The 10 best software podcast episodes I ever heard

This first pick is so good because Josh does inside baseball on other big companies data stacks (FB, Google, AirBnB, Slack) and is generally so much more candid than other software engineers are on podcasts. He doesn't care about getting in trouble with his boss, because he already quit.

Jeff had a remarkable 20th century in the booming software industry—and then joined early Facebook and became a billionaire. There's enthralling industry history here, spanning a 40+ year career, and the passion in the room (hosts and guest) is infectious.

Signals and Threads, hosted by the CTO of Jane Street, is, for me, the podcast best at managing complex technical topics. This episode on unikernels and other fun systems things is a great example.

Software engineers with a writing position at The New Yorker are very rare. James Somers is such a person, and does an excellent job explaining why programmers should care about writing—for documentation, persuasion, or pleasure.

Josh Wills again! He's back with another couple of guys to reminisce on the 2010-2020 decade of data science. For someone who started working around data scientists in 2016, this episode felt like being invited to a bar table with the seniors, where they yarned with the filter off.

Before I listened to this I couldn't tell you what TSMC and ASML were. After listening, they became unforgettable. If you are not astonished by the achievements of the computing industry, listen to this episode. If you are not gobsmacked at how hard it is to make a CPU, listen. Unlike others in this list, this isn't a podcast by engineers. But it is Acquired at its best, before they became unfortunately like hagiographers of big tech.

You might have gathered I love software history. This is an episode with Brian Kernighan, who wrote 'the C book' and worked alongside Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie. This episode is a love letter to Bell Labs and the birth of UNIX.

This is another episode which feels like you're eavesdropping on a great chat between some really smart friends. Which makes sense, because Dwarkesh is friends with his guests here, and even lives with Sholto. This 3-hour episode has a bunch of interesting technical content, but what I like about this episode is that you can sponge off the optimism and excitement of some young people right in the center of the LLM boom.

If open source doesn't already fill you with awe, listen to this episode with the creator of SQLite.

My clear bias for data & ML is obvious by now. This episode was influential in me taking my current job, at modal.com. At the time of listening, I was a lead of Canva's data & ML platform, so this episode doing an interrogation of my own little corner of the software world became something I re-listened to.