Interview by Adam Gordon Bell

A few weeks ago, Adam Gordon Bell had me on his podcast. You can listen to it. Here is the abstract:

Did you ever meet somebody who seemed a little bit different than the rest of the world? Maybe they question things that others wouldn’t question or said things that others would never say. Daniel is a world-renowned expert on software performance, and one of the most popular open source developers. If you measure by GitHub followers. Today, he’s gonna share his story. It involves time at a research lab, teaching students in a new way. it will also involve upending people’s assumptions about IO performance. Elon Musk And Julia Roberts will come up a little bit more than you might expect.

I would not describe myself as “world renowned” about anything, but Adam needs to do the a bit of promotion. My interview is right after an interview with Brian Kernighan: he is world renowned.

I also do not think that I am “different from the rest of the world” though I have maybe given more thought than most to the need to be different. I have always preoccupied about trying to do work that others do not do: sadly, it is much harder than it sounds.

I usually talk mostly about my work, but Adam wanted to go a bit personal, like how I was initially struggling at school.

 

Further reading: After giving this interview, I read Paul Graham’s latest essay. If you liked my interview, you will probably enjoy Graham’s essay. You might enjoy his essay in any case.

Published by

Daniel Lemire

A computer science professor at the University of Quebec (TELUQ).

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