Kodsnack in English

Kristoffer chats with Harald Achitz about test-driven development, Djinni, meetups, and the standardization of C++. How does Harald do TDD? His focus on code coverage plays a role too. Clouds make it easier to skip tests, because everything becomes part of a big puzzle which only lives in production? Building habits are the big thing, not which actual tools you use and whether they can be used everywhere. Then, we discuss Djinni - a interface definition language and code generator for integrating C++ into applications written in other languages. The discussion then moves on to the C++ meetups Harald arranges, another aspect of solving the difficult social side of programming by networking and sharing information. Harald also puts the presentations on Youtube and is fascinated by how accessible the tools are nowadays for recording, producing and publishing video these days. The C++ meetup paused during the pandemic, and we discuss the pros and cons of moving to online meetups. Finally, we discuss the standardization process of C++, and the possibility of forming a local C++ body for Sweden to be involved in the standardization process. We should be interested in getting involved in the standard, both as developers, companies, and industries. Get in touch with Harald if you have ideas and want to help things happen! Thank you Cloudnet for sponsoring our VPS! Comments, questions or tips? We are @kodsnack, @tobiashieta, @oferlund and @bjoreman on Twitter, have a page on Facebook and can be emailed at info@kodsnack.se if you want to write longer. We read everything we receive. If you enjoy Kodsnack we would love a review in iTunes! You can also support the podcast by buying us a coffee (or two!) through Ko-fi. Links Harald Test-driven development Code coverage Djinni Harald has also discussed Djinni in a Cppcast episode Interface definition language Flutter React React native Dropbox' blog post on why they stopped sharing C++ code between platforms Scala Lisp The Stockholm C++ meetup Sweden C++ meetup videos on Youtube OBS Cppcon swedencpp.se - umbrella site for all the Swedish C++ meetups mentioned ISO The ISO working group for C++ JTC1 - the committee for information technology SC22 - the ISO committee for programming languages and more The COBOL working group The programming language vulnerabilities working group within SC22 - does not seem too active at the moment SIS - Swedish standards institute Titles First in the shoes of the user People are lazy, and I’m also lazy I always want the computer to do the job for me Part of a big puzzle that lives in production Solutions often has a long life Existing developers will not be very happy A completely new language every time The difficult part of programming is the social part Communicate practices This was the best meetup A huge box of DVI adapters “Let’s make a simple video!” Download and print as much as I could You need to be reachable, and you need to be responsive This is a meetup I need to see that it’s not just you C can make the life of C++ very hard The standards process has been a mystery It was never a secret The beauty of the world we live in

Kristoffer chats with Harald Achitz about Harald’s path as a developer, test-driven development, seeing the big picture, and more. The first part of the discussion is Harald’s background: Growing up on the far side of Europe, focusing on music, and how he eventually landed in computing. Freelancing as a developer in 1995 - what was that like? How did one find customers? The story then goes into Harald’s way into C and C++. Developing for medical devices and hospitals. Moving toward Linux, making a living as an open source developer, and eventually ending up in Sweden. Then, the conversation moves to Harald’s increasing interest in what happens after you finish writing the code; builds, releases, integrations, package managers, build systems, and so much more. We talk quite a bit about seeing the big picture, and how our code is, at best, a temporary and unimportant part of the greater whole. Are we too focused on the next task, at the expense of thinking about and seeing the whole? Harald explains why he likes to have 100% code coverage, how he goes about setting up his tests, and the challenges of setting up tests when responsibilities strech across teams. Many of the hardest problems are organizational, the code we write is, on the whole, often not very important. Code is temporary. All of which is more motivation for testing more. Thank you Cloudnet for sponsoring our VPS! Comments, questions or tips? We are @kodsnack, @tobiashieta, @oferlund and @bjoreman on Twitter, have a page on Facebook and can be emailed at info@kodsnack.se if you want to write longer. We read everything we receive. If you enjoy Kodsnack we would love a review in iTunes! You can also support the podcast by buying us a coffee (or two!) through Ko-fi. Links Harald Stockholmcpp - C++ meetup which Harald arranges Tron Wargames The Iron curtain Conservatorium Visual basic for applications Novell netware Windows 95 Windows NT 3.51 Office 95 Lotus notes Microsoft press Access AS/400 Stored procedures DCOM MSDN KDE GNOME Red hat Slackware “Linux is cancer” Tobii Conan C and C++ package manager Jenkins Unit testing Test-driven development Boost unit test Github actions Scrum Devops Spock - testing and specification framework for Java, Nimoy - for Python Schrödinger’s cat Titles Austria in the 80s On the side of Europe I started and stopped a lot of things Just jamming around Where you play the songs you hate There were computers in offices I was the young person The internet became a thing Freelancing back in 95 I really loved databases I came back to medical devices Would you like to go to Switzerland? A different spirit in the Linux world I have no problem if things work It’s not just the code I write I love to have everything automated Holistic thinking All the tests are passing, but the thing is not useful Yes, it gives me no guarantee You need to fake it The place where people give up Software is their bread and butter The code I write is most likely not very important Software systems tend to change Code is temporary Throw it away as soon as possible Never enough, but always too much

