All Episodes

Today’s story is an insider view of Debian. One of the oldest Linux distributions and probably one of the longest-running volunteer-based open-source projects.

Joey Hess is my guest, and he dedicated significant parts of his adult life to working on Debian. He’s going to share what that was like. The good and the bad, and... more..

Today’s episode is about remote work. Well, sort of. I found someone with a different perspective on remote work and a fantastic story to share, Paul Lutus.

I think that he might be the original remote software developer.

He left California behind for a lower cost of living in Oregon. And from Oregon, he developed... more..

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 select few items from the list and alternate explaining it to each other. Don’s choices are varied,... more..

Today’s show: How to quit your job and work on open source full time.

This story has it all – balancing side projects and full-time employment, building up enough supports to leave your job, and explaining quitting to your family and friends.

And also: what do you do if your project succeeds, and then someone... more..

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... more..

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... more..

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... more..

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... more..

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,... more..

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... more..

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 Kernighan, the... more..

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 Github followers.... more..

When you work on your computer, there are so many things you take for granted: operating systems, programming languages, they all have to come from somewhere.

In the late 1960s and 1970s, that somewhere was Bell Labs, and the operating system they were building was UNIX.

They were building more than just an operating system... more..

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... more..

Preparing our minds for the inevitable is hard. But, after facing terminal cancer, Kate Gregory recalled that facing death has many lessons to teach us.

In this episode,  Kate will share the lessons she learned and explain how you can apply them to your career as a software developer and live a remarkable life.

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 engineers learn best.

Richard also delves into Elm, his approach, and how... more..

Software is just the tool and it should get out of your way. In this episode, Jim discusses how to build a great developer tool. It all started with: “What’s the worst software that you use every day?” and led to the creation of Subversion.

Choosing the programming language or framework for a project can be to the success of the project.

In today’s episode, Sean Allen 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... more..

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.

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.

Today the story of how twitter engineers came up with a unique solution to data engineering.

Adam interviews Sam about how the abstract algebra and probabilistic data structures help solve fast versus big data issues that many are struggling with.

Adam talks to Sam Ritchie, a machine learning researcher. Stop in to hear Adam and... more..

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... more..

Adam talked to Jared Forsyth about his journey from untyped javascript to using flow and eventually reasonml.

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.

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.

David Heinemeier Hansson talks to Adam about 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.

Today Adam talks to Shadaj Laddad. What is React? Why do we need front end frameworks at all. Shadaj explains modern front end web development. He also explains why he likes to use react from scala.js and built a framework to make that easy for all.

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.

Adam talks to Author and Clojure advocate Zach Tellman about how great software is built.

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.

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 Dhall configuration language. Today we talk about marketing and tech evangelism.

Adam talks to Hal Abelson about the textbook he coauthored in 1985, The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs and why it is still popular and influential today.

Heather Miller is an Assistant Professor 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... more..

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 bytecode. Throsten Ball answers these questions in this interview with Adam.

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... more..

Today Adam talks to Bartosz Milewski. He is the author of a popular 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... more..

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... more..

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... more..

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 content on building languages implementations... more..

Formal verification and type systems - how do they relate? Niki Vazou is on a mission to bring better formal verification to the masses.

I have done a couple of episodes about dependent types and my feeling is that dependent types are super powerful and have some conceptual simplicity ( Types are a first class... more..

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... more..

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... more..

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... more..

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 for the software we write.

In this interview, he explains these concepts using examples from the real world. Examples include SQL, effectful... more..

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... more..

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... more..

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... more..

You can write more correct software and even rigorous mathematical proofs. Prepare for some mind stretching.

Previous guests like Edwin Brady and Stephanie Weirich have discussed some of the exciting things a dependent type system can do Miles Sabin said dependent types are surely the future. This interview is to get us ready for the... more..

In 1997, researchers analyzed the actual architectures of software in the field. The horrifying results: a large portion were best described by colorful phrases like “big ball of mud” and “sweep it under the rug.”

Wade Waldron talks about designing reactive applications and systems and how to avoid these anti-patterns. We also cover when a... more..

Does God Code in Haskell?

Professor and accomplished programming language researcher Philip Wadler believes that typed lambda calculus was discovered not invented – part of the underpinnings of the universe itself. As a result, functional programming languages are more fundamental and deeply justified than their alternatives.

We talk about this principle, which has guided... more..