

39:37 Strong opinions, humility, and fear of being wrong

44:35 Unconventional Career Paths

50:13 What are you reading?

51:22 Thoughts on Clean Code

53:50 Advice for new software engineers

58:00 Closing Thoughts 

In this episode of Book Overflow, Carter Morgan and Nathan Toups discuss the second half of "Working Effectively with Legacy Code" by Michael Feathers. Join them as they discuss how to keep up a good attitude while working on legacy code, how to get started when you're intimidated, and some of the legacy and greenfield projects they've worked on in their careers!

In this special episode of Book Overflow, Neal Ford joins the podcast to reflect on his book "Fundamentals of Software Architecture!" Join Carter and Nathan as they discuss the challenges of compromising with the business, what shifts AI is bringing to the software architecture world, and what sci-fi Neal's been reading lately!

Carter Morgan and Nathan Toups read and discuss the first half of "Working Effectively with Legacy Code" by Michael Feathers. Join them as they reflect on dependency inversion, the importance of interfaces, and continue their never-ending debate on the pros and cons of Test-Driven Development!

(The audio gets a little de-synced in the last three minutes. Carter isn't talking over Nathan on purpose!)

Chapter markers:

00:00 Intro 

04:51 Thoughts on the book

10:54 Defining Legacy Code

21:53 Quick Break: Pull Requests

22:38 How to change software

44:30 Quick Break: CI/CD

45:15 Testing Legacy Code

1:15:10 Quick Break: Linting

1:16:01 Closing Thoughts 

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