Dealing with a crisis as a developer, how to keep everyone in the loop while you fix systems and code, why pointing the blame isn’t useful, some of our horror stories, and more.
Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes
See our contact page for ways to get in touch.
Subscribe to the RSS feed
Dealing with a crisis as a developer, how to keep everyone in the loop while you fix systems and code, why pointing the blame isn’t useful, some of our horror stories, and more.
Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes
See our contact page for ways to get in touch.
Subscribe to the RSS feed
What we are likely to be doing when you hear this, and why it’s unlikely to involve much in the way of development. This is a short episode because Joe is having a break for the Christmas period.
Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes
See our contact page for ways to get in touch.
Subscribe to the RSS feed
When the right time to make a big change to your software is, how you get users to test pre-release versions, how long you keep old features around, when that’s not possible, and more.
Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes
See our contact page for ways to get in touch.
Subscribe to the RSS feed
What object-oriented programming is, why it went out of fashion, and how more modern approaches to development incorporate some of its aspects.
Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes
See our contact page for ways to get in touch.
Subscribe to the RSS feed
Some of the languages that we love and why we love them. It’s not just Rust, honest!
Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes
See our contact page for ways to get in touch.
Subscribe to the RSS feed
With constant news stories about security issues with developer-published software in package managers like npm, we weigh up the pros and cons of this approach to distributing open source software.
Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes
See our contact page for ways to get in touch.
Subscribe to the RSS feed
What makes a good commit, the tools we use to help us produce good commits, and why we care about this.
Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes
See our contact page for ways to get in touch.
Subscribe to the RSS feed
Some of the alternatives to GitHub that we use, why we use them, and how they differ in terms of features and workflows.
Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes
See our contact page for ways to get in touch.
Subscribe to the RSS feed
We explore the differences between terms like coder, software developer, engineer, and architect. They are often used interchangeably, but there can be real differences between them. Or at least once upon a time there were differences.
Vibe coders are in for a shock. Writing code was never that hard.
Don’t Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You
Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes
See our contact page for ways to get in touch.
Subscribe to the RSS feed
Not invented here syndrome is very common in open source. We get into why that is, when it makes sense to start your own project from scratch, and how contributing to existing software can sometimes be better for everyone.
Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes
See our contact page for ways to get in touch.
Subscribe to the RSS feed
With the recent news of Bcachefs (probably) being removed from the Linux kernel, we are joined by Allan Jude from 2.5 Admins and Klara to discuss some of what we think went wrong, how to manage and maintain multiple releases of a project at once, and why release engineering is an important concept.
Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes
See our contact page for ways to get in touch.
Subscribe to the RSS feed
What it takes to sustain a medium-to-large-sized open source project.
Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes
See our contact page for ways to get in touch.
Subscribe to the RSS feed
When and how to use benchmarking in your project, why it’s hard, and why optimising your code can be even harder.
Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes
See our contact page for ways to get in touch.
Subscribe to the RSS feed
In this episode:
You can send your feedback via show@linuxmatters.sh or the Contact Form. If you’d like to hang out with other listeners and share your feedback with the community you can join:
Accedi
#linux-matters channel on the Late Night Linux Discord server.
If you enjoy the show, please consider supporting us using Patreon or PayPal. For $5 a month on Patreon, you can enjoy an ad-free feed of Linux Matters, or for $10, get access to all the Late Night Linux family of podcasts ad-free.
Tailscale
Tailscale makes creating software-defined networks easy: securely connecting users, services, and devices. Go to tailscale.com/linuxmatters and try Tailscale out for free for up to 100 devices and 3 users, with no credit card required.
How we deal with complex projects involving non-technical people as well as developers. How to manage expectations about timing, how to deal with issues, why documenting conversations is important, and more.
Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes
See our contact page for ways to get in touch.
Subscribe to the RSS feed
What are the fundamental ideas and components of development and programming?
Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes
See our contact page for ways to get in touch.
Subscribe to the RSS feed
It’s another hot questions episode. Tabs vs spaces, whether we have imposter syndrome, why software keeps getting heavier, the correct length of functions and files, and what every programmer should know.
Some things we mentioned:
Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes
See our contact page for ways to get in touch.
Subscribe to the RSS feed
Andy is convinced that functional programming isn’t boring. Listen to find out if he’s right!
Functional Programming & Haskell
Functional Programming & Haskell – Computerphile
Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes
See our contact page for ways to get in touch.
Subscribe to the RSS feed
We’ve done hot takes episodes in the past but this is different, it’s hot questions. Would we rather have bad managers who can code or good managers who can’t? Too many comments or none? 80 columns or as long as you like? What editor do we use and why?
Vim for Fun or PeerTube version
Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes
See our contact page for ways to get in touch.
