The World Famous Sponge Display

This week starts off with a discussion about Amos and Chris’s recent trip to Strangeloop and the great talks they saw there. There’s a brief interlude into airports and the World Famous sponge display in the Chattanooga airport.

The main topic this week: How do we handle complexity when designing software. Chris, excited after reading Philosophy of Software Design, gets exceptionally fired up about software design and the tradeoffs that programmers make. The hosts discuss the nature of software developers and the ways that programmer culture influences those decisions.

The hosts turn to discussing the recent changes in Ecto which is mostly Chris ranting for 15 minutes because he doesn’t get it (those who dislike rants will want to turn off their podcast players).

• Strangeloop 2018
• Automatic Detection of Core Erlang Message Passing Errors — Erlang’s powerful communication model allows us to build high-level concurrent systems. These can, however, harbour subtle communication errors less severe than global dead- lock or crashes: messages never received can degrade per- formance and consume swaths of memory.
• Philosophy of Software Design by John Ousterhout
• Rich Hickey - Simplicity matters
• Split ecto into ecto and ecto_sql