How Apps Are Built

Gyroscope provides a dashboard for your life, integrating all kinds of data and giving you a beautiful view on that data. I spoke with their CEO, Anand Sharma about how they built it. Running by Gyroscope is one of the first React Native-based apps in the iOS App Store. We talk about React Native, how they approach managing their data and much more. Links: Gyroscope’s site Gyroscope’s Blog Running by Gyroscope React Native The Cookie Counter The 77 donut ultramarathon Imgix image processing service TinyColor RescueTime The Martian Anand is @aprilzero @gyroscope_app Bonus: my side project 11 Quests series on Amazon The music for this episode is Aitech by Kevin Macleod (incompetech.com). Music licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

I didn’t plan on doing a 2015 retrospective of any sort, but then Swift was open sourced and I realized that this year was amazing for evolution of mainstream programming languages. Join Dion Almaer and me for a conversation about programming language evolution in 2015 as we talk about Swift, Rust, Go, JavaScript, ClojureScript, PHP, Perl 6, Java, Kotlin and more. Swift Swift on GitHub Swift Evolution How Apps Are Built 3 with Andy Matushak talks about Khan Academy’s use of Swift. Almost certainly, Andy tried Swift before you did. Under the Radar 2 with Marco Arment and _David Smith discussing their reluctance to dive into Swift “Perfect” web framework. Rust Rust 1.0 announcement Rust 1.5 is the latest Electron (desktop web app framework) Go Go 1.5 garbage collector performance JavaScript ECMAScript 2015 Babel Microsoft’s Chakra going open source WebAssembly asm.js js-csp Go-like (or Clojure core.async) channels for JavaScript ClojureScript Self-hosting React Om PHP PHP 7 PHP 7 vs. HHVM benchmark Hack Perl 6 Why Python 3 exists by Brett Cannon explains the Python 3 transition Gradual typing Perl 6 gradual typing Python 3.5 typing module How Apps Are Built 2 about Elm TypeScript Flow .NET open source Mono Xamarin RoboVM Java Clojure Scala TIOBE puts Java at #1 with a bullet. Nearly 21% in December, up 6%. Kotlin Now in beta! Books, talks, papers Mindset: the new psychology of success by Carol Dweck One World Schoolhouse by Salman Khan Make It Stick by Peter Brown Superintelligence by Nick Bostrum Follow Dion (@dalmaer) on Twitter The music for this episode is Aitech by Kevin Macleod (incompetech.com). Music licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

Few internet companies operate on the scale of Netflix (this is a mathematical certainty with respect to bandwidth, given that Netflix accounts for almost 37% of all traffic). To make that work, Netflix relies on a host of microservices built and managed by their many developers. In this episode, I spoke with Sangeeta Narayanan, engineering manager of Edge Developer Experience at Netflix. Her team works on the developer experience with respect to the API that all Netflix apps talk to. Our conversation covered a range of topics around how Netflix is able to maintain a reliable and fast service. As part of that, we touched upon a number of open source projects that Netflix has released that can help you manage your own cloud services. Links: Sangeeta Narayanan on Twitter (@sangeetan) Sangeeta on LinkedIn Peter Seibel on Engineering Effectiveness at Twitter Netflix Culture: Freedom and Responsibility Netflix Tech Blog Bitbucket Server (formerly Atlassian Stash, which is how it was referred to in the podcast) Jenkins continuous integration server Spinnaker multi-cloud aware continuous delivery Docker platform for distributed applications Immutable infrastructure Cassandra Canary process or canary release Release It! book by Michael Nygard Hysterix fault tolerance library Simian Army resiliency tools Principles of Chaos Engineering Gradle build automation tool Sangeeta’s links of note Martin Fowler’s blog Drift Into Failure book by Sidney Dekker The Phoenix Project book by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, George Spafford The music for this episode is Aitech by Kevin Macleod (incompetech.com). Music licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

Andy Matuschak, iOS development expert (formerly at Apple), shares his views on app development as the mobile development lead at Khan Academy. We talk about building cross-platform apps, application architecture, having a “source of truth” within a development organization and more. Andy also shares some great book, paper and talk suggestions, so check out the links! Links: Khan Academy Andy’s mobile code sharing spreadsheet React Native Push-pull Functional Reactive Programming demand-driven FRP FRP- Three principles for GUI elements with bidirectional data flow Khan Lab School Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs Boundaries talk by Gary Bernhardt Are We There Yet? talk by Rich Hickey Controlling Complexity in Swift –or– Making Friends with Value Types talk by Andy Matuschak Advanced iOS Application Architecture and Patterns talk at WWDC 2014 by Andy @andy_matuschak Andy’s website The music for this episode is Aitech by Kevin Macleod (incompetech.com). Music licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

NoRedInk builds a web-based grammar and writing platform for English teachers, solving the problem of workbooks not being adaptive or personalized to the learner’s interests. Over the past few years their front end code has migrated from jQuery/Backbone to Angular to React with their newest code being written in Elm, a functional language that compiles to JavaScript. In today’s episode, you’ll hear developers Richard Feldman and Aaron Strick discuss their experiences as early adopters of this exciting new language. Links: http://noredink.com They’re hiring! Their older web stack CoffeeScript Backbone jQuery Angular Then React Now Elm Elm packages Elm “ports” for JS interop Elm Check (property-based testing) JS Check JSVerify may be the more modern variation mentioned Clojure Elixir Recommendations from Aaron and Richard Guy Steele: Growing a Language Katrina Owen: Therapeutic Refactoring Rich Hickey: Simple Made Easy Evan Czaplicki: Let’s Be Mainstream NoRedInk Tech blog: Moving a Flux store to Elm Building a live validated signup form in Elm Richard on Ruby Rogues Richard at Strange Loop 2015 Get in touch! Richard is @rtfeldman on Twitter Aaron can be found at aaronstrick.com The music for this episode is Aitech by Kevin Macleod (incompetech.com). Music licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

For the first episode of How Apps Are Built, I had a chance to talk with Frank Krueger. Though I hadn’t spoken to Frank before this podcast, I have been a happy user of his app Calca for a long time. In addition to Calca, Frank is known for iCircuit and a few smaller apps. During this show, he hinted at a new app to come. Notably, Calca and iCircuit are each available on lots of platforms. How does an indie developer do it? During the interview, you’ll hear about Frank’s success with Xamarin, writing native apps in C# and F# with 80% code reuse between platforms. Plus, he shares his experience with creating open source libraries and some of his thoughts on being an indie developer. Links: Calca iCircuit Mocast Drone Builder Audio Tales Spacey: In the Black NGraphics Xamarin Out of the Tar Pit Get in touch with Frank: Blog Twitter (@praeclarum) The music for this episode is Aitech by Kevin Macleod (incompetech.com). Music licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0