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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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Guilherme Carreiro discusses the architecture behind Shopify’s theme system, focusing on balancing extreme customizability with platform stability. He explains how they leverage Liquid as a safe DSL, optimize performance via native extensions (Rust/C), and use JSON schemas to bridge the gap between developers and merchants.
By Guilherme Carreiro
This virtual panel brings together engineers, architects, and technical leaders to explore how AI is changing the landscape of software development. Practitioners share their insights on successes and failures when AI is incorporated into daily workflows, emphasizing the significance of context, validation, and cultural adaptation in making AI a sustainable element of modern engineering practices.
By Arthur Casals, Mariia Bulycheva, May Walter, Phil Calçado, Andreas KolleggerIn this podcast, Michael Stiefel spoke with David Gudeman about software architecture for startups. The discussion starts by illuminating how to make decisions with imperfect information, and how uncertainty and ambiguity flow through all aspects of developing the architecture. This leads to analyzing how the architect must focus on both product strategy and technical decisions.
By David Gudeman
Innovative programmer Steve Klabnik, known for his contributions to Rust, unveils Rue, a new systems programming language that enhances memory safety without garbage collection. Designed with developer ergonomics in mind, Rue leverages "inout" parameters to simplify ownership management while collaborating with Anthropic's Claude AI to expedite development. Explore Rue at rue-lang.dev.
By Steef-Jan Wiggers
FunctionGemma is a new, lightweight version of the Gemma 3 270M model, fine-tuned to translate natural language into structured function and API calls, enabling AI agents to "do more than just talk" and act.
By Sergio De Simone
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