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.

Cloudflare has announced the beta release of Artifacts, a new system designed to bring Git-style version control to AI agents, enabling developers to track, manage, and evolve agent-generated outputs with the same rigor as traditional code.
By Craig Risi
Today's applications require monitoring, logging, configuration, etc. Each of these concerns can be implemented as a component or a service. These cross-cutting concerns can be tightly integrated into the application. While this tight coupling ensures effective use of shared resources, an outage in any of these components can take your application down. Enter the sidecar design pattern.
By Joydip KanjilalIn this podcast, Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Michael Parker, VP of Engineering at TurinTech AI, about bringing joy back to software development in the AI era, the emerging role of "factory architects" who orchestrate AI agents rather than write code directly, and the cultural divide between AI hype and the reality developers face on legacy codebases.
By Michael Parker
OpenAI introduces a WebSocket-based execution mode for its Responses API to improve agentic workflow performance in coding agents and real-time AI systems. The update reduces latency by up to 40 percent by replacing HTTP request-response cycles with persistent connections, improving streaming, tool execution, and multi-step orchestration in production-scale AI systems.
By Leela Kumili
Adam Wolff discusses the evolution of Claude Code, explaining how AI shifts the SDLC bottleneck from implementation to architectural decision-making. He shares three "war stories" to show why dogfooding and rapid unshipping are vital. He explains that when coding costs drop to zero, the speed of learning becomes the only competitive advantage.
By Adam Wolff
© 2026 Created by Michael Levin.
Powered by
You need to be a member of Codetown to add comments!
Join Codetown