Feeling of Computing

Two years ago, Nadia Eghbal "stumbled onto the internet's biggest blindspot": sustainability of open-source. Her Ford Foundation report "Roads and Bridges" became an instant classic. She shined a light on the underappreciated roles of maintainers and how difficult it was for even vital projects to get enough funding for a single person full time.

In this conversation, we discuss how she found "stumbled onto" this problem initially, and her road from the Ford Foundation to GitHub and now Protocol Labs. We discuss the challenges of indepdendent research and remote work... and how being able to find amazing friends and co-conspirators on Twitter somehow makes it all better. Nadia lays out her vision for the future of open source, and how we can tackle the human side of scaling open-source development. She also gives us a sneak preview of her current work on a new economic model for understanding how open-source software consumption scales. It doesn't scale costlessly, because "you have to make continual changes to it, either because people are submitting changes back to it, but also because software degrades over time. Knowledge degrades over time. You can't just release something once and be done with it."

Notes and transcript at futureofcoding.org/episodes/31

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How do we maintain millions of lines of code? For example, the Social Security Administration has 60-million-lines of COBOL. James Koppel is building tools to help tame these kinds of beasts. His current work is on decreasing the costs to build developer tools by allowing the same tool to work on a variety of languages.

James Koppel is a Carnegie Mellon CS grad, Thiel Fellow, entrepreneur, educator, and currently PhD student at MIT. We talk about his experience withprogram repair, program sythesis, code comprehension, and many other cutting-edge fields relevant to the future of software engineering.

Transcript and episode notes: futureofcoding.org/episodes/30

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My research recap episodes are back! This is the first I've recorded since the end of 2017. I discuss my new mentor-mentee relationship with Jonathan Edwards, my upcoming new paper on functional reactive programming, my move to London, my longer-term goals, and other various musings about abstractions, monads, and data ninja playgrounds.

futureofcoding.org/reflections/13

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Many of you have heard about Dynamicland, Bret Victor's new project. Omar Rizwan comes on the podcast this week to tell us all about it. He recently wrote an amazing write up about it, [Notes from Dynamicland: Geokit](https://rsnous.com/posts/notes-from-dynamicland-geokit/), that I'd highly reccomend to everyone interested in the future of computing.

futureofcoding.org/episodes/28

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David K Piano is bringing explicit software modeling to the web with his xstate library. He gives talks around the world about statecharts, and is cooking up a new SaaS service that will help developers model and understand their application using statecharts. In this conversation, David and I discuss the benefits of declarative languages, such as CSS, the principle of least power,  musical notation, and Facebook Origami.

futureofcoding.org/episodes/27

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Glen Chiacchieri has worked at the MIT Media Lab on Scratch, at Dynamicland with Bret Victor, and is now becoming a psychotherapist. He's known for his Legible Mathematics essay, his Flowsheets programming prototypes, and the Laser Socks game, among many other projects.

In this conversation, we discuss:

• how he grounds his research in compassion,
• the tradeoffs between working on the "model vs UI" of programming,
• his software-company-in-the-making, based on Flowsheets,
• our shared dream for the future of open-source READMEs,
• and how Dynamicland does and does not point towards the future.

The notes for this conversation can be found at futureofcoding.org/episodes/26.

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Kevin Lynagh is a designer specializing in user interfaces for complex systems. He co-created Subform, a CAD-inspired UI design tool, with Ryan Lucas, which got a thousand backers on Kickstarter. He recently created Sketch.systems, an interactive playground for designing system behavior using Statecharts (hierarchical state machines).

In this conversation, we discuss direct manipulation, Statecharts, challenges of layout engines, visual programming languages, the Clojure community, constraint systems, and the three different types of programmers.

futureofcoding.org/episodes/25

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Do you hate Makefiles and YAML config files? Do you feel your soul slowly dying as you wait for your tests to run? Do you yearn for even-more-continuous integration?

Nick Santos, the CTO and founder of Windmill Engineering, is here to help. Windmill's a cloud-based build-system that intelligently runs your relevant tests in the cloud, in parallel on every file save. How's that for a tight feedback loop?

futureofcoding.org/episodes/24

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Brent Yorgey is a professor of math and CS at Hendrix College. He studys functional programming in Haskell, type systems, and category theory, and more. He is the creator of the diagrams vector graphics Haskell library. He taught Introduction to Haskell and The Art of Recursion at the University of Pennslyvaia (which were my two favorite classes in college!).

In this conversation, we talk about Brent’s Monad Tutorial Fallacy essay, type systems, FRP, essential vs accidental complexity in Haskell, and the perils of reading academic CS papers and ways to overcome them.

http://futureofcoding.org/episodes/23

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Philip Guo researches ways to scale programming education beyond the classroom. He is the creator of Python Tutor (http://pythontutor.com/), a widely-used code visualization and collaborative learning platform, and an assistant professor at UC San Diego. In this episode, we discuss why diverse groups of people study CS, his various prototypes, and the differences between technological research and industry.

http://futureofcoding.org/episodes/22

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