The Peterman Pod

Martin Hellman is a Turing Award winner who helped to invent public-key cryptography against the NSA's wishes. I interviewed him all about his work and why it broke the law at the time. • My ergonomic keyboard project I mentioned, you can follow along here: https://read.compose.llc/ • The Kickstarter page for it: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ryanlpeterman/compose-simple-ergonomics-beau...

Ryan Williams is a professor at MIT and the winner of the Gödel Prize in theoretical computer science. I interviewed him all about his work starting by asking him a popular Leetcode question (3 SUM). Correction: In this podcast I say "lower bound" when I mean "upper bound" and vice versa. Was speaking using the intuition that lower is better for running time. In reality, the ac...

Charlie Marsh is the founder of Astral, the Python devtool startup that was acquired by OpenAI. I inteviewed him about how software engineering is changing and learnings from starting his own company as an engineer. • My ergonomic keyboard project I mentioned, you can follow along here: https://read.compose.llc/ • The Kickstarter page for it: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ryanlpeterman/comp...

Vlad Feinberg is Google DeepMind’s pre-training area lead and I asked him all about how to land a job at a frontier lab like Google DeepMind, Anthropic or OpenAI. • My ergonomic keyboard project I mentioned, you can follow along here: https://read.compose.llc/ • The Kickstarter page for it: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ryanlpeterman/compose-simple-ergonomics-beautifully-done Podcast links:...

Simon Peyton Jones is the co-creator of Haskell (pure functional programming language) and I interviewed him about functional programming, why it matters, and his thoughts on other programming languages. • My ergonomic keyboard project I mentioned, you can follow along here: https://read.compose.llc/ Podcast links: • YouTube: https://youtu.be/xcB_LF3cdqw • Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podc...

Avi Wigderson is the only person in history to have won both a Turing Award (computer science) and Abel Prize (math). I interviewed him all about his field. • My ergonomic keyboard project I mentioned, you can follow along here: https://read.compose.llc/ Podcast links: • YouTube: https://youtu.be/5GUcvSAJcJw • Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-peterman-pod/id1777363835 • Transcript:...

James Cowling is the CTO at Convex and was previously the most senior engineer at Dropbox. We discussed technical details of his past projects, simplicity vs complexity, and career advice given where AI is today. • My ergonomic keyboard project I mentioned, you can follow along here: https://read.compose.llc/ Podcast links: • YouTube: https://youtu.be/3XkmNSuHFmY • Apple: https://podcasts.apple.co...

Bjarne Stroustrup is the creator of the C++ programming language and a former researcher at Bell Labs. We talked about what Bell Labs was like, programming language design, and interesting anecdotes from his experience. • My ergonomic keyboard project I mentioned, you can follow along here: https://read.compose.llc/ 𝗣𝗼𝗱𝗰𝗮𝘀𝘁 𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗸𝘀: • YouTube: https://youtu.be/U46fJ2bJ-co • Apple: https://podcasts.a...

David Malan is a Harvard professor known for turning CS50 into a popular online computer science course. We discussed the story behind CS50, how to lecture well, and how AI is changing CS education including in cheating/academic dishonesty. • My ergonomic keyboard project I mentioned, you can follow along here: https://read.compose.llc/ 𝗣𝗼𝗱𝗰𝗮𝘀𝘁 𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗸𝘀: • YouTube: https://youtu.be/bB2o81DnKHk • Appl...

John Myles White recently left his role as a director of engineering at Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL) so we spoke freely about promo culture, how big tech has changed, and how his career grew. 𝗣𝗼𝗱𝗰𝗮𝘀𝘁 𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗸𝘀: • YouTube: https://youtu.be/aPfnP4iAIH8 • Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-peterman-pod/id1777363835 • Transcript: https://www.developing.dev/p/msl-eng-director-promo-hacki...

Barbara Liskov is a Turing Award winner known for her work in programming languages and distributed systems. We discussed the major problems she solved in her career, stories about Dijkstra, getting rejected from Princeton because she was a woman and misc topics around her work. 🔸 My keyboard Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ryanlpeterman/compose-simple-ergonomics-beautifully-don...

Mike Stonebraker is a Turing Award winner famous for his contributions to fundamental database technologies. We discussed the story behind building Postgres, where he disagrees with Google/Amazon on databases, and what he's working on now. 🔸 My keyboard Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ryanlpeterman/compose-simple-ergonomics-beautifully-done 𝗣𝗼𝗱𝗰𝗮𝘀𝘁 𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗸𝘀: • YouTube: https://...

In this episode, I talked to Marc Brooker, a distinguished engineer at AWS who started there as a new grad and rose through the ranks. We discussed technical learnings from 3,000+ cloud system postmortems, how software engineering is changing with AI, how to find impactful problems and much more. 🔶 My keyboard Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ryanlpeterman/compose-simple-ergonomi...

This is James Everingham, former head of engineering at Instagram and a veteran of the tech world with experience at Netscape. We talked about his unconventional start in the industry, learnings from every leg of his career, and regrets he has looking back. 𝗣𝗼𝗱𝗰𝗮𝘀𝘁 𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗸𝘀: • YouTube: https://youtu.be/VIF5Fm8NdE8 • Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-peterman-pod/id1777363835 • Transcri...

