Podcast · Tech & Science
by Scott Hanselman · English · Tech & Science
Hanselminutes is Fresh Air for Developers. A weekly commute-time podcast that promotes fresh technology and fresh voices. Talk and Tech for Developers, Life-long Learners, and Technologists.
21 Aug 2026 · 47 min
A young man who's a sophomore in high school emailed me to come on his podcast that he does with his friend, and I had so much fun. I decided to make it a crossover episode. Check out "Compile after Class" on this week's episode!
E1054 · 13 Aug 2026 · 36 min
Maynard Holliday spent 30+ years at the intersection of robotics, nuclear security, and defense technology, most recently serving as the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Critical Technologies. He's worked on everything from helping remediate Three Mile Island to securing tons of Soviet nuclear material in post-Cold War Ukraine to overseeing the Pentagon's critical technology portfolio including AI, hypersonics, and microelectronics. He shares what "trusted AI" really means, why he co-founded Black in Robotics, and how T'Challa and Tony Stark shaped his career more than you'd expect.
E1053 · 6 Aug 2026 · 36 min
Felix Rieseberg came to computing through poetry, and that background gives him a unique lens for explaining language models. A longtime engineer, Felix now gets to watch AI evolve from the inside. In this episode, Scott and Felix explore why language models are surprisingly easy to understand despite feeling magical, what it's like to train a model from noise to coherence, and the bigger philosophical questions about intelligence that AI keeps surfacing. You can learn how AI really works by making your own in a weekend with his free https://languagemodelbuilder.com/
E1052 · 30 Jul 2026 · 32 min
Varun Badhwar, CEO and Co-Founder of Endor Labs, joins Scott to explore the expanding software supply chain risk in the age of AI-generated code. They discuss how developers have gone from writing code to assembling it from layers of dependencies like open source, third-party libraries, and now the outputs of AI...and what all this means for security. From hallucinated npm packages that could be squatted on, to developers becoming part of the attack surface themselves, this is a wake-up call for anyone building software today.
E1051 · 23 Jul 2026 · 33 min
Alexandra Lato, VP of Product at Stack Overflow, joins Scott to talk about how Stack Overflow is evolving for the age of AI agents. They explore the new "Stack Overflow for Agents" feature, where a single prompt bootstraps an agent with all the knowledge and APIs of Stack Overflow, and what it means for how developers, agents, and communities share and verify knowledge together.
E1050 · 16 Jul 2026 · 35 min
Dr. Chinasa T. Okolo is the Founder and Scientific Director of Technecultura and a consultant for the United Nations and the World Bank. She talks with Scott about the yawning gap between AI's pace of development and policymakers' ability to understand it. She also discusses what it means to do AI governance research with a focus on Global Majority communities that are too often left out of the conversation.
E1049 · 18 Jun 2026 · 34 min
Scott talks with Nathan Sobo, CEO and co-founder of Zed, about what comes after the traditional code editor. They start with Zed’s vision for a fast, collaborative, AI-native development environment, then go deeper on DeltaDB: a new approach to versioning software at the operation level, not just at the commit level. Nathan explains why so much important software work happens “between commits,” how agent conversations and code changes can become durable shared artifacts, and what it might mean for Git, collaboration, and the future of programming tools. Nathan previously helped build Atom at…
E1048 · 11 Jun 2026 · 39 min
On this episode of Hanselminutes, Scott talks with Ed Rogers of Bristol Braille Technology about the Canute project and the long road toward affordable multiline Braille. Most refreshable Braille displays show a single line at a time; Canute changes the experience by giving readers nine lines and 360 cells of spatial context. Ed shares how multiline Braille opens up new possibilities for reading, coding, math, music, diagrams, education, and independence and why Braille remains a vital technology for literacy, employment, and full participation in the digital world.
E1047 · 4 Jun 2026 · 32 min
Charity Majors is the co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb.io, where she pioneered the concept of modern observability for distributed systems. Before Honeycomb, she spent years at Parse (acquired by Facebook), Facebook, and Linden Lab building Second Life. She is the co-author of "Observability Engineering" and "Database Reliability Engineering" (O'Reilly). She writes at charity.wtf. Whatever she and Scott are planning, they are gonna observability the heck out of it.
E1046 · 14 May 2026 · 32 min
Scott talks with Aran Khanna, co-founder and CEO of Archera, about a new category of cloud financial tooling: "Insured Commitments." Instead of locking into 1- or 3-year reserved instance contracts and hoping your usage matches, Archera offers commitments as short as 30 days. They get into the economics of cloud purchasing, how AI workloads are changing capacity planning, and what FinOps looks like in 2026.
E1045 · 7 May 2026 · 32 min
Scott talks with Skyla Loomis, General Manager of IBM Z Software, about the ongoing relevance of mainframes in 2026. They discuss the enduring power of mainframes, how generative AI is transforming COBOL modernization, and why enterprise infrastructure still runs on IBM Z. Skyla shares insights on developer experience, compliance challenges, and the misconceptions about mainframe technology in a cloud-native world.
