Keith Adams & Julien Verlaguet

Computers, Coffee, and Beer

Technology EN ↓ 3 episodes

Computers, Coffee, & Beer is hosted by Keith Adams and Julien Verlaguet — two engineers who helped shape the modern internet and have the war stories to prove it. Keith built the HHVM JIT compiler at Facebook, helped virtualize the world at VMware (employee ~80), and went on to Slack before founding Pebblebed, an early-stage VC firm for technically ambitious founders. Julien created the Hack programming language, spent years writing safety-critical compiler software for Airbus and nuclear plants, and now runs Skip Labs. Together they dig into the systems, languages, and decisions behind the...

Author

Keith Adams & Julien Verlaguet

Episodes

Will AI Make Programming Languages Obsolete? | Two Veterans Debate 08.07.2026 1:17:32

Two veteran engineers who helped build the modern internet sit down to ask the question nobody in tech wants to answer: are programming languages about to become irrelevant? Keith Adams (HHVM, Facebook) and Julien Verlaguet (Skip Labs, ex-Facebook) go deep on how LLMs are reshaping the craft they've spent decades mastering. This isn't a surface-level AI hype conversation — it's a sy...

Julien Bet His Career on Replacing PHP at Facebook | The Hack Story 24.06.2026 1:28:24

Julien Verlaguet didn't just write code at Facebook — he tried to change the language 4 billion people's apps were built on. In this episode of Computers, Coffee, & Beer, Julien tells Keith Adams the full inside story of creating Hack: a gradually typed dialect of PHP that brought static analysis, type safety, and sub-50ms error feedback to one of the largest codebases on Earth. It s...

Truth About LLM 'Intelligence' -- Two Engineers Who Built the Internet Debate AI Intelligence 09.06.2026 1:34:43

Keith Adams (VMware, Facebook, Slack, PebbleBed) and Julien Verlaguet (creator of the Hack programming language, founder of Skip Labs) dig into one of the most contested questions in tech: are LLMs actually thinking? From Keith's early (failed) experiments training a tiny stack VM at Facebook AI Research, to Ilya Sutskever's prophetic 2014 NIPS talk, to the present-day race between Anthr...