I just found out we cracked the Top 20 on Hacker News! Crazy! I’m Carter, one of the podcasters from the video. I’m glad you’re enjoying it! It was such a huge honor to talk to Brian Kernighan.
I hadn't heard of this podcast until just now, but an entire show dedicated to software book sounds like a dream come true! I'm going to download a few of these for the train. I love that you guys are diving into such a niche!
Thanks so much! When we had this idea, I was certain that it had to have been done before because it seemed like such a gap in the market. To my surprise, it didn’t exist! We love the format because not only do we learn a ton, but by focusing on the books we keep the discussions substantive and avoid becoming the millionth “tech news of the week” podcast.
I found your podcast a few days ago on a different book. Keep it up, I think you have a good niche and doing something you rarely see, which are deep dives on programming books. The only other one I really know of is Connor Hoekstra has a couple nice playlists on SICP and something else but this is a little different, good job.
Thanks for listening! Which book was it that you found?
It’s definitely a breadth over depth kind of podcast, but I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. We wanted it to feel like hearing two coworkers discuss a book over lunch. We don’t provide comprehensive reviews, but rather just highlight what we found the most interesting, while trying to keep it substantive.
To be totally honest, I just looked up his Princeton email and asked lol. I told him we loved the book and would love to interview him about it. He was like “What? I haven’t thought about that book in 20 years. But I’m sure we could find something to talk about for an hour.” He was so amazingly kind and generous with his time.
He’s not the only author we’ve gotten on the podcast! We’ve already published our episode with Mark Richards on “Fundamentals of Software Architecture” but we also have in the can and ready to go over the next few weeks Neal Ford of “Fundamentals of Software Architecture” and John Ousterhout of “A Philosophy of Software Design.” That’s not public knowledge yet, so consider it an exclusive Hacker News comment section scoop, haha!
We also have some pretty big names we’re in talks with, but I won’t make any promises until the interviews are actually recorded. But we’ve been so thrilled at the author response so far and are super excited about the future of the podcast!
Years ago he was a guest lecturer for a class I was taking from Scott Bradner - as you said, incredibly nice an approachable guy. I could have listened to him for another hour or two.
We would have loved nothing more than to talk to him for hours. He was already calling in from England while on his vacation, so I didn't want to take any more of his time, haha!
That's been my experience so far, especially because the focus of the podcast is explicitly on the book. It's not, "Hey, come on my podcast to discuss the latest AI development and then maybe plug your book at the end," it's "Hey, come on my podcast solely dedicated to discussing the book you've written." Authors seem pretty eager to participate in that.
