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Software Unscripted

Richard Feldman

Software Unscripted, A weekly podcast of casual conversations about code hosted by Richard Feldman.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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  • 20 episodes
  • monthly
  • Avg 1 hr 19 min
  • English

Episodes 20

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  • July 27 · 1 hr 33 min

    Fast Functional Reactive Programming with Datastar Creator Delaney Gillilan

    Richard talks with Datastar creator Delaney Gillilan about fast functional reactive programming, how Datastar outcompetes more mainstream JavaScript libraries on performance, and how he designed it - including how Richard's book Elm in Action turned out to be one of its sources of inspiration. This episode was sponsored by mailtrap.io - modern email delivery for developers. Try Mailtrap for free: https://l.rw.rw/software_unscripted_5 Patreon supporters get ad-free episodes! https://www.patreon.com/SoftwareUnscripted/ - Datastar: https://data-star.dev - Elm in Action: https://www.manning.com/books/elm-in-action?utm_source=elm_in_action&utm_medium=affiliate&utm_campaign=book_rfeldman_elm_4_14_20&utm_content=number2 - Delaney and ClojureScript Lead David Nolen on Datastar: https://youtu.be/2ECucq-mTGg?si=v_4sB7vIEEDGpjm6 - Datastar experience report: https://youtu.be/8W6Lr1hRgXo?si=TAJU_wRirCYiZywm - Benchmarking the same chat app in Next.js and Datastar: https://zweiundeins.gmbh/en/methodology/spa-vs-hypermedia-real-world-performance-under-load - Real-Time Collaboration with Datastar: https://vimeo.com/1124980036 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

  • June 19 · 1 hr 18 min

    TigerBeetle's Spectacular Jepsen Report - with Joran Greef

    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_4 Patreon 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-4.2.6 Zig - 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.

  • May 9 · 1 hr 28 min

    AI & Software Quality with Shawn Wang (aka swyx)

    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_3 Patreon supporters get ad-free episodes! https://patreon.com/SoftwareUnscripted Shawn'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.

  • April 1 · 1 hr 27 min

    HTMX Creator Carson Gross on Comp Sci's Evolution

    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_2 Patreon 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.

  • February 17 · 1 hr 3 min

    How Mitchell Hashimoto Builds Ghostty

    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_1 Patreon 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.

  • January 10 · 1 hr 11 min

    Gleam's Design and Compiler - with creator Louis Pilfold

    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.

  • Dec 21, 2025 · 41 min

    Metaprogramming Your IDE in Lean 4 with Harry Goldstein

    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/SoftwareUnscripted The Best New Programming Language is a Proof Assistant by Harry Goldstein - https://youtu.be/c5LOYzZx-0c?si=UnTfkczIhdoF7Qkx The Lean Programming Language - https://lean-lang.org Simon 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_n Hypothesis Property-Based Testing library for Python - https://hypothesis.works/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

  • Nov 15, 2025 · 1 hr 41 min

    Jonathan Blow on Programming Language Design

    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/IdpD5QIVOKQ ECS 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=Z5cqazo4QU7AibzB Roc Programming Language - https://roc-lang.org Casey Muratori's "Performance-Aware Programming" Course - https://www.computerenhance.com/p/welcome-to-the-performance-aware File 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/Const Cliff Click's Sea of Nodes Compiler IR - https://github.com/SeaOfNodes/ Chapters 00:00 The Programming Establishment 02:04 Metaprogramming 05:04 Compile-Time Execution 08:05 Language Feature Interoperability 10:53 Compile Time Execution 27:52 Cross-Compiling and FFI 31:04 Determinism in Programming 35:07 Balancing Power and Safety 40:11 Memory Safety vs. Performance 50:15 The Evolution of Software Performance 55:32 Performance Awareness 01:03:56 Dependencies and Version Control 01:14:54 Dependency Availability Risk 01:18:42 Memory Management 01:24:51 Sandboxing 01:30:23 Operating Systems Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

  • Oct 9, 2025 · 1 hr 49 min

    Zig Creator Andrew Kelley

    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.

  • Sep 20, 2025 · 59 min

    Securing Evolving Software with Noah Hall

    xz vulnerability: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XZ_Utils_backdoor Spectre: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectre_(security_vulnerability) Meltdown: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meltdown_(security_vulnerability) Heartbleed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heartbleed Noah 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.

  • Sep 1, 2025 · 1 hr 20 min

    Andreas Kling on Ladybird Browser, SerenityOS, and Powerlifting

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

  • #109
    Jul 25, 2025 · 1 hr 18 min

    GPU Programming and Language Design with Chris Lattner

    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-ai Mojo https://www.modular.com/mojo Roc https://www.roc-lang.org Software Unscripted episode with Futhark language creator https://pod.link/1602572955/episode/00564b1774ebe0e4225a630825ed3dee Claude 4 https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-4 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

  • S1 · E108
    Jul 4, 2025 · 1 hr 19 min

    Broken AI Discourse with Steve Klabnik

    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.

  • S1 · E107
    Jun 1, 2025 · 2 hr 26 min

    Language Design Deep Dive with Elixir Creator José Valim

    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.

  • S1 · E106
    Jan 27, 2025 · 1 hr 7 min

    From Scala to Roc with Monica McGuigan

    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/SoftwareUnscripted Monica's chapter on JSON decoders: https://github.com/roc-lang/book-of-examples/pull/68 Grapheme clusters: https://unicode.org/glossary/#extended_grapheme_cluster Roc's string operations: https://www.roc-lang.org/builtins/Str Talk: The Functional Purity Inference Plan: https://youtu.be/42TUAKhzlRI?si=TwxYoqMgh0UXQLfn Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

  • S1 · E105
    Jan 5, 2025 · 1 hr 17 min

    Testing in Production with Mike Bryzek

    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.

  • S1 · E104
    Dec 16, 2024 · 1 hr 2 min

    Building Video Editing Software with Andrew Lisowski

    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/SoftwareUnscripted Descript: https://www.descript.com Andrew Lisowski: https://www.hipstersmoothie.com devtools.fm episode that was on HN frontpage: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41301639 Zencastr: https://zencastr.com/?via=richard-feldman Forced Aligners: https://github.com/MahmoudAshraf97/ctc-forced-aligner Gentle Aligner: https://github.com/lowerquality/gentle Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

  • S1 · E103
    Nov 17, 2024 · 1 hr 17 min

    The EYG Language with Peter Saxton

    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/SoftwareUnscripted EYG: https://eyg.run Unison: https://unison-lang.org Roc: https://roc-lang.org Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

  • S1 · E102
    Oct 16, 2024 · 59 min

    AI in Programming Education with Will Sentance

    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/SoftwareUnscripted JavaScript: 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.

  • S1 · E101
    Sep 26, 2024 · 1 hr 7 min

    Software for Elite Athletes with Kyle Boddy

    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/K5Dnshu7atU Phind AI: https://www.phind.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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