Ryan Peterman

Ryan Peterman

@ryanlpeterman.bsky.social

• Quit my job to build the podcast and ergonomic keyboard I wish existed • Ex-software engineer @instagram / @meta • See what I'm building at ryanlpeterman.dev

139 followers25 following185 posts

Brian Kernighan is a former Bell Labs member of technical staff, co-author of the original C book, and the one who popularized “Hello World.” We talked about what Bell Labs was like and the stories behind all the famous tools that were built there.

This interview is with Paul Mockapetris, the creator of the internet's Domain Name System (DNS). I talked to him about the story behind building it and certain design choices he made. In this episode: how DNS works, migrating the internet to DNS, and advice for his younger self.

Thank you to the sponsor of this episode for supporting my work: • WorkOS: makes your app Enterprise Ready with easy to use APIs to add SSO, SCIM, RBAC, and more in just a few lines of code, check them out at workos.com

We talked about why he thinks the singularity has already begun for math, who gets credit when AI writes the proof, and whether intelligence will still matter once machines do the thinking.

I used to love the idea of declarative programming, I just say "I want this to happen, you figure out how" Prompting feels like the ultimate version of that and its been fun Wonder how long it'll take for AI to do the "I want this to happen" part

Neetcode is the most well-known coding interview prep creator with over 1M+ subs on YouTube. I interviewed him about the latest on coding interviews, his career at Amazon vs Google, and what it was like quitting big tech to do his own thing.

I don't think you'll find another conversation like this on the internet I asked Ethan Evans (ex-Amazon VP) questions about common situations in corporate politics but they get increasingly darker:

His biggest career regret is only going to become more common for software engineers now. “I wasn’t as inquisitive as I could have been about what the actual underlying particularly technical cause was.”

“You need to understand how things work.” “You’re inquisitive about why it actually worked. And I think that this is just a much more sustainable foundation.”

How he tells if you're smart or not Mike Stonebraker (Turing Award Winner): “It's very easy. You can rapidly surface whether they're smart or not. What was your master's thesis? What did you do? How did it exactly work?…

Why he's never accepted offers to work in big tech Mike Stonebraker (Turing Award Winner): “Gives you a boss, and that gives you company rules. It limits your ability to publish, limits your ability to go talk at conferences.…

Differences between CPU, GPU and TPU David Patterson (Turing Award): “The CPU, they have these general purpose cores that each core is very similar to what the instruction sets used to be like 20 years before that.…

$200 max Claude and $200 pro Codex subscriptions both run out around halfway through the week for me The recent computer use improvements have drastically improved the surface area of useful work they can do Considering getting a 3rd subscription...

The greatest mathmetician of all time Judea Pearl (Turing Award): “I thought that Descartes was the greatest mathematician ever lived. I couldn't get over the idea that you can do in algebra all the geometric constructions that we labeled on it.…

My goal was to record a conversation completely free of "AI doomer" takes as a timeline cleanser. For this episode, I interviewed Casey Muratori who is a video game developer and programming creator also known for his talks about the history of computing:

Top robotics paper he recommends Sergey Levine (World's Top Robotics Researcher): “The original ACT paper or the ALOHA paper. The idea was that, hey, if you set up the right kind of low-cost robot setup without really any particularly fancy tricks, you could easily collect…

Blew through both my Claude Max 20x and ChatGPT Pro 20x weekly limits in ~2 days using Fable 5.1 + GPT6. Some observations: 1. Claude Max 20x ran out noticably faster for me than ChatGPT Pro 20x using Fable 5.1 and GPT6 respectively

2. Fable 5.1 writes much better plans for humans to read (qualitative). Both one shot my work in ~90% cases though 3. Claude Code TUI >> Codex CLI in terms of product craft & user experience

4. Codex Mac app computer use is excellent. It does a ton of rote tasks for me that I didn't trust models to handle before Huge jump in capabilities, curious to see how (4) impacts jobs that do a lot of repetitive tasks on the computer

Should people still learn to code if coding is largely solved? Thariq Shihipar (Engineer on Anthropic’s Claude Code team): I think being technical is really important. Knowing how do computers work? How do languages work?…

Thariq Shihipar is an engineer on Anthropic’s Claude Code team I asked him how Anthropic makes the most out of the models for engineering and how the industry will change soon. In this episode: • Internal best practices in leveraging the models • What percent of Anthropic's work is fully autonomous

What does a FAANG intern project look like these days? When I worked at Instagram, intern projects were detailed task by task showing exactly where to make the changes The latest models could one shot these specs that used to take ~2 months for an onboarding intern

Bought the 256GB mac mini m5 for $499 when I quit my job at Meta to be frugal. It was honestly a great machine with just a few limitations Feeling lucky that I can upgrade my tools now that the podcast has some sponsors 🙏

This meme used to be relatable but it feels off now LLMs have completely changed the cost/benefit math on automation, it's trivial for routine tasks Aside from editing where taste matters, my podcast is run in large part by a bunch of scripts/tools

Why Rust is overused right now Martin Odersky (Creator of Scala): "Right now, rust is actually overused because a lot of people push Rust for things higher up in the stack Where a garbage collector is fine...