What are the most common mistakes in heat pump installs, and how do you avoid them? Here’s what experts had to say about heat pump installation — a must-watch as electrification continues to gain momentum.

As more homeowners are ditching oil heaters and moving to heat pumps, the rest of the country can learn from the cold-climate success story.

Variable-speed heat pumps, which dominate the heat pump market in many countries, are getting more attention in the U.S. The NEWS asked several manufacturers about the benefits of the technology.

All-electric options have come a long way since their inception, and there’s never been a better time to get on board.

“(I’m Your) Heat Pump” is a soft, funky, R&B love song told from the perspective of a heat pump that depicts just what a heat pump can provide to its users.

This new private-public partnership wants to quadruple heat pump installation in California over the next 6 years.

Despite the arguments regarding the practicality of heat pumps in cold climates, residents of Maine have fully embraced them.

The DOE's new Rooftop Accelerator program encourages manufacturers to develop efficient commercial rooftop heat pumps for cold climates, which could reduce GHG emissions and energy costs by up to 50%.

One innovation leading the way in home comfort and efficiency is an air-to-water monobloc heat pump, which offers a blend of efficiency, sustainability, and cutting-edge technology.

With “heat pump” and “incentives” almost being synonymous at this point, contractors need to understand the basics to ensure customers are receiving the benefits.

Two major HVAC industry organizations have weighed in on a DOE proposal that would phase out noncondensing gas furnaces for consumer use beginning in about six years.

Cold climate heat pumps were on full display on the AHR show floor and manufacturers were eager to share their progress reports in the Department of Energy’s CCHP Challenge.

A homeowner in Pickering, Ontario works with an experienced HVAC pro to improve comfort, efficiency, and energy savings with a high-efficiency hydronic forced-air furnace upgrade.

Posted by Ariel Otilibili on Sep 17

Posted by Ariel Otilibili on Sep 17

Posted by Johan Kuuse on Oct 03

Posted by Ramu Burra via dev on Oct 31

Posted by Daniel Miller on Oct 31

This episode is about compile-time metaprogramming, and specifically, about implementing DSLs via compile-time metaprogramming. Our guest, Laurence Tratt, illustrates the idea with his (research) programming language called Converge.

We started by talking about the importance of a custom syntax for DSL and took a brief look at the definition of DSLs by a chap called Paul Hudak. We then briefly covered the disctinction between internal and external DSLs.

More to the point of this episode, we discussed the concept of compile-time metaprogramming, and the language features necessary to achieve it: in converge, these concepts are called splice, quasi-quote and insertion. We then looked at how the Converge compiler works, and at the additional features that are required to implement DSLs based on the metaprogramming features mentioned above. Using an example, we then walked through how to implement a simple DSL.

Looking at some of the more technical details, we discussed the difference between the parse tree and the abstract syntax tree and at different kinds of parsers - specifically, the Earley parser used by Converge. In multi-stage languages (i.e. languages that execute programs and meta programs) error reporting is important, but non trivial. We discussed how this is done in Converge. We finally looked at how to integrate Converge's expression language into your DSL and how to package DSL definition for later use.

The last segment look at the process of implementing a DSL in converge and about some of the history and practical experience with Converge. Lessons learned from building Converge wrap up the episode.

In this episode, Michael and Markus talk about software components. We first looked at a couple of attempts at defining what a component is. We then provided our own definition that will be used in the rest of the episode. We then looked at the promises of component-based development: why are components useful? We then discussed some of the typical metadata components should specify to make them useful. We discussed to some extent typical variations in component models. The next topic was the separation of concerns between the component functionality and functionality provided by the component's execution environment (aka. container). We then compared components with other (more or less) related technologies such as OO and SOA. We concluded the episode with the notion of architecture as language, where you use a formal DSL to describe a system's architecture. Components are the basic building block for this approach.

In this episode we take a brief look at Jetbrains' Meta Programming System, a language workbench for creating external DSLs or for extending existing languages (such as Java). In a brief telephone discussion, Konstantin Solomatov explains what the system does and how it works. The system has recently been released into public beta and will be made available under then Apache 2.0 Open Source license.

Michael discusses with his guest Chuck Connell the differences between software engineering and computer science. What makes software engineering so unpredictable, with so few formal results? And how can we advance the field of software engineering without these results?

