August 28, 202619 min
A friend re-rolls an online magic 8-ball until it agrees with the decision she's already made, so I build her a fully transparent one — no ads, full code walkthrough, proof it never reads the question — and watch her use it exactly the same way afterward. An episode about why legibility doesn't automatically produce calibration, why engineers rerun a flaky CI test until it's green, and the difference between consulting a system for information and consulting it for permission.
Show notes & transcript →August 21, 202618 min
Re-recording a six-and-a-half-year-old Intro to Java playlist turns into an argument about why colleges still teach Java in 2026 — which of those reasons are pedagogy and which are inertia wearing pedagogy's clothes, why object-oriented design's bad reputation is a critique of doing it badly rather than a reason to stop teaching it, and why the design underneath the syntax is the part that never went stale.
Show notes & transcript →August 14, 202618 min
A design review of Pokémon Go that turns into an argument about technical debt: a decade-old crowdsourced dataset reskinned and sold as a new build, a gym system rework that relocated its core failure instead of fixing it, a flagship AR feature almost nobody actually uses, and the one system — retention engineering — that got all the care the rest of the architecture never did.
Show notes & transcript →August 7, 202622 min
A technical due diligence trip to evaluate a golf-and-country-club POS system before an acquisition, a lead architect who loses it in permanent marker on a whiteboard, and the years-later realization that the codebase was never actually what was being decided.
Show notes & transcript →July 31, 202620 min
On July 16, 2026, a capacity limit in a single AWS Frankfurt availability zone triggered a global CloudFront control plane failure that took down Canvas, Blackboard, Hugging Face, the UK National Lottery, and several other services for three and a half hours.
Show notes & transcript →July 24, 202615 min
A real 2026 lawsuit alleges a layoff scoring system structurally couldn't be earned by anyone on parental or medical leave, and how a dashboard's zero can quietly discriminate without anyone writing discriminatory code.
Show notes & transcript →July 17, 202616 min
A DBA finds forty-one unexplained database connections and decides to revoke eleven of them and see what screams: a real look at the scream test and who backs up the one person worried about something.
Show notes & transcript →July 10, 202618 min
A cyberpunk cat RPG built for AWS Summit LA, and the five reliability patterns that decide whether an AI agent survives production.
Show notes & transcript →July 3, 202625 min
AWS's billion-dollar forward-deployed-engineering bet, and the question nobody asks in the sales meeting: who owns the code on day one thousand?
Show notes & transcript →June 26, 202620 min
Two junior engineers at a whiteboard independently reinvent a basic programming construct, and what that says about vocabulary, mentorship, and vibe coding.
Show notes & transcript →June 19, 202621 min
Theranos, Zenefits, and Silicon Valley Bank: three companies that found out the hard way that trust in high-stakes software is a practice, not a possession.
Show notes & transcript →June 12, 202627 min
A seven-year-old trash-talking a Pokemon trainer leads to a much bigger question about what we're practicing every time we interact with something that talks back.
Show notes & transcript →June 5, 202618 min
An 8:30 PM text about tenant secrets leaking into production logs in plain text, and why what you log is an architectural decision, not a default.
Show notes & transcript →May 29, 202620 min
A bad manager's cynical advice, a production script that quietly became a permanent process for 300 users, and how to build a 'no' that actually sticks.
Show notes & transcript →May 26, 202615 min
A bonus episode on Google's AI-first search, the dead internet theory, and what happens when AI trains on a web that's lost its reason to publish anything real.
Show notes & transcript →May 22, 202625 min
Membership cards, free samples, and the receipt check at the exit: every distributed-systems concept from the textbook, found in a Costco warehouse.
Show notes & transcript →May 15, 202618 min
A 40,000-line AI-generated pull request from a non-technical co-founder, and the case for 'accountability debt' as a way to think about AI-written code.
Show notes & transcript →May 8, 202620 min
What nobody tells you before you become a manager, told through a microservice migration that went perfectly once and failed completely the second time.
Show notes & transcript →May 1, 202622 min
A serverless AI dungeon master built on Bedrock, Lambda, and DynamoDB, and everything real users broke within twenty minutes.
Show notes & transcript →April 24, 202620 min
What 'senior engineer' actually means, told through a golf-company inventory incident that cost more than a year's salary to fix.
Show notes & transcript →April 17, 202618 min
A pile of unfolded laundry, an indifferent cat, and Amazon's scrapped recruiting algorithm open a season-long look at who AI actually gets built for.
Show notes & transcript →