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Hi! I'm Adam Gordon Bell

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Skateboarding Meets Software

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...

28 days ago • 1 min read

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...

about 2 months ago • 1 min read

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...

3 months ago • 3 min read

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...

4 months ago • 3 min read

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?...

5 months ago • 3 min read

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...

6 months ago • 2 min read

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...

7 months ago • 2 min read

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 pressure...

8 months ago • 3 min read

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...

9 months ago • 5 min read

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. It...

10 months ago • 4 min read
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