Podcasts

In this episode I speak with Dan Rosanova from Confluent about Kafka, their cloud offering, and project Metamorphosis. I also cover news from the past week including Developer Experience 101, Google Docs as an act of resistance, news from the Linux Kernel, what happened next to the founder of Atari, and much more.

This is a focussed episode, where I interview Alexander Wong of COVID-Net and DarwinAI about an open-source project last week to improve COVID-19 screening using artificial intelligence (AI).

This week I speak with Tess Rinearson about the Interchain foundation and her past thoughts on running inclusive hackathons, privilege, and much more. Also features news from Microsoft Build, Surveillance Capitalism, and the lost Sim games of Maxis.

This week I speak about in-memory computing with Dale Kim of Hazelcast. I also look at the changing world of in-person trade shows, offices, and restaurants.

This week I speak with Spectro Cloud about their new Kubernetes as a service offering, and also take a look at operating system market share changes, Skype just isn’t cool, Apple’s T2 chip woes, gaming, and Stephen Wolfram’s theory of everything.

I speak with Gaurav Deshpande of TigerGraph about their highly scalable graph database. Also features GDPR 2 years later, Flutter, JavaScript, grounded airplanes, cats, and more.

In this episode I speak with Troy Murray of breaker.io, a decentralized ecosystem that empowers creators and delivers fans classic and original content. Also features news items on technology in a time of crisis, self-editing, the bans before musicians were famous, and much more!

This week I speak with Chris Longstaff of Mindtech about their curious plan to help machine learning by augmenting datasets with synthetic data.

In this episode, we chat with Eric Holscher, co-founder of both Read the Docs and Write the Docs, about the recent Salary Survey that the WTD group conducted. This survey was launched in Fall 2019, and the results published were recently published. The salary survey covers details such as types of employment, job titles, roles, length of time in role, work location, annual salary, salary breakdowns by state, additional benefits, satisfaction, reasons for dissastisfaction, organization type, respondent demographics, and more. In addition to exploring the survey, we also chat about tips for working from home, especially given that both Eric and Chris have been working remotely for many years.

In this episode I speak with Quinn Slack of Sourcegraph about the universal code search tool. Also features news on AmigaOS, awesome repos for developers, the truths of lockdown, meetup spins out of WeWork, and early internet streamers.

No links this week as I focus on an interview with Quentin Rhoads-Herrera of Critical Start where we talk about cyber security during a time of crisis.

In this episode I speak with Peter Suma of Applied Brain Research about Nengo, a complete brain maker that allows you to develop and run models with deep learning, online learning, static weights, simple linear neurons, complex spiking neurons, and everything in-between.

Also features content covering tools for working from home, two player games, a “Hello World” for the modern era, and much more!

In this episode I speak with Nick Millward of mGage about the past present and future of mobile engagement, especially RCS. I also cover the history of the URL, teaching an AI to play D&D, how to work from home, why Discord is bad, Brave is good, and so much more.

Episode 28 is a recording of a Berlin WTD meetup focused on UX writing processes, live streamed on March 9, 2020 at the Humanitec in Berlin. The meetup featured two speakers. Natasha Sarana, UX Writer at FlixMobility, talks about her company’s attempts to include UX Writing in their research routine. She shares the main challenges they faced so far and how they deal with them. The second speaker, Roger Sheen, information architect and freelance UX Writer, talks about how the UI copy process at Wire evolved as the product matured. He covers gathering and aligning copy from source code, moving it to dedicated strings files to facilitate version control and localization, and setting up collaboration workflows with developers and external partners.

In this episode, we chat with Eric Holscher, co-founder of both Read the Docs and Write the Docs, about the recent Salary Survey that the WTD group conducted. This survey was launched in Fall 2019, and the results published were recently published. The salary survey covers details such as types of employment, job titles, roles, length of time in role, work location, annual salary, salary breakdowns by state, additional benefits, satisfaction, reasons for dissastisfaction, organization type, respondent demographics, and more. In addition to exploring the survey, we also chat about tips for working from home, especially given that both Eric and Chris have been working remotely for many years.

I’m taking a short break, so something from the archives this week of my ill-fated podcast from last year, “The Enthusiastic Amateur”. This interview is reproduced in entirety to get the listeners it deserved. A great interview with Sinclair Target of two-bit history about the hidden stories from computing history.

In episode 27 of the Write the Docs podcast, we’re joined by Cynthia Ng and Amy Qualls from GitLab to talk about strategies for starting up docs in organizations where there aren’t any other tech writers and where you’re first on scene setting up shop. What are your first steps as a documentarian when there isn’t anyone else, when processes, contacts, tools, and other systems aren’t documented or described anywhere? When you’re first on scene, docs might not even be your full-time job but rather a task that’s on the side of your desk and which you have to bootstrap from ground zero.

In this episode I speak with Patrick McFadin about Datastax and their plans with Apache Cassandra, ponder on the release of MIDI 2.0 after 37 years, plane security, what happened in Iowa, and more

In this episode I speak with Paul Kuijf of learned.io, look at the new Lovecraft film, burst some bubbles, learn new languages, and much more.

In this episode I speak with the makers of the Tactigon wearable gesture controller, look at scandal in Oxford, DLC in D&D, decolonialising gaming, and much more.

This episode I speak with Shlomi Hod about responsible AI, look at the worst D&D monster of all, hello world in assembly, and more.

In this episode I speak with the infamous Kin Lane, the API evangelist, now working with Postman. I also cover my new experiences with the Linux desktop, how “the rise of skywalker” has visions of our dystopian future, and more!

In episode 26, we talk with Alan Bowman about the technical writing forum on Reddit as well as the WTD Slack channel, comparing and contrasting the two spaces. Topics covered include pros and cons of anonymity on the internet, transparency around sensitive or taboo topics (e.g., salary, masters programs, feelings of overwhelm), age/experience demographics for both communities, balancing honesty with professionalism, responding to posts from overwhelmed tech writers, dealing with recurring topics, strategies for participating, and more.

In this episode I speak with Laszlo Toth, Nikolai Astrup, and Dr. Suncheol Gweon from the recent 5GTechritory about the current state, and future promise of 5G. Also in this episode, the Y2K panic, incentivising BitTorrent, Monopoly, tech sexism, and so much more.

In this episode I speak with Martin Mao of Chronosphere about the massive scale monitoring platform. I also cover fixing the internet, fixing air conditioning, the problem with calculators, switching from macOS to Linux, the death of Lil Bub and more!