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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On June 1st, 2014, the following question showed up on hacker news: 

"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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How would you build an operating system?     My answer is I wouldn't. First off, I don't know how. And the second thing is it seems like to large of a task. It took thousands of developers to build Windows XP.  But actually, it is possible to build an operating system from scratch. My guest is doing it. Andreas Kling created SerenityOS starting from an empty Git repository. So today, I find out how he did it, how this is possible. But mainly today, I find out why. Why build an operating system from scratch? And it all started in the 2010s when Andreas worked at Apple. 

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Today, I have two of my favorite guests together: Krystal Maughan and Don McKay. We are going to be sharing strange and interesting facts about computing.

I'm super pumped about this because, sometimes, I learn something new, and I'm excited about it. And I want to tell people about it. And so today is a chance for Don and Krystal and I to share some of these "Oh, my God. Did you guys see this?" stories.

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