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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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In a talk at QCon London 2026, Viktor Petersson argued that software teams are running out of time to adopt SBOMs (Software Bills of Materials) due to pending legislative changes in both the US and Europe. He walked through the current regulatory landscape, spoke on the practical mechanics of generating high-quality SBOMs and on the emerging standards for distributing the resulting artefacts.
By Matt Saunders
Rafael Ring discusses the architectural evolution of server-driven UI at Nubank, moving from static mobile binaries to a sophisticated scripted framework called Catalyst. He explains how they implemented a tree-walk interpreter in Flutter to render dynamic layouts and logic from JSON payloads.
By Rafael Ring
Oracle has released version 26 of the Java programming language and virtual machine. As the first non-LTS release since JDK 25, the final feature set includes 10 JEPs, five of which are still progressing through the preview and incubator stages. This release focuses on Java library improvements, language innovation, performance and security.
By Michael Redlich
At QCon London, TrueLayer engineer Ethan Brierley reframed Rust lifetimes using the Polonius borrow checker's mental model: lifetimes as sets of loans rather than regions of code. He built from borrow checker basics through variance and subtyping to higher-ranked lifetimes with serde, showing how the loans perspective makes previously confusing lifetime errors intuitive.
By Steef-Jan Wiggers
At QCon London 2026, Lada Indra, Head of Data Platform at Pleo, shared insights from his experience across high-scale data systems. He illustrated both the risks of poorly aligned teams and the practical strategies that organizations can adopt to bridge the gap.
By Daniel Dominguez
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