Software Unscripted

TigerBeetle's Spectacular Jepsen Report - with Joran Greef 19.06.2026 1sa 18dk

Richard talks with TigerBeetle founder Joran Greef about how their team's database achieved a wildly successful Jepsen Report. Where other databases have been famously skewered in the past, TigerBeetle passed with flying colors, and Richard and Joran discuss the story of how they got there, how TigerBeetle makes money when their database is open source, and many other topics around software quality in general.This episode was sponsored by mailtrap.io - modern email delivery for developers. Try Mailtrap for free: https://l.rw.rw/software_unscripted_4Patreon supporters get ad-free episodes! https://www.patreon.com/SoftwareUnscripted/TigerBeetle's Jepsen Report - https://tigerbeetle.com/blog/2025-06-06-fuzzer-blind-spots-meet-jepsen/MongoDB's 2020 Jepsen Report - https://jepsen.io/analyses/mongodb-4.2.6Zig - https://ziglang.org/TigerStyle software development methodology - https://tigerstyle.dev/Deterministic Simulation Testing (DST) - https://antithesis.com/docs/resources/deterministic_simulation_testing/Antithesis - https://antithesis.com/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

AI & Software Quality with Shawn Wang (aka swyx) 09.05.2026 1sa 28dk

Richard talks with AI expert Shawn "swyx" Wang about all sorts of AI topics, including how it fits into IDEs, AI agent implementations, the economics of AI subscriptions, the future of AI in software, and how all of this affects software quality.This episode was sponsored by mailtrap.io - modern email delivery for developers. Try Mailtrap for free: https://l.rw.rw/software_unscripted_3Patreon supporters get ad-free episodes! https://patreon.com/SoftwareUnscriptedShawn's Latent Space Podcast - https://www.latent.space/podcast AI Engineer Conference Series - https://www.ai.engineer/ RAG - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retriev... Shawn's "WTF Happened in 2025?" site - https://wtfhappened2025.com/ Radiologist shortage - https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/hea... Intro – LLM psychosis & the Ilya Sutskever story Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

HTMX Creator Carson Gross on Comp Sci's Evolution 01.04.2026 1sa 27dk

HTMX creator and Montana State University instructor Carson Gross talks to Richard about why HTMX moved from version 2 straight to version 4, API boundaries in library design, jQuery, and how the field of Computer Science education is now changing from the perspective of someone who's been teaching it for years.This episode was sponsored by mailtrap.io - modern email delivery for developers. Try Mailtrap for free: https://l.rw.rw/software_unscripted_2Patreon supporters get ad-free episodes! https://www.patreon.com/SoftwareUnscripted- HTMX - https://htmx.org/- Version 2 → Version 4 announcement https://htmx.org/essays/the-fetchening/- Shoutout to other htmx contributors: https://github.com/bencroker https://github.com/benpate https://github.com/alexpetros https://github.com/Telroshan https://github.com/MichaelWest22- Carson's hardware course - https://github.com/msu/csci-366-spring2025/blob/main/SYLLABUS.md- Big Sky Dev Conf - https://bigskydevconf.com/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

How Mitchell Hashimoto Builds Ghostty 17.02.2026 1sa 3dk

Ghostty creator and Hashicorp cofounder Mitchell Hashimoto talks with Richard about the development of that high-performance terminal emulator: how he's been building Ghostty, how he does native GUI development while sharing code across platforms, how LLMs have affected both the project and his love of coding, his thoughts on AI ethics, and more.This episode was sponsored by mailtrap.io - modern email delivery for developers. Try Mailtrap for free: https://l.rw.rw/software_unscripted_1Patreon supporters get ad-free episodes! https://www.patreon.com/SoftwareUnscripted- Ghostty nonprofit announcement - https://mitchellh.com/writing/ghostty-non-profit- Zig programming language - https://ziglang.org- Roc programming language - https://www.roc-lang.org- Zed's Windows 95-inspired launch site - https://www.windowswen.com- Amp Code - https://ampcode.com- Wispr Flow - https://wisprflow.ai Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Gleam's Design and Compiler - with creator Louis Pilfold 10.01.2026 1sa 11dk

