Dead Code – Details, episodes & analysis

Podcast details

Technical and general information from the podcast's RSS feed.

Dead Code

Jared Norman

Technology

Frequency: 1 episode/10d. Total Eps: 42

The software industry has a short memory. It warps good ideas, quickly obfuscating their context and intent. Dead Code seeks to extract the good ideas from the chaos of modern software development.

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

Recent rankings

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Apple Podcasts

🇨🇦 Canada - technology
15/05/2025
#92

Spotify

No recent rankings available

Shared links between episodes and podcasts

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https://hachyderm.io/@deadcode
42 shares
https://supergood.social/@jared
42 shares
https://jardo.dev
11 shares

https://twitter.com/DeadCodePod
42 shares
https://twitter.com/jardonamron
39 shares
https://twitter.com/jessitron
1 share

https://github.com/ruby/prism
2 shares
https://github.com/features/copilot
1 share

RSS feed quality and score

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RSS feed quality

Good

Score global : 79%

Publication history

Monthly episode publishing history over the past years.

Year

Latest published episodes

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Poisoning the Well (with Heydon Pickering)

Tuesday, May 13, 2025 • Duration 37:34

In this episode of Dead Code, Jared interviews Heydon Pickering about his satirical strategy to sabotage AI web crawlers by generating nonsense versions of his blog posts. Using Eleventy and JS DOM, Heydon replaces keywords in his content with absurd alternatives from a static lexicon, creating grammatically broken, jargon-filled text that wastes crawler resources without harming his SEO. Frustrated by how LLMs scrape web content without consent, he frames his approach as both a protest and a creative, Dadaist rebellion against exploitative tech norms. While the method won’t cripple AI models, it reflects a broader resistance to the unchecked harvesting of human-created content.

Links:

“Poisoning the Well” (Heydon’s article)

“Please Stop Externalizing Your Costs Directly In My Face” – The article that partly inspired Heydon’s efforts to push back against LLM scraping.

Heydon’s Blog

Webbed Briefs (Heydon’s video series)

Dead Code Podcast Links:

Mastodon

Jared’s Links:

Mastodon

twitch.tv/jardonamron

Jared’s Newsletter & Website

Episode Transcript

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

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Deterministic Simulation (with Stevan)

Episode 39

Tuesday, May 6, 2025 • Duration 28:27

In this episode of Dead Code, Jared talks with Stevan about building reliable distributed systems using Erlang-inspired design patterns. Stevan shares how his background in functional programming and formal verification led him to simulation testing—a deterministic approach to testing distributed systems that avoids the flakiness of traditional CI environments. He emphasizes that Erlang’s true innovation lies not in lightweight processes, but in its structured behaviors (like gen_server and supervisor), which make systems easier to reason about, test, and verify. These behaviors support a more disciplined approach to concurrency, enabling reproducible fault injection and better simulation frameworks. Stevan advocates for programming languages that natively support deterministic testing and model checking, suggesting that the future of distributed systems lies in building on these structured, verifiable foundations.

Links:

Lethal Dependency Injection (with Tim Riley)

Episode 30

Tuesday, February 25, 2025 • Duration 45:50

In this episode of Dead Code, Jared interviews Tim Riley about Hanami, an alternative Ruby web framework that prioritizes separation of concerns, modular components, and maintainability over Rails’ monolithic approach. Tim explains how Hanami’s repository pattern for database interactions reduces unintended ripple effects, while its built-in dependency injection improves testability and scalability. He shares the evolution of Hanami, its integration with dry-rb and ROM, and the project’s commitment to fostering an inclusive, sustainable community. With ongoing efforts to enhance accessibility and documentation, Hanami aims to offer Ruby developers a flexible, well-structured alternative for building applications while staying within the familiar Ruby ecosystem.

