Kris Brandow
Appearances
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
I have not. I'm kind of, you know, I sat down, I learned Git very deeply. So I mean, I personally don't find much problem with the Git CLI and how everything works. You can see why it's difficult for new people to kind of get in and figure it out. But for me, I'm just like, Git works well enough for this class of version control system.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
I do think that some of the work that is being done by places like Ink and Switch to try and find a more like I guess less a source code and more of a prose style of version control.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
I'm super interested in that the kind of continual we're always kind of keeping track of what you're doing and then you kind of snapshot it and you can upload those snapshots like I like that kind of seamless workflow. But as far as how we kind of move
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
source code around at the moment how we do source code version control i think that git is pretty much like the the best underlying platform and since i'm already so familiar with the tooling i just i don't really look for something new if you know my workflow isn't broken if i'm not it's not painful at the moment which for me it's not
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
I would say Go is a systems language, but it is more of a cloud systems language than a low-level systems language. I think that's where the split is. If you're going to go build something for the cloud that is just cloud-native or at the cloud level, Go is a language you want to do that in.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
If you want to go lower and be close to the hardware, I think that's where Zig and Rust and these other languages fit much better. because they, you know, they have that closer integration with C. They have that closer connection to the hardware. They have much more control over memory. They aren't as they aren't trying to protect you in the same ways that Go is trying to protect you.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
So I think that Go is still a very good systems language, but it's just like a higher level systems than I think what people have traditionally thought. And I think people have in the past just kind of bucketed all of systems together. I think we're starting to see that they're they're splitting apart.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
They're becoming more nuanced, more bifurcated in what they are and the languages are separating into the different parts of that to serve those communities.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
I don't think so. I think that the separation is more about, I think, first of all, who is your target audience? I think for Go, the target audience is, we want to make sure that the super experienced programmers and engineers can write good, efficient code. But we want to make sure that average programmers can also just pick this up and run with it, can go implement things.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
I think with things like Rust and to some degree Zig, these are languages that probably don't cater to the average programmer in that same way. They're very much like, no, you really need to know what you're doing. You have to want to have every single tool at your disposal. You need to understand all of these lower level concepts, and then you can go do these really powerful things.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
So I think it's not even about garbage collection. I mean, Go's garbage collector is fantastic. We have, I think, on the high end, at most, a millisecond pause, and usually much less than that. Or no, I think it's the strangest. Now I think it's 100 microseconds is the longest garbage collection pause you will have.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
and for most real-time systems that is absolutely fine i know people want to say real time is like some super real time is a very broad category of things and being able to do things at 100 with you know 100 millisecond delay some of the time is just not going to affect your real-time system all that much so i think garbage collection is not the the big defining factor as far as the split here i think it's much more about the language ergonomics itself and how the languages are designed
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
But I don't work on the Go team, right? I actually kind of feel the opposite. I think Go is potentially going to be the first language that... undefines backwards incompatibility right that makes makes it so that backwards incompatibility is not a thing at all i think there is a very good opportunity for go to do this with the way it set itself up so far if
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
the Go team decides to invest in a few more tools. Go has pretty much already jettisoned the entire idea. I mean, it was never really an idea that Go version 2 would ever be a thing. It was just a name to give to kind of next gen features.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
And with the way that modules work now, where the version in the module dictates what feature set you're going to use, it is possible to change the language in the future in ways that would be backwards incompatible in another language, but continue being forward, but continue being compatible because the compiler can switch out its tool chain at will.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
So yeah, you can still compile that old code using your current go command. It's just going to go grab a different tool chain and compile the code with that. And that, you know, I guess technically you could say that's backward incompatible or backward, you know, backward breaking change. But for the consumer, it doesn't really feel that way at all.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
And there's a small effort to take some of the ideas from Go's distant past with Go Fix and with this tool called EEG or Example to actually be able to rewrite code for you. So if you do make a backward breaking change, the code will just be rewritten automatically to the new thing, which I think also
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
really reduces the amount of like what is a backward breaking change if you just build that into the compiler as well and the compiler can just do this for you automatically then it can just look at the context of how what is this module code written in oh it's in this version and we have this other version i know how to map these two versions together so i can just automatically translate it and you just reduce or remove almost all of the backwards incompatibility things that you might come up with
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
And I think if you add that with the ability to do the V2 modules, you really just remove the need to ever create something like Go 2. Like, I don't know what would be in Go 2 that would be something we can't use the current tools or some of the upcoming tools to remediate. This is true.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
