Building software that's allowed to be boring
Staff engineer Sarah Lindqvist has spent fifteen years keeping payment systems running at 3 a.m. She makes the case for dull technology, short meetings and the quiet heroism of the on-call rota.
Daniel Osei
Co-host of Signal. Former technology reporter and design researcher. Interested in how the tools we build end up quietly shaping the people who use them.
9 episodes London, England
Episodes
What AI assistants get wrong about memory
Cognitive scientist Dr Tomasz Wiśniewski on why human memory is mostly about forgetting, what that means for AI assistants that remember everything, and the design questions nobody is asking yet.
The design of a good error message
UX writer Leila Haddad has written more error messages than she can count. She explains why they're the most important words in any product — and the four questions every one of them should answer.
Mailbag: burnout, side projects and saying no
Our monthly members-only mailbag. This time: how to tell if you're burning out, whether side projects are worth it, and how to say no to your manager without ruining your career.
Passwords are dying. What replaces them?
Security engineer Priyanka Nair explains passkeys in plain English: how they work, why they're much harder to phish, and what still needs to be fixed before everyone can stop typing passwords.
The economics of a two-person startup
No investors, no office, no plans to hire. The co-founders of a small scheduling tool open their books and explain how two people built a profitable software business — and why they want to keep it tiny.
Why your city's open data matters
Bus timetables, tree surveys, pothole reports. Civic technologist Marcus Bell explains how public data quietly powers the apps we use every day — and why so much of it is still locked in PDFs.
Small models, big ideas: AI on your own device
Not every AI model needs a data centre. Machine learning engineer Ravi Menon explains how smaller models run directly on phones and laptops, what they're good at, and why privacy is only part of the story.
Welcome to Signal
Our first episode. Who we are, why we started a show about technology and the people who build it, and what you can expect every Tuesday.