Fallthrough

Close Encounters of the Human Kind Oct 10, 2026 4026 How should we spend our time now that writing code is cheap? In this episode, Kris and Matt are joined by Doug Soo, a staff engineer working on the storage systems at Honeycomb. They discuss his blog post Spend More Time Talking to Humans, how AI is changing software development, and how that affects the way we communicate.The trio go from hedging the claim that we trust the output of com

Keep Your Enemies Closer Oct 3, 2026 4603 Steve is back! He joins Kris and Matt to discuss the drama around DHH's latest keynote at Rails World and Steve's latest views on AI. Interestingly, Steve believes that he'll sit in opposition to how Kris and Matt see the current situation.We start with Steve giving us the long backstory of Rails and DHH. The trio then dives into a conversation about purity tests, whether you can learn fr

Thinking, Fast and Cheap Sep 26, 2026 4091 Another week, another duo episode, but this time around it's Dylan who's joining Kris! He brings a fresh perspective to the AI conversation that Kris and Matt have been engaging in. The big question: is AI going to kill us all? Dylan thinks the odds are "astronomically small" and neither Kris nor him are going to lose sleep over the fear driven hype.The two are asking bigger questions: w

Apocalypse Not Now Sep 19, 2026 3836 Kris and Matthew have some more spicy and it's about the latest AI news cycle: a greater than ten percent chance that AI wipes out humanity inside a decade. Neither of them are worried about it, what does is why everyone else is so worried about it.Kris brings his usual devil's advocate perspective: a 10% chance of extinction is also a 90% chance of non-extinction. He then widens the fiel

The Elements of Slop Sep 12, 2026 3656 Kris and Matthew have some feelings about AI they want to discuss. No, not about benchmarks or agents, but about the people using it to write things they should be plenty capable of writing themselves: the five paragraph LinkedIn post, the blog post, the tweet.Both Matt and Kris stumbled upon Pangram from the same source: Bryan Cantrill. The two go from there, discussing the ridiculousnes

A Record of One's Own Sep 5, 2026 2956 Matthew hosts this week, joined by Kris and by Bailey Townsend, an AT Protocol community ambassador who builds tools for the atmosphere. AT Proto is the protocol underneath Bluesky, and this is a conversation about what it actually is beyond a social network.Matthew moved his own account onto a personal data server he runs himself, which is how Bailey first turned up in his replies asking

Be Kind, Rewind Aug 29, 2026 3467 Matthew takes the host chair this week with Kris as an unusually quiet producer. They're joined by Ron Efroni and James Bayer from Flox for a long conversation about Nix. Ron co-founded Flox and is also the president of the NixOS Foundation.James gives a live demo, going from flox search to flox activate with no commit SHA anywhere in sight, and Matthew finally gets an answer to a flake.l

A Modest Proposal Proposal Aug 22, 2026 7137 The proposal proposal gets the full Fallthrough treatment. Kris, Matthew, and Jamie dig into Austin's plan for taming the Go project's ever-growing proposal backlog. What starts as a recap becomes a referendum on how Go is governed, who gets heard, and what an open source community owes its members.Jamie brings a maintainer's reality check from Renovate's 1,700-item triage queue, Matthew

Backlog to the Future Aug 15, 2026 3878 Kris is back from GopherCon, Matt is back from the lawn, and Fallthrough is back with news: a brand new website and a whole new show, Continue: Go Proposals Edition, a weekly look at Go proposals. The topic for this week's Fallthrough? It's a listener-requested deep dive into what the two of them have actually been building with AI agents.In the regular edition, Kris runs a frontier-model

Vibe and Prejudice Aug 8, 2026 4185 We've got the classic trio of Kris, Matt, and Steve back to discuss Steve's impending cancellation for putting himself in the middle of some drama! Steve gives us a recount of the current saga between Zig, Rust, Bun, Fil-C, and his own programming language, Rue. The group discuss the problems with the drama, especially since it overshadows an amazing technical feat: a million lines of cod

Token Maxx: Fury Road Aug 1, 2026 5260 On this week, we've got Kris, Matt, and Dylan! Yes, Dylan is back to talk about GopherCon and his experience as a self declared late adopter of agentic coding. Dylan chairs GopherCon, speaks at it next week, and describes his own AI hockey stick as happening in about two months.Dylan walks through what is on the GopherCon program, then explains his coding agent tipping point: a dependency

