The Community Backstage & Roc Solid Platforms ⚡ Zig SHOWTIME #23

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First, thank you all for helping out new people get onboarded. There has been a lot more activity all around and I’m happy to say that I think we all did a good job at that. This is very important as it’s the only way of maintaining our identity (i.e. make sure we don’t lose the good things about our communities) without closing up and becoming a tribe. On that note I have to admit that I’m super happy that a new wave of people has joned. Sure, there are some downsides and some work to do, but it’s a breath of fresh air to see new faces and new perspectives. Of course I’m biased both as VP of Community and host of SHOWTIME (new people = new speakers :D), but I really think it’s nice to have new people regardless of that.

Second, with regards to SHOWTIME itself, while I wait for the new potential speakers to become ripe, I’m starting a small adventure where I want to interview and chat with other people that operate outside of big tech. I think it’s an extremely valuable diversion from the usual “zig project” menu and one that really help me learn more about the tech landscape. I started by interviewing Abner and through him we learned more about the Handmade Network, this episode I’m going to chat with Jonathan Turner who was involved in the growth of both TypeScript and Rust. I also spoke with Andreas Kling of SerenityOS and, while we haven’t yet set a date, we should chat with him afterwards.

Any suggestion on who to invite next? I’m looking for more ideas. Also keep an ear out for a nice blog post coming out tomorrow (Monday) :)

New Episode

The Community Backstage

With Jonathan Turner

Older cooking shows, after showing how to prepare a dish, used to end by pulling out of the counter a pre-made version of the plate. Nowadays YouTube cooking channels don’t do that anymore, but they still don’t show the full story of how the sausage gets made. Sometimes you see a bag of flour fall on the ground and burst open, but you never see the full, uncut, painful cleanup process. You never see the youtuber place the camera and check if the angle is good enough.

This is what we want to talk about when it comes to building communities: what happens behind the scenes that you can’t normally observe.

Roc Solid Platforms in Zig

With Lucas

From Lucas’ own words:
Roc is a language inspired by Elm built using Rust, LLVM, reference counting, and in place mutations. The language has immutability but the compiler is smart enough to flag uniquely referenced data as safe to mutate in place. This allows for significant speed ups while maintaining a high-level pure functional interface. Another unique aspect of Roc is that the standard library has zero IO. In order to use IO in your Roc applications, you need to depend on a platform which is generally written in Rust or Zig. We will explore what creating a simple platform for Roc using Zig looks like.

Last Episode

Here’s a recap of the talks in the last episode, in case you missed it. The full episode is available on YouTube.

Software that you can Love: discovering the Handmade community (YouTube Link)

With Abner Coimbre

I know there is already some overlap between the members our respective communities, but in this interview I’m going to explore with Abner what Handmade and Zig have in common, where our philosophies differ, and by how much.

If you never heard about the Handmade community, the best starting point is without a doubt the Handmade manifesto, which I highly recommend.

Zig RUSH!

Check the full episode link.

See you at showtime,
Loris Cro