Category: 3-SometimeTechTalk

Dylan Ratcliffe lives in San Francisco (for less than a year), but grew up on a farm in the bush in Australia, riding motorbikes and playing video games. He fondly remembers the days whenever you could get a free version of Age of Empires from a cereal box. He was always into computers, and earned a scholarship to head into Melbourne for University. He left his first job as an auditor with KPMG to join a startup called Puppet. Outside of tech, he still rides motorbikes, and has a super small one now (it's actually meant for kids). He loves all food, but prefers Asian and Indian cuisine.

Dylan was deploying Puppet at a financial services company, and was pushing to get a win. When a late Friday afternoon deployment went haywire, he decided to leave his company and set out to build something to automatically discover dependencies on a network, to prevent deployment outages.

This is the creation story of Overmind.

Sponsors

• TECH Domains
• Mezmo
• Braingrid.ai
• Alcor
• Equitybee
• Terms and conditions: Equitybee executes private financing contracts (PFCs) allowing investors a certain claim to ESO upon liquidation event; Could limit your profits. Funding in not guaranteed. PFCs brokered by EquityBee Securities, member FINRA.

Links

• https://overmind.tech/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/dylanratcliffe/

Ryan welcomes back the mighty Scott Hanselman, VP of Developer Community at Microsoft, for a crossover episode about all things vibe coding. They cover the ways it can really improve the software development lifecycle, the importance of keeping human judgement in software so developers can truly understand their code, and how AI can be leveraged as a learning tool…like when Scott vibe coded a simple app over lunch. 

Episode notes:

Scott last sat down with us in 2017 to discuss his journey into tech and his advice for supporting the next generation of developers. 

You can learn more about Scott’s work at his website. If you love the sound of his voice, you can also check out his podcasts Hanselminutes, Azure Friday, and his show with Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich: Scott & Mark Learn To. You can also check out the app he vibe coded over lunch on his GitHub.

This week’s shoutout goes to user Keavon for their answer to Move Line Up/Down shortcut in Visual Studio, which won them a Populist badge.

TRANSCRIPT

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M.G. Siegler of Spyglass is back for our monthly tech news discussion. Today we discuss whether AI needs a Steve Jobs, whether the technology lends itself to that type of leader, and who it might be of the current crop. We also discuss which Big Tech companies are actually winning in the AI race and why so few have a standout AI product. Then we look at the year ahead and get some of Siegler's boldest predictions. Tune in for a fun, deep discussion on the current state of AI and what's missing.

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• port-killer
• How we made Python's packaging library 3x faster
• CodSpeed
• Extras
• Joke

About the show

Sponsored by us! Support our work through:

• Our courses at Talk Python Training
• The Complete pytest Course
• Patreon Supporters

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 11am PT. Older video versions available there too.

Finally, if you want an artisanal, hand-crafted digest of every week of the show notes in email form? Add your name and email to our friends of the show list, we'll never share it.

Michael #1: port-killer

• A powerful cross-platform port management tool for developers.
• Monitor ports, manage Kubernetes port forwards, integrate Cloudflare Tunnels, and kill processes with one click.
• Features:
  • 🔍 Auto-discovers all listening TCP ports
  • ⚡ One-click process termination (graceful + force kill)
  • 🔄 Auto-refresh with configurable interval
  • 🔎 Search and filter by port number or process name
  • ⭐ Favorites for quick access to important ports
  • 👁️ Watched ports with notifications
  • 📂 Smart categorization (Web Server, Database, Development, System)

Brian #2: How we made Python's packaging library 3x faster

• Henry Schreiner
• Some very cool graphs demonstrating some benchmark data.
• And then details about how various speedups
  • each being 2-37% faster
  • the total adding up to about 3x speedup, or shaving 2/3 of the time.
• These also include nice write-ups about why the speedups were chosen.
• If you are trying to speed up part of your system, this would be good article to check out.

Michael #3: AI’s Impact on dev companies

• On TailwindCSS: via Simon
  • Tailwind is growing faster than ever and is bigger than it has ever been
  • Its revenue is down close to 80%.
  • 75% of the people on our engineering team lost their jobs here yesterday because of the brutal impact AI has had on our business.
  • “We had 6 months left”
  • Listen to the founder: “A Morning Walk”
  • Super insightful video: Tailwind is in DEEP trouble
• On Stack Overflow: See video.
  • SO was founded around 2009, first month had 3,749 questions
  • December, SO had 3,862 questions asked
  • Most of its live it had 200,000 questions per month
  • That is a 53x drop!

