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.
Maya Chen
Co-host of Signal. Spent a decade as a product engineer at early-stage startups, then moved into writing and broadcasting. Asks the follow-up question everyone else was too polite to ask.
8 episodes San Francisco, California
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.
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.
How one game studio ships without crunch
Long hours before a launch have been treated as normal in games for decades. Studio director Elif Kaya explains how her twenty-person team has shipped three games without asking anyone to work weekends.
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.