Good Code Podcast

We talk to Harminder Virk, author and maintainer of AdonisJS, a Node.js framework highly focused on developer ergonomics, stability and confidence. We talk about writing frameworks and libraries with a focus on developer experience, first principle thinking and the ecosystem around Node.js development.

We talk to Brent Bradbury, Head of Software at STOKE Space Technologies, about writing code for re-usable rockets. Brent offers a unique contrast on how building enterprise SaaS is different from building software that goes on a rocket.

STOKE is a rocket company that delivers satellites directly to their final orbit at 20x lower cost. They do this using 100% reusable rockets designed to fly daily.

We talk to Badri Rajasekar about how engineering practices differ in large teams vs. small teams; the role automation plays in ensuring good code quality, and how a Microsoft executive stormed into the room with a baseball bat when a Windows build broke!

Badri has spent almost 20 years building software now. He started his career working at companies like Microsoft and then became the CTO of Tokbox in 2014, where he led the core WebRTC based streaming video cloud platform. He's now the founder and CEO of Jamm, a video collaboration app that helps you work better with your teammates remotely.

We talk to Cheuk Ting Ho about her experience in coming from academia to working in an open-source company and building a community of contributors, code review practices in the TerminusDB project, and the importance of communication while building a healthy open-source community.

Cheuk spent 5 years researching theoretical physics at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, before moving to build a career in data science. She's worked with a bunch of startups before joining TerminusDB, where she's working on building a revolutionary graph database. She's contributed to a number of open-source projects, such as Pandas, Keras, scikit-learn. She also maintains a bunch of popular open-source libraries of her own and has been on the organizing team of many meetup groups and conferences, like EuroPython.

We talk to Timothy Chen (@tnachen) about how large open-source projects like Apache Mesos, Kafka, Spark, among others manage code reviews, and contrast the different processes and rigor set by the maintainers. We discuss how finding a balance in the strictness and the scope of the code reviews is important as a new project tries to attract new contributors, and discuss examples from projects who have done this well — in addition to those who have not. We also discuss the Broken Window Theory of software maintenance. 

Timothy is a developer-turned-VC. In the past, he was the founder of HyperPilot and has served as the SVP of Tendermint, where he worked on the Cosmos blockchain SDK. He's been a prolific contributor to open-source, with associations to projects like Apache Mesos, Apache Spark, Apache Kafka, and Kubernetes. He's also a member of the Apache Software Foundation.

In this episode, we talk to Javed Khan (@tuxcanfly) about dev tooling and workflows, and the contrast between small and large teams in how developers collaborate. A pharmacy student turned software developer, Javed brings a unique perspective on how processes and tooling helped him learn the ropes fast during his first gig as a Python developer. We talk about the state of tooling in the Python and the Go ecosystems, and also about how the Lindy effect might govern backward compatibility.

Javed works at Handshake as a software developer. At Handshake, they're building a naming protocol that differs from its predecessors in that it has no concept of namespacing or subdomains at the consensus layer. Its purpose is currently not to replace all of DNS, but to replace the root zone file and the root servers.

In this episode, we talk to Shabda (@shabda) about the nuances of API design and how to think about things like URLs, implicitness vs. explicitness, and security when starting to build a new API from scratch. We also explore the differences in approach between REST and GraphQL API design, contrasting the choices one has to make for either of them.

Shabda is founder of Agiliq, a web and mobile application design consulting firm. In the past 10 years, Shabda has led his team to build applications and APIs for some of the world's largest organizations.