Language design with Leo White

More from Signals and Threads All episodes →

1. 

   E11 · 6 Oct 2021 · 1 hr

   Building a UI Framework with Ty Overby

   Ty Overby is a programmer in Jane Street’s web platform group where he works on Bonsai, our OCaml library for building interactive browser-based UI. In this episode, Ty and Ron consider the functional approach to building user interfaces. They also discuss Ty’s programming roots in Neopets, what development features they crave on the web, the unfairly maligned CSS, and why Excel is “arguably the greatest programming language ever developed.”

2. 

   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.

3. 

   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.

4. 

   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.

5. 

   E8 · 28 Oct 2020 · 1 hr 4 min

   Building a functional email server with Dominick LoBraico

   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…

6. 

   E6 · 14 Oct 2020 · 44 min

   Clock synchronization with Chris Perl

   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.

7. 

   E5 · 7 Oct 2020 · 1 hr

   Python, OCaml, and Machine Learning with Laurent Mazare

   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.

8. 

   E4 · 30 Sep 2020 · 1 hr 10 min

   Compiler optimization with Greta Yorsh

   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.

9. 

   E3 · 23 Sep 2020 · 1 hr 2 min

   Multicast and the markets with Brian Nigito

   Electronic exchanges like Nasdaq need to handle a staggering number of transactions every second. To keep up, they rely on two deceptively simple-sounding concepts: single-threaded programs and multicast networking. In this episode, Ron speaks with Brian Nigito, a 20-year industry veteran who helped build some of the earliest electronic exchanges, about the tradeoffs that led to the architecture we have today, and how modern exchanges use these straightforward building blocks to achieve blindingly fast performance at scale. You can find the transcript for this episode along with links to…

10. 

    E2 · 16 Sep 2020 · 58 min

    Build systems with Andrey Mokhov

    Most software engineers only think about their build system when it breaks; and yet, this often unloved piece of software forms the backbone of every serious project. This week, Ron has a conversation with Andrey Mokhov about build systems, from the venerable Make to Bazel and beyond. Andrey has a lot of experience in this field, including significant contributions to the replacement for the Glasgow Haskell Compiler’s Make-based system and Build Systems à la carte, a paper that untangles the complex ecosystem of existing build systems. Ron and Andrey muse on questions like why every language…