Story: Leaving LinkedIn - Choosing Engineering Excellence Over Expediency

More from CoRecursive: Coding Stories

1. 

   E101 · 4 Jun 2024 · 52 min

   Story: From Burnout to Breakthrough

   Can you imagine risking your career to making coding easier to learn? Meet Felienne Hermans, a professor who did just that by stepping beyond academia to redefine coding education. Disillusioned by her research's limited impact, Felienne discovered a new calling in teaching coding to underserved students. Her journey led to the creation of Hedy, a programming language designed to dismantle language and learning barriers in coding. Confronting skepticism from her peers, Felienne's dedication to accessible coding challenged traditional academic priorities. Felienne's story is a powerful…

2. 

   E100 · 3 May 2024 · 48 min

   Story: Coding Machines

   What if the tools you trust were actually betraying you? Join us for a riveting story where a team of software developers discovers that their compiler is compromised. What starts as suspicion of a simple bug quickly escalates into the alarming realization. In this 100th episode celebration past show regulars Don and Krystal join Adam lend their voice to this work of fiction about the limits of trust in computing from Lawrence Kesteloot. Join us in as we peel back the layers of trust in the software we rely on daily and celebrate our 100th episode. Episode Page Support The Show Subscribe To…

3. 

   E99 · 2 Apr 2024 · 57 min

   Story: Code, Kickflips and Crunch Time - Mick West's Neversoft Journey

   Meet Mick West, whose career began in an unusual office setup — sandwiched between a kebab shop and a phone sex hotline. From there he worked all over Manchester, making computer games for Tiertex and Ocean. Career opportunies brought him to California and to his own game dev company, Neversoft. At Neversoft, navigating team growth and tight deadlines, Mick played a key role in creating "Tony Hawk's Pro Skater." This wasn't just another game; it was a huge hit and secured Mick's legacy in the gaming world. Join us as we explore Mick West's journey from a quirky start to the heights of video…

4. 

   E97 · 2 Feb 2024 · 57 min

   Story: Beautiful Code - Inside Greg Wilson's Vision for Software Design

   Greg Wilson has been on a decades-long quest to transform how we teach and talk about software design. From getting rejections for using the term "beautiful code," to empowering scientists through workshops on Python and Unix, Greg has pushed to bridge the gap between theory and practice. Join us as Greg shares his failures and epiphanies along the way. You'll hear how he revolutionized research computing by showing physicists the power of profilers. How he taught grad students the elegance of shell scripts. And how he's crusaded to create a shared language to discuss software architecture…

5. 

   E123 · 4 Aug 2026 · 53 min

   The Hutter Prize: Compression, prediction, and the limits of intelligence

   I texted Don about a side gig: €5,000 for every 1% you shave off a zip file. It's a real contest. For 20 years, Marcus Hutter has offered €500,000 to anyone who can losslessly compress a gigabyte of Wikipedia below 110 megabytes. Gzip gets you to 322. After that you're on your own. So we tried. Run-length encoding. Pointing back instead of repeating yourself. Huffman coding worked out by hand. Arithmetic coding, which spends less than one bit per character. Then Claude Shannon's 1951 guessing game, and a paper where an LLM beats every record and still wins nothing, because the model counts…

6. 

   E122 · 13 Jun 2026 · 1 hr

   The Bitter Lesson: The history of reinforcement learning

   I've been trying to understand how machine learning actually works. Not use it, 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. Three words in the title: reward is enough. The claim is that all of intelligence, the whole thing, comes down to a system maximizing a reward. Don thought that was far too reductive. I wanted to pull it apart and see if it held up. We backed up through the history to find out how far "reward is enough" really goes: B.F. Skinner training pigeons, a backgammon…

7. 

   E121 · 9 May 2026 · 56 min

   The Pre-Training Wall and the Treadmill After It

   I've been confusing Don with frontier-lab links late at night for a bit. 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 frontier labs call this the pre-training wall. A leaked Google memo from 2023 argued they had no moat. R1 is on GitHub. Llama is on Hugging Face. OpenAI's secondary-market valuation has climbed past $850 billion. Don was confused. So he came over and we made an episode about it. Episode Page Support The Show Subscribe To The Podcast Join The Newsletter

8. 

   E120 · 2 Apr 2026 · 42 min

   Story: The Aging Programmer

   Kate 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 scares you? What's changed? What have you lost? The things people feared most — memory, stamina, keeping up — weren't the real threats. The stuff that was actually breaking down was mostly fixable. A bad knee wasn't aging, it was a torn cartilage. Wrist pain disappeared when she changed how she slept. But buried in the research was…

9. 

   E119 · 2 Mar 2026 · 42 min

   From Hacker News to TikTok - How Algorithms Learned to Hook Us

   Corey told me about his AI cat reel problem. He found these AI-genearted 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 algorithms actually work. It starts simple. Upvote, downvote, sort by time. But by 2017 Facebook has a metric that quietly reshapes what two billion people see. Then a leaked playbook lands, and a CEO takes the stand in Los Angeles. Today is an investigation into what happens when the algorithm knows you better than you know yourself. Episode Page…

10. 

    4 Feb 2026 · 11 min

    Notes: The Universal Paperclip Clicker

    Multiple 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 started reorganizing my life around keeping the machine spinning. Claude Code had become my universal paperclip clicker. This is me trying to figure out the difference between real work and just feeding it tickets. This is some field notes, a shorter, rougher than a normal epsidoe. Episode Page Support The Show Subscribe To The Podcast Join The…

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