Best SmallTalk Hosts Podcasts (2024)

1
Multiplatform Maps Built As Layers on Rust (with Ian Wagner) 1:01:18

7d ago1:01:18

1:01:18

Mapping is a hugely complex task to take on. Even if you moved as much of the data-management as you can out to 3rd-party services, you’d still have a tonne of work to do weaving together map tiles, routing information, GPS data, points of interest, search and more. And as if that wasn’t enough, you’d probably want that software to work on a whole …

1
Building a New Terminal App (with Zach Lloyd) 1:07:39

5d ago1:07:39

1:07:39

The terminal might be the most used development tool in history. So it’s a little odd that it hasn’t changed that much in the decades since the terminal first came into being. Is the terminal a “completed” project? Or are there new ways to look at it that might make it even more useful? This week’s guest—Zach Lloyd—is convinced the terminal is ripe…

1
About Smalltalk 12:17

7d ago12:17

12:17

The way you interact with computers was probably shaped by a small team working at Xerox in the 1970s. Tom explains the history of Smalltalk. Featuring Tom Merritt. Full transcript here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

1
Building A Programming Language From Its Core (with Peter Saxton) 1:01:21

22d ago1:01:21

1:01:21

A language’s AST—it’s abstract syntax tree—is nearly always a hidden implementation detail. It’s not treated as part of the language, but merely the intermediate step between parsing and compiling. But this week’s guest aims to flip that relationship on its head... Peter Saxton joins me to talk about EYG - an AST-first language that defines the fun…

1
Practical Applications for DuckDB (with Simon Aubury & Ned Letcher) 1:08:04

21d ago1:08:04

1:08:04

DuckDB’s become a favourite data-handling tool of mine, simply because it does so many small things well. It can read and write a huge number of data formats; it can infer schemas automatically when you just want to move quickly; and it can interface with most languages, run like lightning on the desktop or be embedded into a webpage. I’m a huge fa…

1
Recording and Replaying the Browser (with Justin Halsall) 1:02:50

20d ago1:02:50

1:02:50

RRWeb is based on a simple idea: If you capture all the DOM events in a browser session, and when they happened, you could play it back later. Play it back for diagnosing error conditions, for understanding your user’s journey, or for creating demo videos that can be edited element-by-element instead of frame-by-frame. Unfortunately, the simple ide…

1
About Laser Printers 12:58

1M ago12:58

12:58

From room-sized machines to barely an inconvenience on your desk, laser printers are in nearly every office. But where did they start? Tom explores the origins of the laser printer. Featuring Tom Merritt. Full transcript here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

1
Zig as a Multi-OS Build System (with Loris Cro) 1:19:05

1M ago1:19:05

1:19:05

The ZigLang team have put an astonishing amount of effort into making Zig work an effective tool for compiling C across different architectures. Work that benefits the Zig language, but also has a chance to benefit languages like Python and Rust. Or indeed, any language that uses native C libraries somewhere in its stack. So this week we’re joined …

1
Creating and Evolving Elixir (with José Valim) 1:42:21

1M ago1:42:21

1:42:21

Back in 2012, José Valim started building Elixir to as a way to have his ideal programming language running on the same platform as Erlang. Fast-forward 12 years and it’s become build anything from distributed infrastructure to notebooks and websites. In this week’s Developer Voices, José joins us to tell the history of Elixir in a series of design…

1
About Ethernet 16:46

1M ago16:46

16:46

Computers talk to each other via networking, most commonly over a wired ethernet connection. Tom explains how that started and why it was such a breakthrough. Featuring Tom Merritt. Full transcript here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

1
PyO3: From Python to Rust and Back Again (with David Hewitt) 1:34:29

1M ago1:34:29

1:34:29

There’s huge pressure on Python at the moment to get faster, ideally without changing at all. One increasingly–popular way of achieving that impossible task is to push the performance critical code down into C, C++, or Rust. And this week we’re focussing on the Python route, as we take a look at PyO3. David Hewitt’s the principal committer to PyO3,…

1
NATS & Jetstream: The System Communication Toolkit (with Jeremy Saenz) 1:11:04

2M ago1:11:04

1:11:04

Most message systems have an opinion on the right way to do inter-systems communication. Whether it’s actors, queues, message logs or just plain ol’ request response, nearly every tool has decided on The Right Way to do messaging, and it optimises heavily for that specific approach. But NATS is absolutely running against that trend. In this week’s …

1
About Xerox PARC 15:24

2M ago15:24

15:24

In 1969, the chief scientist at Xerox, Jack Goldman, decided to found a west-coast research center in Palo Alto, right down the road from Engelbart's SRI. Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center or PARC was far enough from headquarters in Rochester, New York, that scientists could feel a little freer to experiment. Featuring Tom Merritt. Full show transc…

