Kodsnack in English

Fredrik talks to Christian Clausen about the many facets of simplicity.

The cloud and serverless was supposed to be simpler than running your own hardware, but you easily get stuck trying to select the right message bus, needing to know the intricacies of your chosen cloud provider infrastructure, and the like. You end up building your software around the infrastructure you’ve ended up with - rather than picking infrastructure which is right for your software.

The CFO should not be the architect of the software.

Core values and principles - set them up, reflect on them, and notice and decide what to do when they are broken. Should the system change if its core principles are broken, or should the principles be updated to reflect reality? Christian argues simplicity should be a core principle, and very carefully considered and encouraged.

There are enough barriers already, even before you start adding complexity around the problems you’re trying to solve.

And hide the things you do pull in behind true abstractions which don’t leak all over the place.

Don’t ask what you can add, ask what you can postpone.

Generality adds complexity. The more often something changes, the more specific it should be.

Where are the tools which suggest more things to remove instead of things to add?

Thank you Cloudnet for sponsoring our VPS!

Comments, questions or tips? We a re @kodsnack, @tobiashieta, @oferlund and @bjoreman on Twitter, have a page on Facebook and can be emailed at [email protected] if you want to write longer. We read everything we receive.

If you enjoy Kodsnack we would love a review in iTunes! You can also support the podcast by buying us a coffee (or two!) through Ko-fi.

Fredrik talks to Jack Cheng - author and creator of the iPhone note capture app Bebop. Jack describes where Bebop came from and how he built it, and how and why Copilot and other AI tools became integral parts of the workflow.

Being aware of the maintenance cost of each decision, keeping things focused, avoiding building yourself into a bloated corner - sometimes even deciding certain things don’t belong in your app.

Coding on the side, needing to balance the time you have? Use it to your advantage!

Jack also talks about the other apps he uses for working with notes and writing, and how different apps feel right for different types of writing.

(Yes, Obsidian once again makes an appearance.)

Thank you Cloudnet for sponsoring our VPS!

Comments, questions or tips? We a re @kodsnack, @tobiashieta, @oferlund and @bjoreman on Twitter, have a page on Facebook and can be emailed at [email protected] if you want to write longer. We read everything we receive.

If you enjoy Kodsnack we would love a review in iTunes! You can also support the podcast by buying us a coffee (or two!) through Ko-fi.

Fredrik paid a visit to Hogia and got the opportunity to talk to Woody Zuill and Martin Lassbo about mob programming, innovation, and keeping an open and curious mind.

Mob programming is still new.

Every time you say “that can’t work”, you tend to be proven wrong eventually. Try it, for a year or two. You can’t evaluate things after trying it for just an hour or two, some things take much longer.

But do steer and adjust often.

How frequently do you want to steer? Short iterations are valuable in that they give us more opportunities to steer work in a good direction.

Standardization stifles innovation. Sometimes you do want it, but it depends on which space you’re in.

We had a process, but we still succeeded!

Where did the thought I have originate? All your thoughts started somewhere else. The things we most believe can hide our biggest mistakes.

Thank you Cloudnet for sponsoring our VPS!

Comments, questions or tips? We a re @kodsnack, @tobiashieta, @oferlund and @bjoreman on Twitter, have a page on Facebook and can be emailed at [email protected] if you want to write longer. We read everything we receive.

If you enjoy Kodsnack we would love a review in iTunes! You can also support the podcast by buying us a coffee (or two!) through Ko-fi.

Fredrik is again joined by Malin Sundberg and Kai Dombrowski for a review of attending this year’s WWDC, working with “AI”, and more.

The experience of attending - a lot about the great community.

Apple intelligence also leads naturally into a discussion on how everyone works with language models, copilots, and so on.

There is also some discussion of summer development plans, localization, and the snobbiest coffee country in the world.

Thank you Cloudnet for sponsoring our VPS!

Comments, questions or tips? We a re @kodsnack, @tobiashieta, @oferlund and @bjoreman on Twitter, have a page on Facebook and can be emailed at [email protected] if you want to write longer. We read everything we receive.

If you enjoy Kodsnack we would love a review in iTunes! You can also support the podcast by buying us a coffee (or two!) through Ko-fi.

Fredrik is joined by Malin Sundberg and Kai Dombrowski for a quick chat about the Deep dish Swift conference, the past and present of Mercury weather, their next app project, and what might happen at Apple’s WWDC in June.

The first big topic is the developer conference Deep dish Swift. Malin and Kai not only participated in the conference itself, but also created the Slices podcast, interviewing the speakers of the conference. How are indie developers different from each other, and why might it be a bad idea for Malin and Kai to do a regular podcast with Charlie Chapman?

We then dig into the evolution of Mercury weather since the last episode - especially the trip forecast feature. Yes: timezones were a big part of the challenge. The secret marketing advantage of having a Mac version of your IOS app.

Next Malin and Kai talk about their movie industry project - an app for planning shoot days for movies and TV. A project which has given them lots of insight into the quirks of a whole new industry, and made them see whole different things in movies they watch.

We revisit our use of VR for work and gaming. VR of course shades naturally into bringing Mercury to Vision pro - a quick process, but some interesting adjustments were required.

With WWDC fast approaching, we talk wishes and ideas. What would we like the Ipad to become? We do some interesting speculation about Apple’s coming focus on “AI” and how that might work together with apps. Fredrik should perhaps spend some time on his Mac app?

Finally, Malin and Kai reveal their summer project: a kanban-style workflow tracking app. Done with paper cuts!

Also: good deadlines. If Apple gives you one for free, you take it!

Thank you Cloudnet for sponsoring our VPS!

