airhacks.fm podcast with adam bien

An airhacks.fm conversation with Manik Surtani (@maniksurtani) about:
programming on the BBC Micro with Basic and writing a Trojan horse,
GW BASIC and Turbo Pascal on PC,
Space Invaders-style games,
C++ neural network simulating bat learning behavior at university,
PHP e-commerce startup Silk Road Software competing with Intershop in the late 1990s,
multi-tenant web shops for UK customers,
the dot-com crash and startup failure,
first Java job building Virgin Atlantic online check-in and airport kiosks on WebLogic and Oracle,
demonstrating a JBoss and MySQL and Linux open source stack to the Virgin Atlantic CTO,
contributing to JGroups at the Financial Times and meeting Bela Ban,
JBoss Cache tree structure limitations and concurrency issues,
rewriting JBoss Cache into Infinispan as a HashMap-based distributed cache,
removing reflection overhead and pluggable serialization with Protocol Buffers support,
the Hot Rod client-server protocol,
joining Square via Bob Lee to migrate a Ruby on Rails monolith to Java microservices for Starbucks payments,
multi-DC high availability architecture with red-green deployments,
shutting down the Rails monolith with zero downtime using double writes and gradual traffic migration,
Block as a polyglot environment with Java and Kotlin and Ruby and Go and python,
the Head of Open Source role at Block and establishing an Open Source Programs Office,
inner sourcing practices,
co-designing gRPC with Google,
building and open-sourcing Goose as a coding agent predating Claude Code and Codex,
co-designing MCP with Anthropic,
founding the Agentic AI Foundation with Anthropic and OpenAI and AWS and Google and Microsoft and Cloudflare and Bloomberg,
Block Open Source projects including OkHttp and OkIO and Retrofit,
LLMs generating better code with type-safe compiled languages like Java,
grounding LLMs against Jakarta EE APIs to reduce hallucinations,
Block business units including Square,
Cash App,
Afterpay and Tidal
Manik Surtani on twitter: @maniksurtani

An airhacks.fm conversation with Christofer Dutz (@christofer-dutz) about:
discussion about Apache PLC4X as the JDBC of industrial automation,
the API and SPI architecture with Java service loader for driver discovery,
Modbus protocol for HVAC systems and heating devices,
PLC4X core API operations including discovery and browsing and reading and writing and subscribing and publishing,
multi-language support with PLC4J for Java and PLC4Go for Go and PLC4Py for python and C#,
code generation from protocol definitions using language-specific templates,
XML-based cross-language unit tests,
OPC UA as the Esperanto of industrial protocols versus PLC4X speaking native device protocols,
OPC UA overhead causing PLC strain and network congestion,
comparison of OPC UA to CORBA and grpc,
CORBA IIOP protocol on devices,
bidirectional communication for reading sensor data and writing control flags,
subscription-based event-driven data collection to reduce PLC polling load,
founding ToddySoft to provide commercially supported open source industrial products,
the gap between open source libraries and industrial consumption,
ToddySoft Connect as bubble-wrapped PLC4X drivers for platforms like Inductive Automation Ignition,
eliminating edge gateway boxes on shop floors,
native protocol communication reducing network load on 100 Mbit industrial networks,
unified namespace concept as JMS for industrial automation,
Apache IoTDB as time series database with push queries and callback features,
Apache TsFile storage format for writing time series data directly on PLCs,
shifting from polling to pushing in industrial data collection,
ToddySoft File as C libraries compiled for PLCs,
ToddySoft DB as embedded stripped-down IoTDB for edge devices,
ToddySoft Edge as the combined platform resembling an application server for industrial automation,
Industry 4.0 definition and evolution from manual labor through steam power through PLC automation to connected production,
compressed air as a service business model,
early failure detection in multi-step production lines,
OSGi runtime driver loading,
Eclipse Tycho build system difficulties,
Kafka Connect PLC connectors,
SPS fair in Nuremberg as one of the largest industrial automation fairs,
signal theory and Nyquist sampling rate in PLC polling
Christofer Dutz on twitter: @christofer-dutz

