The Curious Engineer

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CoRecursive Podcast

corecursive.com

Welcome to CoRecursive. A Podcast where each episode someone shares the fascinating story behind a piece of software being built. Adam Gordon Bell is the host.

Software / engineering practiceAI / MLComputing history

’05’10’15’20’25
Posts
193 from 15 Sep 2005 to 4 Aug 2026
Posting
monthly (15 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog

2026 13

  1. ai
  2. All Episodes
  3. explainer
  4. The Hutter Prize
  5. The Bitter Lesson#122 Jun 13, 2026 1:00:01I’ve been trying to understand how machine learning actually works. Not use it, but to 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, reward is enough.
  6. The Pre-Training Wall and the Treadmill After It#121 May 9, 2026 56:10I’ve been confusing Don with frontier-lab links late at night for months.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 f
  7. big-tech
  8. Llms
  9. The Aging Programmer#120 Apr 2, 2026 41:00Kate 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
  10. From Hacker News to TikTok#119 Mar 2, 2026 41:32Corey told me about his AI cat reel problem. He found these AI-generated 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 algorith
  11. algorithms
  12. The Universal Paperclip Clicker#118b Feb 4, 2026 10:56Multiple 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 sta
  13. Inside Early Google

2025 14

  1. The Bug He Couldn't Name
  2. Godbolt's Rule
  3. Podcast Update
  4. Coding in the Red-Queen Era
  5. machine-learning
  6. When AI Codes, What’s Left for me?
  7. Coding Through Chaos
  8. redemption
  9. The Power of Context: Reimagining Learning
  10. briffa_sep98_e.pro#110 Apr 2, 2025 57:33Can a single line of code change the way we see science, policy, and trust?In this episode we explore the “Climategate” scandal that erupted from leaked emails and code snippets, fueling doubts about climate science. What starts as an investigation into accusa
  11. HATETRIS
  12. project-origins
  13. One Million Checkboxes
  14. Leaving Stripe

2024 14

  1. Inside Shopify's Layoffs
  2. From Everest to Startups
  3. From Code to Capital
  4. Best Lex Fridman Episodes
  5. Navigating Corporate Giants
  6. From Burnout to Breakthrough
  7. cautionary-tale
  8. security
  9. Coding Machines
  10. Code, Kickflips and Crunch Time
  11. Leaving LinkedIn
  12. personal-journey
  13. Beautiful Code
  14. Code as a Lifeline

2023 14

  1. From 486 to Vue.js
  2. fan-favorites
  3. Platform Takes The Pain
  4. Best Episodes
  5. Sloot Digital Coding System#093 Oct 2, 2023 51:49Lost treasure. Conspiracy theories. Impossible tech demos.Jan Sloot claimed to have invented revolutionary data compression that could fit a full movie into a tiny smart card chip. Top executives and investors witnessed his demos and became true belie
  6. Configuring Identity
  7. The Science of Learning to Code#091 Aug 2, 2023 50:44Learning to code can feel impossible. Like facing a sheer rock wall with no ropes or harnesses. But what if there was a path up the mountain? A trail blazed smooth by master coders who went before?In this episode, we’ll follow that path. We’ll hea
  8. game-development
  9. Quitting (And Then Rejoining) Stack Overflow
  10. From Project Management to Data Compression Innovator#088 May 2, 2023 59:27How do you accomplish something massive over time? I’ve had the chance to meet with a number of exceptional software developers and it’s something I always wonder about.Today, I might have an answer with the incredible story
  11. JSON vs XML
  12. Sun's Mobile Blunders#086 Mar 2, 2023 51:44Shai Almog worked at Sun on Mobile JVMs just as phones started to turn from phones into something else.Sun had deep expertise in mobile development, and unique engineering-driven culture, and relationships with manufacturers and operators. And yet internal
  13. Shipping Graphing Calculator#085 Feb 2, 2023 46:46I’ve been on many projects that get canceled. We’re building cool stuff. We’re going above and beyond, and we’re excited. But the project encounters reality, shifting priorities, or budgeting constraints, and the work never goes anywhere. It always f
  14. The Unfulfilled Engineer

2022 16

  1. Best Coding Podcasts
  2. Best Overall Tech Podcast
  3. DOOMed to Fail: A Horror Story
  4. Software World Tour
  5. Android's Unlikely Success
  6. From Prison To Programming#080 Sep 2, 2022 46:36I believe that getting underrepresented groups into software development is a good thing. This is not a controversial opinion until you start talking about felons.Today’s guest is Rick Wolter. He’s an iOS developer who served 18 years in prison for sec
  7. CPAN#079 Aug 1, 2022 56:02CPAN was the first open-source software module repository. And on this day, Aug 1st, in 1995, CPAN was first announced to a private group of PERL users.And why does this matter? Who is still using PERL anyhow? CPAN inspired everything that would follow: npm, maven, cargo, n
  8. The History and Mystery Of Eliza#078 Jul 5, 2022 44:06I recently got an email from Jeff Shrager, who said he’d been working hard to solve a mystery about some famous code.Eliza, the chatbot, was built in 1964, and she didn’t answer questions like Alexa or Siri. She asked questions. She was a therapi
  9. investigation
  10. Why still 80 columns?#077 Jun 1, 2022 39:22On June 1st, 2014, the following question showed up on hacker news:Why is 80 characters, the standard limit for code width. Why 80?Why not? 79 or 81 or even a hundred.So you probably know what happens next. People started to post their opinions and the comm
  11. LISP in Space#076 May 2, 2022 38:06Have you ever had a unique approach to a problem and been excited to use it, but you’re met with skepticism?Today’s story: what happens if you take someone who’s passionate about LISP and put them in an organization where that’s just not how they write software.Tod
  12. Best Python Bytes Episodes
  13. April Fools' Is Cancelled (2014)#075 Apr 1, 2022 38:51On this day in 2014, “lame april fools’ jokes” were banned from hacker news.Today in our first This-Day-in-History segment, I want to share some of history not just of April Fools’, but of tech pranks in general, all leading up to 2014.Why were p
  14. The Story Graph
  15. Serenity OS
  16. The Internet Is Made of Duct Tape