I, Builder Jul 25, 2026 3162 Kris and Matt have a pretty big question they're trying to answer this week: in the age of AI, what does it actually mean to build something?We start (for real this time!) with the "SDKs are dead" discourse, and whether you still need one when you can just wrap the HTTP calls yourself. Kris then jumps the conversation to Beej's article on what it means to "make" or "build" a thing, he arg

Everything Agentic All at Once Jul 18, 2026 4275 Another week, another deep episode! Kris and Matthew are back and this one goes right off the rails in the best way. What was supposed to be a rundown of the new model landscape turns into a wide-ranging conversation about what AI coding agents actually mean for the people who write software.Matt brings a real dilemma: he had an LLM generate a working program and could not decide whether

Landlord of the Rings Jul 11, 2026 3559 Kris and Matthew are back for a duo episode, and Kris has a hot take: ownership is terrible. What starts as a conversation about AI subscriptions versus API pricing turns into a wide-ranging discussion about what we actually gain by owning things, from Photoshop to your own compute to your house.Along the way, Kris and Matthew dig into why enterprises are drifting toward per-token pricing

Under Pressure Jul 4, 2026 3612 On this week's episode, Kris and Matthew have a topic: tension. Not the bad kind you learn to avoid, but the productive kind that, like a code smell, is worth stopping to examine. They discuss the challenges of APIs and stability, whether SDKs are actually necessary, and as always a little bit of life advice for our wonderful viewers/listeners.We've got supporter content, of course! This

The Spy Who Banned Me Jun 27, 2026 1636 It's Fallthrough time! In this episode, Kris, Matthew, and Steve get into the time Steve pointed Anthropic's Fable at a side project he hadn't touched since January and watched it shepherd 95 pull requests in three days, the US government export banning Fable and its sibling Mythos, the insanity of Mythos popping a national security agency's boxes in a matter of hours, and why a software

Of Fables and Mythos Jun 20, 2026 4041 Another week, another Fallthrough! In this episode, Kris and Matthew get into the US government slapping export controls on Anthropic's Mythos and Fable models, the marketing machine that made them sound world-ending, and how much of the AI hype actually holds up.We've got supporter content, of course! This week that includes whether your phone is already an extension of your mind and the

Shall We Play A Game? Jun 13, 2026 2906 Matt and Kris welcome Fernando Duran, the creator of SAD Servers, the site that drops you onto a broken Linux box over SSH with a timer running and dares you to fix it. They go through what SAD Servers is, the spite-fueled interview story that started it all, how companies use it to hire, and the surprisingly lean infrastructure (plus the tiny Go "checker") that makes the whole thing work

Pull the (AI) Lever, Kronk! Jun 6, 2026 5294 Matt and Kris welcome back Bill Kennedy who's been working on Kronk, AI tooling in Go. They go through what Kronk (and it's dependent library Yzma) is, the power of running models locally, and how they see coding agents and LLMs shaping the future of the industry.We've got supporter content, of course! This week that includes the message-caching trick that turns seconds into thirty millis

Dependencies All The Way Down May 30, 2026 3676 Another week, another Fallthrough! In this episode, Kris and Matthew discuss a personal realization about what AI actually unlocks, their workflow philosophies, local models, a recent hot take from Mitchell Hashimoto, and a thought experiment that would break the NPM ecosystem overnight.Like the previous episode (a pseudo part 1), this episode returns to one question: are you moving in a

Terminal Velocity May 23, 2026 1954 Has AI eaten all of tech? Is 600 billion tokens too many use in a single month? On this week's episode Matt joins Kris to talk about some of the current news in the tech industry. From OpenClaw's maintainer burning through $1.3 million worth of tokens to why we need more epistemic markers, to the rather absurd $725 billion that big tech plans to spend on AI CapEx this year. And of course,

He Who Controls the Source May 16, 2026 5148 This week we've got Kris and Jamie! They open with the Shai-Hulud worm chewing through the npm supply chain and close on the messy economics of who actually pays for open source labor. And there's plenty of great stuff in between: GitHub's everything-platform creep, the case for LLMs as a way out of dependency hell, and the forge alternatives finally maturing into real options.We've got s

