Dead Code

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 Eggs
Praise The Machine Spirit
Ludicity (Nik's blog)
Hermit Tech (Nik's consultancy)
The Agile Manifesto
Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Jeff Sutherland

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Episode Transcript
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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:

Sapphire
Spinel
Rue
Nithin Bekal
Crafting Interpreters
Sorbet
Ruby
Rust

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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 Celis
Ismael on Bluesky
My WIP Ruby stack, the post this episode is built on
Sourced
Sidereal
Steppe
Eventlanes
Dynamic Consistency Boundaries
Datastar
Rails Event Store
Event Sourcing from the ground up, with Ruby examples, the long-form version of his "just open a Ruby file" advice
Baltic Ruby 2025 talk
Ismael's first Dead Code episode, "Event Horizon"

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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:

Hanakai⁠
Hanami⁠
Dry-rb⁠
ROM (Ruby Object Mapper)⁠
Hanami 3.0 Release Notes⁠
Tim Riley’s Week Notes⁠
Contributor Covenant Code of Conduct⁠
JRuby⁠
gem.coop⁠
RubyConf⁠
ORCID (Princeton University Libraries Hanami app)⁠
Minitest⁠
Sidekiq⁠
Honeybadger⁠
AppSignal⁠
FastRuby.io
⁠
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Ted M. Young joins Jared to discuss Extreme Programming, predictive test-driven development, event sourcing, and teaching software practices through board games. Ted explains how predictive TDD encourages developers to anticipate exactly how a test will fail, leading to deeper understanding, faster feedback, and smaller development steps. He also argues for thinking about tests as either I/O-free or I/O-dependent rather than unit or integration tests, a distinction that naturally supports cleaner architectures and more maintainable code. The conversation explores Ted’s growing enthusiasm for event sourcing, which he sees as a simpler way to model state changes, preserve history, and reduce complexity around persistence and caching. They also discuss his TDD board game, which has become an effective tool for teaching collaboration, pairing, and software development concepts. The episode closes with a look at AI’s impact on software craftsmanship, with Ted expressing concern that developers may learn less by outsourcing problem-solving to LLMs, while remaining optimistic that core XP practices like small steps, clear goals, and rapid feedback will continue to matter—and may be more relevant than ever.

Links:

Ted M. Young⁠
Predictive TDD⁠
Extreme Programming (XP)⁠
Test-Driven Development (Kent Beck)⁠
Hexagonal Architecture⁠
Event Sourcing⁠
Domain-Driven Design⁠
TDD Game⁠
JitterTed on Twitch
⁠
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