Developer Voices

Integration testing is always a tricky thing, fraught with problems setting up the right environment and attempting to control the system’s state. That’s particularly true when you’re dealing with a mix of software and hardware, and even worse when you don’t have control of what the hardware can do.

This week I’m joined by Dave Lucia of TVLab’s, who’s building systems for testing television software at scale, and it’s a problem that needs a huge variety of techniques to crack it. He’s using cameras, real time video processing, Erlang & Elixir and a host of other tools to make it possible to test a fleet of televisions on demand.

Sometimes good systems revolve around a single big idea; this time it’s a large combination of solutions, coordinated by the BEAM, that gets the job done.

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TVLabs: https://tvlabs.ai/

Flipper Zero: https://flipperzero.one

ATSC 3.0 “NextGen TV”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATSC_3.0

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Sam Aaron is the creator of Sonic Pi, one of the most unusual software platforms you’ll encounter. It’s a live-coding playground for making music. A tool that lets you write code that defines sounds and musical phrases, and build up a hole program that plays anything from a short bleep to a whole nightclub set. And Sam’s creator has been using it live for years, weaving drum & bass nights out of thin air, all driven by the Ruby-esque he writes.

In this episode we go through Sam’s career path and design journey as we look at what it takes to make a programming language with enough expressivity and productivity to produce music at the speed of Sam’s imagination.

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Sam’s Sonic Pi Course: https://www.patreon.com/posts/new-introductory-115404746

Sonic Pi: https://sonic-pi.net/

SuperCollider: https://supercollider.github.io/

Overtone: https://github.com/overtone/overtone

Power Gloves: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Glove

Web Audio API: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Audio_API

Tau5: https://www.patreon.com/posts/announcing-sonic-112605951

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Evan Czaplicki—the creator of the Elm programming language —joins me to discuss the state and future of Elm, the friendly, type-safe functional programming language. On many fronts Elm has been a huge success: it’s been popular with new and seasoned programmers alike; it’s helped push several language ideas into the mainstream; it’s been a key part of several successful software businesses and he even found himself employed as a kind of Language Designer in Residence. And yet, the material rewards of a successful open-source project were…lacking. Was he naive? Can an open-source developer stay true to open-source principles and still make a decent living? Is open source being exploited by commercial software businesses? These topics and more tumble out of what has to be the first question in the podcast: What’s happening with Elm?

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

The Economics Of Programming Languages: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZ3w_jec1v8

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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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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

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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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