Forging Ahead May 9, 2026 5208 Steve is back to talk JJ (Jujutsu version control) and the related product, ChangeSet, that he works on at East River Source Control. Kris and Steve trace why the GitHub monoculture is finally cracking, what JJ does that Git can't, and Steve's hypothesis that AI agents are pushing companies toward monorepos. Then the pair discuss the Opus 4.7 regression debate, the shift from "always use

Regression to the Mean May 2, 2026 4297 Kris and Ian dig into the slow collapse of GitHub, starting with Ghostty off the platform after years of reliability problems. From there they trace Gary Bernhardt's old observation that we took a decentralized source control system and immediately put it behind a single point of failure, then widen the lens into AI as the engine of enshittification. The episode lands on a more optimistic

No Country for Old Maintainers Apr 25, 2026 2942 Jamie returns, co-hosting with Kris for quite an eventful episode. They start with the Vercel breach, the Axios attack, nvim-treesitter, and Gorilla Mux. Kris draws parallels between the current AI hype cycle to everything that came before: Photoshop was going to destroy photographers, DAWs were going to destroy musicians, and now Claude Code is going to destroy software engineers.Just li

Supply Chain Reaction Apr 18, 2026 4148 After last week's "Another Spectre In The Shell" episode, we felt we needed a follow up! This week Kris is joined by returning co-host Jamie Tanna, with Ian arriving fashionably late. They pick apart the post-Mythos announcement hype cycle, cover counter-narratives from the security community, and examine why our supply chain is already so broken that more powerful LLM barely changes the

Another Spectre In The Shell Apr 11, 2026 3000 It's Kris, Matt, and Steve this week. It's also Matt's last episode before becoming a father. The conversation opens with Claude Mythos, Anthropic's unreleased model that found 147 zero-days in Firefox's JavaScript engine and a 27-year-old bug in OpenBSD. Steve, who's lived through before, puts it in context. The panel also discusses cooldown periods for package upgrades, the implications

Snake Oil Has an Expiration Date Apr 4, 2026 3444 It's Kris and Matt this week, and the conversation goes places. It starts with Matt going all-in on Apple and a leaked Claude Code source dump, then pivots into AI companies repeating social media's diversity-of-thought mistakes and why LLMs still can't beat "better than the average human" as a goalpost. The episode closes with a surprise detour into accounting, finance, and why double-en

Who's Afraid of Superintelligence? Mar 28, 2026 5742 We've got a full panel! In this episode, Kris, Matt, Steve, and Ian have a deep dive into superintelligence, AGI, and why the fear around them might say more about us than about AI. Steve draws a line from colonialism anxiety to alien invasion movies to superintelligence panic. Kris argues that a truly rational superintelligence would see that oppression consistently fails and cooperation

The Joy of Building Mar 21, 2026 5923 This week Kris and Matt go full homelab. The conversation starts with Kris refreshing his dev setup: migrating NeoVim to 100% Lua, switching from ZSH to NuShell, and rethinking Tmux, all with the help of an LLM. The discussion then moves into hardware: Framework Desktop vs. Mac Studio, the RAM price explosion, 10G networking, WiFi with Private Pre-Shared Keys, and GPUs without display por

The Least Contentious Proposal in the History of Go Mar 14, 2026 4000 Dylan's back this week joining Kris and Matt to tackle Go's UUID proposal (#62026). What Dylan thinksshould have been the least contentious proposal in the history of Go. The panel digs into the proposed API's shortcomings, the flawed ecosystem survey used to justify it, and why the Go team's library design philosophy doesn't hold up. The conversation builds into a broader critique of com

Deprecate the Error Interface Mar 7, 2026 3437 Another week, another Kris & Matt duo episode! This week, they're picking up where Bryan Cantrill's "Complexity of Simplicity" framework left off and asking what it means for Go's future. Kris argues Go is squarely rebellious (simple and emergent) and that the community needs to stop appealing to the Go team and start owning the ecosystem. The episode builds to a (potentially unpopula

Package Hell Feb 28, 2026 3656 Another week, another Kris & Matt duo episode! This week, we're digging into Go codebase structure, package design, and why the community keeps struggling with the same problems. The conversation starts with a Gopher Slack discussion about how to arrange Go code, moves through package hell and dependency cycles, and ends with a look at community health.As always, we've got supporter c

Is Go Simple Anymore? Feb 21, 2026 4180 Another week, another Kris & Matt duo episode! This week, they're talking about Go. They cover the recent generic methods proposal by Robert Griesemer, results from the 2025 Go Developer Survey, some highlights of the 1.26 release, and more!As always, we've got supporter content! This week that includes the survey's tooling data, a deep dive into GOPATH nostalgia and why Go Workspaces

