JUXT Cast

In this episode, JUXT’s CEO Jon Pither, CTO Malcolm Sparks, and Head of Delivery Joe Littlejohn, are joined by guest Software Engineer Jake Howard to engage in a thoughtful discussion on the enduring static vs dynamic typing debate. While static typing has long been a staple in programming, the conversation leans toward the growing appeal of dynamic typing in modern software practices.

The team explores how dynamic typing allows for quicker iteration, greater flexibility, and better adaptation to shifting project demands. They also take time to weigh the structure and reliability that static typing provides, making for a balanced look at both approaches.

Our guest is Niall Murphy, CEO of Stanza - a company founded by a group of experienced SREs with a vision to provide the tools, coding platform, culture and community to give any organization industry-leading reliability. Niall previously worked at Google where he co-authored the book "Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems" (2016).

In this podcast episode, we discussed Niall's extensive experience including his role within an important era for Google's infrastructure transformation beginning in the late 2000s, and the wider contemporary challenges in the SRE landscape.

Niall's reflections on operating distributed systems has lead him to the conclusion that there is still a profound missing gap in SRE tooling between discovering 'signals' and taking 'actions'.

The conversation begins by alluding to a couple of other recent podcasts we've recorded on distributed systems in 2024, one with Mark Burgess and the other with András Gerlits.

Happy listening!

In this podcast episode, JUXT CTO Malcolm Sparks, JUXT Head of Delivery Joe Littlejohn, and XTDB Head of Product Jeremy Taylor spoke with guest Mark Burgess, an independent researcher and writer.

Formerly a professor at Oslo University College in Norway and the creator of the CFEngine software and company, Mark was invited to write the foreward (https://sre.google/sre-book/foreword/) to Google's 2016 book: "Site Reliability Engineering - How Google runs production systems".

They discuss Mark's journey to developing Promise Theory and explored techniques to 'scale simplicity' in the creation of large, reliable systems. One common (yet false) assumption is that all components of a system can be trusted to be 100% reliable. This misconception can lead to costly workarounds in production.

They touch on the 'congruence' debate, considering whether and to what extent we should be concerned with the inherent inefficiencies in 'the automated building of things from scratch.'

They also discuss the counter-intuitive observation that digital systems are far more complex and less resilient than analog systems, and how this may be due to the absence of an error-correcting mechanism in digital systems to maintain equilibrium.

Please let us know if you have any points to add or if you were inspired by any part of the discussion. Happy listening!

Our guest is Lukas Eder, creator of jOOQ (https://jooq.org/) - a fluent Java API for SQL building and execution.

In this episode, JUXT Head of Product Jeremy Taylor and Lukas Eder discuss the often under-appreciated power and significance of SQL for developers, and how Lukas' jOOQ library helps Java developers sidestep the pitfalls of ORMs.

Lukas has been developing jOOQ since 2009 and has diligently supported many thousands of companies with their use of relational databases since then. He has written huge amounts of documentation and blogged extensively to advocate for SQL.

As mentioned during the introduction, the inspiration behind recording this episode was an excellent talk Lukas gave a few years ago titled "How Modern SQL Databases Come up with Algorithms that You Would Have Never Dreamed Of": https://www.youtube.com/embed/wTPGW1PNy_Y?si=hfxju9VPSfhlIb70.

Our guest is András Gerlits, founder of OmniLedger - a technology for simplifying distributed consistency across systems. In this episode we discussed the various interpretations of the idea of ‘consistency’ in software and technology more generally.

András has been developing OmniLedger for several years and has written about the many problems it attempts to solve on his blog. These problems include the basic challenges of database scaling, the issues that typically arise through the adoption of microservices, and the pitfalls of distributing transactions.

Since recording this episode, András has published a walkthrough of what ‘Observer-Centric Consistency’ looks like, by applying OmniLedger across a single database namespace that is transparently replicated across two federated instances of a Sprint Boot ‘Petclinic’ demo application.

At the end of the recording we mentioned the XT24 conference that took place in May - you can see a write up of that here. Please sign up to our newsletter in the footer of this page to be first to hear about our future conferences.

Our guest is Prof. Viktor Leis, a Full Professor in the Computer Science Department at the Technical University of Munich. His research revolves around designing high-performance data management systems and includes core database systems topics such as query processing, query optimization, transaction processing, index structures, and storage. [0]

In this episode we discussed a paper that Viktor recently co-authored with Thomas Neumann, titled "A Critique of Modern SQL And A Proposal Towards A Simple and Expressive Query Language", for CIDR 2024. [2] Beyond the specifics of SQL, many other topics are touched on also including: machine learning in the database, a critique of PostgreSQL, and the potential for massive performance gains in the world of practical database systems.

Notes:

[0] https://www.cs.cit.tum.de/dis/team/prof-dr-viktor-leis/

Beyond the headlines, this JUXTCast episode exposes the intricate challenges in managing and securing complex IT systems, providing a more detailed understanding of the Horizon scandal, and hopefully serving as a straightforward reminder for individuals and organizations to stay vigilant and proactive in ensuring the reliability and integrity of the technology that we use and trust.

The JUXT team — Malcolm Sparks (CTO), Joe Littlejohn (Head of Delivery) and Alex Davis (Senior Software Engineer) — were joined by Andras Gerlits, adding an important perspective to the conversation:

For more insights on this episode, please check out Malcolm's post: https://www.juxt.pro/blog/juxtcast-horizon/

In October 2023, Nathan Marz announced the Clojure API to Rama, a new programming platform for building distributed applications that was released last August.

Red Planet Labs revealed Rama for the first time by building and operating a Twitter-scale Mastodon instance that’s 100x less code than Twitter wrote to build the equivalent.

Soon after this announcement, we invited Nathan as a guest on the JUXTCast to find out more.

In this episode, we delve into some of the conceptual foundations of Rama, the influence the Clojure language has had on its design and discuss some of the many difficult problems Nathan and his team have had to solve in the course of developing Rama.

Not to be missed!

For more information about Rama and it's Clojure API, you can read this post on Red Planet Labs blog: "Introducing Rama’s Clojure API: build end-to-end scalable backends in 100x less code".

In this episode, JUXT Head of Delivery, Joe Littlejohn, is joined by JUXT software engineers Aaron Knauf and Mariusz Saternus to talk Platform Engineering, and their experiences delivering effective developer platforms in large tech organisations.

Link to Jeremy Taylor's webinar "Bitemporality and the Art of Maintaining Accurate Databases" — as mentioned by Joe at the top of the episode.

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In this episode, Jeremy Taylor, James Henderson, and Malcolm Sparks are joined by Kent Beck to discuss programming, bitemporality, and the state of Agile.

For more insights, please visit this post about the podcast.