Ride the Mower (with Dave Rooney)

On this episode of Dead Code, Jared talks with Dave Rooney, a developer since 1981 and co-founder of the Ottawa XP User Group, about his blog post "Rethinking 'Small.'" Dave's team got a vague ticket that XP practice would have split into about eight stories. With PR reviews and a UK testing team, each story takes roughly a day, so the work would have taken two weeks or more. He gave the whole ticket to Claude instead and had tested code ready in about two hours. He thinks small slices protected people from cognitive overload, and an LLM can hold much more context. Jared pushed back that on small tasks, a developer who knows the codebase often beats the LLM. Dave says big steps work best for well-understood, deterministic work like coding to a published spec, and he admits some of his big swings failed. He wants newer developers to keep XP's curiosity so they don't lose their fundamentals. Jared closes with his own takeaway: thin slicing was always about fast feedback, and since LLMs can't tell you whether you're building the right thing, that discipline still matters.Links:Dave Rooney's websiteEmbracing Agility (Dave's Substack)Rethinking "Small"Rounding the CornersSystems Thinking in the Back YardExtreme Programming InstalledWard's Wiki (C2 Wiki)Menlo InnovationsDHH's Rails World 2026 Opening KeynoteDead Code Podcast Links:MastodonXJared’s Links:MastodonXtwitch.tv/jardonamronJared’s Newsletter & WebsiteEpisode Transcript Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On this Dead Code episode, Jared talks with Varun Gandhi, a Databricks engineer who works on Git performance for the company's monorepo. The topic is Varun's reply to Dan Luu's post "There's No Reason for Software to Be Slow Anymore," which argues that LLMs have made performance work cheap. Varun agrees the cost of learning and applying advanced techniques has dropped. His objection is that LLMs have also made it cheaper to ship buggy code, and a lower price doesn't change what teams prioritize. He adds that people now accept slower tools because agents run that work in the background. He also points out that writing the code is often the smaller cost compared with deployment, review, and preventing regressions. One example is Bun's fork of the Zig compiler, which was about four times faster but was rejected upstream partly because its type checking could give non-deterministic results. On DHH's prediction that by year's end every developer will treat the code as a black box, Varun doubts Rust rewrites are the answer for everyone, since the Go and Elixir versions came close once their obvious problems were fixed. His takeaway is that slow software has fewer excuses now, but because shipping suboptimal code is easier than ever, he expects to see more of it for a while.Links:There continue to be reasons for software to be slow (Varun Gandhi)There's no reason for software to be slow anymore (Dan Luu)Reviewing code is a skill (Varun Gandhi)DHH's Rails World 2026 opening keynoteBun's Zig fork got 4x faster compilation times (Ziggit discussion)Varun's blog, typesanitizer.comVarun on X (@typesanitizer)Dead Code Podcast Links:MastodonXJared’s Links:MastodonXtwitch.tv/jardonamronJared’s Newsletter & WebsiteEpisode Transcript Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On this episode of Dead Code, host Jared talks with Sofia Besenski and Alistair Norman of Super Good about DHH's 2026 Rails World keynote. In it, DHH announced that HEY is leaving Rails for six native apps and a Rust backend. He has called Rust hideous before, but he now argues that the language's looks don't matter because agents write the code and he doesn't read it. The panel doubts that six apps beat one good web app. Sofia warns that teams leaning on agents build up "cognitive debt" and lose track of how their systems work. Alistair says most people don't want more apps on their phones. All three dismiss DHH's lines-of-code numbers as meaningless. Jared reads José Valim's reply, which asks why DHH didn't use these tools to improve Rails itself, and the hosts point to other Rails World talks on Active Search, Herb, and Ractor safety that did move the framework forward.Links:Rails World 2026 Opening Keynote - DHHRails World 2026 agenda and talksWhat About Rails?Hardly PrometheanHEYOmarchyJosé Valim's reply on XActive Search talk by Donal McBreenActive Search on GitHubHerbAaron Patterson's closing keynoteOn Rails: Aaron Patterson on Ractors, JIT compilers, and rewriting how gems installSteven Shaw and Gideon Nave on cognitive surrender (Wharton)Martin Fowler's Design Stamina HypothesisMosscapHanamiDead Code Podcast Links:MastodonXJared’s Links:MastodonXtwitch.tv/jardonamronJared’s Newsletter & WebsiteEpisode Transcript Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jared talks with Kerri Miller, a Staff