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Signals and Threads — Technology
Signals and Threads

Listen in on Jane Street’s Ron Minsky as he has conversations with engineers who are working on everything from clock synchronization to reliable multicast, build systems to reconfigurable hardware. Get a peek at how Jane Street approaches problems, and how those ideas relate to tech more broadly. You can find transcripts along with related links on our website at signalsandthreads.com.

Copyright: © Jane Street

Latest Episodes:

Building a UI Framework with Ty Overby Oct 06, 2021

Show notes

Ty Overby is a programmer in Jane Street’s web platform group where he works on Bonsai, our OCaml library for building interactive browser-based UI. In this episode, Ty and Ron consider the functional approach to building user interfaces. They also discuss Ty’s programming roots in Neopets, what development features they crave on the web, the unfairly maligned CSS, and why Excel is “arguably the greatest programming language ever developed.”

You can find the transcript for this episode on our website.

Some links to topics that came up in the discussion:

Jane Street’s Bonsai library
The 3D design system OpenSCAD
Matt Keeter’s libfive design tools
Try .NET in-browser repl
Jane Street’s Incr_dom library
The Elm Architecture “pattern for architecting interactive programs”
React JavaScript library
The Houdini proposal
Svelte UI toolkit

Writing, Technically with James Somers Sep 01, 2021

Show notes

James Somers is Jane Street’s writer-in-residence, splitting his time between English and OCaml, and helping to push forward all sorts of efforts around knowledge-sharing at Jane Street. In this episode, James and Ron talk about the role of technical writing in an organization like Jane Street, and how engineering software relates to editing prose.

You can find the transcript for this episode on our website.

Some links to topics that came up in the discussion:

mdx, the modified Markdown format that supports executing OCaml code blocks
More on the 4 types of technical writing that James references
Donald Knuth’s original book on Literate Programming
More on John McPhee’s use of KEDIT
Peter Seibel’s Coders at Work
David Goodsell’s The Machinery of Life
Scott Huler’s Defining the Wind

Some of James’s writing on our tech blog

More Signals & Threads coming soon! Aug 24, 2021

Show notes

Signals & Threads is back, and we have a fun season of topics lined up, including: Building better abstractions for design and user interfaces, the role of writing in a technical organization, the approach that different languages take to memory management...and more. We hope you’ll join us. The first episode drops September 1st.

An inside look at Jane Street's tech internship with Jeanne Van Briesen, Matt Else, and Grace Zhang Nov 06, 2020

Show notes

In this week's episode, the season 1 finale, Ron speaks with Jeanne, Matt, and Grace, three former tech interns at Jane Street who have returned as full-timers. They talk about the experience of being an intern at Jane Street, the types of projects that interns work on, and how they've found the transition to full-time work.

You can find the transcript for this episode along with links to things we discussed on our website.

Building a functional email server with Dominick LoBraico Oct 28, 2020

Show notes

Despite a steady trickle of newcomers, email still reigns supreme as the chief communication mechanism for the Information Age. At Jane Street, it’s just as critical as anywhere, but there’s one difference: the system at the heart of our email infrastructure is homegrown. This week, Ron talks to Dominick LoBraico, an engineer working on Jane Street’s technology infrastructure, about how and why we built Mailcore, an email server written and configured in OCaml. They delve into questions around how best to represent the configuration of a complex system, when you should build your own and when you shouldn’t, and the benefits of bringing a code-focused approach to solving systems problems.

You can find the transcript for this episode along with links to things we discussed on our website.

Language design with Leo White Oct 21, 2020

Show notes

Equal parts science and art, programming language design is very much an unsolved problem. This week, Ron speaks with Leo White, from Jane Street's Tools & Compilers team, about cutting-edge language features, future work happening on OCaml, and Jane Street's relationship with the broader open-source community. The conversation covers everything from the paradox of language popularity, to advanced type system features like modular implicits and dependent types. Listen in, no programming languages PhD required!

You can find the transcript for this episode along with links to things we discussed on our website.

Clock synchronization with Chris Perl Oct 14, 2020

Show notes

Clock synchronization, keeping all of the clocks on your network set to the “correct” time, sounds straightforward: our smartphones sure don’t seem to have trouble with it. Next, keep them all accurate to within 100 microseconds, and prove that you did -- now things start to get tricky. In this episode, Ron talks with Chris Perl, a systems engineer at Jane Street about the fundamental difficulty of solving this problem at scale and how we solved it.

You can find the transcript for this episode along with links to things we discussed on our website.

Python, OCaml, and Machine Learning with Laurent Mazare Oct 07, 2020

Show notes

A conversation with Laurent Mazare about how your choice of programming language interacts with the kind of work you do, and in particular about the tradeoffs between Python and OCaml when doing machine learning and data analysis. Ron and Laurent discuss the tradeoffs between working in a text editor and a Jupyter Notebook, the importance of visualization and interactivity, how tools and practices vary between language ecosystems, and how language features like borrow-checking in Rust and ref-counting in Swift and Python can make machine learning easier.

You can find the transcript for this episode along with links to things we discussed on our website.

Compiler optimization with Greta Yorsh Sep 30, 2020

Show notes

It’s a software engineer’s dream: A compiler that can take idiomatic high-level code and output maximally efficient instructions. Ron’s guest this week is Greta Yorsh, who has worked on just that problem in a career spanning both industry and academia. Ron and Greta talk about some of the tricks that compilers use to make our software faster, ranging from feedback-directed optimization and super-optimization to formal analysis.

You can find the transcript for this episode along with links to things we discussed on our website.

Multicast and the markets with Brian Nigito Sep 23, 2020

Show notes

Electronic exchanges like Nasdaq need to handle a staggering number of transactions every second. To keep up, they rely on two deceptively simple-sounding concepts: single-threaded programs and multicast networking. In this episode, Ron speaks with Brian Nigito, a 20-year industry veteran who helped build some of the earliest electronic exchanges, about the tradeoffs that led to the architecture we have today, and how modern exchanges use these straightforward building blocks to achieve blindingly fast performance at scale.

You can find the transcript for this episode along with links to things we discussed on our website.

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