E1044 · 30 Apr 2026 · 32 min
Greg Hinkle, co-founder of Nimbalyst and former VP of Software Engineering at Salesforce, joins Scott to discuss the future of AI-assisted development. They explore the challenges of managing multiple AI coding agents, finding flow state in an agentic world, and why visual workspaces matter. Greg shares Nimbalyst's opinionated approach to integrating tools like Excalidraw, task management, and session organization directly into the developer workflow.
E1043 · 23 Apr 2026 · 33 min
Kelly Shortridge, author of "Security Chaos Engineering: Sustaining Resilience in Software and Systems" and CPO at Fastly, joins Scott for an ACM ByteCast joint episode about why security should be designed for failure rather than prevention. From airplane coffee makers causing critical failures to squirrels being the real "advanced persistent threat" to power grids, Kelly makes the case that no system is perfectly secure — and the teams that feel most in control are often the least prepared. The conversation covers metrics theater, the cost-resilience tradeoff, why software has unique…
E1042 · 9 Apr 2026 · 36 min
Tori Westerhoff joins Scott to explore the intersection of AI, human psychology, and personal growth. As people increasingly use LLMs for introspection and decision-making, Tori argues that we're missing the diversity of thought that comes from community, even particularly random encounters with strangers. She reveals her own practice: a daily noon reminder to talk to strangers. "If you sycophant yourself, you're never going to grow," she explains. The conversation delves into how LLMs can create echo chambers of thought, and why the randomness of human connection, even just someone on the…
E1041 · 19 Mar 2026 · 33 min
In this episode, in association with the ACM ByteCast, Scott talks with Eric Allman, one of the foundational figures of the early internet. Best known for creating Sendmail, the mail transfer agent that powered a large portion of global email infrastructure through the formative years of the network, Allman helped shape how messages move across the internet. Their conversation explores the origins of internet email, the messy realities of building software that must operate at planetary scale, and what lessons today’s engineers can learn from the systems and design decisions that quietly…
E1040 · 12 Mar 2026 · 31 min
Scott Hanselman sits down with Allen Stewart, Partner Director of Software Engineering at Microsoft, to explore how AI agents with persistent memory are transforming scientific research and software engineering. Allen explains how his team built an AI system that learns from every investigation turning a 12-day autonomous drug discovery run into reusable knowledge that makes future research exponentially faster. Instead of starting from scratch each time, the AI inherits hypotheses, methodologies, and findings from previous work, saving hundreds of millions of tokens and weeks of effort.
E1039 · 5 Mar 2026 · 33 min
In this episode, Scott talks with Don Syme about the emerging world of agentic developer workflows and what it means when coding tools move from autocomplete helpers to collaborators. They explore how modern tools like GitHub Copilot and GitHub Agentic Workflows are evolving into systems that can plan, execute, and iterate on tasks across a codebase, and what that means for software design, type systems, and developer responsibility.
E1038 · 26 Feb 2026 · 33 min
This week on the show, Scott talks to Philip Kiley about his new book, Inference Engineering. Inference Engineering is your guide to becoming an expert in inference. It contains everything that Philip has learned in four years of working at Baseten. This book is based on the hundreds of thousands of words of documentation, blogs, and talks he's written on inference; interviews with dozens of experts from our engineering team; and countless conversations with customers and builders around the world.
E1037 · 19 Feb 2026 · 41 min
What does it take to design a programming language from scratch when the target isn’t just CPUs, but GPUs, accelerators, and the entire AI stack? In this episode, I sit down with legendary language architect Chris Lattner to talk about Mojo — his ambitious attempt to rethink systems programming for the machine learning era. We trace the arc from LLVM and Clang to Swift and now Mojo, unpacking the lessons Chris has carried forward into this new language. Mojo aims to combine Python’s ergonomics with C-level performance, but the real story is deeper: memory ownership, heterogeneous compute,…
E1036 · 12 Feb 2026 · 44 min
There’s a new wave of AI tools that don’t just live in the cloud, don’t just autocomplete code, and don’t just sit in a browser tab. They reach into your local environment, understand your context, and act more like a thinking companion than a chatbot. In this episode, I talk with Peter Steinberger, founder of OpenClaw, about the rise of “The Claw” and what it means to build AI that feels fast, personal, and deeply integrated into your workflow. We explore why OpenClaw is having a moment, how developer expectations are shifting from prompts to agents, and what it takes to design tools that…
E1035 · 5 Feb 2026 · 35 min
AI is making developers dramatically more productive...so why is everyone so exhausted? In this episode, Scott talks with Steve Yegge, legendary blogger and creator of Gas Town, a multi-agent orchestrator he describes as "Kubernetes for coding agents." Steve shares his theory of the "AI Vampire," that working alongside AI drains human energy Colin Robinson-style (What We Do In The Shadows), even as output skyrockets. They dig into what happens when you're managing ten or twenty Claude Code instances at once, who actually captures the value of a 10x productivity boost, and why the most…
E1034 · 29 Jan 2026 · 31 min
