Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman

Hosted by Scott Hanselman

Technology Science Education

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Episodes

1000

Latest episode

Jun 2026

Language

EN-US

About the show

Hanselminutes is Fresh Air for Developers. A weekly commute-time podcast that promotes fresh technology and fresh voices. Talk and Tech for Developers, Life-long Learners, and Technologists.

Listen to episodes

60 recent

June 18, 202633 min

The space between the Commits with Zed and DeltaDB's Nathan Sobo

Scott talks with Nathan Sobo, CEO and co-founder of Zed, about what comes after the traditional code editor. They start with Zed’s vision for a fast, collaborative, AI-native development environment, then go deeper on DeltaDB: a new approach to versioning software at the operation level, not just at the commit level. Nathan explains why so much important software work happens “between commits,” how agent conversations and code changes can become durable shared artifacts, and what it might mean for Git, collaboration, and the future of programming tools. Nathan previously helped build Atom at GitHub, and Zed describes DeltaDB as operation-level version control for human and AI collaboration. https://zed.dev/deltadb

June 11, 202638 min

Braille Is Freedom with Bristol Braille's Ed Rogers

On this episode of Hanselminutes, Scott talks with Ed Rogers of Bristol Braille Technology about the Canute project and the long road toward affordable multiline Braille. Most refreshable Braille displays show a single line at a time; Canute changes the experience by giving readers nine lines and 360 cells of spatial context. Ed shares how multiline Braille opens up new possibilities for reading, coding, math, music, diagrams, education, and independence and why Braille remains a vital technology for literacy, employment, and full participation in the digital world. https://bristolbraille.org

June 4, 202632 min

"Observabilitying" the Future of Software with Charity Majors

Charity Majors is the co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb.io, where she pioneered the concept of modern observability for distributed systems. Before Honeycomb, she spent years at Parse (acquired by Facebook), Facebook, and Linden Lab building Second Life. She is the co-author of "Observability Engineering" and "Database Reliability Engineering" (O'Reilly). She writes at charity.wtf. Whatever she and Scott are planning, they are gonna observability the heck out of it.

May 14, 202631 min

Cloud Commitments Without the Lock-In with Archera's Aran Khanna

Scott talks with Aran Khanna, co-founder and CEO of Archera, about a new category of cloud financial tooling: "Insured Commitments." Instead of locking into 1- or 3-year reserved instance contracts and hoping your usage matches, Archera offers commitments as short as 30 days. They get into the economics of cloud purchasing, how AI workloads are changing capacity planning, and what FinOps looks like in 2026. http://archera.ai

May 7, 202631 min

How IBM Z Is Modernizing Mainframes with Skyla Loomis

Scott talks with Skyla Loomis, General Manager of IBM Z Software, about the ongoing relevance of mainframes in 2026. They discuss the enduring power of mainframes, how generative AI is transforming COBOL modernization, and why enterprise infrastructure still runs on IBM Z. Skyla shares insights on developer experience, compliance challenges, and the misconceptions about mainframe technology in a cloud-native world.

April 30, 202631 min

Making opinionated AI tooling decisions with Nimbalyst's Greg Hinkle

Greg Hinkle, co-founder of Nimbalyst and former VP of Software Engineering at Salesforce, joins Scott to discuss the future of AI-assisted development. They explore the challenges of managing multiple AI coding agents, finding flow state in an agentic world, and why visual workspaces matter. Greg shares Nimbalyst's opinionated approach to integrating tools like Excalidraw, task management, and session organization directly into the developer workflow. https://nimbalyst.com

April 23, 202632 min

The Joy of Unplugging Cables: Kelly Shortridge on Security Resilience

Kelly Shortridge, author of "Security Chaos Engineering: Sustaining Resilience in Software and Systems" and CPO at Fastly, joins Scott for an ACM ByteCast joint episode about why security should be designed for failure rather than prevention. From airplane coffee makers causing critical failures to squirrels being the real "advanced persistent threat" to power grids, Kelly makes the case that no system is perfectly secure — and the teams that feel most in control are often the least prepared. The conversation covers metrics theater, the cost-resilience tradeoff, why software has unique advantages for simulation that we're not leveraging, and where LLMs fit (and don't fit) in security workflows.

April 9, 202636 min

Why Tori Westerhoff says we should talk to strangers

Tori Westerhoff joins Scott to explore the intersection of AI, human psychology, and personal growth. As people increasingly use LLMs for introspection and decision-making, Tori argues that we're missing the diversity of thought that comes from community, even particularly random encounters with strangers. She reveals her own practice: a daily noon reminder to talk to strangers. "If you sycophant yourself, you're never going to grow," she explains. The conversation delves into how LLMs can create echo chambers of thought, and why the randomness of human connection, even just someone on the same bus, helps us update our mental frames and break out of programmed decision-making paradigms.

March 19, 202632 min

Building the Internet with sendmail's Eric Allman

In this episode, in association with the ACM ByteCast, Scott talks with Eric Allman, one of the foundational figures of the early internet. Best known for creating Sendmail, the mail transfer agent that powered a large portion of global email infrastructure through the formative years of the network, Allman helped shape how messages move across the internet. Their conversation explores the origins of internet email, the messy realities of building software that must operate at planetary scale, and what lessons today’s engineers can learn from the systems and design decisions that quietly underpin modern computing.

March 12, 202630 min

A cognition engine for science with Allen Stewart

Scott Hanselman sits down with Allen Stewart, Partner Director of Software Engineering at Microsoft, to explore how AI agents with persistent memory are transforming scientific research and software engineering. Allen explains how his team built an AI system that learns from every investigation turning a 12-day autonomous drug discovery run into reusable knowledge that makes future research exponentially faster. Instead of starting from scratch each time, the AI inherits hypotheses, methodologies, and findings from previous work, saving hundreds of millions of tokens and weeks of effort.