2021 16

  1. Cocoa Culture
  2. Leaving Debian
  3. The Original Remote Developer
  4. Quines, Polyglot Code and Other Fun Computations
  5. Best Cloud Podcasts
  6. open-source
  7. Full-Time Open Source
  8. The Untold Story of SQLite#066 Jul 2, 2021 38:34On 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
  9. Best Info Sec Podcasts
  10. From Competitive Programming to APL
  11. Smart Contract Rescue#064 May 2, 2021 34:57Today 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
  12. Apple 2001#063 Apr 3, 2021 48:07David 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 pow
  13. historical
  14. Video Game Programming From Scratch
  15. Reinforcement Learning At Facebook
  16. 2020 Year End

2020 19

  1. developer-tools
  2. Frontiers of Performance
  3. The Birth of UNIX#058 Nov 1, 2020 51:09When you work on your computer, there are so many things you take for granted: operating systems, programming languages, they all have to come from somewhere.In the late 1960s and 1970s, that somewhere was Bell Labs, and the operating system they were building
  4. To The Assembly
  5. Memento Mori
  6. We're Teaching Functional Programming Wrong
  7. Software That Doesn't Suck
  8. Unproven Techology Case Study
  9. programming-languages
  10. Krystal's Story
  11. Learning a new language
  12. databases
  13. Portal Abstractions with Sam Ritchie
  14. Loving Legacy Code with Jonathan Boccara
  15. The Reason For Types
  16. Karl L Hughes on Conference Talks
  17. Don and Adam Discuss Folds
  18. David Heinemeier Hansson
  19. React and Scala JS

2019 23

  1. The Business Of Developer Tools
  2. Software in Context
  3. Beautiful and Useless Coding
  4. Tech Evangelism
  5. Language Oriented Design
  6. Open Source Health and Diversity
  7. technical-deep-dive
  8. compilers
  9. Learning About Compilers
  10. Advanced Software Design
  11. Category Theory
  12. Using TypeScript Like A Pro
  13. Rethinking Technological Positivism
  14. How to Build a Programming Language
  15. Best Code Newbie Episodes
  16. Refinement Types
  17. Rethinking Databases
  18. Learning to Think
  19. distributed-systems
  20. Data and Scale
  21. Abstraction and Learning
  22. Modern Systems Programming
  23. Recreational Coding

2018 26

  1. Software as a Reflection of Values
  2. The Little Typer
  3. Big Ball Of Mud
  4. God's Programming Language
  5. Concurrency and Functional Programming
  6. Devops
  7. Test in Production
  8. Domain Driven Design and Micro Services
  9. Typeful Functional Streaming HTTP
  10. Moves and Borrowing In Rust
  11. Dependent Types in Haskell
  12. Microservices Architecture
  13. Rust And Bitter C++ Developers
  14. Distributed Systems
  15. Graphql
  16. PureScript
  17. Throwaway the Irrelevant
  18. Generic Programming
  19. Total Programming Using Swift
  20. Type Driven Development and Idris
  21. Algebraic Domain Modelling using Functions
  22. functional-programming
  23. Design Principles From Functional Programming
  24. Scala at Duolingo
  25. Incident Response
  26. Scala Native

2014 1

  1. A Dark Room - From Code Hobo to Indie Game Developer

2013 1

  1. Best Coding Blocks Episodes

2006 1

  1. ReiserFS

2005 1

  1. Risk Rolls Downhill

Undated 34

  1. Story_types
  2. Technologies
  3. Collections
  4. Adam Gordon Bell
  5. Api
  6. Best Android Podcasts
  7. Best C++ Podcasts
  8. Best Game Development Podcasts
  9. Best GoLang Podcasts
  10. Best JavaScript Podcasts
  11. Best Linux Podcasts
  12. Best PHP Podcasts
  13. Python init
  14. Python
  15. Reply all
  16. Ruby
  17. Software engineering radio
  18. Talk python to me
  19. The change log
  20. The real python podcast
  21. Web design
  22. Debug
  23. Guest guide
  24. Links
  25. Book
  26. Book2
  27. Newsletter
  28. Reinforcement
  29. Donate
  30. Supporters
  31. Record
  32. Slack
  33. Rankings
  34. How works