Show Notes
Liam takes the wheel for a personal history of WPF — from battleship-grey WinForms, through the promise of Avalon, into the ideas that still quietly shape every XAML framework we use today.
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Seven Adobe apps cloned in a week. A toolkit that reverse engineers anything. Matt argues the software profession isn't changing — it's ending — and that capability moat is rapidly drying up.
An OpenAI agent got into a Medicare statistics portal, and the Prime Minister got in front of a camera. Matt and Liam ask what actually happened, whether it's as frightening as it sounds, and who ends up carrying the can when nobody told the agent to do it.
A correction to last episode turns into a question neither of us had thought to ask: when a vendor drops your package into a default template, who agreed to the support burden that comes with it?
Matt walks Liam through a year of over-thinking auth for a mobile app, only to realise the answer was something we all used to do and simply forgot. That leads to a bigger question: what else have we been talked out of doing ourselves?
One email from 2007, John Carmack telling his team to think about inlining their functions, turns out to be about far more than code style. We follow the thread from pure functions and consistent state through the state of the games industry to the quiet power dynamics that turn a suggestion into an order, and barely scratch the surface.