Links:

Hanami Website

Tim Riley’s Website

Tim Riley on Mastodon

Hanami GitHub Repository

dry-rb GitHub Repository

ROM-rb GitHub Repository

Tilt (Ruby template engine support)

Dead Code Podcast Links:

Mastodon

Jared’s Links:

Hole-y Diver (with Cyrus Omar and Andrew Blinn)

Episode 29

Tuesday, February 18, 2025 • Duration 36:46

In this Dead Code podcast episode, Cyrus Omar and Andrew Blinn discuss Hazel, an innovative programming language and editor designed to handle incomplete programs by providing continuous feedback and partial code execution, similar to dynamic languages, while maintaining a robust type system. Hazel’s unique graphical editor allows domain-specific visual representations, such as sliders for integers and playing cards for data manipulation, making programming more intuitive and tactile. The team highlights collaborations with climate scientists for interactive data work and explores Hazel’s potential across various domains like hardware design and mathematics. Future developments include “probes” for live runtime data visualization within code, with the hope that Hazel’s novel approach will inspire broader adoption in the programming community.

Links:

Hazel Website

Andrew Blinn’s Website

Andrew’s Balatro Cards Demo

PROPL Workshop Paper

Dead Code Podcast Links:

Mastodon

Jared’s Links:

Mastodon

twitch.tv/jardonamron

Yet Another Podcast Episode (with Ingy döt Net)

Episode 28

Tuesday, February 11, 2025 • Duration 35:34

In this episode of Dead Code, Jared interviews Ingy döt Net, co-creator of YAML, about its origins, unexpected rise in popularity—especially within the Ruby community—and its evolution into a widely used configuration language. Ingy shares insights into YAMLScript, a new programming language he developed to address YAML’s limitations, enabling more powerful configuration and data transformation through a Lisp-like approach. By leveraging Clojure and GraalVM, YAMLScript offers cross-language compatibility and improves YAML’s usability in environments like Kubernetes and Helm. The conversation explores broader industry trends in serialization, the challenges of maintaining a widely adopted format, and Ingy’s philosophy of acmeism, which promotes language-agnostic tooling. He also discusses YAMLScript’s warm reception at KubeCon and its inclusion in programming education platforms like Exercism.

Links:

YAMLScript Official Website

YAMLScript GitHub Repository

Dead Code Podcast Links:

Zero Allocations (with Joel Drapper)

Episode 27

Tuesday, February 4, 2025 • Duration 49:16

In this episode of Dead Code, Jared interviews software engineer Joel Drapper about his open-source projects in the Ruby ecosystem. They discuss Phlex, a view framework that allows developers to build HTML components using pure Ruby, eliminating the need for templating languages like ERB. Joel also introduces Literal, a library for reducing boilerplate in object creation with built-in type validation, and Quickdraw, an experimental test runner optimized for multi-core execution. The conversation concludes with Yippee, a SQLite-centric full-stack Ruby framework designed for simplicity and performance, challenging conventional Rails architectures. Joel shares insights on how these projects streamline development while embracing SQLite’s growing viability in production applications.

Links:

Phlex

Literal

Stephen Margheim (@fractaledmind on Bluesky)

Joel Drapper (@joel.drapper.me on Bluesky)

Dead Code Podcast Links:

Mastodon

Jared’s Links:

Mastodon

twitch.tv/jardonamron

Let’s Go Camping (with Karl Oscar Weber)

Episode 26

Tuesday, January 28, 2025 • Duration 20:45

In this Dead Code episode, host Jared interviews Karl Oscar Weber about revitalizing Camping, a minimalist Ruby web framework originally created by “Why the Lucky Stiff.” Karl shares his 14-year programming journey, his passion for Ruby, and the challenges of modernizing Camping while preserving its compact, esoteric design under five kilobytes. He introduces updates like plugins (“Camping Gear”) and compatibility with newer Ruby features, emphasizing Camping’s educational value and simplicity. Beyond the technical, Karl discusses fostering inclusivity in the Ruby community, countering exclusionary attitudes, and creating spaces that welcome underrepresented developers. Jared commends Karl’s efforts to honor Ruby’s quirky, fun spirit while addressing cultural issues, highlighting the broader impact small projects can have on shaping tech communities.

