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.
Interviews
Long-form conversations with engineers, designers, researchers and founders.
8 episodes Season RSS
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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.
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.
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.