Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt, best known as the authors of The Pragmatic Programmer and founders of The Pragmatic Bookshelf, joined the show today to talk about the 20th anniversary edition of The Pragmatic Programmer. This is a beloved book to software developers all over the world, so we wanted to catch up with Andy and Dave to talk about how this book came to be, some of the wisdom shared in its contents, as well as the impact it’s had on the world of software.

Also, the beta book is now “fully content complete” and is going to production. If you decide to pick up the ebook, you’ll get a coupon for 50% off the hardcover when it comes out this fall.

Dave Thomas:

For a while now I’ve been doing my Cassandra impersonation, telling everyone who’ll listen (and quite a few folks who won’t) that we need to be writing code in smaller chunks. I know what happens when we don’t, as I was the author of one of the largest early Rails applications (65kloc), and it became a nightmare to work with.

He doesn’t want the same thing to happen in Elixirland, so he’s released Component, which is “an attempt to make it so easy to write trivial standalone servers that people will just naturally split their applications up that way.”