Magpie Talk Show

So, after far too long a hiatus, we’re back on the Magpie Talkshow for a one-off episode where I interview Kafka creator and Confluent CEO Jay Kreps. I’ve been doing a small amount of work with Confluent recently, and through this I got the chance to meet Jay, and I thought he’d make a great guest for the show. So in this episode we’re going to learn about Jay’s own journey in the tech industry, as well as diving into the mindset behind Kafka and where you might want to use it. There are a couple of firsts in this episode. Firstly, it was recorded remotely via video conferencing - I think the audio quality is pretty good, largely thanks to the use of zencaster. I did however have to do more editing than usual but I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. Secondly We’re also going to be sharing a video of our chat over on confluent's website, and I’ll update this post with a link once it’s available. I do have to apologise for the sporadic nature of the episodes I’m putting out but as is often the case, life get’s in the way. In between our last episode and this one I setup my own company, and left australia for London, where I am currently based. I still plan to publish the occasional episode from time to time, so please do stay subscribed to the feed. Hopefully if things settle down a bit I may get back to a more regular posting schedule! Jay and I talked about a number of things on the podcast, but the main one I wanted to highlight is previous guest Ben Stopford’s really interesting posts on using Kafka for sharing data between microservices. There are some fascinating ideas there which I think can solve problems many of us face when creating finer-grained distributed systems. You can find Ben's posts here: https://www.confluent.io/blog/author/ben/. Anyway, I hope you enjoy the show!

Adrian Cockcroft has been a great supporter of my work around microservices, and I was really grateful he was able to find the time to catch up with me at Yow 2015 late last year. Few people have done as much to help share the power of the cloud in recent years as Adrian, but he certainly has a career that predates the explosion of Amazon Web Services. In episode 22 of the Magpie Talkshow, he shares is journey so far in the IT industry, from physics to venture capital firm Battery Ventures, with stops at Sun, EBay and Netflix in-between. We also find time to talk about the future of memory, security & compliance, bad puns and flying spaghetti monster simulators. As always you can find more information about the episode over at the blog: http://samnewman.io/blog/2016/10/08/magpie-talkshow-episode-22-adrian-cockcroft/

In episode 21 of the Magpie Talkshow, I interview NASA Scientist Dr Kamal Oudrhiri, who led the radio sciences team for the recent Mars Curiosity Lander. For more information on this episode, along with, links and videos, please check out my blog: http://samnewman.io/blog/2016/09/19/magpie-talkshow-episode-21-kamal-oudrhiri-nasa-special-part-2/ As always, please do subscribe, leave a comment or a review!

In episode 20 of the Magpie Talkshow, I interview NASA Scientist Dr Anita Sengupta, who was the Lead Systems Engineer on the parachute system for the recent Mars Curiosity Lander. For more information, links and videos, please check out my blog: http://samnewman.io/blog/2016/09/08/magpie-talkshow-episode-20-anita-sengputa-nasa-special/

Welcome back to the Magpie Talkshow Podcast! It's been too long (almost exactly 3 months) since I got the last episode out, and despite having a healthy backlog of interviews recorded I've been unable to find the time to get them out. Since then, a number of things have happened including me moving on from ThoughtWorks, where I have worked for over 12 years. I’ll be sharing more about why I made that decision and what comes next over on my blog at some point soon. In this, the 19th episode of the podcast, I chat to Aino Corry. Aino, believe it or not, develops developers! We caught up at the Yow conference late last year, just one of a number of conferences in which she plays a key part. We chatted about a number of things including what being a meta-developer means, how to run conferences, diversity in IT, and the importance of retrospectives. You can follow Aino on twitter @apaipi, and find more details about her work over on Meta Developer at http://metadeveloper.com or via Linked In at https://www.linkedin.com/in/aino-vonge-corry-9a23801.

