CoRecursive: Coding Stories

This episode features a fictional story about software developers debugging code, exploring themes of technology and self-discovery, followed by guest reflections on the podcast's 100th episode.

The host shares his personal experience of being laid off, using trail running as a coping mechanism, and reflects on finding meaning through goal-setting and balancing career ambitions with family life.

The host shares a personal anecdote about a humorous coding mistake during the H1N1 era to illustrate the chaotic software development practices of the time and the transition to more structured processes like code reviews.

This episode tells the story of Jason McDonald, who overcame a traumatic brain injury to become a senior Python developer and teacher, exploring how coding became a lifeline during his recovery and career transformation.

This episode explores how social media algorithms, particularly on platforms like Instagram, learn user preferences and create addictive content loops, using AI-generated cat videos as a case study.

This episode explores Spotify's 2016 challenge of preparing for an IPO while dealing with vulnerabilities in their CI infrastructure, specifically over 200 bespoke Jenkins instances causing complexity and duplication.

This episode explores the viral game 'One Million Checkboxes' and its creator Nolan Royalty's experiences with internet chaos, misuse, and security concerns.

This episode explores the personal crisis of Chef founder Adam Jacob as he grapples with low morale at his company and delivers an emotional, inspirational speech to rally his team.

A personal story about the emotional impact of being involved in layoffs at a tech company, focusing on a specific experience with a colleague named Josh.

This episode explores how abstractions in technology, particularly in database design and disk interfaces, can be misleading simplifications that hide the complex realities underneath, affecting performance and debugging.

The host provides a quick update on the podcast's status, reflecting on the challenges of maintaining consistency and teasing upcoming episodes on software injustice and an interview.

Adam Gordon Bell reflects on his realization that communication, rather than pure technical skill, is what makes influential software developers stand out, as he prepares to be interviewed about his career and this insight.

A developer describes using an AI tool called Clod to successfully refactor a messy Python codebase into a clean, modular pipeline system in just 19 minutes.

This episode tells the story of a burnt-out computer science professor who finds renewal by teaching programming to underprivileged 12-year-olds, leading to profound insights about education and diversity.

This episode explores the personal struggles of fitting in and the hidden costs of being different in the tech industry through the story of John Walker's journey with addiction and recovery.

This episode explores Mick West's journey from college to becoming the lead programmer of Tony Hawk Pro Skater, delving into the game's creation and the pivotal moments that led to its success.

A developer shares personal reflections on the paradox of modern coding productivity and the challenge of meaningful learning in a rapidly changing technological landscape.

This bonus episode features an interview with Ron Garrett about his experiences at early Google, including the creation of AdWords, following a previous episode about Lisp usage at NASA.

This episode tells the story of venture capitalist Tom Perkins' encounter with Jan Sloot's revolutionary video compression technology, which promised to defy information theory and make Sloot the richest man in the world.

This episode features John Dillamott's candid story about his journey to get a job at Stripe, his experiences working there, and his eventual departure, exploring themes of identity, relationships, and company culture.

A Microsoft developer shares his 15-year personal struggle with an unnamed issue that affected his professional and family life, revealing the hidden emotional challenges behind his confident public persona.

This episode explores the story of ReiserFS, a Linux filesystem, through the lens of its creator Hans Reiser, who is in prison for murdering his wife, examining the ethical complexities of separating software from its developer's crimes.

This episode explores the real-life consequences of a software bug in the UK Post Office's Horizon system that led to wrongful convictions and examines the ethical responsibilities of software developers when systems fail.

This episode features Tim Chen discussing his challenging transition from a software engineer working on cloud infrastructure to venture capitalism, highlighting cultural barriers like dress codes and communication styles in VC firms.

This episode explores Amir Rajan's journey from career frustration to indie game development, highlighting how side projects can reignite creative passion in software work.

This episode explores how context and environment can dramatically affect learning, using personal anecdotes and Steve Krause's childhood struggles with math to illustrate the challenges and breakthroughs in education.

The host explores how AI coding agents challenge developers' identities tied to building things, offering a pragmatic perspective on embracing technological change despite resistance.

This episode tells the story of two friends, Dave and Felipe, who became obsessed with a challenging JavaScript game called Hatetris, ultimately achieving the world record after months of dedication.

This episode explores a senior staff engineer's story of leaving LinkedIn due to a clash between his core values of engineering excellence and the company's demands for expediency.

This episode explores Evan You's journey with Vue.js, focusing on the controversial introduction of the Composition API for Vue 3.0 and the community backlash from both simple and complex application users.

The host shares his personal experience learning to code in high school and introduces an episode exploring research-backed methods for effectively learning programming.

The host shares a personal story about his first software development job, describing the office environment and how he learned professional skills through online blogs like those of Jeff Atwood and Martin Fowler, hinting at a connection to Stack Overflow.