Lava Layers Feb 14, 2026 3380 This week it's Kris and Matt diving into the state of hardware, security, and what local AI actually needs to work. The conversation starts with AI agent social networks and why prompt injection is the unsolved SQL injection of our era, then shifts into why memory bandwidth is the real bottleneck for running models locally. Matt compiles Rust on a Mac Studio at the Apple Store, and the tw

The Vibes-Based Legal System Feb 7, 2026 2975 This week Steve's back to tackle the big question: is AI-generated output copyrightable? The conversation includes discussions of the Copyright Act of 1976, the philosophy of why copyright exists at all, whether LLM training is learning, and why owning a style would destroy culture.As always, we've got supporter content! This week that includes the Coca-Cola DEA deal and why trade secrets

The AI Factory Floor Jan 31, 2026 3759 This week we're talking about Gastown! Dylan and Steve join Kris to break down the viral project that spins up hundreds of Claude Code instances to build a software factory. Steve makes the case for why this is an inevitable evolution and the conversation digs into what it actually means to treat software development as a factory floor. The panel traces the cycle from mainframes to PCs to

Systems Thinking for Humans Jan 24, 2026 3193 Annie and Michael Hedgpeth, founders of People Work, join Kris and Matt to unpack the junior hiring crisis and what's really broken about how we grow engineers. Annie's viral blog post sparked debate about whether senior engineers have abandoned their responsibility to mentor and whether our obsession with career ladders created the problem. The conversation moves from systemic dysfunctio

When Reality Drifts Jan 16, 2026 4173 Nick Gerace, Engineering Manager at System Initiative, joins Kris and Matt to explore what infrastructure management looks like beyond Terraform. Nick walks us through how System Initiative differs from traditional IaC, why git isn't really your source of truth, and how the company pivoted to AI-first tooling. The conversation turns to Claude Code and MCP tools before landing on a nuanced

New Year, New Nuance Jan 9, 2026 3644 New Year, New Nuance! In this episode, Kris and Matt discuss what they're looking forward to in 2026—Matt shares the exciting news that he's becoming a dad, and the duo explore the value of growth, changing your opinions, and adding more nuance to how you see the world. They talk about what they're excited to build this year, from physical projects like woodworking and doors to the podcas

Stack Trace 2025 Dec 31, 2025 4570 We decided to do our own wrap up for the year. We've called it Stack Trace, and we pulled a bunch of stats from the first year of Fallthrough. In this episode, Kris, Matt, and Dylan talk through these stats and how they feel about Fallthrough's first year.If you prefer to watch this episode, you can view it on YouTube.This week's episode of break continues the conversation. Watch it on Yo

Worse Is Better Dec 25, 2025 3768 There's a famous joke essay called Worse Is Better, which compares the New Jersey and the MIT ideologies. In this episode, Kris and Matt discuss these two different ideologies and how they show up in technology, from Go, to dependency management, to electric vehicles.If you prefer to watch this episode, you can view it on YouTube.This week's episode of break continues the conversation. Wa

Why Is Tech So Mid? Dec 19, 2025 3464 In the tech industry, we talk about how exceptional and innovative we are. But are we really? In this episode, Kris and Matt explore why they see the industry as pretty mid and how things should be better.If you prefer to watch this episode, you can view it on YouTube.This week's episode of break continues the conversation. Watch it on YouTube or listen with your favorite podcasting app!

Project Management 2 Shell Dec 12, 2025 4033 Another Cloudflare outage. A CVSS 10.0 React RCE vulnerability. We've been dealing with quite a lot these last few weeks. In this week's episode, Kris and Matt discuss the outage and vulnerability and have a deeper discussion about project management and how all of these things relate to each other.If you prefer to watch this episode, you can view it on YouTube.This week's episode of brea

Ghostting Is Better Than Shelling Dec 5, 2025 4223 We've had Mitchell Hashimoto on a couple episodes, and each time we've discussed his vision for libghostty. In this episode, Kris and Matt talk about what the vision for libghostty actually means for the industry as a whole and the power of platforms. The duo also covers the new models that have dropped and how they see using the various models that have become available.If you prefer to