Brian #4: CodSpeed

• “CodSpeed integrates into dev and CI workflows to measure performance, detect regressions, and enable actionable optimizations.”
• Noticed it while looking through the GitHub workflows for FastAPI
• Free for small teams and open-source projects
• Easy to integrate with Python by marking tests with @pytest.mark.benchmark
• They’ve releases a GitHub action to incorporate benchmarking in CI workflows

Extras

Brian:

• Part 2 of Lean TDD released this morning, “Lean TDD Practices”, which has 9 mini chapters.

Michael:

• Our Docker build just broke because of the supply chain techniques from last week (that’s a good thing!). Not a real issue, but really did catch an open CVE.
• Long passwords are bad now? ;)

Joke: Check out my app!

Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. This week, we do our 2026 predictions in an abbreviated holiday-time episode. Here's what we cover: 1) Claude Code's ability to run autonomously and complete tasks 2) Claude's ability to use tools 3) Is this a big deal? 4) Can Claude Code style tools be used for more knowledge work? 5) Gmail adds AI 6) Another explanation for Meta's Manus purchase 7) OpenAI gets into healthcare (officially) 8) Future of the doctor-patient interaction 9) Are rigged prediction markets a good thing? 10) Do we still want to do busywork in the age of AI?

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Ryan is joined by Vanessa Lee, VP of Product at Shopify, to discuss how AI is a tech renaissance and how these new technologies are affecting the ecommerce world. They cover the development of Sidekick, their new tool, along with the general challenges of building AI tools, the importance of maintaining human oversight in AI, and what the future holds for personalized user experiences in ecommerce. 

Episode notes:  

We spoke with Shopify about how they’re building developer-focused AI products last May; you can check it out here. 

Sidekick is Shopify’s new AI assistant that combines commerce knowledge with advanced reasoning. Learn more about how Shopify is using AI agents to evolve their product taxonomy at scale on their blog.

Connect with Vanessa on Twitter. 

Congrats to user Erwin Brandstetter for winning a Great Answer badge for their answer to How to convert empty to null in PostgreSQL?.

TRANSCRIPT

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Michael Intrator is the CEO of Coreweave. Brian Venturo is the chief strategy officer at Coreweave. The two join Big Technology Podcast to discuss the company's rapid rise amid the AI boom and the criticisms of its business model. In this episode, we cover what it takes to build so many datacenters in such a short time, what happens to Coreweave if the AI boom flattens out, why the company uses debt to build its infrastructure, and how AI chips depreciate over time. Tune in to hear an in-depth, illuminating interview with the founding team of one of the AI moment's most fascinating and controversial companies.

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SPONSORED BY MONGODB

Pete Johnson, Field CTO, Artificial Intelligence at MongoDB, joins the podcast to talk about a recent OpenAI paper on the impact that AI will have on jobs and overall GDP. Pete, who reads the papers (and datasets) so you don’t have to, says that looking at AI’s impact as a job killer is a flawed metric. Instead, he and Ryan talk about how AI will be a collaborator for actual human workers, how embeddings and vectorization will move the productivity needle, and the five decisions you need to make to realize ROI on AI. 

Episode notes:

If you’re curious, read the OpenAI blog post and paper yourself. 

For those of you looking for inspiration, check out Werner Vogel’s keynote from re:Invent 2025. 

MongoDB provides a flexible and dynamic database that excels with AI data. 

Connect with Pete on LinkedIn.

Congrats to Populist badge winner Scheff's Cat for dropping a banger of an answer on error: non-const static data member must be initialized out of line.

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

Sam Partee started out his love for tech/engineering by working on cars. After many y ears of working on cars, and even starting his own car stereo installation business, he decided that cards were finite and moved onto computers. He fell in love with the space, and the rest is history, filled with super computers, AI, distributed training, Redis and the lot. Outside of tech, he loves to take long hikes with his snowy husky.

Sam and his team built a prior solution, an agent to solve bugs for you. They ran into a litany of problems, but eventually figured out that there was a dire need for an authorization for the activities that agents wanted to do on your behalf. Fast forward, and they are working with Anthropic to define these auth protocols.

This is the creation story of Arcade.

Sponsors

• Incogni
• NordProtect
• Vention
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• Full Scale
• Paddle.com
• Sema Software
• PropelAuth
• Postman
• Meilisearch

Links

• https://www.arcade.dev/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/sampartee/