Hi! I'm Adam Gordon Bell
Get a monthly update on my podcast, writing and whatever else I'm up to.
Get a monthly update on my podcast, writing and whatever else I'm up to.
Featured Post
Wooden Block Puzzles and Spotify
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...
Read now
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Sleep Sort
Adam Gordon Bell
Oct 2nd
Sleep Sort
Hello CoRecursive newsletter subscriber,
It’s October now, and I have a new episode out here:
Sloot Digital Coding System
Jan Sloot claimed to have invented revolutionary data compression that could fit a full movie into a tiny smart card chip. Top executives and investors witnessed his demos and became true believers, ready to bankroll this company into the stratosphere.
But was it all an elaborate illusion? Check out the episode and let me know your...
2 months ago • 2 min read
Balancing Developer Identity
Adam Gordon Bell
September 2023
Balancing Identity
Hello, CoRecursive newsletter subscriber,
It’s September now, and I have a new episode out here:
https://corecursive.com/configuring-identity-adam-jacob/
It's a look behind the scenes to the creation of Chef - the game-changing infrastructure automation tool. Adam Jacob created Chef, and it became a massively popular DevOps tool. But despite Chef’s success, Adam constantly battled self-doubt.
In this raw episode, Adam shares how the...
3 months ago • 3 min read
Learning When to Learn
Adam Gordon Bell
August 2023
Learning When to Learn
Hello, CoRecursive newsletter subscriber,
It’s August now, and I have a new episode out here:
The Science of Learning to Code
It's about learning, and this is a topic very dear to my own heart. The episode shares some history of learning research and imparts some guidelines for embarking on a learning side project while also being an entertaining listen.
There is, besides these learning guidelines, a higher-level question. What should I...
4 months ago • 5 min read
Passion and Focus
Adam Gordon Bell
July 3rd
Passion and Focus
Hello, CoRecursive newsletter subscriber,
It's July now, and I have a new episode out here:
https://corecursive.com/a-dark-room-with-amir-rajan/
Amir is amazing. I identify with his early struggles – his struggles working with people who didn't care – so much. He is a little worried that his earlier self – who got frustrated at other devs – was an asshole, and, amazingly, he still was willing to share his struggles.
And he built an amazing game....
5 months ago • 4 min read
Waiting for Marv
Adam Gordon Bell
June 1st
Waiting for Marv
Quiting Stack Overflow
It's June now, and I have a new episode out here:
https://corecursive.com/stack-overflow/
The episode is the story of the longest-tenured employee at Stack Overflow, Ben Dumke-von der Ehe. He became an early employee of Stack Overflow by building unicorns and finding a community online.
But one of my favorite parts is about what it's like to realize that you might be a jerk to work with and what to do about that. What do you...
6 months ago • 2 min read
Learning to Learn
Adam Gordon Bell
May 2nth
Learning to Learn
From Project Management to Data Compression Innovator
It's May now, and I have a new episode out here:
https://corecursive.com/data-compression-yann--collet/
Yann Collet became interested in programming and discovered his passion for data compression while working on a game for his HP 48 graphing calculator.
He spent years working project manager and learning and tinkering with compression algorithms on the side. Eventually, he was the best in the...
7 months ago • 3 min read
Be Like Ken
Adam Gordon Bell
April 3rd
Be Like Ken
Hello, CoRecursive newsletter subscriber!
April is here! March has been a challenging month for me. My dad is in the hospital, and I'm heading out on a road trip to visit him shortly.
Some months are tougher than others.
Doug Crockford
But Episode 087 of the podcast is out, and it's an interview with Doug Crockford — the creator of JSON, the finder of the good parts of Javascript, and so much more.
https://corecursive.com/json-vs-xml-douglas-crockford/...
8 months ago • 4 min read
Shades of Grey Personal Truths
Adam Gordon Bell
March 2nd
Shades of Grey Personal Truths
Hello, CoRecursive newsletter subscriber,
It's March now, and I have a new episode out here:
Sun's Mobile Blunders
Shai Almog worked at Sun on Mobile JVMs just as phones started to turn from phones into something else.
Sun had deep expertise in mobile development and unique engineering-driven culture and relationships with manufacturers and operators. And yet internal politics and the collapse of its server market made it hard to...
9 months ago • 2 min read
Make-Believe Projects
Hello, CoRecursive newsletter subscriber!
It’s February now, and I have a new episode out here:
https://corecursive.com/shipping-graphing-calculator/
It’s the story of sneaking onto the Apple Campus to finish working on a project that got canceled. Each episode is only as good as the story, and it would be hard to find one as surprising and well-told as this one.
Mario Sangiorgio pointed me at Ron, and I’m glad I emailed him back in August ( and in September, October, and December -...
10 months ago • 1 min read