About Open Paren

Open paren is a podcast about libraries, librarians, and code.

Whether you’re just setting out to learn to code, or architecting systems in widespread use, I want to have conversations that matter to you. Let’s talk about what you do and why: how code you write makes things better for you and your patrons; your biggest successes and most interesting mistakes; where your projects have been and where they’re going; social issues that feed into, and spring out of, library software.

The title, Open paren, is a play on the xkcd With Apologies to Robert Frost, which ends a comparison of two programming languages by picking sides, saying

should we write it all again
I’d end it with
a close-paren.

I’m happy with whatever language or toolchain gets things done for you. Let’s start something.

Recent Episodes