Computer Science: Just the Useful Bits
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Computer Science: Just the Useful Bits


If you're a working software developer, which bits of computer science are useless? Which are useful? And which ones are superpowers?

Every episode I talk to working developers from all different backgrounds about topics in computer science. From different data structures, algorithms, analysis, paradigms and practices, we talk about which ones matter in their day-to-day work, and what kind of work that is.

Latest Interviews


Andrew Mason: I Expected College To Be Basically Boot Camp

June 21, 2022

(Anchor.fm link)

Andrew and I talk about what college should be, the prison system, feminism in video games and Chesterton's Fence.


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Shai Schechter: Hustle Hard, Do What's Practical

April 19, 2022

(Anchor.fm link)

Shai, a founder of RightMessage, has been hustling since he was 11.


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Caitlyn Greffly: It's Like Being Paid to Go to School and Make Cool Things Forever

April 21, 2021

(Anchor.fm link)

Caitlyn transitioned from a career selling beer to a career writing software.


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Jennifer Tran: Coding Paradigms, the Satisfaction of Studying and Unspoken Cultural Norms

April 8, 2021

(Anchor.fm link)

Jennifer is an early-career cloud engineer. We talk about how she got into software development without having experience before university, and what that meant about picking up the unspoken cultural norms. We also talk about the dark academic aesthetic and how she improves at all of this.


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Ernesto Tagwerker: Learning Programming, Business and Management

March 8, 2021

(Anchor.fm link)

Ernesto and I talk about how he learned software development, but also some business and management in his competitive public university in Argentina. We talk group projects, learning well and trying things that failed.


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John Pavan: Coming to Programming from Nuclear Physics and Some Vagaries of C++

February 24, 2021

(Anchor.fm link)

I met John Pavan early in his career, after he'd just made the transition from nuclear physics to full-time computer programming. We caught up on how C++ is doing and how he's doing in it. We also talked about what he looks for in a software hire, and handling legacy code.


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Chris Seaton: On Ph.Ds and Software Apprenticeships

February 17, 2021

(Anchor.fm link)

Chris Seaton, founder of TruffleRuby, talks with me about getting a computer science Ph.D, how learning compilers is necessarily like an old-style apprenticeship, and a near-the-metal view of complex algorithms for computation.


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Michael Dominick: Your Duck Was the Only Thing That Company Had Going For It!

February 15, 2021

(Anchor.fm link)

Michael Dominick, of the Mike Dominick Show, talks to me about patterns in software, the Pokemon API, what he looks for when hiring developers and how he's pretty sure the universe is POSIX compliant.


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George Sheppard: On Security, UML and What's More Important than Money

November 10, 2020

(Anchor.fm link)

George and I talk about how he learned to do what we do. He loved his classes on security, and I'm envious. He doesn't remember his classes on mathematics — I might envy that, too. We talk about how hard making good games is, a little. And we talk about how you need to think of each job as a stepping stone to the right next thing.


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Jared White: a Trip Through PHP to Ruby

November 3, 2020

(Anchor.fm link)

Jared and I talk about his journey through all sorts of programming platforms, from the Commodore 128, through PHP to Ruby and onward. He talks about Object Oriented programming, Rails service objects and why he doesn't like classes that are just functions. He talks about how GitHub brings a little of the benefits of pair programming to the single-programmer experience. We even talk a little language performance, and how machine learning code looks weirdly like graphics and GPGPU.


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