Category: 3-SometimeTechTalk

Brandon Card has always been involved in sports. In High School, he was a 3 sport athlete and still plays today, along side working out, doing yoga and pilates. He's heavily interested in holistic healing and alternative medicine, mentioning a big interest in quantum frequency healing, using the sun and ocean to add voltage to the body. He has also started a foundation around mental health, as sadly, he lost his co-founder to suicide, and wishes to remove the stigma from the mental health conversation.

Brandon and his co-founder realized that all software platforms around contracts were directed towards lawyers - not towards finance. This was mind blowing, as negotiations are mostly finance driven, not based on the paragraphs of legal jargon. Brandon wanted to build something to serve this need.

This is the creation story of Terzo.

Sponsors

• Incogni
• NordProtect
• Vention
• CodeCrafters helps you become a better engineer by building real-world, production-grade projects. Learn hands-on by creating your own Git, Redis, HTTP server, SQLite, or DNS server from scratch. Sign up for free today using this link and enjoy 40% off.
• Full Scale
• Paddle.com
• Sema Software
• PropelAuth
• Postman
• Meilisearch

Links

• https://terzo.ai/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandonrcard

Ryan welcomes Anil Dash, writer and former Stack Overflow board member, back to the show to discuss how AI is not a magical technology, but rather the normal next step in computing’s evolution. They explore the importance of democratizing access to technology, the unique challenges that LLMs’ non-determinism poses, and how developers can keep Stack Overflow’s ethos of community alive in a world of AI. 

Episode notes: 

Anil is a tech entrepreneur (former CEO at our sister company Fog Creek Software) and writer. You can find him at his blog anildash.com and on Linkedin. 

Check out the last time Anil was on the pod in 2020 to talk all things Glitch and Glimmer. 

Shoutout to user pgrad for winning a Lifejacket badge on their answer to Using type hint Any in Django - NameError: name 'Any' is not defined.

TRANSCRIPT

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

• Has the cost of building software just dropped 90%?
• More on Deprecation Warnings
• How FOSS Won and Why It Matters
• Should I be looking for a GitHub alternative?
• Extras
• Joke

About the show

Sponsored by us! Support our work through:

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Connect with the hosts

• Michael: @mkennedy@fosstodon.org / @mkennedy.codes (bsky)
• Brian: @brianokken@fosstodon.org / @brianokken.bsky.social
• Show: @pythonbytes@fosstodon.org / @pythonbytes.fm (bsky)

Join us on YouTube at pythonbytes.fm/live to be part of the audience. Usually Monday at 10am PT. Older video versions available there too.

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HEADS UP: We are taking next week off, happy holiday everyone.

Michael #1: Has the cost of building software just dropped 90%?

• by Martin Alderson
• Agentic coding tools are collapsing “implementation time,” so the cost curve of shipping software may be shifting sharply
• Recent programming advancements haven’t been that great of a true benefit: Cloud, TDD, microservices, complex frontends, Kubernetes, etc.
• Agentic AI’s big savings are not just code generation, but coordination overhead reduction (fewer handoffs, fewer meetings, fewer blocks).
• Thinking, product clarity, and domain decisions stay hard, while typing and scaffolding get cheap.
• Is it the end of software dev? Not really, see Jevons paradox: when production gets cheaper, total demand can rise rather than spending simply falling. (Historically: the efficiency of coal use led to the increased consumption of coal)
• Pushes back on “only good for greenfield” by arguing agents also help with legacy code comprehension and bug-fixing. I 100% agree. #Legacy code for the win.

