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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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Sarah Usher discusses the architectural "breaking point" where warehouses like BigQuery struggle with latency and cost. She explains the necessity of a conceptual data lifecycle (Raw, Curated, Use Case) to regain control over lineage and innovation. She shares practical strategies to design a single source of truth that empowers both ML teams and analytics without bottlenecking scale.
By Sarah Usher
The OpenJDK Amber project has published a new design note proposing “carrier classes” and “carrier interfaces” to extend record-style data modeling to more Java types. The proposal preserves concise state descriptions, derived methods, and pattern matching, while relaxing structural constraints that limit records.
By A N M Bazlur Rahman
Vercel has released Skills.sh, an open-source tool designed to provide AI agents with a standardized way to execute reusable actions, or skills, through the command line.
By Daniel Dominguez
Cursor has published Agent Trace, a draft open specification aimed at standardizing how AI-generated code is attributed in software projects. Released as a Request for Comments (RFC), the proposal defines a vendor-neutral format for recording AI contributions alongside human authorship in version-controlled codebases.
By Robert Krzaczyński
As systems grow, observability becomes harder to maintain and incidents harder to diagnose. Agentic observability layers AI on existing tools, starting in read-only mode to detect anomalies and summarize issues. Over time, agents add context, correlate signals, and automate low-risk tasks. This approach frees engineers to focus on analysis and judgment.
By Rohit Dhawan
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