Around IT in 256 seconds

Feb 13 2023 98 ep. 4 mins 103

Around IT in 256 seconds Podcast artwork

Podcast for developers, testers, SREs... and their managers. I explain complex and convoluted technologies in a clear way, avoiding buzzwords and hype. Never longer than 4 minutes and 16 seconds. Because software development does not require hours of lectures, dev advocates' slide decks and hand waving. For those of you, who want to combat FOMO, while brushing your teeth. 256 seconds is plenty of time. If I can't explain something within this time frame, it's either too complex, or I don't understand it myself. By Tomasz Nurkiewicz. Java Champion, CTO, trainer, O'Reilly author, blogger

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#97: Ruby: help every programmer to be productive and to be happy

Feb 13 2023 4 mins

Yukihiro Matsumoto, the creator of Ruby programming language, famously said: “I hope to see Ruby help every programmer in the world to be productive, and to enjoy programming, and to be happy.” Honestly, not many programming languages were built with developer’s happines in mind. And to be honest, Ruby is a joy to work with. It’s fairly easy to learn, easy to read, yet, ver

#96: Border Gateway Protocol: the duct tape that makes the Internet work

Feb 06 2023 4 mins

Border Gateway Protocol, BGP for short, is probably the most important protocols you might have never heard of. Well, you did at least once, in October 2021. When Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger all went down because of BGP misconfiguration. Or that one day back in 2008 when all YouTube traffic was accidentally routed to Pakistan. Because of BGP… misconfiguration. So

#95: SQLite: the most ubiquitus database on the planet. And beyond!

Jan 23 2023 4 mins

SQLite is by far the most common SQL database ever deployed. Are you lsitening to this on iPhone or Android device? It runs SQLite. Or maybe through a web browser? Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Opera and Android Browser all use SQLite underneath. Are you running MacOS or Windows? It’s built-in. Most Linux distributions have it as well. “But I’m listening to your podcast while driv

#94: Scala: language with academic background and huge industry adoption

Jan 16 2023 4 mins

Scala is a programming language running on the Java Virtual Machine. It’s statically typed, and you can use it both as functional and object-oriented language. Even at the same time. The functional side of Scala supports higher-order (and higher-kinded) types. For those of you know what it means. On the other hand, object-relational features of Scala are equally strong. Including

#93: K-means clustering: machine learning algorithm to easily split observations into multiple buckets

Jan 11 2023 4 mins

K-means clustering is an algorithm for partitioning data into multiple, non-overlapping buckets. For example, if you have a bunch of points in two-dimensional space, this algorithm can easily find concentrated clusters of points. To be honest, that’s quite a simple task for humans. Just plot all the points on a piece of paper and find areas with higher density. For example, most

#92: Clojure: a languages that will change the way you think about programming

Nov 28 2022 4 mins

Clojure is a dynamically, strongly typed programming language. It’s a dialect of Lisp running on the Java Virtual Machine. Lisp is 6 decades old and has a really weird syntax. That weird syntax is called Polish prefix notation. Basically, in every other language you’ve used math operators like plus or minus are infix. It means they are placed between operands. For example, 1 +

#91: Asynchronous communication: loose coupling in distributed systems

Nov 21 2022 4 mins

There are two main ways to communicate between components in your distributed system: synchronous and asynchronous. Synchronous communication is like making a phone call. The system on the other side must be present and you actively wait for a response to your every question. Examples of this style include REST, SOAP and GraphQL. Read more: https://nurkiewicz.com/91 Get the new epi

#90: Mastodon: next-generation, open source social network

Nov 15 2022 4 mins

After many dramatic events around Twitter lately, many people, including myself, began experimenting with Mastodon. Superficially it’s an open-source clone of the former that anyone can deploy and host. However, once you look deeper, it’s actually a completely different philosophy and architecture. Let’s focus on how Mastodon federated network is built. To understand the diff

#89: RabbitMQ: A proven message broker for asynchronous communication

Oct 12 2022 3 mins

RabbitMQ is a message broker, allowing asynchronous communication in distrubuted systems. The key advantages of RabbitMQ include: 15 years of open source history, battle proven Erlang implementation and support for industry standard protocols. RabbitMQ is among the most popular implementations of message brokers. Others include ActiveMQ for Java, celery for Python and Kafka - if yo

#88: SLI, SLO and SLA: a number, a threshold and a legal document respectively

Oct 03 2022 4 mins

Many people, when asked about SLA, simply shout 99%. The correct answer to that question is probably a long, boring PDF, written by lawyers. Yes, SLA is a legal obligation. Not a metric or a number. You probably meant SLI or SLO. Read more: https://nurkiewicz.com/88 Get the new episode straight to your mailbox: https://nurkiewicz.com/newsletter