Code reviews are one of the most powerful tools teams have for maintaining quality — but they're also one of the most emotionally charged parts of the development process. With AI coding agents generating more code than ever, the review bottleneck is growing fast. But what if AI-assisted reviews could not only keep up with the volume, but actually be kinder about it? Scott talks with Nnenna Ndukwe, Developer Relations Lead at Qodo, about how AI code review is evolving beyond glorified linting into something that understands context, catches what matters, and delivers feedback developers…
E1033 · 22 Jan 2026 · 32 min
Sandboxing is having a moment. As agents move from chat windows into terminals, repos, and production-adjacent workflows, the question is no longer “What can AI generate?” but “Where can it safely run?” In this episode, Scott talks with Mark Cavage, President of Docker, about the resurgence of sandboxes as critical infrastructure for the agent era and the thinking behind Docker’s newly released sandbox feature. They explore why isolation, reproducibility, and least-privilege execution are becoming table stakes for AI-assisted development. From protecting local machines to enabling…
E1032 · 15 Jan 2026 · 45 min
AI is moving faster than our collective ability to metabolize it. Between copilots, agents, vibe coding, and the ever-shifting definition of “senior engineer,” developers are asking a deeper question. Where is this all actually going? In this episode, Scott sits down with Gergely Orosz, author of The Pragmatic Engineer and longtime observer of how software gets built inside high-performing teams, to separate signal from hype. They dig into what AI is really doing to day-to-day engineering work. Productivity boosts versus skill atrophy. The changing expectations for junior developers. Whether…
E1031 · 8 Jan 2026 · 33 min
Join Scott and Eric Lippert for a lively tour through Fabulous Adventures in Data Structures and Algorithms, a fresh take on timeless topics that flips the script on how programmers think about core tools of the trade. Eric shares why he wrote a book that avoids the predictable interview-prep regurgitations, and instead dives into clever, lesser-known data structures and algorithmic ideas that he’s encountered over a long career in language design and tooling. You’ll hear how immutability can make data structures both simpler and faster, why backtracking shows up everywhere from tree search…
E1030 · 1 Jan 2026 · 34 min
Modern computers are faster than ever, yet much of our software feels slower, heavier, and more frustrating to use. In this episode of Hanselminutes, Scott talks with Vjekoslav Krajačić, creator of File Pilot, about bringing speed and responsiveness back to everyday tools. Vjekoslav built File Pilot as a reaction to bloated file managers and laggy interfaces, focusing on instant feedback, keyboard-first workflows, and a UI that feels immediate. We talk about what actually makes software feel fast, why modern frameworks often work against that goal, and how users instinctively know when an…
E1029 · 25 Dec 2025 · 32 min
Why are so many developers suddenly talking about Zig? Is it just another systems language, or is something deeper happening? Scott sits down with Loris Cro, one of the community voices behind Zig, to explore why this relatively young language is getting so much attention from systems programmers, game developers, and performance-obsessed engineers alike. We dig into Zig’s radical focus on simplicity, explicitness, and control...and why not having features like a garbage collector or hidden magic is actually the point. Loris explains how Zig approaches memory safety, cross-compilation, and…
E1028 · 18 Dec 2025 · 36 min
In this partnership episode between Hanselminutes and the ACM Bytecast, Scott talks with Dr. Dawn Song, MacArthur Fellow and leading researcher in computer security and AI and co-director at the Berkeley Center for Responsible Decentralized Intelligence about how privacy-preserving computation, fairness, and accountability can help us design intelligent systems we can actually trust.
E1027 · 11 Dec 2025 · 35 min
Marcus Fontoura has led engineering teams at IBM, Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft...building the very systems that power our digital lives. Now, as the author of Human Agency in a Digital World, he’s asking a more profound question: how do we stay in charge of the technology we create? Scott and Marcus explore what it means to move from being passengers to pilots in an age of automation — through ethics, education, and intentional design.
E1026 · 4 Dec 2025 · 35 min
What happens when code stops being useful and starts being art? Scott talks with artist and programmer Daniel Temkin about his new book Forty-Four Esolangs, a deep dive into the world of esoteric programming languages...systems designed not to ship software, but to provoke thought. They explore how absurdity, constraint, and humor reveal something profound about how we think in code.
Hanselminutes is Fresh Air for Developers. A weekly commute-time podcast that promotes fresh technology and fresh voices. Talk and Tech for Developers, Life-long Learners, and Technologists.
Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman is a English tech & science podcast from Scott Hanselman. Melo plays each episode straight from the publisher's own feed — no ads added, no account needed — and remembers where you stopped, in this browser only.
"Lecture-casts"- A Lecture Series on General Chemistry
D.J. Ferguson
"The Cognitive Revolution"
Erik Torenberg, Nathan Labenz
#Railnatter
Gareth Dennis
'Mind the Kids': an ACAMH podcast
The Association for Child and Adolescent Mental Health
(don't) Waste Water! | Water Tech to Solve the World
Antoine Walter
.NET Rocks!
Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell
The Melo app keeps playing with the screen off, works in the car and on your watch, wakes you to your station, and browses the whole catalogue offline. Free, no ads, no account.
