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.

pnpm 11 RC has been released, featuring significant changes in performance, security, and configuration. Key updates include an SQLite-backed store index, tighter security defaults, and a consolidated build script setting. It now requires Node.js v22 or later. Global installs are isolated by default, and new commands enhance usability. Migration guidance is available in the documentation.
By Daniel Curtis
Anthropic introduces Managed Agents on Claude, a managed execution layer for agent-based workflows. It separates agent logic from runtime concerns like orchestration, sandboxing, state management, and credentials. The system supports long-running multi-step workflows with external tools, error recovery, and session continuity via a meta-harness architecture.
By Leela Kumili
Slack has rebuilt its notification system with a unified architecture that separates activity from delivery, improving consistency across platforms. The redesign simplifies preferences, preserves legacy settings through transformation, and resulted in a 5x increase in user engagement with notification settings along with reduced support tickets.
By Leela Kumili
GitHub has publicly addressed a series of recent availability and performance issues that disrupted services across its platform, attributing the incidents to rapid growth, architectural coupling, and limitations in handling system load.
By Craig Risi
Sudeep Das and Pradeep Muthukrishnan explain the shift from static merchandising to dynamic, moment-aware personalization at DoorDash. They share how LLMs generate natural-language "consumer profiles" and content blueprints, while traditional deep learning handles last-mile ranking. This hybrid approach allows the platform to adapt to short-lived user intent and massive catalog abundance.
By Sudeep Das, Pradeep Muthukrishnan
© 2026 Created by Michael Levin.
Powered by
You need to be a member of Codetown to add comments!
Join Codetown