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Join Michael Levin in this video interview with Jonathan Schwartz, former Sun Microsystems CEO. "Jonathan Ian Schwartz (born October 20, 1965) is an American...
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Here’s a blast from the past. Wikipedia CTO Brion Vibber walks us through the beginnings of Wikipedia. Enjoy! Click here to hear the podcast.
Swampcast features Tim Westergren, Pandora CEOJoin 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:
In 1999 Westergren 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]"
This is one of the most deeply technical Swampcasts - fascinating!
https://codetown.com/profiles/blogs/pandora-swampcast-features-pand...
#pandora #tomconrad #swampcast #mikelevin
Here's a Swampcast featuring Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist. Enjoy!
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.
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PlanetScale has announced the general availability of its managed sharded Postgres service, built for performance and reliability on AWS or Google Cloud. The launch extends PlanetScale's offerings to PostgreSQL users, adding to the company's existing popular MySQL-based platform built on top of Vitess.
By Renato LosioGoogle DeepMind has introduced CodeMender, a new AI-driven agent designed to detect, fix, and secure software vulnerabilities automatically. The project builds on recent advances in reasoning models and program analysis, aiming to reduce the time developers spend identifying and patching security issues.
By Robert KrzaczyńskiStephen Batifol discusses building and optimizing self-hosted, multimodal RAG systems. He breaks down vector search, nearest neighbor indexes (FLAT, IVF, HNSW), and the critical role of choosing the right embedding model. He then explains vLLM inference optimization (paged attention, quantization) and uses Mistral's Pixtral to detail multimodal large language model architecture.
By Stephen BatifolAt OpenAI's DevDay 2025, AgentKit and models GPT-5 Pro and Sora 2 were unveiled, enabling interactive software experiences directly within ChatGPT. This shift towards "apps inside ChatGPT" fosters collaboration and commercialization in conversations. Enhanced self-hosting options and robust SDKs empower developers and streamline workflows, positioning OpenAI at the forefront of AI innovation.
By Andrew HoblitzellMicrosoft has released Data API Builder (DAB) 1.6, expanding the open-source runtime’s capabilities for REST and GraphQL endpoints over Azure SQL, PostgreSQL, MySQL, and Cosmos DB. The new version introduces advanced HTTP header behaviours for better client-side control and a revamped logging subsystem designed to improve diagnostics and observability in both cloud and on-premise deployments.
By Edin Kapić
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