Signals and Threads

Aug 27/2020

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  Andrew Hunter makes code really, really fast. Before joining Jane Street, he worked for seven years at Google on multithreaded architecture, and was a tech lead for tcmalloc, Google’s world-class scalable malloc implementation. In this episode, Andrew and Ron discuss how, paradoxically, it can be easier to optimize systems at hyperscale because of the impact[...]
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  Peter Bogart-Johnson was one of Jane Street’s first program managers, and helped bring the art of PMing—where that “P” variously stands for “project,” “product,” or some blend of the two—to the company at large. He’s also a poet and the editor of a literary magazine. In this episode, Peter and Ron discuss the challenge of[...]
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  Richard Eisenberg is one of the core maintainers of Haskell. He recently joined Jane Street’s Tools and Compilers team, where he hacks on the OCaml compiler. He and Ron discuss the powerful language feature that got him into PL design in the first place—dependent types—and its role in a world where AIs can (somewhat) competently[...]
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  Ella Ehrlich has been a developer at Jane Street for close to a decade. During much of that time, she’s worked on Gord, one of Jane Street’s oldest and most critical systems, which is responsible for normalizing and distributing the firm’s trading data. Ella and Ron talk about how to grow and modernize a legacy[...]
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  Doug Patti is a developer in Jane Street’s Client-Facing Tech team, where he works on a system called Concord that undergirds Jane Street’s client offerings. In this episode, Doug and Ron discuss how Concord, which has state-machine replication as its core abstraction, helps Jane Street achieve the reliability, scalability, and speed that the client business[...]
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  Stephen Dolan works on Jane Street’s Tools and Compilers team where he focuses on the OCaml compiler. In this episode, Stephen and Ron take a trip down memory lane, discussing how to manage computer memory efficiently and safely. They consider trade-offs between reference counting and garbage collection, the surprising gains achieved by prefetching, and how[...]
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  Anil Madhavapeddy is an academic, author, engineer, entrepreneur, and OCaml aficionado. In this episode, Anil and Ron consider the evolving role of operating systems, security on the internet, and the pending arrival (at last!) of OCaml 5.0. They also discuss using Raspberry Pis to fight climate change; the programming inspiration found in British pubs and[...]
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  Ty Overby is a programmer in Jane Street’s web platform group where he works on Bonsai, our OCaml library for building interactive browser-based UI. In this episode, Ty and Ron consider the functional approach to building user interfaces. They also discuss Ty’s programming roots in Neopets, what development features they crave on the web, the[...]
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  James Somers is Jane Street’s writer-in-residence, splitting his time between English and OCaml, and helping to push forward all sorts of efforts around knowledge-sharing at Jane Street. In this episode, James and Ron talk about the role of technical writing in an organization like Jane Street, and how engineering software relates to editing prose.You can[...]
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  Signals & Threads is back, and we have a fun season of topics lined up, including: Building better abstractions for design and user interfaces, the role of writing in a technical organization, the approach that different languages take to memory management...and more. We hope you’ll join us. The first episode drops September 1st.
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  In this week's episode, the season 1 finale, Ron speaks with Jeanne, Matt, and Grace, three former tech interns at Jane Street who have returned as full-timers. They talk about the experience of being an intern at Jane Street, the types of projects that interns work on, and how they've found the transition to full-time[...]
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  Despite a steady trickle of newcomers, email still reigns supreme as the chief communication mechanism for the Information Age. At Jane Street, it’s just as critical as anywhere, but there’s one difference: the system at the heart of our email infrastructure is homegrown. This week, Ron talks to Dominick LoBraico, an engineer working on Jane[...]
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  Equal parts science and art, programming language design is very much an unsolved problem. This week, Ron speaks with Leo White, from Jane Street's Tools & Compilers team, about cutting-edge language features, future work happening on OCaml, and Jane Street's relationship with the broader open-source community. The conversation covers everything from the paradox of language[...]
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  Clock synchronization, keeping all of the clocks on your network set to the “correct” time, sounds straightforward: our smartphones sure don’t seem to have trouble with it. Next, keep them all accurate to within 100 microseconds, and prove that you did -- now things start to get tricky. In this episode, Ron talks with Chris[...]
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  A conversation with Laurent Mazare about how your choice of programming language interacts with the kind of work you do, and in particular about the tradeoffs between Python and OCaml when doing machine learning and data analysis. Ron and Laurent discuss the tradeoffs between working in a text editor and a Jupyter Notebook, the importance[...]
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  It’s a software engineer’s dream: A compiler that can take idiomatic high-level code and output maximally efficient instructions. Ron’s guest this week is Greta Yorsh, who has worked on just that problem in a career spanning both industry and academia. Ron and Greta talk about some  of the tricks that compilers use to make our[...]
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  Electronic exchanges like Nasdaq need to handle a staggering number of transactions every second. To keep up, they rely on two deceptively simple-sounding concepts: single-threaded programs and multicast networking. In this episode, Ron speaks with Brian Nigito, a 20-year industry veteran who helped build some of the earliest electronic exchanges, about the tradeoffs that led[...]
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  Most software engineers only think about their build system when it breaks; and yet, this often unloved piece of software forms the backbone of every serious project. This week, Ron has a conversation with Andrey Mokhov about build systems, from the venerable Make to Bazel and beyond. Andrey has a lot of experience in this[...]
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  The ever-widening availability of FPGAs has opened the door to solving a broad set of performance-critical problems in hardware.  In this episode, Ron speaks with Andy Ray, who leads Jane Street’s hardware design team. Andy has a long career prior to Jane Street shipping hardware designs for things like modems and video codecs. That work[...]
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  Listen in on Jane Street’s Ron Minsky as he has conversations with engineers working on everything from clock synchronization to reliable multicast, build systems to reconfigurable hardware. Get a peek at how Jane Street approaches problems, and how those ideas relate to tech more broadly.

Listen in on Jane Street’s Ron Minsky as he has conversations with engineers who are working on everything from clock synchronization to reliable multicast, build systems to reconfigurable hardware. Get a peek at how Jane Street approaches problems, and how those ideas relate to tech more broadly. You can find transcripts along with related links on our website at signalsandthreads.com.