The End.
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Imagine Andreas going around making annoying electronic sounds all the time.
Strike that. Andreas and Lars discuss using less power - less fancy abstractions - to make things easier to understand. Andreas likes to do a de-powering pass to code.
Avoid making something which is more general than is useful.
Lars goes into the lure of event sourcing - going for very high data resolution - it might come in handy! - at the cost of a lot of other things - how do we prevent duplicate user names?
You've got to love a JSON blob.
Finally, Lars derails Andreas' arrow of time and discussion of locking things down early when possible.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Stories about Ecto quickly redeeming itself, and of what it takes to introduce foreign keys.
Some of us are super comfortable referencing the ID. Lars dislikes that Ecto needs to be more complicated because of SQL, but the abstractions do hold.
Also: the biggest reason to ever use a ORM! It can be reallynice to come back to one after a tour of plain SQL-land.
Some people have just been bitten so hard by cowboys.
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Fredrik wants to think about long-lived code. Lars is offended, Andreas only a little bit so.
Are there other good software development practices out there? Other than the ones focusing on building something quickly? Practices for building software which lives on and is maintained for much longer than we seem to care to admit? Should we remove dependencies over time? The swamp of dependency management and vendoring is probed, gradually shifting into firmware, the horrors of floating point (proper excuses are made), small language models.
Finally, of course, indecent cups of tea.
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The Saint Valentine's peak passed without issue. Andreas had time for semlor.
Lars has opinions on semlor, and can imagine many possible improvements. Like having an apple. Or a pizza.
Lars has had a nice influx of work, including hardware work using Nerves. Testing and very hackish hot code reloading are both included.
Finally, some thoughts on Linux audio, and musings about the possibility of creating really nice audio tools for the platform.
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Andreas tells the story of a old system which suddenly exhibited a new and frightening bug. Lars shares similar experiences of things going wrong in new and novel ways.
When things do go wrong, it is so nice to have supervision trees or other things which allow you to hear about problems, not to mention recover from them.
Also covered are some stories about TCP, networks, and timeouts. And a realization that testing the frameworks upon which you build could have saved some bacon, had it just been done a long time ago.
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Lars dove into data pipelines, and emerged bearing arrows and wishing for a lot fewer copies.
What is there to think about regarding data pipelines, what is interesting about them?
Which tools are out there, and why might you want to use them?
Why all this talk about making fewer copies of data?
What does Lars' current ideal pipeline look like, and where does Elixir fit in?
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GenServers are fun! Andreas gives all the context. Things were learned, knowledge was aquired. You can do so much with GenServers, but make sure you have a good reason.
If you don't watch out, this is where concurrency goes to die.
Dynamic supervisors, and their children, are thoroughly considered.
Also delved into is the mess other ecosystems make of doing things at the same time, waiting, and so on.
The strange worlds of C and other unusual languages are considered.
Finally, an interesting bug.
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Every web app starts out fine, the tabula rasa of an unwritten BODY. But sooner or later you need users. And a million other things which live in trees.
Also: email.
And that layer between the controller and the database where things like fine-grained access control goes.
I'd like to have an admin, please.
Eventually, web apps grows up. And while a larger framework with solutions and conventions for all those grown-up features may not necessarily be fun, it can certainly be useful.
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The software development industry is very much built for code nerds. It shouldn’t be.
Many of us know many people who are really into coding. Not every working developer can, or even should, be though. Doesn't that create kind of a weird gap between professionals who live and breathe code both on and off work, and those who have a more balanced life?
Being passionate about your job shouldn't be an expectation or requirement for anyone or anything.
Is there too little space for learning - are we assumed to know too much, and assumed to spend our own time figuring out things we don't?
Your path into coding is not, can not, and should not be the only path possible.
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