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.
