Story: From Code to Capital - Tim Chen's Journey from Engineer to VC

More from CoRecursive: Coding Stories

1. 

   E106 · 2 Dec 2024 · 43 min

   Story: Inside Shopify's Layoffs

   What if you had to break life-changing news to your team—could you handle the weight of their futures? Allison's journey from software engineer to compassionate leader at Shopify is filled with challenges and growth. It all started when her mentor was suddenly laid off, leaving her with uncertainty and guilt. This turning point taught her the importance of adaptability in the tech industry's ups and downs. When Allison faced her own layoff, she found the strength to move on to new roles, including a position at Shopify. There, she had to announce layoffs to her team, learning to lead with…

2. 

   E105 · 4 Nov 2024 · 53 min

   Story: ReiserFS

   Have you ever known someone who's technical brilliance was overshadowed by personal failings? This is the story of Hans Reiser, a software developer driven to create a superior Linux filesystem, but whose difficult personality got in the way. Then came the disappearance of his wife, Nina, in 2006. The investigation pointed to Reiser, ending with a murder conviction that shocked the tech world. Reiser's story is a reminder of how technical skills and personal integrity need to go hand in hand. From prison, he reflects on his mistakes, realizing the need for empathy and collaboration. His…

3. 

   E104 · 2 Oct 2024 · 50 min

   Story: From Everest to Startups: Yoshio's Journey of Resilience and Coding

   How do you know what matters? What if training to climb Everest left you certain you were on the wrong career path? Join us as we explore Yoshio's incredible journey from the heights of Everest, to coding bootcamps, to finding his true calling in start-ups and communication skills training. Episode Page Support The Show Subscribe To The Podcast Join The Newsletter

4. 

   6 Aug 2024 · 1 hr 4 min

   Behind the Mic: Adam Gordon Bell on Communication with Software Misadventures Podcast

   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

5. 

   E102 · 4 Jul 2024 · 49 min

   Story: Jeffrey Snover and the Making of PowerShell

   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…

6. 

   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…

7. 

   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…

8. 

   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…

9. 

   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

10. 

    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…

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