Elm Town

Felienne Hermans relates her journey in programming—writing The Programmer's Brain, uncovering biases within computing culture & herself, and building the multilingual, gradual-syntax programming language Hedy. We even dip into AI (trigger warning) and dumb phones.
Thanks to our sponsor, Logistically. Email: [email protected].
Music by Jesse Moore.
Edited by Toni Cañete.
Recording date: 2025.04.08
Guest
Felienne Hermans
Show notes
[00:00:26] Sponsored by Logistically
[00:00:48] Introducing Felienne Hermans
Hedy - Textual programming made easy
The Programmer's Brain by Felienne Hermans
"How to teach programming (and other things)?" at Strange Loop 2019
"A Case for Feminism in Programming Language Design", co-authored with Ari Schlesinger
Elm Town 59 – Elm Camp with Katja Mordaunt
Code Reading Club
The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman
[00:04:09] The costs of misconceptions
Science Mike
[00:09:51] Journey to computer science
[00:14:33] Programming culture: challenges and creativity
Elm Town 48 – Making Little Games Like Presents with Martin Stewart
Elm Town 64 – The network effect with Martin Stewart
Advent of Code
[00:21:36] Bias and building a multi-lingual programming language
Mark Guzdial's blog: Computing Ed Research - Guzdial's Take
[00:28:35] Hedy's gradual syntax
Addressing Computing’s Discrimination Problem: A Framework for Anti-Discriminatory Computing by Ari Schlesinger
The Will to Change by bell hooks
[00:38:12] Programming language community, learning, and valuing hard things
[00:47:19] How language design choices affect cognitive load
"The Hard Parts of Open Source" by Evan Czaplicki at Strange Loop 2019
Elm Town 58 – Unblocking users with quality software with Tessa Kelly
Episode 68: Elm and ADD with Dillon Kearns and Jeroen Engels
[00:56:22] History of women in computing
"Female Inventors and Narratives of Innovation in Late Twentieth-Century Computing" by Myra Cheng
Nathan Ensmenger
[01:03:40] Kotodama (言霊): What's in a name?
Feeling of Computing 75 • A Case for Feminism in Programming Language Design by Felienne Hermans
[01:08:49] Switching to a dumb phone
[01:16:48] AI
"An Age of Hyperabundance" by Laura Preston
In Praise of Messy Lives by Katie Roiphe
[01:30:10] Picks
Felienne's picks
"An Age of Hyperabundance" by Laura Preston
Death Glitch: How Techno-Solutionism Fails Us in This Life and Beyond by Tamara Kneese
Crisis of Narration by Byung-Chul Han
Jared's pick
The End of This Day's Business by Katharine Burdekin

Sophie Collard describes her transition from environmental engineering to software, mob programming to teach functional concepts, and building a startup app with Elm.
Thanks to our sponsor, Logistically. Email: [email protected].
Music by Jesse Moore.
Recording date: 2025.02.24
Guest
Sophie Collard
Show notes
[00:00:29] Sponsored by Logistically
[00:00:50] Introducing Sophie
London Air UI using Elm & Leafletjs
"Lessons learnt from writing 10k LOC in Elm" at Lambda Days 2024
sophiecollard/jsonpath
[00:01:33] Journey to programming
[00:10:35] Learning Elm
[00:14:30] Questions from Monica McGuigan on learning
[00:17:41] Mob programming
Mobster by Dillon Kearns
Zed channels for collaboration
[00:23:47] London Air UI
Custom elements (Elm Guide chapter)
[00:27:48] Railpackers
Railpackers
xkcd: Standards
[00:33:51] The Jackson guitar project (Chushin Gakki)
Chushin Gakki Jacksons Directory (GitHub)
elm-pages
Elm Town
[00:41:41] sophiecollard/jsonpath
[00:44:51] Picks
Sophie's picks
Elm in Action by Richard Feldman
Programming Elm by Jeremy Fairbank
Jared's pick
Future of Coding (a.k.a. Feeling of Comput(er)ing)

Joël Quenneville conveys his growth process—taking notes, creating connections between ideas, and sharing those artifacts.
Thanks to our sponsor, Logistically. Email: [email protected].
Music by Jesse Moore.
Recording date: 2025.01.30
Guest
Joël Quenneville
Show notes
[00:00:19] Sponsored by Logistically
[00:00:39] Introducing Joël
Some blog posts by Joël"Structuring Conditionals in a Wizard"
"The Mechanics of Maybe"
"Problem Solving with Maybe"

Sample Joël podcast appearancesElm Radio 32 - "Elm's Universal Pattern"
Elm Radio 52 - "Category Theory in Elm with Joël Quenneville"
SW Unscripted - "Conditional Cardinality with Joël Quenneville"