Fredrik chats with Wilson Snyder about Verilator, chip design, performance, and open hardware. This episode is a bit of a follow-up to episode 389 where Robert Wikander talked - in Swedish - about verification of circuit designs. Afterward, Robert mentioned that we should really ask Wilson Snyder to talk about Verilator, and here we are! Wilson works with CPU and other hardware design, and is one of the lead developers of Verilator. When you design hardware, hardware description languages come in handy - you use them to describe hardware precisely. Then you can generate runnable code simulating the hardware, and run batteries of tests against it without needing to manufacture physical hardware. Verilator is one tool for turning code in the Verilog hardware description language into C++ or Systemc. The major competing tools are more on the interpreter side - which means that Verilator usually has a performance advantage. Oh, and it’s GPL licensed as well. As we discuss, Verilator doesn’t actually support all of Verilog, but that’s being worked on. And increased performance in itself is a clear goal of both research and concrete improvements. We also discuss a bit what might come out hardware-wise in the future. Wilson predicts DPUs - data-offload units, basically - will become even more of a thing than today. The second part of the discussion is focused on Verilator itself - how it’s built, designed, and developed. People with knowledge of compilers will feel right at home inside the Verilator source code. Thank you Cloudnet for sponsoring our VPS! Comments, questions or tips? We are @kodsnack, @tobiashieta, @oferlund and @bjoreman on Twitter, have a page on Facebook and can be emailed at info@kodsnack.se if you want to write longer. We read everything we receive. If you enjoy Kodsnack we would love a review in iTunes! You can also support the podcast by buying us a coffee (or two!) through Ko-fi. Links Wilson Snyder Robert Wikander - appeared in episode 389 (in Swedish) Digital equipment Verilator Hardware verification Synthesis - converting the language used into hardware gates Emacs Linus - yes, Torvalds GPL 2 GPL 3 Compiler Interpreter CHIPS alliance Duane Galbi got Verilator open sourced Tarball Systemc EDA - Electronic design automation Cadence Synopsys - provides synthesis tools Git RISC-V Open cores FPGA Open source ARM and MIPS cores Standard cell DSP Amiga ML GPUs DPUs Parsing Lexing Verilator on Github Verilator’s Github issues UVM - Universal verification methodology veripool.org Titles An open source tool that could do verification It started as a hobby It has a life of its own Into actual hardware gates Matching the languages A good escape story It’s bascially a compiler Open source hardware design The performance to generate the next CPU Innovation feedback cycles Download a core Always a little bit of a focus My real job is CPU design

Fredrik chats with Tommy Maloteaux, developer of VR god game Deisim. Tommy tells us where the inspiration came from, how he started developing the game, the tools he’s used, and more. Deisim has been developed most of the time as an early access game with a active community of players contributing heavily to the process. Also discussed are the problems of 2016, and the advantage of not knowing too much when starting. Since we recorded, Oculus has released App lab - a feature which makes it possible to buy and try Deisim and many other games right inside the Quest headset, without the need of sideloading or other complicating processes. The VR future is full of exciting things! Thank you Cloudnet for sponsoring our VPS! Comments, questions or tips? We are @kodsnack, @tobiashieta, @oferlund and @bjoreman on Twitter, have a page on Facebook and can be emailed at info@kodsnack.se if you want to write longer. We read everything we receive. If you enjoy Kodsnack we would love a review in iTunes! You can also support the podcast by buying us a coffee (or two!) through Ko-fi. Links Tommy Maloteaux Deisim Sidequest HTC vive Steam Populous Black & white Rift S Oculus link cable - allows you to use the Quest as a headset for your PC Unity Unreal engine Deferred rendering Deisim’s Discord server The Crusader games Half-life: Alyx The Deisim Trello board Oculus start Cubism App lab Titles A third-party app store for VR A really early adopter of VR Sit down in the middle of the world The world spreads out around me Play with small toys Always room for expansion Especially in 2016 It was not the case in 2016 It can be considered a game

Fredrik chats with Dave Jones of Podcast index - a new open podcast directory and API, and also one of the drivers of a new podcasting namespace for RSS. Podcasting as infrastructure has not advanced much at all in a long time. Dave, Adam and Podcast index wants to preserve podcasting as free and distributed, and also advance what the ecosystem can be - such as providing value. The namespace contains down-to-earth things such as chapters and location tags, but also much more ambitious ideas. Part of the vision is to reimagine podcasting as a platform of value where listeners can more easily and naturally support not only podcasters, but also app developers and anyone else who might be involved. This is where the value tag and cryptocurrencies enter the picture. We also discuss programming languages a bit - what it takes to entice you to really get into a programming language. Perhaps the specific languages we use are no longer as critical as they used to be? How hard is it to set up your own podcast directory? Not that hard, says David, but keeping it within a sane budget can take some balancing. And if everyone supported Websub things wouldn’t be nearly as tricky. Thank you Cloudnet for sponsoring our VPS! Comments, questions or tips? We are @kodsnack, @tobiashieta, @oferlund and @bjoreman on Twitter, have a page on Facebook and can be emailed at info@kodsnack.se if you want to write longer. We read everything we receive. If you enjoy Kodsnack we would love a review in iTunes! You can also support the podcast by buying us a coffee (or two!) through Ko-fi. Links Dave Jones Birmingham, Alabama Adam Curry Podcast index The podcast index API The yellow pages Apple’s podcast directory Podcast addict Marco Arment, creator of the podcast app Overcast XML namespaces The podcast namespace Podlove and their namespace Atom links for payment Buzzsprout and transcripts XKCD about standards The value for value model Blubrry Fireside Transistor Captivate Acast Pocket casts OPML Satoshis Sphinx chat Podcasting 2.0 podcast episode 10 - introducing the value tag Lightning Breez lightning wallet app Anita Posch - German bitcoin podcaster Deplatforming Podcast Chapters Thomas Pritchard Forecast Swift Vapor Webpack Nginx The Podcast index website on Github JSX Websub Webhooks Libsyn Superfeedr Google’s websub hub Google reader JSON chapter export in Podcast Chapters ID3 metadata Stitcher Pandora Rush The mind and the brain Joe Rogan Alex Jones podcastindex.social - the Mastodon instance for discussing the namespace and more Titles Podcasting as a platform for free speech Podcasting as a platform of value Take back the open nature of podcasting Apple or Google is not the center of the universe A big chicken and egg problem People have been wedging things in Picks and shovels The value block 100 Satoshis a minute If I know I can pay this podcaster A very steep learning curve Developers are busy Beyond the point where the language layer is the critical part of the puzzle npm audit fix and hope for the best Now you’ve got two stacks The reverse of JSX 1.3 million feeds Not as distributed as you’d like it to be Google reader bad vibes You just don’t get pinged sometimes You don’t have to be at the mercy of Google The days of free need to die Free is very expensive The silo companies But you don’t have to sell your soul AI your way into discovery Always human suggestion A personal relation of some kind Synapses firing in the brain Aboutness Science our way out of every problem What makes artificial intelligence artificial Err on the side of freedom A de-humanizing force International fun time

Fredrik chats with Sara Vieira about The Opinionated Guide to React - the guide to making all the choices React doesn’t make for you (plus hooks). We talk about the magic train ride from Prague which led to the creation of the book, what the writing and publication process was like, and of course about the surprising and horrific code Sara uses to create the final book files. We also discuss MC:ing conferences, what happens when world events explode all over your writing, finding your voice, and making the most of your Grammarly plan. Thank you Cloudnet for sponsoring our VPS! Comments, questions or tips? We are @kodsnack, @tobiashieta, @oferlund and @bjoreman on Twitter, have a page on Facebook and can be emailed at info@kodsnack.se if you want to write longer. We read everything we receive. If you enjoy Kodsnack we would love a review in iTunes! You can also support the podcast by buying us a coffee (or two!) through Ko-fi. Links Sara Sara on Github Entertaining talk about making good buttons (and more) The Opinionated Guide to React - Sara’s book Codesandbox Codepen Glitch Hooks in React Class components React state management Overmind Christian Alfoni - creator of Overmind Vue Styled components Emotion Reach router React router Preact Ryan Florence Blender Photo of girl giving a police officer flowers and being arrested The Carnation Revolution - the end of the Portugese dictatorship This is fine - the meme and plushie Grammarly Full stack fest Markdown Gatsby Puppeteer - for scraping web pages, and more Pdflib Epub Calibre Mobi files Paddle Gatsby-starter-book Prism VS code theme to Prism theme converter VAT Stripe GDPR Cheerio Product hunt Cypress useMemo Sitges Rust React Amsterdam Titles It’s like sad Spanish I make buttons Goth Glitch I finished something The stress doesn’t end On a train from Prague Also kind of European Apparently I started this on Christmas It depends Why it depends I don’t think that’s an answer Thank you for not calling it “React Best Practises” March never ended I can only write like I speak I’m not school-smart yarn generate book A very dirty Javascript function A different type of terrifying All of a sudden, nothing’s scary anymore “I think this thing has a computer” It was the worst visa

