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.
Jared 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. Requirements reach engineers through a game of telephone, so she argues you have to go back to the...
Charles 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 Hanami apps come over and run, and what you get underneath is world-class garbage collection, real par...
Host 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 dishonest marketing (Sutherland's "twice the work in half the time" promise) and that its rituals ampli...
On 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, object-oriented language inspired by Ruby but stripped of metaprogramming magic, implemented in Rust, with fe...
On 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 around them. Ismael frames event sourcing as thinking in time rather than space: instead of persi...
Tim 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, collaboration, and community. He explains how Hanami 3.0 represents the culmination of years of wo...
Ted M. Young joins Jared to discuss Extreme Programming, predictive test-driven development, event sourcing, and teaching software practices through board games. Ted explains how predictive TDD encourages developers to anticipate exactly how a test will fail, leading to deep...
Jared 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 that while AI can generate software, it cannot recreate the communities, culture, trust, moderati...
In 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 abstractions, helping developers model domains more effectively and avoid bloated ActiveRecord models....
In 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 nesting, advanced selectors, and state-based logic enable complex interactivity without relying on J...
In 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 reshaping the role of programmers. Copeland describes a personal reckoning with whether traditional progr...
Sean Goedecke contrasts generic design advice (principles and patterns not grounded in a specific codebase) with concrete design (decisions shaped by the real code, constraints, and existing “prior art”), arguing you can’t meaningfully design software you don’t work on becau...
Jared 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 teach his young son to code (anything but Java) to how Rails suddenly made Ruby mainstream and push...
Jared interviews CS and cybersecurity grad student Daniel Fichtinger about “slopware” in open source. These are projects, often boosted by AI, that perform legitimacy with buzzwords, emoji feature lists, templates, donation links, and sweeping claims, while the underlying co...
Jared talks with Stephen Margheim about a “missing” middle layer in modern design systems: reusable CSS affordances that sit between Tailwind utilities and full components. Stephen shares how building a no-JavaScript half-star rating input (radio buttons + labels + SVG + car...
In 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 powerful IDE refactoring workflows to the ways pull requests can turn into delayed integration. ...
Jared 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 OCaml role despite only having written “Hello, World,” and what she’s building now: FeedMansion, a ...
Jared interviews Steve Klabnik (Rust author and longtime OSS contributor) about JJ (Jujutsu), a newer version control system that can operate on Git repos via pluggable backends so you can adopt it locally without forcing teammates to switch, while getting a simpler, more fl...
In this episode, GitHub engineer Joel Hawksley breaks down the evolution of GitHub’s UI architecture—from Rails views to ViewComponent to React—and the tradeoffs behind each step. ViewComponent emerged as a practical, backwards-compatible way to eliminate duplicated UI logic...
In this Dead Code episode, Jared and ReScript contributor Josh Vlk explain why ReScript is a strongly typed, sound language for web development that compiles to JavaScript, offers first-class React support, and favors a “one right way” approach (built-in formatter, no linter...
In this episode, Dave Copeland discusses Brut, his Ruby web framework built atop Sinatra that prioritizes “simple over easy” design principles. Brut replaces traditional MVC with pages, forms, and handlers, uses Flex for HTML generation, Sequel for database access, and light...
Jared talks with Adam Tornhill, founder of CodeScene, about the psychology of programming and how understanding human cognitive limits leads to better software. Adam explains that since working memory can only juggle a few items at once, developers must rely on chunking and ...
Jared sits down with Trail of Bits security engineer Matt Schwager to discuss the persistent security risks of Ruby’s Marshal library. Matt explains that while Marshal (and Python’s Pickle) makes serialization simple and fast for tasks like caching, its “serialize anything” ...
In this Dead Code episode, Jared talks with longtime Rubyist and former Rails Core member Kasper Timm Hansen about “riffing,” a sketch-first approach to software design. Instead of jumping straight into migrations and production code, Kasper opens a scratch Ruby file—mixing ...
On this episode of Dead Code, Jared talks with Justin Searls, co-founder of Test Double, about programming workflows, decision-making, and the evolving role of developers. They explore how the order and tempo of thought matter more than static code, why tackling the riskiest...
The 50th episode of the Dead Code Podcast brought Karl Weber, Jared Norman, Benjamin Wil, Sofia Besenski, and Noah Silveira together to mark the milestone with sharp, funny, and critical takes on the state of tech. They skewered CEOs bragging about AI-driven layoffs as short...
In this episode of Dead Code, Jared interviews Dave Gauer, creator of the Ziglings project—a whimsical, hands-on tutorial for learning the Zig programming language. Dave shares how Ziglings began as a personal learning tool and grew into a widely loved resource, especially a...
In this episode of Dead Code, Jared and guest Mond explore how James C. Scott’s concepts of legibility, metis, and episteme apply to tech interviews, arguing that standardized hiring processes prioritize what’s easy to measure over what truly reflects engineering skill. They...
In this episode of Dead Code, Jared speaks with Jens Oliver Meiert and Fabien Basmaison, co-maintainers of CSS Naked Day, a long-standing web tradition that invites developers to strip CSS from their websites for one day to emphasize semantic HTML, accessibility, and the sep...
In this episode of Dead Code, Jared interviews Ivo Anjo, a Ruby performance expert at Datadog, about Ruby’s concurrency model and his work improving visibility into it. They discuss the Global VM Lock (GVL), which simplifies Ruby’s internals but hinders multithreading, and e...
