//podcastplus.net/feed/podcast~f06679e1cda3530fa543b4acca5235ecba93842d03c08cb9456e5ca24c4d384d I share stories and tips from my 3 decades of experience in the Big Tech industry, including working for many years at both Amazon and Google. This is not a deeply technical show. I talk mostly about things like tech leadership, corporate decision-making, politics, dysfunction, and how to be a better engineer. Anyone interested in Big Tech should be able to listen to this and enjoy the storytelling. Fri, 15 May 2026 08:29:19 +0000 https://www.buzzsprout.com/1888235/11383869-stt-e54-on-to-my-next-adventure.mp3 Hi folks, In this episode I say a tearful adieu.  I have taken a very exciting new role at Sourcegraph, and I only want to talk about that from now on, so I'm semi-retiring this podcast. I will release a few episodes a year on this channel, and I will likely put more work than usual into them, so stay subscribed if you would like to see occasional new drops on this channel. Thanks so much for listening, and I hope to see you all on my Sourcegraph talks! Cheers, Steve Mon, 26 Sep 2022 04:00:00 +0000 https://www.buzzsprout.com/1888235/11383869-stt-e54-on-to-my-next-adventure.mp3 https://www.buzzsprout.com/1888235/10904642-stt-e53-the-bazel-build-system.mp3 Featuring special guest Alex Eagle, Founder and CEO of Aspect.dev, which specializes in Enterprise Bazel support.  I worked with Alex for years back at Google and we both have a ton of respect for the Bazel build system, which is the open-source version of Blaze (Google's internal build system). I have some sound issues on my end this week, though Alex's sound came out great.  But the biggest problem with this week's episode is that my stream (in postproduction) wound up about 1.5 seconds ahead of Alex's, so I respond (and often begin) too quickly. I tried to clean it up during editing but the damage was done. Sorry about that. Please send me ideas for stuff you want me to talk about - LinkedIn works well for me:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/steveyegge/ Tue, 05 Jul 2022 01:00:00 +0000 https://www.buzzsprout.com/1888235/10904642-stt-e53-the-bazel-build-system.mp3 https://www.buzzsprout.com/1888235/10820937-stt-e52-service-mesh-101.mp3 Hey folks!  Today's episode is an intro to Service Meshes. There are many, many players in this space, and I only talk about a few of them.  Notably I left out Buoyant, which provides a mesh based on linkerd.  So this is not a full comparison of all possible options. But it does cover a lot of the big ones. This episode has some sound and picture issues.  I recorded it in my guitar/music studio instead of my regular studio, because I am considering consolidating them and wanted to try out a temp setup.  It worked OK, but I had some serious mic issues in the middle, and lots of extraneous noise and bumps.  For which I apologize! Also, everything in this second studio is not as good -- the lights, the mic, the audio interface, the green screen, pretty much the whole setup.  So it doesn't look great. I'll keep tinkering with it. I'm sure it'll get better. Fair warning: My talk today is heavily biased towards HashiCorp products, which are generally ope... Mon, 20 Jun 2022 05:00:00 +0000 https://www.buzzsprout.com/1888235/10820937-stt-e52-service-mesh-101.mp3 https://www.buzzsprout.com/1888235/10789092-stt-e51-should-i-be-a-manager.mp3 Hey folks, Someone asked me for career advice on whether they should make the jump over onto the management track.  We had a nice conversation about it and I decided to give a little talk on it this week. I had some technical issues and wound up getting delayed a day; my apologies. I also apologize that the editing is a bit choppy. It's a little bit of a bumpy ride, but I wanted to keep myself on topic and I wound up deleting a good 25-30% of the talk.  I hope it's intelligible. If you like this content, please share it with others! Tue, 14 Jun 2022 04:00:00 +0000 https://www.buzzsprout.com/1888235/10789092-stt-e51-should-i-be-a-manager.mp3 https://www.buzzsprout.com/1888235/10743031-stt-e50-jeff-atwood-stack-overflow-cofounder.mp3 Hey folks! I'm very pleased to be hosting Jeff Atwood as our guest this week. Jeff was co-creator of Stack Overflow, which is by far one of the most successful Q&A sites ever created, and is every programmer's best friend. Jeff and I talked about all sorts of stuff.  I didn't have a fixed agenda and just let the conversation roll.  Jeff talks about quite a few topics near and dear to his heart, especially hardware and colocation.  