Paul Frazee returns to discuss the evolution of Beaker - the peer-to-peer browser for web hackers. Just released as a public beta, Beaker has gone through a lot of changes since October when we last chatted. Paul tells us about what Beaker is and some of the important concepts, such as feeds, the file system, and starting to create things on top of them. On the surface, Beaker looks like a standard web browser with some unusual buttons, but just below the UI there’s a lot of peer-to-peer technology, a serverless model of the web where you can just as easily edit, add, and remix as you can browse. Beaker feels like a tool to make the web open and easily editable - something anyone can pick up and start hacking on without strange hurdles of server setups, package management, hosting fees, and build scripts. We also talk about the very iterative and open development process of Beaker, and the high value of user testing. Paul talks about some of the many interesting problems left to solve, and the reasons why they’re better solved later. Thank you Cloudnet for sponsoring our VPS! Comments, questions or tips? We are @kodsnack, @tobiashieta, @oferlund and @bjoreman on Twitter, have a page on Facebook and can be emailed at info@kodsnack.se if you want to write longer. We read everything we receive. If you enjoy Kodsnack we would love a review in iTunes! You can also support the podcast by buying us a coffee (or two!) through Ko-fi. Links Paul Frazee The last episode Beaker browser Bittorrent The hypercore protocol Decentralized web summit Electron Chromium IPFS RSS peersockets Documentation for Beaker Codepen Web components Hyperdrive Markdown Iframe Globbing patterns JSON-LD - JSON standard for linking data RDF Microformats Append-only log Secure scuttlebutt Mathias Buus Andrew Osheroff Devops Eventual consistency Hashbase Unwalled.garden spec Ink & switch Gateway browser - mobile browser for building the P2P web. Alpha coming soon! Titles A peer-to-peer browser for web hackers Bittorrent 2.0 No servers involved Almost an IDE in itself Open up the creative side of web development Lowering the barrier to hackcess Standards all the way down Empower userland That’s what we’re trying to do: give developers new problems New problems of their own choosing Pulling it from Denmark You don’t need a server for it Only superficially like other browsers The answer is “maybe” Your personal anchor Plane wifi is getting pretty good What you choose to put in front of people Lots of auditability

Recorded at Øredev 2019, Fredrik talks to Nate Ebel about special cases in programming - like the importance of performance when it comes to drawing. Then we discuss automation - also the topic of Nate’s talk at the conference. Code review should be an enjoyable thing! Nate discusses how to use tools to automate away all the little things you might want to check during development - such as how the size of the built app changes. As a bonus, it’s hard to get mad at a picky bot. We also discuss the importance and difficulty of taking the extra step and making your automation really turnkey, instead of something you set up once and then forgot to maintain or make easy for others to use. We talk about the book Nate just (at the time of the interview) wrote on Kotlin. We discuss both the approach and contents of the book, and also the process of actually writing the book. Thank you Cloudnet for sponsoring our VPS! Comments, questions or tips? We are @kodsnack, @tobiashieta, @oferlund and @bjoreman on Twitter, have a page on Facebook and can be emailed at info@kodsnack.se if you want to write longer. We read everything we receive. If you enjoy Kodsnack we would love a review in iTunes! You can also support the podcast by buying us a coffee (or two!) through Ko-fi. Links Nate Ebel Øredev The search space Felix - creator of The search space The search space interview with Robert Kowalski Pixite - where Nate works Pigment - the app Nate works on Ryan Harter - Nate’s colleague Automate all the things! - Nate’s talk Git hooks Github issue and pull request templates The tool Danger - integrates with your build - a scripting engine to tie into your continuous integration pipeline Android dev summit 2019 Unit testing Integration testing Marie Kondo Github actions Circleci Bitrise Bitbucket APK - the Android application package format Mastering Kotlin - Nate’s book on Kotlin Kotlin Android development is now Kotlin-first Ktor - server framework for/in Kotlin Kevin Galligan and his talk on multiplatform Kotlin React native Flutter Packt publishing Jetbrains Coroutines Coroutines in Kotlin Nate’s Youtube channel Titles Drawing at 60 frames per second Automate literally all the things More like a turnkey thing As if it was another person It’s hard to get mad at the bot Go copy this random script Hello world plus Such an all or nothing approach

