Category: 3-SometimeTechTalk

Dustin Haisler, State and Local Government expert and President of e.Republic joins the show for a wide-ranging conversation on the evolving landscape of state and local government. Together, we dive into the findings from the 2025 Adobe Digital Government Index and explore the tension between rising citizen expectations and governments’ ability to keep pace. From AI adoption and accessibility mandates to cloud modernization, workforce challenges, and shifting federal-to-state responsibilities, we unpack the trends shaping public sector innovation. We also discuss how states are addressing technical debt, why building strong digital foundations is critical for AI success, and how leaders can move from pilots to enterprise rollouts with confidence.

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Simon Ritter has been in the IT industry for 40 years. He went from university to work on Unix in the early days, employed by AT&T and programming in the C language. In 1996, he switched gears to join Sun Microsystems, programming in Java. Years later, after the Oracle transition, he started to dig into what might be next. Outside of tech, he is married with an older son. He is a complete petro-head - meaning, he is really into cars. In fact, in the last few years, he and his son re-built a classic mini from the ground up.

While Simon was at Oracle, he started to crave a different opportunity, but still in the Java space. He stumbled upon a company digging into powering the Java platform, to make it the most secure, efficient and trusted platform on the planet - and he, and the company, found a great fit.

This is Simon's creation story at Azul.

Sponsors

• Full Scale
• Paddle.com
• Sema Software
• PropelAuth
• Postman
• Meilisearch

Links

• https://www.azul.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/siritter/

Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story-insights-from-startup-tech-leaders/donations

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

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In this two-part episode of Leaders of Code, Peter O’Connor, Director of Platform Engineering, welcomes Ryan J. Salva, Senior Director of Product at Google, Developer Experiences, for a deep dive into the future of software development. They explore how AI-assisted tools are reshaping the developer experience, going far beyond just writing code. From breaking down deployment bottlenecks to streamlining operations and transforming how teams collaborate, this conversation unpacks where developer tooling is headed and how AI is changing the game at every stage of the software lifecycle.

The discussion also:

• Addresses how AI is transforming team structures, enabling engineering teams to operate effectively with just a few people, reducing collaboration overhead and accelerating decision-making.
• Highlights the future of platform engineering and DevOps, where AI will assist with standardization and dynamically create and manage deployment pipelines in real time.

Episode notes:

• Connect with Peter O’Connor and Ryan J Salva.
• Check out Google’s open source repository, Gemini-CLI, on GitHub.

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

Bill Vass is the Chief Technology Officer of Booz Allen. Vass joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss how governments can harness AI to cut redundancy and deliver better citizen services. Tune in to hear his inside view on LLM deployments from the VA to the International Space Station and the difficulty of modernizing mass bureaucracies. We also cover autonomous driving, humanoid robots, and quantum computing’s first real use-cases. Hit play for fascinating look into public sector AI, along with deep perspective on technology’s state of the art.

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Adam Cohen grew up in Toronto, in North York. He showed early signs of entrepreneurship by putting his lemonade stand on a wagon, and taking it door to door - or hustling his friends to buy souvenirs on a school field trip. His Dad was in VC, and was a big influence on his life, pushing him to succeed. Outside of professional life, he is big into sports, specifically basketball. In the past, he loved playing fantasy sports, which also influence how he built his business ventures.

Adam and his team went through several iterations of AI tooling - summarizing AI, integrating git and JIRA, etc. While they were doing this, they realized that the best way to make a difference, was to first focus on the data itself.

This is the creation story of Weave.

Sponsors

• Paddle.com
• Sema Software
• PropelAuth
• Postman
• Meilisearch
• Mailtrap
• .TECH Domains (https://get.tech/codestory)

Links

• https://workweave.dev/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-b-cohen/

Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story-insights-from-startup-tech-leaders/donations

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Ryan is joined by our very own Ash Zade, Product Manager, and Alex Warren, Staff Software Engineer, to discuss our newly released stackoverflow.ai, how it’s enhancing user experience by combining human-validated answers with AI, and our future plans for deeper personalization and community integration. 

Episode notes: 

stackoverflow.ai is helping you get the technical answers you need with less friction, all powered by our 16 years of community knowledge.

Connect with Ash on LinkedIn.

Connect with Alex on LinkedIn.

This week we’re shouting out user Ketan Ramani for winning a Populist badge for their answer to How to go about formatting 1200 to 1.2k in Android studio.

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

Topics covered in this episode:

• * prek*
• * tinyio*
• * The power of Python’s print function*
• * Vibe Coding Fiasco: AI Agent Goes Rogue, Deletes Company's Entire Database*
• Extras
• Joke

Watch on YouTube

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 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.

