In our ops & infra world, we learn to optimise for redundancy, for mean time to recovery and for graceful degradation. We instinctively recognise single points of failure, and try to mitigate the risks associated with them.

For some years now, Daniel Vassallo has been doing the same, but in the context of life & work. Daniel talks about the role of randomness, about learning from small wins & about optimising for a lifestyle that matches your true preferences. Apparently, ideas too should be treated like cattle, not pets.

What’s the current reality and practical implications of using 3D environments for simulation and synthetic data creation? In this episode, we cut right through the hype of the Metaverse, Multiverse, Omniverse, and all the “verses” to understand how 3D assets and tooling are actually helping AI developers develop industrial robots, autonomous vehicles, and more. Beau Perschall is at the center of these innovations in his work with NVIDIA, and there is no one better to help us explore the topic!

Jeremia Kimelman takes stock of his “data tool belt”, Build Your Own Redis with C/C++ is ready to read, giscus is a comments system powered by GitHub Discussions, Matt Rickard says prompt engineering shouldn’t be a thing and won’t be a thing in the future & Kolja Lubitz’s ALPACA is engine for building adventure games and interactive comics.

This week we’re talking about mainframes with Cameron Seay, Adjunct Professor at East Carolina University and a member of the Governing Board of the Open Mainframe Project. If you’ve been curious about mainframes, this show will be a great guide.

Cameron explains exactly what a mainframe is and how it’s different from the cloud. We talk COBOL and the state of education and opportunities around that language. We cover the state-of-the-art in mainframe land, System Z, Linux on mainframes, and more.

Ole Bulbuk & Sandor Szücs join Natalie to discuss the ins & outs of long-term code maintenance. What does it take to maintain a codebase for a decade or more? How do you plan for that? What about inheriting a codebase for the long term? Oh, and (how) can AI help?

Last September, at the 🇨🇭 Swiss Cloud Native Day, Florian Forster, co-founder & CEO of ZITADEL, talked about why they switched to serverless containers. ZITADEL has a really interesting workload that is both CPU intensive and latency sensitive. On top of this, their users are global, and traffic is bursty. Florian talks about how they evaluated AWS, GCP & Azure before they settled on the platform that met their requirements.

Creating and sharing reproducible development environments for AI experiments and production systems is a huge pain. You have all sorts of weird dependencies, and then you have to deal with GPUs and NVIDIA drivers on top of all that! brev.dev is attempting to mitigate this pain and create delightful GPU dev environments. Now that sounds practical!

Fred K. Schott joins the party again to discuss all the new and fun changes in Astro 2. Nick and KBall dig in on what’s new, what’s exciting, and what to expect from the framework built around content.

Max Countryman wrote up a framework for prioritizing tech debt, shadcn builds a copy/paste-able UI component library in public, Justin Etheredge shares 20 things he’s learned in his 20 years as a software engineer, Jacob Stopak’s git-sim lets you easily visualize git operations without affecting your repo & Mattias Wadman implemented jq in jq.

This week we’re talking about by Postgres with Craig Kerstiens, Chief Product Officer at Crunchy Data, and a well known ambassador for Postgres. Just Postgres. That’s what this week’s show is about.

Jerod & the gang analyze the State of JS 2022 survey results, play a wicked game of HeadLIES & share some Pro Tips to help you live your best dev life.

Lars is big on Elixir. Think apps that scale really well, tend to be monolithic, and have one of the most mature deployment models: self-contained releases & built-in hot code reloading. In episode 7, Gerhard talked to Lars about “Why Kubernetes”. There is a follow-up YouTube stream that showed how to automate deploys for an Elixir app using K3s & ArgoCD.

More than a year later, how does Lars think about running applications in production? What does simple & straightforward mean to him? Gerhard’s favourite: what is “human scale deployments”?

Tech lawyer Luis Villa returns to Go Time to school us once again on the intellectual property concerns of software creators in this crazy day we live in. This time around, we’re focusing on the implications of Large Language Models, code generation, and crazy stuff like that.

Why is ML is so poorly adopted in small organizations (hint: it’s not because they don’t have enough data)? In this episode, Kirsten Lum from Storytellers shares the patterns she has seen in small orgs that lead to a successful ML practice. We discuss how the job of a ML Engineer/Data Scientist is different in that environment and how end-to-end project management is key to adoption.

WestArtFactory’s premium PCB cheat sheets, Maxime Topolov tells of a disappearing AWS dev, Juspay Technologies releases HyperSwitch for payment processing, Servo gets new funding for 2023 & Cloudflare’s open source Wildebeest.

Jerod is joined by Yehonathan Sharvit, author of Data-Oriented Programming, to discuss the virtues of treating data as a first-class citizen in our applications and the four principles that make it possible.