Ethan Evans is a former VP at Amazon has seen pretty much every possible type of corporate politics. Now that he's retired, he could share everything he'd seen including stories about empire building, hidden politics, reorgs, senior promos and dealing with bad managers. 🔸 The keyboard I'm building: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ryanlpeterman/compose-simple-ergonomics-beautifully-done 𝗣𝗼𝗱𝗰𝗮...

This is a conversation with Brendan Burns, co-creator of Kubernetes and current technical fellow at Microsoft working on Azure. We discussed what it was like building it at Google, how he got buy-in, and what he learned along the way. 🔸 My keyboard project: https://read.compose.llc/p/our-keyboard-design-reveal 𝗣𝗼𝗱𝗰𝗮𝘀𝘁 𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗸𝘀: • YouTube: https://youtu.be/FKijpCEH9D8 • Apple: https://podcasts.apple....

Austen McDonald is a former hiring committee member at Meta, where he led mobile hiring and conducted hundreds of interviews. In this episode, we talked about what happens behind the scenes in a hiring committee, unethical candidates, and the role referrals play. 🔸 (Sponsor) Hello Interview's Website - https://www.hellointerview.com/ 𝗣𝗼𝗱𝗰𝗮𝘀𝘁 𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗸𝘀: • YouTube: https://youtu.be/nOapM8i5jr0 • Ap...

This is Michael Bolin, the tech lead for the open source Codex repository and a former distinguished engineer at Meta. We talked about his career path, how OpenAI engineers use Codex and the difference between research-led vs engineering-led company cultures. 🔸 My keyboard project: https://read.compose.llc/p/our-keyboard-design-reveal 𝗣𝗼𝗱𝗰𝗮𝘀𝘁 𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗸𝘀: • YouTube: https://youtu.be/hN5ZFzWFhhg • Apple...

Bryan Cantrill was a distinguished engineer at Sun Microsystems and has now founded his own company called Oxide Computer Company. We discussed his career experiences through boom/busts, what competing with Bezos was like, and career regrets. 𝗣𝗼𝗱𝗰𝗮𝘀𝘁 𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗸𝘀: • YouTube: https://youtu.be/qhSL-5GtmQM • Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-peterman-pod/id1777363835 • Transcript: https://www...

I interviewed Leslie Lamport, a Turing Award winner known for his contributions to distributed systems and the inventor of the Paxos algorithm. We walked through the major contributions of his career for the stories behind them and what he learned along the way. 🔸 My keyboard project: https://read.compose.llc/p/our-keyboard-design-reveal 𝗣𝗼𝗱𝗰𝗮𝘀𝘁 𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗸𝘀: • YouTube: https://youtu.be/U719vQz-WFs • Ap...

David Ronca joined Netflix in 2007 and grew to an engineering director there. Later he joined Meta as a Director and transitioned to a Principal engineer working on video technologies. Now he's retired and was graciously willing to share his career story with us. I asked him for everything he learned in his 36 year career. 𝗣𝗼𝗱𝗰𝗮𝘀𝘁 𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗸𝘀: • Transcript: https://www.developing.dev/p/retired-netfl...

This is Adam Ernst, a Distinguished Engineer at Meta (IC9) who’s built iOS infrastructure that has impacted the entire company. We talked about how his career grew, a major failed project of his, and everything he learned growing to that level. 🔸 My keyboard project link: https://read.compose.llc/p/our-keyboard-design-reveal 𝗣𝗼𝗱𝗰𝗮𝘀𝘁 𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗸𝘀: • YouTube: https://youtu.be/YA_OYJF3Mmw • Apple: https://...

Ryan Olson grew from mid-level engineer (IC4) to a principal engineer (IC8) at Instagram through a series of famous projects. The most notable was when he was the lead iOS developer that built Instagram Stories. We discuss his career journey and learnings. 𝗣𝗼𝗱𝗰𝗮𝘀𝘁 𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗸𝘀: • Transcript: https://www.developing.dev/p/instagram-principal-eng-ic8-on-building • Spotify: Episode link from Spotify after sc...

In this episode, I talked to "Asian Dad Energy" an anonymous big techie who was laid off after 25 years in the industry. We discussed his layoffs experience, his early career in engineering consulting, and the realities of big tech compensation. 🔸 My keyboard project link: https://read.compose.llc/p/our-keyboard-design-reveal 𝗣𝗼𝗱𝗰𝗮𝘀𝘁 𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗸𝘀: • YouTube: https://youtu.be/8bs6KmJX4_g • Spotify: https...

In this episode, I talked to Nimit Sohoni, a Stanford PhD and AI Researcher at Cartesia who previously worked as a quant at Citadel. We discussed the differences between AI research and quant careers, including work-life balance and the value of a PhD in these fields. Nimit also shared what he's currently working on and offered advice for those looking to transition into AI research. 𝗣𝗼𝗱𝗰𝗮𝘀𝘁 𝗹...