Regular Programming

How do people learn about licenses?

If you entered into software in a certain way, it's easy to assume that everyone is a part-time license attorney. But how do other people pick up license knowledge? And what does one really need to know?

Licenses underpin open source but seem kind of dull. But they are also a cool and special thing about the software industry.

Lars provides his licenses 101 thoughts and looks forward to becoming open source grandpa.

Links

• GPL
• BSD license
• MIT license
• Apache license
• LGPL
• AGPL - Affero license
• OSI
• Open source licenses tried in court
• Source-available
• Cockroach
• BSL - business source license
• FOSDEM
• Oxide & friends on how they handle the CockroachDB thing
• Forking
• Terraform
• Opentofu
• Elasticsearch
• Opensearch
• Redis
• Valkey
• The Redis-Valkey-story
• The XZ backdoor
• Andres Freund - The Microsoftie who found the issue
• Visual studio code
• VSCodium
• Gitpod
• code-server
• Embrace, extend, extinguish
• Docker
• Podman
• Hashicorp
• Salt
• Ansible
• Terraform
• Stallman
• Compis
• Apple II
• MySQL
• CLA - contributor license agreement
• Kelsey Hightower
• VLC
• Winamp
• Slackware
• Debian
• Coding freedom - book by Gabriella Coleman (full PDF)
• FreeBSD
• Ideell förening
• Moomin dad
• Snufkin
• Pettson
• Jussi Björling
• Gramophone player

Everyone's favorite idempotent podcast returns to discuss learning new languages and concepts. Can mixing and matching new concepts and syntax help or hinder language adoption? A new concept but a familiar syntax might make a language easier for all the drifting Javascript developers to grab on to.

Lars considers picking up a lisp at some point.

It's harder to pick up new languages when you're mainly keen on building. Lars is very much in a building phase. He has problems, but they are his problems.

Lars is currently learning - among other things - by working with other people, putting himself out there, and arranging a conference.

Links

• Alan Perlis
• A language that does not affect the way you're thinking is not worth knowing
• Domain-specific languages
• Rails
• Phoenix
• Elixir
• Erlang
• Prolog
• Gleam
• Elm
• The CodeBEAM Gleam keynote by Hayleigh Thompson and Louis Pilfold is not out in video form yet
• Ant (the build system)
• Bash
• XLST - Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations
• Xquery
• SAX parser
• SweetXml
• Exercism course on Gleam
• Lustre web framework
• Sprocket web framework - Gleam-style implementation of Liveview
• OTP
• AtomVM
• Cardputer
• REPL - read-eval-print loop
• NIF
• GHC - the Haskell compiler
• Lua
• Dave Lucia and Robert Virding talking about Lua on the BEAM - also not out in video form yet
• The Konami code
• Uiua
• ZFS
• Evan - creator of Elm - in Kodsnack 604
• Smalltalk
• Pony

Wherein the wonders of C are explored.

But first, let Andreas tell you what's so great about Chalmers' approach to teaching computer engineering. Spoiler: starting with Haskell, close to math.

The tooling around C: cultural mystery meat.

Lars tries out a shocking plan for a productive framework for C!

It's very cool to be able to just poke memory. Memory, arrays, structs, and strings are discussed. Strings are a bundle of fun. Arrays are desugared.

Finally, a dive into the wonderful world of interoperability, both with and without C directly involved.

Links

• Rust
• C
• D latches
• Gymnasiet - roughly upper secondary school or high school
• C++
• Autotools
• Autoconf
• Linux from scratch
• Slackware
• Debian
• Makefiles
• Bash
• GNU Make
• Buildroot
• Cmake
• Zig
• TOML
• Isaac who does Zigler for Elixir
• POSIX
• Win32 API:s
• Libuv
• SIMD
• B-tree
• Redis
• Erlang NIF
• Cocoa - the wild Elixir community member integrating stuff
• OpenCV
• Pythonx - run Python from within Elixir
• Lua
• Luerl
• LFE - Lisp flavoured Erlang
• Fennel - lispier Lua
• Chicken Scheme

What is functional programming?

Andreas grabs his whiteboard and his Turing machine, and starts from laziness, while Lars thinks of immutability, functions, and data.

Is syntax important for being functional or not?

The functionalness of various languages are delved into, from Haskell to Rust via Python, Go, and Ruby. And, of course, the evil version of Elixir.

A good pipeline can be really nice.

Oh, and you shouldn't use witchcraft anymore.

Links

• Functional programming
• Haskell
• Lazy evaluation
• Lambda calculus
• Turing machines
• Alonzo Church
• Gödel - "A German guy" who formalized the definition general recursive functions
• Immutability
• Pure functions
• Witchcraft
• Continuation passing
• Partial application
• Currying
• The ML language family
• Why the lucky stiff
• Sam Aaron
• Sonic pi
• Roc
• Clojure
• AST - abstract syntax tree
• UV
• The UV company: Astral
• Memoization
• Singleton

Lars wants a less demanding way to prepare for giving talks, but he doesn't have the time right now.

Andreas knows a cheat code for public speaking. Lars uses slides like a blunt instrument.

How should you wield your slides? How do you weigh information content against entertainment value? Should you try to reach precisely everyone with your talk? Many slides, or few? Lars has the questions, and some of the answers, at least for himself.

Last but not least, Lars reveals his current way of preparing for talks. It ideally involves getting quite bored.

Links

• Proof of Andreas speaking in public
• Sverok
• Beamer - write your slides in LaTeX
• Lars' Gigcity Elixir talk
• José Valim
• Chris McCord
• Øredev
• Lars' Øredev talk
• Lars Lisbon talk - Lively LiveView
• Code BEAM Berlin
• Jon Carstens
• Null modem
• Erlang clusters
• Wireguard
• Open source summit
• Another brick in the wall

What are people talking about when they talk about developer experience? Pretty colors in the terminal?

What is worth improving, what is not? Lars has thoughts about all of developer experience, not least the one of Nerves. How flaky do you accept, for how fast?

Revealed: why all Andreas' Elm programs are one line long.

Also: Why not attend the Øredev developer conference in Malmö this November? 

Links

• DX - developer experience
• Elm
• Language server
• Elixir's brand new official language server team unifies the work of the previous separate teams
• The Elm language server
• Mix - Elixir build tool
• Nerves
• NervesHub
• Nerves Cloud
• Buildroot
• Vintage - network configuration and management for Nerves devices
• REPL - Read-evaluate-print loop
• Ccache
• IEx - Elixir's interactive shell
• Hyllie
• Øredev
• Yocto
• SKF
• Bredbandsbolaget
• NervesHubLink
• OTP
• Smalltalk
• Lisp machines
• Beam Radio
• Bryan Hunter
• Rebar3

Andreas' place of work ceased to exist.

It was mostly a relief.

The main worry is about resting and recovering enough before whatever comes next begins. All the learnings about how not to do certain things live on.

The right way of doing those things still remains to be learned.

Lars is on the other end of the spectrum: beginning completely new things. Figuring out where exactly Delaware is, finding a Nerves-shaped Elixir hole, wading through Python scripts, and so much more.

Also: Why not attend the Øredev developer conference in Malmö this November? 

Links

• Lönegaranti - wage guarantee
• Uppsägningstid - notice period
• Aria
• Hyllie
• Øredev
• Frank Hunleth talking about Nerves
• Nerves
• Raspbian
• Raspberry pi 3
• Raspberry pi zero
• Adafruit
• Inky pHAT e-ink display
• Lars' ported Inky library
• Buildroot
• Yocto
• NervesHub
• Josh Kalderimis
• Travis CI
• Nerves Cloud
• Milwaukee
• Delaware
• Stripe Atlas
• Heartbleed
• Shellshock
• Stagefright
• Row hammer
• CrowdStrike
• Flickswitch
• SmartRent

CRUD - a classic term among supposedly simple web apps. But, not always the right move? Not always all that mappable to the actual problem?

Discussed: picking spicy architectures, non-CRUD data storage needs, slovely solutions, dirty refunds, and doing the OAuth dance.

Hey, thing happened!

Finally: a story where pubsub was reasonable, and some telemetry.

Links

• CRUD - Create, read, update, delete
• Django
• Ruby on rails
• Phoenix
• Ash
• RethinkDB
• Mnesia
• Plausible analytics
• Timescale
• Clickhouse
• Nervesconf
• Alex McLain
• Nerves
• CubDB
• RocksDB
• DynamoDB
• The DynamoDB paper
• Ecto
• OAuth

Embedded is a weird thing. Lars is all Nerves and tries to explain and report from a world where people know part numbers off the top of their heads. The physical device missing is rarely a thing that happens in web development.

Embedded-style work can sneak into other areas as well. Without a root file system, everything is a lot more secure. Security is a deep topic in general, and WPA is not just for wifi.

Andreas shares his view of what "embedded" means, plus the story of building a really bad audio cable.

Links

• Raspberry pi
• Nerves
• Frank Hunleth
• Threadripper
• Coral TPU
• Tensor processing units
• AI kit for Raspberry pi 5
• Lars' Nervesconf talk is not out yet
• TI AM625
• Zephyr
• Real-time operating system
• HAL - hardware abstraction layer
• HAL 9000
• Oxide
• Arm Trustzone
• Buildroot
• Linux from scratch
• Alpine
• Wolfi
• Vintagenet
• wpa_supplicant
• Eduroam
• 802.1x
• PAP MS-CHAP
• EAP
• EAP-TLS
• Orangepi
• Get secrets by shooting lasers at security chips
• Nonce
• HMAC

Andreas is a man of many hobbies. Interviewing for example. But sometimes, you get strange questions from strange people, end up feeling scared, or start lying just a bit. Then, perhaps, you tell the story of a bug. Perhaps we shouldn't work during the winter?

Lars doesn't have interviews. More like sales calls. H§e shares his experiences of how to recruitment, both as part of interviews and as a more straightforward recruiter.

Finally: the secret to everything Lars does.

Links

• Percy Nilegård
• Hiring Processes with Gergely Orosz - Oxide and Friends (podcast)
• The Indiana Jones switch
• Gigcity Elixir
• Lars' conference report
• Chattanooga
• Nerves
• Amazon Aurora
• Rewriting the Technical Interview