Matt stumbled across a famous John Carmack email from 2007 — the one where he asks his team to start thinking about inlining their functions — and couldn’t stop thinking about it. So this week we sat down to pull it apart.

On the surface it reads like a hot take on code style: stop breaking everything into small functions, inline the logic, use big comment blocks instead. Easy to dismiss, easy to misread. Matt read it, formed a confident take, went back and re-read it, and discovered his first take was wrong. That gap, between what the email seems to say and what it’s actually getting at, is where the whole conversation lives.

Because the real message isn’t “inline everything.” It’s think about it. And once you take that seriously, one short email starts asking uncomfortable questions about state, consistency, and why we trust the advice we trust. What does it mean to write code with no surprises? When is running code you don’t need the safer choice? And why does a technique that’s obviously right for a game’s core loop feel obviously wrong for the software the two of us actually build?

That last question turns out to be the point. Carmack isn’t handing down a rule; he’s showing his working for a specific set of constraints, and trusting his readers to notice their own constraints are different. Which is exactly the part our industry is worst at: we take “here’s how I do it” and turn it into “here’s how it’s done,” pattern by pattern, until blind adherence becomes its own anti-pattern.

And then there’s the human sting in the tail. Carmack signs off the whole thing with a single word — “Discussion?” — inviting his team to push back. It’s a lovely gesture. It’s also, we suspect, a little naive about what happens when someone that senior “invites discussion.” Sometimes the most powerful person in the room can’t make a suggestion at all, no matter how they phrase it.

No grand thesis, no neat landing. Just two mates thinking out loud about a genuinely great piece of writing; which, fittingly, is all Carmack was ever asking for. We barely scratched the surface, and we’d genuinely love to hear what it stirs up for you.

🍻 Tonight’s Drinks

Liam – Neither beer nor scotch this week (the garage beckoned, the scotch cupboard was bare). Just a driven dev.

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This one starts with Matt eating his words from It’s time to let JavaScript go, but the admission is just the door in. What’s on the other side is a longer, harder look at security fatalism: why the entire software world runs on code nobody can fully check, why even careful people keep running install scripts they haven’t read, and why that behaviour is rational rather than reckless. Shai-Hulud, a supply-chain worm we’ve seen before, now spreading beyond JavaScript into other ecosystems in what Matt calls a zoonotic spillover, gives it all a nasty topicality, but the real question underneath is about trust, and where you can honestly draw the line.

We get into:

No neat bow, and no silver bullet; just an honest map of how we got here and where the fuzzy line might sit.

Matt – A pint of Clone and Wood (his own homebrew — he felt he’d earned it)

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First things first: an apology. After three-plus years and 73 episodes without missing a drop, we finally missed one. Turns out even the Beer Driven Devs need a break sometimes.

Refreshed and back at the mics, Matt goes full tech historian this week. While researching a long-form essay for his blog, he went down a rabbit hole on the history of CPUs and GPUs, and came back with a story that runs from the Amiga’s dedicated graphics chips all the way to today’s AI-fuelled GPU gold rush.

We cover:

The through-line of the whole story: constraints drive innovation, and the current kings can be dethroned. They always have been before.

🍻 Tonight’s Drinks:

🔗 Tonight’s Links:

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Matt’s back from /NEW Conference in Newcastle and has a lot to unpack. Liam missed out this year, so this episode is a whistle-stop debrief of the highlights: talks, panels, stickers, and a few recurring themes that kept surfacing across the two days.

The conference theme was Human in the Loop, and while Matt deliberately stuck to the non-AI track, AI still found its way into nearly every conversation. Not because it was forced, but because the same questions kept coming up: who’s in control, who’s being listened to, and why do we keep ignoring the lessons we already know?

We cover:

A lot of ideas circled the same centre: the problems aren’t new, only the substrate has changed. And if we’d been doing what we said we were doing all along, most of the hard parts wouldn’t be hard at all.

No beers tonight, Liam’s still recovering from a recent night out at Sunday Road Brewing, and Matt’s running on conference afterglow and not much else.

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Last week we talked about bespoke software and whether it has to be out of reach for smaller businesses. This week we pick up the thread we deliberately put a pin in: what even is enterprise — and do you actually need it?

Spoiler: probably not as much of it as you’ve been quoted for.

The conversation kicks off with a real one Matt had recently — someone pushing back on Azure with “Facebook runs on PHP and MySQL, so why can’t we?” It’s a fair question with an uncomfortable answer: Facebook doesn’t run MySQL, it runs Facebook’s MySQL, maintained by tens of thousands of engineers. You don’t have that. The $30–$100/month floor on Azure isn’t a tax — it’s a team of Microsoft engineers doing the boring infrastructure work you’d otherwise have to do yourself.

From there we get into the meat of it:

The point we keep landing on: there are a lot of dials you can turn on a software solution — scale, uptime, redundancy, perimeter security, geographic availability — and every one of them costs money. Enterprise customers turn them all to 11 because they need to. Smaller businesses don’t, and the job of a good consultant is to ask which dials actually matter for this customer, this problem.

