TechZing is an informal bi-weekly chat show aimed at entreprenures and hackers interested in creating their own web app startup. The show is both educational (with practical advice) and conversational.
214: TZ Discussion – The Madness
Justin and Jason talk about why taking multiple shorter vacations is usually better than taking one long vacation, Justin's plans to create an Udemy course, the latest on Catalyst, Colby's madness, Justin's personal training sessions, how to choose health insurance, the GOP's flip flop on copyright, Romney's IT fail, Nate Silver's prediction methodology, the Obama campaign's analytics team, the programming games Check iO and RoboNode, how Tesla won Motor Trend Car of the Year, the variance in home prices across the country, whether programming can be commoditized and why it's important to make a name for yourself, Hailo Cab vs Uber, the Uber profiler Clouseau and the dividends it's paid for scaling Uber's dispatching system, the science fiction web series H+ and Battlestar Galactica: Blood and Chrome, the TV series The Walking Dead and Breaking Bad, how sixteen Fisker Karma's blew up because of Hurricane Sandy, why Jason wants to buy the Model S, how $75,000 is the happiness tipping point, how Pluggio is the little engine that could, and hints about Justin's next project.
213: TZ Discussion - Why Elon Musk is Having the Best Week Ever
Justin and Jason discuss Justin's trip to Ireland and the UK and Rob Walling's visit to Pasadena, the latest version of the Catalyst IDE and the power of gamification, AppFog's free plan for Node.js, ActivityHero and the potential future of Catalyst Academy, Justin's thoughts on hiring for experience, how Justin resolved Pluggio's cascading query problem, Jason's idea for an Uber prize and scaling Uber's Node.js-based dispatching system, why you should CallTheseGuys.com if you need a website built, how computer science graduates are the least employable in the UK, how SpaceX completed the first delivery trip to the International Space Station and the Tesla Model S was voted car of year, the History Channel's show The Men Who Built America, Jason's investment strategy for 2013, and why Justin and Jason are both long Rob Walling.
212: TZ Discussion - Where the Hell is My Heisenmachine?
Justin and Jason discuss how to make progress when you have too much to do, an update on running the audio job board, hiring someone to keep you on task and tricks to reduce the cost of context switching, why Jason thinks Justin will regret taking a three-week trip to Europe, the latest on Catalyst Coder (the in-browser educational IDE), Justin's domino method of teaching and the nightmare of explaining the for loop, some hacks for simplifying Javascript and the possibility of writing a new language called "KidScript" that transcompiles to Javascript, new stylistic conventions in Node.js, the idea of creating coding games and a simplified graphics library for Catalyst Coder, tracking who bought your politician, exposing messaged economic models ShadowStats, how the returns of angel investors are better than previously thought, why PC obsolescence is obsolete, the best way to find aliens, Nikola Tesla, his patents and his Tower of Power, why the possibility of being in a simulation is driving Justin crazy, what's realistic and what's not about aircraft carriers in space and how the modern carriers are sitting ducks, how Tesla's Supercharger network has gone live in six California towns, the rise of the rocketship school, setting up an AnyFu Paypal account and what's going to happen with the show while Justin is in Europe.
211: TZ Discussion - Magic Dragon
Justin and Jason discuss Justin's approach to developing HTML5 apps that feel truly native, how Titanium finally fixed the build bug for iOS6 devices, more on the Titanium license issue, the first paid job advertisement (Java API developer at Uber Media), the effect of moving Catalyst to a new space and the browser-based IDE that Jason is building for the class, setting up a Node.js application on AppFog, resolving payment issues on AnyFu and using PayPal as a payout option, how to determine if reality is merely a computer simulation, Jason's iPad information workflow - Browser / HackerNode => Instapaper => Pinboard / Evernote, why the first laptop had such a hard time catching on, the mysterious book Jason received in the mail (Axiomatic - Greg Egan), and some of their favorite movies.
