Linux Dev Time

We get into the process of working on and with formal protocol specifications, something Andy is familiar with from his work on Matrix.               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 get into dependency management. The pros and cons of tools like Dependabot, the varying approaches with different languages and standard library sizes, the times when pinning dependencies makes sense, and more.   Turn Dependabot Off             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. Whether we think better on our own or with other people, our non-standard debugging habits, favourite interview questions, coding at night, character encoding, and abolishing time zones.             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 the wake of Discord’s recent announcement about age verification, Matrix recently came in for a lot of criticism by a lot of people who said it’s not a viable replacement. Andy works on Matrix for a living and Amolith is invested in the XMPP world so we get into secure messaging, trade-offs between security and user experience, federation, and more.   Piss up at The Shipwrights Arms (just next to London Bridge station) on Saturday 27th June from 6pm until late         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

The importance of having and sticking to correct development processes, what can go wrong when you don’t, and how to fix the problems you might end up with.               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

People often like to talk down Electron, but it is really that bad? There may be better ways to use Web technologies to make desktop apps, but isn’t having Linux versions of apps a good thing no matter how they are made?   We mentioned Tauri and Wails.               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

The career progression options you have as a software engineer, moving from junior to senior dev, other paths you can go down like architecture or tech lead, and why management isn’t 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    

Software complexity is a complex topic, so we dig into it.             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

How far you can go with eliminating global variables, forcing everything you ever need to be passed in as arguments.         Tailscale Tailscale is an easy to deploy, zero-config, no-fuss VPN that allows you to build simple networks across complex infrastructure. Go to tailscale.com/ldt and try Tailscale out for free for up to 100 devices and 3 users, with no credit card required. Use code LATENIGHTLINUX for three free months of any Tailscale paid plan.     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

A lot of key open source software is paid for by large companies. That has some advantages, but it can also cause some issues. Maybe it would be better if more FOSS development was paid for by smaller companies and contributions from users.             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.   Blog post about the speed of ripgrep hyperfine: A command-line benchmarking tool Profile-guided optimization Andy benchmarking IndexedDb             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 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: Interesting Characters (UTF-16, utf-8, Unicode, encodings) Software Design is Knowledge Building The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Must Know About Unicode in 2023 (Still No Excuses!)         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 Beautiful Racket 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.   Rabbit Escape Box Stacker Smolpxl Games Adresilo Sepia Search             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.   Moodle Mark’s Bash text adventure 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. watt-wiser         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 Andy’s videos – Rust, General Lobsters Amolith’s RSS feeds Computer inside Terraria Fasterthanlime Self-Directed Research Podcast Jon Gjengset Jon Gjengset – YouTube DevConf – YouTube MEAP Catalog           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 Wayland Support on Linux         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 is it about Linux that draws us to it as a development platform? Plus why we choose the specific distros that we use.           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

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 git-what IGCC Box Stacker Rightwaves Eat Apples Quick! Smolpxl Games Rabbit Escape Android Game element-web matrix-rust-sdk FreeGuide i-dunno Announcing I-DUNNO 1.0 and web-i-dunno qdsync   Kevin’s links clap clog-cli clog-lib typed-oid usbwatch-rs baseline iptables_exporter wireguard_exporter CLI2048 violin         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.   git-what 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

Developing as part of an in-person team vs working remotely, synchronous vs asynchronous development, how to make a hybrid team work effectively, and how code review fits into it all.         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

What agile software development is exactly, why planning and being willing to adapt the plan are key, the pros and cons of all the process that’s involved, the role that scrum plays, and why it’s all about communication.   Study finds 268% higher failure rates for Agile software projects Amolith will be at Fossy in August.         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 annoyed that so much free and open source software is hosted on a proprietary platform that’s owned by Microsoft. There are plenty of alternatives to GitHub, but ultimately the network effect is why so many people host their code there. We dream of a proper federated solution. Maybe one day…         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

If you want to be a good developer, how many different programming languages should you learn? Maybe becoming an expert in one specific language is the way to go. Maybe it’s more a case of learning different concepts and paradigms than languages.         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