Harish Chandramowli grew up in a small town in India. The goal was simple early on - study well, go to university, and get a job. After undergrad, he realized he can do so much more, eventually coming stateside to get his masters, and meet a ton of really smart people over the last 10 years. Outside of tech, he is a broadway show fanatic, seeing 1-2 on a regular basis. He also follows Manchester United, which can be difficult watching the lose on the regular.
Harish used to work for MongoDB, and spent some time on call and in the weeds. At that time, he realized how much data is used by a business. When he eventually supported the fashion industry, specifically the back office, he wanted to build a solution to make the lives of those back office individuals as easy as possible.
In the second part of this two-part Leaders of Code episode, Peter O'Connor, Director of Platform Engineering, and Ryan J. Salva, Senior Director of Product at Google Developer Experiences, dive beyond AI hype to explore the shifts reshaping how engineering teams operate and scale. From the critical role of documentation quality in AI workflows to the cultural transformations needed for successful adoption, Peter and Ryan discuss the deeper implications of integrating AI into modern software development practices.
The discussion also:
Explores how poor documentation creates problems as AI systems learn and repeat mistakes, making high-quality documentation essential for successful AI integrations.
Covers how consistent tools and processes become more important when using AI, and why leaders should prioritize helping teams learn and experiment with AI tools instead of just measuring productivity.
Offers practical advice for leaders on how to create environments where developers can learn and build confidence with AI tools.
Scott Guthrie is the executive vice president of Cloud and AI at Microsoft. Guthrie joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss the tech industry's massive AI infrastructure buildout and whether it is overdoing it with the hundreds of billions of investment. Guthrie discusses the way Microsoft thinks about its OpenAI investment, whether it's worth investing in scaling pre-training, and Silicon Valley's growing debt problem Tune in for the second half where we discuss the longevity of the GPU, custom silicon, and competing with NVIDIA.
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Pavel Durov is the founder and CEO of Telegram.
Thank you for listening ❤ Check out our sponsors: https://lexfridman.com/sponsors/ep482-sc
See below for timestamps, transcript, and to give feedback, submit questions, contact Lex, etc.
OUTLINE:
(00:00) – Introduction
(02:46) – Sponsors, Comments, and Reflections
(11:29) – Philosophy of freedom
(14:37) – No alcohol
(22:42) – No phone
(28:38) – Discipline
(49:50) – Telegram: Lean philosophy, privacy, and geopolitics
(1:05:12) – Arrest in France
(1:21:23) – Romanian elections
(1:32:18) – Power and corruption
(1:41:50) – Intense education
(1:53:51) – Nikolai Durov
(1:58:19) – Programming and video games
(2:02:33) – VK origins & engineering
(2:19:46) – Hiring a great team
(2:29:02) – Telegram engineering & design
(2:48:04) – Encryption
(2:53:01) – Open source
(2:57:48) – Edward Snowden
(3:00:20) – Intelligence agencies
(3:01:32) – Iran and Russia government pressure
(3:04:41) – Apple
(3:11:38) – Poisoning
(3:43:53) – Money
(3:52:45) – TON
(4:02:35) – Bitcoin
(4:05:34) – Two chairs dilemma
(4:12:14) – Children
(4:23:24) – Father
(4:27:55) – Quantum immortality
(4:34:27) – Kafka
Madhavan "Maddy" Malonan has always been in - and around - technology, and fell in love with building things early on. He got a video game console early on, and found it a little boring. BUT, when his Dad got a computer and he played Age of Empires, he got excited about all the possibilities, trying to tinker with building things that mimicked these computer games. Even these days, he writes a lot of code, building side projects with Claude Code. When he's not coding, he's playing sports, primarily tennis.
Maddy and his team identified that verification of age, credentials, employment history, etc. was a big, big problem. So much so, that it was difficult to do so in a tamper proof, zero knowledge proof manner. They set out to create a solution - and protocol - to solve this problem.
Ryan sits down with Marco Palladino, CTO of Kong, to talk about the rise of AI agents and their impact on API consumption, the MCP protocol as a new standard for agents, the importance of observability and security in AI systems, and the importance for businesses and entrepreneurs to leverage opportunities in the agentic AI space now.
Episode notes:
Kong is an all-in-one API platform for AI and agentic workflows.
English is now an API. Our apps read untrusted text; they follow instructions hidden in plain sight, and sometimes they turn that text into action. If you connect a model to tools or let it read documents from the wild, you have created a brand new attack surface. In this episode, we will make that concrete. We will talk about the attacks teams are seeing in 2025, the defenses that actually work, and how to test those defenses the same way we test code. Our guides are Tori Westerhoff and Roman Lutz from Microsoft. They help lead AI red teaming and build PyRIT, a Python framework the Microsoft AI Red Team uses to pressure test real products. By the end of this hour you will know where the biggest risks live, what you can ship this quarter to reduce them, and how PyRIT can turn security from a one time audit into an everyday engineering practice.
