Adam Gordon Bell - Software Developer
The stories and people behind the code. Hear stories of software development from interesting people.
Today on the show, we have solving algorithmic programming problems. You know when you interview for a job to write CSS and they ask you to reverse a binary tree on the whiteboard using C and in constant memory space? It's that kind of thing. These problems have their roots in algorithmic programming contests. And our guest, Conor Hoekstra, is a former competitor. Episode Page
Today I talk to Dan Robinson about trying to get someone their money back on Ethereum. He's going to be battling this murky world of blockchain high-frequency bots. Along the way, we'll learn how trades are executed on Ethereum and a bit of game theory and political philosophy. It's an entertaining peek into a world that seems like pure science fiction to me, a world where nobody's in charge, where there's no regulation, and where these forces of greed and idealism are in direct conflict with each other Episode Page / Transcript
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 today. David worked as a Software Engineer but for the hardware organization with Apple. He worked on a few special projects at Apple: at least one of them was top secret. But he is also going to share the struggles of building file systems and working on really short timelines and having development plans upended by Steve jobs. Episode Page
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, creator. He has been doing it for over 30 years. His approach to development feels a little bit like it's from the 1970s. Yet, it resonates with many smart people who are learning how to truly build things and understand fundamentals from Casey. Casey has a lesson about learning and teaching for us all. Episode Page
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 this problem that was being solved the wrong way and set out to find a solution to it. So that's the show today. Jason is going to share his story. Links: ReAgent.ai Programming Throwdown Episode Bonus
Welcome to the year-end episode. Today is all the bonus questions. Often times I have questions that I want to ask guests, but they don't quite fit the overall theme of the episode. So today we're going to do a whole episode of those extra questions. I have previously recorded questions for Brian Kernaghan, the creator of AWK among many other things. I have questions for Sean Allen, who works at Microsoft Research, and a couple of other people. Episode Page: http://corecursive.com/060-2020-year-end Slack Channel: https://rebrand.ly/corec_slack Twitter: https://twitter.com/adamgordonbell
Did you ever meet somebody who seemed a little bit different than the rest of the world? Maybe they question things that others wouldn't question or said things that others would never say. Daniel is a world-renowned expert on software performance, and one of the most popular open source developers, if you measure by get up followers. Today, he's gonna share his story. It involves time at a research lab, teaching students in a new way. It will also involve upending people's assumptions about IO performance. Elon Musk And Julia Roberts will come up a little bit more than you might expect. Episode Page Episode Transcript Links: Daniel's Blog Daniel's Github Parsing JSON Really Quickly: Lessons Learned
As Brian Kernighan said "UNIX since the start has become a vehicle for creating and using programming languages." Brian initiated work on what would become the UNIX system. He helped develop it to run on a minicomputer and would eventually be ported to other computers. In this episode, Brain will go in-depth on how the UNIX was built. Episode Page Episode Transcript "If you wanted, you could go sit in your office and think deep thoughts or program, or write on your own blackboard or whatever, but then come back to the common space when you wanted to." - Brian Kernighan "I found it easier to program when I was trying to figure out the logic for myself rather than trying to figure out where in the infinite stack of documentation was the function I needed. So for me, programming is more like creating something rather than looking it up, and too much of today's programming is more like looking it up." - Brian Kernighan "If what I find challenging or hard or whatever is also something that other people find hard or challenging or whatever, then if I do something that will improve my lot, I'm perhaps improving their lot at the same time." - Brian Kernighan Links: Brian's Homepage Book: Unix: A History and a Memoir Book: Millions, Billions, Zillions: Defending Yourself in a World of Too Many Numbers Book: Understanding the Digital World: What You Need to Know about Computers, the Internet, Privacy, and Security
How do CPUs work? How do compilers work? How does high-level code get translated into machine code? Today's guest is Matt Godbolt and he knows the answers to these questions. How he became an expert in bare metal programming is an interesting story. Matt shares his origin story and the creation of compiler explorer in today's interview. Episode Page Episode Transcript Links: Compiler Explorer Matt's Github Matt's Blog Matt's YouTube
