Turing Award Special: A Conversation with Jeffrey Ullman

Mar 27, 2025 by SED

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

Thanks to our sponsors

This episode is brought to you by:

chronosphere.io/sed
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.
Jellyfish
This episode of Software Engineering Daily is brought to you by Jellyfish, the software engineering intelligence platform powered by a patented allocations model and boasting the industry’s largest customer dataset.
You know, one of the biggest shifts in the past year or so is the adoption of genAI coding tools like GitHub Copilot. And engineering leaders are trying to figure out if their teams are actually using it, how much they’re using it, and how it’s affecting the business. Are they shipping more? Is more roadmap work being done? How do you know beyond anecdotes and surveys?
That’s why Jellyfish introduced the Copilot dashboard in 2024 in partnership with GitHub…and since then they’ve analyzed data from more than 4200 developers at more than 200 companies.
Want to know an interesting finding? Developers are shipping 20.9% more with Copilot.

chronosphere.io/sed

Jellyfish

Subscribe to the newsletter

Related episodes

Subscribe
to the newsletter