Signals and Threads – Détails, épisodes et analyse

Liora Friedberg is a Production Engineer at Jane Street with a background in economics and computer science. In this episode, Liora and Ron discuss how production engineering blends high-stakes puzzle solving with thoughtful software engineering, as the people doing support build tools to make that support less necessary. They also discuss how Jane Street uses both tabletop simulation and hands-on exercises to train Production Engineers; what skills effective Production Engineers have in common; and how to create a culture where people aren’t blamed for making costly mistakes.

You can find the transcript for this episode  on our website.

Some links to topics that came up in the discussion:

• More about production engineering at Jane Street, including how to apply.
• Notes on Site reliability engineering in the wider world.
• Alarm fatigue and desensitization.
• Jane Street’s 1950’s era serialization-format of choice,
• Some games that Streeters have used for training people to respond to incidents.

Erin Murphy is Jane Street’s first UX designer, and before that, she worked at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory building user interfaces for space missions. She’s also an illustrator with her own quarterly journal. In this episode, Erin and Ron discuss the challenge of doing user-centered design in an organization where experts are used to building tools for themselves. How do you bring a command-line interface to the web without making it worse for power users? They also discuss how beauty in design is more about utility than aesthetics; what Jane Street looks for in UX candidates; and how to help engineers discover what their users really want.

You can find the transcript for this episode  on our website.

Some links to topics that came up in the discussion:

• Erin’s website that shows off her work.
• Her quarterly journal of sketches and observations.
• An article about Erin’s design work with NASA JPL.
• A paper that among other things talks about the user study work that Erin did at JPL.
• Jane Street’s current UX job opening.

James Somers is Jane Street’s writer-in-residence, splitting his time between English and OCaml, and helping to push forward all sorts of efforts around knowledge-sharing at Jane Street. In this episode, James and Ron talk about the role of technical writing in an organization like Jane Street, and how engineering software relates to editing prose.

You can find the transcript for this episode  on our website.

Some links to topics that came up in the discussion:

• mdx, the modified Markdown format that supports executing OCaml code blocks
• More on the 4 types of technical writing that James references
• Donald Knuth’s original book on Literate Programming
• More on John McPhee’s use of KEDIT
• Peter Seibel’s Coders at Work
• David Goodsell’s The Machinery of Life
• Scott Huler’s Defining the Wind

Some of James’s writing on our tech blog

Signals & Threads is back, and we have a fun season of topics lined up, including: Building better abstractions for design and user interfaces, the role of writing in a technical organization, the approach that different languages take to memory management...and more. We hope you’ll join us. The first episode drops September 1st.

In this week's episode, the season 1 finale, Ron speaks with Jeanne, Matt, and Grace, three former tech interns at Jane Street who have returned as full-timers. They talk about the experience of being an intern at Jane Street, the types of projects that interns work on, and how they've found the transition to full-time work.

You can find the transcript for this episode along with links to things we discussed on our website.

Despite a steady trickle of newcomers, email still reigns supreme as the chief communication mechanism for the Information Age. At Jane Street, it’s just as critical as anywhere, but there’s one difference: the system at the heart of our email infrastructure is homegrown. This week, Ron talks to Dominick LoBraico, an engineer working on Jane Street’s technology infrastructure, about how and why we built Mailcore, an email server written and configured in OCaml. They delve into questions around how best to represent the configuration of a complex system, when you should build your own and when you shouldn’t, and the benefits of bringing a code-focused approach to solving systems problems.

You can find the transcript for this episode along with links to things we discussed on our website.

Equal parts science and art, programming language design is very much an unsolved problem. This week, Ron speaks with Leo White, from Jane Street's Tools & Compilers team, about cutting-edge language features, future work happening on OCaml, and Jane Street's relationship with the broader open-source community. The conversation covers everything from the paradox of language popularity, to advanced type system features like modular implicits and dependent types. Listen in, no programming languages PhD required!

You can find the transcript for this episode along with links to things we discussed on our website.

Clock synchronization, keeping all of the clocks on your network set to the “correct” time, sounds straightforward: our smartphones sure don’t seem to have trouble with it. Next, keep them all accurate to within 100 microseconds, and prove that you did -- now things start to get tricky. In this episode, Ron talks with Chris Perl, a systems engineer at Jane Street about the fundamental difficulty of solving this problem at scale and how we solved it.

You can find the transcript for this episode along with links to things we discussed on our website.

A conversation with Laurent Mazare about how your choice of programming language interacts with the kind of work you do, and in particular about the tradeoffs between Python and OCaml when doing machine learning and data analysis. Ron and Laurent discuss the tradeoffs between working in a text editor and a Jupyter Notebook, the importance of visualization and interactivity, how tools and practices vary between language ecosystems, and how language features like borrow-checking in Rust and ref-counting in Swift and Python can make machine learning easier.

You can find the transcript for this episode along with links to things we discussed on our website.

It’s a software engineer’s dream: A compiler that can take idiomatic high-level code and output maximally efficient instructions. Ron’s guest this week is Greta Yorsh, who has worked on just that problem in a career spanning both industry and academia. Ron and Greta talk about some  of the tricks that compilers use to make our software faster, ranging from feedback-directed optimization and super-optimization to formal analysis.

You can find the transcript for this episode along with links to things we discussed on our website.