After just another multi-month hiatus, we're proud to finally publish Episode 39 (now featuring and actual intro music!!!!). This time, we're talking about a whole bunch of different things.
Starting off with a brief discussion on what each of us is currently playing (Kai got back into the Nintendo handheld world while Mark is playing Farcry 4 on his PC), we're getting into SeaweedFS, which looks like as if it's a really cool "NoFS" distributed file system/file storage. Kai's been toying around with it a bit and its technology is based on Facebook's Haystack paper. The paper itself is really worthwhile having a read.
Mark's been using Docker quite a bit to build customised development environments and tells us about that and there's even some code to grab and some video to be watched. There you go!
IntelliJ 15 - both our favourite IDE - is out and sure enough both of us upgraded straight away. It's been a really good experience so far and it's an absolutely worthwhile upgrade. We also briefly discuss Jetbrains' licensing changes and the perception/impact of those. While we're talking about Jetbrains, the discussion moves to Kotlin and to Frege, both reasonably new-ish JVM-based languages. Kotlin is an in-house development of Jetbrains and Frege is more or less Haskell for the JVM.
An interesting discussing arose from that - what makes a language a good fit for a certain purpose or audience - and Mark mentioned he saw a talk about "Evidence-Oriented Programming". It's funny how people pretty much "design" languages (and frameworks) by using criteria "I like this" or "This is how I think X should be done" instead of using approaches such as studies, user-tests or other experiments in trying to figure out what works and what doesn't. And while we have this can of worms opened, let's also question that 'computer science' is a proper science. Kai even dug out a 2003 philosophy of sciences paper he wrote during uni while finishing his Masters concluding that computer science overall really is nothing but an engineering discipline and not a science as such.
We also briefly talked about Kubernetes, a platform to orchestrate Docker, Bitnami Stacksmith and the need (or non-need) to have Windows Server containers that could run on Docker.
Both of us have been to various events (Mark as part of his job and poor Kai self-funded...) and particular mentions went to Strange Loop, Clojure/conj and CFCamp. Also - if you're interest in presenting at dev.Objective in Minneapolis next year, the call for papers finished on November 29 - that's in 2 days.
Nearly last but not least, there's another quick public service announcement for the folks who have a particular interest in Google's cloud platform. Mark's started a Google Cloud Platform Podcast that's worthwhile listening to. Also - this was the first recording we've ever done with Google Hangouts on Air and Zencastr. Surprisingly (after all of Kai's really bad experiences with Hangouts) this worked really well and we might use those platforms regularly now.
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