CoRecursive: Coding Stories – Details, episodes & analysis

Today the tables have turned and you're going to hear someone interview me.  Ronak and Guang from the Software Misadventures podcast are going to interview me  about podcasting. My history as a software developer and I guess this big idea. That I don't think I've shared too much about the importance of communication.

More details including a video version of the interview here:

https://softwaremisadventures.com/p/adam-gordon-bell-story-telling

What if you had to fight against your company's culture to bring a revolutionary tool to life? Meet Jeffrey Snover, the Microsoft architect behind PowerShell, a command tool that transformed Windows system administration. Initially met with skepticism, Snover's idea faced resistance from a company that favored graphical interfaces. 

Snover's journey began with a simple mission: to make Windows as command-line managable as UNIX systems. Despite facing pushback and navigating through company restructures, his persistence paid off. 

This episode explores how Snover's relentless drive and clear vision overcame numerous obstacles, leading to a tool that is now fundamental in modern enterprise environments. Listen to how one person's determination can challenge the status quo.

Help Adam Find His Next Role

I'm on the hunt for a new developer relations role. 

If you know of any companies where they need someone who can speak engineer, who can communicate to developers, that's me. I'm your guy for explaining complex stuff in a way that's catchy and fun and makes sense to software developers. If you know of any roles like this, let me know. Who should I be talking to?

Reach out: [email protected], @adamgordonbell, Linkedin, My Calendar.

Links:

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Lost 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 believers, ready to bankroll this company into the stratosphere. 

But was it all an elaborate illusion? 

Join me as I unravel the perplexing story of Jan Sloot, the eccentric Dutch TV repairman who dazzled the tech world with his compression claims. 

Discover the shady details and follow the bizarre twists and turns, as we try to separate fact from fiction in the puzzling case of the Sloot Digital Coding System. 

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Today, we go behind the scenes at Chef - the game changing infrastructure automation tool. Adam Jacob created Chef, and it became a massively popular DevOps tool. But despite Chef's success, Adam constantly battled self-doubt and finding his footing as a leader. 

In this raw episode, Adam shares how the pressure of going from sysadmin to startup CEO caused an identity crisis. He opens up about the motivational speech that left him in tears, realizing his self-worth was too tied to Chef's outcomes. 

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Learning 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 hear the stories of legends like Seymour Papert, who championed active, project-based learning. Of Fred Brooks, who discovered that pairing accelerates learning. And more. 

The research shows that with the right methods, motivation, and support, anyone can master learning curves and summit. So join me as we uncover the science behind learning to code. You'll walk away fired up, equipped with proven techniques to unlock your potential and conquer new technical skills. 
 
 The climb is on!  

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 Have you ever been frustrated with your job? Maybe not burnt out, but getting close to there? You used to love what you did, and it felt so creative and empowering, but then it starts to feel a bit more cookie cutter.

Have you ever been frustrated with your whole life? The daily grind has taken what you love and it just doesn't feel the same anymore. Some of the magic just has slowly faded away. You don't know when it started, but it did. 

Today's guest is Amir Rajan. He's hard to describe. 
  
Is he a developer? Yes. An artist who sold everything that he owned for indie game development. Yes. The subject of a New Yorker profile? Yes, all of that. And also, somebody who got frustrated with his life and left everything behind.

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Today, we meet Ben Dumke-von der Ehe, one of the early developers on the Stack Overflow team. 

He was on the front lines as the platform transformed how programmers worked. And he embodies the spirit of Stack Overflow:  Its transparency, playfulness, and even some of its struggles to be as welcoming and friendly as it should be. 
 
But you'll see what I mean. 
 
So stick around as Ben takes us on a journey through the building of Stack Overflow. Get ready for a candid inside look at the creation of a platform that would become an essential part of the developer community and the internet as we know it. 

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How 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 of Yann Collet.

Yann was a project manager who went from being burnt out on corporate life to becoming one of the most sought-after developers in the world. What happens when you build something so impressive and valuable that it essentially becomes invisible?

And how do you do that when your day job is mainly organizing spreadsheets and keeping timelines on track?

Yann built LZ4 and ZStandard - two of the world's fastest compression algorithms that have transformed databases, operating systems, file systems, and much more. We'll go back in time to Yann's initial steps with programming, his game-changing discoveries along the way and how his devotion to data compression hobby led him to create something that saves billions of dollars worldwide.

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Today's guest is Douglas Crockford. He's sharing the story of JSON, his discovery of JavaScript's good parts, and his approach to finding a simple way to build software. Also, his battles against XML, against complexity, his battles to say that there's a better way to build software. 
 

This is foundational stuff for the web, and Doug is an iconoclast

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Shai 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 amazing engineering driven culture and relationships with manufacturers and operators. And yet interal politics and the collapse of its server market made it hard to get things done.
  
At Sun, as the mobile market changed, Shai and his friend Chen Fishbein launched a popular UI toolkit. 
  
  Today Shai shares their struggles at Sun and after it to shape mobile UI development. 

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