Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots
About the show
A podcast about the design, development, and business of great software. Each week thoughtbot's Chad Pytel is joined by the people who build and nurture the products we love.
Episodes
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95: Making Time (Chas Emerick)
April 20th, 2014 | Season 2 | 41 mins 55 secs
This week Ben sits down with Chas Emerick to discuss his latest venture, The Quilt Project, start up philosophies and the importance of balanced time management.
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94: The Nature of Writing (Diana Zmuda, Jessie Young)
April 13th, 2014 | Season 2 | 36 mins 24 secs
Ben is joined by Diana & Jessie of thoughtbot San Francisco to discuss their latest book, iOS on Rails, the concept of releasing a book in Beta and the importance of apprenticeships to emerging junior developers.
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93: Diversity of Approach (David Nolen)
April 6th, 2014 | Season 2 | 41 mins 38 secs
On this weeks show Ben talks to David Nolen, Rails & JavaScript developer for the NY Times, about being a steward of ClojureScript, functional programming, the advantages of immutable values and Om.
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92: Program to the Machine You Have (Ryan Hoover)
March 30th, 2014 | Season 2 | 32 mins 32 secs
Ben and Ryan Hoover, co-creator of Product Hunt, talk revenue models, the value of blogging, diversification of skills, and tiny steps towards major change.
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91: Not Ruining Design (Rich Thornett)
March 23rd, 2014 | Season 2 | 34 mins 18 secs
This week on Giant Robots, Ben talks to Rich Thornett, Co-Founder of Dribbble, about the formation and criticisms of the company, the role of product design and remote team management.
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90: Do One Thing Well (George Brocklehurst, Mike Burns)
March 16th, 2014 | Season 2 | 22 mins 31 secs
Ben talks to George Brocklehurst & Mike Burns of thoughtbot's Stockholm office on creating and distributing gitsh, an interactive shell for Git, and why it shouldn't be a Ruby gem.
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89: Moving Beyond The Wheel (Mahmoud Abdelkader)
March 9th, 2014 | Season 2 | 35 mins 23 secs
This week on Giant Robots, Mahmoud Abdelkader of Balanced joins Ben to talk the priorities in ones career trajectory, the role of a successful CTO, and the benefits of radically open transparency.
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88: Prospering Communities (Kyle Bragger)
March 2nd, 2014 | Season 2 | 28 mins 25 secs
This week Ben Talks with Kyle Bragger of Elepath, Inc on the nature of online community building, advertising vs subscription revenue models and the importance of continued creative output (and actually releasing it to the world).
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87: Monitoring the Bathrooms (Tony DiPasquale)
February 23rd, 2014 | Season 2 | 23 mins 4 secs
This week on Giant Robots, Ben chats with Tony DiPasquale on utilizing Arduino engineering to solve 0th world problems.
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86: Humility and Patience (Peter Reinhardt)
February 16th, 2014 | Season 2 | 21 mins 50 secs
In this week's episode, we're joined by Peter Reinhardt, Co-founder and CEO of Segment.io. Ben and Peter discuss the product, their tech stack, the companies big pivot to Segment.io, their growth and future plans. They also discuss leaving MIT to start a company, getting along with your co-founders, nuclear reactors, hiking, and much more.
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85: I Want These Ideas To Be Free (Max Temkin)
February 9th, 2014 | Season 2 | 40 mins 12 secs
This week, Ben is joined by Max Temkin, creator of Cards Against Humanity and Humans vs. Zombies. Max talks about his success with Cards Against Humanity and his feelings of impostor syndrome. He talks about some of his other projects including his first indie game, Humans vs. Zombies. Most recently Max had a multiplayer PC game published called Samurai Gunn. Max talks about the "open source" nature of his games. They discuss money, sustainability, kickstarter, and much more.
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84: The Bus Number (Harper Reed)
February 2nd, 2014 | Season 2 | 46 mins 20 secs
On this week's episode, Ben talks with Harper Reed, former CTO of Threadless, former CTO of Obama for America, and currently CEO of Modest. Harper talks about management and his "cabal" of people that he likes to work with. He also discusses his experience on the campaign, healthcare.gov, and procurement laws. When asked about his playbook for success, Harper talks about networking strategies, the use of different languages for different problems, craziness, and much more.
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83: Turning the Tables (Ben Orenstein)
January 26th, 2014 | Season 2 | 53 mins 30 secs
On this week's special episode, Chad Pytel turns the tables and interviews host Ben Orenstein. They discuss the process of running the podcast and Ben's roots in programming and computer science. Ben talks about his Vim mastery, how he got into public speaking, and his experiences speaking at RailsConf. This year Ben is organizing the live coding track at RailConf. Ben describes his strategies for learning programming, how he's getting into Clojure, and much more!
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82: Teach all the things (Matt Knox)
January 19th, 2014 | Season 2 | 38 mins 25 secs
This week's episode features Matt Knox of Twitter. Matt is a part of Twitter's university team which teaches new Twitter recruits about the company. He works as an engineer as well in order to stay current. Matt discusses his background as an engineer, and how he got into teaching. He discusses using Storm, essentially a real-time Hadoop, for Twitter. Ben and Matt talk about the importance of keeping a portfolio as a programmer and deliberate practice routines for coding, and more.
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81: An Agent of Change (Seth Godin)
January 12th, 2014 | Season 2 | 33 mins 41 secs
In this week's episode, Ben Orenstein is joined by best selling author, Seth Godin. Seth describes himself as an entrepreneur, a blogger, and an agent of change. They discuss art, frustration, and the endless pursuit of perfection as an artist. In his newest book, The Icarus Deception, Seth discusses seeking art in your work and looking beyond standards and production. They talk about the importance of finding connections with other artists and people who can provide meaningful feedback. They discuss several of Seth's blog posts which are linked below, and much more.
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80: Growing Business (Josh Pigford)
December 22nd, 2013 | Season 2 | 28 mins 11 secs
This week on Giant Robots, Ben Orenstein chats with Josh Pigford about time management, entrepreneurship and farming