Best Episodes

How did Spotify scale from 10 engineers to 100s to 1000s …without slowing down? Without becoming corporate?

Facing an IPO deadline, Pia Nilsson worked with 300 teams to transform how Spotify built software. She spearheaded a movement that led them from working in silos to a unified developer platform.

Hear the inside story of how... more..

Today’s guest is Douglas Crockford. He’s sharing the story of JSON, his discovery of JavaScript’s good parts, and his approach to finding a simple way to build software. Also, his battles against XML, against complexity, his battles to say that there’s a better way to build software.

This is foundational stuff for the web, and... more..

I’ve been on many projects that get canceled. We’re building cool stuff. We’re going above and beyond, and we’re excited. But the project encounters reality, shifting priorities, or budgeting constraints, and the work never goes anywhere. It always feels tragic, but then I move on.

But what if I didn’t let a project get canceled?... more..

I believe that getting underrepresented groups into software development is a good thing. This is not a controversial opinion until you start talking about felons.

Today’s guest is Rick Wolter. He’s an iOS developer who served 18 years in prison for second degree murder. Rick killed somebody and for some that’s all they need to... more..

I recently got an email from Jeff Shrager, who said he’d been working hard to solve a mystery about some famous code.

Eliza, the chatbot, was built in 1964, and she didn’t answer questions like Alexa or Siri. She asked questions. She was a therapist chatbot and quickly became famous after being described in a... more..

On today’s show, I’m talking to Richard Hipp about surviving becoming core infrastructure for the world. SQLite is everywhere. It’s in your web browser, it’s in your phone, it’s probably in your car, and it’s definitely in commercial planes. It’s where your iMessages and WhatsApp messages are stored, and if you do a find on... more..

David Shayer worked at Apple for 14 years, and he has a wild experience to share. Apple has a unique culture, and David will give us an insider view of what it was like for him at Apple during the 2000s, roughly between 2001 to 2015 when Apple transformed into the powerhouse that it is... more..

I’m not really a big gamer, but lately, I’ve fallen down this rabbit hole into the world of Casey Muratori, and this project that he started on Twitch in 2014. He is building a video game from scratch and explaining it all as he goes along.

Casey is a professional video game and game engine,... more..

When you work on your computer, there are so many things you take for granted: operating systems, programming languages, they all have to come from somewhere.

In the late 1960s and 1970s, that somewhere was Bell Labs, and the operating system they were building was UNIX.

They were building more than just an operating system... more..

How do CPUs work? How do compilers work? How does high-level code get translated into machine code? Today’s guest is Matt Godbolt and he knows the answers to these questions.

How he became an expert in bare metal programming is an interesting story. Matt shares his origin story and the creation of compiler explorer in... more..

Preparing our minds for the inevitable is hard. But, after facing terminal cancer, Kate Gregory recalled that facing death has many lessons to teach us.

In this episode,  Kate will share the lessons she learned and explain how you can apply them to your career as a software developer and live a remarkable life.

Today Richard Feldman shares his story of going from javascript developer to elm developer to functional programming teacher.

Along the way, Richard finds that people are teaching functional programming wrong. We are teaching it in a way that misses how most industrial software engineers learn best.

Richard also delves into Elm, his approach, and how... more..

Software is just the tool and it should get out of your way. In this episode, Jim discusses how to build a great developer tool. It all started with: “What’s the worst software that you use every day?” and led to the creation of Subversion.

Choosing the programming language or framework for a project can be to the success of the project.

In today’s episode, Sean Allen shares a story of picking the right tool for a job. The tool he ends up picking will surprise you.

His problem: make a distributed stream processing framework, something that can take a... more..

What makes some pieces of technology take off? Why is java popular and not small talk or Haskell?

Gabe is a popular blogger, a former Haskell cheerleader, and creator of the Dhall configuration language. Today we talk about marketing and tech evangelism.