Magic Numbers Take Down The Internet Nov 25, 2025 3151 This cannot keep happening. Another day, another outage. On this week's episode Kris and Matt talk about the recent Cloudflare outage. And boy do they have thoughts, we really hope you enjoy this exchange of monologues.If you prefer to watch this episode, you can view it on YouTube: https://youtu.be/LsOgDolc9FwThis week's episode of break continues the conversation, with a few more monolo

The AI Marketing Problem Nov 19, 2025 3920 The tech industry is terrible at marketing things. From AI to Blockchain to Git, we constantly miss the actual innovation by looking too closely at the surface level. In this episode, Kris is joined by the full panel of Ian, Matthew, and Dylan to discuss the marketing problem AI seems to have and its wider implications.If you prefer to watch this episode, you can view it on YouTube: https

Artisanal Software Engineering Nov 12, 2025 4112 Software engineering has an identity problem. Some software engineers want to be craftspeople and artisans, while others want to be more like the traditional engineers, while others just want to write some code. In this episode, Kris and Matt talk about the state of software engineering today and the areas that they think could use improvement.For this week's episode of break, we're pulli

The Fault In Our Clouds Nov 4, 2025 3900 First it was GCP in June. Then it was AWS in October. Then it was Azure a week later. It seems that our cloud providers are having outages far more often, and for far longer, than any of us would like. In this episode, Kris, Ian, and Matthew discuss the two most recent outages along with some of their thoughts on the current state of the industry and the future of software.We continue thi

JJ and How to Evolve an Open Source Ecosystem Oct 28, 2025 3486 Jujutsu is a new version control system that's gaining in popularity. Its swappable backends allow users to continue using version control systems like Git without other users even noticing. Steve Klabnik aims to be a big part of it. Much like with Rust, he's getting involved early and making some big swings. In this episode, he joins Kris and Matt to discuss JJ and his recent announcemen

DevOps: The Answer to Life, The Universe, and Everything Oct 20, 2025 4041 In this episode, hosts Angelica Hill and Matthew Sanabria are joined by special guest Cory O'Daniel to dive deep into DevOps. They chat through some of the big questions shaping the industry: Is the "cloud promise" still holding up? What role does on-prem infrastructure play now? And perhaps most importantly, what does "DevOps" even mean today?We continue this discussion in this week's ep

Ghostty & The Shell Oct 13, 2025 3436 Mitchell once again joins Matt and Kris to give us an update about Ghostty, a new library he's working on called libxev, and some of his thoughts around AI.We continue this discussion in this week's episode of Break! We get into some of the topics briefly mentioned during the main episode. Watch it on YouTube or listen with your favorite podcasting app! Learn more by going to https://brea

The Failure of Open Source Leadership Oct 7, 2025 5412 Open source project leaders have faced heavy challenges over the last decade and a half. It seems every language community has had conflicts with its leadership: Python with the struggles of the Python 2 to 3 migration; Node.JS and the community's conflict with Joyent; Rust and their handling of trademarks and IP; Wordpress and their conflict with WPEngine; and of course Go and their conf

PHP Was Never Dead Sep 30, 2025 4476 This week we've got a grab bag episode! Kris and Matt discuss a variety of topics, including a GopherCon debrief (featuring some RustConf comparisons!), why people can't be mad all the time, the need for better abstractions, and so much more!We continue this discussion in this week's episode of Break! We get into some of the topics briefly mentioned during the main episode. Watch it on Yo

Defer Life Considered Harmful Sep 23, 2025 4689 From AI winters to Tiny Go, Ron Evans has a long and storied career. In this episode he joins Angelica and Matt to discuss his journey, what past AI winters can tell us about our current AI moment, the importance of Tiny Go, and so much more.This week's episode has a Break aftershow! Watch it on YouTube or listen with your favorite podcasting app! Learn more by going to https://break.show

Building For The Future Sep 15, 2025 5781 We've all experienced the dreaded rewrite. A system that was promised to last for years has grown so full of technical debt and cruft that we feel we need to throw it out and start over again. How can we avoid this? In this episode, Angelica and Matt are joined by Jon Sabados, where they discuss how to build software that can last long into the future.This week's episode does not have a c

Bootstrapping A Podcast Sep 8, 2025 7038 Ever wondered what it really takes to build a successful online presence? How about if you were doing it as a couple? In this episode, Angelica and Matt are joined by Sophie and Rory of the "Media Couple" podcast as they pull back the curtain on their current projects and share the unfiltered reality of being content creators, the tools and tech they use, and how it's going.This week's ep

