Our friends at Cult.Repo launch their epic Python documentary on August 28th, 2025! To celebrate, we sat down with Travis Oliphant –creator of NumPy, SciPy, and more– to get his perspective on how Python took over the software world.

Stick around for the twist ending! We set aside Python and dissect Travis’ big idea to make open source projects financially sustainable through direct investment.

The epic show with Adam Jacob has been remastered! Now with full-length video on YouTube. Adam goes solo with Adam Jacob for an epic pod into his journey to get to System Initiative. From SysAdmin at 8 years old, to discovering Linux and working for Mom-and-pop ISPs, to open source changing his life and starting Opscode and building Chef. Buckle up and enjoy.

Dr. Ewelina Kurtys is leading the way in biocomputing at FinalSpark where she is working on the next evolutionary leap for AI and neuron-powered computing. It’s a brave new world, just 10 years in the making. We discuss lab-grown human brain organoids connected to electrodes, the possibility to solve AI’s massive energy consumption challenge, post-silicon approach to computing, biological vs quantum physics and more.

We’re LIVE at the historic Oriental Theater in Denver, CO with Nora Jones. Nora is the founder of Jeli.io, recently acquired by PagerDuty and she’s been shaping the way we think about reliability, incident response, and human-centered engineering for years.

We get into the real story behind the deal. Not just the headline, but what it’s like selling your company, what it takes to actually integrate a product into a larger platform, how customers responded, what changed for her team, and why her new role at PagerDuty is basically everything she was building Jeli for.

Greg Osuri, Founder and CEO of Akash Network joins us to share the backstory in his testimony before congress on the energy crisis and what it’s going to take to power the future of AI. From powering datacenters, to solar, decentralized AI compute, to zombies in SF.

Sugu Sougoumarane, creator of Vitess, comes off sabbatical to bring Vitess to Postgres. We discuss what motivated Sugu to come off sabbatical, why now is the time, the technical challenges of doing so, the implementation details of Multigres (Vitess for Postgres). We also discuss the state of Postgres at scale.

David Hsu from Retool joins Adam to discuss how he built Retool. From the pivot in YC, to building the most widely used internal tools platform, to now being the platform for AI agents in the enterprise—on this episode we cover David journey from YC to building agents for the enterprise.

We talk with Don MacKinnon, Co-founder and CTO of Searchcraft—a lightspeed search engine built in Rust. We dig into the future of search, how it blends vector embeddings with classic ranking, and what it takes to build developer-friendly, production-grade search from the ground up.

Thorsten Ball returned to Sourcegraph to work on Amp because he believes being able to talk to an alien intelligence that edits your code changes everything. On this episode, Thorsten joins us to discuss exactly how coding agents work, recent advancements in AI tooling, Amp’s uniqueness in a sea of competitors, the divide between believers and skeptics, and more.

Chris Anderson joins the show. You may recognize Chris from the early days of CouchDB and Couchbase. Back when the world was just waking up to NoSQL, Chris was at the center of it all, shaping how developers think about data distribution and offline-first architecture.

These days, Chris is working on Vibes.diy and Fireproof — tools that make one-shot app generation not only possible, but shareable within minutes. We talk about the origins of CouchDB, the fork that led to Membase and Couchbase, and how that long journey led to this new paradigm: Vibe Coding.

Jerod is joined by Carson Gross, the creator of htmx –a small, zero-dependency JavaScript library that he says, “completes HTML as a hypertext”. Carson built it because he’s big on hypermedia, he even wrote a book called Hypermedia Systems. Carson has a lot of strong opinions weakly held that we dive into in this conversation.

Jerod chats with Richard Feldman about Roc – his fast, friendly, functional language inspired by Richard’s love of Elm. Roc takes many of Elm’s ideas beyond the frontend and introduces some great ideas of its own. Get ready to learn about static dispatch, platforms vs applications, opportunistic mutation, purity inference, and a whole lot more.

We’re on location at Microsoft Build 2025 with Amanda Silver, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft’s Developer Division. Amanda leads product, design, user research, and engineering systems for some of the tools you use every day. We discuss the latest AI announcements from Microsoft at Build 2025, how AI is reshaping development tools, what’s next for VS Code, TypeScript, GitHub’s evolution, and even emerging editors like Windsurf that are forking the VS Code ecosystem.

We’re joined by Andreas Møller, Co-founder of Nordcraft — the team behind Nordcraft Engine, a powerful new platform designed to give web developers what gaming developers have had for years. Andreas shares what inspired them to build Nordcraft Engine, why they believe the web is overdue for a shift in how we approach designing and building for the web, ee explore how the platform works, how you can get started, and what’s next for Nordcraft.

