The Peterman Pod

David J Malan, a Harvard professor who created CS50 and a global open online curriculum. He tells the story of CS50’s evolution. He explains how to lecture with theatrical demos and rehearsal. He discusses why CS50 teaches C. He explores AI’s role in teaching, academic dishonesty, and tooling like a virtual rubber duck.

John Myles White, former Meta engineering director and PyTorch contributor, reflects on promo-driven incentives, shifts in big tech labor dynamics, and the culture differences between careful infra work and promotion-chasing teams. He talks about how internal experiment tooling shaped products, why Julia tried to fix R and Python speed, and a candid career regret about missed leadership access.

Barbara Liskov, Turing Award–winning computer scientist known for data abstraction and distributed systems. She recalls Princeton rejection and early career turns. She talks about inventing data abstraction and CLU, encapsulation limits in Python, building Argus and viewstamped replication, and contrasts Paxos, Dijkstra’s influence, and why some ideas gain fame.

Mike Stonebraker, Turing Award–winning creator of Ingres and Postgres, and serial database entrepreneur. He tells the origin story of Postgres and why one-size-fits-all databases fail. He explains clashes with Google/Amazon approaches, the DBOS idea of replacing OS state with a database, and why future agentic AI and text-to-SQL tasks push new database challenges.

Marc Brooker, a Distinguished Engineer at AWS known for building distributed databases and analyzing thousands of postmortems. He discusses lessons from 3,000+ incident postmortems, why caches can trigger large-scale failures, how on-call experience shapes product thinking, and how AI will reshape software engineering and career paths.

James Everingham, former Head of Engineering at Instagram and veteran of Netscape and Meta, now building AI and developer infrastructure startups. He shares tales from getting expelled to FBI attention, rapid scaling at Netscape, why tiny teams boosted Stories velocity, leading crypto efforts at Meta, and building Guild for controlling AI agents.

Ethan Evans, a former Amazon vice president who led large engineering teams and navigated intense corporate politics. He tells candid stories about empire building, scope stealing, reorg mechanics, and managing out leaders. Short, punchy conversations cover negotiation tactics, backchanneling, influence without authority, and when to rally allies before escalating problems.

Brendan Burns, co-creator of Kubernetes and Microsoft technical fellow known for distributed systems work. He recounts convincing leadership, building a rapid MVP, and rallying an open source ecosystem. He explains design tradeoffs like declarative models, etcd bottlenecks, and scaling Kubernetes for huge AI workloads.

Austen McDonald, former Meta hiring committee lead for mobile who ran hundreds of interviews. He pulls back the curtain on how leveling and hiring committees work. He talks about spotting unethical candidates, the real role of referrals, tailoring stories for senior scope, and what senior behavioral rounds prioritize. Practical prep and common senior mistakes come up throughout.

Michael Bolin, tech lead of the open source Codex repo and former Meta engineer behind Buck and NewClyde. He recalls building faster build systems, a virtual filesystem for massive monorepos, and why Codex was open sourced. He contrasts research-led and engineering-led cultures. He also reveals how he uses Codex daily, agent design choices, and practical career and engineering advice.