I’m excited (and slightly terrified) to announce that Jane Street is releasing a new podcast, called Signals and Threads, and I’m going to be the host.

The idea for the podcast came up as we were discussing what would become of our public tech talk series and our on-campus talks in an era where in-person talks are not so easy to arrange. It occurred to us that a podcast might be a fun alternative.

And it has been fun! More fun than I expected, really. The structure of the podcast is simple enough: each episode is a conversation between me and a different one of Jane Street’s engineers, diving deep into that person’s expertise. The topics are varied; language design, clock synchronization, the role of IP multicast in markets, the ups and downs of reconfigurable hardware, and so on.

Our initial thought was that this would be a good way of communicating with potential recruits (you do know a big part of why we do all these tech talks is to hire great people, right?), but as we got into the process, we came to realize that these were conversations that would interest the people here at Jane Street as well, and we’re hoping this ends up being useful for both internal and external audiences.

In any case, we’ve been working hard on it, and we hope you enjoy the results.

The trailer should be out today, September 2nd. We’ll release one episode each week, on Wednesday morning. The first episode will be an interview with the inimitable Andy Ray who leads our hardware engineering team, and is the original author of Hardcaml, an OCaml library for designing hardware.

You can listen and subscribe to Signals and Threads using the links below, or you can listen directly from the podcast’s own website.