After an unplanned two week hiatus, the Magpie Talkshow is back. The break was due to a bunch of craziness going on which I'll hopefully let you know about soon, but I'm hoping from here on out we can get back to an episode a week.

Aside from Øredev being a generally great conference, it was also my most successful in managing to grab people for interviews. This week in the second interview from that conference I'm chatting to Håkan Jonsso about data science.

Håkan is a researcher working on Sony's Lifelog project, which aims to help you collect data about yourself to build insights. The sensitive nature of the data involved with Lifelog puts Håkan in an interesting position with regards to the privacy of the data collected, a subject we explore at some length, especially the role of ongoing informed consent.

We also try and tease apart the distinction between data science and data engineering, explore why terms & conditions are pretty useless in building trust with your users, and talk about some of the tools Håkan uses in his work.

I do have to put in my oft-used disclaimer here around the quality of the recording. We chatted in what I thought was a deserted restaurant at a nearby hotel only to find that not only was there piped music which is way more audible in the recording that I'd hoped but that there was also a lot of noise coming from the restaurant's kitchen. Hopefully it doesn't impact too much on your enjoyment of the episode though!

During the interview Håkan mentoned a tutorial on how to access your data from Lifelog which you can find here: http://developer.sonymobile.com/2015/07/28/app-developers-can-now-explore-lifelog-user-predictability-with-data-science-and-machine-learning/

He also mentioned Animashree Anandkumars work on Tensors which you can find here: http://newport.eecs.uci.edu/anandkumar/. On the subject of tensors, since Håkan and I chatted Google have released their Tensorflow library which is worth looking at if the subject interests you: https://www.tensorflow.org/.

If you'd like to know more about Håkan's work with Lifelog, his presentation from Øredev is available below now: https://vimeo.com/144721448

And finally you can follow Håkan at Twitter on @hajons

This episode is a week later than planned, due to me being on holiday. Good for me, not so good for all of you I'm afraid! It'll be weekly from here on out I hope, and I'll get better at letting you know if they'll be any interruptions in service. Anyway, on with the episode details.

I had the chance to visit SoundCloud's Berlin HQ last year, and sat down with Kristof Adriaenssens, an engineer in their Core Engineering team. Among other things he contributes to a project called Zipkin, a distributed tracing tool. We talk about Zipkin itself, the general challenges of managing microservices at scale, and some of the solutions that they have come up with at SoundCloud to handle the complexities.

For more on the Zipkin project: http://zipkin.io/index.html

Brave, the Zipkin Java library: https://github.com/openzipkin/brave

You can follow Kristof over at twitter as @KristofAdr

Or see his Github account at https://github.com/kristofa

I got to record a number of great interviews at Øredev in Sweden late last year. Amy's was the third, but due to slightly confusing reasons on my side, is actually the first to get released.

Amy is a software engineer in test at Songkick, who has been helping the delivery organisation there make the journey towards continuous delivery. We talk about many, many things, including the value of parent pester power, why university courses with sandwich (work placement) years are a good idea, he different types of testing, and how to adopt continuous delivery.

Amy on Twitter: @itjustbroke

Amy’s Blog: https://testingthemind.wordpress.com/ -

A recent presentation, 'Testing in a Continuous Delivery World': https://vimeo.com/95185769

Amy’s involvement with the Weekend Testing group: http://weekendtesting.com/?page_id=3515

Finally, the name of the Jason Huggins angry-birds playing robot I mentioned is Tapsterbot. Jason actually has a new venture up and running looking to build more of these, and you can see lots of fun videos of them in action here: https://t.co/ADFi5Maqeg

Many of you have probably heard of my colleague Martin Fowler before. I'm lucky enough to get to work with him on occasion as part of my role on ThoughtWorks' Technology Advisory Board, which is an internal body inside ThoughtWorks itself. One of our main jobs is putting out the twice yearly Technology Radar, and I was in our New York office recently to work on the new version when Martin and I found time to catch up for a chat.

Recorded in a rather cozy room, we talked about many things, including how Martin got where he is today, how the tech radar is created, and even the future of computing books.

During the interview we reference quite a few things, so there are a bunch of links for further reading if you're so inclined:

- Martin On Twitter: https://twitter.com/martinfowler

- Toby Clemson's Infodeck on Testing Microservices: http://martinfowler.com/articles/microservice-testing/

- Martin's early writing (late 90's): http://martinfowler.com/tags/distributed%20computing%20magazine.html

- Recent refactoring articles: http://martinfowler.com/tags/refactoring.html

- General microserservices resources: http://martinfowler.com/microservices/

- Infodeck on future of data: http://martinfowler.com/articles/bigData/

- Anti-pattern: http://martinfowler.com/bliki/AntiPattern.html

- Feature branches: http://martinfowler.com/bliki/FeatureBranch.html

- Taking responsibility for what we build: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8aECe4lp44

And the latest version of the tech radar can be found here: (https://www.thoughtworks.com/radar)

In a change to the normal schedule, rather than releasing episodes in the strict order in which they were recorded I've instead brought forward one of my most recent interviews. In Episode 9 of the Magpie Talkshow, I talk to security consultant, blogger and pluralsught author Troy Hunt.

In the interview, recorded at Yow 2015, Troy and I discuss a number of security breaches, including the recent VTech hacking incident which happened in late 2015. Given the recency of the events we covered, I thought it made sense to pull this episode forward.

