Fredrik chats with Dave Jones of Podcast index - a new open podcast directory and API, and also one of the drivers of a new podcasting namespace for RSS.

Podcasting as infrastructure has not advanced much at all in a long time. Dave, Adam and Podcast index wants to preserve podcasting as free and distributed, and also advance what the ecosystem can be - such as providing value.

The namespace contains down-to-earth things such as chapters and location tags, but also much more ambitious ideas. Part of the vision is to reimagine podcasting as a platform of value where listeners can more easily and naturally support not only podcasters, but also app developers and anyone else who might be involved. This is where the value tag and cryptocurrencies enter the picture.

We also discuss programming languages a bit - what it takes to entice you to really get into a programming language. Perhaps the specific languages we use are no longer as critical as they used to be?

How hard is it to set up your own podcast directory? Not that hard, says David, but keeping it within a sane budget can take some balancing. And if everyone supported Websub things wouldn’t be nearly as tricky.

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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 chats with Sara Vieira about The Opinionated Guide to React - the guide to making all the choices React doesn’t make for you (plus hooks). We talk about the magic train ride from Prague which led to the creation of the book, what the writing and publication process was like, and of course about the surprising and horrific code Sara uses to create the final book files. We also discuss MC:ing conferences, what happens when world events explode all over your writing, finding your voice, and making the most of your Grammarly plan.

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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.

Paul Frazee returns to discuss the evolution of Beaker - the peer-to-peer browser for web hackers. Just released as a public beta, Beaker has gone through a lot of changes since October when we last chatted. Paul tells us about what Beaker is and some of the important concepts, such as feeds, the file system, and starting to create things on top of them.

On the surface, Beaker looks like a standard web browser with some unusual buttons, but just below the UI there’s a lot of peer-to-peer technology, a serverless model of the web where you can just as easily edit, add, and remix as you can browse.

Beaker feels like a tool to make the web open and easily editable - something anyone can pick up and start hacking on without strange hurdles of server setups, package management, hosting fees, and build scripts.

We also talk about the very iterative and open development process of Beaker, and the high value of user testing. Paul talks about some of the many interesting problems left to solve, and the reasons why they’re better solved later.

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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 at Øredev 2019, Fredrik talks to Nate Ebel about special cases in programming - like the importance of performance when it comes to drawing. Then we discuss automation - also the topic of Nate’s talk at the conference. Code review should be an enjoyable thing! Nate discusses how to use tools to automate away all the little things you might want to check during development - such as how the size of the built app changes. As a bonus, it’s hard to get mad at a picky bot.

We also discuss the importance and difficulty of taking the extra step and making your automation really turnkey, instead of something you set up once and then forgot to maintain or make easy for others to use.

We talk about the book Nate just (at the time of the interview) wrote on Kotlin. We discuss both the approach and contents of the book, and also the process of actually writing the book.

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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 at Øredev 2019, Fredrik talks to Marianne Bellotti; keynote speaker, software anthropologist and frequent modernizer of legacy systems.

We start our discussion talking about modernizing old yet mission critical systems, while they’re still being used, without breaking everything. “Legacy” might invoke ancient software, but even a young system can have a lot of legacy which has not been updated in a surprisingly long time. From there we move on to code as the new pottery shards - coming to understandsing software from a perspective of anthropology - it’s a surprisingly natural and interesting way to approach legacy systems.

We also talk about mindmapping and knowledge transfer, how to teach people to think like that amazing code reviewer instead of asking the reviewer all the time.

Finally, we talk about how and why people feel the need to back their ideas up with research, or not, and how an idea can run away from you and suddenly become truth just because you happened to package it well.

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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 at Øredev 2019, Fredrik talks to Stephanie Gasche, who decided to use her skills from the agile software development world to make the larger world better.

Stephanie started thinking about wanting to make a positivt impact, and how in many consulting jobs you can give a lot without getting to see a big-picture impact of your work. The refugee movement in 2014-2016 made her realize this was an area where she could make an impact. She started working helping refugees arriving in Austria, and eventually realized something really missing was one good single starting point for refugees.

We also discuss why there are so few people doing similar things. It’s hard to get funding in general, and even harder if you don’t fit in specific enough slots that might have specific funding. Also: slow processes.

Also: how hitch-hiking can change the world.

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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 at Øredev 2019, Fredrik talks to Tomer Gabel. We start from Tomer’s talk about microservices, why the timing was right to do a microservices talk in the form of a retrospective, what is happening now, and how the answer to the question of whether you should go microservices has changed in the last few years. Tomer discusses how problems and solutions evolve, are commoditized and sometimes almost disappear as a concept (or gain new terminology to describe them). In the future, we might not be talking or thinking about microservices at all, but the concept may have evolved and adapted and actually form a basis for everything we do - technology becoming so central that we don’t even need to think about it anymore.

Also: it may not be worth it to migrate everything into the future. Common sense and judgement required, as always.

We discuss how many of the peculiarities of the software development industry may simply be because the industry is so young. Tomer thinks we as an industry will eventually figure things out and become a lot more settled down, and less exciting if you will. We should all be excited about being around in the industry right now, when there is so much freedom and so many things to do and try.

Is the software industry somewhat unique in being so much about sharing knowledge? And are we making the most out of our golden age?

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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 at Øredev 2019, Fredrik talks to Carmen Medina about affecting change in organizations. Carmen used to work at CIA, and talks about her work there as a heretic, working to affect changes at a theological level.

How can you get your ideas implemented without being in a position of power?

How can you sneak ideas through side doors?

Why might you consider digging into the beaurucratic sides of the organization?

And what do tug boat pilots have to do with all this?

Finally, we touch a bit on the challenges of promoting diversity and diversity of thought. Does your organization have a working agreement on how to disagree?

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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 at Øredev 2019, Fredrik talks to Azad Balabanian about virtual and augmented worlds. Azad works with photogrammetry - a process of capturing environments and objects for, among onther possibilities, use in VR and AR. He also hosts the Research VR podcast and dives deep into all aspects of virtual realities.

We start with discussing photogrammetry, how it works and what its challenges currently are for those wanting to get into scanning environments on top of just photographing or filming them.

Then we discuss how AR is or is not coming along and how to get a feel for what might be coming - by going to hardware conferences and piecing together what different companies are developing. AR has a lot of promise, but it is still a long way from being something you really could imagine wearing all day. There are promising initial use cases, but we are still looking for real consumer killer apps and hardware.

We then gradually move over into VR, games, good experiences and how room space and motion sickness are perhaps not the big problems people imagined at the start. Fredrik gets excited by how close most of us regular computer users may actually be to being able to work in VR.

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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 talks to Paul Frazee about Beaker browser and making the web more peer-to-peer rather than client-server. Beaker also aims to make it radically easier to create and publish your own content rather Paul explains what Beaker browser is and the technologies it builds on. The central piece of technology is the distributed file system Hyperdrive and the DAT protocol which provides a sort of file- and folder-based API for building applications and handling their data.

Paul discusses the hard problems of Beaker and P2P networks - such as deciding when and how you as a peer start to share something online in the system. Sharing everything all the time does not feel like the right solution to the problem. We also discuss how to think about things more like applications and dynamic web sites in the Beaker way.

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.