Codetown ::: a software developer's community
Join Michael Levin in this Swampcast interview with Tim Westergren, Pandora CEO. Click here to listen. Photo credit: Gala
In 2007, Tim started touring the USA giving presentations about a new music service on the web called Pandora. I met Tim in Orlando. There's quite a bit of background about Pandora that Tim describes in this interview. He deferred to his CTO, Tom Conrad when I asked him about technical details. Tom and I did a Swampcast interview shortly after this one.
From Wikipedia:
"Westergren was born in 1965 in Minneapolis. He attended boarding school, Cranbrook Kingswood, during his high school years. He graduated from Stanford University with a B.A. in political science.[2] Following his graduation, Westergren spent twenty years working as a record producer and composer (working as a nanny in between jobs), devoting the majority of his time to emerging artists and independent labels.
In 1999 he started Pandora Media along with two co-founders: Will Glaser and Jon Kraft. The Oakland, Calif., company went public in 2011,[3] reporting $138 million in revenue that fiscal year.
As an early project, Westergren and Glaser created the Music Genome Project, a mathematical algorithm to organize music.[1] As the company's chief strategy officer, Westergren spends the majority of his time traveling the nation and gathering feedback from Pandora Radio users. In 2010 he was listed by Time magazine as one among the 100 most influential people in the world.[4]
In April 2016, Pandora Media announced that Tim Westergren would replace Brian McAndrews as CEO. He had previously served as CEO and president from May 2002 to July 2004.[5]
In June 2017, he announced that he is going to step down as CEO.[6]"
Codetown is a social network. It's got blogs, forums, groups, personal pages and more! You might think of Codetown as a funky camper van with lots of compartments for your stuff and a great multimedia system, too! Best of all, Codetown has room for all of your friends.
Created by Michael Levin Dec 18, 2008 at 6:56pm. Last updated by Michael Levin May 4, 2018.
Check out the Codetown Jobs group.
During AI Week 2025, Cloudflare announced Application Confidence Scores, an automated assessment system that is designed to help organizations evaluate the safety and security of third-party AI applications at scale.
By Renato LosioVercel has rolled out the AI Gateway for production workloads. The service provides a single API endpoint for accessing a wide range of large language and generative models, aiming to simplify integration and management for developers.
By Daniel DominguezStefania Chaplin explains how to integrate security into engineering workflows and teams using a "Secure by Design" approach. Drawing on her extensive experience, she shares practical strategies for a security-first culture by focusing on people, processes, and technology, including the use of security champions and automation to improve resilience and reduce costs.
By Stefania ChaplinShane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Thanos Diacakis about how teams often struggle with software delivery. He proposes a shift in mental models and a four-step framework to systematically improve software development by focusing on bottlenecks, balancing different types of work beyond just feature delivery, and investing 20-30% of effort in improving how the team works.
By Thanos DiacakisNext.js 15.5 has landed, delivering faster builds and powerful server-side middleware. Key highlights include the Turbopack bundler, which boosts compilation speed by 2x to 5x, and Node.js middleware enhancements. TypeScript improvements enhance developer experience with stable typed routes and early error detection.
By Daniel Curtis
© 2025 Created by Michael Levin.
Powered by
You need to be a member of Codetown to add comments!
Join Codetown