CoRecursive: Coding Stories
Adam Gordon Bell - Software Developer
- 41 minutes 52 secondsStory: The Aging Programmer
Kate Gregory has been writing C++ for over forty years. Books, keynotes, a consulting firm she built from the ground up. At sixty-three, she's one of the most experienced programmers alive.
She surveyed hundreds of software engineers about getting older. What scares you? What's changed? What have you lost? The things people feared most — memory, stamina, keeping up — weren't the real threats. The stuff that was actually breaking down was mostly fixable. A bad knee wasn't aging, it was a torn cartilage. Wrist pain disappeared when she changed how she slept.
But buried in the research was something harder to fix. The single factor that predicted whether you'd age well or badly had nothing to do with your body at all.
The opponent isn't aging. The opponent is the story about aging.
2 April 2026, 11:19 am - 41 minutes 32 secondsFrom Hacker News to TikTok - How Algorithms Learned to Hook Us
Corey told me about his AI cat reel problem. He found these AI-genearted cat videos hilarious. Who makes these? He kept sending them to his wife. Then he tried to stop watching and he couldn't.
So I went down the rabbit hole of how social media algorithms actually work. It starts simple. Upvote, downvote, sort by time. But by 2017 Facebook has a metric that quietly reshapes what two billion people see. Then a leaked playbook lands, and a CEO takes the stand in Los Angeles.
Today is an investigation into what happens when the algorithm knows you better than you know yourself.
2 March 2026, 11:00 am - 11 minutes 5 secondsNotes: The Universal Paperclip Clicker
Multiple VS Code windows. "Agent stopping" in a robot voice. A laptop stand on the treadmill so Claude can keep working while I run. The Big Rich sitting unread by the fireplace while I check if the migration's done.
Somewhere along the way, I started reorganizing my life around keeping the machine spinning. Claude Code had become my universal paperclip clicker. This is me trying to figure out the difference between real work and just feeding it tickets. This is some field notes, a shorter, rougher than a normal epsidoe.
4 February 2026, 2:11 pm - 37 minutes 40 secondsStory: Inside Early Google - Race Conditions, Java Pain, and the Birth of AdWords
Ron Garret left JPL for a 100-person startup he'd just discovered on Usenet. Four a.m. alarms. Burbank to San Jose on Southwest. A rented room in Susan Wojcicki's house.
He expected the search engine engineering and instead he got asked to build ad serving. In Java and with JSPs and no syntax highlighting and no delimiter balancing.
Launch week was a stampede and then a window on his screen fills with declines. Numbers he can't explain. Some of them look… real. How do you even name what's happening? This episode is about creating Google AdWords. Building the machine that prints money, while trying not to get crushed in the gears.
2 January 2026, 11:00 am - 44 minutes 27 secondsStory: The Bug He Couldn't Name - A 15-Year Fight Inside One Developer's Mind
Imagine facing a problem you can't name, something that feels bigger than any bug you've ever had to fix. How do you debug your own mind when you don't even know what's wrong?
Burke Holland's story starts with a college party and a bad trip that leaves a deeper mark than he expects. Sleep gets harder. Fear creeps in. His life starts shrinking. School falls apart, friends drift away, and he ends up back at home trying to understand what's happening to him.
He looks for structure in the Coast Guard. Later he discovers computers and realizes he might have found the thing he's meant to do. But the shadow that followed him out of that party doesn't care about career paths. It shows up during college, during work, during marriage, during parenthood. Sometimes it's quiet, sometimes it knocks him completely flat.
This is the story of a developer who looks effortless on stage but spent years fighting something no one else could see, and what changed once he finally understood what he was up against.
What do you do when the hardest problem in your life isn't in your code, but in yourself?
2 December 2025, 11:06 am - 44 minutes 13 secondsStory: Godbolt's Rule - When Abstractions Fail
What do you do when your code breaks and the only fix is to dig into the runtime below?
Matt Godbolt lives for that. Tile-based renderers, color-coded scanlines, zero-copy NICs—each story is a clue that leads past the abstraction to the real machine. He shares the rule that guides him: master your layer, learn the one below, and know the outline of the layer under that.
Matt Godbolt's journey proves the real breakthroughs are hideen behind the abstrations where you are comfortable and familiar.
4 November 2025, 11:29 am - 54 minutes 58 secondsStory: Risk Rolls Downhill - The Software Bug That Sent People to Prison
What if a software bug drained your savings, ruined your reputation, and nobody believed it wasn't your fault?
Scott Darlington took over a village post office, hoping to give his family a steady life. But the software system kept showing cash shortfalls he couldn't explain. Each time, the Post Office told him the numbers were right and made him pay the difference out of his own pocket.
Eventually it became too much and actions Scott took to protect himself lead to his arrest and public shaming.
How do you build trust in systems when the people behind them refuse to admit they're broken?
2 October 2025, 10:00 am - 8 minutes 52 secondsQuick Update
A quick update from Adam about the podcast's current state, consistency challenges, and what's coming next.
2 September 2025, 10:00 am - 42 minutes 24 secondsCoding in the Red-Queen Era
What do we risk when we let AI do the heavy lifting in our coding? Are we giving up the thinking that makes us good at what we do? And as expectations keep rising to match productivy gains, is all this speed really helping, or just making us busier?
Today, let's look at the tradeoffs of coding with AI and why the hardest part might be deciding what to hold onto, and what to let go.
6 August 2025, 10:05 am - 39 minutes 51 secondsWhen AI Codes, What's Left for me?
I've always found meaning—and a lot of strength—in building things. Now, with AI coding agents changing the way we work, it's easy to feel threatened, like something essential might get taken away. But honestly, that creative urge can't be replaced by any tool. In this episode, I talk about what it's like when your identity is tied to making things, and the tools suddenly change.
2 July 2025, 10:00 am - 48 minutes 6 secondsStory: Coding Through Chaos : Addiction, Recovery and Acceptance
What if your search for connection took you somewhere you never meant to go—almost costing you everything?
John Walker grew up building computers and exploring early internet forums, always looking for a place to fit in. As a teenager, he hacked his school network and spent hours on IRC, but loneliness crept in. Drugs became a fun exploration and a social experiment. But soon, addiction pulled him into homelessness and jail.
Even at his lowest, John turned to online communities. He ran IRC bots to keep recovery chatrooms safe from trolls and built scrapers to solve tough data problems at work. These technical challenges gave him a reason to keep going, even when face-to-face life felt impossible.
But the real turning point came when John stopped trying to hide his differences.
How do you rebuild when you feel like an outsider?
3 June 2025, 10:44 am - More Episodes? Get the App