First class thingamajig

Hey guys, it's time for another episode of Space Welders, episode 88, recorded Friday 18th of August, 2017. First class thingamajig with your hosts Mike Wise and Steve Rogers. Are you a first class thingamajig? Of course.

I'm glad thingamajigs are now first class. I was getting annoyed having to do workarounds and hacks to get my thingamajigs to work. Now it's just straight API calls, new thingamajig, thingamajig dot blue de blue. Naming in software is one of the hardest things.

The three hardest things in software development is naming things in off-by-one errors. Off-by-one errors and probably cache issues or solving ghosts in the cache issues on a regular basis. So I tell you what's not a first class thingamajig and there were a lot of people including myself who wanted it to be a first class thingamajig and that's Flash. Flash is dead.

I know we're late. We're not dead. Flash is dead. Everyone's obviously heard the news.

Adobe's, you know, de-supporting Flash by 2020 because it just sounds nice. And most people really don't care. But what it did was... Really?

Yeah, it sparked a... It's like the old thing, you know, this is how it ends, not with a bang but with a whimper. Flash has just been just decreasing for years and is just being taken out the back and behind the woodshed and shot in the face like old yellow. It's that dog you just drive it out into the woods.

It sparked a lot of... Flash is the old yellow of software development. It's like you grew up with it, you love it, and then one day it gets sick and your mum or your dad says, son, it's time. Time to go.

I'm going to take it out the back and you go, no, no, I'll do it. It sparked a lot of discussion. Delete the GitHub. Or you could delete, yeah.

A lot of discussion because obviously Apple killed Flash. Well, this is the story with the iPad and iPhone. Lack of support for it. It's been buggy.

Jobs hated it. But a lot of folks loved it because it was consistent. Of course, you know, there's nothing wrong with margin hyphen top colon negative 24 4px because it makes sense when you're trying to align things. So if you've got, you know, other technologies joining in on Flash and able to lay things out properly and animate things properly, you know, that's a great idea.

And so a lot of people, you know, built tool sets to animate things and bring whole ideas to life. And there was video, FLV, of course. And then there was real-time messaging, RTMP, and a whole bunch of other really cool offshoot technologies that happened around Flash. And it was a tremendous great time.

But sparked a number of articles over the past month or so where people are talking about other technologies which should just be, you know, driven out into the woods and shot or buried or one of the three or four. Well, it was the iPhone dropping it that killed Flash. Really, wasn't it? That kind of coincided with the death of it because as the iPhone and iOS in general gained popularity, if it didn't support Flash, then what's the point in developing anything for it?

Well, I was... You had to develop two sides anyway. You may as well just do the one that works on everything. Yeah, well, I grew up with, you know, C and C++ and they were great.

And then suddenly, you know, the ability to do a user interface on Unix and Motif came along and, you know, that was my jam. And then, you know, coming across to the PC and doing things in character-based stuff and then doing stuff in AFX and MFC and then using Windows and being able to develop the user interfaces you kind of want. And then Java came along and you were building things in GWT and all the other weirdo graphical frameworks to kind of do the kinds of applications that you want. And you really wanted to have this rich internet application idea because the web came along and HTML sucked and you couldn't really build the applications you kind of wanted to build, which is, you know, crud on scale or anything.

And so for me, Flex came around, which was this... And back at Oracle, we were definitely using XML to generate some kind of user interface in a target implementation like XML Blaf or UIX was the technology at the time. And we were using that to define things like buttons and then press the render and then it would render to a HTML something, who cares how it was implemented. And then you would be able to put events and other things on one side and be abstracted away.

And so Flex, for me, presented the same idea. And XML was the golden child of doing this thing where you're able to have code and function and design together in a code base that you could program with and that you could manipulate from multiple places, but then had this really great pervasive runtime where you could run it just about every way you thought because Flash was just ported everywhere. So that gave you a great delivery platform for outputting ideas. So to me, that's what it represented.

So Flex for me was very important and obviously Microsoft Silverlight and XAML came along and all of the other sort of XML-based delivery technologies. The pretenders coming out of the woodwork trying to seize the throne. That's right. We're still using XML to deliver or some kind of tag-based design language, HTML inclusive of XML, to design things but then have code run against it like JavaScript, HTML, like peas in a pod.