In this week's episode I chat to Kathleen Fisher, a professor at Tufts University. I caught up with Kathleen during the first stop of the three city Yow 2015 conference late last year, where she was delivering the opening keynote on the topic of formal methods. Back in university I struggled with the topic of formal verification of software. The amount of work required to formally, mathematically, prove a given implementation actually did what you hoped, always seemed to be an order of magnitude too great. But Kathleen's incredibly entertaining and informative keynote showed me how much the topic has come on. In our interview, we talk about her work in this area, including about how formally verified systems can greatly help improve the security of systems, from off the shelf quadcoptoers to full-sized unmanned helicopters. She also explains how even systems with small amounts of formally proved software can still be useful, and why it's important to know if your in-car entertainment system is actually backed by a fully fledged linux OS, especially if someone has a dodgy encoding of some classical music lying around! You can find out more about Kathleen's work here: www.cs.tufts.edu/~kfisher/Kathlee…Fisher/Home.html. Her Yow keynote is now also available here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aFeGGyi19A and see her latest talk here: prezi.com/wr41rmfmhotj/using-f…hare&utm_medium=copy.

After far too long a hiatus, the Magpie Talkshow is back with it's 17th episode. This week we wrap up the last of the interviews I recorded at Øredev last year, and hear my chat with Android developer Corey Latislaw. Mobile development in general is somewhat outside my wheelhouse, so I was very keen to hear about the challenges in that space. At Øredev, Corey did a talk about Android as the world phone, and during our interview we touch on a number of aspects of developing solutions for the emerging world, and how as a mobile developer you can start targetting the next 5 billion users. We also find time to talk about the merits of minesweeper for identifying algorithmic aptitude, Corey's work helping bring small-scale solar to off-grid communities, and why Android fragmentation might not be as bad as you might have previously heard. You can find more about Corey here: http://coreylatislaw.com, find more about Off Grid Electric here: http://offgrid-electric.com, and follow her on twitter here: https://twitter.com/corey_latislaw.

Distributed systems can be pretty hard things to understand, so I'm always on the lookout for someone who manages to explain these things well. Neha Narula is one such person, and I was lucky enough to see one of her sessions at Øredev late last year. After spending several years researching distributed systems at Google, Neha is now working at the MIT Media Lab looking into uses of the blockchain. During our interview, we talk about distributed databases, why distributed transactions can be a pretty good solution sometimes, and how much Postgres rocks! You can follow Neha on Twitter @neha, and find her blog at http://transientneha.blogspot.com/.

Back in November, again at the Øredev conference, I sat down with an old colleague of mine, Ben Stopford. After starting out in physics (specialising in cosmology no less!) Ben shifted over to computing, where he has been ever since. After leaving ThoughtWorks, he spent much of his time in financial institutions working in the areas of high performance computing and data engineering. Since then he has taken up a role at Confluent, the company behind the Kafka distributed message broker. During our interview we talk about the challenges of handling volume at scale, why Kafka is different to other sorts of message brokers, and which Fortran is the best Fortran! As always, lots of links: * Kafka: http://kafka.apache.org/ * Confluent: http://www.confluent.io/ * Follow Ben on Twitter: @benstopford * From Øredev: Elements Of Scale http://oredev.org/2015/sessions/elements-of-scale-composing-and-scaling-data-platforms * Another of his talks from Øredev: The Future Of Data Technology http://oredev.org/2015/sessions/the-future-of-data-technology

*** When I first put this episode out, there was a glitch at the end with overlaid speech. This is now fixed! *** I've enjoyed all the interviews I've done for The Magpie Talkshow so far, but some do stick out more than others. Often the key distinction is the enthusiasm the interviewee has for a given topic - their passion really shines through when I listen back. Sam Aaron, this week's guest on the show, is a great example of this. I've known Sam for a while. Back when we first met, he was using Overtone to create music using Clojure. Nowadays he works in research at Cambridge University, where amongst other things he works on SonicPi, a Ruby-based tool for making music and livecoding. During the episode, we explore his work on SonicPi, the challenges of live coding, how graphing calculators rock and why Aphex Twin should be using code to create his music. Sam's main passion isn't necessarily music, more the idea that coding can and should be seen as a creative endeavour. As he puts it in the podcast, wouldn't it be dull if we only used English to describe business logic, rather than plays or poetry? Sam hopes that platforms like SonicPi can shine a light on the potential for code to enable other things. SonicPi itself is now on the default distribution for the Raseberry Pi, and is being used all over to help children code (which is a neat link back to Lynn Langit's work all the way back in episode 1). But it isn't just for kids! It's easy to use, comes with a great set of tutorials, and if you needed any encouragement to give it a go, then just listen to the episode :-) When not working on SonicPi itself, Sam uses it in live events - I was lucky enough to see him perform at an after-hours concert at Øredev after seeing an earlier talk all about livecoding, and I'd highly recommend seeing Sam in person or at least watching one of the various videos of his work available to get a sense of how it all works. The talk he gave at Øredev is probably a good place to start. Sam's Homepage: http://sam.aaron.name/ His talk at Øredev: https://vimeo.com/144751429 SonicPi: http://sonic-pi.net/ Examples of his live coding: https://www.livecoding.tv/samaaron/ A recent interview he did with the BBC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbgOfrvXsGk

After an unplanned two week hiatus, the Magpie Talkshow is back. The break was due to a bunch of craziness going on which I'll hopefully let you know about soon, but I'm hoping from here on out we can get back to an episode a week. Aside from Øredev being a generally great conference, it was also my most successful in managing to grab people for interviews. This week in the second interview from that conference I'm chatting to Håkan Jonsso about data science. Håkan is a researcher working on Sony's Lifelog project, which aims to help you collect data about yourself to build insights. The sensitive nature of the data involved with Lifelog puts Håkan in an interesting position with regards to the privacy of the data collected, a subject we explore at some length, especially the role of ongoing informed consent. We also try and tease apart the distinction between data science and data engineering, explore why terms & conditions are pretty useless in building trust with your users, and talk about some of the tools Håkan uses in his work. I do have to put in my oft-used disclaimer here around the quality of the recording. We chatted in what I thought was a deserted restaurant at a nearby hotel only to find that not only was there piped music which is way more audible in the recording that I'd hoped but that there was also a lot of noise coming from the restaurant's kitchen. Hopefully it doesn't impact too much on your enjoyment of the episode though! During the interview Håkan mentoned a tutorial on how to access your data from Lifelog which you can find here: http://developer.sonymobile.com/2015/07/28/app-developers-can-now-explore-lifelog-user-predictability-with-data-science-and-machine-learning/ He also mentioned Animashree Anandkumars work on Tensors which you can find here: http://newport.eecs.uci.edu/anandkumar/. On the subject of tensors, since Håkan and I chatted Google have released their Tensorflow library which is worth looking at if the subject interests you: https://www.tensorflow.org/. If you'd like to know more about Håkan's work with Lifelog, his presentation from Øredev is available below now: https://vimeo.com/144721448 And finally you can follow Håkan at Twitter on @hajons

This episode is a week later than planned, due to me being on holiday. Good for me, not so good for all of you I'm afraid! It'll be weekly from here on out I hope, and I'll get better at letting you know if they'll be any interruptions in service. Anyway, on with the episode details. I had the chance to visit SoundCloud's Berlin HQ last year, and sat down with Kristof Adriaenssens, an engineer in their Core Engineering team. Among other things he contributes to a project called Zipkin, a distributed tracing tool. We talk about Zipkin itself, the general challenges of managing microservices at scale, and some of the solutions that they have come up with at SoundCloud to handle the complexities. For more on the Zipkin project: http://zipkin.io/index.html Brave, the Zipkin Java library: https://github.com/openzipkin/brave You can follow Kristof over at twitter as @KristofAdr Or see his Github account at https://github.com/kristofa

I got to record a number of great interviews at Øredev in Sweden late last year. Amy's was the third, but due to slightly confusing reasons on my side, is actually the first to get released. Amy is a software engineer in test at Songkick, who has been helping the delivery organisation there make the journey towards continuous delivery. We talk about many, many things, including the value of parent pester power, why university courses with sandwich (work placement) years are a good idea, he different types of testing, and how to adopt continuous delivery. Amy on Twitter: @itjustbroke Amy’s Blog: https://testingthemind.wordpress.com/ - A recent presentation, 'Testing in a Continuous Delivery World': https://vimeo.com/95185769 Amy’s involvement with the Weekend Testing group: http://weekendtesting.com/?page_id=3515 Finally, the name of the Jason Huggins angry-birds playing robot I mentioned is Tapsterbot. Jason actually has a new venture up and running looking to build more of these, and you can see lots of fun videos of them in action here: https://t.co/ADFi5Maqeg