1
Cuis Smalltalk and the History of Computing's Future (with Juan Vuletich) 1:18:53

2M ago1:18:53

1:18:53

Smalltalk is one of those programming languages that’s lived out of the mainstream, but often referenced as an influence and an important part of programming history. It’s the cornerstone of object-oriented programming, it was into message passing before actors were cool, and it blurs the line between operating system, programming language and pers…

1
The Inko Programming Language, and Life as a Language Designer (with Yorick Peterse) 1:24:21

2M ago1:24:21

1:24:21

This week we take a close look at the language Inko from two perspectives: The language design features that make it special, and the realities of being a language developer. Yorick Peterse joins us to discuss why he’s building Inko, and which design sweetspots he’s looking for. We begin with memory management, aiming for the kind of developer who …

1
About GPUs 12:09

3M ago12:09

12:09

Tom explains what GPUs are, why they are different than CPUs, and how they kinda just evolved into a product. Featuring Tom Merritt. Full episode transcript here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

1
Building the Zed Text Editor (with Nathan Sobo) 1:23:51

2M ago1:23:51

1:23:51

I’ve often wondered how you build a text editor. Like many software projects, it’s a simple idea at the core with an almost infinite scope for features. How do you build a solid foundation to expand on? Which features matter for launch? And how do you hope to satisfy the needs of every programmer, working in every language? My guest for this episod…

1
Reimplementing Apache Kafka with Golang and S3 1:23:04

3M ago1:23:04

1:23:04

This week on Developer Voices we’re talking to Ryan Worl, whose career in big data engineering has taken him from DataDog to Co-Founding WarpStream, an Apache Kafka-compatible streaming system that uses Golang for the brains and S3 for the storage. Ryan tells us about his time at DataDog, along with the things he learnt from doing large-scale syste…

1
About Login 9:15

3M ago9:15

9:15

Tom discusses the origin of the term "log in", it's early use, and how it became something most of us do every day. Featuring Tom Merritt. Full transcript can be found here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

1
Extending Postgres for High-Performance Analytics (with Philippe Noël) 1:07:33

3M ago1:07:33

1:07:33

PostgreSQL is an incredible general-purpose database, but it can’t do everything. Every design decision is a tradeoff, and inevitably some of those tradeoffs get fundamentally baked into the way it’s built. Take storage for instance - Postgres tables are row-oriented; great for row-by-row access, but when it comes to analytics, it can’t compete wit…

1
Designing Actor-Based Software (with Hugh McKee) 1:12:02

3M ago1:12:02

1:12:02

The actor model is a popular approach to building scalable software systems. And isn’t hard to understand when you’re just reading about the beginner’s examples. But how do you architect a complex design using the actor model? Which patterns work well? How do you think through it? Joining me to take us through it is Hugh McKee. Hugh’s a total actor…

1
ByteWax: Rust's Research Meets Python's Practicalities (with Dan Herrera) 1:01:54

3M ago1:01:54

1:01:54

Bytewax is a curious stream processing tool that blends a Python surface with a Rust core to produce something that’s in a similar vein to Kafka Streams or Apache Flink, but with a fundamentally different implementation. This week we’re going to take a look at what it does, how it works in theory, and how the marriage of Python and Rust works in pr…

1
Mojo Lang - Tomorrow's High Performance Python? (with Chris Lattner) 1:24:38

4M ago1:24:38

1:24:38

Mojo is the latest language from the creator of Swift and LLVM. It’s an attempt to take some of the best techniques from CPU/GPU-level programming and package them up in a Python-compatible syntax. In this episode we explore why Mojo was created, and what it offers to Python programmers and non-Python programmers alike. How is it built for performa…

1
Batch Data & Streaming Data in one Atom (with Jove Zhong) 51:46

4M ago51:46

51:46

Every database has to juggle the need to process new data and to query old data. That task falls to any system that “does stuff and remembers stuff”. But it’s quite hard to really optimise one system for both use cases. There are different constraints on new and old data, and as a system gets larger and larger, those differences multiply to breakin…

1
About Virtual Korea 12:36

4M ago12:36

12:36

The last 120 years or so have seen tons of change for Korea, but what does the future hold? Tom shares what one heir is doing with their legacy. Featuring Tom Merritt. Episode transcript here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

1
Advanced Memory Management in Vale (with Evan Ovadia) 1:09:31

4M ago1:09:31

1:09:31

Rust changed the discussion around memory management - this week's guest hopes to push that discussion even further. This week we're joined by Evan Ovadia, creator of the Vale programming language and collector of memory management techniques from far and wide. He takes us through his most important ones, including linear types, generation referenc…

1
About ChatGPT 17:45

5M ago17:45

17:45

The predictive capabilities of ChatGPT and other programs based on Large Language Models really seem to infer an artificial intelligence. How do the applications work...and are they sentient? Tom explains why you shouldn't fear ChatGPT. Featuring Tom Merritt. Full transcript here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.…

1
Bringing Pure Python to Apache Kafka (with Tomáš Neubauer) 1:06:38

5M ago1:06:38

1:06:38

The “big data infrastructure” world is dominated by Java, but the data-analysis world is dominated by Python. So if you need to analyse and process huge amounts of data, chances are you’re in for a less-than-ideal time. The impedance mismatch will probably make your life hard somehow. So there are a lot of projects and companies trying to solve tha…

1
Taking Erlang to OCaml 5 (with Leandro Ostera) 1:03:47

5M ago1:03:47

1:03:47

Erlang wears three hats - it’s a language, it’s a platform, and it’s an approach to making software run reliably once it’s in production. Those last two are so interesting I sometimes wonder why those ideas haven’t been ported to every language going. How much work would it be? This week we’re going to dig right down into that question with Leandro…

1
How Apache Pinot Achieves 200,000 Queries per Second (with Tim Berglund) 1:14:28

5M ago1:14:28

1:14:28

The likes of LinkedIn and Uber use Pinot to power some astonishingly high-scale queries against realtime data. The numbers alone would make an impressive case-study. But behind the headline lies a fascinating set of architectural decisions and constraints to get there. So how does Pinot work? How does it process queries? How are the various roles s…

1
About ByteDance 20:39

6M ago20:39

20:39

With all the talk about banning TikTok in the United States, Tom dives in to explain who actually owns and controls its parent company, ByteDance, and why there's so much discourse about security. Featuring Tom Merritt. Full transcript can be found here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.…

1
Neovim: Creating, Curating and Customising your Ideal Editor (with TJ DeVries) 1:07:41

5M ago1:07:41

1:07:41

TJ DeVries is a core contributor to Neovim and several of its most interesting sub-projects, and he joins us this week to go in depth into how Neovim got started, how it’s structured, and what a truly programmable editor has to offer programmers who want the perfect environment. Along the way we look at what we can learn from Neovim’s successful fo…

1
Creating Hackathons that Work (with Jon Gottfried) 1:02:52

6M ago1:02:52

1:02:52

Done right, a Hackathon can be a fantastic place to be a programmer - you get time and space to build and learn, in a room full of like-minded people, with swag and prizes to sweeten the deal. It’s a great way to pick up new ideas and run with them. But done wrong it can be a waste of time. What’s the difference between a good hackathon and a bad o…

1
Automate Your Way to Better Code: Advanced Property Testing (with Oskar Wickström) 1:07:09

6M ago1:07:09

1:07:09

One of the most promising techniques for software reliability is property testing. The idea that, instead of writing unit tests we describe some property of our code that ought to always be true, then have the computer figure out thousands of unit tests that try to break that rule. For example, you might say, “No matter which page you visit on my w…

1
Bridging the Gap Between Languages (with Martin Johansen) 49:01

6M ago49:01

49:01

If you ever feel overwhelmed by the number of different programming languages, this week’s episode might just offer you some solace, as we talk about an attempt to reunify many of the most popular languages by focussing on the bread & butter things that every language supports. I’m joined by Martin Johansen, who’s been working on a new tool called …

1
If You Want Better Code, Do It For Me (with Jonathan Schneider) 1:02:48

6M ago1:02:48

1:02:48

A lot of programming is split into the mechanical work of writing what you know, and the creative work of figuring out what you don’t know. Wouldn’t it be nice to automate the mechanical stuff away? Well the good news is we’re already automating a lot of it. Every time you run a refactoring tool or a pretty-printer, you’re handing boring work off t…

1
Implementing Hardware-Friendly Databases (with DuckDB co-creator, Hannes Mühleisen) 1:20:12

6M ago1:20:12

1:20:12

SQLite could do with a little competition, so when I invited the co-creator of DuckDB in to talk, I thought we'd be discussing the perils of trying to build a new in-process database engine. I quickly realised things went much deeper than just a tech refresh. Hannes Mühleisen joins me this week to blend his academic credentials as a database resear…

1
Verse, Haskell & Core Language Design (with Simon Peyton Jones) 1:23:07

7M ago1:23:07

1:23:07

This week we talk to Simon Peyton Jones, a veteran language designer and researcher, and key figure in the development of Haskell. Haskell. Simon has made countless contributions to advancement of functional programming, and computer programming in general, and is currently working at Epic Games, working on the foundations of their new programming …

1
Shouldn't Data Connections Be Easier? (with Ashley Jeffs) 1:15:25

7M ago1:15:25

1:15:25

Benthos wants to be part of your Data Engineering toolkit - it’s there as a quick and easy way to set up data pipelines and start streaming data out of A and into B. In contrast to a lot of the tools we’ve talked about on Developer Voices, Benthos seems focussed on cutting development time down to a minimum, so you can quickly configure a new pipel…

1
What can game programming teach us about databases? (with Tyler Cloutier) 1:05:31

7M ago1:05:31

1:05:31

The world of game programming might seem a million miles away from 'regular' programming. But they still have to deal with the same kinds of data, scale and concurrency problems that we’re all familiar with in the software world. And that makes the gaming world an interesting place for new ideas - under the hood they’re solving those same problems …

1
Is Odin, "programming done right"? (with 'Ginger' Bill Hall) 1:00:04

8M ago1:00:04

1:00:04

Odin’s creator, Bill Hall, makes some bold claims about the language, including that it’s “programming done right”. Before that starts a war on the internet, we’d best ask him to explain what that means, and how Odin tries to achieve it. And while we get deep into the details, overall his answer seems to be, “By gathering masses of feedback and the…

1
Can Event-Driven Architecture make Software Design Easier? (with Bobby Calderwood) 1:09:59

8M ago1:09:59

1:09:59

This week’s guest describes Event Sourcing as, “all I’m going to use for the rest of my career.” But what is Event Sourcing? How should we think about it, and how does it encourage us to think about writing software? In this episode we take a close look at systems designed around the idea of Events, with guest Bobby Calderwood. Bobby’s been designi…

1
How Lisp is designing Nanotechnology (with Prof. Christian Schafmeister) 52:58

8M ago52:58

52:58

One of our oldest languages meets one of our newest sciences in this episode, as we talk with Professor Christian Schafmeister, an award-winning nanotech researcher who's been developing a language and a design suite to help research the future molecular machines. In this episode Christian gives us a quick chemistry lesson to explain what his resea…

1
Roc - A Functional Language looking for those Software Sweetspots (with Richard Feldman) 1:01:48

8M ago1:01:48

1:01:48

Sometimes, what a programming language makes harder is just as important as what it makes easier. For a simple example, think of GOTO. We’ve been wisely avoiding it for decades because it makes confusing control flow desperately easy. Types and tests are other examples - they’re as much about specifying what shouldn’t work as what should. And persp…

1
If Kafka has a UX problem, does UNIX have the answer? (with Luca Pette) 1:19:29

9M ago1:19:29

1:19:29

One of the recurring themes in the big data & data streaming worlds at the moment is developer experience. It seems like every major tool is trying to answer this question: how do we make large-scale data processing feel trivial? In some places the answer is any library you like as long as it’s Python. In other realms, a mixture of Java and SQL sho…

1
About Black Friday 9:58

9M ago9:58

9:58

What's really being celebrated on Black Friday and is it the biggest shopping day in the world? Featuring Tom Merritt. Full Episode Transcript here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

1
Will we be writing Hare in 2099? (with Drew DeVault) 54:38

9M ago54:38

54:38

This week we're back on systems programming with Hare. A C-like language for the ages. We talk to its creator, Drew DeVault, about what he thinks we can learn from the past 50 years of programming, and how we can build that hindsight into a new language that will last for the next 100. In among all that long-term ambition we talk cover everything f…

1
Startups Should Solve Real People's Real Problems (with Michael Drogalis) 51:30

9M ago51:30

51:30

A few months ago, Michael Drogalis quit his job and decided launch 4 viable startup business ideas in 4 months, publically documenting every step of the journey. Over here at Developer Voices it seemed fun, inspired, and just crazy enough to work. We had him on the podcast a few months back just as that journey was beginning, and since he launched …

1
Is Flink the answer to the ETL problem? (with Robert Metzger) 1:04:26

9M ago1:04:26

1:04:26

Integration is probably the last, hardest, and least well thought-out part of any large software project. So anything that makes the data-streaming job easier is worth knowing about. So this week we turn our attention to Apache Flink, a flexible system for grabbing, transforming and shipping data between systems using Java, Python or good ol’ SQL. …

1
What's Zig got that C, Rust and Go don't have? (with Loris Cro) 1:23:52

10M ago1:23:52

1:23:52

Zig is a programming language that’s attempting to become “the new C” - the language of choice for low-level systems programming and embedded hardware. Going into that space not only puts it in competition with C and C++, but also other newcomers like Rust and Go. So what makes Zig special? Joining us to discuss it is Loris Cro from the Zig Foundat…

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