What It Takes To Be A Content Creator Sep 1, 2025 5853 Everyone can be a content creator. Whether it's posting long form content on YouTube, shorter content on TikTok, or photos on Instagram, content creation is accessible to all. In this episode, Angelica and Matt are joined by Benjamin Bryant to talk about what it takes to become a content creator. This episode contains extra chapters for supporters.This week's episode does not have a compa

How To Have A Great Conference Experience Aug 25, 2025 3127 GopherCon is this week! Kris, Matt, Dylan, and Angelica are talking about conferences: their favorite experiences, how they approach them, and advice for first time conference attendees. For our supporters, the panel has an in-depth discussion of what would make for better conferences and where current conferences are failing.We've also have a new episode of Break! Watch it on YouTube or

What's New in Go 1.25? Aug 18, 2025 4230 It's August, which means we've got a fresh new Go release! In this episode, Kris and Matt pick up the "What's New in Go?" series with an edition for the Go 1.25 release. We've also have a new episode of Break! Watch it on YouTube or listen with your favorite podcasting app! Learn more by going to https://break.show.This episode contains an extra Unpopular Opinion and lengthy discussion fo

Big Data Energy Aug 11, 2025 4709 In the years leading up to the current AI hype cycle we're currently all experiencing, there was another hype cycle: Big Data. In this episode, Kris is joined by Matt and Steve to discuss how the Big Data craze relates to the current Artificial Intelligence one, where Big Data ends and AI/ML begin, and so much more.We've also have a new episode of Break! We've decided that Break will be v

Championing A Cause Aug 4, 2025 4357 How do you make change happen effectively? In this episode, Matt is joined by Alex Sims to discuss championing a cause and making change happen within your organization. They discuss various strategies, including how to get started, different technical approaches, and how to deal with those who resist change.We've also have a new episode of Break! We've decided that Break will be video fi

AI Booster? AI Doomer? You're Wrong Either Way Jul 28, 2025 4839 It's a rarity in recent years to have a conversation and not have the topic of AI brought up. There are those who think we're on the cusp of AI super-intelligence, those who think AI will destroy the job market, and those who completely write the entire thing off. What these conversations lack is nuance. In this episode, Kris is joined by Matt and Steve to bring some much needed nuance to

Versioning: We Did It To Ourselves Jul 21, 2025 6104 Versioning! It's a topic that we all deal with on a daily basis, and yet it's a topic that many of us dread. Our ecosystems love semantic versioning, but many of us find it lacking for many of our use cases. In this episode, Kris and Matt are joined once again by Jamie and Steve to talk about versioning. The panel discusses what versioning is, when to use Semantic Versioning, whether iden

[Break] You're Now Less Wrong About REST Jul 15, 2025 2397 Welcome to Break, a Fallthrough aftershow! After months of spending time after each recording of Fallthrough chatting, Kris and Matt decided it's time to record some of these chats and publish them to the world! In many ways the show's name is apropos: it's more like a watercooler break than a podcast recording and it's a break from the way we usually record podcast episodes.In this first

Why You're Wrong About REST Jul 14, 2025 6512 The web has been around for nearly 40 years, yet despite its massive success, the principles that made it a success still prove elusive to most software engineers today. We've stumbled into a world where so called REST APIs are less RESTful than GraphQL, where most definitions of hypermedia are wrong, and where nuance has been replaced with "well actually". In this episode, Kris is joined

What Even Is A [Programming|Natural] Language? Jul 7, 2025 4230 Whether you're talking to another person, talking to a computer, or just talking to yourself, we use languages every day. For a long time now, there's been a debate about whether natural languages and programming languages are distinct from each other. The creation of large language models and their ability to produce code from natural language has blurred these lines even further. In thi

Language and Codes of Misconduct Jul 7, 2025 4105 In episode 27, the panel discussed what languages are, what it means to know things, and what meaning is. In this bonus episode, we extend that conversation to discuss how language affects the tech and software communities. We delve into things like whether Codes of Conduct are actually a good thing, how efforts to make language more inclusive can be harmful, and much more.This content wo