Gleam programming language creator Louis Pilfold talks with Richard about Gleam's design and various challenges that came up when implementing its compiler.- Gleam Language - https://gleam.run- Erlang Language - https://www.erlang.org- Elixir Language - https://elixir-lang.org- Roc Language - https://www.roc-lang.org- Hadoukenify https://github.com/reibitto/hadoukenify - presumably based on https://twitter.com/dr4goonis/status/476617165463105536- "Let-generalization: Let's not?" by Ayaz Hafiz - https://github.com/roc-lang/rfcs/blob/e4f05480ed96136395bb466bf5c241e42100bf66/0010-let-generalization-lets-not.md- "Let Should Not Be Generalised" by Simon Peyton Jones, Dimitrios Vytiniotis, and Tom Schrijvers - https://simon.peytonjones.org/let-generalised/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Metaprogramming Your IDE in Lean 4 with Harry Goldstein 21.12.2025 41dk

Harry Goldstein talks with Richard Feldman about the Lean 4 programming language's compile-time metaprogramming capabilities, including how they can be used to control elements of your IDE in realtime. They also discuss other topics like property-based testing, theorem proving, and Smalltalk.You can get ad-free episodes (including video) by supporting Software Unscripted on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/SoftwareUnscriptedThe Best New Programming Language is a Proof Assistant by Harry Goldstein - https://youtu.be/c5LOYzZx-0c?si=UnTfkczIhdoF7QkxThe Lean Programming Language - https://lean-lang.orgSimon Peyton-Jones: Escape from the ivory tower: the Haskell journey - https://youtu.be/re96UgMk6GQ?si=8xqpAS8VTQaqgbzg"Shen: A Sufficiently Advanced Lisp" by Aditya Siram - https://youtu.be/lMcRBdSdO_U?si=VOwJNeLAvnIRUm_nHypothesis Property-Based Testing library for Python - https://hypothesis.works/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jonathan Blow on Programming Language Design 15.11.2025 1sa 41dk

Jonathan Blow, creator of popular games Braid and The Witness, talks with Richard about programming language design - including the design of the programming language he's been building for game developers.Keynote & Tech Demo - https://youtu.be/IdpD5QIVOKQECS and Rust's Borrow Checker - https://youtu.be/4t1K66dMhWk"The 30 Million Line Problem" - https://youtu.be/kZRE7HIO3vk"A New Programming Language for Games" - https://youtu.be/TH9VCN6UkyQ?si=Z5cqazo4QU7AibzBRoc Programming Language - https://roc-lang.orgCasey Muratori's "Performance-Aware Programming" Course - https://www.computerenhance.com/p/welcome-to-the-performance-awareFile Pilot File Explorer - https://filepilot.tech/Ghostty Terminal - https://ghostty.org/Language Server Protocol - https://microsoft.github.io/language-server-protocol/WebAssembly Integer Sizes - https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/WebAssembly/Reference/Numeric/ConstCliff Click's Sea of Nodes Compiler IR - https://github.com/SeaOfNodes/Chapters00:00 The Programming Establishment02:04 Metaprogramming05:04 Compile-Time Execution08:05 Language Feature Interoperability10:53 Compile Time Execution27:52 Cross-Compiling and FFI31:04 Determinism in Programming35:07 Balancing Power and Safety40:11 Memory Safety vs. Performance50:15 The Evolution of Software Performance55:32 Performance Awareness01:03:56 Dependencies and Version Control01:14:54 Dependency Availability Risk01:18:42 Memory Management01:24:51 Sandboxing01:30:23 Operating Systems Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Zig Creator Andrew Kelley 09.10.2025 1sa 49dk

