Happy Path Programming

We chat with Steve Manuel (of dylibso.com and mcp.run) about LLM "plugins" with Wasm & MCP (Model Context Protocol).

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Justin Reock has spent a lot of his career thinking about how to help developers be more productive. In this episode we learn about the methodologies that can help developers spend more time in "flow state" - happily coding the fun stuff. Further reading: Measuring developer productivity with the DX Core 4

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Lize Raes teaches us about AI models, LLMs, Tools, Agents, and MCP.

Article from Anthropic on Agent architectures: Building effective agents

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Join us at the 2025 Winter Tech Forum! www.wintertechforum.com

Projects Mentioned:

• uv for Python
• TypeScript Effect
• Pkl CloudFormation Extras
• Pkl GitHub Actions

Other Episodes Mentioned:

• #81 TypeScript & Effects with Michael Arnaldi
• #97 The Pkl Configuration Language with Philip Hölzenspies

We chat with Dave Thomas, co-author of The Pragmatic Programmer, about the joy of programming and the tensions between our and others needs.

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Jutta Eckstein is expanding the concepts of Agile to be a company-wide model, instead of a niche process for software developers. We chat with her about the book "Company-wide Agility with Beyond Budgeting, Open Space & Sociocracy" which she co-authored on this subject. For more details on the book and many free resources, see: www.agilebossanova.com

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Nathan Sobo is co-founder of Zed, a super-fast, collaborative, AI-powered, code editor. We chat about his journey to build the ultimate code editor: lessons learned from building Atom, Electron and its challenges, CRDTs, Rust native GPU GUIs, AI Code Assistants, and more CRDTs.

See also:

• ⁠Nathan on the Software Unscripted podcast⁠

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After 4 years in development, our book is out! Along with our friend and lead-author, Bill Frasure, we we discuss the book, its motivation and the process we used to create it. Now available in digital and print forms at: effectorientedprogramming.com

At the end of the episode we step into the "twilight zone" with a 7 minute NotebookLM AI-generated podcast based on the book.

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⁠Stephan Janssen⁠ is always on the bleeding edge of both helping developers grow and with how he uses technology to accomplish amazing things. He led the creation of Devoxx but is a coder at heart. Stephan shares his journey with AI, both as a "library" in his applications and also as an "assistant" that helps him iterate and program more quickly.

Resources:

• DevoxxGenie IntelliJ Plugin
• Ollama
• LangChain for Java
• LMstudio
• Llama.cpp
• James on The AI Native Dev Podcast: Rethinking Software Development: James Ward on AI's Role in Software Testing and Coding

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We chat with Venkat about his upcoming dev2next conference and the new Stream Gatherers API (preview in JDK 22).

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Johannes Schickling (@schickling | schickling.dev⁠) gets us up-to-speed on Effect, the ZIO-inspired Effect System for TypeScript, and the Local-First movement. Resources:

• Local-First Podcast: www.localfirst.fm
• Ink & Switch's Local-First Essay: www.inkandswitch.com/local-first
• Effect (TypeScript Library): effect.website
• Riffle research project: riffle.systems
• LiveStore: github.com/livestorejs
• Overtone: overtone.pro

Related Episodes:

• #81 TypeScript & Effects with Michael Arnaldi
• #62 Musing About Local-First Sync & CRDTs with Mark McGranaghan

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Diana Montalion teaches us about Systems Thinking and why it matters for those of us building software. Diana is founder of ⁠Mentrix⁠, which teaches "systems architecture skills for an increasingly complex world."

Pre-Order Diana's book: Learning Systems Thinking: Essential Nonlinear Skills and Practices for Software Professionals

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We chat with Trond Hjorteland about Agile and why it hasn't led to successful outcomes in many traditional organizations.

Mentioned and related resources:

• Trond & João Rosa's training on Agile + DP2
• Open Systems Theory
• LinkedIn Group for Open Systems Theory
• More material on Open Systems Theory
• Resource List from Trond
• Some of Trond's recorded talks

We chat with Valentina Servile about her upcoming book on Continuous Deployment and reducing the risks to keeping HEAD not just always deployable, but automatically deployed to production.

Book for preorder on Amazon: Continuous Deployment: Enable Faster Feedback, Safer Releases, and More Reliable Software

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We chat with Philip Hölzenspies, one of the maintainers of the new Pkl configuration language (pkl-lang.org).

Resources:

• James' Pkl for GitHub Actions: github.com/jamesward/pklgha

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We chat with April Wensel, founder of Compassionate Coding, about helping programmers bring more compassion to themselves and others.

Resources:

• Confessions of a Recovering Jerk Programmer
• Marshall Rosenberg - Nonviolent Communication
• Kristin Neff - Self-Compassion
• Karen Armstrong - Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life
• UC Berkeley Greater Good Science Center definition of compassion
• Oren Jay Sofer's Needs & Feelings Lists

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We chat with Gwen Shapira, co-founder of Nile, about her journey to creating a virtualized, serverless Postgres database service. We also dive into the challenges with traditional data architectures and approaches like ORMs.

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We chat with Trisha Gee about Test Driven Development (TDD), flaky tests, ops & observability for builds, and developer productivity.

Mentioned TDD Article:

The beautiful theory of TDD and the reality check of practice

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• Challenge details: www.morling.dev/blog/one-billion-row-challenge
• Rust 1BRC Blog: aminediro.com/posts/billion_row/
• Cliff Click's implementation walkthrough: www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJNIbgV6j-Y
• James' very slow Scala ZIO implementation: github.com/jamesward/1brc-zio/blob/main/src/main/scala/Main.scala

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We chat with Adam Warski about Loom, Virtual Threads, and his Loom-based Scala library, Ox, for structured concurrency & Go-Like Channels.

Referenced articles & code:

• Ox EasyRacer Client
• Go statement considered harmful
• Go-like selects using jox channels in Java
• Limits of Loom's performance
• Fast and Scalable Channels in Kotlin Coroutines

Discuss this episode: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://discord.gg/nPa76qF

https://github.com/jamesward/graboo

Buy your Happy Path Programming Shirt:

https://happy-path.printify.me/products

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We learn about Algebraic Effects with the Scala library Kyo ( getkyo.io) from the creator, Flavio Brasil.

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• SpringOne Talk
• Arty's Idea Flow Book
• FlowInsight

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Zalim Bashorov (@bashorov) works on Kotlin/Wasm at JetBrains and answers our many questions about Wasm, GC, the Component Model, and other future proposals.

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Referenced Article: 10 Years of Failure Friday at PagerDuty: Fostering Resilience, Learning and Reliability

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Michael created Effect, a functional effect system inspired by Scala ZIO, for TypeScript. We chat about Functional Programming, the TypeScript language, and Effects.

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We chat with Oliver Drotbohm about what Domain-Driven Design is and how it might intersect with Microservices, Monoliths, or Moduliths. Mentioned resources:

• Parnas on modularity
• Chris Richardson – Introducing Assemblage - a microservice architecture definition process
• Spring Modulith Project
• Introducing Spring Modulith

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Developer Productivity Engineering (DPE) is a set of tools & practices that help engineers be more productive. We chat with Justin Reock, field CTO at Gradle, about why more organizations need DPE and what that really means.  Learn more at: https://gradle.com/developer-productivity-engineering/

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Referenced blog: Why Are There Functions?

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Andrew Harmel-Law shares a better way to make decisions in software teams using the "Advice Process" which he has used in a number of teams resulting in happier, more productive programmers.

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Finally Bruce gets a whole episode about Python with our friend Luciano Ramalho, author of Fluent Python.  In the words of Luciano:

"Thanks James and Bruce for the most enjoyable podcast panel I ever had!"

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• ScalaDays 2013 Talk
• Stockfish Chess Engine

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Book repo: https://github.com/EffectOrientedProgramming/book

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Mark McGranaghan joins us to talk about how the Muse app uses Conflict-free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs) for local-first data synchronization.

More details on Local-first: https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first/

Referenced article about hybrid logical clocks: https://archive.jlongster.com/using-crdts-in-the-wild

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