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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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AWS launched Lambda MicroVMs, a new serverless compute primitive that runs each user session or AI agent in its own Firecracker virtual machine with hardware-level isolation, snapshot-based rapid launch, and state preservation for up to eight hours. Reddit community analysis found the minimum setup costs $3.03/day, roughly 9x Fargate spot pricing.
By Steef-Jan Wiggers
Event-driven architecture promises scalability, but in Java-based real-time systems the tradeoffs only surface in production. Drawing on a Java/Kafka contact center platform handling 80k BHCC across 10k agents, this article details where the design breaks down—state management, partition limits, deduplication, JVM tuning, cascading consumer failures—and the Redis-backed patterns that fixed each.
By Sagar Deepak Joshi
This week's Java roundup for June 22nd, 2026, features news highlighting: the GA releases of Hardwood 1.0 and Endive 1.0; the June 2026 edition of Azul Payara; point releases of Quarkus, LangChain4j; the first beta release of WildFly 41; and introducing Eliya JDK and the Open Source Sustainability Initiative (OSSI), the latter of which was founded by HeroDevs and Commonhaus Foundation.
By Michael Redlich
Asymm Systems has released Eliya 25.0.3, an OpenJDK 25 LTS distribution aimed at improving production diagnostics in Java environments. It consolidates several HotSpot features into an opt-in Production profile. Eliya is designed for teams needing reliable diagnostic data, especially in regulated settings. Future enhancements are planned for Phase 2.
By A N M Bazlur Rahman
Target built a generative AI system to improve marketing campaign forecasting by retrieving and ranking similar historical campaigns. Using embeddings, vector search, and LLM ranking, it replaces rule-based workflows. Evaluation shows 75% top-1 and 100% top-3 coverage. The system reduces manual effort, improves consistency, and uses feedback loops to refine retrieval using campaign outcomes.
By Leela Kumili
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