He also talks about his $10k bet with John Carmack over the near future of self-driving cars. We also talk about Discourse, which is Jeff's newest offering: An open-source, modernized, full-featured forum software package. I'm super stoked that Jeff took the time to be on the show. Make sure you check out Discourse for your next forum! As always, if you like the content and want to see more great guests like Jeff, please head to YT and like the video and subscribe to our channel.  It really helps with our gr... Mon, 06 Jun 2022 04:00:00 +0000 https://www.buzzsprout.com/1888235/10743031-stt-e50-jeff-atwood-stack-overflow-cofounder.mp3 https://www.buzzsprout.com/1888235/10703758-stt-e49-i-m-un-retiring.mp3 Today I talk about how (and why) after 2 years of really enjoying retirement, I've decided to go back into the industry. Feel free to give this one a pass if you are looking for something more like one of my usual "tech talks".  This is basically a status update that was suggested by next week's guest, while we were recording. Mon, 30 May 2022 04:00:00 +0000 https://www.buzzsprout.com/1888235/10703758-stt-e49-i-m-un-retiring.mp3 https://www.buzzsprout.com/1888235/10671153-stt-e48-exploring-recursion-and-programming-language-expressiveness.mp3 Hey folks!  This was an overly-ambitious attempt to do a mini-lecture on the Farmer, Dog, Chicken, Grain puzzle and its programming solutions. This was one of the homework questions I had in my Intro to Programming Languages course in the University of Washington's undergraduate Computer Science program, taught at the time by Linda Shapiro. She had us solve this problem in Lisp, Smalltalk, and Prolog. So this is a fairly in-depth technical discussion that might seem a BIT on the boring side, compared to some of my other episodes. But it's 100% something you could find in a computer science course. I'll find a way to. upload the code somewhere, since there's no code formatting available here. Tue, 24 May 2022 04:00:00 +0000 https://www.buzzsprout.com/1888235/10671153-stt-e48-exploring-recursion-and-programming-language-expressiveness.mp3 https://www.buzzsprout.com/1888235/10624059-stt-e47-ruby-is-great.mp3 Hey folks! This week I talk about Ruby, which is one of my Top 3 favorite programming languages (if you count "Lisp" as a single language), the third being Kotlin. If you want to get straight to the hand-waving ranting, you can jump to around the 40 minute mark. This week we're having a competition!  We're going to re-do the Farmer, Dog, Chicken, Grain competition I held at Amazon.com around 18 years ago. Sometime this week, if you have time, try writing a succinct and elegant solution to this problem, in the programming language of your choice, and post it here in the YT comment section. The problem:  A farmer (F) needs to get his dog (D), chicken (C) and bag of grain (G) across a river. He has a boat that allows him to carry exactly zero or one item across with him. Write a program that spits out a solution when you run the program with no input/arguments. Example solution that your program might output:   carry chicken   carry nothing   carry grain   carry chicke... Mon, 16 May 2022 04:00:00 +0000 https://www.buzzsprout.com/1888235/10624059-stt-e47-ruby-is-great.mp3 https://www.buzzsprout.com/1888235/10546888-stt-e46-learn-lisp.mp3 Hey folks!  Sorry this one is a day late.  I had to redact some confidential information and it took a little extra time. Today we talk about the Lisp family of languages, and how coooool they are, and how cool yoooouuu would be if you learned one or more of them. http://paulgraham.com has the essays I mentioned in the talk.  Enjoy! Tue, 03 May 2022 02:00:00 +0000 https://www.buzzsprout.com/1888235/10546888-stt-e46-learn-lisp.mp3 https://www.buzzsprout.com/1888235/10497110-stt-e45-compilers-why-learn-them.mp3 Hey folks, Apologies for 2 weeks of missing podcasts.  The episode 2 weeks ago was all coding and didn't make much sense to just do the audio for.  And last week I was busy redoing my recording studio cabling and equipment. In this episode I talk about compilers:  a bit about how they work, and a lot about how useful they have been at various points in my career. They are a fun subject and it was an easy episode to record! I mentioned a book, The Essentials of Programming Languages. It's the one by Friedman, Wand et al.  I reaaally enjoyed working through this book, although I did study Scheme in other books first. I also mentioned the bare-bones user manual for my Wyvern game's autobag minilanguage:  It's at https://ghosttrack.com/autobag if you want to have a look. I hope this episode was interesting. It's a challenging topic to talk about at a high level without getting bogged down in the details.  I did a lot of editing in this episode, but it... Mon, 25 Apr 2022 07:00:00 +0000 https://www.buzzsprout.com/1888235/10497110-stt-e45-compilers-why-learn-them.mp3