CoRecursive: Coding Stories

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 that's just not how they write software.

Today's story is about getting LISP into space.

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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 up to 2014.

Why were pranks and April Fools' jokes traditionally celebrated in tech? Why are they now considered as dang said, "lame?"? And is there anything we can do to save them? Those are today's questions.

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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 would end up spreading virally. She didn't know that it would end up competing with an Amazon product. She didn't know that keeping it up would be something that would drive her close to tears.

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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. But actually, it is possible to build an operating system from scratch. My guest is doing it. Andreas Kling created SerenityOS starting from an empty Git repository. So today, I find out how he did it, how this is possible. But mainly today, I find out why. Why build an operating system from scratch? And it all started in the 2010s when Andreas worked at Apple.

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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 about it. And I want to tell people about it. And so today is a chance for Don and Krystal and I to share some of these "Oh, my God. Did you guys see this?" stories.

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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 built.

The team where people roll their eyes at UX feedback will not have as simple of a product as a team where the user experience is highly valued.

If software performance isn't valued, the end result won't be performant.

Today, I found an expert on observing developer cultures. Hansen Hsu worked on the AppKit team at Apple, and he's here to talk about this mushy concept called culture. How does it manifest? How does it affect what people build? And how can it lead to beautiful software?

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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 it's almost all good.

It's a story about open source software, but it's also about community and teamwork

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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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You can support the podcast and encourage me to keep making it on patreon.

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.

Sponsor the podcast:

If you go to patreon.com/adamgordonbell, you can find the Patreon page for the podcast, and if you are enjoying these episodes and want me to keep putting more time into them, think about setting up a recurring donation.

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