Parens of the Dead

Episode 1: It Lives Again

Starting with an empty folder sure is a choice. Much like digging your way out of a grave, it can be intimidating, perhaps because it's not something you do every day. Watch us struggle with these issues and more in the very first episode of Parens of the Dead.

Episode 2: Shambling Along

Watch us totally ruin a pristine, beautiful lightly tinted purple page by adding decrepit buildings to it in this very second episode of Parens of the Dead. We'll get ClojureScript up and running with surprisingly little hassle. There might even be jokes.

Episode 3: Stumbling out of the Graveyard

Someone eated our brains! In this very third episode, we're struggling to get more wiring wired properly while also typing with our fingers on the keyboard. It's a hard life, being a zombie developer. Web socket setup surely is no joke.

Episode 4: Braaains!

Are the tests red, green, or both? Find out as we tackle the final pieces of the wiring, and inch towards something that might even resemble business logic. The future is looking bright, what with brains to chew on.

Episode 5: Internal Organs

Well, hearts at least. If we are to fight back the zombie horde, they're going to need some hit points. In this episode we get to do some good old-fashioned test driven pair programming. It's almost nice enough to forget that episode title.

666: Episode of the Beast

There's little chance this game will take 666 episodes to make, so we're celebrating early. In this very sixth episode we're continuing to build the UI, while also making time for a much needed safety net for ourselves.

Episode 7: Iacta alea est

Literal use of a figurative statement is already a horror show, but when you take into account that the dice are in fact not even cast in this episode, then the title becomes horrific enough to fit the theme. At least that's what I keep telling myself.

Episode 8: The Rolling Chaos

I once heard about a professor who would avoid stirring his tea too vigorously, to avoid needlessly increasing the entropy of the universe. In this very eight episode, we throw caution to the wind and roll dice with abandon.

Episode 9: The Abomination

Going through these videoes for publication can be a mentally taxing exercise. One thing is having to listen to my own recorded voice, but another is watching us mash together aesthetically displeasing code, all the while laughing and having fun. What monsters.

Episode 10: Wired together

Much like in The Human Centipede, we're experimenting with wiring stuff together in this very tenth episode. The victims? Our client and server, poor things. Avert your eyes as we tackle such horrors as event handling and messages going over web sockets.

Episode 11: Symptoms of the Apocalypse

In this very eleventh episode, we establish two major factors of life after the zombie apocalypse. You know the world is a harsh and unforgiving place when microphone stands tip over without warning in the middle of a recording, and rerolls ... don't. Do you even roll, bro? No.

Erpisode 12: A peaceful moment

It's episode 12 and everything seems oddly ... peaceful. Our pair of intrepid programmers seem to have hit their stride, and are working on features in good spirits. Having seen horror movies before, you already know what's going to happen next. Some damn cat is waiting around the next corner, ready for its jump scare. It's what comes after, that really scares you.

Derpisode 13: Exception handling

clojure.lang.Numbers ops "Numbers.java" 1068
clojure.lang.Numbers isPos "Numbers.java" 121
clojure.lang.Range create "Range.java" 80
clojure.core$range invokeStatic "core.clj" 3031

Episode 14: Back from the Void

We got sucked into the void of JVM stack traces. Thank Gosling, we managed to escape with our lives! These last few weeks being our Christmas and New Years holidays certainly had nothing to do with it.

Episode 15: Bad Texan Accents

Two Norwegians donning their cowboy hats, rolling dice, and laying it on thick with their bad Texan accents. It might not be horrible in the Lovecraftian sense, but it sure is horrible still. Did you know "helt texas" means "wildly out of control" in Norwegian?

Episode 16: Rolling in the Grave

In this very sixteenth episode, we dive into the dark art of dice rolling. The bones clatter ominously, echoing against the walls of our dark crypt, heralding the Goddess of Chaos and her prophet: RNGesus.

Episode 17: Something's different

We find ourselves changed after our return from the void. Is this newfound knowledge a blessing or a curse? Will this be our hero origin story or a descent into the darkest recesses of coding horrors? Like, stateful objects, or something?

Episode 18: A Melee of Knuckles

English has the best collective nouns. A conspiracy of ravens, a murder of crows, a parliament of owls, a prickle of porcupines. In this very 18th episode, we have a delivery of punches for you. You're welcome!

Episode 19: Fist Club

In the spirit of Fight Club, we're coding a flurry of fists in this nineteenth episode, but with a strict rule: You do talk about punching zombies. Join us as we give our survivors a fistful of justice in this undead showdown.

Episode 20: 20th Episodiversary

Celebrating our very twentieth episode, we honor this twisted milestone by coding a spectacular zombie face-punching extravaganza ... or something like that. Raise a glass to our macabre journey as we continue to navigate the landscape of the undead apocalypse.

Episode 21: Disarmed and Dangerous

As we punch through the undead ranks in this twenty-first episode, we uncover a morbid side effect: a cascade of detached hands. Join us as we code our way through this macabre spectacle, where flying appendages are just part of the job.

Episode 22: The Re-Deceased

In this very twenty-second episode, we explore the delicate balance between life and undeath. Join us as we code the logic that determines the fate of zombies, giving our survivors the power to topple the undead menace, one decaying corpse at a time.

Episode 23: Dicey Visuals

This very twenty-third episode finds us enhancing the game's visual cues, before we begin preparing for the next turn in our chilling adventure through the land of the undead. In other words, here are 10 minutes of us, like, writing some code, dude.

Episode 24: Merry Happy!

Sensible night, appropriate night
Snow on ground, left and right

In this very special non-denominational holiday special, two human beings write a few functions with relative ease.

Episode 25: Musings on the nature of Christmas mornings.

Another Christmas special has taken a beating falling down the chimney, as two confused developers with bad microphone technique and questionable diction struggle to remember the code they themselves wrote just a few episodes ago.

Episode 26: Reluctantly making deadlier zombies

The zombies might have looked scary before, but they were about as deadly as a table fan, just standing there, blowing air and shaking their heads. Join us as we hesitantly embark on a journey to attach knives to our table fans.

Episode 27: The ObjectMother pattern

Sorry to scare you with such a shocking episode title. Why are you standing out there in the cold anyway? Come in, come in, and calm down by the fire. It's all cozy in here, with immutable data structures, pure functions, and lots of parens in all the right places. Not an object - or their mothers - in sight.

Episode 28: "wow"

Join us as we put the horror in horrible, one blundering code line at a time. Zombies are not known for planning things, and we certainly live up to that in this very twenty eight episode of something resembling actual live coding, in that it is not scripted, and obviously so.

Episode 29: We’re friends ‘til the end!

Much like Chucky, this episode is short and ugly with evil intentions. Did you know that the "My Buddy" doll line never recovered after the first Child's Play movie? I imagine a warehouse full of dollies no-one wants to buy, just sitting there on dark shelves, waiting. Maybe I could interest you in a murder dolly?

Episode 30: Payback

After 30 episodes of brain-churning code it's finally time for our zombies to start doing what they do best. You might think an awkward gait, rotting flesh, missing limbs, open wounds, and a healthy appetite for brains is the quintessential zombie experience, but no. It's punching.

Episode 31: On hit points

Dungeons & Dragons was the first game to track hit points as a measure of health in living beings, drawing its inspiration from the number of hits - usually from 14 inch shells - a ship could take before sinking in naval war games. On this scale, humans and zombies alike would have 1 hit point.

Episode 32: You die at the end

"John dies at the end" is a horror book (and also a movie) with what just might be the best title for any piece of literature ever. Unfortunately the book itself ultimately disappoints, much like this episode.

Episode 33: Bill Paxton

Well that's great. That's just fucking great, man. Now what the fuck are we supposed to do!? We're in some real pretty shit now, man! That's it man. Game over, man. GAME OVER! What the fuck are we gonna do now? What are we gonna do?

Episode 34: "The horror of the mailman"

Another friday, another episode of Parens of the Dead. In this very 34th episode, we introduce the mailman, the chef, and the pencil pusher - new zombies all. It's some scary stuff, for sure.

Episode 35: The Star Wars joke

I guess you had to be there.

Episode 36: Thirty six!

The one in which we discover that Christian is promising features to people on Slack.

Next episode? Follow @parensofthedead

Looking for the old episodes? Season one