181: Strong Types and a Functional Flair

On this episode of the Bike Shed, Chris is joined by thoughtbot CTO Joe Ferris. Chris & Joe start by talking about all things data. More and more we're building applications that need to manage medium to large data sets, combining data from multiple sources, and our approaches and frameworks need to evolve to match these needs. Joe provides the low down on how this can shape the way we build our applications. As part of the discussion around data they dig into the idea of event logs, most notably discussing Apache Kafka and it's unique approach to capturing state by storing an immutable event log, and the resulting architecture that falls out of this. Lastly they chat about the Scala language both in relation to data and streaming applications, but also more generally as an example of an approachable yet powerful strongly typed language.