Some of Joël's conference talks"Rolling Random Romans" at elm-conf 2016
"A Number by Any Other Name" at Elm in the Spring 2019
"Inverting a binary tree with 1 line of Elm" from an Elm Online meetup in 2021

[00:01:51] Getting started crafting software
[00:09:37] Discovering Elm
[00:11:50] JSON Decoders, and then...
Reasoning by Analogy by Joël Quenneville
Getting Unstuck with Elm JSON Decoders by Joël Quenneville
Elm’s Universal Pattern by Joël Quenneville
[00:23:57] Inspiration, artifacts, and note-taking
Learning by helping out in the Elm Slack by Joël Quenneville
My Note Taking System Gives Me Constant Ideas by Joël Quenneville
Obsidian
The Notecard System: The Key For Remembering, Organizing And Using Everything You Read by Ryan Holiday
Gingko Writer 
[00:39:11] Active versus passive growth
Turning experience into growth by Joël Quenneville
[00:49:47] Collect mental models and heuristics
Triangle of Separation by Joël Quenneville
Elm Town 76 – Between the paving stones with Andrew Lenards
Andrew's Arboriculture zine No. 001 – Joël's Triangle
[00:54:18] Picks
Joël's pick
How To Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens
Jared's pick
Jesse Welles

In a short break from the Wonder series, John Pavlick, Wolfgang Schuster, and Tristan Pendergrass join Jared to report on the Elm Camp 2025 unconference experience in Michigan, USA.
Thanks to our sponsor, Logistically. Email: [email protected].
Music by Jesse Moore.
Recording date: 2025.07.07
Guests
John Pavlick
Wolfgang Schuster
Tristan Pendergrass
Show notes
[00:00:14] Sponsored by Logistically
[00:00:35] Elm Camp sponsors
NoRedInk
Concentric
[00:01:09] Introductions
Tony Bradley @abradley2 (GitHub)
Tony Bradley's elm-i18next-gen
[00:06:27] Setting the scene
elm.camp
Ronora Lodge & Retreat Center
[00:13:15] Unconference format
Feedback.one
[00:26:48] Sessions
Elm Town 81 – Inspired: Bubble Tea with Christian Rocha
Wolfgang's blog series on Elm virtual DOMsBring Your Own DOM – Part 1 – Portals
Bring Your Own DOM – Part 2 – TUIs

Wolfgang's elm-ink (GitHub) repo
elm-tooling/elm-language-server initially by Kolja (@razze)
Elm - Community
Elmcraft - Community
Elm Land
Lamdera
Simon Lydell's elm-safe-virtual-dom
React DOM issue - Dan Abramov's link to Chromium issue & hack
[00:52:27] Picks
John's picks

John's jmpavlick/q
Zokka
Michigan
Wolfgang's picks
Summer Games Done Quick
The Last Phi Hunter
Richard Feldman's course on Frontend Masters Write a Compiler That Understands Types
Tristan's pick
Vantage
Jared's picks
Parks (1st edition)
Elmcraft.org

Justin Lubin sketches his journey from undergrad research at UChicago with Ravi Chugh on output-directed and bidirectional programming environments (Sketch-n-Sketch) to graduate work at UC Berkeley with Sarah E. Chasins, focusing on programming language theory, researching how statically-typed functional programmers write code, and beyond, to helping domain experts.
Thanks to our sponsor, Logistically. Email: [email protected].
Music by Jesse Moore.
Recording date: 2024.12.09
Guest
Justin Lubin
Show notes
[00:00:44] Introducing Justin
Sketch-n-Sketch
"How statically-typed functional programmers write code" by Justin Lubin and Sarah E. Chasins
[00:07:07] Elm all the way down
[00:08:36] What is Sketch-n-Sketch?
Hazel
[00:11:03] From Parker Ziegler: Getting started in a large Elm codebase
[00:13:01] The  Sketch-n-Sketch cinematic universe
Maniposynth
[00:22:21] Research on how  statically-typed functional programmers write code
Elm Town 83 – Wonder: Meeting people where they are with Ryan Haskell
[00:35:11]  From Parker Ziegler: Ergonomics vs. hindrances
[00:40:25] Fork of the Elm compiler
ravichugh/sketch-n-sketch (GitHub)
[00:45:04] Cobbler
"Equivalence by Canonicalization for Synthesis-Backed Refactoring" by Justin Lubin, Jeremy Ferguson, Kevin Ye, Jacob Yim, and Sarah E. Chasins
Cobbler (GitHub)
[00:47:36] Justin's current work
[00:51:45] Picks
Justin's pick
Design at Work: Cooperative Design of Computer Systems by Joan Greenbaum and Morten Kyng
Jared's pick
Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake