Today Rebecca Burger Becky Heineman shares the tale of porting Doom to the 3DO console under extreme conditions. There is an engine to tweak, deadlines to hit, hardware acceleration to get working, and dramatic rock anthems to record.

We also learn about how game piracy led her to game development and what it was like to do game development in the mania of the mid-nineties. Finally, we close with Becky's advice on learning bare metal development skills. 

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Today story is from Son Luong Ngoc who shares what’s it was like for him to work and live in many different countries around the world, including working for AliBaba at the Xixi campus in Hangzhou, China.

It’s a story of a software developer finding a place that fits them, a place that suits them.

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What could you accomplish if your teammates were all excited and determined to hit some project timelines? What is it like for a group of people to give it all they have? That's what today is about. 

   Chet Haase from the Android team is here to share the story of the early days of Android, the mobile operating system that powers the majority of phones worldwide. We'll cover the years from 2005 to around 2011.    It's a wild story.

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• Android's Book

 I believe that getting underrepresented groups into software development is a good thing. This is not a controversial opinion until you start talking about felons. 

  Today's guest is Rick Wolter. He's an iOS developer who served 18 years in prison for second degree murder.  Rick killed somebody and for some that's all they need to know about Rick. But today's episode is about Rick's path to redemption him, teaching himself to code in prison, smuggling in a Python interpreter, and then getting out and trying to get a job as a dev when you're a felon.

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UnderDog Devs

CPAN was the first open-source software module repository. And on this day, Aug 1st, in 1995, CPAN was first announced to a private group of PERL users.

If you are building things today by pulling in various packages from various open source places – and really, who isn’t – then the history of how this world came to be is essential.

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I recently got an email from Jeff Shrager, who said he'd been working hard to solve a mystery about some famous code.

Eliza, the chatbot, was built in 1964, and she didn't answer questions like Alexa or Siri. She asked questions. She was a therapist chatbot and quickly became famous after being described in a 1964 paper. 

But here is the mystery. We're not sure how the original version worked. Joseph Weizenbaum never released the code. But Jeff tracked it down, and some of the things we thought we knew about Eliza turned out to be wrong.  

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"Why is 80 characters, the standard limit for code width."

You probably know what happens next. People started to post their opinions and the comments and other people started to disagree. The posts spread around the internet.

 So that is going to be today's show: Let's answer this question. 

 It's a question about traditions and teamwork, and how preexisting idioms shape us and help us, but sometimes restrict us. 

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Have you ever had a unique approach to a problem and been excited to use it, but you're met with skepticism?

  Today's story: what happens if you take someone who's passionate about LISP and put them in an organization where that's just not how they write software.

  Today's story is about getting LISP into space.

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On this day in 2014 "lame april fools' jokes" were banned from hacker news.  

 Today in our first This-Day-in-History segment, I want to share some of history not just of April Fools', but of tech pranks in general, all leading up to 2014.

 Why were pranks and April Fools' jokes traditionally celebrated in tech? Why are they now considered as dang said, "lame?"? And is there anything we can do to save them? Those are today's questions.

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Whenever I work on a side project, I can't help but daydream of it taking off in a big way. For today's guests, something like that did happen. 

  When Nadia started building her side project, she didn't know that it would end up spreading virally. She didn't know that it would end up competing with an Amazon product. She didn't know that keeping it up would be something that would drive her close to tears.

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