Developer Voices

Neil Buesing, a seasoned Apache Kafka® user and respected voice from the Kafka community, discusses the problems Kafka can solve, including queuing, real-time transitioning, and software integration headaches. He also explores the challenges of adopting new technology, the relationship between Kafka and microservices, and achieving client satisfaction. The significance of structured business data and the future prospects of adopting new technologies are also examined.

How do distributed systems work? If you’ve got a database spread over three servers, how do they elect a leader? How does that change when we spread those machines out across data centers, situated around the globe? Do we even need to understand how it works, or can we relegate those problems to an off the shelf tool like Zookeeper?Joining me this week is Distributed Systems Doctor—Benjamin Bengfort—for a deep dive into consensus algorithms. We start off by discussing how much of “the clustering problem” is your problem, and how much can be handled by a library. We go through many of the constraints and tradeoffs that you need to understand either way. And we eventually reach Benjamin’s surprising message - maybe the time is ripe to roll your own. Should we be writing our own bespoke Raft implementations? And if so, how hard would that be? What guidance can he offer us? Somewhere in the recording of this episode, I decided I want to sit down and try to implement a leader election protocol. Maybe you will too. And if not, you’ll at least have a better appreciation for what it takes. Distributed systems used to be rocket science, but they’re becoming deployment as usual. This episode should help us all to keep up!--KubeCon talk on the FCD bug: https://kccncna2022.sched.com/event/182N9/lessons-learned-from-etcd-the-data-inconsistency-issues-marek-siarkowicz-google-benjamin-wang-vmwareThe Raft paper by Diego Ongaro and John Ousterhout: https://raft.github.io/raft.pdfThe EPaxos Algorithm: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dga/papers/epaxos-sosp2013.pdfLevelDB: https://github.com/google/leveldbBenjamin on Twitter: https://twitter.com/bbengfortBenjamin on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bbengfortBenjamin on GitHub: https://github.com/bbengfortRotational Labs: https://rotational.io (check out the blog!)Kris on Twitter: https://twitter.com/krisajenkinsKris on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/krisjenkins/

How do you get started as a programmer? And how do experienced programmers help them as they start their journey?This week's guest is a developer-turned-teacher, James Q. Quick. A former coder and developer advocate, he's s been been working on tutorials, courses and bootcamps to teach aspiring developers how to get started with JavaScript. We talk about why people get into programming as a new career, what they need to succeed, and what James thinks is the best indicator of success.We also discuss what's new and exciting in JavaScript, James' favourite up & coming libraries, and dive into the JavaScript vs. TypeScript debate.James’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/jamesqquickJames’s website: https://www.jamesqquick.com/Astro website builder: https://astro.build/James’ Astro course: https://astrocourse.dev/Svelte framework: https://svelte.dev/Vite build tool: https://vitejs.dev/James on Twitter: https://twitter.com/jamesqquickKris on Twitter: https://twitter.com/krisajenkinsKris on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/krisjenkins/

Sooner or later, every programmer will have to cross the gap between their programming language and their database. It feels like it should be easy, but in practice it’s always a much wider chasm than it seems, and every tool that bridges that gaps comes with its own strengths, weaknesses and opinions.This week we take a look at a relatively new library for database access—jOOQ—by chatting with its author, Lukas Eder. This episode takes in the simple questions like syntax, the thornier ones like supporting multiple databases, and the deeply philosophical ones like how we even think about data and data-processing.If you’re a Java (or JVM) programmer, there’s a new tool to learn here, and even if you're not there’s food for thought and ideas to borrow for the next time you need to SELECT…jOOQ: https://www.jooq.org/YesQL: https://github.com/krisajenkins/yesqlDatomic: https://www.datomic.com/XTDB: https://www.xtdb.com/The Elm Architecture: https://guide.elm-lang.org/architecture/Kris on Twitter: https://twitter.com/krisajenkinsKris on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/krisjenkins/

Mathis Hammel, a veteran of the competitive coding scene, reveals the world of competitive coding, shares tips to become a better coder, discusses the ICPC coding contest, and explores the potential impact of televising competitive coding. He also highlights the benefits of solving coding puzzles and working on side projects.