210: TZ Discussion - Supercharged
Justin and Jason talk about time management and focus, what Jason likes about the iPad, programming using Codea and Lua, managing information using Instapper, Pinboard and Evernote, Colby's soccer resurgence, why Jason is selling Facebook and buying Tesla and Tesla's plans for a supercharger network, the recent growth of the show and the idea of bringing in revenue via job advertisements, Jason's LinkedIn debacle, what happens when $$ meets Hacker News, better learning tools and a better space for Catalyst, learning bioinformations through problem solving on Rosalind, inconsistant complaining about the science of science fiction movies, and using a worker queue to process a large number of emails.
209: TZ Discussion - The Overloaded Life
Justin and Jason discuss Jason's new iPad and his old MacBook Pro, the costs and limitations of Titanium's licensing plans and the surrounding controversy, a post-mortem of the third Catalyst session, KidsRuby, and the idea of creating a DragonBox inspired Catalyst coding game, the status of Appignite, Justin's $$ Javascript framework, "The Madness", the progress being made on SkyBoard and some potential revenue models, the movie Looper, how California has passed a law allowing for the testing of self-driving cars on public roads, how Blizzard was head-faked into creating a better StartCraft, the recent growth of the podcast, how everyone who attended OWS with a cell phone had their identity logged and the Apple patent that describes remotely disabling protesters' phone cameras, the Uber Javascript profiler to be named Clouseau, the superiority of the Singapore Math curriculum and the ThinkMath Foundation, the power of keeping a Spark File and of storing your notes in a BATF (big ass text file), Jason's overloaded schedule, Colby's football future, the awesome new hover bike that you'll never get to ride, and why Justin never wears shorts.
208: TZ Discussion - Boundary Testing
Justin and Jason talk about the latest progress on AnyFu, the new Catalyst volunteer CJ Winslow and lessons learned from the most recent session, Justin's new version of SkyBoard and how he built it using his new Javascript framework $$, the idea of creating a programming game in the style of DragonBox, their recent outing to a Richard Dolan talk, how Jason is getting back into watching Battlestar Galactica and why warp drive may be more feasible than previously thought, how Jason needs to buy a new printer, using Redis at Uber, the tradeoffs of storing schema-less JSON data, and why you shouldn't believe the hype about Iran conducting cyberwar on the U.S..
207: TZ Discussion - Catalyzed
Justin and Jason discuss meeting AnyFu all-stars Joanna Wiebe and Lance Jones, the eBook that Jason thinks Justin should write, the lessons Jason wants to teach his kids, principles of negotiation, why kids have to learn things the hard way, a post-mortem on the first Catalyst session and what Jason has planned for the second, Rob Walling's advice on buying apps and websites, Justin's new $$ Javascript framework and what it takes for an open source project to take off, how the NSA is recruiting hackers and the AT&T tech who blew the whistle on the NSA's domestic eavesdropping program back in 2006, why Jason thinks Justin would make more money if he marketed himself as an on-demand CTO, how Jason's father-in-law mistakenly deleted every recording on their DVR, the results of Colby's academic standards test and what is says about his personality, the story of Wordspoke.me, why Jason likes Titanium, how Google, Amazon, eBay and Facebook et al. are forming a powerful U.S. lobby called the Internet Association, how NOT to recruit top technical talent, the bacteria that was discovered eating plastic in the Sargasso Sea, AnyFu's true market and why the experts charge so much, and how scientists bioengineered an artificial esophagus.
206: TZ Interview - Corey Maass / The Birdy
Justin and Jason talk to Corey Maass, founder of personal expense tracker, The Birdy.