Brian #2: More on Deprecation Warnings

• How are people ignoring them?
  • yep, it’s right in the Python docs: -W ignore::DeprecationWarning
  • Don’t do that!
  • Perhaps the docs should give the example of emitting them only once
    • -W once::::DeprecationWarning
• See also <code>-X dev</code> mode , which sets -W default and some other runtime checks
• Don’t use warn, use the <code>@warnings.deprecated</code> decorator instead
  • Thanks John Hagen for pointing this out
  • Emits a warning
  • It’s understood by type checkers, so editors visually warn you
  • You can pass in your own custom UserWarning with category
• mypy also has a command line option and setting for this
  • --enable-error-code deprecated
  • or in [tool.mypy] enable_error_code = ["deprecated"]
• My recommendation
  • Use @deprecated
  • with your own custom warning
  • and test with pytest -W error

Michael #3: How FOSS Won and Why It Matters

• by Thomas Depierre
• Companies are not cheap, companies optimize cost control. They do this by making purchasing slow and painful.
• FOSS is/was a major unlock hack to skip procurement, legal, etc.
• Example is months to start using a paid “Add to calendar” widget!
• It “works both ways”: the same bypass lowers the barrier for maintainers too, no need for a legal entity, lawyers, liability insurance, or sales motion.
• Proposals that “fix FOSS” by reintroducing supply-chain style controls (he name-checks SBOMs and mandated processes) risk being rejected or gamed, because they restore the very friction FOSS sidesteps.

Brian #4: Should I be looking for a GitHub alternative?

• Pricing changes for GitHub Actions
  • The self-hosted runner pricing change caused a kerfuffle.
  • It’s has been postponed
• But… if you were to look around, maybe pay attention to
  • These 4 GitHub alternatives are just as good—or better
    • Codeburg, BitBucket, GitLab, Gitea
  • And a new-ish entry, Tangled

Extras

Brian:

• End of year sale for The Complete pytest Course
  • Use code XMAS2025 for 50% off before Dec 31
• Writing work on Lean TDD book on hold for holidays
  • Will pick up again in January

Michael:

• PyCharm has better Ruff support now out of the box, via Daniel Molnar
  • This is from the release notes of 2025.3: "PyCharm 2025.3 expands its LSP integration with support for Ruff, ty, Pyright, and Pyrefly.”
  • If you check out the LSP section it will land you on this page and you can go to Ruff.
  • The Ruff doc site was also updated. Previously it was only available external tools and a third party plugin, this feels like a big step.
• Fun quote I saw on ExTwitter: May your bug tracker be forever empty.

Joke:

• Try/Catch/Stack Overflow
• Create a super annoying linkedin profile - From Tim Kellogg, submitted by archtoad

Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover: 1) Recap of my Sam Altman interview 2) OpenAI's memory play 3) Deepening relationships between people and chatbots 4) Could an all-knowing AI assistant work? 5) Model vs. product revisited 6) OpenAI's enterprise play 7) The infrastructure bet 8) OpenAI's forthcoming AI device 9) AGI's meaning? 10) Google's fast Gemini flash models 11) Microsoft Copilot falling out of favor

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From Big Technology on Substack: Seven Big Thoughts on OpenAI's Strategy & Future Following My Sam Altman Conversation
https://www.bigtechnology.com/p/seven-big-thoughts-on-openais-strategy

Questions? Feedback? Write to: bigtechnologypodcast@gmail.com

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Ryan sits down with Corey Quinn, Chief Cloud Economist at Duckbill, at AWS re:Invent to get Corey’s patented snarky take on all the happenings from the conference. They discuss whether the AI agent hype is supported by actual buyers, how startups are faring as AWS focuses on large enterprises, and how many of the new technologies coming out this year will actually be transformative. 

Episode notes:

This episode was recorded at AWS re:Invent 2025! Check out Ryan’s recap of events on our blog. 

Duckbill provides financial planning and analysis for enterprise infrastructure to help you understand, negotiate, and optimize your cloud spend.

Connect with Corey on Linkedin and subscribe to his newsletter Last Week in AWS.

TRANSCRIPT

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Sam Altman is the CEO of OpenAI. Altman joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss OpenAI's plan to win in a tightening AI race. Altman dissects his company's strategy, where he sees OpenAI having an advantage, and where he expects his product lineup to go in 2026 and beyond. We discuss AI memory and personalization, the distribution vs. product debate, how OpenAI will pay for its infrastructure buildout, AI devices, AI clouds, whether we've hit AGI yet, and plenty more. Tune in for an exclusive, 1-on-1 discussion with the AI industry's top catalyst.

