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’s recent global outage, linked to a database update, caused widespread disruption and highlighted the risks of single-vendor reliance. While service was restored, the incident sparked discussions on the importance of multi-vendor strategies in tech. Cloudflare's CEO vowed to enhance system resilience, emphasizing that outages can impact even the largest providers.
By Steef-Jan Wiggers
Grafana Labs has published major updates across two of its core observability products: Grafana 12.3, and Grafana Tempo 2.9. The two releases have distinct improvements in monitoring, logs, and tracing for Grafana users.
By Matt Saunders
The Linux Foundation has announced the general availability of Valkey 9.0, the open-source in-memory storage solution developed as a successor to Redis. The latest major version introduces atomic slot migrations, hash field expiration, and full support for numbered databases in cluster mode, enabling scaling to 2,000 nodes and achieving over 1 billion requests per second.
By Renato Losio
At QCon SF 2025, Michelle Brush of Google explored the evolving landscape of software engineering in her keynote, “Humans in the Loop: Engineering Leadership in a Chaotic Industry.” She highlighted the complexities engineers face amid automation and AI, stressing the importance of conscious competence, higher-level problem-solving, and effective leadership in navigating today's challenges.
By Andrew Hoblitzell
Airbnb upgraded Mussel, its multi-tenant key-value store, replacing static per-client rate limits with an adaptive, resource-aware traffic control system. The redesign ensures resilience during traffic spikes, protects critical workflows, and maintains fair usage across thousands of tenants while scaling efficiently.
By Leela Kumili
© 2025 Created by Michael Levin.
Powered by
You need to be a member of Codetown to add comments!
Join Codetown