Book Overflow

In this episode of Book Overflow, Carter Morgan and Nathan Toups discuss "Looks Good To Me" by Adrienne Braganza. Join them as they discuss what makes a bad code review, pair programming, AI automation, and more!

In this special episode of Book Overflow, Carter Morgan and Nathan Toups sit down with Stephen Wolfram to discuss his book What Is ChatGPT Doing... And Why Does It Work? Tune in as he discusses his initial experiments with OpenAI, how his early work in particle physics influenced his current work with LLMs, and his thoughts on if ChatGPT is truly intelligent! -- Books Mentioned in this Episode -- For a list of books mentioned in this episode, see the episode description at https://youtu.be/Aw7_CBczUD4 ---------------- Original discussion of the book: https://youtu.be/4gyi9UDSzw4 ---------------- https://www.x.com/bookoverflowpod Book Overflow is a podcast for software engineers, by software engineers dedicated to improving our craft by reading the best technical books in the world. Join Carter Morgan and Nathan Toups as they read and discuss a new technical book each week! The full book schedule and links to every major podcast player can be found at https://www.bookoverflow.io

In this episode of Book Overflow, Carter Morgan and Nathan toups discuss "Looks Good To Me" by Adrienne Braganza. Join them as they discuss everything about code reviews, including automation, team procedures, and more! Carter on For Your Amusement: https://youtu.be/rhdyrTXbvlg?si=9csVUrBEWonG40VY To get links to the books mentioned in this episode, check the YouTube episode description at https://youtu.be/8B4_hl2dcow 00:00 Intro 04:30 About the Book 07:04 General Thoughts on the Book 12:49 A high-level overview of code reviews 16:14 Learning together, knowledge-sharing, Jargon, Process, and Automation 27:00 Keys to Effective Code Review Process, Roles, and Expectations 46:07 Tools, Platforms, and Patterns Standards for Code Reviews 01:03:46 Closing Thoughts Tools and technology mentioned in the episode: - Phabricator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phabricator - Phorge (successor to Phabricator) https://we.phorge.it/ - Gerrit https://www.gerritcodereview.com/ - Conventional Commits https://www.conventionalcommits.org/en/v1.0.0/ - Github https://github.com/ - Semantic Versioning (SEMVER) https://semver.org/ Book Overflow is a podcast for software engineers, by software engineers dedicated to improving our craft by reading the best technical books in the world. Join Carter Morgan and Nathan Toups as they read and discuss a new technical book each week! The full book schedule and links to every major podcast player can be found at https://www.bookoverflow.io

In this special episode of Book Overflow, Carl Brown (of the YouTube channel Internet of Bugs) joins Carter and Nathan to share some of his favorite books! Carl is incredibly well read and shares which books have influenced him over his very impressive 35 year career. To get links to the books mentioned in this episode, check the YouTube episode description at https://youtu.be/GL0EE_cv9T0 00:00 Intro 02:17 How did Internet of Bugs come to be? 06:03 Why still read tech books? 08:32 Mythical Man-Month 14:40 Philosophy of Software Design, TCL/TK, 25:56 Advanced Programming in Unix and TCP/IP Illustrated 32:32 How important is it to be well-versed in Unix? 42:27 Freelance, Business, and Consulting book recommendations 52:57 Lightning Round: Managing your programming career, philosophy, and general advice 01:02:34 Final Thoughts

In this episode of Book Overflow, Carter Morgan and Nathan Toups discuss "Building Evolutionary Architectures" by Neal Ford, Rebecca Parsons, Patrick Kua, and Pramod Sadalage. Join them as they discuss how to evolve your data schema, modern DevOps practices, and common architectural pitfalls and antipatterns.

In this special episode of Book Overflow, Carter Morgan and Nathan Toups sit down with Scott Tolinski, the host of the web development podcast Syntax. Join the three of them as they discuss Scott's favorite books, his career as a developer, and what you can learn by being a voracious reader! Links to all the books discussed in the episode can be found in the YouTube episode description: https://youtu.be/kJs9pVy94jM

In this episode of Book Overflow, Carter Morgan and Nathan toups discuss "Building Evolutionary Architecture" by Neal Ford, Rebecca Parsons, Patrick Kua, and Pramod Sadalage. Join them as they discuss how the approaches to designing software architecture have changed over the years, the purpose of fitness functions, and how trying to re-use code can backfire!

In this episode of Book Overflow, Carter Morgan and Nathan Toups interview Apple Design Award Winner Devin Davies! Devin won the Apple Design Award for his recipe app Crouton, which was featured prominently by the Wall Street Journal for its creative use of the visionOS platform. In keeping with the podcast theme of continuous education, Devin tells the story of how he started Crouton, what he needed to learn to create it, and how he learned it. This episode is a little outside of our usual fare, so please let us know in the comments if you'd like more of them!

In this episode of Book Overflow, Carter Morgan and Nathan Toups discuss "Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better" by Jennifer Pahlka. This book was personally recommended by Brian Kernighan and is about what processes and cultures make government technology so woefully inadequate. Join Carter and Nathan as they discuss agile vs. waterfall, the importance of a good business culture, and possible infringements on civil liberties!

