Developer Voices

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 ADHD, and critically, how you manage coders with ADHD. And the answer to that comes full circle, in understanding how coders with ADHD manage themselves…

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ADHDFTW Homepage: https://adhdftw.com/developer-voices/

Do I Have ADHD? https://adhdftw.com/do-i-have-adhd/

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Kris on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/krisjenkins/

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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 big architectural idea.

This interview was recorded live at GOTO Copenhagen, with two microservice experts and thinkers: James Lewis of Thoughtworks and Ian Cooper of JustEat. 

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Residuality Theory: https://leanpub.com/residuality

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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 complex rules about who owns and frees which piece of memory, or you just copy every piece of data and kill your performance. Pony’s solution is a third way - a novel approach to memory management called reference capabilities.

In this week’s Developer Voices, Sean Allen joins us from the Pony team to explain what reference capabilities are, how Pony uses them in its high-performance actor framework, and how they implement a garbage collector without stop-the-world pauses. The result is a language for performant actors, and a set of ideas bigger than the language itself…

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Pony: https://www.ponylang.io/

The Pony Tutorial: https://tutorial.ponylang.io/

The Pony Playground: https://playground.ponylang.io/

Azul Garbage Collector: https://www.azul.com/products/components/pgc/

Shenandoah Garbage Collector: https://wiki.openjdk.org/display/shenandoah/Main

A String of Ponies (Distributed Actors Paper): https://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~scb12/publications/s.blessing.pdf

Garbage Collection with Pony-ORCA: https://tutorial.ponylang.io/appendices/garbage-collection.html

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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 Functional Programming to build something entirely unique and surprisingly high-performance.

Joining us to explain all is Alice Cecile. She’s part of the Bevy foundation, which is charting a course from data-management and rendering tool to fully-featured game development environment. A journey they’ve made huge progress on, but still expect to take another decade to come to full fruition. We look at the core ECS, and the wider project-management approaches they need to make the journey.

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Bevy: https://bevyengine.org/

Bevy Examples: https://bevyengine.org/examples/

Flecs (C++): https://github.com/SanderMertens/flecs

Tiny Glade (game): https://store.steampowered.com/app/2198150/Tiny_Glade/

Alice on Mastodon: https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@alice_i_cecile

Kris on Mastodon: http://mastodon.social/@krisajenkins

Kris on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/krisjenkins/

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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 Zoo, developing KCL - a language that looks like JavaScript, runs on Rust, and offers users a seamless hybrid experience of both coding and point-and-click modelling. So, how does that all fit together?

In this episode we look at the design and implementation of a programming language in Rust; how KittyCAD creates that hybrid environment for text-based programming and point-and-click modelling; and how we can learn to write our own Rust-interpreted languages.

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Adam’s Blog: https://adamchalmers.com/

Adam’s Guide To Writing Parsers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QF3kMyzMC40

Zoo’s Modelling App: https://zoo.dev/modeling-app

Mechanical CAD: https://zoo.dev/blog/mechanical-cad-yesterday-today-and-tomorrow

A Lego brick in KCL: https://zoo.dev/docs/kcl-samples/lego

Winnow: https://docs.rs/winnow/latest/winnow/

Nom: https://docs.rs/nom/latest/nom/

Factorio: https://www.factorio.com/

Satisfactory: https://store.steampowered.com/app/526870/Satisfactory/

Crafting Interpreters: https://craftinginterpreters.com/

Coding in Antarctica: https://brr.fyi/

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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 TUI library with the excellent name ‘ratatui’. We’re joined by Orhun Parmaksız, one of the lead developers and a huge TUI enthusiast on a quest to see how far Text UIs can be pushed.