Preston Thorpe joins us from inside prison, where he awaits a hopeful release within the next 12 months. His journey has been anything but easy—marked by hardship and uncertainty. But over the past few years, Preston has undergone a profound transformation. He’s refactored not just his skills, but his identity. Today, he proudly calls himself a software engineer and an open source contributor. In this episode, Preston shares his story of redemption, resilience, and what comes next.

Derek Collison — creator of NATS and Co-founder & CEO of Synadia — joins the show to dive into the origins, design, and evolution of NATS, a high-performance, open-source messaging system built for modern cloud-native systems and part of the CNCF. Derek shares the story behind NATS, what makes it unique, and unpacks the recent tensions between Synadia and the CNCF over the future of the project.

Nathan Sobo is back talking about the next big thing for Zed—agentic editing! You now have a full-blown AI-native editor to play with. Collaborate with agents at 120fps in a natively multiplayer IDE.

Drew Wilson is back! It’s been more than a decade since Adam and Drew have spoken and wow, Drew has been busy. He built Plasso and got acquired by GoDaddy. He built a bank called Letter which didn’t work out…and now he’s Head of Design at Clerk and back to chasing that next big thing.

Kendall Miller is a bubbly extrovert who sticks his fingers in a lot of pies. He advises tech companies like FusionAuth, positions tech products like Civo & Tensorlake, organizes tech networks like CTO Lunches, and even sells whiskey & gin to tech people like us via his Friday Deployment Spirits brand. Kendall has learned a lot since he first entered the industry and he’s eager to share what he knows, and who he knows, with the world.

Anthony Eden, Founder & CEO of DNSimple, joins the show to talk about the world of managed hosting for DNS and more.

Stephan Ewen, Founder and CEO of Restate.dev joins the show to talk about the coming era of resilient apps, the meaning of and what it takes to achieve idempotency, this world of stateful durable execution functions, and when it makes sense to reach for this tech.

In July of 2020, Joran Dirk Greef stumbled into a fundamental limitation in the general-purpose database design for transaction processing. This sent him on a path that ended with TigerBeetle, a redesigned distributed database for financial transactions that yielded three orders of magnitude faster OLTP performance over the usual (general-purpose) suspects.

On this episode, Joran joins Jerod to explain how TigerBeetle got so fast, to defend its resilience and durability claims as a new market entrant, and to stake his claim at the intersection of open source and business. Oh, plus the age old question: Why Zig?

This week we’re bringing you a remaster of our epic 2021interview with Lara Hogan – author of Resilient Management and management coach / trainer for the tech industry.

The majority of our conversation focuses on the four primary hats leaders and managers end up wearing; mentoring, coaching, sponsoring, and delivering feedback. We also talk about knowing when you’re ready to lead, empathy and compassion, and learning to lead.

Ilya Grigorik and his team at Shopify has been hard at work securing ecommerce checkouts from sophisticated news attacks (such as digital skimming) and he’s here to share all the technical intricacies and far-reaching implications of this work.

Beyang Liu, the CTO & Co-founder of Sourcegraph is back on the pod. Adam and Beyang go deep on the idea of “industrializing software development” using AI agents, using AI in general, using code generation. So much is happening in and around AI and Sourcegraph continues to innovate again and again. From their editor assistant called Cody, to Code Search, to AI agents, to Batch Changes, they’re really helping software teams to industrialize the process, the inner and the outer loop, of being a software developer on high performance teams with large codebases.

Antirez has returned to Redis! Yes, Salvatore Sanfilippo (aka Antirez), the creator of Redis has returned to Redis and he joined us to share the backstory on Redis, what’s going on with the tech and the company, the possible (likely) move back to open source via the AGPL license, the new possibilities of AI and vector embeddings in Redis, and some good ’ol LLM inference discussions.

Anurag Goel, Founder/CEO of Render, joins Adam to discuss what they’re doing to solve cloud problems for application developers. They just raised $80M they don’t even need and they’re poised to solve boring problems like object storage, and less boring things like building for the AI era.

For the past year, David Crawshaw has intentionally sought ways to use LLMs while programming, in order to learn about them. He now regularly use LLMs while working and considers their benefits a net-positive on his productivity. David wrote down his experience, which we found both practical and insightful. Hopefully you will too!

Arun Gupta is back, this time with his latest book in hand titled “Fostering Open Source Culture” to share his wisdom and experiences of fostering open source culture. BTW you can use the code OSCULTURE20 to get 20% off (both print and e-book). Use this link and enjoy.

After 30+ years in the software industry, Bert Hubert has experienced a lot. He founded PowerDNS, published articles for places like IETF / IEEE, and built his own parliament monitoring system. That just scratches the surface.

Recently, Bert wrote about what it takes to build software for the long term. Let’s dig in.