Codetown ::: a software developer's community
Join Michael Levin in this video interview with Jonathan Schwartz, former Sun Microsystems CEO. "Jonathan Ian Schwartz (born October 20, 1965) is an American...
Tags:
Comment
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.
Check out the Codetown Jobs group.

OpenAI described how it scaled PostgreSQL to support ChatGPT and its API platform, handling millions of queries per second for hundreds of millions of users. By running a single-primary PostgreSQL deployment on Azure with nearly 50 read replicas, optimizing query patterns, and offloading write-heavy workloads to sharded systems, OpenAI maintained low-latency reads while managing write pressure.
By Leela Kumili
Diverse and empowered teams are impactful teams, Natan Žabkar Nordberg mentioned in his talk on creating impactful software teams at QCon London. A session 0 helps set expectations and ensures that everyone is approaching the team in a compatible way.
By Ben Linders
WhatsApp has rewritten its media handling library in Rust, replacing 160,000 lines of C++ with 90,000 lines of memory-safe code for 3 billion devices. The rollout, part of a system called Kaleidoscope, uses differential fuzzing to ensure bug-for-bug compatibility. The move mirrors a decade-long industry shift toward memory safety, tracing back to Mozilla's first Rust MP4 parser deployment in 2016.
By Steef-Jan Wiggers
AI‑generated code creates implicit architectural decisions, forcing teams to rely on experimentation to validate quality attributes. To get useful results from AI, teams must clearly express trade‑offs and reasoning so the model can generate solutions aligned with desired QARs.
By Pierre Pureur, Kurt Bittner
Thiago Ghisi explains the structural shifts required as an engineering org scales from 30 to 100+ engineers. He shares how to transition from managing performance to building opinionated leadership teams and shaping long-term culture. He discusses his "Three Levels of Impact" framework - Org, Skip-Level, and Company - to help leaders drive strategy and secure high-level promotions.
By Thiago Ghisi
© 2026 Created by Michael Levin.
Powered by
You need to be a member of Codetown to add comments!
Join Codetown