I think there's definitely some warts around them, but I think that's mostly because it's difficult to design generics or iterators that work well. I think people are very used to the things that are already in languages, so they're much more likely to overlook how awkward those things can be. And since Go hasn't had them and they're trying to add them, it's this new thing.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
So you have people on both sides being like, this isn't as good. Like, people that didn't have them are like, why do we need these things? And people that are used to them in other languages want them to look like those things in other languages and don't like that they don't look like that. So I think that's a lot of where their problem comes from.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
Like, I like generics for the things that it does. want something like a sum or a union type, I think the language badly needs it. But I don't think generics are bad because we don't have sum or union types. Or I don't think generics are bad because you can't attach a method, can't have a generic method, right? I think it would be nice if we could do those things. I understand why we can't.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
It's a little bit of annoyance that you can't, but it's not... I don't think it's a show-stopping thing that people usually make it out to be like, oh, this is so terrible, we can't do this thing.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
I mean, even with the way GoMod works, you can even have syntactic changes to the language, right? That's not something that can't be done while still keeping the Go backward compatibility system, really the Go backward and forward compatibility system.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
I mean, if this is the case, right, I mean, you know me, I'm extremely skeptical of the idea of swapping out very precise languages with natural languages. But if that were to happen, I don't really see a reason why we would have the language spit out go or rust or even see, like, why would you not just spit out assembly? Like, what's the point in having this intermediate language?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
I don't think there is one. I think that if the thing that we want to do in the future is say we're just going to write prose and that prose is going to turn into eventually instructions that a machine can process.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
Maybe you have an IR like LLVM's IR or something like that, but I don't think you would translate into a high level language and then translate it down to something because like translating into a high level language implies that you're going to sit there and tinker with it But that doesn't seem like that would be the goal of we want to be able to use, say, English to write our code.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
Just like now, most people don't spit out the assembly. You don't take Go and spit out the assembly and then tinker with that and then send it off to an assembler. You just run the Go compiler and that spits out your machine code. So I think that's more of the flow. You wouldn't have these intermediate steps. I don't think that makes sense.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
So I think in that future, most of our languages can kind of just be thrown in the trash for the most part. But once again, I'm extremely skeptical of using English or any natural language to write code or anything approaching code.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
Just hanging out. It's another nice day. It's snowing again in New York, so it's been a little weird. We haven't had snow in a few years, so this is a new experience.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
I mean, as someone that writes a lot of prose and has a degree in writing prose, I just...
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
it's it's it's kind of like saying we should get rid of all of mathematical notation and just write all math problems with prose it's like there's a reason we came up with mathematical notation right it's much more precise and it's much more like you know you can easily find a mistake and it's not like oh i misunderstood the context of this word it's like no we have these symbols these symbols mean specific things like i i
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
I find it interesting that people are so quick to kind of buy into the idea that, oh, we'll just replace all of coding with writing prose, but they're not saying let's replace all of math notation with prose, right? Like that's just not something I'm seeing anybody really talk about or anybody really suggest, even though these are two basically equivalent things.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
In fact, you could say there's more reason to replace math with prose since math is just a language and we're kind of replacing languages with languages.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
Whereas like to some degree there's a machine readable element of this, you know, there's a machine readable element of coding of programming languages because they are an unambiguous, whereas some math equations can be ambiguous if you're not careful. So they're much more closer to natural languages, I think, than they are to programming languages.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
But I think it's because a lot of us feel like we're writing a natural language when writing code that we get tripped up by this idea and it becomes very alluring.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
I think anything that gets us to write more docs is good. I think at the top of my head I want to say, sure, seven actions, the actions seem pretty good. I'd say try it. I'd say try as many different things as we possibly can at this point. I think my biggest gripe right now is just how few docs we have, how little documentation so many things have.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
But if there was a way, I think there was a specialty. What was it? There was one that was the discover and learn steps. I am very frustrated often at... libraries that I want to go in and understand.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
And there's no like, oh, like, start looking here or like, here's the basic architecture that you can then use to understand how this code base is laid out so you can go read the code and understand how we've implemented all of these things. That documentation is almost always completely missing.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
So anything that gets us closer to having that documentation and having a way for people to actually go in and learn more about a code base, I am fully in favor of. Anything that gives us troubleshooting or FAQs, anything like that also, definitely I'd like to see more of that.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
It's not going to come down for a while. It's a piece of nostalgia, you know.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
I mean, it's kind of, I guess I see that question as the same as like, is there a world where you have too many books? The answer is, I think, in the simple, no. I think the way we could wind up in an effective too many docs, and I think we are already there to some degree, is if we don't have good cataloging systems.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