Troy discusses his involvement with the VTech situation, as well as his work with Have I Been Pwned? A site which helps you understand if your information may have been compromised in a data breach. Along the way we find time to discuss including ethical hacking, how not to store passwords, why a pineapple might be a hackers best friend and the success he's been having with Pluralsight. I hope you enjoy it!

You can read Troy's blog here: http://www,troyhunt.com/

Follow him at Twitter: https://twitter.com/troyhunt

Check out Have I Been Pwned? https://haveibeenpwned.com

And finally see his recent pluralsight video courses: http://app.pluralsight.com/author/troy-hunt

Microservices have been a focus of mine for the last few years, and one of the trickiest problems in this area is how to ensure that when you change one service that you don't break other, collaborating services. While working as a Consultant for Dius at REA in Australia, Beth helped create an internal project called Pact to help solve this problem. Now an open source project in its own right, Beth and I discuss what Pact is and the problems it solves.

We also found time to talk about why Ruby (and specifically Rails) might not be the right choice for that next giant codebase, why we keep making the same mistakes over and over again, and even discover that Beth was one of the few people not using Logo to draw rude words during school programming classes.

You can find Beth on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/bethesque

Details on the project she helps lead, Pact: https://github.com/realestate-com-au/pact

And if you're interested in learning more, this video from Yow 2014 gives a great overview of how REA moved to microservices and the role that Pact played: https://yow.eventer.com/yow-2014-1222/the-odyssey-from-monoliths-to-microservices-at-realestate-com-au-by-beth-skurrie-and-evan-bottcher-and-jon-eaves-1751

Brian Sletten has long been passionate about the semantic web, and I was fortunate enough to catch up with him at UberConf 2015 in Denver, Colorado. We talk about why the early promise of the semantic web didn't materialise at the time (and why it now may be coming into it's own), why XML may be a terrible way to view graphs, and even touch on the problems with encryption.

You can follow Brian on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/bsletten

And see some of his previous talks: http://nofluffjuststuff.com/conference/speaker/brian_sletten

You can also read up on JSON-LD here: http://json-ld.org/

Finally, Brian has a bunch of reading & presentations out there if you're interested in exploring some of his ideas on the semantic web further:

Caring Doesn't Scale - https://www.oreilly.com/ideas/caring-doesnt-scale

A Webinar on JSON-LD - http://www.dataversity.net/smartdata-webinar-json-ld/

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/wa-data-integration-at-scale_rdf/

And a series of articles on using RDF and associated technology to create webs of data - https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/wa-data-integration-at-scale_sparql/,

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/wa-data-integration-at-scale_linked-data/index.html, http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/wa-data-integration-at-scale-OSLC-and-the-linked-data-platform/index.html and

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/wa-data-integration-at-scale-oslc/index.html

Simon Brown is a freelance author, consultant and trainer based on Jersey in the channel islands. I've known Simon for a while, and we caught up at Devoxx Poland earlier this year.

Simon's focus for the last few years has been on helping people articulate their architectures, and come up with sensible abstractions to make it easy to share them. This is represented in his work on the C4 Model, in his book Software Architecture For Developers, and a new venture, an online tool to help you generate and roundtrip architecture diagrams from code.

Aside from talking about architecture diagrams, we also talk a little about Jersey, self-publshing books, and manage to not mention Bergerac once.

Simon's Website: http://www.simonbrown.je/

The C4 model: https://www.voxxed.com/blog/2014/10/simple-sketches-for-diagramming-your-software-architecture/

Structurizr: https://structurizr.com/

Software Architecture For Developers: https://leanpub.com/software-architecture-for-developers

His new book, The Art Of Visualising Software Architecture: https://leanpub.com/visualising-software-architecture

David Pollack it turns out has done many things. He wasn't just born before the internet, he saw the internet being built. Since then he created the Lift framework for Scala, discovered Clojure, and can now be seen playing with Docker.

In one of the longer episodes so far, our conversation also takes in types, docker security, and why minecraft might be the spectrum or commodore64 of the 21st century. Trust me, it makes more sense when you listen to it...

David's blog can be found at: http://blog.goodstuff.im/, and you can follow him as @dpp on Twitter. His talk on Docker and Weave at Devoxx Poland can be found here: https://www.parleys.com/tutorial/security-platform-service-docker-weave.

The Docker and Security talk I mention during the interview was by Jen Andre at Velocity 2015, and was titled "Operating Docker securely for fun and profit".

Some people love their job, and Irina is clearly one of them. Coming into computing via a somewhat unconventional route, Irina spent a long time with Java before discovering Erlang, which as you can tell from our discussion is something of a passion of hers! We talk about What caused her to switch from Java to Erlang, whether or not Elixir could be the killer app for Erlang, and why you should always let kids play with robots.

Regarding Elixir, we talk towards the end of the interview about good books to read on the subject. Irina mentioned afterwards that she would recommend starting with "Programming Elixir" by Dave Thomas, and perhaps following that up with "Metaprogramming Elixir" by Chris McCord.

You can follow Irina on Twitter at https://twitter.com/irina_guberman. She was also speaking at City Code Chicago recently - the video should be available soon - check http://chicago.citycode.io/irina-guberman.html for details. If you can't wait for that, her talk from NDC Oslo "Maximizing throughput on Multicore Systems" is already available online at https://vimeo.com/131642358.