CoRecursive: Coding Stories

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 mi...

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 processe...

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...

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 bui...

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. ...

David Heinemeier Hansson talks to Adam about being avoiding a software monoculture. He explains why we should find a programming language that speaks to us, why ergonomics matter and why single page apps and microservices are not for him. "That is the pleasure and privilege of working with the web. No one knows what you built it. It, you could build an in basic, you can build it a Ocaml, you can b...

How do you build a business around tools for software engineers? Adam talks to Lee Edwards, a VC who spends a lot of time thinking about this question. "When I think about is this a good business, I think about is there value Accruing. The question is just how much. The question about is it a venture-backed business? The very, very oversimplified answer is do you believe you can get $100 million i...

Tech Talks are in-depth technical discussions. Adam talks to Author and Clojure advocate Zach Tellman about how great software is built. "If we say something is over-engineered, what we mean is it's too complex or it's too robust or it handles a bunch of situations or scenarios that are not relevant to how we're using it. It's okay for us to create narrow things. It's okay for us to create Powersh...

Tech Talks are in-depth technical discussions. Generative Art involves using the tools of computation to creative ends. Adam talks to Allison Parrish about how she uses word vectors to create unique poetry. Word vectors represent a fundamentally new tool for working with text. Adam and Allison also talk about creative computer programming and building twitter bots and what makes something art. "Co...

What makes some pieces of technology take off? Why is java popular and not small talk or Haskell. Gabe is a popular blogger, a former Haskell cheerleader, and creator of the Dhal configuration language. Today we talk about marketing and tech evangelism. "One common mistake I see a lot of new open source developers make is they tried to build what I call the hype train. Where they have started a ne...

Tech Talks are in-depth technical discussions. Adam talks to Hal Abelson about the textbook he coauthored in 1984, SICP and why it is still popular and influential today. "If you pick up almost any computing book it starts out 'here are these datatypes, these operations that you do' and somewhere around 20 or 30% through the book, they show you how to define a function or a procedure. Whereas we r...

Tech Talks are in-depth technical discussions. Heather C Miller is an Assistant Processor at CMU. She is concerned that key open source projects are at risk of failure and no one is paying attention. Adam talks to her about open source, how it grows, the diversity problems it has and much more. Heather also shares some interesting stories about the early days of Scala and her ideas for increasing...

Tech Talks are in-depth technical discussions. What do compilers do? What is the runtime of a language? What does it mean to compile something down to bytecode and what executes the byte code. Throsten Ball Answers these questions in this interview with Adam. "A virtual machine is a computer built-in software, a CPU built-in software" "Compilers can be slow. You know, I grew up running Linux and I...

Tech Talks are in-depth technical discussions. Today Adam talks to Bartosz Milewski. He is the author of a famous blog series, lecture series and now book on Category Theory for programmers. The world of functional programming is rife with terminology imported from abstract algebra and Category Theory. In fact, it may be one of the most valid criticisms of functional programming is the use of Cate...

Tech Talks are in-depth technical discussions. How do we create great software? What are the important skills need to properly review a PR? How do you identify assumptions of a code base and the stable contracts of a software module? Jimmy Koppel is working on his Ph. D. in the field of program synthesis at MIT.  He was previously paid 100 thousand dollars to drop out of university by Peter Thiel,...

Tech Talks are in-depth technical discussions. How do we make JavaScript easier to work with? Chris Krycho has been using typescript to add types to javascript since 2016. Chris is a software developer at LinkedIn who, at his previous gig, worked on converting one of the largest Ember apps in the world to TypeScript. I was shocked by the size. Chris also loves Rust and types and is a former C and...

Self-driving cars or armed autonomous military robots may make use of the same technologies. In a certain sense, we as software developers are helping to build and shape the future. What does the future look like and are we helping build the right one? Is technology a force for liberty or oppression. Cory Doctorow is one of my favorite authors and also a public intellectual with a keen insight int...

Bob Nystrom is the author of Crafting Interpreters. I speak with Nystrom about building a programming language and an interpreter implementation for it. We talk about parsing, the difference between compiler and interpreters and a lot more. If you are wondering why many languages have hand-rolled parser implementations yet much work on build language implementations focuses on parser and tokenizer...

Can we make databases faster and remove the need for caching reads in an external cache? Can we make a distributed SQL based relational database that outperforms memcached? Jon Gjengset and the PDOS team at MIT CSAIL have done just that with Noria. Today I talk to Jon about Noria, about building a database in rust and his efforts to teach people intermediate rust via live coding sessions. Jon was...

Andy Hunt is a celebrity in the world of software development. Or at least he is one to me. The Pragmatic Programmer is a classic book on software development book. He is an author of the agile manifesto and started the book company that has published many great books, including several by recent guests. Today I talk to Andy about how software engineers can get better at thinking and learning. How...

Tech Talks are in-depth technical discussions. Pat Helland has a wealth of knowledge on building distributed data stores. He has been working on distributed data stores since 1978, when he worked on the tandem fault-tolerant database. Since then he has been involved in many distributed database projects. Here is the key thing, he is also a master at explaining the key ideas of distributed systems...

What is abstraction?  Can we have a precise definition of abstraction that, once understood, makes writing software simpler?  Runar has thought a lot about abstraction and how we can choose the proper level of abstraction for the software we write.  In this interview, he explains these concepts using examples from the real world, from SQL, from effectful computing and many other areas. We also tal...

Richard Whaling has an interesting perspective on software development. If you write software for the JVM or if you are interested in low level system programming, or even doing data heavy or network heavy IO programming then you will find this interview interesting. We discuss how to build faster software in a modern fashion by using glibc and techniques from system programming. This means using...

A decade ago Jamis Buck was not loving his job. He was an important open source contributor. He worked for the hottest trendiest software company at the time, 37 signals, creator of ruby on rails. He was on top of the world but also he was burnt out. Today Jamis talks about how he overcame burn out.  We discuss how his struggle lead him to write a book about generating mazes and another about buil...

Which operating system is the best? Which programming language is the best? What text editor? Bryan Cantrill, CTO of Joyent says that is the wrong question. Languages, operating systems and communities have to make trade offs and they do that based on their values. So the right language is the one who's values align with you and your projects goals. This simple idea carries a lot of weight and I t...