The Peterman Pod

Creator of Scala: Comparing Languages And How AI Will Impact Them | Martin Odersky

Martin Odersky is the creator of Scala and I interviewed him to compare different languages designs (Rust vs Zig vs Python vs Scala) and how AI will impact programming la

Sergey Levine: Current State of Humanoid Robotics, China & Future Predictions

Sergey Levine is one of the world's top robotics researchers and co-founder of Physical Intelligence. We talked about where humanoid robotics is today, thoughts on the Ch

Creator of TypeScript: 10x Faster Typescript, Why AI Won't Replace SWEs | Anders Hejlsberg

Anders Hejlsberg is the creator of TypeScript and C#, and I asked him about how the TypeScript compiler got 10x faster through a rewrite in Go and his thoughts on how AI

Creator of Lean: Handwritten Math Will Change Dramatically | Leonardo de Moura

Leonardo de Moura is the creator of Lean and the Z3 theorem prover. I talked with him about how Lean works and why LLMs plus Lean will fundamentally change how we write s

Creator of Lua: Scripting, Programming Languages, Predictions | Roberto Ierusalimschy

Roberto Ierusalimschy is the creator of the Lua programming language. I interviewed him about Lua's unique strengths, programming language design and predictions for how

Turing Award Winner: Early AI, LLM Predictions, Causality | Judea Pearl

Judea Pearl is a Turing Award winner and a pioneer in artificial intelligence and causal reasoning. We talked about how he got into science, his major breakthroughs and h

Creator of OCaml: Functional Programming, Formal Verification, Programming Languages | Xavier Leroy

Xavier Leroy (creator of OCaml) is an expert in compilers, formal verification of software and functional programming. This interview should be an approachable resource i

Turing Award Winner: TPU vs GPU vs CPU, Computer Architecture, RISC vs CISC | David Patterson

David Patterson is a Turing Award winner famous for his contributions to computer architecture. I interviewed him about his past work, thoughts on GPU/TPUs and career adv

Turing Award Winner: NSA, Public Key Cryptography, Crypto Wars | Martin Hellman

Martin Hellman is a Turing Award winner who helped to invent public-key cryptography against the NSA's wishes. I interviewed him all about his work and why it broke the l

MIT Complexity Theorist: Why You Can Do Better Than “Optimal” On Leetcode & SAT | Ryan Williams

Ryan Williams is a professor at MIT and the winner of the Gödel Prize in theoretical computer science. I interviewed him all about his work starting by asking him a popul

OpenAI Eng & Dev Tools Founder: How Software Engineering Is Changing | Charlie Marsh

Charlie Marsh is the founder of Astral, the Python devtool startup that was acquired by OpenAI. I inteviewed him about how software engineering is changing and learnings

Google DeepMind Pre-Training Lead: How To Land a Job at a Frontier Lab | Vlad Feinberg

Vlad Feinberg is Google DeepMind’s pre-training area lead and I asked him all about how to land a job at a frontier lab like Google DeepMind, Anthropic or OpenAI. • My e

Co-Creator of Haskell: Functional Programming, Thinking in Types, Useless Languages | Simon Jones

Simon Peyton Jones is the co-creator of Haskell (pure functional programming language) and I interviewed him about functional programming, why it matters, and his thought

Turing Award Winner: P vs NP, Zero-Knowledge Proofs, Quantum Computation | Avi Wigderson

Avi Wigderson is the only person in history to have won both a Turing Award (computer science) and Abel Prize (math). I interviewed him all about his field. • My ergonom

Dropbox’s Former Most Senior Eng: Building Great Systems and Advice for the AI Era | James Cowling

James Cowling is the CTO at Convex and was previously the most senior engineer at Dropbox. We discussed technical details of his past projects, simplicity vs complexity,

Creator of C++: Bell Labs, Negative Overhead Abstraction, Mistakes | Bjarne Stroustrup

Bjarne Stroustrup is the creator of the C++ programming language and a former researcher at Bell Labs. We talked about what Bell Labs was like, programming language desig

Harvard Professor: CS50, What Matters More Than CS, Lecturing Well | David J Malan

David Malan is a Harvard professor known for turning CS50 into a popular online computer science course. We discussed the story behind CS50, how to lecture well, and how

PyTorch Eng Director: Promo Hacking, Industry Shifts, Regrets | John Myles White

John Myles White recently left his role as a director of engineering at Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL) so we spoke freely about promo culture, how big tech has changed

Turing Award Winner: Data Abstraction, Dijkstra, Distributed Systems | Barbara Liskov

Barbara Liskov is a Turing Award winner known for her work in programming languages and distributed systems. We discussed the major problems she solved in her career, sto

Turing Award Winner: Postgres, Disagreeing with Google, Future Problems | Mike Stonebraker

Mike Stonebraker is a Turing Award winner famous for his contributions to fundamental database technologies. We discussed the story behind building Postgres, where he dis