So that's it. Stack Overflow then went into Overdrive saying, well, here's some shrinking technologies. But they did it by looking at Stack Overflow stats, which is probably not really interesting. You could say this technology has been so well discussed that it's tapering off.

The conversations are tapering off. It doesn't mean that the tech is actually declining in any way. But, dear God, Ruby on Rails does need to be shot in the head. But it's the hotness.

You can build anything on Ruby on Rails until it gets more than 10 users and then it's too much. Twitter was built on it, don't you know? And look how stable that was for the first five years. Yeah, so there's lots of tech out there.

And so shrinking tags that Stack Overflow were talking about, which is more interesting than the Flash story, but it's like ASP.NET, Ruby on Rails, Eclipse, Silverlight, Flash obviously, Flex obviously, Pearl, and jQuery Mobile. And friends, do not let friends use jQuery Mobile, dear God. So yeah, there's plenty of discussion going on about, obviously, technology's going down the gurgler. And obviously these days it's great to be a COBOL programmer, because so much COBOL is still around and you get paid lots of cash.

And you can move around in that language for forever, amen. So rest in peace Flash, as I did lots of presentations and I'll put a link into some of my YouTube stuff that I've done, where I've told people how great Flex is and then suddenly I'm telling people how great XAML is and doing stuff with WinFX. It's you, you did it. So popular, oh yeah, it's such a fun thing.

What's the next thing so we know we can jump off it now? Oh, I don't know. So Steve, we have to talk about this. The whole world's talking about it and I know we're late, but we're going to talk about it.

So it's the Google Memo. And so there's been a lot of discussion about this and I think it's a good example of don't write shit at work, because you'll probably get zacked for it, maybe. How about just don't write shit? Just don't write it and don't say it's a stupid thing to do.

It was a silly thing, but he should have, he can have these views, that's perfectly fine. Yeah, keep it to yourself. Don't write it from your work email account, sending it to your work colleagues. I mean, what did he think was going to happen?

Did he think Google was going to turn around and go, do you know that's some good salient points there and we're going to take them on board? But he clearly thought he was honest about some of these thoughts and you can kind of, it doesn't include sort of Bayesian thinking on how this would actually work out, because it doesn't, how do you, and then the other thing is like how the outrage worked thereafter and it sort of went the way you thought it went. You know, you either acknowledge that there are differences, you can say nothing, you just can't be outraged at all, that's a good idea, or you could acknowledge there are gender differences but not really point them out, which is all he's doing is saying yes, girls are different from boys, they have different likes and because they have different likes therefore they don't succeed in IT, which is absolutely bullshit. So, but that's my opinion.

But then, you know, you could say, you can't then not talk about it, you could say, well that's a harmful topic, we can't talk about the gender equality, so on and so forth. But also there's, you know, inside of what he's doing there's just a lot of statistical misunderstanding as well, like it doesn't really kind of add up. So I kind of don't understand, I understand what his point is, his point was to try and get Google to change a certain practice and then have some kind of manifesto that, I don't understand where he was going with it, like he was just shooting himself in the foot for something to do on that day. He looked at LinkedIn and thought he had a great medium article.

You know Google gives its employees like a day, a week, or half a day a week to work on their own projects. Do you think he wrote it in that time? You know, the free time that Google engineers get. He went, I've got a brilliant idea for Friday afternoon, I'm going to write a manifesto that will get me fired.

I've been watching Julia Galef, she's worthwhile having a read. So she does a lot on critical thinking and ways to think about problems. She's got a great YouTube channel and she also does a lot of work with looking at paradoxes and explaining how various paradoxes work, whether they're kind of social, psychological, mathematical, whatever. She loves diving into these like nice problems.

But she also does have a viewpoint on this particular thing which is what I've been repeating. So it's implied by his implied hypothesis and it's basically saying that personality differences are smaller, well just because their personalities are different doesn't mean that they... What's this causality and causation? He was trying to basically join correlation and causation.

Correlation and causation. Just because something follows doesn't mean it was caused by it. Post hoc ergo proctor hoc. Yeah, so it's logic, yeah.

Yeah, so I think there's an element of this, but I think that the biggest story is what Google was going, how they were going to respond. It also put them into the spotlight as well. They did the right thing. They had to fire him.

They could not fire him. Yeah, and that's it. So it's, I mean, you know, it's just as silly as at the moment a lot of white supremacists are getting blood tests and being shocked by their background. I mean, honestly, like for real.

