Ron Minsky
Head of Technology at Jane Street, the quantitative trading firm, and host of Signals and Threads. A long-standing advocate of functional programming and OCaml, Minsky co-authored Real World OCaml and led Jane Street’s adoption of the language across its trading systems.
Minsky’s interviews go deeper into engineering craft than almost any other podcast: a single guest, usually a Jane Street engineer or researcher, talks through one layer of the stack — garbage collection, build systems, clock synchronisation, performance, machine-learning compilers — at the level of detail practitioners actually work at. The register is collegial and unhurried; Minsky tends to restate each technical idea in his own words, which makes the conversations unusually legible to non-specialists.
Show
Signals and Threads — in-depth technical conversations about every layer of the tech stack, produced by Jane Street. Roughly one to two hours, a few episodes a year. Full free transcripts on each episode page; audio on all podcast platforms.
Episodes hosted
- Andrey Mokhov on Build Systems (Sep 2020)
- Richard Eisenberg on The Future of Programming (May 2023)
- Nate Foster on The Network as a Program (Jun 2026)
- Jacob Baskin on Building a Data Warehouse from Scratch (Jun 2026)
- Chris Perl on Clock Synchronization (Oct 2020)
- Doug Patti on State Machine Replication, and Why You Should Care (Apr 2022)
- Leo White on Language Design (Oct 2020)
- Anil Madhavapeddy on What is an Operating System (Nov 2021)
- Stephen Dolan on Memory Management, Garbage Collection, and OCaml (Jan 2022)
- Andrew Hunter on Performance Engineering on Hard Mode (Nov 2023)
- Sylvain Gugger on The Uncertain Art of Accelerating ML Models (Oct 2024)
- Chris Lattner on Why Machine Learning Needs a New Programming Language (Sep 2025)
- Will Wilson on Why Testing is Hard and How to Fix it (Mar 2026)
Related
- Leo White — OCaml language design and type systems
- Anil Madhavapeddy — operating systems, unikernels, and MirageOS
- Stephen Dolan — OCaml compiler and garbage collection
- Sylvain Gugger — accelerating machine-learning models
- Will Wilson — deterministic simulation testing
- Andrey Mokhov — build systems and dependency graphs
- Chris Perl — clock synchronisation and time infrastructure
- Doug Patti — state machine replication and consensus
- Richard Eisenberg — type systems, dependent types, and Haskell
- Nate Foster — network programming languages and verification
- Andrew Hunter — performance engineering
- Chris Lattner — compilers, ML systems, and language design
- Jacob Baskin — data warehouses, distributed systems, and mechanism design