Engineer at GitLab, about Keela. It's her new open-source tool that finds unused code in Rails apps, and it's named after a UK police dog known for finding buried bodies. It began about three years ago as an attempt to cut GitLab's CI costs. Kerri didn't want a tool that deletes dead code all at once, so Keela uses regex to snapshot the methods it thinks are unused and fails the build when someone adds new dead code. An exclusion file handles false positives. So far the work has removed about 290 methods and saves GitLab around $150,000 a year in CI costs. Kerri has shipped five releases in six weeks, and partials are next on her list.Links:KeelaKerri Miller on GitHubSponsored LogsRubydexTOONLefthookSeattle.rbGitLabDead Code Podcast Links:MastodonXJared’s Links:MastodonXtwitch.tv/jardonamronJared’s Newsletter & WebsiteEpisode Transcript Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jared talks with Noah Silvera, a Super Good Software engineer and the show's most frequent guest, about treating requirements as negotiable rather than as literal instructions. Requirements reach engineers through a game of telephone, so she argues you have to go back to the client, understand the reasoning, and lead them toward better decisions they arrive at themselves. Engineers own the outcome and cannot hide behind "that's just what they told me." She makes the case for spikes, formal or informal, on the grounds that understanding an unfamiliar part of the system first is usually cheaper than fixing it later. Which decisions deserve that investment depends on how expensive they are to undo: design is easy to change in production, while data models require migrations and leave permanent gaps in what you collected. When a launch date will not move and Brooks' Law rules out adding people, the only real lever is cutting scope, which requires knowing what the business actually needs at launch. Her advice to newer developers is that working within constraints is the engineering problem, not an obstacle to it.Links:Brooks' LawThe Mythical Man-MonthSpikeSpikes in SAFeExtreme ProgrammingBig Design Up FrontBoehm's cost-of-change curveTechnical debtGetting Empirical about RefactoringChurn vs. Complexity vs. Code CoverageMinimum viable productSchema migrationDead Code Podcast Links:MastodonXJared’s Links:MastodonXtwitch.tv/jardonamronJared’s Newsletter & WebsiteEpisode Transcript Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Charles Nutter has led JRuby for 20 years and still spends much of his time correcting the assumption that running Ruby on the JVM means writing Java. It doesn't. Rails and Hanami apps come over and run, and what you get underneath is world-class garbage collection, real parallel threads instead of 50 forked processes, the Maven Central ecosystem, and profilers you can attach to a live production server. He tells Jared how a $50 Ruby conference in 2004 pulled him out of Java enterprise work and into a project that had been idle since 2001. They also get into the startup time problem and how much recent JVM work has closed it, the compatibility jump through JRuby 10 and 10.1, invoke dynamic, fibers on virtual threads, and what Panama, Valhalla and Project Babylon could mean for Ruby. Charles now funds the work himself through Headius Enterprises after Red Hat's sponsorship ended.Links:JRubyJRuby on GitHubActiverecord-jdbc-adapterHeadius EnterprisesMaven CentralPrismHanamiTruffleRubyProject LoomProject PanamaProject LilliputProject ValhallaProject BabylonDead Code Podcast Links:MastodonXJared’s Links:MastodonXtwitch.tv/jardonamronJared’s Newsletter & WebsiteEpisode Transcript Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Host Jared Norman talks with Nik Suresh, who runs Hermit Tech, an extreme programming data consultancy in Melbourne, about why Scrum fails. Nik argues Scrum spread through dishonest marketing (Sutherland's "twice the work in half the time" promise) and that its rituals amplify bad management rather than fix it, from Fibonacci story points that are really just time estimates to one-hour standups he's seen more often than the correct version. His core point is that the map is not the territory: Jira boards and status PowerPoints give executives a simulated cockpit rather than an accurate picture, and he admits he once moved cards to done without doing the work and nobody noticed. He advocates treating any deadline slip as evidence the whole estimate was wrong, paying attention to morale and sick days as the real project signals, and tells engineers stuck in dysfunctional standups to just quit before the environment warps them. His closing lesson is that dropping Scrum alone won't help, since the conditions that produced it will just produce the next silly framework unless teams honestly ask how they came to follow a process on faith.Links:Tossed Salads and