Or Nationals MPs being shocked that they're a citizen of another country. Oops. Yes, in Australia at the moment. Australia for Australians.

On a related note, I saw Dick Smith's ad this morning, his anti-immigration ad. What a hunk of crap that is. Have you seen it? It's like scary black and white, you know, you don't know who's coming to the country, and they're turking out curbs and houses, and then it's Dick Smith saying, we need to control immigration, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Really? I think he's gone off his rocker a little bit old. Even more so than he has done previously. I mean, elderly statesmen type people.

Elderly statesmen, elderly rich white men like Dick Smith, who have racist views. What a shocker. It's like Trump. It's like, you know, we clearly should have said, racists and Nazis are bad.

There's no denying. And not go, well, you're a bit of, you know, both kids were bad. Both kids were bad. That's not the case.

That's not the case at all. Let's talk about programming. GoToChicago2017 was on. It was a conference from May 1st through to May 4th.

And of interest, our good friend Martin, not our good friend, everybody's good friend, I should rewrite that. Martin Fowler was there. Now, if you don't know who Martin Fowler is, you must be drunk or been under a rock for a very long time. Anyway, he works for a company called ThoughtWorks, but it's more or less, I don't know who, he discovered them or they discovered him, one of the two.

But Martin Fowler has written many books that most people probably have written or been a part of the gang of four. Refactoring is probably his most famous in the 2000s, which most people would have read. You know, he's very focused on the practicalities of developing software and techniques and architectures and patterns. And so, you know, there is the traditional, there's a number of books like the object-oriented book, which I read from.

He's got a great C++ exercise in there where he's talking about all the different patterns and how to write them all in, you know, C++. And that's sort of how I met Martin in terms of understanding his work. So he actually opened the conference GoTo2017 with a keynote. And one of the things, it seems like it's the most exciting things programmers can do.

So he opened up the conference with a good old chinwag on events and event sourcing. And what does event-driven mean, Steve? Now, we've been developing, we've been busy developing software applications. We've recently released travelreal.com, so you can go check it out.

UI and everything done by Steve, built on our software and technology, Next Data Engine. And it has a lot of event-driven bits and pieces in it and different practices and patterns for doing that. And so I'll put a link into our show notes, which we'll talk about, which will have the conference itself and the keynote, which you can watch him. And it's very, very interesting to watch and see where he's at with event-driven systems and what event-driven means.

It's like everyone says, oh, you probably met your manager who pseudo knows something about IT and saying, oh, it's service-oriented architecture or it's APIs. We're doing APIs now, Steve. Everything's about an API and the API economy and so on. It's very important.

It's very important. I read about it in a magazine. Yeah, this is kind of the same thing. Our APIs need to be more blue.

Yeah, they need to be more, they need to be enriched. There's an enriching service, maybe. Anyway, an event-driven, it tries to sort of talk about or describe the different practices that he's seen and differentiate them or how they're used. Like, for example, when we bring on new users in Travel Reel, we have an event which gets synchronized across our Mutex between engine and the application.

And then the events rebroadcast inside of the engine, something happens, and then it responds to this event and then fires another event across to the application, which is listening. So, for example, if you're adding a new user or you're creating an email, it's all events. But not events are all the same. So what he's trying to do is talk about how developers use events and event notifications, and he's kind of got it down to about three.

So the primary one, which everyone's probably familiar with, is like an event-carried state. So what that means is, for example, something happens, like you want to change a customer's address. Like, normally you'd have a transaction, like most people would have. If I want to change a customer address, I would just talk to the ORM, object relational mapper, and it would probably have a repository for a unit of work.

And you would say, you know, find that customer by a particular ID, and then get the object out, and then change all of the method, change all the properties, fields, and then ask the ORM to say, you know, pacify that back, save that back. But some people, they actually use an event system to do this. So they say, oh, create an event. An event could be a command or an event, so they could have a command called change customer command or event, and then they plumb a lot of the data in that was the before and after shot, or maybe it's the after shot, and say go change it.

And then that could be could be done asynchronously, could be synchronous. And so you're waiting around for for things to change. So this is event sourcing, he's calling this. And so there's, you know, there's good things and bad things that could be done about that.

Sorry, that's an event carried state transfer. So it's that the event itself has the state, and it transfers the state to something else. And says, well, the change of customer address details is inside that event. The next one is event sourcing.