Richard talks with Zig Creator Andrew Kelley.- Support Zig - https://ziglang.org/zsf/- Zig's "Writergate" - https://ziglang.org/download/0.15.1/release-notes.html#Writergate- "What Color is Your Function?" by Robert Nystrom - https://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2015/02/01/what-color-is-your-function/- "Asynchrony is not Concurrency" by Loris Cro - https://kristoff.it/blog/asynchrony-is-not-concurrency/- "Data alignment for speed: myth or reality?" by Daniel Lemire - https://lemire.me/blog/2012/05/31/data-alignment-for-speed-myth-or-reality/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Securing Evolving Software with Noah Hall 20.09.2025 59dk

xz vulnerability: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XZ_Utils_backdoorSpectre: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectre_(security_vulnerability)Meltdown: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meltdown_(security_vulnerability)Heartbleed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeartbleedNoah on GitHub https://github.com/eeue56 - Substack https://substack.com/@eeue56 - BlueSky https://bsky.app/profile/derw-lang.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Andreas Kling on Ladybird Browser, SerenityOS, and Powerlifting 01.09.2025 1sa 20dk

Ladybird Browser - https://ladybird.orgSerenityOS - https://serenityos.orgStory of the man who used powerlifting to recover after falling off a roof https://startingstrength.com/articles/brian_jones_story.pdfStrongLifts 5x5 - https://stronglifts.com/stronglifts-5x5/Starting Strength - https://startingstrength.com/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

GPU Programming and Language Design with Chris Lattner 25.07.2025 1sa 18dk

Richard talks with Swift, LLVM, Clang, and Mojo creator Chris Lattner about programming on the GPU and on the CPU, as well as a number of programming language design topics.Chris's "Democratizing AI Compute" blog series - https://www.modular.com/blog/democratizing-compute-part-1-deepseeks-impact-on-aiMojo https://www.modular.com/mojoRoc https://www.roc-lang.orgSoftware Unscripted episode with Futhark language creator https://pod.link/1602572955/episode/00564b1774ebe0e4225a630825ed3deeClaude 4 https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-4 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Broken AI Discourse with Steve Klabnik 04.07.2025 1sa 19dk

Longtime Rust contributor Steve Klabnik talks with Richard about the broken state of AI discourse, from excessive hype to excessive hate, and reasonable alternatives we could pursue instead.Steve's blog post: "I am disappointed in the AI discourse" - https://steveklabnik.com/writing/i-am-disappointed-in-the-ai-discourse/Deep dive into why Rust's compile times are slow: https://www.pingcap.com/blog/rust-compilation-model-calamity/Y Combinator partners on "100x productivity" claims: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IACHfKmZMr8&t=155s Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Language Design Deep Dive with Elixir Creator José Valim 01.06.2025 2sa 26dk

Elixir creator José Valim goes into a very deep dive on language design with Richard, centered around some upcoming major design changes to the Roc programming language.- https://elixir-lang.org- https://roc-lang.org- Unison's algebraic effects: https://www.unison-lang.org/docs/fundamentals/abilities/- Koka's algebraic effects: https://koka-lang.github.io/koka/doc/book.html#why-effects- OCaml's algebraic effects: https://ocaml.org/manual/5.3/effects.html Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From Scala to Roc with Monica McGuigan 27.01.2025 1sa 7dk

Monica McGuigan, a Scala programmer at JP Morgan, talks with Richard about her experiences learning Roc with a Scala background. They get into topics like how language design affects beginners and experts, what parts of functional programming are easier and harder to learn than others, and how language designers inform their design decisions.Support Software Unscripted on Patreon: https://patreon.com/SoftwareUnscriptedMonica's chapter on JSON decoders: https://github.com/roc-lang/book-of-examples/pull/68Grapheme clusters: https://unicode.org/glossary/#extended_grapheme_clusterRoc's string operations: https://www.roc-lang.org/builtins/StrTalk: The Functional Purity Inference Plan: https://youtu.be/42TUAKhzlRI?si=TwxYoqMgh0UXQLfn Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Testing in Production with Mike Bryzek 05.01.2025 1sa 17dk