Scrumbled EggsPraise The Machine SpiritLudicity (Nik's blog)Hermit Tech (Nik's consultancy)The Agile ManifestoScrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Jeff SutherlandDead Code Podcast Links:MastodonXJared’s Links:MastodonXtwitch.tv/jardonamronJared’s Newsletter & WebsiteEpisode Transcript Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On this episode of Dead Code, Jared talks with Nithin Bekal, a longtime Ruby developer at Shopify, about Sapphire, his hobby programming language: a gradually typed, object-oriented language inspired by Ruby but stripped of metaprogramming magic, implemented in Rust, with features admitted only if he'd use them in production code. Nithin built much of it with LLM coding agents, even prompting from his phone after his laptop died, and now has 10,000 to 15,000 lines of Rust he doesn't fully understand, so he plans to scale back to asking agents questions rather than letting them drive, a struggle Jared relates to after throwing away his own fully vibe-coded OCaml compiler before hand-building his ML-style language, Shroom. Nithin prioritized tooling early because developer experience is what he most wants to learn, cites the LLM-fueled wave of hobby languages like Matz's Spinel and Steve Klabnik's Rue as motivation, advises aspiring language builders to just dive in since parsing is more approachable than it looks, and plans a docs generator as Sapphire's first real codebase.Links:SapphireSpinelRueNithin BekalCrafting InterpretersSorbetRubyRustDead Code Podcast Links:MastodonXJared’s Links:MastodonXtwitch.tv/jardonamronJared’s Newsletter & WebsiteEpisode Transcript Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On Dead Code, Jared talks with returning guest Ismael, a London-based developer who came to programming from fine arts, about event sourcing, CQRS, and the Ruby stack he's built around them. Ismael frames event sourcing as thinking in time rather than space: instead of persisting current state, you keep an append-only log of facts and reduce over it to derive any view you need, which makes gnarly e-commerce discount rules collapse from a sprawling schema into small functions over a flat event stream. His stack includes Sourced (event sourcing), Sidereal (a command-driven web toolkit where forms fire commands into a queue and workers push re-rendered templates back over SSE via Datastar, and notably it isn't tied to event sourcing at all, since the only interface is a plain command struct), and Step (a DSL that yields a running REST API plus OpenAPI docs, tests, clients, and MCP tools from one definition). He's now reworking Sourced around Dynamic Consistency Boundaries, abandoning DDD's aggregate-root God streams in favor of loading only the events needed to validate a specific decision, which cuts lock contention, because consistency is really about the state you used to make a decision. His advice: use Rails Event Store for real work, but to actually understand it, skip frameworks, put event structs in an array, and reduce.Links:Ismael CelisIsmael on BlueskyMy WIP Ruby stack, the post this episode is built onSourcedSiderealSteppeEventlanesDynamic Consistency BoundariesDatastarRails Event StoreEvent Sourcing from the ground up, with Ruby examples, the long-form version of his "just open a Ruby file" adviceBaltic Ruby 2025 talkIsmael's first Dead Code episode, "Event Horizon"Dead Code Podcast Links:MastodonXJared’s Links:MastodonXtwitch.tv/jardonamronJared’s Newsletter & WebsiteEpisode Transcript Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Tim Riley returns to discuss the launch of Hanakai, a new organization unifying the Hanami, Dry, and ROM projects into a cohesive Ruby ecosystem focused on modern architecture, collaboration, and community. He explains how Hanami 3.0 represents the culmination of years of work, introducing rebuilt mailers, Minitest support, built-in internationalization, significant performance improvements, better logging, and a preview of a language server, while also making the framework more extensible for future growth. The conversation also explores the realities of sustaining mature open source projects through sponsorship, transparent development, and contributor-friendly practices, along with Hanakai’s commitment to inclusive community values, technical diversity, and giving Ruby developers more ways to build applications beyond the traditional Rails path.Links:Hanakai⁠Hanami⁠Dry-rb⁠ROM (Ruby Object Mapper)⁠Hanami 3.0 Release Notes⁠Tim Riley’s Week Notes⁠Contributor Covenant Code of Conduct⁠JRuby⁠gem.coop⁠RubyConf⁠ORCID (Princeton University Libraries Hanami app)⁠Minitest⁠Sidekiq⁠Honeybadger⁠AppSignal⁠FastRuby.io⁠Dead Code Podcast Links:MastodonXJared’s Links:MastodonXtwitch.tv/jardonamronJared’s Newsletter & WebsiteEpisode Transcript Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.