The stories and people behind the code. Hear stories of software development from interesting people.
The Unfulfilled Engineer
Nothing good comes from being insecure about your worth, especially at your job. That's what today's episode is about. That's what today's guest is here to discuss. It's a slow burn, but if you listen to the end, I think you will value yourself more professionally. My Guest is Don Mckay. Someone longtime listeners will undoubtedly know. Episode Page Support The Show Subscribe To The Podcast Join The Newsletter
DOOMed to Fail: A Horror Story
Today Rebecca Burger Becky Heineman shares the tale of porting Doom to the 3DO console under extreme conditions. There is an engine to tweak, deadlines to hit, hardware acceleration to get working, and dramatic rock anthems to record. We also learn about how game piracy led her to game development and what it was like to do game development in the mania of the mid-nineties. Finally, we close with Becky's advice on learning bare metal development skills. Episode Page Support The Show Subscribe To The Podcast Join The Newsletter
Software World Tour
Today story is from Son Luong Ngoc who shares what’s it was like for him to work and live in many different countries around the world, including working for AliBaba at the Xixi campus in Hangzhou, China. It’s a story of a software developer finding a place that fits them, a place that suits them. Episode Page Support The Show Subscribe To The Podcast Join The Newsletter
Android's Unlikely Success
What could you accomplish if your teammates were all excited and determined to hit some project timelines? What is it like for a group of people to give it all they have? That's what today is about. Chet Haase from the Android team is here to share the story of the early days of Android, the mobile operating system that powers the majority of phones worldwide. We'll cover the years from 2005 to around 2011. It's a wild story. Episode Page Support The Show Subscribe To The Podcast Join The Newsletter Android's Book
From Prison To Programming
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 know about Rick. But today's episode is about Rick's path to redemption him, teaching himself to code in prison, smuggling in a Python interpreter, and then getting out and trying to get a job as a dev when you're a felon. Episode Page Support The Show Subscribe To The Podcast Join The Newsletter UnderDog Devs
CPAN - This Day In History
CPAN was the first open-source software module repository. And on this day, Aug 1st, in 1995, CPAN was first announced to a private group of PERL users. If you are building things today by pulling in various packages from various open source places – and really, who isn’t – then the history of how this world came to be is essential. Episode Page Support The Show Subscribe To The Podcast Join The Newsletter
The History and Mystery Of Eliza
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 1964 paper. But here is the mystery. We're not sure how the original version worked. Joseph Weizenbaum never released the code. But Jeff tracked it down, and some of the things we thought we knew about Eliza turned out to be wrong. Episode Page Support The Show Subscribe To The Podcast Join The Newsletter
Why still 80 columns?
On June 1st, 2014, the following question showed up on hacker news: "Why is 80 characters, the standard limit for code width." You probably know what happens next. People started to post their opinions and the comments and other people started to disagree. The posts spread around the internet. So that is going to be today's show: Let's answer this question. It's a question about traditions and teamwork, and how preexisting idioms shape us and help us, but sometimes restrict us. Episode Page Support The Show Subscribe To The Podcast Join The Newsletter
LISP in Space
Have you ever had a unique approach to a problem and been excited to use it, but you're met with skepticism? Today's story: what happens if you take someone who's passionate about LISP and put them in an organization where that's just not how they write software. Today's story is about getting LISP into space. Episode Page Support The Show Subscribe To The Podcast Join The Newsletter
April Fools' Is Cancelled
On this day in 2014 "lame april fools' jokes" were banned from hacker news. Today in our first This-Day-in-History segment, I want to share some of history not just of April Fools', but of tech pranks in general, all leading up to 2014. Why were pranks and April Fools' jokes traditionally celebrated in tech? Why are they now considered as dang said, "lame?"? And is there anything we can do to save them? Those are today's questions. Episode Page Support The Show Subscribe To The Podcast Join The Newsletter
The Story Graph with Nadia Odunayo
Whenever I work on a side project, I can't help but daydream of it taking off in a big way. For today's guests, something like that did happen. When Nadia started building her side project, she didn't know that it would end up spreading virally. She didn't know that it would end up competing with an Amazon product. She didn't know that keeping it up would be something that would drive her close to tears. Episode Page Support The Show Subscribe To The Podcast Join The Newsletter
Serenity OS
How would you build an operating system? My answer is I wouldn't. First off, I don't know how. And the second thing is it seems like to large of a task. It took thousands of developers to build Windows XP. But actually, it is possible to build an operating system from scratch. My guest is doing it. Andreas Kling created SerenityOS starting from an empty Git repository. So today, I find out how he did it, how this is possible. But mainly today, I find out why. Why build an operating system from scratch? And it all started in the 2010s when Andreas worked at Apple. Episode Page Support The Show Subscribe To The Podcast Join The Newsletter
The Internet Is Made of Duct Tape
Today, I have two of my favorite guests together: Krystal Maughan and Don McKay. We are going to be sharing strange and interesting facts about computing. I'm super pumped about this because, sometimes, I learn something new, and I'm excited about it. And I want to tell people about it. And so today is a chance for Don and Krystal and I to share some of these "Oh, my God. Did you guys see this?" stories. Episode Page Support The Show Subscribe To The Podcast Join The Newsletter
Cocoa Culture
The last episode, I said I wasn't sure there was such a thing as culture, but that's not the case. Every place I've worked has been a bit different, and often those differences had huge impacts on the software we built. The team where people roll their eyes at UX feedback will not have as simple of a product as a team where the user experience is highly valued. If software performance isn't valued, the end result won't be performant. Today, I found an expert on observing developer cultures. Hansen Hsu worked on the AppKit team at Apple, and he's here to talk about this mushy concept called culture. How does it manifest? How does it affect what people build? And how can it lead to beautiful software? Episode Page Support The Show Subscribe To The Podcast Join The Newsletter
Leaving Debian
Today’s story is an insider view of Debian. One of the oldest Linux distributions and probably one of the longest-running volunteer-based open-source projects. Joey Hess is my guest, and he dedicated significant parts of his adult life to working on Debian. He’s going to share what that was like. The good and the bad, and it’s almost all good. It’s a story about open source software, but it’s also about community and teamwork Links: Episode Page Support The Show Subscribe To The Podcast Join The Newsletter