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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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JEP 526 introduces Lazy Constants for JDK 26, enhancing developer ergonomics and performance. This feature replaces the earlier Stable Values, simplifying initialization while ensuring thread safety and immutability. With utilities for lazy lists and maps, it promotes efficient resource management, reducing startup costs. Feedback is welcomed to refine this API ahead of a potential future release.
By A N M Bazlur Rahman
Google has released Nano Banana Pro. The system moves beyond conventional diffusion workflows by tightly coupling image generation with Gemini’s multimodal reasoning stack. The result: visuals that are not only aesthetically pleasing, but structurally, contextually, and informationally accurate.
By Robert Krzaczyński
Erin Doyle explains the evolution from siloed IT Ops to the Platform Team model, revealing why the "You Build It, You Run It" principle created new cognitive load. She shares the Empathy-Driven Platforms strategy - the ultimate attack against engineering roadblocks. Discover ways platform teams can build empathy, foster psychological safety, and adopt a product mindset.
By Erin Doyle
Dynamic React speaker Aurora Scharff captivated attendees at React Advanced 2025 with her talk on "Building Interactive Async UI with React 19 and Ariakit." She showcased ARIAKit, an open-source accessibility library that empowers developers to create WCAG-compliant components effortlessly, blending modern React patterns with customizable, accessible UI primitives.
By Daniel CurtisIn this podcast, Michael Stiefel spoke with David Blank-Edelman about the relationship between software architecture and site reliability engineering. Site reliability engineering can give architecture vital feedback about how the system actually behaves in production. Architects and designers can then learn from their failures to improve their ability to build systems that can evolve.
By David Blank-Edelman
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