In this very special episode of Book Overflow, Carter Morgan and Nathan Toups are joined by the prolific Robert "Uncle Bob" Martin to discuss his book "Clean Coder." Join them as Uncle Bob talks about his thoughts on the "flow zone," humility, and what coding has to do with flying an airplane! Links to all the books mentioned in the episode can be found in the YouTube episode description: https://youtu.be/wf68VDObVX0 00:00 Intro 03:29 Motivation for writing Clean Coder 06:00 Learning from Life Experiences 09:39 Professionalism and the Challenger Story 17:14 Pros and Cons of Flow State (The Zone) 21:10 Learning from your mistakes 24:11 Sobriety (and a story of getting drunk at a party) 30:17 Timeless advice, Professionalism, and saying No 35:39 Blameless Postmortems and taking responsibility 40:03 Agency, Control, Situational Awareness and Culture 43:58 Unconventional career paths and creativity 53:00 Layers of Abstraction 56:16 Thoughts on AI and LLMs 01:00:58 Book Recommendations 01:06:49 Closing Thoughts

In this episode of Book Overflow, Carter Morgan and Nathan Toups finish up their discussion of "Web Scalability for Startup Engineers" by Artur Ejsmont. Join them as they discuss caching strategies, async messaging, and managing burnout in your career! Book Overflow is a podcast for software engineers, by software engineers dedicated to improving our craft by reading the best technical books in the world. Join Carter Morgan and Nathan Toups as they read and discuss a new technical book each week! The full book schedule and links to every major podcast player can be found at https://www.bookoverflow.io

In this special episode of Book Overflow, Michael Feathers joins Carter Morgan and Nathan Toups to reflect on his book "Working Effectively with Legacy Code." Join them as they discuss the pros and cons of TDD, the dangers of AI hallucination, and why Michael became a software engineer!

In this episode of Book Overflow, Carter Morgan and Nathan Toups discuss "Web Scalability for Startup Engineers" by Artur Ejsmont. Join them as they discuss how to build a stateless front-end, the benefits of microservices, and the differences between SQL and NoSQL!

In this special episode of Book Overflow, Dr. John Ousterhout joins Carter and Nathan to discuss his book "A Philosophy of Software Design." He reflects on why he wrote the book, how he teaches the principles in it to his Stanford students, and what we can learn from our mistakes. --------------- 00:00 Intro 01:18 Motivation for writing this book 06:17 Why No TAs for Stanford Class 08:55 Thoughts on TDD 14:24 Design it Twice 20:30 Most Surprising Feedback 31:46 Taking suggestions with a grain of salt 33:20 Curiosity and Humility 36:13 Misunderstandings from the book 39:37 Strong opinions, humility, and fear of being wrong 44:35 Unconventional Career Paths 50:13 What are you reading? 51:22 Thoughts on Clean Code 53:50 Advice for new software engineers 58:00 Closing Thoughts 

In this episode of Book Overflow, Carter Morgan and Nathan Toups discuss the second half of "Working Effectively with Legacy Code" by Michael Feathers. Join them as they discuss how to keep up a good attitude while working on legacy code, how to get started when you're intimidated, and some of the legacy and greenfield projects they've worked on in their careers! ------------ Book Overflow is a podcast for software engineers, by software engineers dedicated to improving our craft by reading the best technical books in the world. Join Carter Morgan and Nathan Toups as they read and discuss a new technical book each week! The full book schedule and links to every major podcast player can be found at https://bookoverflow.io https://x.com/bookoverflowpod

In this special episode of Book Overflow, Neal Ford joins the podcast to reflect on his book "Fundamentals of Software Architecture!" Join Carter and Nathan as they discuss the challenges of compromising with the business, what shifts AI is bringing to the software architecture world, and what sci-fi Neal's been reading lately!

Carter Morgan and Nathan Toups read and discuss the first half of "Working Effectively with Legacy Code" by Michael Feathers. Join them as they reflect on dependency inversion, the importance of interfaces, and continue their never-ending debate on the pros and cons of Test-Driven Development! (The audio gets a little de-synced in the last three minutes. Carter isn't talking over Nathan on purpose!) Chapter markers: 00:00 Intro  04:51 Thoughts on the book 10:54 Defining Legacy Code 21:53 Quick Break: Pull Requests 22:38 How to change software 44:30 Quick Break: CI/CD 45:15 Testing Legacy Code 1:15:10 Quick Break: Linting 1:16:01 Closing Thoughts 

In this very special episode of Book Overflow, Dr. Brian Kernighan, the author of "The Practice of Programming" joins us to discuss his experience writing the book! Tune in as he talks about his experience at Bell Labs, what it was like co-authoring the book with Rob Pike, his thoughts on LLMs and the future of programming, and more! 00:00 - Intro 02:38 - Why write this book? 12:23 - Working at Bell Labs 16:29 - Life Learning Process 22:33 - What motivates you to write a book?  28:13 - AI and LLMs 35:48 - Layers of Abstraction 37:50 - What excites you about the future? 41:34 - Programmatic Thinking in Humanities 50:13 - Favorite Books 57:39 - Closing Thoughts

In this episode of Book Overflow, Carter Morgan and Nathan Toups read and discuss "Clean Coder: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers" by Bob Martin. Join them as they discuss what it means to be a professional, how you can say "no" to your boss, and more!

In this very special episode of Book Overflow, Mark Richards joins the podcast to reflect on his book, "Fundamentals of Software Architecture"! Join us as we discuss with Mark what inspired the book, what he wish he had changed, and what he's excited about for the future!