Coding By Numbers

Coding By Numbers - Episode 35 (Linda Rising - Cognitive Science, Agile & Patterns)

podcast@codingbynumbers.com (Craig Aspinall and Steve Dalton) — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 03:14:00 PST

In this episode, Steve, Craig & Craig Smith are joined by the "Queen of Retrospectives" Linda Rising to talk about cognitive science, training your brain, Agile and lots more. This podcast was recorded during YOW 2011 in Brisbane.

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Quotes

"So you at 35 or you at 40 are just beginning. Don't let anyone tell you that you are too old to learn, too old to go back to school, get that degree or do whatever it is you want to do. Never feel you have invested a certain amount in any setting so that you can't change that. That will not be wasted and you should not be afraid, you should go forward.... fearless."

Related Podcasts

The Agile Revolution (Craig Smith is co-host on this one)
The Brain Science Podcast
Office Hours (Dan Pink)

Thanks to Craig Smith for joining us - Craig's intelligent questions were a good balance to Steve's :-)

Coding By Numbers - Episode 34 (Mike Lee - Appsterdam, Patent Extortion & Product Engineering)

podcast@codingbynumbers.com (Craig Aspinall and Steve Dalton) — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 15:22:30 PST

In this episode, Steve and Craig are joined by Mike Lee from Appsterdam Foundation to talk about moving to Amsterdam, Patent Extortion and Product Engineering. This podcast was recorded during YOW 2011 in Brisbane.

A big thank you to Rob Dawson for suggesting to us at YOW that we interview Mike - this was one of the most interesting and funny interviews we have done so far.

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Quotes

What makes a good speaker also makes a good teacher
When you hear there's a guy dressed like a mariachi .... that you have to see!
When I saw magnetic smart covers I thought "Maybe my mom would like my old Ipad"
Amsterdam is like a cross between Epcot Center and Burning Man

Coding By Numbers - Episode 33 (Michael Neale - Cloud)

podcast@codingbynumbers.com (Craig Aspinall and Steve Dalton) — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 13:37:38 PST

In this episode, Steve and Craig are joined by Michael Neale from Cloudbees to talk about Cloud, polyglot programming and much more! This podcast was recorded during Open Source Developers Conference 2011 at the Australian National University, Canberra .

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Coding By Numbers - Episode 32 (Open Hardware)

podcast@codingbynumbers.com (Craig Aspinall and Steve Dalton) — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 20:57:29 PST

In this episode, Steve and Craig are joined by Jon Oxer and Hugh Blemings to talk about hardware hacking, Open hardware and the bold future that is 3D printing. This podcast was recorded during Open Source Developers Conference 2011 at the Australian National University, Canberra .

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Coding By Numbers - Episode 31 (Perl)

podcast@codingbynumbers.com (Craig Aspinall and Steve Dalton) — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 05:09:44 PST

In this episode, Steve and Craig are joined by Perl Hackers , Jacinta Richardson, Paul Fenwick and Damian Conway to talk about Perl, Perl 6 and having fun with programming. This podcast was recorded during Open Source Developers Conference 2011 at the Australian National University, Canberra .

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Coding By Numbers - Episode 30 (Dave Thomas interview)

podcast@codingbynumbers.com (Craig Aspinall and Steve Dalton) — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 15:23:40 PST

In this episode, Steve and Craig are joined by software luminary, Dave Thomas, from Bedarra Research Labs. Amongst many other things, Dave is the person responsible for bringing the YOW! Conference to Australia.

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Coding By Numbers - Episode 29 (Conferences)

podcast@codingbynumbers.com (Craig Aspinall and Steve Dalton) — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 03:51:46 PDT

In this episode, Steve, Craig and a panel of guests talking about the various conferences we’ve either attended or participated in this year, and the changing role and nature of conferences. Our panel included Craig Smith and Katie Miller from Suncorp and Tom Lee from Shine Technologies.

