CoRecursive: Coding Stories

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 and explain how you would apply her 5 pieces of advice to your career as a software developer to help you to build a remarkable career for yourself.

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Gregory Consulting Limited

Kate's Classes in Pluralsight

Include CPP

Kate's Blog

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 developers learn best.

In this episode, Richard Feldman delves into Elm, his approach, and how to make teaching delightful.

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Book: Elm in Action

A Taze of ATS

Elm Language

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 he approached the question: "What's the worst software that you use every day?"

"Everybody likes imaginary code because imaginary code is always perfect." -Jim Blandy

"You don't want to maximize engagement with your version control system. You just want it to do its job and get out of the way. And so basically if somebody says, you know, this doesn't suck. That's actually pretty much exactly the right thing." - Jim Blandy

"If you're making a series of small incremental changes to a large data structure, then the way that the persistent data structures are trying really hard to share as much data as possible really works in your favor." -Jim Blandy

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Links:

• Subversion
• Jim's Email
• Mercurial
• GNU Emacs

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 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 fire hose of events and perform customer's specific calculations on them but the latency needs to be less than a millisecond and the calculations might be CPU intensive. Who would need something like this? The initial use case was risk systems for Wall Street banks.

"Basically programming languages are tools. It's not about ergonomics, it's not about developer experience, it's not about all the things that we normally talk about, it's about getting the job right. For whatever that means it's a means to an end." - Sean Allen

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Links:

• Martin Thompson - Low Latency JVM
• Basho - Riak
• Haskell Quicksort
• Pony Talk
• Pony Lang

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 journey as she chased her curiosity in programming wherever it led her.

"Everybody has that moment when everything's shiny, you know when it's new and you walk on to campus like Google or whatever. Like the first time, I went to Google IO and I just thought it was like, this is insane."

"If you like to learn things, I think that's a gift. I think that's not something that everybody has."

"I think that seeing programming in different ways and seeing that it could be this kind of fun thing that you could break apart and find different ways of executing."

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Links:

• Krystal's Blog

• Her GSOC Project

• Interview with Krystal

• Full Timeline of Krystal's Journey

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.

"I find that learning a new language mixes a lot of joy in that pain, and that's when I grow most rapidly as a developer."

"You can't break somebody else through their own pain. They have to learn their own lessons, and they have to, at some point in the model, they have to feel more and more pain to break through to the expert."

"When you visit other places, when you learn other languages, the world gets smaller."

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Links:

• 7 Languages in 7 Weeks Book
• 7 More Languages
• Joy Talk

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 by training.

Stop in to hear Adam and Sam's conversation about portal abstractions that let you leverage work from other fields. You cannot miss this episode!

"And that's really all we want to do. Like, we want things where you can pause and wait a while and then load it back out and keep going." - Sam Ritchie

"I'm aiming to implement these interfaces and pass these tests and then being able to immediately turn around and have like an approximate sliding window counter that would just work with stripes, like entire machine learning feature generation interface." - Sam Ritchie

"I'm really passionate about and the reason this stuff's important is. You want to go mine the literature of what other people have done. You know you want to go be able to plug these things into your work and really just benefit from this incredible community that's been cranking for, you know, again, maybe hundreds of years." - Sam Ritchie

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Sam's Blog

Summing Bird

Algebird

Reinforcement Learning

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 mindset to effectively work with legacy code by using his approach and processes.

"An important message I'm trying to get across is that you should not complain if you don't, in turn, intend to improve the code." - Jonathan Boccara

"That would be any critique that's technical. One thing that comes up very often is levels of obstruction. If I had to sum up best practices in, in three words, that would be those levels of obstruction." - Jonathan Boccara

"The point of code is to make a piece of software run and to make it run in a way that will make customers happy. " - Jonathan Boccara

Episode Page

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Links:

• Fluent C++
• SE Radio: Understanding Legacy Code
• Counting words in your code

Tech Talks are in-depth technical discussions.

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

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"I mean, I was, I'll admit it I was definitely in the: 'I was scarred by Java and C plus plus in an intro to programming class and I never want to look at types again' Camp"

"My first language was Python and followed closely by Javascript. And so I was, I was loving the loosey goosey scripting language. My first experience of using types in JavaScript, I was like is this going to be terrible? Because there's so much overhead in Java and C plus, plus you have to write types for literally everything."

Links:

• Springboard Scholarship
• Reason Town Podcast
• ReasonML
• Jared's Talk on ReasonML
• React with Reason Talk
• Types in Javascript

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 to speak at conferences until I was at least seven or eight years into my software development career. So. Just a couple of years ago and before that, I think what helped build confidence was speaking occasionally at meetups. I started talking occasionally at local code bootcamps, just kind of getting to be in front of a crowd and start to build up some like level of self-assuredness and eventually I think the next step was just obvious. I wanted to push myself to do something a little scarier and bigger, and that was like, get in front of people at a real conference. "

"And so it is scary. Partly also it's that, you know, because it was my first time, I didn't really know what to expect. I had only been to a couple of tech conferences before. I didn't know what the audiences were going to be like. If there was kind of be this like big tomato throwing thing at the end, they're all just bashed me or if it was going to be like a more of a friendly conversation."

Show notes:

• CFP Land
• Karl's Personal Site
• Washing Machine Guy Talk
• episode webpage