About this podcast
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.
Episodes
The newest 20 of 80 episodes
- Harvester of Slow (with Varun Gandhi) · 35 min · Episode 78On this Dead Code episode, Jared talks with Varun Gandhi, a Databricks engineer who works on Git performance for the company's monorepo. The topic is Varun's reply to Dan Luu's…
- Rust in Pieces (with Alistair Norman and Sofia Besenski) · 39 min · Episode 77On this episode of Dead Code, host Jared talks with Sofia Besenski and Alistair Norman of Super Good about DHH's 2026 Rails World keynote. In it, DHH announced that HEY is…
- Where the Bodies Are Buried (with Kerri Miller) · 26 min · Episode 76Jared talks with Kerri Miller, a Staff Engineer at GitLab, about Keela. It's her new open-source tool that finds unused code in Rails apps, and it's named after a UK police dog…
- None Dare Refactor (with Noah Silvera) · 32 min · Episode 75Jared talks with Noah Silvera, a Super Good Software engineer and the show's most frequent guest, about treating requirements as negotiable rather than as literal instructions…
- Bound for Valhalla (with Charles Nutter) · 39 min · Episode 74Charles Nutter has led JRuby for 20 years and still spends much of his time correcting the assumption that running Ruby on the JVM means writing Java. It doesn't. Rails and…
- Dragged Into Done (with Nikhil Suresh) · 51 min · Episode 73Host Jared Norman talks with Nik Suresh, who runs Hermit Tech, an extreme programming data consultancy in Melbourne, about why Scrum fails. Nik argues Scrum spread through…
- No More Magic (with Nithin Bekal) · 26 min · Episode 72On this episode of Dead Code, Jared talks with Nithin Bekal, a longtime Ruby developer at Shopify, about Sapphire, his hobby programming language: a gradually typed…
- Twilight of the Object God (with Ismael Celis) · 45 min · Episode 71On Dead Code, Jared talks with returning guest Ismael, a London-based developer who came to programming from fine arts, about event sourcing, CQRS, and the Ruby stack he's built…
- Bloom of the Undying (with Tim Riley) · 39 min · Episode 70Tim Riley returns to discuss the launch of Hanakai, a new organization unifying the Hanami, Dry, and ROM projects into a cohesive Ruby ecosystem focused on modern architecture…
- Altars of Append (with Ted M. Young) · 51 min · Episode 69Ted M. Young joins Jared to discuss Extreme Programming, predictive test-driven development, event sourcing, and teaching software practices through board games. Ted explains how…
- Toxic Deluge (with Joan Westenberg) · 28 min · Episode 68Jared talks with Joan Westenberg about her essay “The Hacker News Tar Pit” and the misconception that AI-powered vibe coding can easily replace established products. Joan argues…
- Seeds of Devastation (with Kasper Timm Hansen) · 39 min · Episode 67In this episode of Dead Code, Kasper Timm Hansen shares how his post–Rails Core work focuses on small, high-impact Ruby gems built around clear “concepts” rather than loose…
- Felony CSS (with Lyra Rebane) · 20 min · Episode 66In this episode, Jared talks with security researcher Lyra Rebane about pushing CSS far beyond its reputation as a simple styling language, exploring how modern features like…
- Reject Modernity (with David Copeland) · 40 min · Episode 65In this episode of Dead Code, Jared talks with developer Dave Copeland about his article “The Death of the Software Craftsman,” which reflects on how AI coding tools are…
- Frankenstein’s System (with Sean Goedecke) · 28 min · Episode 64Sean Goedecke contrasts generic design advice (principles and patterns not grounded in a specific codebase) with concrete design (decisions shaped by the real code, constraints…
- Indistinguishable From Evil (with Russ Olsen) · 34 min · Episode 63Jared interviews veteran programmer and author Russ Olsen about updating Eloquent Ruby for the last 15-ish years of Ruby evolution, from how he discovered Ruby while trying to…
- The Slop Slope (with Daniel Fichtinger) · 44 min · Episode 62Jared interviews CS and cybersecurity grad student Daniel Fichtinger about “slopware” in open source. These are projects, often boosted by AI, that perform legitimacy with…
- Zero Specificity (with Stephen Margheim) · 49 min · Episode 61Jared talks with Stephen Margheim about a “missing” middle layer in modern design systems: reusable CSS affordances that sit between Tailwind utilities and full components…
- IDE-cide (with Samir Talwar) · 47 min · Episode 60In this episode, Jared is joined by Samir Talwar to talk about why “programming peaked” and how the developer experience has arguably regressed over the last 15 years—from losing…
- Death From Algorithm W 1978 (with Sabine Schmaltz) · 39 min · Episode 59Jared talks with Sabine Schmaltz, an OCaml Developer Advocate at Tarides, about how she went from learning Standard ML in a demanding university course to getting hired for an…