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M4A

MP3

Ogg Vorbis

Links

Coding By Numbers - Episode 28 (Agile Startups)

podcast@codingbynumbers.com (Craig Aspinall and Steve Dalton) — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 20:48:23 PDT

In this episode, Steve and Craig interview Adrian Smith, Hugh Hofmeister and Lucas Willett from Ennova on Agile Startups.

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Coding By Numbers - Episode 27 (Python)

podcast@codingbynumbers.com (Craig Aspinall and Steve Dalton) — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 06:02:19 PDT

In this episode, Steve and guest host Katie Miller, interview CPython contributor Nick Coghlan about the Python programming language, at least until they get interrupted by a fire alarm!

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Coding By Numbers - Episode 26 (Stewart Mackenzie - Mozart Oz)

podcast@codingbynumbers.com (Craig Aspinall and Steve Dalton) — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 16:15:35 PDT

Steve talks to Stewart Mackenzie about Mozart Oz and the development of a language from the ground up. This episode was recorded in May 2011 in Hong Kong.

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Coding By Numbers - Episode 25 (ATDD)

podcast@codingbynumbers.com (Craig Aspinall and Steve Dalton) — Sun, 15 May 2011 15:44:00 PDT

Craig talks to the “Building Quality In” team from Suncorp about software quality and Acceptance Test Driven Development. This episode was recorded in March 2011.

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Tools

Books

Coding By Numbers - Episode 24 (DevOps)

podcast@codingbynumbers.com (Craig Aspinall and Steve Dalton) — Sat, 23 Apr 2011 20:29:31 PDT

Craig and Steve talk to Andrew Newman from SDX about the DevOps movement. This episode was recorded in February 2011.

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Picks of the week

Haiku OS

LCA2011 talk on Haiku

Coding By Numbers - Episode 23 (Interview with Adam Harvey & Jethro Carr about PHP)

podcast@codingbynumbers.com (Craig Aspinall and Steve Dalton) — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 04:14:35 PDT

Jethro Carr

Adam Harvey

In this episode of Coding By Numbers, Steve interviews Adam Harvey and Jethro Carr at LCA2011 about PHP development.

Download links:

Links:

Adam's presentation at LCA2011
PHP
PEAR - PHP Extension and Application Repository
Rasmus Lerdrof
PHP-Nuke
Doctrine - PHP Object Persistence Libraries and more
PHP Data Objects
Zend - The PHP Company
Drupal
Xinc - PHP Continuous Integration Server
PHPUnit
Phing - PHP build tool
IDEs

LAMP/WAMP
Caching solutions:

APC (Alternative PHP Cache)
XCache
PHP: Memcache

Coding By Numbers - Episode 22 (linux.conf.au)

podcast@codingbynumbers.com (Craig Aspinall and Steve Dalton) — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 04:14:09 PDT

In this episode, Steve and Craig talk about their experience of linux.conf.au 2011, announce the winner of the IntelliJ competition, and announce some plans for the coming year. Plus there's a chance to win a year's subscription to JSMag, so listen carefully!

Download links:

Links:

linux.conf.au 2011

Videos

Mark Pesce keynote (essay and slides)

Coding By Numbers - Episode 21 (Interview with Justen Stepka & Jesper Noehr about Atlassian Bitbucket)

podcast@codingbynumbers.com (Craig Aspinall and Steve Dalton) — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 19:20:26 PST

In this episode, Steve talks to Justen Stepka and Jesper Noehr from Atlassian about Bitbucket and their company culture.

Download links:

Links:

Coding By Numbers - Episode 20 (Interview with Andrew Gerrand about Go Programming Language)

podcast@codingbynumbers.com (Craig Aspinall and Steve Dalton) — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 13:14:11 PST

In this episode, Steve talks to Andrew Gerrand from Google about the programming language Go.