“Software development has not caught up with the internet age.” So says this week’s guest, Rúnar Bjarnason. But what does that mean? What would a programming language for the internet age look like?Rúnar’s answer is Unison. A language that completely rethinks the way distributing computing can work, from the source code up. Borrowing some key ideas from git, it challenges the way we think about code-sharing, compilation, versioning and more. --Kris on Twitter: https://twitter.com/krisajenkinsKris on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/krisjenkins/Rúnar on Twitter: https://twitter.com/runaroramaRúnar’s book, Function Programming in Scala: https://amzn.to/46I9jewUnison website: https://unison-lang.orgComplete and Easy Bidirectional Typechecking for Higher-Rank Polymorphism (pdf): https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~nk480/bidir.pdfDo Be Do Be Do (pdf): https://arxiv.org/pdf/1611.09259.pdfRúnar’s Øredev conference talk: https://youtu.be/EgIVzOobD48Cloud icons created by Freepik - Flaticon: https://www.flaticon.com/free-icons/cloudComputer icons created by xnimrodx - Flaticon: https://www.flaticon.com/free-icons/computer

Have you ever been overwhelmed by the number of databases on offer? This week we welcome database expert Ben Stopford as a guide to help us map the database landscape and make sense of it all!Join us as we embark on a journey through the history of databases, tracing the path from Edgar Codd to the multitude cloud-era of options available today. Discover the strengths of various database styles and explore the tradeoffs between general-purpose databases like #PostgreSQL and highly customised ones like #Cassandra or #Snowflake.We delve into the realm of the cloud and the opportunities it brings, both for users and the database vendors themselves. And then we examine the challenges that arise when you're forced to connect multiple databases across an organisation. Should you look at Event Sourcing? Or Event Streaming, and how exactly do they differ?Finally, we look towards the future, discussing Ben's vision of an ideal database and which programming language he would choose to build it in.Kris on Twitter: https://twitter.com/krisajenkinsKris on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/krisjenkins/Kris on Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@krisajenkins

Discover how you can run LLMs on your laptop and customize them to create a tailored research assistant. Learn about the open source AI revolution and the shift towards community-driven LLM development. Explore topics such as neural network configuration, quantization in AI, and the importance of prompt engineering in AI models. Dive into Langchain and open source AI development, emphasizing the potential for personalized AI on desktops and the impact of open AI on the open source community.

Time to put another new #programming language - and its creator - under the spotlight, as we talk to Robin Heggelund Hansen, the creator of Gren. Gren is a Norwegian word meaning 'branch', which is appropriate for a language that started as a fork from its roots in Elm.With Gren, Robin's trying to create a safe, sane, #fullstack language that puts the power and elegance of functional programming working seamlessly on the server and the browser. But how and why do you do that? What design choices to do make, how much time do you spend on adding new features vs. improving the developer's experience of the existing ones? And most importantly...how do you pronounce Gren correctly? 😅Gren Website: https://gren-lang.orgGren Zulip: https://gren.zulipchat.com/Gren package site: https://packages.gren-lang.org/Example projects written in Gren: https://github.com/gren-lang/example-projectsGren on Mastodon: https://fosstodon.org/@gren_langGren on Twitter: https://twitter.com/gren_lang Gren language proposal on parameterized modules: https://github.com/gren-lang/compiler/issues/81 Elm Website: https://elm-lang.org/  Robin on Mastodon: https://snabelen.no/@robinheghan Kris on Twitter: https://twitter.com/krisajenkins Kris on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/krisjenkins/ Kris on Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@krisajenkins

What's going on with Postgres? Joining us for his perspective is Raouf Chebri, a Developer Advocate for PostgreSQL and the cloud service Neon. We catch up on what's new and important in recent versions of Postgres, what Neon have been doing to make Postgres work well in the Cloud, and what Raouf's life is like as a professional singer of Postgres's virtues.Neon: https://neon.tech/Neon’s architecture: https://neon.tech/docs/introduction/architecture-overviewThat CEO quote: https://twitter.com/nikitabase/status/1563913187862335489Raouf on Twitter: https://twitter.com/raoufdevrelKris on Twitter: https://twitter.com/krisajenkinsKris on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/krisjenkins/