Sing Me A Song of Stack Overflow: A Musical Tail Call Optimization
When Anjana Vakil and Natalia Margolis applied to speak at !!Con (read Bang Bang Con) this year, they wanted to take the call for ‘non-traditional’ talks to heart while still sharing useful insights. They decided to tackle the following question: why recursion poses a problem for the finite-memory call stack. That could be quite a…

“It’s the whole culture that surrounds !!Con that made us do a talk like this.” Vakil tells us. The conference originated from a coding retreat in NYC called the Recurse Center (RC). “It’s like a writers’ retreat but for coding.” Vakil, an RC alumna herself, describes the goals of the project. ”There are no classes, just the breathing space to work on your self-directed projects surrounded by peers.” The tuition-free program aims to attract a diverse group of people, offering need-based living expense grants for people from traditionally underrepresented groups in programming.
Like the festival’s motto, the musical captures that ‘joy, excitement, and surprise’ when you solve a problem and – spoiler alert! – their functions get a happy ending. Margolis, who works with Vakil at Mapbox, likens the experience to her early days on Stack Overflow’s Q&A. “Stepping in front of a group of people to perform a musical as a non-professional singer can feel scary, just like asking your first question on Stack Overflow. But having a supportive environment like !!Con makes it easy to push yourself out of your comfort zone and do the thing.”
Today Margolis and Vakil get to answer as well as ask questions on Stack Overflow, where the Mapbox tech-tag brings together an established community of developers using the Mapbox location data platform.
You can follow Anjana Vakil and Natalia Margolis on Twitter and catch “Tail-recursive Functions – The Movie” – coming to theaters near you, Summer 2029
Tags: !!con, bulletin, mapbox, musical, stackoverflow
10 Comments
WTF => Wow, That’s Fantastic.
Greatly enjoyed!
Hope you ladies could teach us next time about Divide and Conquer … 🙂
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divide-and-conquer_algorithm
Amazing! Very impressive, gonna try to do that in my next presentations…
Just read this instead XD https://stackoverflow.com/questions/310974/what-is-tail-call-optimization/55230417#55230417
Impressive
Not exactly related but the title alone reminds me much to the Song of Century.
https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=sing+me+a+song+of+the+century&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
It reminds me of Outlander OST (serie) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRW_xszIhLM
Tremendous!
I cringed at the whole idea, as I’m not a fan of musicals, but man, did I learn something today. Worth the time for code newbies.
Excellent and unique