Download links:

Links:

Google
Go Programming Language
Noop Programming Language
Ken Thompson
Rob Pike
Robert Griesemer
Bell Labs
Limbo Programming Language
Pascal Programming Language
Oberon Programming Language
Systems Programming Languages
BSD Licence
nginx
Memory Fences
SWIG (Simplified Wrapper and Interface Generator)
Tuxedo
Andrew's blogs: personal and Go
Andrew's Twitter feeds: @enneff and @go_nuts

Coding By Numbers - Episode 19 (End Of Year Wrap Up)

podcast@codingbynumbers.com (Craig Aspinall and Steve Dalton) — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 13:33:07 PST

In this episode, Steve and Craig talk about the events of 2010, and ponder what is to come in 2011.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

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Coding By Numbers - Episode 18 (The role of automated testing)

podcast@codingbynumbers.com (Craig Aspinall and Steve Dalton) — Thu, 25 Nov 2010 05:27:41 PST

In this episode, Craig talks to Andrew Newman and Richard Westwell from Suncorp about the role automated testing should play in software development teams.

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Links:

Automated testing
Fighter/Magic-user
TDD
Technical debt
"If you don't have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?" John Wooden
Spock Framework
Geb
Pair programming
Exponential cost of fixing defects

Fiddling with the feed!

podcast@codingbynumbers.com (Craig Aspinall and Steve Dalton) — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 02:09:55 PST

Thank you to all those who have given us feedback on the podcast, please keep it coming!

A number of you have asked about an MP3 version of the show. From now on we're making the show available in MP3 and Ogg Vorbis formats, as well as the existing AAC (.m4a). We're also switching the default file format contained within the feed from AAC to MP3 which is compatible with a wider range of devices.

We will also be putting direct links to each of the files into the show notes. I've been through and done this for the previous shows from episode 12 onwards, and I'll get to the previous episodes over the next week or so!

Coding By Numbers - Episode 17 (Interview with OJ Reeves)

podcast@codingbynumbers.com (Craig Aspinall and Steve Dalton) — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 20:13:25 PST

In this episode, we interview O.J. Reeves about going it alone with his company, Functional IO, Erlang and functional programming in general. There's also another chance to win one of Mike Beale's CDs so listen carefully!

Download links:

Links:

OJ Reeves:

Blog

Web development with Erlang

Erlang

Examples of Erlang in use:

ejabberd
Wings3D

Learning Erlang:

Programming Erlang by Joe Armstrong
Erlang Programming by Francesco Cesarini and Simon Thompson
Erlang in Practice screencasts by Kevin Smith
TryErlang.org
Learn You Some Erlang!
Erlang: The Movie
IRC channels (#erlang-otp #riak)

Conferences:

Open Source:

Other languages/platforms:

Editors/IDEs:

Brisbane (Riverfire) Festival

F-111

Coding By Numbers - Episode 16 (Peter Allison from iLab and James Ottaway from ThoughtWorks)

podcast@codingbynumbers.com (Craig Aspinall and Steve Dalton) — Mon, 16 May 2011 12:56:27 PDT

In this episode, recorded at Barcamp Brisbane, Steve interviews Peter Allison from iLab about startups and business models, and James Ottaway from Thoughtworks about receiving feedback, and what ThoughtWorks Australia are up to.

The intermission music is by Dwight Walker.

Download links:

Links:

Paul King interviews J.B. Rainsberger!

podcast@codingbynumbers.com (Craig Aspinall and Steve Dalton) — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 04:17:58 PST

Now there's a headline I didn't expect to write when we started Coding By Numbers :-)

Paul King recently interviewed J.B. Rainsberger about the "Simple Approach to Modular Design" and "Solve Just Enough Of Your Worst Problem" workshops he will be running at the YOW! conference in Brisbane and he was kind enough to let us publish it here.

If you like what you read, be sure to check out the conference on the 6-7th December and the workshops on the 8-9th December. The conference and workshops are also in Melbourne from November 30th through December 2nd. Enjoy!

Paul: I have read about Robert Martin's SOLID principles for good OO design. Will you be discussing those principles or are there other things we should be discussing?