Comments, questions or tips? We a re @kodsnack, @tobiashieta, @oferlund and @bjoreman on Twitter, have a page on Facebook and can be emailed at [email protected] if you want to write longer. We read everything we receive.

If you enjoy Kodsnack we would love a review in iTunes! You can also support the podcast by buying us a coffee (or two!) through Ko-fi.

Fredrik is joined by Emil Privér and Leandro Ostera for a discussion of the OCaml ecosystem, and making it Saas-ready by building Riot.

First of all: OCaml. What is the thing with the language, and how you might get into it coming from other languages? The OCaml community is nice, interested in getting new people in, and pragmatic. And it has a nice mix of research and industry as well.

Then, Leandro tells us about Riot - an experiment in bringing everything good about the Erlang and Elixir ecosystems into OCaml. The goal? Make OCaml saas-ready. Riot is not 1.0 just yet, but an impressive amount has been built in just five(!) months.

Emil moves the discussion over to the mindset of shipping, and of finding and understanding good ideas in other places and picking them up rather than reinventing the wheel. Leandro highly recommends reading the code of other projects. Read and understand the code and solutions others have written, re-use good ideas and don’t reinvent the wheel more often than you really have to.

Last, but by no means least, shoutouts to some of the great people building the OCaml community, and a bit about Emil’s project DBCaml.

Thank you Cloudnet for sponsoring our VPS!

Comments, questions or tips? We a re @kodsnack, @tobiashieta, @oferlund and @bjoreman on Twitter, have a page on Facebook and can be emailed at [email protected] if you want to write longer. We read everything we receive.

If you enjoy Kodsnack we would love a review in iTunes! You can also support the podcast by buying us a coffee (or two!) through Ko-fi.

Fredrik is joined by Eric Normand for a discussion of debugging your ideas through domain modeling, using Eric’s concept of lenses to find more good questions to ask.

Eric is writing a book about domain modeling and has developed the concept of lenses - ways to look at various aspects of your domain, model, and code in order to better consider various solutions and questions.

Why? Because design is needed, but is easily lost in the modern urge to be fast and agile. There’s a lot you can and need do on the way to a working system. Eric pushes for design which is an integral part, perferably right in the code, rather than a separate one which can become outdated and separated without anyone noticing. Just spend a little more time on it.

Tricks for seeing your domain with fresher eyes.

Change is not always maximal and unpredictable! But thinking it is can lead to a lot of indirection and abstraction where a single if-statement could have sufficed for years.

Refactoring as a way of finding the seams in your model. What is the code actually supposed to do? How does it actually fit with the domain?

Recorded during Øredev 2023, where Eric gave two presentations about the topics discussed: Better software design with domain modeling and Stratified design and functional architecture.

Thank you Cloudnet for sponsoring our VPS!

Comments, questions or tips? We are @kodsnack, @tobiashieta, @oferlund and @bjoreman on Twitter, have a page on Facebook and can be emailed at [email protected] if you want to write longer. We read everything we receive.

If you enjoy Kodsnack we would love a review in iTunes! You can also support the podcast by buying us a coffee (or two!) through Ko-fi.

Fredrik has Matt Topol and Lars Wikman over for a deep and wide chat about Apache Arrow and many, many topics in the orbit of the language-independent columnar memory format for flat and hierarchical data. What does that even mean? What is the point? And why does Arrow only feel more and more interesting and useful the more you think about deeply integrating it into your systems?

Feeding data to systems fast enough is a problem which is focused on much less than it ought to be. With Arrow you can send data over the network, process it on the CPU - or GPU for that matter- and send it along to the database. All without parsing, transformation, or copies unless absolutely necessary.

Thank you Cloudnet for sponsoring our VPS!

Comments, questions or tips? We are @kodsnack, @tobiashieta, @oferlund and @bjoreman on Twitter, have a page on Facebook and can be emailed at [email protected] if you want to write longer. We read everything we receive.

If you enjoy Kodsnack we would love a review in iTunes! You can also support the podcast by buying us a coffee (or two!) through Ko-fi.

Recorded on-stage at Øredev 2023 just after her keynote, Fredrik chats to Diana Larsen about leadership and building good teams.

And everything doesn’t have to be a formal meeting with agendas and stuff.

Power dynamics - hard to percieve and to talk about. Even what location you are in can become part of the power dynamics and important to take into consideration.

Teams - they also exist on different levels. They don’t have to be static.

Thank you Cloudnet for sponsoring our VPS!

Comments, questions or tips? We are @kodsnack, @tobiashieta, @oferlund and @bjoreman on Twitter, have a page on Facebook and can be emailed at [email protected] if you want to write longer. We read everything we receive.

If you enjoy Kodsnack we would love a review in iTunes! You can also support the podcast by buying us a coffee (or two!) through Ko-fi.

Recorded on-stage at Øredev 2023 just after his keynote, Fredrik chats to Cyrus Clarke about plants, imagining things, exploring, and building. And not presenting speculative things as possible here right now. Daring to not be useful right now.

How to bridge the gap between theory and academia on one side and practice and industry wanting to build things right now? By example.

Do our short time scales and focus on iteration hurt us? Eighteen months sounds like an impossibly long timespan, because we think in two-week iterations of what we have and customers want right now.

Getting in touch with researchers. Adapt how you talk to people! Scientists and artists are very similar.

We are all at intersections between things.

Thank you Cloudnet for sponsoring our VPS!

Comments, questions or tips? We are @kodsnack, @tobiashieta, @oferlund and @bjoreman on Twitter, have a page on Facebook and can be emailed at [email protected] if you want to write longer. We read everything we receive.

If you enjoy Kodsnack we would love a review in iTunes! You can also support the podcast by buying us a coffee (or two!) through Ko-fi.