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Juan DeAngulo was born and raised in South America - then eventually, came to the status in 2017 for college to play Tennis. He kept playing throughout college and into his 40's, at which point he switched to golf and never picked up a racket again. He's been married for 25 years, with 2 older kids - one in law school, and one studying software development. As a family, they enjoy comedy, which funny enough was an acquired taste for Juan. They also love being outdoors, anywhere they can get out and about.

At a prior company, Juan and his team created proprietary algorithms to intelligently predict and tie revenue. These models were based on tried and true processes. While Juan was obtaining an advanced degree at Harvard, his current venture was incubated around predictive revenue, and these algorithms.

This is the creation story of Inselligence.

Sponsors

• Incogni
• NordProtect
• Vention
• CodeCrafters helps you become a better engineer by building real-world, production-grade projects. Learn hands-on by creating your own Git, Redis, HTTP server, SQLite, or DNS server from scratch. Sign up for free today using this link and enjoy 40% off.
• Full Scale
• Paddle.com
• Sema Software
• PropelAuth
• Postman
• Meilisearch

Links

• https://inselligence.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/juandeangulo/

Jim Cramer is the host of CNBC's Mad Money and author of How To Make Money In Any Market. Cramer joins Big Technology Podcast to talk through hot takes the top tech names: Apple, Amazon, Meta, OpenAI, NVIDIA, Microsoft, Tesla, Coreweave, and more. We discuss whether NVIDIA can hit $10 trillion, whether Tesla needs self driving to work, whether OpenAI can make it, and much more. We talk why Cramer encourages looking at individual stocks vs. index funds and what money is for.

Check out Jim's book here: https://www.amazon.com/How-Make-Money-Any-Market-ebook/dp/B0F4RGS9TF/

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Questions? Feedback? Write to: bigtechnologypodcast@gmail.com

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Today, we are continuing our series, entitled Developer Chats - hearing from the large scale system builders themselves.

In this episode, we are talking with Petr Petrenko, Senior PHP Backend Engineer at Bumble. Petr will take us through his developer journey, in working on large scale backends, managing the tension between stability and innovation, and designing systems to interact with culturally different economies.

Questions

• You’ve worked on large-scale backends that serve millions of users. At what point do systems start to outgrow the teams that built them?
• At some point, every mature backend reaches a stage where rewriting is no longer realistic. How do you recognize when a system has crossed that line, and what’s the right way to handle it?
• There’s always this tension between stability and innovation. How do you decide when a system needs refactoring versus when you just need to live with the technical debt?
• Let’s talk about the human side of legacy systems — what have you learned about culture, documentation, and knowledge transfer that keeps old systems alive and reliable?
• You’ve also built and maintained complex payment systems for global users. What’s something most engineers underestimate about cross-border transactions?
• When you’re designing systems that deal with different currencies, laws, and tax regulations, how do you balance the technical with the ethical — for example, user privacy or data sovereignty?
• For engineers listening who want to build something durable — not just fast — what advice would you give about writing code that will still make sense years from now?
• One of your most impressive projects is a high-performance image-matching system you built yourself, capable of scanning tens of millions of images with sub-second results. Can you walk us through the moment you realized you needed to redesign the system — and what engineering choices made that level of performance possible?
• You’ve also worked on billing systems and fraud mitigation at scale. Was there ever a moment when you had to choose between a technically “clean” solution and a solution that better protected users or the business? How did you make that call?

Sponsors

• Incogni
• NordProtect
• Vention
• CodeCrafters helps you become a better engineer by building real-world, production-grade projects. Learn hands-on by creating your own Git, Redis, HTTP server, SQLite, or DNS server from scratch. Sign up for free today using this link and enjoy 40% off.
• Full Scale
• Paddle.com
• Sema Software
• PropelAuth
• Postman
• Meilisearch

Links

• https://www.bumble.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/petr-petrenko-006534150/