CoRecursive: Coding Stories

By Adam Gordon Bell - Software Developer

Tech News Education

What's CoRecursive: Coding Stories about?

The stories and people behind the code. Hear stories of software development from interesting people.

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LAST EPISODE

Story: Platform Takes The Pain

11.02.2023

How did Spotify scale from 10 engineers to 100s to 1000s ...without slowing down? Without becoming corporate? Facing an IPO deadline, Pia Nilsson worked with 300 teams to transform how Spotify built software. She spearheaded a movement that led them ...

CoRecursive: Coding Stories episodes:

11.02.2023 Story: Platform Takes The Pain How did Spotify scale from 10 engineers to 100s to 1000s ...without slowing down? Without becoming corporate? Facing an IPO deadline, Pia Nilsson worked with 300 teams to transform how Spotify built software. She spearheaded a movement that led them ...
10.02.2023 Story: Sloot Digital Coding System Lost treasure. Conspiracy theories. Impossible tech demos. Jan Sloot claimed to have invented revolutionary data compression that could fit a full movie into a tiny smart card chip. Top executives and investors witnessed his demos and became true believers, ready ...
09.01.2023 Story: Configuring Identity: Adam Jacob and the Search for Self in Software Today, we go behind the scenes at Chef - the game changing infrastructure automation tool. Adam Jacob created Chef, and it became a massively popular DevOps tool. But despite Chef's success, Adam constantly battled self-doubt and finding his footing as ...
08.02.2023 The Science of Learning to Code Learning to code can feel impossible. Like facing a sheer rock wall with no ropes or harnesses. But what if there was a path up the mountain? A trail blazed smooth by master coders who went before? In this episode, ...
07.03.2023 Story: A Dark Room Have you ever been frustrated with your job? Maybe not burnt out, but getting close to there? You used to love what you did, and it felt so creative and empowering, but then it starts to feel a bit more ...
06.02.2023 Story: Quitting (And Then Rejoining) Stack Overflow Today, we meet Ben Dumke-von der Ehe, one of the early developers on the Stack Overflow team. He was on the front lines as the platform transformed how programmers worked. And he embodies the spirit of Stack Overflow: Its transparency, ...
05.02.2023 Story: From Project Management to Data Compression Innovator How do you accomplish something massive over time? I've had the chance to meet with a number of exceptional software developers and it's something I always wonder about. Today, I might have an answer with the incredible story of Yann ...
04.03.2023 Story: JSON vs XML Today's guest is Douglas Crockford. He's sharing the story of JSON, his discovery of JavaScript's good parts, and his approach to finding a simple way to build software. Also, his battles against XML, against complexity, his battles to say that ...
03.02.2023 Story: Sun's Mobile Blunders Shai Almog worked at Sun on Mobile JVMs just as phones started to turn from phones into something else. Sun had deep expertise in mobile development, and amazing engineering driven culture and relationships with manufacturers and operators. And yet interal ...
02.02.2023 Story: Shipping Graphing Calculator I've been on many projects that get canceled. We're building cool stuff. We're going above and beyond, and we're excited. But the project encounters reality, shifting priorities, or budgeting constraints, and the work never goes anywhere. It always feels tragic, ...
01.02.2023 Story: The Unfulfilled Engineer Nothing good comes from being insecure about your worth, especially at your job. That's what today's episode is about. That's what today's guest is here to discuss. It's a slow burn, but if you listen to the end, I think ...
12.02.2022 Story: DOOMed to Fail Today Rebecca Burger Becky Heineman shares the tale of porting Doom to the 3DO console under extreme conditions. There is an engine to tweak, deadlines to hit, hardware acceleration to get working, and dramatic rock anthems to record. We also ...
11.02.2022 Story: Software World Tour Today story is from Son Luong Ngoc who shares what’s it was like for him to work and live in many different countries around the world, including working for AliBaba at the Xixi campus in Hangzhou, China. It’s a story ...
10.03.2022 Story: Android's Unlikely Success What could you accomplish if your teammates were all excited and determined to hit some project timelines? What is it like for a group of people to give it all they have? That's what today is about. Chet Haase from ...
09.02.2022 Story: From Prison To Programming I believe that getting underrepresented groups into software development is a good thing. This is not a controversial opinion until you start talking about felons. Today's guest is Rick Wolter. He's an iOS developer who served 18 years in prison ...
08.01.2022 CPAN - This Day In History CPAN was the first open-source software module repository. And on this day, Aug 1st, in 1995, CPAN was first announced to a private group of PERL users. If you are building things today by pulling in various packages from various ...
07.05.2022 Story: The History and Mystery Of Eliza I recently got an email from Jeff Shrager, who said he'd been working hard to solve a mystery about some famous code. Eliza, the chatbot, was built in 1964, and she didn't answer questions like Alexa or Siri. She asked ...
06.01.2022 Chat: Why still 80 columns? On June 1st, 2014, the following question showed up on hacker news: "Why is 80 characters, the standard limit for code width." You probably know what happens next. People started to post their opinions and the comments and other people ...
05.02.2022 Story: LISP in Space Have you ever had a unique approach to a problem and been excited to use it, but you're met with skepticism? Today's story: what happens if you take someone who's passionate about LISP and put them in an organization where ...
04.01.2022 Chat: April Fools' Is Cancelled On this day in 2014 "lame april fools' jokes" were banned from hacker news. Today in our first This-Day-in-History segment, I want to share some of history not just of April Fools', but of tech pranks in general, all leading ...
03.02.2022 Story: The Story Graph with Nadia Odunayo Whenever I work on a side project, I can't help but daydream of it taking off in a big way. For today's guests, something like that did happen. When Nadia started building her side project, she didn't know that it ...
02.01.2022 Story: Serenity OS How would you build an operating system? My answer is I wouldn't. First off, I don't know how. And the second thing is it seems like to large of a task. It took thousands of developers to build Windows XP. ...
01.02.2022 Chat: The Internet Is Made of Duct Tape Today, I have two of my favorite guests together: Krystal Maughan and Don McKay. We are going to be sharing strange and interesting facts about computing. I'm super pumped about this because, sometimes, I learn something new, and I'm excited ...
12.02.2021 Story: Cocoa Culture The last episode, I said I wasn't sure there was such a thing as culture, but that's not the case. Every place I've worked has been a bit different, and often those differences had huge impacts on the software we ...
11.02.2021 Story: Leaving Debian 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 ...
10.04.2021 Story: The Original Remote Developer 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 ...
09.02.2021 Chat: Quines, Polygot Code, and Other Fun Computations 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 ...
08.02.2021 Story: Full-Time Open Source 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 ...
07.02.2021 Story: The Untold Story of SQLite 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 ...
06.02.2021 Story: From Competitive Programming to APL 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? ...
05.02.2021 Story: Ethereum Rescue 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 ...
04.03.2021 Story: Apple 2001 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 ...
03.01.2021 Story: Video Game Programming From Scratch 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 ...
02.01.2021 Story: Reinforcement Learning At Facebook with Jason Gauci 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 ...
01.01.2021 Chat: 2020 Year End 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 ...
12.01.2020 Story: Frontiers of Performance with Daniel Lemire 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 ...
11.01.2020 Story: The Birth of Unix with Brian Kernighan 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 ...
10.01.2020 Story: To The Assembly 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 ...
09.01.2020 Story: Memento Mori 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 ...
08.03.2020 Story: We are teaching Functional Programming Wrong 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 ...
07.01.2020 Story: Software That Doesn't Suck With Jim Blandy 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 ...
06.10.2020 Story: Unproven Tech Case Study with Sean Allen 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 ...
05.18.2020 Story: Krystal's Story 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 ...
05.06.2020 Story: Learning a new language with Bruce Tate 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 ...
04.17.2020 Story: Portal Abstractions with Sam Ritchie 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 ...
04.03.2020 Chat: Loving Legacy Code with Jonathan Boccara 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 ...
03.16.2020 Tech Talk: The Reason For Types with Jared Forsyth on ReasonML and Javascript 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 ...
03.02.2020 Tech Talk: Karl L Hughes on Speaking and Conference Talks 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 ...
02.15.2020 Chat: Don and Adam discuss folds 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 ...
02.01.2020 Story: David Heinemeier Hansson, Software Contrarian 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 ...

