Charlie Malmqvist on Engineering, Nowgrep and BSC Conference

Charlie Malmqvist shares his programming journey from learning C at 14 to building nowgrep, a high-performance file search tool for Windows. He discusses parsing NTFS directly to achieve sub-second search times versus minutes with existing tools, building everything from scratch including a CPU-rendered GUI without libraries or C runtime. The conversation covers his work organizing the Better Software Conference, philosophy on simple problem-solving over abstractions, and advice for aspiring systems programmers to focus on understanding fundamentals and solving specific problems rather than applying general patterns.