205: TZ Discussion - Check Your Egometer
Justin and Jason discuss how much time they spend on the podcast, Justin's thoughts on becoming a multi-product entrepreneur, Seth Godin's book - The Dip, how much time should be devoted to consulting vs. working on a side business, potential email strategies for recruiting experts, building an email reminder system for AnyFu, problems with the donation model, the Node.js profiler that Jason and Guyon built for Uber, the misleading CNN article about why we need a longer school year and the other side of the story, Justin's idea for creating an ego depletion meter, the challenges of scheduling the first Catalyst Academy session, the Mathigon mathematics education project, how Oracle is moving MySQL towards the closed-source model, why Reddit only has two MySQL Tables - Thing and Data, Jason's idea for doing lazy schema migrations, why Uber is moving from MySQL to ProstgreSQL (PostGIS), how self-driving cars were just approved by the California legislature and the rise of drones, the free diving world records, why there is no American Ninja Warrior, why Darpa thinks the future of computing is analog, HP and Hynix's one-year delay on memristors, how the Flynn Effect isn't about people getting smarter, how the New York Times has been colluding with the CIA to boost Obama's reelection chances, how the spyware known as FinFisher can take over your mobile device, the Pirate Bay founder who was arrested in Cambodia, how the U.S. is probably using Sweden to get at Julian Assange, and finally how Obama's justice department has granted final immunity to Bush's CIA torturers.
204: TZ Discussion - Don't Panic, It's Only Radiation
Justin and Jason discuss why Jason is sad about Colby quitting club soccer, scaling Node.js to a million concurrent connections and how Redis is used at Uber, what it's like working at UberMedia and Idealab, how Sandy is helping out with AnyFu, ideas on how to share customer support responsibilities, why Justin is frustrated with Pluggio and what Jason thinks he should do about it, the upstart success of Jason's iPad fund and why Justin wants to raise money for audio software, building iPhone apps with Visual Studio and JyOS, the panic over Fukushima and how uranium extracted from the ocean could power the human race until 5000AD, Justin's update on intermittent fasting, recruiting kids for Catalyst, RoboRally and learning to program by training a robot, how your brain can be hacked, the high performance PHP framework Phalcon PHP, how Coursera is introducing an honor code in an attempt to reduce cheating, how Twitter is slitting their own throat, individualist and collectivist coding and why quality happens when someone is responsible for it, the problem of sorting out who owns what when signing IP contracts, speculating on whether Buffer was influenced by Pluggio, and how Rob Walling was quoted in a New York Times article.
203: TZ Discussion - The Future Ain't What It Used to Be
Justin and Jason discuss Justin's experiments with intermittent fasting, the latest on AnyFu, Justin's call for an open Twitter, how to be a math or science rockstar, why the singularity is not coming, sci-fi predictions from 1987, storing 700 terabytes of data in a single gram of DNA, Jason's thoughts on learning synthetic biology and the GenoCon competition, Jason's teaching strategy for Catalyst and why he thinks Python will be a better learning language than Chipmunk Basic, Justin's new Galaxy Nexus 7, how Google's self-driving car is going to change everything, why WebRTC wil change the web, TrapWire and the new totalitarianism of surveillance technology, and the efficacy of using loss aversion to improve teacher performance.
202: TZ Discussion - Hacking Jason
Justin and Jason talk about the response to the wives show, Justin's new life in Pasadena and his new contract at UberMedia, how Jason is going to spend his half of the podcast donation money, the latest on Jason's math and science academy - Catalyst, why Justin is excited about intermittent fasting, the recent scientific reversals on salt, sitting posture, positive thinking and fluoride, why Justin wants to pay Jason to work on AnyFu, deploying real-time systems code at Uber, how Justin moved Pluggio to a Rackspace Cloud Database and why he thinks growing Pluggio's revenue is so difficult, whether App.net has any chance of disrupting Twitter, engineering bacteria to survive on Mars, the discovery of the Gauss cyber weapon, why Algebra isn't necessary, why Jason thinks most textbooks are inefficient, and the stark contrast between electronics hobbyist books and introductory electrical engineering books.
201: TZ Interview - Scott Young / The MIT Challenge
Jason speaks with Scott Young, creator of the online course Learn More, Study Less, about his effort to master the entire 4-year MIT computer science curriculum in only 12 months.
200: TZ Wives - Setting the Record Straight
In this wives tell-all episode, Georgie Wisen-Vincent, Sandy Roberts and Sherry Walling give their respective views on what it's like being married to a technology entrepreneur.