One of the things that allows us to have so many books and actually be able to find them, like you think about libraries, like big libraries, like the Library of Congress. The reason you can find things is because they have very good cataloging systems, what's called bibliographic control.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
They have good ways of saying, here's their metadata, here's what you can search for, here's how we arrange everything. And for the most part, we don't do any of that in tech.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
We just kind of I mean, we talked about this actually on the episode of Fall Through that's going to be shipping on Monday after this episode ships about the fact that, you know, lots of people just store things as flat files. You just chuck a bunch of stuff into a wiki and then you just rely on the web search feature to find things and how much that falls over and how much that fails.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
And I think that if we don't develop good cataloging systems along with our increase in docs, we're going to find that it's very difficult to actually find the information that we want to search for the information we want. And I think in that case, yes, we do wind up with too many docs. But that is also a very fixable problem.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
And I believe that Oxide is running into this a little bit with your RFD system, where it's like you're trying to figure out how to find stuff.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
And it's challenging because, you know, your search, I believe I talked about it on an episode when they're talking about RFDs, about how difficult it is to find things based on search because there isn't, as far as I know, a robust cataloging system for the RFDs, even though you've produced a very large number of them.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
Right, yeah, we need a librarian. That will always be something that baffles me about companies, especially large companies. If you go back 50 years, before we had digitized everything, every company had a team of corporate archivists because you had so much paper. You had all of this paper, boxes and boxes and boxes of paper. And you had to be able to find things.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
And you couldn't just go to a terminal and just punch in some keywords. You had to go to somebody who could help you find it. So we had archivists and all these people that would organize this information so it was findable. And we went digital. And now we have orders of magnitude more information that our companies produce.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
And we're like, yeah, but we don't need all those people anymore because it's not physical. We are just like, oh, well, it should be easily searchable, even though search algorithms for digital search algorithms are very terrible at finding things if you haven't cataloged them.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
They're pretty good when you've cataloged things, but they're not good at all when you're just doing full text search because words have so many different meanings. And you have to, you know, it's basically a guess of,
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
The person who wrote this, are they going to use the same words that I'm using to try and find it, which is just a not fun matching game if you haven't already decided on the words you're going to use and what those words mean, which is effectively what cataloging gives you.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
I also think part of the problem here is that no one really understands. I think especially executives do not understand the insane amount of money that they are throwing in the trash because they have not organized their information properly. Like, you're paying software engineers, like, total comp, even for mid-level engineers, is sometimes in excess of a quarter million dollars a year.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
And you're now paying people that you're paying, like, a cumulative half million dollars a year, or if you have a meeting, like, millions of dollars a year to just talk to each other instead of just having them read some document, right? So now you're having them waste hours of time to go read, instead of reading something, to go talk to someone to coordinate. And now they're blocked.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
And now your entire system has, like, slowed to a crawl Because you can't actually get the information to the people when they need it. And you're having more bugs. You're not building as many features. Everything is slowed down. And I think the only reason this is tolerable is because everybody's doing it.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
If there were a couple of companies that had their information organized well, they'd be running circles around everybody else. Like their products would be higher quality. They'd have fewer bugs. They'd have fewer problems just because they wouldn't run into the typical things that we all as engineers experience every day. But it was like, oh, there's this problem.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
And oh, yep, I called it out, but I couldn't talk to the team or the team didn't want to listen to me. Or we had the same meeting five times. We made five different decisions each time, right? Like the lack of having information where we want it winds up with us losing a lot of money and losing out on market opportunities we'd have otherwise.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
And, you know, I just think that the executives who are in charge of caring about this money and caring about this don't understand that this is happening. It's completely opaque to them.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
I'm busy editing podcasts, Jared. Come on, man. I'm a pro. I'm trying to spin up this whole writing, publishing career. And also now I have a whole podcast I'm doing. There's things in the queue. There's things in the queue, Jared. We will get there.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
I met him at GopherCon a number of years ago. And, yeah, I spent a whole bunch of time with him at GopherCon in 2024. And when we were like, oh, we're going to spin off GoTime, he was like the second person. The first person I thought of was Matt. And I was like, oh, got to try and get Matt on. And I was like, who else? I'm like, oh, Dylan. Got to try and get Dylan on.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
And thankfully, both of them said yes. Awesome.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
And actually, we do have a fifth member. We now have a producer and a reoccurring guest host. So a reoccurring guest host is the wonderful Johnny Borsico. He's already guest hosted an episode that will be shipping soon, the What's New in Go 1.24 episode with Carlana.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
Yeah. And we have a producer actually joined us for an episode that we recorded yesterday. The one that's going to ship out on the Monday after this episode ships of Angelica Hill. So she has joined us as in a producer role to help us with producing and booking and scheduling and all of that.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
