Nix, The Build-Everything Language (with Julian Arni)

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1. 

   5 Jun 2025 · 1 hr 29 min

   Making Apache Kafka Diskless (with Filip Yonov & Josep Prat)

   How do you retrofit a clustered data-processing system to use cheap commodity storage? That's the big question in this episode as we look at one of the many attempts to build a version of Kafka that uses object storage services like S3 as its main disk, sacrificing a little latency for cheap, infinitely-scalable disks. There are several companies trying to walk down that road, and it's clearly big business - one of them recently got bought out for a rumoured $250m. But one of them is actively trying to get those changes back into the community, as are pushing to make Apache Kafka speak…

2. 

   23 May 2025 · 1 hr 24 min

   Java's Cutting Edge Comeback (with Josh Long)

   Java's has been evolving faster than any 30 year old language has a right to do, and there's probably no-one more pleased about it than my guest this week - Josh Long. He's a Java & Kotlin programming, a JVM enthusiast in general, and an advocate for Spring, and he has chapters full of news about what's been happening in Javaland over the past few years. Everything from new threading models to C interop changes, custom primitives to high performance computing and all the ways in which Java is modernising for age of AI workloads. If you're out of touch with the latest in the JVM, or don't…

3. 

   8 May 2025 · 1 hr 12 min

   The State & Future of Apache Kafka (with Anatoly Zelenin)

   I'm joined this week by one of the authors of Apache Kafka In Action, to take a look at the state of Kafka, event systems & stream-processing technology. It's an approach (and a whole market) that's had at least a decade to mature, so how has it done? What does Kafka offer to developers and businesses, and which parts do they actually care about? What have streaming data systems promised and what have they actually delivered? What's still left to build? – Apache Kafka in Action: https://www.manning.com/books/apache-kafka-in-action Pat Helland, Data on the Inside vs Data on the Outside:…

4. 

   25 Apr 2025 · 1 hr 32 min

   DataFusion - The Database Building Toolkit (with Andrew Lamb)

   Building a database is a serious undertaking. There are just so many parts that you have to implement before you even get to a decent prototype, and so many hours of work before you could begin working on the ideas that would make your database unique. Apache DataFusion is a project that hopes to change all that, but building an extensible, composable toolkit of database pieces, which could let you build a viable database extremely quickly, and then innovate from that starting point. And even if you're not building a database, it's a fascinating project to explain how databases are built.…

5. 

   10 Apr 2025 · 1 hr 29 min

   Jupyter's Architecture Unpacked (with Afshin Darian & Sylvain Corlay)

   Jupyter's become an incredibly popular programming and data science tool, but how does it actually work? How have they built an interactive language execution engine? And if we understand the architecture, what else could it be used for? Joining me to look inside the Jupyter toolbox are Afshin Darian and Sylvain Corlay, two of Jupyters long-standing contributors and project-steerers. They've going to take us on a journey that starts with today's userbase, goes through the execution protocol and ends with a look at what Jupyter will be in the future - an ambitious framework for interactive,…

6. 

   13 Mar 2025 · 1 hr 18 min

   Graphite: Image Editing as a Syntax Tree (with Keavon Chambers & Dennis Kobert)

   Graphite is a new image editor with an interesting architecture - it's a classic UI-driven app, an image-manipulation language, and a library of programmable graphics primitives that any Rust coder could use, extend or add to. The result is something that you can use like Photoshop or Inkscape, or make use of in batch pipelines, a bit like ImageMagick. Joining me to discuss it are Keavon Chambers & Dennis Kobert, who are hammering away on building a project that's potentially as demanding as Photoshop, but with a more ambitious architecture. How can they hope to compete? Perhaps in the short…

7. 

   20 Feb 2025 · 1 hr 33 min

   ReScript: A Better Typed JavaScript? (with Gabriel Nordeborn)

   ReScript is a strongly-typed programming language that compiles to JavaScript, and that puts it squarely in competition with TypeScript. So why would a JavaScript developer choose to learn it next? What does it offer that makes it a tempting proposition? And how are the ReScript developers making life easier for anyone who wants to make the switch? To answer all these questions and more, I'm joined this week by Gabriel Nordeborn, one of ReScript's compiler contributors. -- ReScript: https://rescript-lang.org/ ReScript & React: https://rescript-lang.org/docs/react/latest/introduction…

8. 

   7 Feb 2025 · 1 hr 16 min

   A universal query engine in Rust (with Predrag Gruevski)

   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…

9. 

   23 Jan 2025 · 1 hr 35 min

   Raspberry Pi Hardware & A Lisp Brain (with Dimitris Kyriakoudis)

   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…

10. 

    16 Jan 2025 · 1 hr 50 min

    Software Systems Aren't Just Software (with Diana Montalion)

    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…