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Hi! I'm Adam Gordon Bell

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From Everest to startups
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Life is short

Adam Gordon Bell Oct 2nd Hey! It's October, and new podcast episode is out: https://corecursive.com/from-everest-to-startups-with-yoshio-goto/ This episode is about your life. It's about accepting that life is short and using that to structure how you live. Yoshio Goto shares his story of finding what matters by throwing himself at challenges like climbing Everest and joining early-stage start-ups in Silicon Valley. Then, where he finds meaning is totally somewhere else. It feels like I’m...

Adam Gordon Bell July 4th Hey! It's July, and happy July 4th to my American readers. A new podcast episode is out: https://corecursive.com/building-powershell-with-jeffrey-snover/ It's a detailed peek into the internals of Microsoft and the development of Powershell. My guest is Jeffrey Snover and he has a story to share. It's about one man's vision for a better way to manage Windows Servers and the battles that were fought to bring that vision to completion. Overcoming Microsoft's GUI bias —...

Adam Gordon Bell June 4th Hey, It's June now, and I have a new episode out here: Hedy https://corecursive.com/hedy-with-felienne-hermans/ I've been telling friends and colleagues about this episode for several weeks. Whenever someone asks me how the podcast is going, I jump into it: Ok, Imagine this: A burned-out academic seeks renewal by teaching underprivileged 12-year-olds to program. In doing so, she risks her career and builds a programming language that spreads around the world and...

Adam Gordon Bell May 3rd One Hundred Episodes Hello, CoRecursive newsletter subscriber, It’s May now, and I have a new episode out. But it’s just not just any episode 100, and it’s something special. : 100! https://corecursive.com/coding-machines-with-don-and-krystal/ It's a story about debugging code, and I don't want to spoil it, but it blew my mind. It's about questioning the trust we put in our tools when building software. Also, Don and Krystal are back and sharing reflections on the...

Adam Gordon Bell April 2nd Skateboarding Meets Software Welcome to April and a new CoRecursive episode: Code, Kickflips and Crunch Time: Mick West's Neversoft Journey How do you build one of the most successful video games? The one that tops the charts, leads to a franchise and becomes a cultural phenomenon? Today, Mick West shares the story behind his incredible career and behind creating The Tony Hawk Pro Skater game. Find it in your podcast player or on the website. Repetition And Fluency...

Adam Gordon Bell March 4th Leaving LinkedIn Welcome to March and a new CoRecursive episode: Leaving LinkedIn - Choosing Engineering Excellence Over Expediency Can sustainable software development and tech giant fast-paced cultures truly coexist? Imagine having to choose between your career at a tech giant and your deepest values. This is Chris Krycho's story, an engineer whose drive for sustainable coding clashed with some at LinkedIn. What would you do in Chris's shoes? Let me know what you...

Adam Gordon Bell Feb 2nd Beautiful Code Welcome to February and a new CoRecursive episode: 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. In this episode, Greg shares his failures and...

Adam Gordon Bell Jan 2nd Brain Injury Sparks Python Mastery Welcome to 2024 and a new CoRecursive episode: Code As A Lifeline What if your dreams were suddenly ripped away? What if your talents vanished, your passions erased? That’s what happened to Jason McDonald when a traumatic brain injury at 16 ravaged his planned destiny of becoming a doctor. Jason painfully rebuilt his identity from scratch - relearning to read, write, and even speak. A serendipitous discovery of coding ignited a new...

Adam Gordon Bell Dec 4th Echoes of Creation: Decoding Vue's Genesis and the FTX Saga Hey, It's December now, and I have a new podcast episode out here: From 486 to Vue.js - Evan You's Full-Time Gamble on Open Source It's the unlikely origin story behind Vue.js and how Evan You's frustration with Angular sparked a side project that snowballed into one of today's most popular JavaScript frameworks. Two of the big focuses are: 1) What happens when your hobby project takes on a life of its own?...

Adam Gordon Bell Nov 2nd Wooden Block Puzzles and Spotify Hello, CoRecursive newsletter subscriber, It’s November now, and I have a new episode out here: The Inside Story of Spotify's Engineering Growth It’s about Spotify, back in 2016-2018. Facing an IPO deadline, Pia Nilsson worked with 300 teams to transform how Spotify built software. She spearheaded a movement that led them from working in silos to a unified developer platform. It’s about changes, both big and small, that transformed an...