Podcast profile
By Adam Gordon Bell - Software Developer
The stories and people behind the code. Hear stories of software development from interesting people.
Latest episode
53 min
Topics
Application architecture, modularity, APIs, maintainability, and technical design decisions.
Language design, runtimes, compilers, syntax, and language-specific engineering practice.
Historical development of technologies, companies, industries, and computing culture.
Formats
Host-led conversation where a guest supplies most of the subject matter.
Structured stories using chronology, scenes, characters, and production.
Audience level
Regularly assumes specialist knowledge and discusses implementation, architecture, protocols, code, or research in depth.
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Episodes shown — 10 of 25
I texted Don about a side gig: €5,000 for every 1% you shave off a zip file. It's a real contest. For 20 years, Marcus Hutter has offered €500,000 to anyone who can losslessly compress a gigabyte of Wikipedia below 110 megabytes. Gzip gets you to 322. After that you're on your own. So we tried. Run-length encoding.
I've been trying to understand how machine learning actually works. Not use it, understand it, down to the ifs and loops. How does a program built out of plain conditionals get better on its own? So late one night I sent Don a paper. Three words in the title: reward is enough.
I've been confusing Don with frontier-lab links late at night for a bit. Ilya Sutskever told a NeurIPS audience that pre-training as we know it would unquestionably end. There's only one internet, and the data isn't growing. The frontier labs call this the pre-training wall.
Kate Gregory has been writing C++ for over forty years. Books, keynotes, a consulting firm she built from the ground up. At sixty-three, she's one of the most experienced programmers alive. She surveyed hundreds of software engineers about getting older. What scares you? What's changed? What have you lost?
Corey told me about his AI cat reel problem. He found these AI-genearted cat videos hilarious. Who makes these? He kept sending them to his wife. Then he tried to stop watching and he couldn't. So I went down the rabbit hole of how social media algorithms actually work. It starts simple. Upvote, downvote, sort by time.
Multiple VS Code windows. "Agent stopping" in a robot voice. A laptop stand on the treadmill so Claude can keep working while I run. The Big Rich sitting unread by the fireplace while I check if the migration's done. Somewhere along the way, I started reorganizing my life around keeping the machine spinning.
Ron Garret left JPL for a 100-person startup he'd just discovered on Usenet. Four a.m. alarms. Burbank to San Jose on Southwest. A rented room in Susan Wojcicki's house. He expected the search engine engineering and instead he got asked to build ad serving.
Imagine facing a problem you can't name, something that feels bigger than any bug you've ever had to fix. How do you debug your own mind when you don't even know what's wrong? Burke Holland's story starts with a college party and a bad trip that leaves a deeper mark than he expects. Sleep gets harder. Fear creeps in.
What do you do when your code breaks and the only fix is to dig into the runtime below? Matt Godbolt lives for that. Tile-based renderers, color-coded scanlines, zero-copy NICs—each story is a clue that leads past the abstraction to the real machine.
What if a software bug drained your savings, ruined your reputation, and nobody believed it wasn't your fault? Scott Darlington took over a village post office, hoping to give his family a steady life. But the software system kept showing cash shortfalls he couldn't explain.