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 software for Apple. But the kind of surprising thing is he did this in the 1970s! And he did it so well he became rich and even briefly quite famous.

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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.

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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 news feedback, how to improve upon the C programming language and how to be super ambitious without seeming arrogant.

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Zig

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 project and having it grow beyond your wildest ambitions. It's the story of following that success wherever it leads: From relationships with tech-giants to interesting testing procedures and more.

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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.

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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 each other

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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 struggles of building file systems and working on really short timelines and having development plans upended by Steve jobs.

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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 and understand fundamentals from Casey.

Casey has a lesson about learning and teaching for us all.

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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.

ReAgent.ai

Programming Throwdown

Episode Bonus

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-end

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https://rebrand.ly/corec_slack

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https://twitter.com/adamgordonbell