A young man who's a sophomore in high school emailed me to come on his podcast that he does with his friend, and I had so much fun. I decided to make it a crossover episode. Check out "Compile after Class" on this week's episode! https://www.youtube.com/@shreemanickaraja

Maynard Holliday spent 30+ years at the intersection of robotics, nuclear security, and defense technology, most recently serving as the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Critical Technologies. He's worked on everything from helping remediate Three Mile Island to securing tons of Soviet nuclear material in post-Cold War Ukraine to overseeing the Pentagon's critical technology portfolio including

Felix Rieseberg came to computing through poetry, and that background gives him a unique lens for explaining language models. A longtime engineer, Felix now gets to watch AI evolve from the inside. In this episode, Scott and Felix explore why language models are surprisingly easy to understand despite feeling magical, what it's like to train a model from noise to coherence, and the bigger philosop

Varun Badhwar, CEO and Co-Founder of Endor Labs, joins Scott to explore the expanding software supply chain risk in the age of AI-generated code. They discuss how developers have gone from writing code to assembling it from layers of dependencies like open source, third-party libraries, and now the outputs of AI...and what all this means for security. From hallucinated npm packages that could be s

Alexandra Lato, VP of Product at Stack Overflow, joins Scott to talk about how Stack Overflow is evolving for the age of AI agents. They explore the new "Stack Overflow for Agents" feature, where a single prompt bootstraps an agent with all the knowledge and APIs of Stack Overflow, and what it means for how developers, agents, and communities share and verify knowledge together. https://agents.sta

Dr. Chinasa T. Okolo is the Founder and Scientific Director of Technecultura and a consultant for the United Nations and the World Bank. She talks with Scott about the yawning gap between AI's pace of development and policymakers' ability to understand it. She also discusses what it means to do AI governance research with a focus on Global Majority communities that are too often left out of the co

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,” ho

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,

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 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 lik

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 c

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 ses

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 s

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

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

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 expone

In this episode, Scott talks with Don Syme about the emerging world of agentic developer workflows and what it means when coding tools move from autocomplete helpers to collaborators. They explore how modern tools like GitHub Copilot and GitHub Agentic Workflows are evolving into systems that can plan, execute, and iterate on tasks across a codebase, and what that means for software design, type s

This week on the show, Scott talks to Philip Kiley about his new book, Inference Engineering. Inference Engineering is your guide to becoming an expert in inference. It contains everything that Philip has learned in four years of working at Baseten. This book is based on the hundreds of thousands of words of documentation, blogs, and talks he's written on inference; interviews with dozens of exper

What does it take to design a programming language from scratch when the target isn’t just CPUs, but GPUs, accelerators, and the entire AI stack? In this episode, I sit down with legendary language architect Chris Lattner to talk about Mojo — his ambitious attempt to rethink systems programming for the machine learning era. We trace the arc from LLVM and Clang to Swift and now Mojo, unpacking the

There’s a new wave of AI tools that don’t just live in the cloud, don’t just autocomplete code, and don’t just sit in a browser tab. They reach into your local environment, understand your context, and act more like a thinking companion than a chatbot. In this episode, I talk with Peter Steinberger, founder of OpenClaw, about the rise of “The Claw” and what it means to build AI that feels fast, pe