We chat with James Mickens, researcher and most likely funniest man at Microsoft, live on stage during Øredev 2014. Topics include C development, the purity of incrementation, death by specifications, scandinavian death metal and its font choices and also British football, distributed systems and the problems you encounter dealing with them. The downsides of being stuck alone in a set of universes is that Stack overflow can’t help you. And how should we fix the Javascript and web browser technology world?

Comments on the internet? No.

This recording exists as good as it is thanks to Stephen Chin of nighthacking.com for providing and masterfully wrangling all the necessary technology.

Comments, thoughts or suggestions? Discuss this episode at Techworld!

Links

• Freedom fries
• Microsoft research
• Distributed systems
• James’ talk at Øredev 2014
• Handling the zombie apocalypse - James’ article “The night watch”
• James’ talk at Monitorama 2014
• Satya Nadella - CEO of Microsoft
• Nuclear proliferation
• Segfault
• Logical shift
• Logical AND
• Malmö
• Logical OR
• W3C - World wide web consortium
• Web components
• Web components templates
• Gorgoroth
• Fibonacci
• Factorial
• Fizz buzz
• Sepultura
• King diamond
• British steel
• Notepad
• Web workers
• Crom - James’ system for speculative Javascript execution
• Speculative execution
• Total recall
• Firebug
• Galactus
• Odin
• The Shellshock bug
• Turtles all the way down
• Jquery
• Angular
• XHR
• MDN - Mozilla developer network, great source of Javascript and browser API documentation
• Git
• The grandfather paradox
• Polyfill
• asm.js
• NoSQL
• Mongodb
• Bare metal
• Just in time compiler
• Maslow’s hierarchy of needs
• let-satement
• Zeus
• Quirksmode.org
• Yo
• Leviticus
• Registry
• ASCII art
• About:config
• Max TCP connections
• Shockwave
• Singularity
• DVR - Digital video recorder
• Futures
• Bendgate
• Captain America’s shield
• Georgia
• Tomfoolery
• 4chan
• Huge sloths

Titles

• This is just Hollywood stuff
• We’ll edit this out with CGI
• What happens on the set
• #freedom #america
• What prevents me from being a happy person in life
• It cheapens the art
• Homelessness is bad too
• At least you have hope
• Do you like iteration?
• I only increment variables
• Only go forward
• Black Gandalf
• Not just fair or balanced
• Otto von Hyphen
• We laugh to stop from crying
• Darkness is delightful
• The great thing about scandinavian death metal
• What would Beelzebub do?
• That TV is in the cloud now
• Like jazz musicians
• Like trying to write Inception 2
• The left hand of satan
• Multiple speculative universes
• What universe am I in?
• A low-rent Stephen Hawking
• Firebug had no notion of my separate universes
• The Odin object
• In the regular development world
• Chicanery all the way down
• Function calls are not our strong point
• Not nothing will happen
• XHR:s over passenger pidgeon
• LOL I took a hard dependency on it
• It’s very difficult to make a joke in this space
• We don’t even issue writes
• devnulldb
• But we have hoverboards
• Tread carefully on the polyfills
• Close the tab and reboot the machine
• This is such a character builder
• Mumblefoo.js
• Fast Javascript, and cancer
• No-lock cancer
• Asynchronous cancer
• That kitten on a tradmill is not going to watch itself
• Another special type of disaster
• Folk wisdom on the web
• 127i content
• Emu futures
• If I had a website, I’d run it like Singapore
• Every computer should come with an old person
• This whole alternate semantic reality