#interviews
23 posts
2017 - June
1 post2009 - November
2 posts2008 - September
1 post2008 - July
1 post2008 - June
1 post2008 - May
1 post2008 - April
1 post2008 - February
2 posts2008 - January
3 posts2007 - December
2 posts2007 - November
1 post2007 - August
1 post2007 - July
1 post2007 - June
1 post2007 - May
2 posts2007 - April
2 posts2017 - June
1 postAppearing on Podcasts
I collect six podcast appearances about the Ruby community, tech careers, Rails, and my professional path, from its beginnings in the 1990s to conversations lasting nearly two hours.
2009 - November
2 postsChatting with Adam Jacob
Adam Jacob and Jesse Robbins explain how Chef began, defend its Ruby-based flexibility, and show how the tool balances automation, scalability, and agility in Web Ops.
Chatting with Luke Kanies
Luke Kanies explains why he created Puppet, how its abstraction of resources and dependencies simplifies heterogeneous configurations, and why ITIL can become a checklist without solving problems.
2008 - September
1 postChatting with Joshua Peek
Joshua Peek explains how he joined Rails Core after making Rails 2.2 thread-safe during Google Summer of Code. The interview covers modest MRI gains, JRuby improvements, and caches preloaded at boot.
2008 - July
1 postChatting with Luis Lavena (Ruby on Windows)
Luis Lavena explains why maintaining Ruby on Windows involves CRT, MinGW, C extensions, and RubySpecs. RubyInstaller already runs Rails, but the project needs more contributors.
2008 - June
1 postChatting with Blaine Cook (Twitter)
Blaine Cook separates performance from scalability, explains Twitter’s asynchronous architecture and the cost of sharding. In his view, scaling problems are rarely Rails’ fault.
2008 - May
1 postChatting with Hongli Lai and Ninh Bui (Phusion)
Hongli Lai and Ninh Bui explain how Phusion Passenger simplifies Rails deployment, shuts down idle processes, and matches or outperforms Mongrel clusters. Ruby Enterprise Edition saved 33% of memory on average.
2008 - April
1 postChatting with Chris Wanstrath (Err the Blog/Github)
Chris Wanstrath explains why he created GitHub to make open source contributions easier and reveals the platform’s architecture, with Git, SSH, memcached, background jobs, and a feed of nearly 1 million lines.
2008 - February
2 postsChatting with Scott Hanselman
Scott Hanselman talks about his career, diabetes, and Microsoft tools. He sees ASP.NET MVC as a testable alternative to WebForms and attributes most Vista crashes to third-party drivers.
Chatting with Evan Phoenix
Evan Phoenix presents Rubinius, a Ruby VM inspired by Smalltalk and written almost entirely in Ruby. The interview covers generational GC, FFI, compatibility, and the plan for multiple VMs.
2008 - January
3 postsChatting with Hal Fulton
Hal Fulton recalls how Ruby won him over with dynamic typing and consistency, discusses The Ruby Way, and recommends playing around and reading code. He also warns that metaprogramming can be misused.
Chatting with Peter Cooper
Peter Cooper tells how he created Ruby Inside, sold Code Snippets and Feed Digest, and wrote Beginning Ruby. He argues for the right tool for each job and sees truth in Zed Shaw’s criticism.
Chatting with Adrian Holovaty
Adrian Holovaty explains how demands from news sites led to Django and its high-level abstractions, such as site admin and Databrowse, while also discussing data and EveryBlock.
2007 - December
2 postsChatting with Avi Bryant - Part 2
Avi Bryant defends Smalltalk’s pragmatic simplicity, estimates that Ruby could be up to 25 times faster, and explains how Seaside uses continuations and components.
Chatting with Avi Bryant - Part 1
Avi Bryant recounts moving through Objective-C and Ruby before creating Seaside and Dabble DB, and explains why Smalltalk’s maturity and environment make him more productive.
2007 - November
1 postChatting with John Lam (IronRuby)
John Lam explains how IronRuby uses the DLR to run Ruby on .NET, prioritizes compatibility with MRI 1.8 and Rails, seeks CLR interoperability, and beats MRI in benchmarks.
2007 - August
1 postChatting with Jamis Buck
Jamis Buck tells how he moved from Java to Ruby, joined 37signals, and created Capistrano to run deployments across multiple servers. He also explains the name change and the limit for Windows destinations.
2007 - July
1 postChatting with Carl Youngblood
Carl Youngblood discusses his time in Brazil, BBSes, multiple languages, and arrival at Rails, showing how SBN, RailsConf, and Confreaks brought his work closer to the Ruby community.
2007 - June
1 postChatting with Ola Bini (JRuby Core Team Member)
Ola Bini explains joining the JRuby Core Team, the challenges of compatibility with MRI and C extensions, using JRuby in Rails and Mingle, and why learning different languages makes better programmers.
2007 - May
2 postsChatting with David Black
David Black tells how he stumbled across Ruby, helped create Ruby Central, and left academia for training and consulting. To him, Rails requires truly understanding Ruby.
Chatting with Chad Fowler
Chad Fowler recounts moving from music to Ruby, creating Ruby Central, and writing his books. He sees Rails reaching traditional companies but warns against a closed, defensive community.
2007 - April
2 postsChatting with Geoffrey Grosenbach
Geoffrey Grosenbach recounts finding Rails, taking over the Rails Podcast, and creating PeepCode. The conversation covers self-teaching, open source, continuous learning, and small software businesses.
Chatting with Dr. Nic
Dr. Nic explains how he created Magic Models, Newgem, and Magic Multi Connection to solve real problems. He argues for extracting features from Rails core and sharing solutions through open source.