Older episodes

CoRecursive: Coding Stories

What's CoRecursive: Coding Stories about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

CoRecursive: Coding Stories episodes:

Story: Platform Takes The Pain

Story: Sloot Digital Coding System

Story: Configuring Identity: Adam Jacob and the Search for Self in Software

The Science of Learning to Code

Story: A Dark Room

Story: Quitting (And Then Rejoining) Stack Overflow

Story: From Project Management to Data Compression Innovator

Story: JSON vs XML

Story: Sun's Mobile Blunders

Story: Shipping Graphing Calculator

Story: The Unfulfilled Engineer

Story: DOOMed to Fail

Story: Software World Tour

Story: Android's Unlikely Success

Story: From Prison To Programming

CPAN - This Day In History

Story: The History and Mystery Of Eliza

Chat: Why still 80 columns?

Story: LISP in Space

Chat: April Fools' Is Cancelled

Story: The Story Graph with Nadia Odunayo

Story: Serenity OS

Chat: The Internet Is Made of Duct Tape

Story: Cocoa Culture

Story: Leaving Debian

Story: The Original Remote Developer

Chat: Quines, Polygot Code, and Other Fun Computations

Story: Full-Time Open Source

Story: The Untold Story of SQLite

Story: From Competitive Programming to APL

Story: Ethereum Rescue

Story: Apple 2001

Story: Video Game Programming From Scratch

Story: Reinforcement Learning At Facebook with Jason Gauci

Chat: 2020 Year End

Story: Frontiers of Performance with Daniel Lemire

Story: The Birth of Unix with Brian Kernighan

Story: To The Assembly

Story: Memento Mori

Story: We are teaching Functional Programming Wrong

Story: Software That Doesn't Suck With Jim Blandy

Story: Unproven Tech Case Study with Sean Allen

Story: Krystal's Story

Story: Learning a new language with Bruce Tate

Story: Portal Abstractions with Sam Ritchie

Chat: Loving Legacy Code with Jonathan Boccara

Tech Talk: The Reason For Types with Jared Forsyth on ReasonML and Javascript

Tech Talk: Karl L Hughes on Speaking and Conference Talks

Chat: Don and Adam discuss folds

Story: David Heinemeier Hansson, Software Contrarian