In this episode Johannes Link interviews Lasse Koskela - the author of "Test-Driven" - about test-driven development (TDD). We cover the basics, the rationale behind it and the challenges you face when doing it in more difficult environments.

We talk with Martin Laforest about topics ranging from how quantum computing works, which different models of quantum computing are explored, current and future uses of the approach as well as the current state of the art.

Martin Thompson, proprietor of the blog Mechanical Sympathy, founder of the LMAX disruptor open source project, and a consultant and frequent speaker on high performance computing talks with Robert about computer program performance. Martin explains the meaning of the term “mechanical sympathy,” derived from auto racing, and its relevance to program performance: the importance of […]

Leslie Lamport won a Turing Award in 2013 for his work in distributed and concurrent systems. He also designed the document preparation tool LaTex. Leslie is employed by Microsoft Research, and has recently been working with TLA+, a language that is useful for specifying concurrent systems from a high level. The interview begins with a […]

Tobias Kaatz talks to former Kixeye CTO Randy Shoup about company culture in the software industry in this sequel to the show on hiring in the software industry (Episode 208). Prior to Kixeye, Randy worked as director of engineering at Google for the Google App Engine and as chief engineer and distinguished architect at eBay. […]

Felienne interviews Marian Petre & André van der Hoek on their book ‘Software Design Decoded’, which contains 66 scientifically backed insights for the design process.

Edaena Salinas talks with Maria Gorlatova about Edge Computing. Maria Gorlatova is an Associate Research Scholar at Princeton University Department of Electrical Engineering. The discussion covers: IoT, edge computing, the architecture of edge computing, running a machine learning model on the edge, and the benefits of edge computing.

Jafar Soltani of Rare (Microsoft Studios) discusses Continuous Delivery in AAA Games and how it can increase quality, reduce crunch, and deliver games faster. Topics include implementation and architecture, asset and delivery pipelines, and special challenges of games.

Avi Kivity of Scylladb deep dives into the internals of Scylladb and what makes it a high performant version of Cassandra, a distributed key-value datastore. The discussion covers the architecture of Scylladb, its relationship with high performance...

Ryan Singer on Basecamp’s “Shape Up” software development process. Basecamp has ditched the backlog and 2-week sprint in favor of solution “shaping” and strategic 6-week projects, using tools like scope mapping, checklists, and hill charts to understand and reduce risk.

Pat Helland talks to host Akshay Manchale about Data Management at scale in a Microservices world. Pat talks about trends in managaging data in a distributed microservices world, immutability, idempotence, inside and outside data, descriptive...

Matt Arbesfeld, cofounder of LogRocket, discusses the benefits and drawbacks of starting a software company as a software engineer, including finding cofounders, fundraising, and determining what ideas are worth pursuing.

L Peter Deutsch of Aladdin Enterprises and formerly of Sun Microsystems joined host Jeff Doolittle to discuss the fallacies of distributed computing. Peter retold the history and origin of the fallacies and how they have been addressed over...

Luis Ceze of OctoML discusses Apache TVM, an open source machine learning model compiler for a variety of different hardware architectures with host Akshay Manchale. Luis talks about the challenges in deploying models on specialized hardware and how TVM.

Brian Campbell, Distinguished Engineer at Ping Identity discusses cryptographic defences against stolen tokens for the OAUTH2 protocol with host Priyanka Raghavan. The discussion explores various subtopics such as the history of Proof of possession...

Alex Hidalgo, principal reliability advocate at Nobl9 and author of Implementing Service Level Objectives, joins SE Radio's Robert Blumen for a discussion of service-level objectives (SLOs) and error budgets. The conversation covers the meaning...

Maxim Fateev, the CEO of Temporal, speaks with SE Radio's Philip Winston about how Temporal implements durable execution. They explore concepts including workflows, activities, timers, event histories, signals, and queries. Maxim also compares deployment using self-hosted clusters or the Temporal Cloud.

Nicolas Carlo talks with host Sam Taggart about Nicolas’s recent book, Legacy Code First Aid Kit. They start by defining legacy code and the general issues that developers face when dealing with it. Nicolas describes some of the tools in his book and provides examples of where he has found them useful. The episode also touches briefly on the role of AI and some other tools Nicolas has discovered since writing the book. This episode sponsored by WorkOS.

