Ryan Brewer is a college dropout who has an incredible blog about PL, Category Theory and Logic. He better define his goal as making Formal Theory more accessible outside the ivory tower of academia, and easier to put into practice where it matters.
He has a couple of very interesting main projects, such as the first Cedille 2 Interpreter, Saber VM, and Arctic.
In this episode we will talk about all of his projects. His trajectory becoming self-taught in PL, compilers and Formal Methods, and he shares with us the wealth of resources he used to navigate this sea of knowledge. We also have a brief but heated discussion on the ethics of Science.
0:00 – Intro & Podcast Community
3:40 – How Ryan Started Learning Programming Languages
12:40 – Projects, Category Theory & Early Experiences
18:00 – College Life, Dropping Out & Study Strategies
27:00 – Landing a Developer Job Without a Degree
32:00 – Thoughts on JavaScript, TypeScript & WebAssembly
37:00 – Building Arctic: A Compiler for Blogs
41:00 – Introduction to Gleam & Its Unique Features
48:00 – Functional Programming at Work & Community Impact
59:00 – Diving into Haskell and Category Theory
1:08:30 – Ethical Considerations in Software Licensing
1:20:00 – Reflections on Academia & Learning
1:32:30 – Job Interviews & Practical Programming Tools
1:38:00 – Dan on Academia and Podcasting Philosophy
1:54:00 – Final Reflections & Advice for Self-Learners
2:05:00 – Closing Thoughts, Blog, Open Source
2:19:58 – Outro
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