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 few items from the list and alternate explaining it to each other. Don's choices are varied, and mine focus on quines and esoteric coding problems. We also share some coding horror stories from our past. You can support the podcast and encourage me to keep making it on patreon ....
Sep 02, 2021•1 hr 1 min•Ep 68•Transcript available on Metacast Today's show: How to Quit Your Job and Work on Open Source Full Time. This story has it all, balancing open source work and full-time employment, building up enough supporters and enough savings to leave your job. The hardest part to me which is explaining leaving your job to your significant other and to your family and friends. And also what do you do if your project succeeds, and then someone forks it and builds a commercial business around it? There's a lot more as well dealing: with hacker ...
Aug 02, 2021•46 min•Ep 67•Transcript available on Metacast 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 your computer for *.db, you'll be amazed at how many SQLite databases you find. Today, Richard is going to share his story. It's the story of creating a small open source pro...
Jul 02, 2021•39 min•Ep 66•Transcript available on Metacast 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
Jun 02, 2021•54 min•Ep 65•Transcript available on Metacast 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 ea...
May 02, 2021•35 min•Ep 64•Transcript available on Metacast 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 struggl...
Apr 03, 2021•48 min•Ep 63•Transcript available on Metacast 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 a...
Mar 01, 2021•41 min•Ep 62•Transcript available on Metacast 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 Pro...
Feb 01, 2021•38 min•Ep 61•Transcript available on Metacast 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-...
Jan 01, 2021•34 min•Ep 60•Transcript available on Metacast 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 ...
Dec 01, 2020•47 min•Ep 59•Transcript available on Metacast 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, bu...
Nov 01, 2020•51 min•Ep 58•Transcript available on Metacast 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...
Oct 01, 2020•41 min•Ep 57•Transcript available on Metacast 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...
Sep 01, 2020•41 min•Ep 56•Transcript available on Metacast 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...
Aug 03, 2020•47 min•Ep 55•Transcript available on Metacast 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 ge...
Jul 01, 2020•37 min•Ep 54•Transcript available on Metacast 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 ...
Jun 10, 2020•39 min•Ep 53•Transcript available on Metacast 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 ...
May 18, 2020•40 min•Ep 52•Transcript available on Metacast 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 the...
May 06, 2020•36 min•Ep 51•Transcript available on Metacast 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 ...
Apr 17, 2020•35 min•Ep 50•Transcript available on Metacast 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 t...
Apr 03, 2020•25 min•Ep 49•Transcript available on Metacast 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, ...
Mar 16, 2020•37 min•Ep 48•Transcript available on Metacast 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 boo...
Mar 02, 2020•51 min•Ep 47•Transcript available on Metacast 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 prog...
Feb 15, 2020•36 min•Ep 46•Transcript available on Metacast 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 build in the Haskell, you can build it in whatever Ruby. No one is going to be none the wiser you get...
Feb 01, 2020•1 hr 2 min•Ep 45•Transcript available on Metacast 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 in revenue within 10 years? And those numbers are kind of fudgy. But if you can do that, you can IPO ...
Dec 18, 2019•38 min•Ep 43•Transcript available on Metacast 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 Powershells instead of bash sort of environments because that narrowness gives us the ability to go and do ...
Dec 02, 2019•53 min•Ep 42•Transcript available on Metacast 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. "Computer programming is beautiful and useless. That's the reason that you should want to do it is not ...
Nov 16, 2019•52 min•Ep 41•Transcript available on Metacast 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 new project that has a lot of poTech Evangelism with Gabriel Gonzalez tential and they advertise on ha...
Nov 01, 2019•1 hr 7 min•Ep 40•Transcript available on Metacast 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 really take the opposite approach. We say the key thing is abstraction. So we kind of start there." "...
Oct 01, 2019•56 min•Ep 39•Transcript available on Metacast 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 diversity in tech. Heather's JuliaCon keynote Digital Infrastructure Scala Center https://corecursiv...
Sep 15, 2019•41 min•Ep 38•Transcript available on Metacast 
