Why Software Should Crash Before It Breaks (with Isaac Van Doren)

At 23, Isaac is already jaded about software reliability - and frankly, he's got good reason to be. When your grandmother can't access her medical records because a username change broke the entire system, when bugs routinely make people's lives harder, you start to wonder: why do we just accept that software is broken most of the time?

Isaac's answer isn't just better testing - it's a whole toolkit of techniques working together. He's advocating for scattering "little bombs" throughout your code via runtime assertions, adding in the right amount of static typing, building feedback loops that page you when invariants break, and running nightly SQL queries to catch the bugs that slip through everything else. All building what he sees as a pyramid of software reliability.

Weaving into that, we also dive into the Roc programming language, its unique platform architecture that tailors development to specific domains. Software reliability isn’t just about the end user experience - Roc feeds in the idea we can make reliability easier by tailoring the language domain to the problem at hand.

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Isaac’s Homepage: https://isaacvando.com/
Episode on Property Testing:    • Automate Your Way to Better Code: Advanced...  
Property Testing Walkthrough:    • The Magic of Property Testing  

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Kris on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/krisajenkins...
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0:00 Intro
3:58 Why Isaac Is Already Jaded About Software
7:06 Beyond Testing: A Toolkit for Reliable Software
13:04 Rolling Your Own Assertions
14:42 Selling "Little Bombs" to Your Team
16:51 Are Assertions A Poor Man's Typesystem?
18:22 When Type Systems Hit Their Limits
22:47 Making Sure Your Bombs Actually Explode
26:32 Languages That Embrace Failure
27:55 Roc vs Java: More Than Just Syntax
31:58 Building Domain-Specific Platforms in Roc
41:19 Why Roc Ditched Rust for Zig
47:55 SQL Queries as Bug Detectors
53:46 The Pyramid of Reliability
55:16 Outro