Turing Award Special: A Conversation with Jeffrey Ullman

Podcast Thursday, March 27 2025

Subscribe: RSS

Jeffrey Ullman is a renowned computer scientist and professor emeritus at Stanford University, celebrated for his groundbreaking contributions to database systems, compilers, and algorithms. He co-authored influential texts like Principles of Database Systems and Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools (often called the “Dragon Book”), which have shaped generations of computer science students.

Jeffrey received the 2020 Turing Award together with Alfred Aho “for fundamental algorithms and theory underlying programming language implementation and for synthesizing these results and those of others in their highly influential books, which educated generations of computer scientists.”

In this episode he joins Kevin Ball to talk about his life and career.

Kevin Ball or KBall, is the vice president of engineering at Mento and an independent coach for engineers and engineering leaders. He co-founded and served as CTO for two companies, founded the San Diego JavaScript meetup, and organizes the AI inaction discussion group through Latent Space.

Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.

Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com

SEDaily

Sponsors

Developers, we’ve all been there… It’s 3 AM and your phone blares, jolting you awake. Another alert. You scramble to troubleshoot, but the complexity of your microservices environment makes it nearly impossible to pinpoint the problem quickly.

That’s why Chronosphere is on a mission to help you take back control with Differential Diagnosis, a new distributed tracing feature that takes the guesswork out of troubleshooting. With just one click, DDx automatically analyzes all spans and dimensions related to a service, pinpointing the most likely cause of the issue.

Don’t let troubleshooting drag you into the early hours of the morning. Just “DDx it” and resolve issues faster.

See why Chronosphere was named a leader in the 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Observability Platforms at chronosphere.io/sed.

This episode of Software Engineering Daily is brought to you by Jellyfish, the leading software engineering intelligence platform.

AI codegen tools can be force multipliers for R&D organizations, but are you making the most of them? Join your peers on April 17 at GLOWLive. It’s a dynamic 90-minute virtual event that explores the transformative nature and potential impact of AI codegen solutions.

At GLOWLive, you’ll hear expert insights on:
Navigating a constantly-shifting landscape
Adopting codegen tools successfully
And measuring their impact on your team, your work, and your company’s long-term success