If you’ve ever looked at a quote for bespoke software and thought “there’s no way that’s worth it” — there’s a decent chance a big chunk of that number was for things you don’t need.

We close the loop on last week and tee up the next question: what changes when the software is consumer-facing? That’s a different conversation. Tune in next time.

Matt – Oakvale Shiraz 🍷

Both wineries are in the Hunter Valley. We should probably get back up there.

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This week Matt and Liam pull at a thread they’ve been circling for a while: the idea that bespoke software is too expensive, too risky, and only really viable for the big end of town.

It’s a myth. And once you start poking it, it falls apart in several directions at once.

Liam comes at it from the SMB angle — the mum-and-dad shops, the 10-to-20-person firms competing against the big names that have custom tools quietly humming away in the background. Matt comes at it from the risk angle — the belief that commercial off-the-shelf software is the “safe” option, when in practice it’s often the more expensive, more locked-in, more liability-heavy choice.

Both angles land in roughly the same place: most businesses are being sold a story that doesn’t reflect the reality of where software is, or what it costs, in 2026.

We get into:

It’s a conversation between two people who agree, which Matt and Liam cheerfully acknowledge — and an open invitation to anyone who thinks they’re wrong to come on and argue the other side.

The episode also lands on a clear mission statement for both of them: helping businesses make informed choices about build vs buy, rather than misinformed ones shaped by decades of enterprise sales narrative.

And there’s a teaser for next episode — picking up the related question: what even is “enterprise”? And do you actually need it?

Matt – Lagavulin, in a Superman glass (both birthday presents) 🥃

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We promised we weren’t a political podcast, but here we are.

This week Matt drags Liam through the tangled history that led us to EuroOffice, the EU-driven scramble to build a homegrown alternative to Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace. It’s a story that starts in 2008, runs through Ireland, and lands squarely in the lap of every consultant who’s ever been asked “where is our data hosted?”

Spoiler: the answer matters less than you’d think, but more than you’d hope.

We trace the thread from:

Along the way we get into the uncomfortable bits: that Microsoft’s “sovereign cloud” for Australian government is still operated by a US corporation; that GDPR is in direct conflict with the CLOUD Act and European companies are stuck in the middle; that Australia’s biggest “cloud provider” is really just a data centre operator; and that “where is your data hosted” might be the wrong question entirely.

The bigger question we land on is one for consultants: what’s our responsibility here? For most clients, US law enforcement is a non-issue. But “almost certainly not relevant” isn’t the same as “not a risk.” When someone asks you to sign off on an architecture, can you honestly say their data is safe from these scenarios? And if not, how do you present that risk profile fairly, without being paranoid, and without hand-waving it away?

We don’t solve it. We’re not sure it’s ours to solve. But it’s worth being aware of — because the questions are starting to filter down from the big end of town to the mid-market, and “we use the European data centres” isn’t the answer it used to be.

Tangents include: biometrics vs PINs under US law (don’t use Face ID at the border), Steve Gibson’s neurometric authentication idea, rubber-hose cryptanalysis, mechanical typewriters in Cold War embassies, and the eternal question of why YubiKeys cost $150 each.

We also briefly tease a future episode on enshittification — Cory Doctorow’s term for the slow rot of platforms we’ve all become dependent on. That one’s coming. Eventually.

Matt – Sunday Road Blackwoods Pale Ale 🍺

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This week, Matt and Liam sit down to make sense of the biggest AI news in recent memory — Anthropic’s preview of a model called Mythos, and what it might actually mean for the rest of us.

They don’t dance around the scepticism.

We cover:

It’s not a doom episode. But it’s not a reassuring one either.

🍻 Tonight’s Drinks:

🔗 Tonight’s Links:

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It started with a broken VR headset. It ended with a clean Linux install, an encrypted drive, and a PowerShell script with a two-line README whose name we probably shouldn’t repeat here.

This week, Matt walks Liam through the years-long saga that finally pushed him off Windows for good — a story that winds through faulty GPUs, crypto mining, second-hand warranties, a brand new Lenovo Legion, and a pre-bundled audio driver that behaves, in Matt’s words, exactly like a rootkit.

We cover:

No tidy resolution. No regrets. Just a stable machine, encrypted drives, working VR, and the quiet satisfaction of knowing NAHIMIC is never coming back.

🍻 Tonight’s Drinks

Matt – Aldi Scotch

🔗 Links from the Episode

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After a couple of episodes of near-misses, Matt finally gets to talk about .NET MAUI Day London — and it was worth the wait.

Fresh off BDD Live and with a head full of hallway conversations and live demos, Matt and Liam settle in for a wide-ranging debrief on mobile development, agentic experiments, and the surprisingly hard problem of filtering YouTube for things that are actually worth your time.

They cover:

✔️ The BDD Live wrap-up — what it was like watching it back, Bubbles the AI panellist, and why they’re already thinking about the next one

🍻 Tonight’s Drinks:

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🔗 Tonight’s Links:

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