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.
The Network as a Program with Nate Foster
Nate Foster is a professor at EPFL in Switzerland in the Networked Systems Abstractions Lab, and a visiting researcher at Jane Street on the Networking team. In this episode, he and Ron consider what happens when you bring a software mindset to network engineering. Can you use programming language theory and formal methods to realize the dream of software-defined networks? Along the way, they discuss how hyperscalers have shaped networking hardware; the return (or not) of multicast; the ways ML workloads are reshaping the networking layer; and the success Jane Street has had using an early Internet protocol, BGP, together with a more declarative high-level specification language.
You can find the transcript for this episode on our website.
Some links to topics that came up in the discussion: