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.
Compiler optimization with Greta Yorsh
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 software faster, ranging from feedback-directed optimization and super-optimization to formal analysis.You can find the transcript for this episode along with links to things we discussed on our website.
Multicast and the markets with Brian Nigito
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 to the architecture we have today, and how modern exchanges use these straightforward building blocks to achieve blindingly fast performance at scale.You can find the transcript for this episode along with links to things we discussed on our website.
Build systems with Andrey Mokhov
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 field, including significant contributions to the replacement for the Glasgow Haskell Compiler’s Make-based system and Build Systems à la carte, a paper that untangles the complex ecosystem of existing build systems. Ron and Andrey muse on questions like why every language community seems to have its own purpose-built system and, closer to home, where Andrey and the rest of the build systems team at Jane Street are focusing their efforts.You can find the transcript for this episode along with links to related work on our website.
Programmable hardware with Andy Ray
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 led him to create Hardcaml, a domain-specific language for expressing hardware designs. Ron and Andy talk about the current state-of-the-art in hardware tooling, the economics of FPGAs, and how the process of designing hardware can be improved by applying lessons from software engineering.You can find the transcript for this episode along with links to related work on our website.
Introducing Signals & Threads
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.