And it's a more interesting one, because it's basically saying, what is the state of the whole system at this particular point in time? So if you're changing, it's like a history or an auditing feature type thing, where like a version control. And so you've got events which are happening, which at that point in time, this is what was going on. And then at the next point in time, a commit point, say these are all of the things that made up the change.

And, you know, that's got its own problems. And because everything these days you can do in memory, like the whole of everything can be done in memory, you can get serious speed by having such, you know, a particular system. You can have it singularly threaded and just absolutely pummel it. And, you know, event sourcing works really well because you can kind of go forward and back in time and get a lot of auditing.

And that's great. And then there's the next last one, which he gets to, which I hate. I've seen a lot of people implement it and do it differently in different ways. And this is the way for it, Steve.

CQRS. Oh, that classic. So it's the command query responsibility segregation. I knew that.

Yeah, everyone knows this. In short, it's basically saying this is where the reads happen and that's where the writes happen. And fuck me, if that's not a mindfuck, I don't know what is. But debugging, debugging all of this is just nightmare to try and say, I know with our emails.

going out through travel reel, you know, if there's something that goes wrong, how do you follow through whether or not it it worked whether it Passed across into engine pass back to the application those sorts of things and whether you're choosing to do use that kind of technique Anyway, so go to 2017 plenty of other things to go and watch there. They've got like in lit. Oh, everyone's got machine learning microservices You know various programming constructs. They've course serverless guys are there dancing around nude But Martin fellow turned up and had a had a bit of a chat did the keynotes very rare that you see I haven't seen Martin around and presentation form for a little while.

So I thought I'd call it out It's very interesting and definitely where he wrote a speech and he's just been constantly Changing and editing the speech for years and years. He's never quite happy I just he just gets up and just has a good old ramble. He actually He when you hear him, I've never heard his voice Like it when I listen, it's like cynical Brit It he sounds like the coding but the coding person's version of cynical Brit on YouTube Anyway, he works with like the ThoughtWorks and shout out to the ThoughtWorks people Hello, and if you want to come and show you can come on the show and have a chat So Steve later in the month around sometime August 21st There's a major solar eclipse happening and the world's gonna involve know what you're gonna see Oh, no, watch out Animals gonna die Let's extend that blackout further How about some nuclear on your ass my chakras are misaligning already true So all of the the who has coming out, so it's a total solar eclipse. It's actually called the Great American solar eclipse It's like well bully for them.

Yeah, they get their own it's on the 21st of August 2017 lots of stuff about it passing across the entire center of The United States and there's animations and there's start times and in times It's funny how scientists have been predicting this for years and years and years and everyone's excited and no one Doesn't think that this is going to happen yet climate change which scientists have been predicting for years and years No, that's not working Yeah, yeah, that's that that's a very ingrained way of thinking Yeah, so that's that's something that we don't have to spend lots of money on to fix. Yeah, it's great. It's happening as we speak It's happening. Wait climate change you have to spend the money on.

Oh, no, that's not how I think we need to do a bit More research on that one first. Yeah So yeah, it's as we have 31 degree days in August. Yeah We've been having some seriously hot days, which I don't know what's going wrong with that winter. It's not happening Winter is just well, it's mostly a high-pressure system pushing wind from inland It's not really climate change weather does not climate change make thanks weatherman Steve This week on with us back to you back to you Steve back to the studio Moving on to some media Steve.

Have you been watching Game of Thrones? Where are we up to with that? Has everyone died yet? Yep Great.

Everyone's dead. This isn't there's have been any new releases on telly at the moment I know that there's a new game show with Peter. Hell yeah Yeah Skip that one Utopia's come back. We haven't talked about utopia watch utopia.

So my god, what's the premise of utopia? It's by Rob sitch and All those guys who were on the panel Working dog productions. It's it's it's not like the office. Is it?

No, no, no. No, it's set in infrastructure Australia the nation nation building Australia or something like an office that deals with federal infrastructure projects But it's just constantly Shat on by the minister and by Kitty Flanagan whose character is amazing, but awful Just truly awful character, but Kitty Flanagan does it so well of like the pointy haired boss It's the satire is Spectacular you must watch it. It's on the ABC. So it's on maybe see I view or whatever.