SIMD & Go Jun 30, 2025 4063 Speed and software should go hand in hand, but with Moore's Law coming to an end and CPU clock speeds remaining steady over the last 20 years, software engineers need to turn to new techniques to improve the efficiency of their code. In this episode, Matt and Angelica and joined by Clement Jean to discuss one of these techniques: SIMD. They'll discuss what SIMD is, how it can be used from

The Three Ps: Understanding Product, Project, and Program Management Jun 23, 2025 4527 Building software is difficult and rarely can software engineers do it alone. In this episode, Kris is joined by Ian, Matthew, and Angelica to talk managing software projects and what three often used but rarely defined roles actually mean: project manager, product manager, and program manager. The panel also discusses how these roles interact with engineering managers, what they think th

Go's Error Handling Is Handled Jun 16, 2025 4172 Error handling in Go is one of the language's most controversial topics. It ranks high in each Go Developer Survey and many different people have proposed many different solutions to the perceived problems. The Go Team's stance on error handling as a problem in need of a fix has changed recently, with a declaration that no proposals will be accepted for changes to Go's error handling synt

A Discourse On AI Discourse Jun 9, 2025 4706 AI is a divisive topic. Some people are AI boosters while others are AI doomers. And then there are those of us who sit in the middle, feeling both sides are not just wrong but that they aren't experiencing a shared reality with the rest of us. In this episode, Kris and Matt are joined by Steve Klabnik to talk about the state of AI and the discourse around it.For our supporters, this epis

Building An Open Source Maintenance Company Jun 2, 2025 4688 We all use open source software on a daily basis. Even though the software is free to consume doesn't mean it's free to produce. Over the years, there have been many attempts to support open source development financially, from companies that sell support to foundations and many things in between. On this week's episode, Angelica and Matt are joined by Filippo Valsorda and Daniel McCarney

Event Driven Architectures May 26, 2025 3568 When it comes to building distributed systems, RPC and REST style interfaces aren't the only options. Events provide an alternative way to build a distributed system that can result in more robust systems that are easier to extend and deploy, while reducing the chances of a single bottlenecked service taking down the entire system. In this episode, your host Angelica is joined by Indu Ala

Blown Glass Half-Full of WebAssembly & SQLite May 19, 2025 4441 From deploying WebAssembly all over the world, to using SQLite to keep track of distributed data, to blowing glass, this episode is quite the adventure! Your co-hosting power duo of Matt and Angelica are joined by Danielle Lancashire, a Principal Engineer at Fermyon, to navigate this discussion filled with insights and advice.This episode's extended content includes two chapters: one abou

A Phoenix's Path to Principal May 12, 2025 5827 From implementing minesweeper on a TI calculator to becoming a prolific open source maintainer, Evan Phoenix has had quite the journey. In this week's episode, Matt & Angelica sit down with Evan to discuss his journey, from his early days writing basic on his TI calculator, to writing an alternative implementation of Ruby, being GitHub user #7, becoming a Principal Engineer at Hashico

The Language of Data Visualization May 5, 2025 4272 Little languages are powerful. From text processing with AWK to calculations with APL, domain specific languages help us do things more concisely and with more precision than with other languages. Anthony Starks knows this well, as he's designed several little languages, including decksh, the focus of this episode, which allows users to create powerful presentations without the hassle of

Maintainers, Monetization, and Making The Time Apr 28, 2025 3549 Maintaining software is challenging, but monetizing it while properly valuing your time complicate matters even more. Doing all of this for open source projects is a challenge that few have figured out. In this week's episode Matt and Angelica are joined by Carlos Becker to discuss maintaining and monetizing open source projects, what it's like to work out an open source company, and how

From TinyGo to Takeoff Apr 21, 2025 4529 Most of us write code for servers and systems with terabytes of storage and gigabytes of RAM. This week, we're talking about Go in the small. Patricio Whittingslow joins Dylan and Angelica to discuss how he got started with Tiny Go; how he's used Go in software ranging from trajectory simulations to rocket fueling systems to rocket engine fuel injectors to 3D modeling; and so much more. T

The Podcast Pipeline Apr 14, 2025 5155 Fallthrough is a podcast about having conversations in public, and over the last 3 months we've shipped 15 of them! In this episode, Kris, Ian, and Matt sit down to discuss the podcast so far: what we've enjoyed, the feedback we've gotten, how we produce episodes, and so much more. We're excited to take a look at the first 15 episodes we've produced and look forward to making the next 15!

Episodes

Recommended