Category: 3-SometimeTechTalk

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

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

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.

---

Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice.

Want a discount for Big Technology on Substack + Discord? Here’s 25% off for the first year: https://www.bigtechnology.com/subscribe?coupon=0843016b

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

Ryan hosts Akamai data scientist Robert Lester on the show to discuss how the growth of AI bots affects internet traffic, the ways these AI bots differ from the original search engine optimization ones, and why you might not want to mitigate AI bots on your websites.

Episode notes:

Akamai is a CDN, full-stack cloud computing, and cybersecurity company that keeps experiences closer to users and threats further away using the world’s most distributed compute platform. 

Connect with Robert on LinkedIn and check out his AI Pulse blogs.

Today’s shoutout goes to user Evan Phoenix for winning a Populist badge for their answer to llvm ir back to human-readable source language?.

TRANSCRIPT

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

• ty: An extremely fast Python type checker and LSP
• Python Supply Chain Security Made Easy
• typing_extensions
• MI6 chief: We'll be as fluent in Python as we are in Russian
• Extras
• Joke

About the show

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: ty: An extremely fast Python type checker and LSP

• Charlie Marsh announced the Beta release of ty on Dec 16
• “designed as an alternative to tools like mypy, Pyright, and Pylance.”
• Extremely fast even from first run
• Successive runs are incremental, only rerunning necessary computations as a user edits a file or function. This allows live updates.
• Includes nice visual diagnostics much like color enhanced tracebacks
• Extensive configuration control
  • Nice for if you want to gradually fix warnings from ty for a project
• Also released a nice VSCode (or Cursor) extension
  • Check the docs. There are lots of features.
  • Also a note about disabling the default language server (or disabling ty’s language server) so you don’t have 2 running

Michael #2: Python Supply Chain Security Made Easy

• We know about supply chain security issues, but what can you do?
  • Typosquatting (not great)
  • Github/PyPI account take-overs (very bad)
• Enter pip-audit.
• Run it in two ways:
  1. Against your installed dependencies in current venv
  2. As a proper unit test (so when running pytest or CI/CD).
  3. Let others find out first, wait a week on all dependency updates: uv pip compile requirements.piptools --upgrade --output-file requirements.txt --exclude-newer "1 week"
• Follow up article: DevOps Python Supply Chain Security
  1. Create a dedicated Docker image for testing dependencies with pip-audit in isolation before installing them into your venv.
     1. Run pip-compile / uv lock --upgrade to generate the new lock file
     2. Test in a ephemeral pip-audit optimized Docker container
     3. Only then if things pass, uv pip install / uv sync
  2. Add a dedicated Docker image build step that fails the docker build step if a vulnerable package is found.

Brian #3: typing_extensions

• Kind of a followup on the deprecation warning topic we were talking about in December.
• prioinv on Mastodon notified us that the project typing-extensions includes it as part of the backport set.
• The warnings.deprecated decorator is new to Python 3.13, but with typing-extensions, you can use it in previous versions.
• But typing_extesions is way cooler than just that.
• The module serves 2 purposes:
  • Enable use of new type system features on older Python versions.
  • Enable experimentation with type system features proposed in new PEPs before they are accepted and added to the <code>typing</code> module.
• So cool.
• There’s a lot of features here. I’m hoping it allows someone to use the latest typing syntax across multiple Python versions.
• I’m “tentatively” excited. But I’m bracing for someone to tell me why it’s not a silver bullet.

Michael #4: MI6 chief: We'll be as fluent in Python as we are in Russian

• "Advances in artificial intelligence, biotechnology and quantum computing are not only revolutionizing economies but rewriting the reality of conflict, as they 'converge' to create science fiction-like tools,” said new MI6 chief Blaise Metreweli.
• She focused mainly on threats from Russia, the country is "testing us in the grey zone with tactics that are just below the threshold of war.”
• This demands what she called "mastery of technology" across the service, with officers required to become "as comfortable with lines of code as we are with human sources, as fluent in Python as we are in multiple other languages."
• Recruitment will target linguists, data scientists, engineers, and technologists alike.

Extras

Brian:

• Next chapter of Lean TDD being released today, Finding Waste in TDD
  • Still going to attempt a Jan 31 deadline for first draft of book.
  • That really doesn’t seem like enough time, but I’m optimistic.
• SteamDeck is not helping me find time to write
  • But I very much appreciate the gift from my fam
  • Send me game suggestions on Mastodon or Bluesky. I’d love to hear what you all are playing.

Michael:

• Astral has announced the Beta release of ty, which they say they are "ready to recommend to motivated users for production use."
  • Blog post
  • Release page
• Reuven Lerner has a video series on Pandas 3

Joke: Error Handling in the age of AI

• Play on the inversion of JavaScript the Good Parts

Tony Scott, former Federal Chief Information Officer under President Barack Obama and current President & CEO of Intrusion joins the show to give a candid, inside look at how the CIO role has evolved across government and industry—from back-office IT leadership to becoming a critical connector across mission, policy, technology, and organizational strategy. Tony reflects on his time overseeing an $85B federal IT portfolio, the challenges and urgency of modernizing aging systems, and the events surrounding the OPM breach that reshaped federal cybersecurity. 

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) Meta buys Manus 2) Is the Manus deal an enterprise play? 3) What Meta could do with consumer AI agents 4) Why consumer AI agents are a good advertising strategy for Meta 5) Instagram head Adam Mosseri addresses AI slop 6) Meta Ray-Bans don't work in the cold 7) NVIDIA pretty much buys Groq 8) Elon Musk's Grok goes full pervert 9) Who's responsible? 10) What explains the rise of sports betting and prediction markets -- is it a lack of a stable financial future that would otherwise be worth investing in?

---

Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice.

Want a discount for Big Technology on Substack + Discord? Here’s 25% off for the first year: https://www.bigtechnology.com/subscribe?coupon=0843016b

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ryan sits down with Tom Totenberg, head of release automation at LaunchDarkly, to discuss the perils of taking too many shortcuts in software development, how business pressures and AI code tools have contributed to dangerous corner cutting, and the importance of balancing speed with sustainability to maintain system integrity. 

Episode notes: 

LaunchDarkly is a feature management and experimentation platform that allows you to decouple software feature rollouts from code deployment so you can manage features safely and securely.

Connect with Tom on Linkedin. 

This episode’s shoutout goes to user Boris Gorelik, who won a Great Question badge for asking Removing handlers from python's logging loggers. 

TRANSCRIPT

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