Mike Bryzek has been a technical cofounder of two very successful companies using some very unorthodox technical strategies that have worked out very well for him and his teams! These include testing in production, spending the first few months of a brand-new company's life investing in automation and tooling before shipping a product, and microservices - but not done in the way I've usually heard them described.Support Software Unscripted on Patreon: https://patreon.com/SoftwareUnscripted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Building Video Editing Software with Andrew Lisowski 16.12.2024 1sa 2dk

Richard talks with Andrew Lisowski, a Senior Engineer at Descript - which makes audio and video editing software that has been used to edit this very podcast! They talk about some of the surprising challenges of dealing with video editing compared to audio alone, the economics of niche podcasts and programming conferences, and the evolution of Web browsers!Support Software Unscripted on Patreon: https://patreon.com/SoftwareUnscriptedDescript: https://www.descript.comAndrew Lisowski: https://www.hipstersmoothie.comdevtools.fm episode that was on HN frontpage: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41301639Zencastr: https://zencastr.com/?via=richard-feldmanForced Aligners: https://github.com/MahmoudAshraf97/ctc-forced-alignerGentle Aligner: https://github.com/lowerquality/gentle Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The EYG Language with Peter Saxton 17.11.2024 1sa 17dk

Richard talks with Peter Saxton, creator of the EYG programming language, about the problems Peter aims to solve with EYG, and some of the unique design decisions he's made with it. A type-safe eval() operation even comes up in the discussion!Support Software Unscripted on Patreon: https://patreon.com/SoftwareUnscriptedEYG: https://eyg.runUnison: https://unison-lang.orgRoc: https://roc-lang.org Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

AI in Programming Education with Will Sentance 16.10.2024 59dk

Richard talks with Will Sentance, the teacher of the Hard Parts series and the founder and CEO of CodeSmith, which is a Software Engineering and AI immersive education program. They talk about how AI is intersecting with modern programming education, what's considered "fundamentals" these days, and how Will thinks about teaching object-oriented and functional programming.Support Software Unscripted on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/SoftwareUnscriptedJavaScript: The Hard Parts: https://frontendmasters.com/courses/javascript-hard-parts-v2/AI for Software Engineers: https://frontendmasters.com/workshops/engineering-and-ai/CodeSmith: https://www.codesmith.io/Richard's courses: https://frontendmasters.com/teachers/richard-feldman/#courses Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Software for Elite Athletes with Kyle Boddy 26.09.2024 1sa 7dk

Richard talks with Kyle Boddy about the biomechanical and data analysis software Kyle wrote—and continues to write—as the founder and CTO of Driveline Baseball, a data-driven player development company that has landed numerous players in Major League Baseball, including multiple Most Valuable Players and 2024's number one draft pick. They talk about Kyle's background in PHP and the C++ he wrote to coordinate budget high-speed cameras back when Driveline was a one-programmer garage shop, up through today where large language models have become an integral part of the development team's daily work.Driveline Baseball: https://www.drivelinebaseball.com/Washington Post article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/04/10/op-moneyballai/Documentary about Driveline: https://youtu.be/K5Dnshu7atUPhind AI: https://www.phind.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Mojo with Chris Lattner 30.08.2024 1sa 49dk

For the 100th episode of Software Unscripted, Richard talks with Chris Lattner, creator of Swift, the Clang C++ compiler, LLVM, and now the Mojo programming language, about Mojo, Roc, API design, compiler optimizations, and language design!"Swift for C++ Practitioners" by Doug Gregor - https://www.douggregor.net/posts/swift-for-cxx-practitioners-value-types/Mojo - https://www.modular.com/mojoModular Computing - https://www.modular.comRoc - https://roc-lang.orgLLVM - https://llvm.orgClang - https://clang.llvm.orgSwift - https://www.swift.orgCUDA - https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-zoneSIMD - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_instructionmultipledatacmov instruction - https://github.com/marcin-osowski/cmov Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.