CoRecursive: Coding Stories

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

Slack Channel:

https://rebrand.ly/corec_slack

Twitter:

https://twitter.com/adamgordonbell

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 get up followers. Today, he's gonna share his story. It involves time at a research lab, teaching students in a new way. It will also involve upending people's assumptions about IO performance. Elon Musk And Julia Roberts will come up a little bit more than you might expect.

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Links:

Daniel's Blog

Daniel's Github

Parsing JSON Really Quickly: Lessons Learned

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 be ported to other computers.

In this episode, Brain will go in-depth on how the UNIX was built.

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"If you wanted, you could go sit in your office and think deep thoughts or program, or write on your own blackboard or whatever, but then come back to the common space when you wanted to." - Brian Kernighan

"I found it easier to program when I was trying to figure out the logic for myself rather than trying to figure out where in the infinite stack of documentation was the function I needed. So for me, programming is more like creating something rather than looking it up, and too much of today's programming is more like looking it up." - Brian Kernighan

"If what I find challenging or hard or whatever is also something that other people find hard or challenging or whatever, then if I do something that will improve my lot, I'm perhaps improving their lot at the same time." - Brian Kernighan

Links:

Brian's Homepage

Book: Unix: A History and a Memoir

Book: Millions, Billions, Zillions: Defending Yourself in a World of Too Many Numbers

Book: Understanding the Digital World: What You Need to Know about Computers, the Internet, Privacy, and Security

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 today's interview.

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Links:

Compiler Explorer

Matt's Github

Matt's Blog

Matt's YouTube