Development
Building software: programming, developer tools, APIs, deployment and DevOps, and building with AI (agents, MCP servers, RAG, AI coding tools). An extra channel alongside an episode's main one, so AI engineering episodes sit in both.
#2506: Squashing Database Migrations Without Breaking Production
How to safely squash old migrations, cut deploy times, and generate schema documentation at version boundaries.
#2505: How Self-Hosted Search Actually Works for AI Agents
SearXNG isn't a crawler — it's a metasearch router. Here's how it works and why AI agents change everything.
#2503: The Gap Between Your Mental Model and the Wire
What really happens when you press Enter on a URL? From DNS to TLS to headers, we break down the full lifecycle.
#2501: Describing a Neighborhood: Databases Without Screens
Can you design a relational database using only your voice? We coach a beginner through PostgreSQL from scratch.
#2499: Coding by Voice: Teaching a Beginner TypeScript
Learn to code by building a real TypeScript tip calculator — no experience needed, just your ears and keyboard.
#2498: Build Your First Python Program in 7 Lines
We coach a complete beginner through building a working Python game using only voice—no screenshare, no diagrams.
#2497: Tracing One Python Print Through 6 Abstraction Layers
What actually happens when you print "Hello" in Python? Six layers, 562 system calls, and a hardware-enforced kernel boundary.
#2496: Are Hidden API Endpoints Leaks or Just Plumbing?
When LLM agents discover unauthenticated JSON endpoints in browser DevTools, is it a security breach or just reading the page?
#2495: How to Bake Personality Into an LLM in 15 Minutes
Fine-tune a model's personality with ~300 examples and a consumer GPU. SFT + DPO explained.
#2494: Active Prompt Engineering: Daniel's Diff-Based Loop
A deep dive into iterative prompt refinement using inter-iteration prediction change as an uncertainty signal.
#2493: Are You Writing for Humans or AI Agents?
How GitHub repos, JSON formats, and competing standards are reshaping who (and what) you're publishing for.
#2492: When AI Agents Collapse Stack Evaluation from Weeks to Seconds
How Claude Code and agentic AI are turning GitHub into a discovery layer and collapsing library evaluation from weeks to seconds.
#2488: Hybrid Pipelines for Entity Resolution
Classic NLP pipelines vs. lightweight LLMs for handling Hezbollah’s half-dozen spellings.
#2486: Why Noise Reduction Can Ruin Transcription Accuracy
Cleaning audio before transcription can increase errors by up to 46%. Here's the right approach for your voice app.
#2483: Substitution Anonymization: Privacy Without Utility Loss
How to generate realistic synthetic voice notes and calendar data with zero PII exposure risk.
#2482: When AI Chatbots Leak Your PDFs via Public S3 Buckets
A user uploaded a sensitive PDF to an AI chatbot. The chatbot stored it in a public S3 bucket with zero authentication.
#2478: MCP File Handling: Why Your Base64 Upload Breaks at 4MB
MCP has no standard file input. Base64 breaks at 4MB, presigned URLs need whitelisting, and MinIO workarounds aren't standardized.
#2477: Stop Polling: Push-to-Deploy for Solo Devs
Why your cron job is obsolete. Push-to-deploy with GitHub Actions and deploy keys — the simplest setup that actually works.
#2476: Database Backups Without the Bloat
pg_dump, WAL archiving, and the free tools that beat expensive commercial backup software.
#2475: Docker Volumes: Why They Can't Move and What To Do
Docker made apps portable but left your data stuck. Here's how to actually move volumes between hosts.