No, so fall through is actually a very rarely used keyword in a switch statement. Unlike in many languages, when you hit the bottom of a case statement in a switch statement, you exit out of the switch statement.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
And what fall through allows you to do is go into the next switch statement, which is the default behavior in languages like C, which is why you have to put a break at the end of every case statement to make sure you don't go into the next one. So fall through allows you to have that old style functionality of going into the next case statement of your switch statement.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
Yeah, we see ourselves as, because fall through is also a keyword in other languages, so other languages have picked it up since Go has included it. And we see ourselves as definitely like a, we're going to cover Go content. As I said, we're shipping a What's New in Go 1.24 episode. We're still going to try and have the Go team on.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
But as we've started producing episodes, what we've realized is that we're not nearly as much of a Go podcast as what Go Time was. So we are starting to be more of a general podcast about computing and technology and software. Originally, we wanted to do this from the Go perspective thing, but what we've realized is that we're really just from a nuanced perspective, from a subtle perspective.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
That's what a lot of our episodes have in them, this level of subtlety and nuance that isn't really on display in many other podcasts or many other forums. So that's kind of the new thing we're aiming for and we're trying to do, still having a place for the Go community to have their Go content and still in the same kind of vibe as what Go time was.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
I think a lot of Go time's most successful episodes had very little to do with Go and they were much more general. So we're taking that trajectory and trying to hone in on our own little kind of niche within that, within the whole ecosystem of developer pods and within the ecosystem of technology podcasts and things like that.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
I definitely started... one of the things that i realized after i became a software engineer and kind of left college in college i was you know heavily doing audio and video you know i was uh my second major was broadcasting mass communication so i was doing a lot of like video editing video production and i kind of did an audio minor so i was doing tons of audio stuff and
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
And when I got out of college and started programming, I realized that there's so much that I could have done more efficiently or better or expanded my creativity if I'd just known how to write software. So now that I know how to write software and now that I have a thing that I'm doing video and audio with, I'm super excited to actually start building things.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
I'm already seeing things in Audition where you know, if I was back in college, I would've been like, I guess this is just the workflow I kind of got to deal with. But now it's like, I can write JavaScript. I can write a plugin for audition that gives me new, gives me new shortcuts that I can do so I can move things around so I can edit faster.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
So there's a whole bunch of stuff like that, that I'm really excited to do now that I'm marrying together these two different, I guess these two different parts of who I am, kind of like my recent current and my distant past are kind of coming together in a way that I
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
We've taken some inspiration from what you all have done with ChangeLog, where you have this wonderful backend system that distributes and does all the fat stuff for it. And we just want to kind of take that idea and expand upon it. Because there's a lot of stuff, too, even in the production work.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
I like Riverside a lot, but there's all these little warts that I'm like, could we potentially build something better? I don't know, but we're going to take a shot at it and see what happens.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
Still NeoVim. I feel like a year ago I went through and I just completely ripped apart my NeoVim config and redid the whole thing, and it runs much better now. But yeah, still doing NeoVim. Love how much stuff is built in, right? You have to configure it, but there's trees that are built in, there's the LSP client built in, so a bunch of nice stuff built in for NeoVim.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
I have started slowly moving myself over to ghosty. So that's, that's one thing I've liked it so far. I like the ease of configuration. I'm a real, I'm a big fan of this whole, like basically command line flags in a file. Like I like that. So simple. Yeah. Very clean. That is cool. But yeah, I mean as far as like, like, um,
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
software tools or software building tools no but as far as other tools yes because now that i'm doing post-production on a podcast i've had to relearn audition i've had to relearn final cut pro which is basically a completely different app because back when i you know got my degree we were still on final cut pro 7 so and and then final cut pro 10 came out and we were all like This is awful.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
Don't use this as iMovie, but for prosumers, get rid of that. Blah, terrible. And in the decade-plus sense, it's grown into a mature NLE. So I've been learning Final Cut Pro 11. It's... Still got some things I don't like about it that still feel a little like more iMovie consumer-ish than professional editing tool. But overall, it's been a pretty good experience. Re-learning all of my shortcuts.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
I've been using my trackpad way more than I like because it just slows you down in a lot of ways. Mm-hmm. But yeah, it's been a nice experience getting back into these familiar but old tools. So like new tools, but they're old tools at the same time.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
It's sort of painful, I will say. I see that export to a Premiere button or menu item in Audition, and I'm like, I should just be doing this. But, you know, I'm on a Mac and there's a lot of really deep integration that Final Cut has with the hardware that I wanted to, you know, take advantage of if I could.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
And unfortunately, Apple does not have a similar level DAW digital audio workstation for Apple. podcast editing. Like they have logic, but that's definitely more of a music based DAW that you can sort of squint at and turn it into like a spoken speech kind of thing. But it's like audition is definitely the gold standard for this type of audio content.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Fallthrough & Friends (Friends)
Um, and so I was just like, you know what, I'm just, I'm just going to use audition and I'll just deal with this weird flipping between final cut and audition. I think I've gotten it down after editing a few episodes. Now it was kind of a mass jumping back and forth between the two. Um, But I think I figured it out now, gotten it down.