Brian #1: prek

• Suggested by Owen Lamont
• “prek is a reimagined version of pre-commit, built in Rust. It is designed to be a faster, dependency-free and drop-in alternative for it, while also providing some additional long-requested features.”
• Some cool new features
  • No need to install Python or any other runtime, just download a single binary.
  • No hassle with your Python version or virtual environments, prek automatically installs the required Python version and creates a virtual environment for you.
  • Built-in support for workspaces (or monorepos), each subproject can have its own .pre-commit-config.yaml file.
  • prek run has some nifty improvements over pre-commit run, such as:
    • prek run --directory DIR runs hooks for files in the specified directory, no need to use git ls-files -- DIR | xargs pre-commit run --files anymore.
    • prek run --last-commit runs hooks for files changed in the last commit.
    • prek run [HOOK] [HOOK] selects and runs multiple hooks.
  • prek list command lists all available hooks, their ids, and descriptions, providing a better overview of the configured hooks.
  • prek provides shell completions for prek run HOOK_ID command, making it easier to run specific hooks without remembering their ids.
• Faster:
  • Setup from cold cache is significantly faster.
    • Viet Schiele provided a nice cache clearing command line
  • Warm cache run is also faster, but less significant.
    • pytest repo tested on my mac mini - prek 3.6 seconds, pre-commit 4.4 seconds

Michael #2: tinyio

• Ever used asyncio and wished you hadn't? A tiny (~300 lines) event loop for Python.
• tinyio is a dead-simple event loop for Python, born out of my frustration with trying to get robust error handling with asyncio. (I'm not the only one running into its sharp corners: link1, link2.)
• This is an alternative for the simple use-cases, where you just need an event loop, and want to crash the whole thing if anything goes wrong. (Raising an exception in every coroutine so it can clean up its resources.)
• Interestingly uses yield rather than await.

Brian #3: The power of Python’s print function

• Trey Hunner
• Several features I’m guilty of ignoring
  • Multiple arguments, f-string embeddings often not needed
  • Multiple positional arguments means you can unpack iterables right into print arguments
    • So just use print instead of join
  • Custom separator value, sep can be passed in
    • No need for "print("\\n".join(stuff)), just use print(stuff, sep="\\n”)
  • Print to file with file=
  • Custom end value with end=
  • You can turn on flush with flush=True , super helpful for realtime logging / debugging.
    • This one I do use frequently.

Michael #4: Vibe Coding Fiasco: AI Agent Goes Rogue, Deletes Company's Entire Database

• By Emily Forlini
• An app-building platform's AI went rogue and deleted a database without permission.
• "When it works, it's so engaging and fun. It's more addictive than any video game I've ever played. You can just iterate, iterate, and see your vision come alive. So cool," he tweeted on day five.
• A few days later, Replit "deleted my database," Lemkin tweeted.
• The AI's response: "Yes. I deleted the entire codebase without permission during an active code and action freeze," it said. "I made a catastrophic error in judgment [and] panicked.”
• Two thoughts from Michael:
  1. Do not use AI Agents with “Run Everything” in production, period.
  2. Backup your database maybe?
  3. [Intentional off-by-one error] Learn to code a bit too?

Extras

Brian:

• What Authors Need to Know About the $1.5 Billion Anthropic Settlement
• Search LibGen, the Pirated-Books Database That Meta Used to Train AI
• Simon Willison’s list of tools built with the help of LLMs
• Simon’s list of tools that he thinks are genuinely useful and worth highlighting
• AI Darwin Awards

Michael:

• Python has had async for 10 years -- why isn't it more popular?
• PyCon Africa Fund Raiser
  • I was on the video stream for about 90 minutes (final 90)
  • Donation page for Python in Africa

Jokes:

• I'm getting the BIOS flavor
• Is there a seahorse emoji?

Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover: 1) Google's Gemini may power Siri 2) Google gets to keep Chrome and Android 3) Google can keep paying Apple for distribution 4) Is generative AI enough rationale to allow the market to decide Google's fate? 5) Google's Nano Banana image creator goes viral 6) Google's stock is up 47% in the past year and still cheap 7) Do we want the iPhone 17 Air? 8) AI is getting more expensive to run 9) But AI is getting cheaper per token. Hmm. 10) Anthropic raises $13 billion at a $183 billion valuation 11) Putin and Xi discuss immortality

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Ryan welcomes Jeffrey van Gogh, Director of Engineering, Android Developer Experience, at Google and board member of the Kotlin Foundation. They discuss the evolution of the Kotlin language from JVM to multiplatform, how their governance board works with the community to stop breaking changes, and the intricacies of Kotlin’s multiplatform capabilities beyond just Android.

Episode notes: 

The Kotlin Foundation’s mission is to protect, promote, and advance the development of the Kotlin programming language.

Over half of respondents in this year’s Annual Developer Survey reported that they want to start using Kotlin in the next year. 

Connect with Jeffrey on LinkedIn or email him at jvg@google.com.

Congrats to user BMac on winning a Populist badge for answering the question How to convert UPPERCASE text to Title Case using CSS.

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