Many of you have probably heard of my colleague Martin Fowler before. I'm lucky enough to get to work with him on occasion as part of my role on ThoughtWorks' Technology Advisory Board, which is an internal body inside ThoughtWorks itself. One of our main jobs is putting out the twice yearly Technology Radar, and I was in our New York office recently to work on the new version when Martin and I found time to catch up for a chat. Recorded in a rather cozy room, we talked about many things, including how Martin got where he is today, how the tech radar is created, and even the future of computing books. During the interview we reference quite a few things, so there are a bunch of links for further reading if you're so inclined: - Martin On Twitter: https://twitter.com/martinfowler - Toby Clemson's Infodeck on Testing Microservices: http://martinfowler.com/articles/microservice-testing/ - Martin's early writing (late 90's): http://martinfowler.com/tags/distributed%20computing%20magazine.html - Recent refactoring articles: http://martinfowler.com/tags/refactoring.html - General microserservices resources: http://martinfowler.com/microservices/ - Infodeck on future of data: http://martinfowler.com/articles/bigData/ - Anti-pattern: http://martinfowler.com/bliki/AntiPattern.html - Feature branches: http://martinfowler.com/bliki/FeatureBranch.html - Taking responsibility for what we build: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8aECe4lp44 And the latest version of the tech radar can be found here: (https://www.thoughtworks.com/radar)

In a change to the normal schedule, rather than releasing episodes in the strict order in which they were recorded I've instead brought forward one of my most recent interviews. In Episode 9 of the Magpie Talkshow, I talk to security consultant, blogger and pluralsught author Troy Hunt. In the interview, recorded at Yow 2015, Troy and I discuss a number of security breaches, including the recent VTech hacking incident which happened in late 2015. Given the recency of the events we covered, I thought it made sense to pull this episode forward. Troy discusses his involvement with the VTech situation, as well as his work with Have I Been Pwned? A site which helps you understand if your information may have been compromised in a data breach. Along the way we find time to discuss including ethical hacking, how not to store passwords, why a pineapple might be a hackers best friend and the success he's been having with Pluralsight. I hope you enjoy it! You can read Troy's blog here: http://www,troyhunt.com/ Follow him at Twitter: https://twitter.com/troyhunt Check out Have I Been Pwned? https://haveibeenpwned.com And finally see his recent pluralsight video courses: http://app.pluralsight.com/author/troy-hunt

Microservices have been a focus of mine for the last few years, and one of the trickiest problems in this area is how to ensure that when you change one service that you don't break other, collaborating services. While working as a Consultant for Dius at REA in Australia, Beth helped create an internal project called Pact to help solve this problem. Now an open source project in its own right, Beth and I discuss what Pact is and the problems it solves. We also found time to talk about why Ruby (and specifically Rails) might not be the right choice for that next giant codebase, why we keep making the same mistakes over and over again, and even discover that Beth was one of the few people not using Logo to draw rude words during school programming classes. You can find Beth on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/bethesque Details on the project she helps lead, Pact: https://github.com/realestate-com-au/pact And if you're interested in learning more, this video from Yow 2014 gives a great overview of how REA moved to microservices and the role that Pact played: https://yow.eventer.com/yow-2014-1222/the-odyssey-from-monoliths-to-microservices-at-realestate-com-au-by-beth-skurrie-and-evan-bottcher-and-jon-eaves-1751

Brian Sletten has long been passionate about the semantic web, and I was fortunate enough to catch up with him at UberConf 2015 in Denver, Colorado. We talk about why the early promise of the semantic web didn't materialise at the time (and why it now may be coming into it's own), why XML may be a terrible way to view graphs, and even touch on the problems with encryption. You can follow Brian on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/bsletten And see some of his previous talks: http://nofluffjuststuff.com/conference/speaker/brian_sletten You can also read up on JSON-LD here: http://json-ld.org/ Finally, Brian has a bunch of reading & presentations out there if you're interested in exploring some of his ideas on the semantic web further: Caring Doesn't Scale - https://www.oreilly.com/ideas/caring-doesnt-scale A Webinar on JSON-LD - http://www.dataversity.net/smartdata-webinar-json-ld/ http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/wa-data-integration-at-scale_rdf/ And a series of articles on using RDF and associated technology to create webs of data - https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/wa-data-integration-at-scale_sparql/, http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/wa-data-integration-at-scale_linked-data/index.html, http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/wa-data-integration-at-scale-OSLC-and-the-linked-data-platform/index.html and http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/wa-data-integration-at-scale-oslc/index.html

