Loading…

Podcast 286: If you could fix any software, what would you change?

You have a do-over on one technology or programming language. What do you change?

Article hero image

We review the things about programming and tech that drive us nuts. If we had the chance to do it all over again, how would we build Regex, CSS, or Bluetooth?

Paul spent the weekend building a parser, cause who doesn't? He needed a Regex, found one on Stack Overflow, looked over the characters, and realized this is not the way to get folks interested or excited about code. "You come across a problem and you think to yourself, I know I'll use a regular expression. Now you have two problems."

This sets Sara off on a tangent about CSS. What's wrong with CSS in her opinion. Well, all of it. She shares a few thoughts on how it could have been built right.

Ben dives into the endless annoyances Bluetooth has been bringing to his life recently. When you have four people in a family sharing six mobile devices and five sets of headphones, audio signals are constantly getting piped to the wrong ears. Now his car wants to connect. When Bluetooth tells you it's forgetting a device, how come it never keeps it promise?

Our lifeboat badge of the week goes to Zero Piraeus for answering the question: Why must dictionary keys be immutable? He provided his answer in the form an elegant short essay, and it's definitely worth checking out.

TRANSCRIPT AVAILBLE HERE

Login with your stackoverflow.com account to take part in the discussion.