Links:

Camping GitHub Repository

Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby

Sequel Gem Documentation

Roda GitHub Repository

Cuba GitHub Repository

Andrew Tate Background (Wikipedia)

Metroid Series Overview (Wikipedia)

Dead Code Podcast Links:

Mastodon

Event Horizon (with Ismael Celis)

Episode 25

Tuesday, January 21, 2025 • Duration 34:25

In this episode of Dead Code, Jared Norman hosts Ruby developer and consultant Ismael Celis to discuss event sourcing—a data storage model that records historical events to derive the current state of an application, offering benefits like accurate audit trails and reduced complexity. Ismael explains how event sourcing contrasts with traditional CRUD systems by focusing on a flat sequence of events rather than intricate relational models, making it particularly useful in e-commerce and microservices. He highlights his experimentation with event sourcing in Ruby, aiming to combine its simplicity with Ruby’s expressiveness, and mentions existing tools like Rails Event Store, Sequence, and Eventide. Offering practical advice, Ismael suggests starting small with simple Ruby scripts to grasp the concept before adopting established libraries. The episode underscores the potential for event sourcing to streamline debugging and enhance adaptability in dynamic systems.

Links:

Ismael Celis on Twitter

Ismael Celis on GitHub

Ismael’s Website

Rails Event Store

Eventide Documentation

Dead Code Podcast Links:

Mastodon

Jared’s Links:

Mastodon

For Whom The Compiler Tolls (with Felienne Hermans)

Episode 24

Tuesday, January 14, 2025 • Duration 29:23

In this episode of Dead Code, Jared Norman interviews Felienne Hermans, creator of the Hedy programming language and author of “A Case for Feminism in Programming Language Design.” Felienne discusses her experiences of alienation in the programming language design community and critiques its prioritization of mathematical rigor and technical difficulty over accessibility and inclusivity. Highlighting Hedy, a simplified, multilingual language designed for beginners and non-English speakers, she emphasizes the value of user-centered design in making programming more approachable and impactful. The conversation explores the exclusionary culture in programming, such as dismissing spreadsheets and front-end work as “not real coding,” and proposes reimagining programming languages to focus on collaboration, user experience, and joy rather than gatekeeping and status. Felienne calls for a cultural shift to prioritize inclusivity and creativity, showcasing how tools like Hedy can inspire and empower diverse communities.

Links:

The Hedy Programming Language

A Case for Feminism in Programming Language Design

Felienne Hermans’s Personal Website

Programming Language Conference: SPLASH

Elm Programming Language

Edgar Dijkstra’s EWDs

Ruby Programming Language

Rust Programming Language

Violent Sleep of Concurrency (with JP Camara)

Episode 23

Tuesday, January 7, 2025 • Duration 41:15

In this Dead Code episode, host Jared Norman interviews JP Camara, Principal Software Engineer at Wealthbox, about Ruby concurrency. JP explains that Ruby applications are inherently multithreaded, even when developers assume otherwise, highlighting how background threads from libraries like Sidekiq or monitoring tools can introduce concurrency issues. He discusses the Ruby community's progress in thread safety, driven by tools like Puma and Sidekiq, and contrasts Ruby's "colorless" concurrency model with JavaScript's explicit async/await syntax, emphasizing Ruby's reduced cognitive overhead. JP also shares his experience contributing to Ruby's M:N thread scheduler for macOS, advocating for developers to rely on vetted concurrency tools like concurrent-ruby and async instead of manually managing threads. He concludes by stressing the importance of avoiding global state, breaking tasks into smaller pieces, and approaching concurrency with a thoughtful mindset.

Links:

JP's Ruby Concurrency Series

What Color is Your Function?

Async Gem