Eyal Solomon, CEO and co-founder of Lunar.dev, joins SE Radio’s Kanchan Shringi for a discussion on tooling for API consumption management. The episode starts by examining why API consumption management is an increasingly important topic, and how existing tooling on the provider side can be inadequate for client-side issues. Eyal talks in detail about issues that are unique to API consumers, before taking a deep dive into the evolution of middleware built by teams and companies to address these issues and the gaps. Finally they consider how Lunar.dev seeks to solve these issues, as well as Eyal's vision of lunar.dev as a open source platform. This episode is sponsored by WorkOS.

Frances Buontempo, author of the new book Learn C++ by Example, discusses the C++ programming language, a widely used general-purpose programming language. Host Philip Winston spoke with Buontempo about where C++ fits into the landscape of existing programming languages and how recent C++ standards have changed things. They talk about specific language features such as lambdas, templates, concurrency, ranges, concepts along with tips for learning and using C++. Brought to you by IEEE Software and IEEE Computer Society.

Emily Bache, founder of the Samman Technical Coaching Society and author of several books about technical agile coaching, talks with SE Radio host Sam Taggart about katas and the importance of practice. They discuss how practicing in a safe environment helps developers to learn new skills and build new habits. They also talk about how Samman coaching combines this sort of deliberate practice with applying the lessons learned in practice to the production code base. They also touch briefly on the advantages of working in an ensemble fashion.

Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.

AMD just announced today a design win in conjunction with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE), win which it will be providing the hardware powering the El Capitan exascale-class supercomputer. What caught our eye about this announcement was not the compute performance -- which will be enormous ... [PCSTATS]

At AMD Financial Analyst Day 2020, Mark Papermaster unveiled the AMD computing roadmap for 2020 and beyond. Check it out!... [PCSTATS]

If you need to load an RSS feed with the PHP programming language, the open source library SimplePie greatly simplifies the process of pulling in items from a feed to present on a website, store in a database or do something else coooool with the data. There's a full installation guide for SimplePie but you can skip it with just three steps:

1. Download SimplePie 1.5.
2. Copy the file autoloader.php and the folder library to a folder that's accessible from your PHP code.
3. Make note of this folder; you'll be using require_once() to load autoloader.php from that location.

SimplePie has been designed to work the same regardless a feed's format. It supports RSS 2.0, RSS 1.0, Atom and the earlier versions of RSS. Additionally it can read feed elements from nine namespaces.

Here's PHP code that loads feed items from the news site Techdirt and displays them in HTML:

// load the SimplePie library
require_once('/var/www/libraries/simplepie-1.5/autoloader.php');

// load the feed
$feed = new SimplePie();
$feed->set_feed_url('https://www.techdirt.com/feed/');
$feed->init();
$feed->handle_content_type();

// create the output
$html_output = '';
foreach ($feed->get_items() as $item) {
  $html_output .= '<p><a href="' . $item->get_link() . '">' . $item->get_title() . '</a></p>';
  $html_output .= $item->get_description();
  $html_output .= '<p>By ' . $item->get_author(0)->get_name() . ', ' . $item->get_date();
}

// display the output
ECHO <<<END
$html_output
END;


The API documentation for SimplePie_Item lists the functions that can extract data from each feed item. The versatility of the library is demonstrated by get_authors(), which can retrieve an item's authorship information whether it was in the RSS author element, Dublin Core creator, iTunes author, or Atom author.

SimplePie supports caching so that a feed isn't downloaded every time code is executed. The addition of these lines turns on caching, specifies the location of a cache folder and sets the time to use a cached version to four hours (14,400 seconds):

$feed->set_cache_location('/var/www/cache/');
$feed->set_cache_duration(14400);
$feed->enable_cache();

SimplePie was created by RSS Advisory Board member Ryan Parman, Geoffrey Sneddon and Ryan McCue. The project is currently maintained on GitHub by Malcom Blaney.

A new report by Insurrection Exposed prepares voters on what to expect from Trump’s next effort to steal an election.

Investigative journalist Arun Gupta offers an eyewitness account of the hate—and sense of belonging—on display at Donald Trump’s New York City rally.

Video now circulating in Israeli media corroborates allegations from Palestinian detainees that Israeli agents at Sde Teiman detention center rape and torture prisoners.