Episode · Developer Voices
Building Fyrox: A Rust Game Engine (with Dmitry Stepanov)
9 Jan 2025 · 1 hr 44 min
Episode · Developer Voices
9 Jan 2025 · 1 hr 44 min
To kick off 2025 we're looking at Fyrox a game engine built in Rust, largely by one person - Dmitry Stepanov. For an individual project, it's covered an incredible amount of ground, covering the rendering and animation features you'd expect from a game engine, with some features that might surprise you - like Rust scripting support with hot-reloading. As we dive into Fyrox, Dmitry explains what it takes to build a game engine, why he chose Rust (and why he's happy with the choice), and how one person can hope to build a project of that size. – Support Developer Voices on Patreon:…
by Kris Jenkins · English · Tech & Science
Deep-dive discussions with the smartest developers we know, explaining what they're working on, how they're trying to move the industry forward, and what we can learn from them. You might find the solution to your next architectural headache, pick up a new programming language, or just hear some…
7 Feb 2025 · 1 hr 16 min
Trustfall is a library based on a simple question - what happens if we can query absolutely anything? If you could join REST APIs and databases with filesystems and dockerfiles? It's possible in theory because those are all just datasources. Predrag Gruevski is trying to make it easy by building a universal query engine, with pluggable datasources, all in Rust. This week we dive into Trustfall to figure out how it works. How do you model nearly anything as a datasource? How do you make it easy to extend? And what does it take to optimize a query that's going to be spread out over multiple…
23 Jan 2025 · 1 hr 35 min
Dimitris Kyriakoudis is a researcher, programmer and musician who's combining all three talents to build dedicated music hardware. Specifically a device called the µseq, which reads Lisp programs and uses them to drive synthesizers to make music. In this episode we go through the full platform that he's building, from soldering resistors to an RPi chip, up through writing a Lisp interpreter, to the design ideas that make Lisp a good choice for composing both software and music. – uSeq Homepage: https://www.emutelabinstruments.co.uk/useq/ Emute Lab's Homepage: https://www.emutelab.org/ Buy a…
16 Jan 2025 · 1 hr 50 min
If you want to build really large software systems well, you have to stop thinking of them as just software systems. Beyond a certain size, everything your software touches becomes part of the wider system. You're part of the system, your users are part of the system, and every other employee & department & priority eventually forms part of that system. And that can make it incredibly difficult to make changes, or even to understand which changes will actually matter. That might be overwhelming, but there's hope. Understanding how systems work and how to improve them is something that can be…
25 Sep 2026 · 2 hr 22 min
How would you manage 30 million lines of PHP? You can't rewrite it - you'd be fired long before you delivered. That was the problem facing Facebook around 2011, and their answer was to add a type system, giving birth to the Hack language. But adding types to PHP turned out to be the easy part. The hard part was building a type checker that developers used to "edit, save, refresh" would actually tolerate. So how do you type-check tens of millions of lines of code fast enough that nobody notices? Julien Verlaguet co-designed Hack at Facebook, and has spent the fifteen years since chasing a…
26 Aug 2026 · 1 hr 46 min
Building something people actually want is supposed to be the happy ending. But it arrives with a bill attached: feature requests you didn't ask for, pull requests you'd rather not maintain forever, users demanding the one thing you swore you'd never build, and — if you're unlucky — a company where the sales team quietly starts deciding what engineering works on. DuckDB has spent the last two and a half years working through that list. So how do you stay a database engineering team when success keeps trying to turn you into something else? Hannes Mühleisen, co-creator of DuckDB, is back to…
12 Aug 2026 · 1 hr 2 min
My guest this week is James Brown, an engineering lead at Schroders, and that's a useful vantage point — asset managers carry all the regulation and organisational weight of a bank, mixed with the first-to-market pressure of a startup. James starts with his own "Claude mania": months of agents running around the clock, and the wave of anxiety that hit him one morning walking to the shop without one running at home. From there, Clair — the plugin he's building to give coding agents proximal awareness of each other, using git orphan branches as a zero-infrastructure message bus; why AI behaves…
8 Jul 2026 · 1 hr 5 min
There's a problem that's bugged the database industry since the 1980s: you run an expensive query over millions of rows, cache the result, and then a single new row arrives. Logically that's one small update, but most engines throw the cached answer away and recompute everything from scratch. Some will handle changes incrementally, but only for "simple" queries - and the rules for what counts as simple are arbitrary and brittle. So can you incrementally maintain *any* SQL query, no matter how complex? For decades the answer was no. Then an award-winning paper called DBSP proved that the…
26 Mar 2026 · 1 hr 40 min
AI is changing the way we all build software — that much seems clear. But the landscape is moving so fast that even the people paid to keep up are struggling. MCP or skills? Fine-tune or just prompt? LangChain or let a thousand agents loose? With almost 70 competing technologies and a shelf life of maybe six months on any advice, how do you figure out what's actually worth your time? Henry Garner is CTO of JUXT, a consultancy with about 150 senior engineers working at the coalface of AI-assisted development, including building AI platforms for tier-one banks. JUXT publishes a quarterly AI…
19 Feb 2026 · 1 hr 27 min
I have a theory that only bad projects get finished — good ones keep finding new things to do. Asciinema is a case in point. What started as a way to share terminal sessions with friends has, over 14 years, grown into a full suite of tools covering recording, hosting, playback, and live streaming — and been rebuilt multiple times along the way. So what does it actually take to record and replay a terminal session faithfully in a browser? Joining us for this conversation is Marcin Kulik, Asciinema's creator. The project's architecture has passed through almost every interesting corner of…
4 Feb 2026 · 1 hr 41 min
Eighteen months ago, Tyler Cloutier appeared on the show with what sounded like an ambitious (some might say crazy) plan: build a new distributed database from scratch, then use it to power a massively multiplayer online game. That's two of the hardest problems in software, tackled simultaneously. But sometimes the best infrastructure comes from solving your own impossible problems. The game, Bitcraft, has now launched on Steam. SpacetimeDB has hit version 1.0. And Tyler returns to share what actually happened when theory met production reality. We cover the launch day performance disasters…