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Ratatui: https://ratatui.rs/

Ratatouille Tutorials: https://ratatui.rs/tutorials/

Tui Realm: https://github.com/veeso/tui-realm

Awesome Ratatui: https://github.com/ratatui/awesome-ratatui

RTL SDR: https://www.rtl-sdr.com/about-rtl-sdr/

Rust Snake AI: https://github.com/bones-ai/rust-snake-ai-ratatui

SystemCtl-Tui: https://github.com/rgwood/systemctl-tui

GitU: https://github.com/altsem/gitu

…and GitUi: https://github.com/extrawurst/gitui

GitCliff Changelog Tool: https://git-cliff.org/

ATAC (Postman in the Terminal): https://github.com/Julien-cpsn/ATAC

BubbleTea (TUIs in Golang): https://github.com/charmbracelet/bubbletea

Imgcat (images in the terminal): https://github.com/danielgatis/imgcat

TachyonFX: https://github.com/junkdog/tachyonfx

ASCIITheatre: https://ascii.theater/

Rio Terminal: https://raphamorim.io/rio/

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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.

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Lustre: https://hexdocs.pm/lustre/index.html

Gleam: https://gleam.run/

Join the Gleam Community: https://gleam.run/community/

Processing (AV Framework for Java): https://processing.org/

Vue.js: https://vuejs.org/

Svelte: https://svelte.dev/

Elm: https://elm-lang.org/

Elm Table: https://package.elm-lang.org/packages/gribouille/elm-table/5.3.0/

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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 we’re joined by Romain Michon, who works on and teaches Faust, as we look at how it’s designed, what kind of programmers it's for, and how it does the job of turning audio-pipeline definitions into executable code.

And one of the surprising parts of that compilation strategy is the decision to have it compile to multiple targets, from the expected ones like C and Rust, to the exotic destination of FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays). FPGAs are like reprogrammable circuit boards, and Romain dives into Faust’s attempts to go from a high-level description of an audio program, all the way down to instructions that tell a chip exactly how it should wire itself.

So rather aptly for a technology podcast, we start this week with what your ear can hear and go all the way down to logic gates and circuit boards…

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Try Faust in the Browser: https://faustide.grame.fr/

Faust Online Course: https://www.kadenze.com/courses/real-time-audio-signal-processing-in-faust/info

FPGAs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field-programmable_gate_array

VHDL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VHDL

Verilog: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verilog

Grame: https://www.grame.fr/

The (Strawberry Jam) Gramophone: https://www.grame.fr/articles/gramophone

Gramophone Workshops: https://www.grame.fr/evenements/atelier-gramophones-65ca16b19fec4

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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 figuring out how to make a new approach to encryption run fast enough to make it practical…

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Become a Developer Voices supporter! https://patreon.com/DeveloperVoices

A Fully Homomorphic Encryption Scheme (pdf): https://crypto.stanford.edu/craig/craig-thesis.pdf

CUDA platform: https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-zone

Rust-CUDA: https://github.com/Rust-GPU/Rust-CUDA

And in case anyone was wondering, A List of Hydroelectric Power Stations in France: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Hydroelectric_power_stations_in_France

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Kris on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/krisjenkins/

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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 something that looks like JavaScript but runs OCaml on the backend.

Joining me to explore the OCaml-meets-JavaScript world is Antonio Montiero. He’s a key maintainer/contributor for Melange and ReasonML, as well as several other interesting OCaml web projects.

We kick off by discussing the benefits of OCaml and how it clicked with him personally, before we dive into how and why the compiler is being adapted and tweaked to take it to a whole new audience of web-hungry developers.

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Sponsor Antonio’s Work: https://github.com/sponsors/anmonteiro/

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The OCaml Platform: https://ocaml.org/platform

OCaml on Discord: https://discuss.ocaml.org/t/ocaml-discord-server/1884

ReasonML: https://reasonml.github.io/en/

What is Melange? https://melange.re/v4.0.0/what-is-melange.html

Melange for React Devs: https://react-book.melange.re/

The Melange Playground: https://melange.re/v4.0.0/playground/

js_of_ocaml: https://github.com/ocsigen/js_of_ocaml

FUN OCaml Conference: https://fun-ocaml.com/

Kris on Mastodon: http://mastodon.social/@krisajenkins

Kris on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/krisjenkins/

Kris on Twitter: https://twitter.com/krisajenkins