Three Devs and a Maybe

In this weeks episode we are lucky to have Keyvan Akbary back on the show. We start off by discussing the job role he has taken since moving back to Madrid, and the importance of building autonomous teams. From here, we talk about the technology stack they are using at Cabify, highlighting some of the interesting features found in Elixir and Go. Finally, we touch upon Cabify’s infrastructure and deployment strategy, showcasing how awesome GitLab is along the way.

In this weeks episode we chat to Simon Bennett about his experience bootstrapping SaaS products. We start off with how he got into software development and highlight some of his previous/current business ventures. This leads us to highlight treating each failure as an experiment, and the danger (as a developer) of using a new product idea as a platform to learn new technology. From here, we discuss the success he has had from SnapShooter, his new product Automaily, and the unique challenges building products targeted at developers. Finally, we touch upon how he comes up with new ideas, the necessity to quickly validate them, and advice for any listener who has an idea and is thinking of building a product from it.

In this weeks episode we have good friend of the show Joe Watkins back on to discuss the recent developments in PHP. We start off by highlighting how code is currently compiled and executed using the Zend VM, and distill how the recently approved JIT (for PHP 8) will change this. From here we mention the reasoning for going down this path now, the difference between I/O vs CPU bound code, and the use-cases where the JIT will improve performance. This leads us to the PHP compiler project Anthony Ferrara is working on (with the goal of Ahead-of-Time PHP compilation), and the new parallel concurrency API Joe is working on which uses a model similar to Goroutines. Finally, we discuss his recently approved Weak References and Abolish Narrow Margins RFC’s.

In this weeks episode we are lucky to have Mattias Geniar back on the show to discuss his experiences delving into Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies. We start off by chatting about his introduction to Bitcoin, the ‘bear market’ of 2018 and how valuable the ‘Mastering Bitcoin’ book is to understanding its’ internals. From here we move on to the concept of ‘Code is Law’ and the implications of such an approach, the pros n’ cons of being a developer in this space, and how he stores his private keys (not your keys, not your coins!). This leads us to highlight second-layer scaling solutions such as the Lighting Network, and the confusion around projects reusing the Bitcoin name. We then touch upon the power of Ethereum, its’ planned consensus transition from PoW to PoS, and how different it is developing on a distributed platform. Finally, we look at the Mimblewimble protocol and Atomic Swaps, discussing their use-cases and how they can improve the space.

In this weeks episode we are lucky to have both Matthieu Napoli and Neal Brooks on the show to discuss all things Serverless PHP. We start off by discussing what drew Matthieu to Serverless, the creation of the Bref project and the technical challenges encountered with getting PHP to work within the Lambda environment. From here, we touch upon the reasons behind moving from the Serverless Framework to SAM (for the 0.3 release) and how Bref uses the new Lambda Layers and Runtime API. This leads us on to highlight how a typical PHP project would use Bref, the decision to be opinionated in order to stay minimal and the experimental Loop SAPI. Finally, we envision what the future holds for the Bref project and Serverless compute.