Recorded at Øredev 2019, Fredrik talks to Marianne Bellotti; keynote speaker, software anthropologist and frequent modernizer of legacy systems. We start our discussion talking about modernizing old yet mission critical systems, while they’re still being used, without breaking everything. “Legacy” might invoke ancient software, but even a young system can have a lot of legacy which has not been updated in a surprisingly long time. From there we move on to code as the new pottery shards - coming to understandsing software from a perspective of anthropology - it’s a surprisingly natural and interesting way to approach legacy systems. We also talk about mindmapping and knowledge transfer, how to teach people to think like that amazing code reviewer instead of asking the reviewer all the time. Finally, we talk about how and why people feel the need to back their ideas up with research, or not, and how an idea can run away from you and suddenly become truth just because you happened to package it well. Thank you Cloudnet for sponsoring our VPS! Comments, questions or tips? We are @kodsnack, @tobiashieta, @oferlund and @bjoreman on Twitter, have a page on Facebook and can be emailed at info@kodsnack.se if you want to write longer. We read everything we receive. If you enjoy Kodsnack we would love a review in iTunes! You can also support the podcast by buying us a coffee (or two!) through Ko-fi. Links Marianne Bellotti Marianne’s Øredev 2019 keynote - We killed these things with fire: economics, society and system design Auth0 Identity as a service Michael Feather’s keynote - Technical modeling as a practice Anthropology - the scientific study of humans, human behavior and societies in the past and present. Conway’s law Humanitarian data exchange United states digital service Government digital service - the UK version COBOL Servant leadership Mindmapping Couchdb Formal specification TLA+ Alloy specification language Marianne’s first (in a series) blog post on running COBOL in the modern world All the best engineering advice I stole from non-technical people The leprechauns of software engineering Secret Hitler Codenames Mikey Dickerson SRE - site reliability engineering Maslow’s hierarchy of needs Titles A very simple question that’s getting progressively harder to answer Legacy modernization Hard to define when something becomes legacy The organizational dynamics around fear Code as an artifact of human thought Code is the new pottery shards Crap, I probably would have done it this way Really good at doing what they’re doing The oldest technology is government technology A knack for organizing engineering teams Who actually knows what the hell they’re doing? Re-acclimate to the non-government world Screaming into the void You will find a way to apply it at some point Absorb as much as you can I don’t have to understand this now Systems that are ungooglable I just started writing it down A bet we’ll never be able to settle The ultimate datastore for a web application There’s no way they’re using a mainframe Scientific research in triplicate Maslow’s hierarchy of needs for reliability

Recorded at Øredev 2019, Fredrik talks to Stephanie Gasche, who decided to use her skills from the agile software development world to make the larger world better. Stephanie started thinking about wanting to make a positivt impact, and how in many consulting jobs you can give a lot without getting to see a big-picture impact of your work. The refugee movement in 2014-2016 made her realize this was an area where she could make an impact. She started working helping refugees arriving in Austria, and eventually realized something really missing was one good single starting point for refugees. We also discuss why there are so few people doing similar things. It’s hard to get funding in general, and even harder if you don’t fit in specific enough slots that might have specific funding. Also: slow processes. Also: how hitch-hiking can change the world. Thank you Cloudnet for sponsoring our VPS! Comments, questions or tips? We are @kodsnack, @tobiashieta, @oferlund and @bjoreman on Twitter, have a page on Facebook and can be emailed at info@kodsnack.se if you want to write longer. We read everything we receive. If you enjoy Kodsnack we would love a review in iTunes! You can also support the podcast by buying us a coffee (or two!) through Ko-fi. Links Stephanie Gasche Stephanie’s consulting company 2015 refugee crisis Stephanie’s Øredev 2019 talks - How we introduced agile to the non-profit sector and Measuring performance of a scrum master Stephanie’s videos for refugees arriving in Austria refugee.at New Austrian coding school MTOP - More than one perspective I am refugee wawiwa.at Wawiwa on Facebook Titles Making an impact, in any way I can Making an impact on people’s lives I rolled into the agile world Knowledge never ends I was doing everything for other people I thought I was going to write a book How hitch-hiking can change the course of the world It was a new situation Democracy moves a bit slower We use what we know for a situation that has never happened before I think I can actually help Full-time from the inside Lots of interesting press Being the glue A very agile approach We can’t really fail