Preparing our minds for the inevitable - death is pressing. After facing terminal cancer, Kate Gregory reminded herself that this event can still become inspiring by focusing on the positive. In this episode, Kate is going to share her success and explain how you would apply her 5 pieces of advice to your career as a software developer to help you to build a remarkable career for yourself. Episode Page Episode Transcript Links: Gregory Consulting Limited Kate's Classes in Pluralsight Include CPP Kate's Blog
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 developers learn best. In this episode, Richard Feldman delves into Elm, his approach, and how to make teaching delightful. Episode Page Episode Transcript Links: Book: Elm in Action A Taze of ATS Elm Language
Building Subversion Software is just the tool and it should get out of your way. In this episode, we will discuss Jim Blandy's insights on how to build and recognize improvements for a great developer tool and find out how he approached the question: "What's the worst software that you use every day?" "Everybody likes imaginary code because imaginary code is always perfect." -Jim Blandy "You don't want to maximize engagement with your version control system. You just want it to do its job and get out of the way. And so basically if somebody says, you know, this doesn't suck. That's actually pretty much exactly the right thing." - Jim Blandy "If you're making a series of small incremental changes to a large data structure, then the way that the persistent data structures are trying really hard to share as much data as possible really works in your favor." -Jim Blandy Episode Page Episode Transcript Links: Subversion Jim's Email Mercurial GNU Emacs
Choosing The Right Tool For the Job Choosing the right programming language or framework for a project can be key to the success of the project. In today's episode, Sean Allen Sean shares a story of picking the right tool for a job. The tool he ends up picking will surprise you. His problem: make a distributed stream processing framework, something that can take a fire hose of events and perform customer's specific calculations on them but the latency needs to be less than a millisecond and the calculations might be CPU intensive. Who would need something like this? The initial use case was risk systems for Wall Street banks. "Basically programming languages are tools. It's not about ergonomics, it's not about developer experience, it's not about all the things that we normally talk about, it's about getting the job right. For whatever that means it's a means to an end." - Sean Allen Episode Page Episode Transcript Links: Martin Thompson - Low Latency JVM Basho - Riak Haskell Quicksort Pony Talk Pony Lang
Chasing Your Curiosity and Continuous Learning Things are easier to learn when you are passionate about something. A lot of great careers are built on curiosity and obsession including Krystal Maughan our guest for today's episode. Krystal will share her journey as she chased her curiosity in programming wherever it led her. "Everybody has that moment when everything's shiny, you know when it's new and you walk on to campus like Google or whatever. Like the first time, I went to Google IO and I just thought it was like, this is insane." "If you like to learn things, I think that's a gift. I think that's not something that everybody has." "I think that seeing programming in different ways and seeing that it could be this kind of fun thing that you could break apart and find different ways of executing." Episode Page Episode Transcript Links: Krystal's Blog Her GSOC Project Interview with Krystal Full Timeline of Krystal's Journey
There's joy that can be found in language learning and pain as well. Whether you're a beginner or an expert, there are still some things you can only discover by picking up a new language. Bruce Tate will tell us how learning new languages rekindled the spark of joy for him. "I find that learning a new language mixes a lot of joy in that pain, and that's when I grow most rapidly as a developer." "You can't break somebody else through their own pain. They have to learn their own lessons, and they have to, at some point in the model, they have to feel more and more pain to break through to the expert." "When you visit other places, when you learn other languages, the world gets smaller." Episode Page Episode Transcript Links: 7 Languages in 7 Weeks Book 7 More Languages Joy Talk
Buckle up, on today's episode Adam interviews Sam about how the abstract algebra and probabilistic data structures helped solve fast versus big data issues that many are struggling with. Sam Ritchie is a machine learning researcher and a mechanical engineer by training. Stop in to hear Adam and Sam's conversation about portal abstractions that let you leverage work from other fields. You cannot miss this episode! "And that's really all we want to do. Like, we want things where you can pause and wait a while and then load it back out and keep going." - Sam Ritchie "I'm aiming to implement these interfaces and pass these tests and then being able to immediately turn around and have like an approximate sliding window counter that would just work with stripes, like entire machine learning feature generation interface." - Sam Ritchie "I'm really passionate about and the reason this stuff's important is. You want to go mine the literature of what other people have done. You know you want to go be able to plug these things into your work and really just benefit from this incredible community that's been cranking for, you know, again, maybe hundreds of years." - Sam Ritchie Episode Page Episode Transcript Links: Sam's Blog Summing Bird Algebird Reinforcement Learning
Legacy code is everywhere. I don't think I've met anyone who doesn't have to deal with legacy code in the substantial portion of his work. Our guest, Jonathan Boccara is a French C++ developer and the author of The Legacy Code Programmer's Toolbox. In this episode, Jonathan will help us understand and build the correct mindset to effectively work with legacy code by using his approach and processes. "An important message I'm trying to get across is that you should not complain if you don't, in turn, intend to improve the code." - Jonathan Boccara "That would be any critique that's technical. One thing that comes up very often is levels of obstruction. If I had to sum up best practices in, in three words, that would be those levels of obstruction." - Jonathan Boccara "The point of code is to make a piece of software run and to make it run in a way that will make customers happy. " - Jonathan Boccara Episode Page Episode Transcript Links: Fluent C++ SE Radio: Understanding Legacy Code Counting words in your code
Tech Talks are in-depth technical discussions. Adam talked to Jared Forsyth about his journey from untyped javascript to using flow and eventually reasonml. Click here to see if you are eligible for a the Springboard scholarship from our sponsor "I mean, I was, I'll admit it I was definitely in the: 'I was scarred by Java and C plus plus in an intro to programming class and I never want to look at types again' Camp" "My first language was Python and followed closely by Javascript. And so I was, I was loving the loosey goosey scripting language. My first experience of using types in JavaScript, I was like is this going to be terrible? Because there's so much overhead in Java and C plus, plus you have to write types for literally everything." Links: Springboard Scholarship Reason Town Podcast ReasonML Jared's Talk on ReasonML React with Reason Talk Types in Javascript
Tech Talks are in-depth technical discussions. Adam talks to Karl Hughes about his path to becoming a conference speaker and the work he has done to make it easier for others to follow in his footsteps. "I didn't start trying to speak at conferences until I was at least seven or eight years into my software development career. So. Just a couple of years ago and before that, I think what helped build confidence was speaking occasionally at meetups. I started talking occasionally at local code bootcamps, just kind of getting to be in front of a crowd and start to build up some like level of self-assuredness and eventually I think the next step was just obvious. I wanted to push myself to do something a little scarier and bigger, and that was like, get in front of people at a real conference. " "And so it is scary. Partly also it's that, you know, because it was my first time, I didn't really know what to expect. I had only been to a couple of tech conferences before. I didn't know what the audiences were going to be like. If there was kind of be this like big tomato throwing thing at the end, they're all just bashed me or if it was going to be like a more of a friendly conversation." Show notes: CFP Land Karl's Personal Site Washing Machine Guy Talk episode webpage
Today we try a different format. Adam invites his neighbour, Don McKay, over to ask him questions. An interesting discussion on recursion, corecursion and the naming of the podcast unfolds. "John was saying, we conclude that since modularity is the key to successful programming, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. I think what he means by modularity is okay, we write our fold and it's like three lines long. Once that exists somewhere, we don't have to have that base case all over our code. We ended up programming a higher declarative level. The other reason is just I really like clean abstractions. There's more to learn but once you do, you're able to kind of have this language where you can talk about these things at a higher level" Why Functional Programming Matters - John Hughes Beautiful Folds - Gabriel Gonzalez Folds in Scala Recursion Training https://corecursive.com/046-don-and-adam-folds/