Simon Brown is a freelance author, consultant and trainer based on Jersey in the channel islands. I've known Simon for a while, and we caught up at Devoxx Poland earlier this year. Simon's focus for the last few years has been on helping people articulate their architectures, and come up with sensible abstractions to make it easy to share them. This is represented in his work on the C4 Model, in his book Software Architecture For Developers, and a new venture, an online tool to help you generate and roundtrip architecture diagrams from code. Aside from talking about architecture diagrams, we also talk a little about Jersey, self-publshing books, and manage to not mention Bergerac once. Simon's Website: http://www.simonbrown.je/ The C4 model: https://www.voxxed.com/blog/2014/10/simple-sketches-for-diagramming-your-software-architecture/ Structurizr: https://structurizr.com/ Software Architecture For Developers: https://leanpub.com/software-architecture-for-developers His new book, The Art Of Visualising Software Architecture: https://leanpub.com/visualising-software-architecture

David Pollack it turns out has done many things. He wasn't just born before the internet, he saw the internet being built. Since then he created the Lift framework for Scala, discovered Clojure, and can now be seen playing with Docker. In one of the longer episodes so far, our conversation also takes in types, docker security, and why minecraft might be the spectrum or commodore64 of the 21st century. Trust me, it makes more sense when you listen to it... David's blog can be found at: http://blog.goodstuff.im/, and you can follow him as @dpp on Twitter. His talk on Docker and Weave at Devoxx Poland can be found here: https://www.parleys.com/tutorial/security-platform-service-docker-weave. The Docker and Security talk I mention during the interview was by Jen Andre at Velocity 2015, and was titled "Operating Docker securely for fun and profit".

Some people love their job, and Irina is clearly one of them. Coming into computing via a somewhat unconventional route, Irina spent a long time with Java before discovering Erlang, which as you can tell from our discussion is something of a passion of hers! We talk about What caused her to switch from Java to Erlang, whether or not Elixir could be the killer app for Erlang, and why you should always let kids play with robots. Regarding Elixir, we talk towards the end of the interview about good books to read on the subject. Irina mentioned afterwards that she would recommend starting with "Programming Elixir" by Dave Thomas, and perhaps following that up with "Metaprogramming Elixir" by Chris McCord. You can follow Irina on Twitter at https://twitter.com/irina_guberman. She was also speaking at City Code Chicago recently - the video should be available soon - check http://chicago.citycode.io/irina-guberman.html for details. If you can't wait for that, her talk from NDC Oslo "Maximizing throughput on Multicore Systems" is already available online at https://vimeo.com/131642358.

In the 3rd of my 4 interviews at NDC Oslo, I talk to ThoughtWorks colleague and co-Technical Radar author Neal Ford. Neal talks about his journey into computing, the uneven distribution of holographic politicians, indoor plumbing, and functional thinking. Perhaps not in that order. You can find out more about Neal Ford over at http://nealford.com/, or follow him on twitter @neal4d

In this week's episode, I speak to Venkat Subramaniam. Venkat seems to have the stamina of 5 normal people - whenever I start to feel sorry for myself about my own hectic schedule, I look at what Venkat is up to and realise that I have no cause to complain. Aside from being a serial author, and conference speaker, Venkat also finds time to do consulting and training too, all while continuing to be incredibly passionate about his work. In this interview we talk about many things, but in particular functional programming and how you might be able to try it out in environments that are otherwise a bit more traditional. We caught up in what I thought would be a nice quiet location at NDC Oslo, only to find that I had placed us next to a coffee machine. I'll get this right one day. If you want to know more about his work or what he is up to, you can head over to his website at agiledeveloper.com/

In the first episode of The Magpie Talkshow, I interview Lynn Langit. Lynn focuses both on data engineering and the cloud, and we discuss both, as well as her work with the Teach Kids Programming organisation. I'm also pretty sure she's the first person I've met who is a Microsoft MVP, a Google Developer Expert, and an AWS Community Hero... If you want to know more about Lynn, you can find her here: main blog - http://www.lynnlangit.com twitter - https://twitter.com/lynnlangit And if you want to know more about the Teach Kids Programming project, or the associated open source projects we talk about on the podcast, these are a good place to start: kids website - http://www.teachingkidsprogramming.org TKP GitHub - https://github.com/TeachingKidsProgramming