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Hi! I'm Adam Gordon Bell

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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...
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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
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