I was interviewed for by Signify Technolgies for Scala in the City.
Below is a machine generated transcription.
[0:02] Adam: CoRecursive is a podcast I host. So I’m a professional software engineer and I invite on experts in different areas of software development and I learn from them and the listener gets to learn along with me. So we’ve had interesting topics like functional programming, Scala, Haskell, Rust, concurrency, incident response—cover a broad spectrum of topics.
[0:30] Adam: So I started programming maybe in grade 10. I had a class on Turbo Pascal and it was super fun. And actually I guess I started even earlier than that because I do remember that we had these Commodore 64 in our classroom when I was in elementary school and they had this Logo program where it’s like a little turtle that you can like give instructions to and he draws.
[0:52] Adam: And I remember like we had to write like while loops and then he could make him draw spiral graphs and it was super fun. So ever since then I just loved kind of building things with the computer and yeah, I’ve been playing around with software ever since.
[1:11] Adam: So I listen to a lot of Software Engineering Daily a couple years ago and it was great, a great way for me to learn about some DevOps and distributed systems topics that they were covering a lot. But there was a lot of other areas of software development that I thought weren’t really getting the coverage.
[1:26] Adam: So I ended up reaching out to Jeff, the host, with some suggestions on topics and he invited me to do some guest episodes. So that’s how I got started. First one I did was on Scala Native for SE Daily and it’s just a lot of fun. So I’ve just kept at it.
[1:48] Adam: Software Engineering Daily, obviously since it got me into podcasting, I really like it. There’s also Software Engineering Radio. I think these two shows do a great job of like a deep dive into a technical area.
[2:02] Adam: I also like there’s a—the Data Skeptic podcast. It kind of talks about data science in an approachable way and there’s a podcast called New Rustacean which is all about Rust which I quite enjoy.
[2:13] Adam: And non-technical podcast, they also like Conversations with Tyler. I like a podcast called My Brother, My Brother and Me and a whole bunch of others. I guess I also do a lot of podcasts.
[2:25] Adam: What do I learn from podcasting? That’s a good question. I learn a lot by talking to guests. Like often, you know, I’ll see a great conference talk or read a great article or paper and, you know, I think I’ll understand the issue but I’ll have some, some questions or maybe I’ll misunderstand something.
[2:40] Adam: So it’s great to get the person on, you know, into an interview format where we have like an hour and I can kind of ask them questions in depth, kind of make sure that I’m not misunderstanding certain things. And then kind of explain to me like what motivated them and yeah. So I learned a lot from kind of these in-depth discussions with with experts.
[3:01] Adam: My most valued experience since podcasting. So one for sure is interviewing Phil Wadler. So he is a professor, I think at the University of Edinburgh, and he—he’s had a long and successful career. He invented monads, for instance, along with many other things.
[3:22] Adam: So it took me a while to get the interview with him and I kind of had a plan about the different areas I was gonna ask about. But he’s actually like quite a personality. And so once I started talking to him, like he just took it in lots of different, you know, exciting and fun directions.
[3:37] Adam: He was pulling papers out of his desk, there were old copies of, you know, letters that Bertrand Russell had sent to some other academic and reading them to me. And, you know, just, just a super interesting person to talk to.
[3:48] Adam: I’m not even sure we covered everything that we had planned to cover, but, but he was great. I think that, you know, if I could get like two days of his time and a film crew that we could make some sort of, cups—I Netflix documentary that would blow everybody’s socks off. So Netflix, let me know.
[4:07] Adam: But another one I did was with Bryan Cantrill who has like a long history of building operating systems. And he’s similar—he just kind of has a lot of great insights and is a very animated person to listen to. So that was, that was a very valuable experience for me to hear his perspective.
[4:30] Adam: And a third one, I guess in a different vein, was I interviewed James Buck and he is kind of a bit more of a reserved person. And he has spent a lot of time programming in the early days of Ruby, built a lot of important libraries.
[4:44] Adam: But he kind of got burnt out on it and kind of all, all of this value he was getting out of, you know, programming day and night kind of fell away from him. And we kind of talked about about how he came to terms with that and kind of how he learned to to overcome it and then find value in programming again.
[5:08] Adam: And so that was like a different type of interview that, that I don’t normally do, but I really enjoyed it. It was a valuable experience.
[5:16] Adam: So there’s just so many interesting people, interesting conference videos on YouTube, interesting papers, just a lot of new and exciting things going on in the world of software development.
[5:30] Adam: So the podcast is just a way for me to talk to these people, you know, explore their ideas, help spread their message, help understand their ideas and spread that understanding.
[5:41] Adam: So I have an upcoming interview with Andy Hunt who co-wrote the Pragmatic Programmers—Pragmatic Programmer. And it’s a great book and we talked about like thinking and problem-solving just in kind of a general fashion and how that applies in software development. It’s kind of really the base skill that all software developers need.
[6:03] Adam: And yeah, he’s also written a science fiction book, so we talked about that a little bit. Super interesting interview coming soon.
[6:10] Adam: I have one about refinement types that I think will be interesting. And yeah, I guess just what you can expect is, is just me talking to people who have like ideas that I find exciting and kind of me trying to understand and kind of spread that learning. Yeah, just lots of that coming.