JB: I will discuss SOLID, Bertrand Meyer's principles, Larry Constantine's principles of coupling and cohesion and some other principles I've named for myself. Through a decade of practice, I have seen how to reduce all these bewildering ideas to the rules of simple design that Kent Beck taught us, and at that, I even go further to simplify his rules. The result is an almost unbelievably simple approach to learning how to design well, meaning mostly how to reduce the number of unpleasant surprises when you go back to add feaures to an existing code base. I truly believe that, with enough mindful practice, anyone can become an excellent designer using these techniques.

Paul: There has been a lot of interest in functional programming lately. Should we all be changing to functional programming?

JB: I don't think we should, although I have noticed that as I practise TDD more, my style of programming leans towards the functional. In particular, one needs to consider functions as first-class types to notice, and then remove, certain types of duplication. What I don't yet see is how the move towards functional design might obviate the need for things like aspects. Seeing as I find aspects useful, but no-one ever uses them, I hope that functional programming offers a similar expressive power so that aspects can die a graceful, silent death.

Paul: I can see TDD being useful when writing small bits of code but when creating large systems and working on integration projects, would I still consider it as a useful technique?

JB: Without question. I use TDD as a technique to teach and learn modular design principles, and I don't believe there can exist a large, modular system, but rather only a large network of loosely coupled, highly cohesive modules. Through TDD I have learned, and can teach, how to create highly modular designs that scale indefinitely and don't suffer the typical pains of large systems. As for small bits of code, I wouldn't TDD that any longer: if it's small enough to throw away and rewrite, then there's no need to do it correctly, and TDD wouldn't help. Using TDD on small bits of code provides tremendous practice, but at some point one realises that TDD helps most when a code base just reaches the verge of starting to spiral out of control.

Paul: What are the strengths and weaknesses of unit, integration and acceptance tests?

JB: I find acceptance tests do a fantastic job of helping us clarify our understanding of a feature, but when teams attempt to test systems exhaustively this way, they find those tests become costly both to run and to maintain within a few short months.

JB: I find integrated tests helpful in highlighting (but not finding) mistakes in the system, but they make it too easy to allow unhealthy dependencies between modules to flourish.

JB: I find unit tests, specifically focused object tests, put fantastic positive pressure on my designs, and encourage me to keep dependencies loose, but without collaboration and contract tests, they can lead one to a false sense of security about the soundness of the system, and, of course, unit tests typically won't uncover system-wide problems.

Paul: There has been a lot of interest in parallel programming lately. Do you think our fundamental programming practices are going to change at some point as concurrency comes into the mainstream?

JB: I do. I'm quite a novice at parallel programming, having not done any since university, but I do know that attempting to take advantage of multiple cores to partition work will put even more positive pressure on our designs to become stateless, and I imagine that will shatter the object-oriented approach to pieces.

Paul: Some people claim that agile means that you don't need to do much design. Is that true?

JB: Certainly not. Evolutionary design, the central agile programming discipline, encourages amortising the design work over the entire project, deferring design decisions until we absolutely need to make them. Even so, we will always have irreversible -- or costly-to-reverse -- decisions to make in any project, and while evolutionary designs helps us challenge our assumptions about which decisions we must make now, it doesn't eliminate the need to make some key decisions early. It teaches us that we probably don't have to make as many up-front decisions as we think.

Paul: What is the difference between Agile and Lean? Don't they mean essentially the same thing?

JB: I don't know what the average person thinks about this. When I first read the Poppendiecks' first Lean book, I recognised it as a theoretical basis for Agile. Now I don't think I can tell the difference between Lean Software Developmet and Agile Software Development.

Paul: If there was one guiding principle you would give to organisations to reduce waste, what would that be?

JB: Don't automate what you can eliminate. I learned that from Tim Ferriss' Four-Hour Work Week and it works wonders.

Paul: I noticed you mentioned the theory of constraints in one of your talks. Can you explain that? Is it related to Systems Thinking?

JB: I suppose one could consider Theory of Constraints a kind of school of Systems Thinking, but I'd never considered that before. Certainly, they have one thing in common: they caution against optimising small parts of the system.

