Latest: Episode 24

The Bothness of It — with Alex Hillman

Alex Hillman built one of America's first co-working spaces, wrote a business book in tweets, and recently handed his inbox to a Claude Code agent — not to draft emails, but to notice when a friendship is going cold. In this episode, Alex, Michael, Wes, and Hadley dig into marketing for people who hate marketing, what 20 years of email reveals about your relationships, and why the hardest part of AI-assisted coding was always the part before you wrote a single line.

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Episode 23

The Code Doesn't Lie — with Mike Bostock

Mike Bostock made D3 when the browser was still a joke. He built bl.ocks when people needed somewhere to share their work. Now he's building Observable — reactive notebooks with an AI that actually looks at what it made. In this episode: the three-GIF bar chart that launched 25 years of viz, why open source needs both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, and why an agent that can't see its own output is likely to be confidently wrong.

Release date: 1 June 2026
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Episode 22

The Wonder-Driven Builder — with Paige Bailey

Paige Bailey is a developer relations engineering lead at Google DeepMind, a geophysicist-turned-AI-engineer who was once told by her professors that building open-source libraries was a waste of time. We talk about her path from planetary science to TensorFlow, why statisticians have a hidden edge in the age of AI, and what it means to be a curious generalist when the cost of building software is approaching zero. Bonus: installing solar-powered silent-film birdhouses as street art in San Francisco.

Release date: 18 May 2026
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Episode 21

Widgets Are Lego Bricks (and Other Things People Are Sleeping On) — with Vincent Warmerdam

Vincent Warmerdam has been the first full-time hire at a startup, a Spacey punster who accidentally got himself a job, a bartender at an Amsterdam comedy theater, and a Dutch bike tour guide — and he'll tell you all of it was career development. Now doing DevRel at Marimo, Vincent makes the case for reactive notebooks, Lego-brick widgets, and why "number go up" is not a data science strategy. Also: chickens die. The model doesn't know. This matters more than you think.

Release date: 5 May 2026
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Data Scientist and Software Engineer at Posit, PBC

Michael Chow

Michael is a data science tool builder at Posit, where he works on open source tools for data analysis. He received a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from Princeton University, and is interested in what drives expert data science performance. When not wrangling data, you can find him in Philly writing tiny poems, baking bread, and embroidering.
Hadley Wickham Headshot
Chief Scientist, Posit

Hadley Wickham

Hadley is Chief Scientist at Posit PBC, winner of the 2019 COPSS award, and a member of the R Foundation. He builds tools (both computational and cognitive) to make data science easier, faster, and more fun. His work includes packages for data science (like the tidyverse, which includes ggplot2, dplyr, and tidyr)and principled software development (e.g. roxygen2, testthat, and pkgdown). He is also a writer, educator, and speaker promoting the use of R for data science.
Wes McKinney Headshot
Principal Architect, Posit

Wes McKinney

Wes McKinney is Principal Architect at Posit and an open source software developer focusing on analytical computing. He created the Python pandas project and is a co-creator of Apache Arrow, his current focus. He authored two editions of the reference book, Python for Data Analysis.