Building a UI Framework with Ty Overby

More from Signals and Threads

1. 

   E14 · 20 Apr 2022 · 1 hr 12 min

   State Machine Replication, and Why You Should Care with Doug Patti

   Doug Patti is a developer in Jane Street’s Client-Facing Tech team, where he works on a system called Concord that undergirds Jane Street’s client offerings. In this episode, Doug and Ron discuss how Concord, which has state-machine replication as its core abstraction, helps Jane Street achieve the reliability, scalability, and speed that the client business demands. They’ll also discuss Doug’s involvement in building a successor system called Aria, which is designed to deliver those same benefits to a much wider audience.

2. 

   E13 · 5 Jan 2022 · 1 hr 23 min

   Memory Management with Stephen Dolan

   Stephen Dolan works on Jane Street’s Tools and Compilers team where he focuses on the OCaml compiler. In this episode, Stephen and Ron take a trip down memory lane, discussing how to manage computer memory efficiently and safely. They consider trade-offs between reference counting and garbage collection, the surprising gains achieved by prefetching, and how new language features like local allocation and unboxed types could give OCaml users more control over their memory.

3. 

   E12 · 3 Nov 2021 · 1 hr 1 min

   What Is an Operating System? with Anil Madhavapeddy

   Anil Madhavapeddy is an academic, author, engineer, entrepreneur, and OCaml aficionado. In this episode, Anil and Ron consider the evolving role of operating systems, security on the internet, and the pending arrival (at last!) of OCaml 5.0. They also discuss using Raspberry Pis to fight climate change; the programming inspiration found in British pubs and on Moroccan beaches; and the time Anil went to a party, got drunk, and woke up with a job working on the Mars Polar Lander.

4. 

   E10 · 1 Sep 2021 · 1 hr 1 min

   Writing, Technically with James Somers

   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.

5. 

   24 Aug 2021 · 1 min

   More Signals & Threads coming soon!

   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.

6. 

   E9 · 6 Nov 2020 · 1 hr 3 min

   An inside look at Jane Street's tech internship with Jeanne Van Briesen, Matt Else, and Grace Zhang

   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.

7. 

   E30 · 23 Sep 2026 · 1 hr 37 min

   Learning Goals and the Goals of Learning: Teaching in the Age of AI with Aaron Bauer

   Aaron Bauer is a software engineer and one of Jane Street's few developer educators—a role that splits his time between writing code and teaching other people how to write it. Before joining the firm, he taught computer science at Carleton College, including four straight terms online during the pandemic. In this episode, Ron and Aaron discuss what it takes to teach engineering inside a company with its own language, its own version control, and its own editors, and what changes when an LLM can do the exercise for you. Along the way, they consider the underrated power of a live lecture; why…

8. 

   E29 · 2 Sep 2026 · 1 hr 25 min

   Wrestling the world into rows with Eric Mannes

   "Alternative data" is Wall Street's name for information that comes from non-traditional sources: satellite photos of parking lots, credit card panels, weather forecasts. Eric Mannes has spent over a decade at Jane Street, first as a commodities trader and now helping lead the firm's alternative data team. In this episode, Eric and Ron talk about what it takes to turn messy external data into datasets a trading strategy can rely on. Along the way, they cover the day oil futures settled at a negative price and the systems that broke as a result; the years when the commodities desk's risk…

9. 

   E28 · 24 Jun 2026 · 1 hr 34 min

   Building a data warehouse from scratch with Jacob Baskin

   In university Jacob Baskin studied at the intersection of computer science and economics, thinking about systems that incentivize people to express their true preferences. He put those ideas into practice at Google, where he worked on ad serving, before joining Jane Street’s database infrastructure team. In this episode, Ron and Jacob discuss Superstore, a distributed columnar database now central to Jane Street’s tech stack that Jacob began building practically the day he started. How do you support wide-ranging analytical queries while transactional writes stream in at the speed of trading…

10. 

    E27 · 1 Jun 2026 · 1 hr 35 min

    The Network as a Program with Nate Foster

    Nate Foster is a professor at EPFL in Switzerland in the Networked Systems Abstractions Lab, and a visiting researcher at Jane Street on the Networking team. In this episode, he and Ron consider what happens when you bring a software mindset to network engineering. Can you use programming language theory and formal methods to realize the dream of software-defined networks? Along the way, they discuss how hyperscalers have shaped networking hardware; the return (or not) of multicast; the ways ML workloads are reshaping the networking layer; and the success Jane Street has had using an early…

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