Paul: I have been involved in Agile in Brisbane for quite some time. I know some projects that still haven't really taken on board many agile practices. I also know others that have taken on board many of the practices but are still struggling making them all work together or are struggling to retain the fun and productivity when applying all these practices. And of course there are plenty of people in between as well. Will there be things to learn from your talks for all these groups, i.e. beginners, average and advanced agilists?

JB: Both sessions focus on ways to learn how to do good work, rather than ways to do the work itself. In that sense, everyone can benefit. More specifically, however, there's something for everyone in each of these sessions.

JB: In A Simple Approach to Modular Design, beginners will learn how to do TDD, intermediate practitioners will learn or re-learn some key design principles and advanced agilists will learn a new model for teaching and learning how to design well. In Solve Just Enough of Your Worst Problem, beginners will learn how to map value streams, intermediate pracitioners will be reminded that understanding problems matters more than practising solutions, and advanced agilists will see how by understanding the problem deeply one knows exactly which portion of it to solve, how much of it to solve, and which solutions to apply.

Paul King leads ASERT, an organization based in Brisbane, Australia which provides software development, training and mentoring services to customers wanting to embrace new technologies, harness best practices and innovate. He has been contributing to open source projects for nearly 20 years and is an active committer on numerous projects including Groovy, and is a co-author of Manning's best-seller: Groovy in Action.

Links:

J. B. (Joe) Rainsberger is a Canadian software development consultant and technology writer, best known for his contributions to agile development, for which he was awarded the highest honor from the agile community, the Gordon Pask Award in 2005 (its first year of existence). He is the founder of XPDay North America. He is also well known for his book, JUnit Recipes : Practical Methods for Programmer Testing.

Links:

Coding By Numbers - Episode 15 (Clinton Roy - Linux Conference Australia)

podcast@codingbynumbers.com (Craig Aspinall and Steve Dalton) — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 20:47:22 PST

In this episode, Steve interviews Clinton Roy one of the organisers of the Linux Conference Australia 2011 to be held in Brisbane (QUT) on 24th-29th January.

Download links:

Links:

Linux Conference Australia 2011
Register for Linux Conf Brisbane 2011
Volunteer at Linux Conf Brisbane 2011
LCA Melbourne (2008)
Linux Torvalds
Open Source Developers Conference
Barcamp Brisbane
Debian
APT
Microsoft co-app project (our previous podcast interview with Tom Hanrahan)
Miniconfs
Inkscape
Audacity
Richard Stallman (and why he wants you to say "GNU/Linux")
Keynotes

Coding By Numbers - Episode 14 (Craig Smith - Agile)

podcast@codingbynumbers.com (Craig Aspinall and Steve Dalton) — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 13:29:57 PST

In this episode, we are joined again by Craig Smith, Delivery Coach at Suncorp to discuss the Racoon methodology (formerly known as Agile). We also launch our first competition - so listen to the podcast and email us at podcast@codingbynumbers.com with the answer to win a free Mike Beale CD.

Download links:

Links:

Craig on Twitter
Agile 2010
Agile Australia
Agile Academy
Suncorp
Agile Manifesto
Scrum Alliance & Scrum Certification
Extreme Programming
Continuous Integration
Test Driven Development
Racoon
Uncle Bob Martin - Software Craftsmanship - Clean Code
Kent Beck - XP Explained
XP Installed (The Pink Book)
The Pragmatic Programmer
The Agile Toolkit Podcast
Ron Jeffries - Scrum Alliance: Drop “Certified”?
Lean Software
Kanban
Product Owner
ISTQB
37 Signals - Getting Real & Rework Book
Continuous Deployment
Lego Information Radiators
Puppet
Standups in 2nd Life - Bill Krebs
Australian National Broadband Network (NBN)

Coding By Numbers - Episode 13 (Nick Byrne from Engineers Without Borders and Business Coach Des Walsh)

podcast@codingbynumbers.com (Craig Aspinall and Steve Dalton) — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 20:46:46 PST

In this episode, Steve conducts two interviews. The first is with Nick Byrne from Engineers Without Borders, and the second is with business coach Des Walsh.

Download links:

Links from Nick Byrne interview:

Links from Des Walsh interview: