Late Night Linux Extra

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... Read More

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... Read More

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... Read More

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... Read More

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... Read More

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... Read More

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... Read More

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  ... Read More

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... Read More

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... Read More

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... Read More

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... Read More

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... Read More

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... Read More

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... Read More

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... Read More

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... Read More

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... Read More

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... Read More

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... Read More

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... Read More

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... Read More

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…      ... Read More

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... Read More

Forks are a fundamental aspect of open source software so we get into the different types of forks, when and why you might want to fork a project, the maintenance burden that comes with a hard fork, the importance of winning mindshare for your fork, what exactly counts as a fork, when it's not always... Read More

We are joined by Allan Jude to talk about what it's like to run a company that develops and maintains open source software with a focus on upstreaming as much code as possible.   Klara November 2023 FreeBSD Vendor Summit – The Value of Upstream First How to upstream code to open source projects FiloSottile (Filippo... Read More

Andy is a huge proponent of test-driven development and explains why – including types of code testing including unit tests and integration tests, when you actually need to run tests, how long they should take, and more.   Emily Bache cyber‑dojo Test with Go         Kolide Kolide ensures that if a device... Read More

Kevin and Andy answer Joe's noob questions about development including the differences between compiled and interpreted languages, C vs C++, why the Linux kernel is written in C, Go vs Rust, and what memory safety means.       Kolide Kolide ensures that if a device isn't secure it can't access your apps.  It's Device... Read More

We are joined by Drew DeVault to discuss his programming language called Hare, which aims for 100 years of forwards compatibility. We mentioned Drew's blog posts Can I be on your podcast? and It takes a village         Kolide Kolide ensures that if a device isn't secure it can't access your apps. ... Read More

How we first learned to code, and how we learn new technologies now. Snake in Terraform Snake in lots of languages Web server in Sinclair BASIC       Kolide Kolide ensures that if a device isn't secure it can't access your apps.  It's Device Trust for Okta. Visit kolide.com/linuxdevtime to learn more.   Support... Read More

What we've learned over the years about the interview process for software development jobs, both as the applicant and the interviewer.       Kolide Kolide ensures that if a device isn't secure it can't access your apps.  It's Device Trust for Okta. Visit kolide.com/linuxdevtime to learn more.   Support us on Patreon and get... Read More

The automation tools we use in our development and why we use them. Plus how to engage with your project's community – both in real time, and asynchronously.       Kolide Kolide ensures that if a device isn't secure it can't access your apps.  It's Device Trust for Okta. Visit kolide.com/linuxdevtime to learn more.... Read More

Andy Balaam joins us to talk about accepting contributions from devs with varying levels of experience. When to invest the time to mentor them, why documentation is important, how automated tools fit in, being willing to decline some contributions, dealing with companies vs individuals, and more.         Kolide Kolide ensures that if... Read More

How we use AI coding assistants like GitHub Copilot, what they have done to the development industry, what might happen in the future, and the ethics of the whole thing. With guest host Linus.       Kolide Kolide ensures that if a device isn't secure it can't access your apps.  It's Device Trust for... Read More

We follow up on last episode with some clarifications from Amolith about code collaboration. Plus we get into development workflows in general, code review, the paradigms we couldn't do without, and more. With guest host Linus.   Amolith mentioned a Low energy game jam.     Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS... Read More

When it comes to collaboration workflows, Amolith dislikes the pull request model that GitHub made popular and much prefers the email/patch-based approach. Kevin does his best to get to the bottom of why, and Joe wonders if it might come down to disliking Microsoft.   Your GitHub pull request workflow is slowing everyone down Graphite... Read More

Linux Downtime is now Linux Dev Time! In this first episode we talk about “sharpening our tools” – changing your dev tools, trying out new languages, using existing code vs writing something new, how to get over creative blocks, and more.   How Often Should We Sharpen Our Tools?       See our contact... Read More

Kevin joins us to talk about the hype that surrounds some programming languages like Rust and Python, how some languages like Java went out of fashion, and why the likes of PHP never saw much hype at all. With guest host Jim from 2.5 Admins.   Kevin's Twitter Kevin's Mastodon Clap        ... Read More

There's a meme that software developers should be forced to use low end hardware to experience what it's like to be a real user. So what hardware should devs actually use to test their software? How does this differ for GUI and CLI applications? With guest host Jim from 2.5 Admins.       HelloFresh... Read More

We are joined by Roger Light to discuss what it's like to work for a company that uses the open core model — maintaining an open source project and offering additional paid for proprietary features.   Mosquitto Cedalo       Factor Factor's fresh, never frozen, meals are ready in just 2 minutes, so all... Read More

We are joined by Marcin Kulik – the creator and maintainer of asciinema. We talk about the project itself, developing on Linux, IDEs, targetting a technical audience, the advantages of writing for a command line interface, why -R is always wrong for the recursive flag, and more. Marcin on Mastodon asciinema on Mastodon asciinema on... Read More

Jim Salter joins us to talk about getting the most out of your open source project. From designing and planning, to attracting contributors, considering the correct scope, building on top of existing software, and more.   Sanoid and Syncoid Perlpv Jim's website Jim's social media links 2.5 Admins podcast       Factor Factor's fresh,... Read More

How to get hired for your first development job, more on contributor license agreements, and our thoughts on different immutable OS approaches.   Fiduciary Licence Agreement (FLA) – FSFE Why the FSF Gets Copyright Assignments from Contributors         HelloFresh With HelloFresh, you get farm-fresh, pre-portioned ingredients and seasonal recipes delivered right to... Read More

We are joined by Element developer Andy Balaam to talk about working on open source software after 20 years in the proprietary world. We get into working in public, the realities of accepting code contributions, being part of a distributed team, the pros and cons of working from home, and more.   Andy's links: Live... Read More

We are all on board with the right to be forgotten but it can cause some tricky problems for open source projects – particularly small ones. Plus why we won't stop going on about why we take such a dim view of crypto. Amolith mentioned a toot from the Tor Project.       HelloFresh... Read More

Why Amolith uses Arch, why Gary uses Debian, and why Joe uses Ubuntu.       Factor Factor's fresh, never frozen, meals are ready in just 2 minutes, so all you have to do is heat them up and enjoy. Go to factormeals.com/ldt50 and use code ldt50 to get 50% off.       See... Read More

Contributor license agreements aren't very popular, but not having a CLA can cause problems for projects in the future. Gary can't do things like publishing Pidgin on Apple's app stores, and Amolith is wrestling with how to keep his options open for the SaaS project he's working on. Don't sign a CLA Seriously, don't sign... Read More

We are joined by Chris Waldon to talk about how to get started with coding and software development. Chris mentioned his blog.       Factor Factor's fresh, never frozen, meals are ready in just 2 minutes, so all you have to do is heat them up and enjoy. Go to factormeals.com/ldt50 and use code... Read More

Is there really a renaissance in open communication tools? Does the success of the Fediverse mean that people are finally moving away from the huge companies that lock your data up? Are FOSS people just living in a bubble while the world continues to use the big platforms? How does Meta/Facebook joining the Fediverse fit... Read More