An airhacks.fm conversation with Thorsten Hoeger (@hoegertn) about:
discussion about migrating a German bank to AWS in 2012,
early EC2 instances and the launch of AWS VPC for private networking,
clicking the AWS console before discovering CloudFormation,
CloudFormation released in 2011 with JSON-only templates,
Hazelcast cluster synchronization bugs on single-core EC2 instances,
multicast limitations in VPC and the transit gateway workaround,
CFEngine from 1993 as a predecessor to declarative infrastructure management,
Puppet and Chef and Ansible as configuration management tools,
CloudFormation's declarative state reconciliation predating kubernetes by three years,
CloudFormation's managed state versus Terraform's local state storage,
three-way diff comparing new template and old template and physical resource state,
drift detection and its limitations with default values,
writing 3000 lines of CloudFormation JSON in Eclipse IDE,
building a Jenkins plugin for CloudFormation lifecycle management,
GitOps with Git servers and Jenkins for CloudFormation deployments,
separating infrastructure changes from business logic changes in early setups,
treating everything as a change in modern CI/CD pipelines,
the origin of CDK at Amazon as an internal tool written in Java then rewritten in typescript,
CDK beta participation through the AWS Hero program,
CDK constructs and L1 low-level constructs mapping directly to CloudFormation resources,
CDK synth phase serializing Java objects to CloudFormation JSON,
Stacks as atomic deployment units in CDK,
the trade-offs of splitting stateful resources into separate stacks versus single-stack deployments,
AWS CloudFormation export and reference coupling between stacks,
using AWS Parameter Store for loose coupling between stacks,
CDK application as the project root with application code in subfolders,
Terraform benefits for multi-provider scenarios like GitHub repos and on-prem routers,
regulated industries and compliance benefits of cloud infrastructure as code,
change management as a byproduct of Git-based infrastructure pipelines,
serverless architecture similarities to application server and WAR deployment models,
CDK asset system for versioning and pushing artifacts,
CDK custom resource types and self-mutating pipelines as future topics,
The CDK Book co-authored by Thorsten Hoeger and colleagues,
Taimos GmbH consulting for AWS infrastructure
Thorsten Hoeger on twitter: @hoegertn

An airhacks.fm conversation with Holly Cummins (@holly_cummins) about:
discussion about Quarkus energy efficiency and performance benchmarks,
comparing Quarkus throughput and energy consumption to Spring Boot,
the Quarkus Benchmarks repository and Spring-Quarkus performance comparison repository on GitHub,
three times throughput and half the energy consumption with Quarkus,
Quarkus build-time optimization and tree shaking,
monomorphic vs megamorphic dispatching in the JVM,
removing reflection at build time,
the reactive core built on Vert.x enabling blocking APIs with reactive scalability,
Quarkus dev experience and fast reload,
build duration comparison between Quarkus and Spring Boot,
the Writing Greener Java Applications white paper,
the Energy Efficiency across Programming Languages study,
Java ranking among the most energy-efficient languages,
carbon-aware dispatching and Electricity Maps,
zombie deployments and kubernetes cluster waste,
serverless architecture with Quarkus on AWS Lambda,
SnapStart for sub-second cold starts,
Provisioned Concurrency cost savings,
GraalVM native binaries vs JVM mode in serverless environments,
CycloneDX SBOM generation in Quarkus,
build-time vs runtime configuration for ISO 27001 security certification,
Kruize Autotune for JVM hyperparameter optimization,
JVM tuning folk wisdom and the copy-paste typo anecdote,
Francesco Nigro's performance optimization work across the stack from assembly to JVM,
Jeff Mesnil leading JBoss energy efficiency efforts,
cheese fondue recipe,
UK chocolate and Cadbury Roses
Holly Cummins on twitter: @holly_cummins

An airhacks.fm conversation with Brian Vermeer (@BrianVerm) about:
growing up with a Commodore 64 and gaming,
inheriting a 486 DX2 with Windows 3.1,
first "enterprise" migration from Windows 3.1 to 3.11,
early experiments with Turbo Pascal and Basic,
curiosity-driven programming and disassembling electronics,
building computers from parts in the early PC era,
high school informatics classes and the transition from hobby to career,
bachelor's degree in software engineering,
master's degree at Utrecht University focusing on Formal methods and compiler construction,
mathematical proofs of program correctness,
abstract syntax trees and program analysis,
Haskell and pure functional programming,
recursion vs loops and thinking in different paradigms,
the influence of functional programming on Java development,
first professional Java job at a temperature sensor monitoring company,
building systems for vaccine transport temperature verification,
enterprise service-based architecture,
JavaServer Faces for frontend development,
transitioning to consultancy at Blue4IT working for banks and government,
community involvement and knowledge sharing,
joining Snyk as a hybrid engineer and developer advocate,
Snyk's origins as an NPM dependency scanner,
supply chain security and NPM package vulnerabilities,
expansion from Node.js to Java and other ecosystems,
static code analysis and container analysis and AI flow analysis,
security as part of the development lifecycle not an afterthought,
vibe coding and AI assistant security checks,
MCP server toxic flow risks,
Java vs python for scripting and automation,
JBang for Java scripting,
modern Java simplicity vs legacy enterprise verbosity,
Java developers thinking about production from the start,
Java and C# as the main languages for large backends,
JVM optimization over time,
Leslie Lamport and formal verification of concurrent programs,
outsourcing expertise vs doing everything
Brian Vermeer on twitter: @BrianVerm