Rock the Code

A podcast about interesting programming topics for the curious software engineer. You will learn about programming languages, tools, libraries, and combinations thereof, from the best in the field.

Rock the Code is a technology podcast hosted by Daniel Ciocirlan, with 18 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Daniel Ciocirlan hosts Rock the Code, a technology show with 18 episodes published.

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  Episode #18

  Daniel Spiewak on Cats Effect, Underrated Scala, and Becoming a Distinguished Engineer

  Aug 9, 20261h 37m

  Daniel Spiewak is known for spearheading Cats Effect, one of the major effect systems in the Scala ecosystem, and for leading Typelevel, a mini-ecosystem of libraries and tools for functional programming in Scala. He's held various senior engineering roles and is currently working for NVidia as a distinguished engineer. --- 0:00 Intro 1:00 Cats Effect 3.7 and Scala Native multithreading 6:30 Building async I/O from scratch on LLVM 9:30 The integrated runtime: replacing Java NIO on the JVM 13:30 Scala Native vs Rust: who wins? 17:00 Popularizing Scala Native with minimal resources 20:24 Scala in the agentic coding era 28:00 Where Scala's tooling falls short for AI agents 33:30 Resource lifecycle bugs: capture checking as the fix 37:38 Daniel's work at NVIDIA on autonomous vehicles 43:00 The Distinguished Engineer role explained 49:19 Becoming a Distinguished Engineer fast 54:18 Holding abstractions and bare metal simultaneously 1:03:00 Lessons from open source on people and patience 1:13:19 Starting a foundational OSS project: the steam engine analogy 1:20:00 The open frontier: DevOps and deployment orchestration in Scala 1:33:00 Unison's insight and what Scala should borrow

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  Episode #17

  Magnus Madsen on Flix, Scala Inspiration, AI, and the Relevance of Programming Languages

  Jun 24, 20261h 16m

  Magnus Madsen is an associate computer science professor at Aarhus University and the creator of the Flix programming language. --- 0:00 Intro 1:37 Flix fundamentals and design philosophy 3:57 Effect systems in the language vs. as a library 6:30 Effects as checked exceptions 10:57 Type inference and effect propagation 15:53 LLMs and Flix code generation 22:47 Datalog inside Flix 32:13 Research language vs. industry needs 37:03 Compiler tooling and VS Code integration 49:02 No warnings, only errors 51:03 Effect-aware package manager and supply chain attacks 54:59 Why the JVM, and WebAssembly futures 58:04 Flix-generated code outperforming Java 1:01:31 Java interop and effect system boundaries 1:07:48 Is programming language design still relevant in the AI age 1:09:35 Design regrets in Flix 1:13:09 Maintaining motivation across a decade of work

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  Episode #16

  16 - Richard Eisenberg on OCaml, Effective AI, Teaching FP and Hiring for Fundamentals

  Jun 5, 20261h 40mS0

  <p>Richard Eisenberg is a language designer and compiler engineer for OCaml at Jane Street and a core contributor to the Haskell language. He focuses on static type systems and functional programming to make software more reliable, while maintaining ease of use and runtime efficiency. Richard has also taught various computer science topics to both university and high school students, and he holds a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania.<br/><br/>You can find Richard's work at https://richarde.dev/</p> <p>0:00 Intro<br/>0:56 Teaching CS to high school students<br/>3:20 Turning down Microsoft for a teaching career<br/>8:26...

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  Episode #15

  15 - Sam Newman on Microservices, Monoliths, and Building Resilient Distributed Systems

  May 27, 20261h 21mS0

  <p>Sam Newman is an engineer and consultant, specialized in service architecture. He's the author of the books Building Microservices and Monolith to Microservices, and has helped many companies make informed choices about their service architecture. His forthcoming book is Building Resilient Distributed Systems.<br/><br/>You can find Sam on his website https://samnewman.io/.</p> <p>0:00 Intro<br/>0:57 The distributed monolith trap<br/>6:30 Structured programming fundamentals most devs skip<br/>10:00 Why long-lived teams make better architecture decisions<br/>13:33 Building Resilient Distributed Systems: the book<br/>22:00 Three golden rules of distributed systems<br/>22:11 The human side of resilience engineering<...

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  Episode #14

  Daniel Spiewak on Cats Effect, Underrated Scala, and Becoming a Distinguished Engineer

  May 13, 20261h 37mS0

  <p>Daniel Spiewak is known for spearheading Cats Effect, one of the major effect systems in the Scala ecosystem, and for leading Typelevel, a mini-ecosystem of libraries and tools for functional programming in Scala. He's held various senior engineering roles and is currently working for NVidia as a distinguished engineer.</p> <p>0:00 Intro<br/>0:40 Cats Effect 3.7 and Scala Native multithreading<br/>6:26 The integrated runtime: replacing Java NIO on the JVM<br/>12:00 Scala Native vs the JVM for cloud-native workloads<br/>14:00 Scala Native vs Rust: can it compete?<br/>17:58 Popularizing Scala Native with minimal resources<br/>21:04 Agentic coding and Scala's type...

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