KBall and Chris dive into the current JavaScript trends towards smaller frameworks, compiled JavaScript, and why Chris believes “this time is different” with regards to developers caring about network speed and reducing JS sent over the wire.

Paul Smith (from “Obama’s Trauma Team”) tells us the tale of how Go played a big role in the rescuing and rebuilding of the HealthCare.gov website. Along the way we learn what the original team did wrong, how the rescue team kept it afloat during huge traffic spikes, and what they’ve done since to rebuild it to serve the people’s needs.

Marcos Nils has been into platform engineering for the best part of the last decade. He helped architect & build developer platforms using VMs & OpenStack, containers with Docker, and even Kubernetes. He did this at startups with 10 people, as well as large, publicly traded companies with 1000+ software engineers.

Today we talk with Marcos about the hard parts of platform engineering.

Daniel and Chris do a deep dive into OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which is the first LLM to enjoy direct mass adoption by folks outside the AI world. They discuss how it works, its effect on the world, ramifications of its adoption, and what we may expect in the future as these types of models continue to evolve.

Brandur Leach’s easy, alternative soft deletion strategy, Lane Wagner’s zen of proverbs, Nicolas Carlo says fake it until you can automate it, Felix A. Crux thinks feeds are the only civilized way to read online & Ben Thompson analyzes AI and the big five tech companies.

Welcome to 2023 — we’re kicking off the year talking to Justin Searls about the state of web development and why he just might write a “You Might Not Need React” post. He’s been so productive using Turbo and Stimulus (and tailwind) in Rails 7 that we had to talk about the state of Rails development today and a bunch of other fun topics around building for the web in 2023.

It’s our 4th annual New Year’s party! Jerod & the gang review our (failed) resolutions from last year, discuss what’s trending in the web world, make a few predictions of our own & even set some new (probably failed) resolutions for this year.

Mat and the gang ring in the new year by gathering around a make believe fireplace and discussing what they’re excited about in 2023, their new years resolutions & a little bit of Go talk, too. But only a little.

Welcome to 2023! A new year is the perfect time to start with a fresh perspective. Given a few bare metal hosts with fast, local storage, how would you run your workloads on them? Would you cluster them for redundancy? What operating system would you choose?

Steve Francis, CEO at Sidero Labs and Andrew Rynhard, CTO at Sidero Labs join us today to talk about running Talos Linux on bare metal.

While at EMNLP 2022, Daniel got a chance to sit down with an amazing group of researchers creating NLP technology that actually works for their local language communities. Just Zwennicker (Universiteit van Amsterdam) discusses his work on a machine translation system for Sranan Tongo, a creole language that is spoken in Suriname. Andiswa Bukula (SADiLaR), Rooweither Mabuya (SADiLaR), and Bonaventure Dossou (Lanfrica, Mila) discuss their work with Masakhane to strengthen and spur NLP research in African languages, for Africans, by Africans.

The group emphasized the need for more linguistically diverse NLP systems that work in scenarios of data scarcity, non-Latin scripts, rich morphology, etc. You don’t want to miss this one!

Jackson Huff’s clipboard powertool for the command line, Fernando Borretti thinks tools for thought should be unbundled, Listen Notes helps you run a microfeed on Cloudflare, Martin Rue says to be productive, be prepared & Paul Sawers takes TechCrunch readers inside Matrix and features its recent adoption wins.

Our 5th annual year-end wrap-up episode! Sit back, relax, pour a glass of your favorite beverage and join us for listener voice mails, our favorite episodes, some must-listens, and of course the top 5 most listened to episodes of the year. Thanks for listening! 💚

We’re back! This is from our “lost episodes” — This is your brain…and this is your brain on burnout, any questions? OK, but seriously, burnout effects everyone, even if they/you don’t admit it. Burnout is a state of physical, emotional, and mental exhaustion caused by prolonged stress. It can affect ANYONE, but it is especially common among high-performers who push themselves to the limit. In this episode, we dive into the latest research on burnout and its effects on the brain, as well as offer practical advice for preventing and managing burnout. If you’re heading into 2023 feeling overwhelmed and drained, this episode is for you.

To wrap up the year we’re talking about what’s breaking the internet, again. Yes, we’re talking about ChatGPT and we’re joined by our good friend Shawn “swyx” Wang. Between his writings on L-Space Diaries and his AI notes repo on GitHub, we had a lot to cover around the world of AI and what might be coming in 2023.

Also, we have one more show coming out before the end of the year — our 5th annual “State of the log” episode where Adam and Jerod look back at the year and talk through their favorite episodes of the year and feature voices from the community. So, stay tuned for that next week.