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://youtu.be/4nGG8Mv4L88 This week's episode of break continues the conversation, with a deeper discussion ar...
Nov 20, 2025•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 46
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 pulling one out of the archives! Sometimes we record an episode and don't ship it for quite a while, and this one...
Nov 12, 2025•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 45
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 this discussion in this week's episode of Break ! The panel talks about whether seeking a career with a FAANG c...
Nov 04, 2025•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 44
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 announcement that he'll be joining East River Source Control to work on JJ and related projects full time. We continue t...
Oct 28, 2025•58 min•Ep. 43
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 episode of Break! We get into some of the topics briefly mentioned during the main episode. Watch it on YouTub...
Oct 20, 2025•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 42
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://break.show . For our supporters, we have extra chapters on Mitchell's talk on open source governance and requir...
Oct 13, 2025•57 min•Ep. 41
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 conflict around dependency management (and error handling). Now we've added another: the recent conflict between ...
Oct 07, 2025•1 hr 30 min•Ep. 40
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 YouTube or listen with your favorite podcasting app! Learn more by going to https://break.show . For our suppo...
Sep 30, 2025•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 39
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 . For our supporters, we've got two great chapters about epistemology and how AI affects newcomers to progr...
Sep 23, 2025•1 hr 18 min•Ep. 38
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 companion break episode, but check out our backlog if you haven't watched them already! Watch it on YouTube o...
Sep 15, 2025•1 hr 36 min•Ep. 37
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 episode does not have a companion break episode, but check out our backlog if you haven't watched them already...
Sep 08, 2025•1 hr 57 min•Ep. 36
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 companion break episode, but check out our backlog if you haven't watched them already! Watch it on YouTube or li...
Sep 01, 2025•1 hr 38 min•Ep. 35
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 listen with your favorite podcasting app! Learn more by going to https://break.show . Not a supporter yet? Y...
Aug 25, 2025•52 min•Ep. 34
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 for our supporters. Not a supporter yet? You can fix that by heading over to https://fallthrough.fm/subscribe...
Aug 18, 2025•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 33
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 video first, so you can watch it on YouTube or in your favorite podcast app by going to: https://break.show/e...
Aug 11, 2025•1 hr 18 min•Ep. 32
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 first, so you can watch it on YouTube or in your favorite podcast app by going to: https://break.show/ep/4 . F...
Aug 04, 2025•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 31
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 the conversation around artificial intelligence. They discuss the history of AI; how everything old is new a...
Jul 28, 2025•1 hr 21 min•Ep. 30
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 identifiers and versions are the same thing, and so much more. Last week we shipped the first episode of our afte...
Jul 21, 2025•1 hr 42 min•Ep. 29
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 episode, Kris, Matt, and Jamie discuss the recording of Fallthrough episode #28 . They talk more about Open...
Jul 15, 2025•40 min•Ep. 28
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 by Matt, Jamie, and Steve to discuss REST, hypermedia, the Web (now at version 4.0!), where all of these cam...
Jul 14, 2025•1 hr 49 min•Ep. 28
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 this episode, Kris is joined by Angelica, Matt, and guest co-host Steve Klabnik, to discuss language, what it me...
Jul 07, 2025•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 27
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 would usually be included as supporter only content, but we decided to release it to everyone! If you enjoy th...
Jul 07, 2025•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 27
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 languages like Go, the various proposals to get better support for SIMD directly into Go and its compiler, a...
Jun 30, 2025•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 26
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 these roles actually do, and whether product managers should actually exist. For our supporters, this episode c...
Jun 23, 2025•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 25
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 syntax. In this episode, Kris is joined by Ian and Matt to discuss this news. They talk about whether error handl...
Jun 16, 2025•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 24
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 episode contains extra chapters of discussion. Get access by signing up at https://fallthrough.fm/subscribe . Th...
Jun 09, 2025•1 hr 18 min•Ep. 23
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 to discuss Geomys, an open source maintenance company. The goal of Geomys is to provide open source maintain...
Jun 02, 2025•1 hr 18 min•Ep. 22
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 Alagarsamy, Ignacio Castillejos, and Chris Richardson to discuss what event-driven architecture is, what technol...
May 26, 2025•59 min•Ep. 21
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 about the groups thoughts on artificial intelligence and another on the local tech scenes across the world. Get ...
May 19, 2025•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 20
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 Hashicorp, starting his own company (with his wife!), and so much more. This episode is packed with life lessons and...
May 12, 2025•1 hr 37 min•Ep. 19