This episode explores the story of Jeffrey Snover and the creation of PowerShell, focusing on software development history and the host's personal career transition in developer relations.

Adam Gordon-Bell profiles Andreas Kling, a former Apple WebKit engineer who built an entire operating system called SerenityOS from a blank Git repository, alone, starting in 2018 during recovery from addiction.

Adam Gordon-Bell tells the story of Ron Avitzur, a programmer who in 1993 refused to let the Apple Graphing Calculator be cancelled and instead snuck back onto Apple's campus for months to finish shipping it.

Chet Haas shares the story of Android's early days, from its startup origins to becoming a dominant mobile OS.

Adam Gordon-Bell interviews Ron Garrett, a robotics and AI researcher who worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory from the late 1980s through the 1990s and was instrumental in using Lisp to build the autonomous control software for the prototypes that eventually led to the Sojourner Mars rover, which landed in 1997.

Adam Gordon-Bell tells the story of Rebecca Ann Heinemann, known as Burger Becky, who won the first national Atari Space Invaders tournament at age fifteen, escaped an abusive home to sleep behind dumpsters, and became one of the video game industry's premier porting specialists at Interplay.

This episode explores how a spreadsheet error in a Harvard economists' paper on debt-to-GDP ratios led to flawed austerity policies that devastated economies like Greece's.

Shai Almag shares the untold story of Sun Microsystems' mobile blunders, from developing JVMs and the Luit UI toolkit to internal politics that stifled innovation.

Host Adam Gordon-Bell shares his early career insecurity about being colorblind in web design, then interviews senior developer Donald McKay about his formative years at a chaotic startup, Initech.

Host Adam Gordon-Bell tells the career story of Sun Lung, an open source contributor to Bazel, Git, and GitLab who grew up in Asia, studied computer science at the University of Waterloo, and eventually found his professional home by learning to read the cultural fit of software workplaces the way a musician learns to recognize a genre.

Doug Crockford shares the story of JSON's creation, from his early skepticism of JavaScript to battling XML's dominance in web development.

Adam Gordon-Bell tells the story of Yan Collet, a French project manager who spent his evenings writing data compression algorithms as a hobby and eventually created LZ4 and ZStandard — two of the most widely deployed compression libraries in the world, running inside Linux, Hadoop, databases, and the Large Hadron Collider.

CoRecursive host Adam Gordon Bell traces the origin of CPAN, the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network, which launched in 1994 as the first open-source software module repository and directly inspired every package manager that followed — npm, PyPI, RubyGems, Cargo, Maven, and others.

The episode explores the historical and practical reasons behind the 80-column code width limit, tracing it back to IBM punch cards.

Adam Gordon-Bell interviews Nadia Odunayo, founder and CEO of The StoryGraph, about how she built a viral book-tracking and recommendation platform that grew to compete directly with Amazon's Goodreads.

This episode explores the history and mystery of Eliza, the first chatbot created in 1964, through an interview with Jeff Schrager who uncovers the lost original code.

Host Adam Gordon-Bell tells the story of Rick Walter, an iOS developer who taught himself to code in prison after being convicted of killing a man during a fight at a party when he was a teenager, and who has spent years since his release trying to prove that a criminal record does not define a person.

CoRecursive host Adam Gordon Bell presents a This Day in History segment on April 1, 2014, when Hacker News moderator Dan G posted a challenge asking users to flag tech company April Fools jokes as lame, effectively marking the end of an era of elaborate corporate pranks.

Adam Gordon-Bell and Kate Gregory examine why software developers worry about aging, with Gregory’s survey finding that 75% were worried or very worried about eyesight.

CoRecursive: Coding Stories brings Adam Gordon-Bell, Crystal Mohn, and Donald McKay together to examine strange computing facts, including why browsers identify themselves as “Mozilla 5.0.” The discussion covers Null Island, illegal prime numbers encoding DCSS, and Bill Zimmerman publishing PGP source code as a book.

Hanson Hsu recalls joining Apple’s classic Mac operating-system team on October 4, 1999, as Mac OS 9 gave way to the Next-derived Mac OS X.

CoRecursive host Adam Gordon-Bell interviews Debian developer Joey Hess about spending 18 years building software in a volunteer open-source project.

CoRecursive: Coding Stories follows Adam Gordon-Bell’s conversation with Paul Lutus, who built NASA shuttle lights, Apple World, and AppleWriter from remote Oregon.

Host Adam interviews Charity Majors about debugging production issues in distributed systems.

Host Adam interviews Ross Baker about HTTP4S, a functional programming web framework, discussing the benefits of referentially transparent code.

An interview with Jim Blandy, co-author of Programming Rust, discussing Rust's ownership and borrowing concepts.

Host Adam interviews professor Stephanie Wyrick about dependent types in Haskell and their implications for software development.

Host Adam interviews distributed systems expert Jan Machacek about decomposing monolithic apps and designing distributed systems.