It's called the catch-up I think if you're listening to us in a different country we ought to get to it. So Rob's I'm sure there's ways Celia Colia Dave Lawson Kitty Flanagan and Louise and then you've got is it new cast members in here who represent? There's a few but it's mostly the working dog production. So Santos in it.

I think it's Santo. She sent it to Laura. Yes They had We'll put a clip on to the site so you can watch it. There was one which were they were choosing It's a my gov clone.

It reminded me a lot of Silicon Valley, of course, it's similar. Yeah similar in the just the the total cluelessness of everybody involved and Rob sitch is the sort of straight man who's just trying to get the work done and is just stymied it Every opportunity by everybody so you do find kind of feel sorry for him There was of course the open source org there was a One of the producers from Silicon Valley came on and he was talking about his experiences at HubSpot I kind of get you get the the kind of feeling if you've watched I have now gone and watched all of the episodes of Silicon Valley And of course, it's great and there's lots of people that you kind of go. I've met that guy. I know that guy And HubSpot there seems to be like the most craziest place probably to work but looking at utopia gives you such chills because you've either met that person or been in that situation or in that meeting room and that's Reproduced so well, so it's currently on iview you can watch it And it's on Wednesdays At 9 o'clock sometime like that on TV, so go check out utopia heaps of fun So Steve would come to the end of the pod If you want to become a first-class thingamajig or want us to look at your thingamajig How would you get the space welders to do it?

Just send pictures of your thingamajig to Mike He's on Twitter twitter.com slash Michael underscore wise. He'll be he'll be glad to look at pictures of your thingamajig I'm a doctor of thingamajig. So yeah, you heard it here first. I'll give a look at it You can head over to WW2.com to find the show notes for this episode and all the other episodes that we've done or 87 of them.

Wow, we're nearly to a hundred. What shall we do? Probably the same thing You can Subscribe to the show on iTunes stitcher and SoundCloud SoundCloud's been bailed out Yeah, it's SoundCloud news they got bailed out they got bailed out was a chance to rapper in the end I didn't actually see who it was Someone put money down some do put money down so they've probably got another three months in them or something so you can still subscribe They're gonna go run out and buy iPhones the new ones. Well, they've got to repaint their offices They've got to get another foosball table Restock the fridge.

Oh and pay for some development work somewhere in there. Yeah get the interns to do it While you're on iTunes stitcher and SoundCloud Make sure you leave a comment and a like and a favorite and a share and a subscribe smash that like button That's that's what you say, isn't it? Hammer it hammer that like button Tell your friends organize listening parties Live tweet it with the hashtag Space welders, I mean, it's simple You can follow us on twitter twitter.com slash space waters Michael comm space waters what? Twitter.com slash Michael underscore wise twitter.com slash the skeptical Dave.

We're also on Facebook. It's facebook.com slash base waters You sound like a Connie at the show Steve Like you're a bird up step right up first space where it is here We've got some space where it is here quickly launched knock down five little toys of my can win a stuffed teddy bear We recently I went to the show with my daughter for the first time. It's like that daddy daughter show And I went before the People's Day on a day that I thought oh, it's not going to be busy And so she goes daddy daddy. Take me down sideshow alley Anyway, she has anxiety.

I want to spend all of your money. Yeah, we so we take take me to the show bags I wear these show bags. I hear of these show bags. I heard you can get bags with lollies and toys in them It's take me there now this time I command you go into sideshow alley and they've now decided to put all of the machines of death Which normally line otherwise known as carnival rides ha machines of death and and there's like literally she's She's up to my hip and height and it's crowded and there's lots of people and she's looking up and I can just see sheer terror as these people are swinging over the top of the crowd screaming their brains out with you know sprays of vomit and joy and Yeah, so she didn't enjoy that at all and then Asked to leave so that was the show That was my experience a metaphor for listening to the space welders and that's what listening to the space Make sure you check out our merch store.

There's a link on the website buy a t-shirt and Mike sees you in it He'll buy you a drink That's all he'll buy you And finally if you have any questions comments or feedback email us info at space waters calm So If you're not blinded by looking at the eclipse next week or if we haven't been you mean if you're not blinded by the light blowing the total eclipse of the Sun or dead You know nuked Then you're probably listening to us. Excellent. Well done. So yes, we'll continue on.

We'll have to have a guest on next week It's Mike out Steve out You