CoRecursive: Coding Stories

Latest Episodes:

Tech Talk: Jimmy Koppel on Advanced Software Design Aug 01, 2019

Show notes

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, but yet still graduated with two degrees.

The most interesting, however, about Jimmy is he is working hard to teach the world how to design better software. Due to his time working on program synthesis, he developed some unique insights into what makes software good, and what makes it bad, and he spends time teaching people his insights.

Three Level of Software

Peter Thiel 20 under 20

Benjamin Franklin Method You are a Program Synthesizer

Jimmy's Coaching Program

Episode Page: https://corecursive.com/036-jimmy-koppel-advanced-software-design/

Tech Talk: Typescript with Chris Krycho Jul 15, 2019

Show notes

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 FORTRAN programmers. He hosted a podcast called the New Rustacean, which he has retired from.

Today we talk about TypeScript and when you should use it. We also talk about Language Server Protocols, Rust, working with large codebases, Structural types, row polymorphism and talking code over audio.

https://corecursive.com/034-chris-krycho-typescript/

Tech Talk: Rethinking Technological Positivism with Cory Doctorow Jun 15, 2019

Show notes

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 into the dangers we face a society. In this interview, I ask him how to avoid ending up in a techno-totalitarian society. We also talk about Turing, DRM, data mining and monopolies.

Website for Page

Tech Talk: Crafting Interpreters With Bob Nystrom May 31, 2019

Show notes

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 generators then Bob's insights will be eye-opening. Also, if you've ever used regexes to pull strings apart into structured data, and I sure have, then Bob's perspective on the simplicity of hand-rolled parsers will certainly open up some new possibilities for you.

Links:

http://craftinginterpreters.com/ http://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/ http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/

Tech Talk: Rethinking databases and Noria with Jon Gjengset Apr 30, 2019

Show notes

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 great to talk to. He really was able to explain to me how Noria is able to do what it does and where it is in terms of maturity. The key, besides Rust and evmaps, is that Noria uses materialized views to do query optimization ahead of time, on write. The devil is in the details though, of course. And the details, in this case, are turning declarative SQL into a dataflow program that handles cache updates on new writes.

http://corecursive.com/030-rethinking-databases-with-jon-gjengset/

Show notes:

Tech Talk: Learning to Think with Andy Hunt - Pragmatic Programmers guide to being productive Apr 15, 2019

Show notes

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 can we develop this meta-skill and how can being aware of common mistakes our brain make us more productive?

Show notes:

Webpage for Episode

Tech Talk: Data and Scale with Pat Helland - The long view on distributed databases Mar 31, 2019

Show notes

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 using simple language and practical everyday examples. Can you get married on the phone? How are messaging systems and idempotence like regional offices communicating via fax machine? These are the type of metaphor that Pat uses. Today, Pat sits down with me and teaches me about dealing with data in a distributed, fault tolerant, infinitely scaling world.

Webpage : http://corecursive.com/028-data-pat-heland/

Links:

Abstraction and Learning with Runar Bjarnason Mar 15, 2019

Show notes

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 talk about how to learn and acquire the skills necessary to understand abstract concepts like very polymorphic code and category theory.

Runar also explains his latest project unison computing and how it uses the correct level of abstraction to rethink several foundation ideas in software development.

Links:

Webpage for show

Tech Talk: Modern Systems Programming And Scala Native With Richard Whaling Feb 22, 2019

Show notes

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 raw pointers and manual memory management but from a modern language.

Richard also shares some perspectives on better utilizing the underlying operating system and how we can build better software by depending on services rather than libraries.

Links:

Burn out and recreational coding with Jamis Buck Jan 25, 2019

Show notes

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 building a ray tracer. His books are great fun, and all about recreational programming. You will learn to build things with a focus not on the latest trends in software development and not even a specific programming language.

The focus instead is on fun.

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