Two's Complement

Matt ponders the future of his accidentally eponymous hobby project. Ben offers thoughtful consideration while waiting for the right opportunity to crack a joke. No lawyers were harmed in the making of this podcast.

Ben and Matt discuss their transition to using ARM-based Apple Silicon laptops for their day jobs. Ben rewrites Bash into Java because it makes his tests run faster. Matt tries to teach VSCode something and winds up writing JSON instead.

Matt and Ben describe how to build a developer automation interface with Make, a ubiquitous build tool that can be conveniently inflicted on other people. Ben explains a great way to test shell scripts that doesn't work. Matt deletes libbob3.so and then regrets it.

Ben and Matt discuss the original definition of technical debt a metaphor created by Ward Cunningham to explain why software designs that were correct when created now need to be changed. Ben invents a new verb, 'to soapbox' and then demonstrates its practical use. Matt reads timestamps in the future.

Matt and Ben talk about when it's OK to copy and paste code. Matt explains how helpful compilers take the time-saving step of copying and pasting code for you, saving you precious microseconds. Ben recalls things from the 80s, like word processors and Indiana Jones.

Ben and Matt compare iterative and incremental approaches to software development. To everyone's astonishment, they turn out to be different. Then they decide we need better names for these things, but it turns out naming things is hard.

Matt and Ben talk about how compression works, specifically deflate, which is apparently everywhere. Ben gets particular about compression ratios. Matt explains how to compress /dev/random by sorting it first.

Ben and Matt comment on different types of comments in code. Join our hosts and they explore both good and bad types of comments, from the essential to the inexcusable. Matt explains how to bump the failure counter to 99. Ben suggests violence against cats.

Ben ventures into the forest, finds a tree traversal problem, and then fails his will save and gets fascinated by a hash map. Matt suggests zombies. Then they come up with a solution and talk about how to test it because of course they do.

Matt and Ben talk about what they would do if they founded a game studio. And ASICs. And testing because why not. Join our hosts as they speculate on whether anyone has made a successful open source video game instead of just taking 5 minutes to Google it.