Ron Garret left JPL for a 100-person startup he’d just discovered on Usenet. Four a.m. alarms. Burbank to San Jose on Southwest. A rented room in Susan Wojcicki’s house.
He expected the search engine engineering and instead he got asked to build ad serving. In Java and with JSPs and no syntax highlighting and no... more..
Imagine facing a problem you can’t name, something that feels bigger than any bug you’ve ever had to fix. How do you debug your own mind when you don’t even know what’s wrong?
Burke Holland’s story starts with a college party and a bad trip that leaves a deeper mark than he expects. Sleep gets... more..
What do you do when your code breaks and the only fix is to dig into the runtime below?
Matt Godbolt lives for that. Tile-based renderers, color-coded scanlines, zero-copy NICs—each story is a clue that leads past the abstraction to the real machine. He shares the rule that guides him: master your layer, learn the... more..
What if a software bug drained your savings, ruined your reputation, and nobody believed it wasn’t your fault?
Scott Darlington took over a village post office, hoping to give his family a steady life. But the software system kept showing cash shortfalls he couldn’t explain. Each time, the Post Office told him the numbers were... more..
A quick update from Adam about the podcast’s current state, consistency challenges, and what’s coming next.
more..What do we risk when we let AI do the heavy lifting in our coding? Are we giving up the thinking that makes us good at what we do? And as expectations keep rising to match productivy gains, is all this speed really helping, or just making us busier?
Today, let’s look at the tradeoffs... more..
How do you accomplish something massive over time? I’ve had the chance to meet with a number of exceptional software developers and it’s something I always wonder about.
Today, I might have an answer with the incredible story of Yann Collet.
Yann was a project manager who went from being burnt out on corporate life... more..
I’ve been on many projects that get canceled. We’re building cool stuff. We’re going above and beyond, and we’re excited. But the project encounters reality, shifting priorities, or budgeting constraints, and the work never goes anywhere. It always feels tragic, but then I move on.
But what if I didn’t let a project get canceled?... more..
I believe that getting underrepresented groups into software development is a good thing. This is not a controversial opinion until you start talking about felons.
Today’s guest is Rick Wolter. He’s an iOS developer who served 18 years in prison for second degree murder. Rick killed somebody and for some that’s all they need to... more..
I recently got an email from Jeff Shrager, who said he’d been working hard to solve a mystery about some famous code.
Eliza, the chatbot, was built in 1964, and she didn’t answer questions like Alexa or Siri. She asked questions. She was a therapist chatbot and quickly became famous after being described in a... more..
On today’s show, I’m talking to Richard Hipp about surviving becoming core infrastructure for the world. SQLite is everywhere. It’s in your web browser, it’s in your phone, it’s probably in your car, and it’s definitely in commercial planes. It’s where your iMessages and WhatsApp messages are stored, and if you do a find on... more..
Software is just the tool and it should get out of your way. In this episode, Jim discusses how to build a great developer tool. It all started with: “What’s the worst software that you use every day?” and led to the creation of Subversion.
more..David Shayer worked at Apple for 14 years, and he has a wild experience to share. Apple has a unique culture, and David will give us an insider view of what it was like for him at Apple during the 2000s, roughly between 2001 to 2015 when Apple transformed into the powerhouse that it is... more..
I’m not really a big gamer, but lately, I’ve fallen down this rabbit hole into the world of Casey Muratori, and this project that he started on Twitch in 2014. He is building a video game from scratch and explaining it all as he goes along.
Casey is a professional video game and game engine,... more..
When you work on your computer, there are so many things you take for granted: operating systems, programming languages, they all have to come from somewhere.
In the late 1960s and 1970s, that somewhere was Bell Labs, and the operating system they were building was UNIX.
They were building more than just an operating system... more..
Today Richard Feldman shares his story of going from javascript developer to elm developer to functional programming teacher.
Along the way, Richard finds that people are teaching functional programming wrong. We are teaching it in a way that misses how most industrial software engineers learn best.
Richard also delves into Elm, his approach, and how... more..
Preparing our minds for the inevitable is hard. But, after facing terminal cancer, Kate Gregory recalled that facing death has many lessons to teach us.
In this episode, Kate will share the lessons she learned and explain how you can apply them to your career as a software developer and live a remarkable life.
more..Today’s guest is Douglas Crockford. He’s sharing the story of JSON, his discovery of JavaScript’s good parts, and his approach to finding a simple way to build software. Also, his battles against XML, against complexity, his battles to say that there’s a better way to build software.
This is foundational stuff for the web, and... more..
How did Spotify scale from 10 engineers to 100s to 1000s …without slowing down? Without becoming corporate?
Facing an IPO deadline, Pia Nilsson worked with 300 teams to transform how Spotify built software. She spearheaded a movement that led them from working in silos to a unified developer platform.
Hear the inside story of how... more..
CPAN was the first open-source software module repository. And on this day, Aug 1st, in 1995, CPAN was first announced to a private group of PERL users.
And why does this matter? Who is still using PERL anyhow? CPAN inspired everything that would follow: npm, maven, cargo, nuget, hackage, ruby gems, python pypi and so... more..
On June 1st, 2014, the following question showed up on hacker news:
Why is 80 characters, the standard limit for code width. Why 80?
Why not? 79 or 81 or even a hundred.
So you probably know what happens next. People started to post their opinions and the comments and other people started... more..
On this day in 2014, “lame april fools’ jokes” were banned from hacker news.
Today in our first This-Day-in-History segment, I want to share some of history not just of April Fools’, but of tech pranks in general, all leading up to 2014.
Why were pranks and April Fools’ jokes traditionally celebrated in tech? Why... more..
Today, I have two of my favorite guests together: Krystal Maughan and Don McKay. We are going to be sharing strange and interesting facts about computing.
I’m super pumped about this because, sometimes, I learn something new, and I’m excited about it. And I want to tell people about it. And so today is a... more..
Today, previous guest and my neighbor Don Mckay and I will discuss items from the endless fascinating Cursed Computer Iceberg Meme. The Iceberg is a giant list of “the peculiarities and weirdness of computers.”
We each a select few items from the list and alternate explaining it to each other. Don’s choices are varied,... more..
Adam talks to Hal Abelson about the textbook he coauthored in 1985, The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs and why it is still popular and influential today.
more..Software is just the tool and it should get out of your way. In this episode, Jim discusses how to build a great developer tool. It all started with: “What’s the worst software that you use every day?” and led to the creation of Subversion.
more..If you ever wanted to learn about machine learning you could do worse than have Jason Gauci teach you. Jason has worked on YouTube recommendations. He was an early contributor to TensorFlow the open-source machine learning platform. His thesis work was cited by DeepMind.
But what I find so fascinating with Jason is he recognized... more..
The consistently best podcast I listen to is CoRecursive Podcast with Adam Gordon Bell. So far, every single episode I've heard has been excellent: engaging, informative, sometimes provocative, always well-produced. He chooses good guests and draws the best out of them!
I’ve really, really been enjoying @adamgbell’s @corecursive podcast – solid and informative interviews on interesting topics in programming ...
I'd describe CoRecrusive as different, exotic, sublime, serious, or some such combination. Yes, it's about software development and software development only, but it digs underneath until the very foundations are exposed. And when an episode is not on technical details, it's on ideas and themes that are mind-blowing and unseen anywhere else.
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