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.
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.
PostgreSQL 18 is out (Sep 25, 2025) with a focus on faster text handling, async I/O, and easier upgrades.
New async I/O subsystem speeds sequential scans, bitmap heap scans, and vacuum by issuing concurrent reads instead of blocking on each request.
Major-version upgrades are smoother: pg_upgrade retains planner stats, adds parallel checks via -jobs, and supports faster cutovers with -swap.
Smarter query performance lands with skip scans on multicolumn B-tree indexes, better OR optimization, incremental-sort merge joins, and parallel GIN index builds.
Dev quality-of-life: virtual generated columns enabled by default, a uuidv7() generator for time-ordered IDs, and RETURNING can expose both OLD and NEW.
Security gets an upgrade with native OAuth 2.0 authentication; MD5 password auth is deprecated and TLS controls expand.
Text operations get a boost via the new PG_UNICODE_FAST collation, faster upper/lower, a casefold() helper, and clearer collation behavior for LIKE/FTS.
If you need to grind through DSA problems to get your first job, then of course, do that, but if you want to prepare yourself for a career, and also stand out in job interviews, learn how to write tests.
Testing is a skill you’ll use constantly, will make you stand out in job interviews, and isn’t taught well in school (usually).
Testing code well is not obvious. It’s a puzzle and a problem to solve.
It gives you confidence and helps you write better code.
Applies everywhere, at all levels.
Notes from Brian
Most devs suck at testing, so being good at it helps you stand out very quickly.
Thinking about a system and how to test it often very quickly shines a spotlight on problem areas, parts with not enough specification, and fuzzy requirements. This is a good thing, and bringing up these topics helps you to become a super valuable team member.
High level tests need to be understood by key engineers on a project. Even if tons of the code is AI generated. Even if many of the tests are, the people understanding the requirements and the high level tests are quite valuable.
I’ve subsequently had the team on Talk Python: #523: Pyrefly: Fast, IDE-friendly typing for Python (podcast version coming in a few weeks, see video for now.)
My experience has been Pyrefly changes the feel of the editor, give it a try. But disable the regular language server extension.
“I’ve been working with playwright more often to do end to end tests. As a project grows to do more with HTMX and Alpine in the markup, there’s less unit and integration test coverage and a greater need for end to end tests.”
Tim covers some cool E2E techniques
Open new pages / tabs to be tested
Using a pytest marker to identify playwright tests
Using a pytest marker in place of fixtures
Using page.pause() and Playwright’s debugging tool
Using assert_axe_violations to prevent accessibility regressions
Using page.expect_response() to confirm a background request occurred
From Brian
Again, with more and more lower level code being generated, and many unit tests being generated (shakes head in sadness), there’s an increased need for high level tests.
Don’t forget API tests, obviously, but if there’s a web interface, it’s gotta be tested.
Especially if the primary user experience is the web interface, building your Playwright testing chops helps you stand out and let’s you test a whole lot of your system with not very many tests.
Yes, take Ned’s advice and don’t focus so much on DSA, focus also on learning to test.
However, one topic you should be comfortable with in algortithm-land is Big O, at least enough to have a gut feel for it. And this article is really good enough for most people.
Great graphics, demos, visuals. As usual, great content from Sam Who, and a must read for all serious devs.
Some interesting discussions around setting up my own server, but this seems like it might be yak shaving procrastination research when I really should be writing or coding. So I’m holding off until I get some writing projects and a couple SaaS projects further along.
Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover: 1) Nvidia invests $100 billion in OpenAI 2) Will the money ever get there? 3) Do AI companies have to make money eventually? 4) What has to happen for OpenAI to return NVIDIA's investment? 5) Is another financial crisis coming? 6) OpenAI's new Pulse feature 7) Is Pulse a precursor to ChatGPT ads? 8) Meta's new Vibes feed of AI slop 9) TikTok deal is on the table 10) Ranjan says TIkTok deal isn't happening 11) A promise to be less gloom and doom next week :)
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Three Faces Of Generative AI: https://www.bigtechnology.com/p/the-three-faces-of-generative-ai
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Ryan welcomes Pia Nilsson, GM for Backstage and head of developer experience at Spotify, to discuss the evolution and adoption of Backstage, the impact of AI on dev experience, and how Spotify approaches platform engineering and standardization to help teams solve for specific needs.
Episode notes:
Backstage is an open-source IDP by Spotify that reduces everyday friction, cognitive overhead, and operational toil for developers.