Subscribe to the RSS feed
Joe accidentally tried vibe coding and it was as much of a disaster as you’d imagine. Amolith has also tried it, and does his best to defend the use of LLMs with development. Kevin and Andy are mostly bemused. We all have concerns about the ethics and environmental issues.
This episode has a bit more bad language than usual.
Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes
See our contact page for ways to get in touch.
Subscribe to the RSS feed
Our advice on how to move into a career in software development including making and contributing to projects, advocating for your work, collaborating, avoiding exploitation, learning Git, and loads more.
Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes
See our contact page for ways to get in touch.
Subscribe to the RSS feed
Andy is only publishing his games on F-Droid and not the Google Play Store from now on, and he tells us why.
Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes
See our contact page for ways to get in touch.
Subscribe to the RSS feed
We dig into the technical details of the Linux Kernel Rust drama.
Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes
See our contact page for ways to get in touch.
Subscribe to the RSS feed
Mark from Linux Matters who’s a web developer joins us to talk about working in PHP – a language that’s mature and well established, and how that compares with working with newer “cooler” languages like Rust and Go.
Bash associative array examples
Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes
See our contact page for ways to get in touch.
Subscribe to the RSS feed
Where is the balance between efficiency and openness when it comes to saved file formats? If everything was based on plain text it would make the files readable for years to come, but at what cost?
Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes
See our contact page for ways to get in touch.
Subscribe to the RSS feed
We dig into SQLite – an interesting and unusual project that is widely used but has an uncommon licence, a proprietary test suite, and doesn’t take external contributions. Plus printf() vs “proper” debugging.
Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes
See our contact page for ways to get in touch.
Subscribe to the RSS feed
We explore the line between developer and sysadmin and come to the conclusion that despite the clear difference between the roles, there is a lot of crossover when it comes to skills and character traits.
The Six Dumbest Ideas in Computer Security
Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes
See our contact page for ways to get in touch.
Subscribe to the RSS feed
We are joined by popey from Linux Matters to talk about how software packaging has changed over the years. The tooling has improved massively, containerisation has made a huge impact, but Andy still prefers the old distro repo model.
Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes
See our contact page for ways to get in touch.
Subscribe to the RSS feed
More of our development hot takes including excessive energy use, optimising your code, the importance of licences, Matrix and Jabber being on the same side, the myth of secure code, and why self-hosting is hard.
1Password
Extended Access Management: Secure every sign-in for every app on every device. Support the show and check it out at 1password.com/linuxdevtime
Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes
See our contact page for ways to get in touch.
Subscribe to the RSS feed
Some of the work-adjacent things that we do including writing code that we shouldn’t like writing Rust in Rust, fun projects that turned into paid work, and career progression. Plus some of our go to resources for learning about development.
Some resources we mentioned
Self-Directed Research Podcast
1Password
Extended Access Management: Secure every sign-in for every app on every device. Support the show and check it out at 1password.com/linuxdevtime
Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes
See our contact page for ways to get in touch.
Subscribe to the RSS feed
Our development hot takes including “rewrite it in Rust”, lack of documentation, single vs multiple monitors, dependency numbers, light vs dark mode, and distro package repos.
Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes
See our contact page for ways to get in touch.
Subscribe to the RSS feed
You need to be able to write good code to be a successful developer, but how important are other “soft” skills like communication, relating to and motivating others, and time management?
Kevin mentioned a blog post about burnout in the Rust project
1Password
Extended Access Management: Secure every sign-in for every app on every device. Support the show and check it out at 1password.com/linuxdevtime
Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes
See our contact page for ways to get in touch.
Subscribe to the RSS feed
Campbell Barton joins us to talk about porting Blender, the hugely popular professional 3D software, to Wayland.
Wayland support in blender task
Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes
See our contact page for ways to get in touch.
Subscribe to the RSS feed
Following on from our episode about dealing with a horrible codebase, Andy argues that completely rewriting a project is almost always a bad idea.
Things You Should Never Do, Part I
Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes
See our contact page for ways to get in touch.
Subscribe to the RSS feed
Kevin and Andy talk about their project extremes: the oldest and newest projects they’ve worked on, the biggest and smallest codebases, the ugliest hack, the most elegant, the most popular, the most trivial, and the most important.
Andy’s links
Announcing I-DUNNO 1.0 and web-i-dunno
Kevin’s links
1Password
Extended Access Management: Secure every sign-in for every app on every device. Support the show and check it out at 1password.com/linuxdevtime
Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes
See our contact page for ways to get in touch.
Subscribe to the RSS feed
How to deal with a horrible codebase that you’ve inherited. Getting started, breaking the problem into smaller pieces, understanding what’s actually wrong, the importance of testing (as usual), and why technical debt isn’t necessarily the best name for the problem.
Working Effectively with Legacy Code
Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes
See our contact page for ways to get in touch.
Subscribe to the RSS feed
