Tech Lounge

I speak with Greg Fawson of next.app dev con, the largest mobile app developer conference in the world, right here in my home of Berlin. We speak about how they got there, their plans for the future, and organising events in Berlin in 2026.

In this episode, I speak with Luca Belli about his forthcoming Manning book, “Hidden Influences,” which explains how algorithmic recommendation systems work from socio-technical and ethical perspectives rather than teaching readers to build them.

In this episode I speak with Den Odell, author of a new comprehensive book on performance engineering about the practice technically as well as justifying to business and product stakeholders.

I speak with Thede Loader of Rewarded Interest, another project and product attempting to make privacy and consent on the web better, while offering you an opportunity to make a slice of revenue. Too good to be true?

I speak with Ricardo Noriega and Doug Smith from Red Hat about their experiments using VLLM Omni for video generation.

This episode, I am joined again by Mike McQuaid, Homebrew project leader, amongst many other things, including OSS Resistance, a new quiet call to encourage people to contribute to open source when they feel they should.

In this episode, I speak with Peter Staar of Docling about the wonderful open-source project that converts messy documents into structured data, perfect for ingestion into AI tools and more. Recorded live at PyTorch con in 2026

This episode, I am joined by Sharath Narayana of Sanas, and AI company working to remove the barriers in audio since 2020.

Joining me in person (and thus the horrible audio quality) is Daniel Gräfe, independent developer of the amazing apps Timing and CoTypist. Based in Germany, we discuss how he builds his apps, why there are so many independent macOS developers in Germany, and what the future holds for independent developers.

In this episode, I speak with Mark Collier, executive director of the PyTorch Foundation, from PyTorch Con in Paris.

I speak with Ewelina Kurtys about Final Spark, a company building a bioprocessor, which they believe will enhance AI growth with no energy restrictions

In this episode, I speak with Simon Ritter of Azul about what's new in the JDK26 release and how you maintain community interest with a language that has the vintage of Java.

In this episode, I speak with the fascinating Victor of Supreme Robot about their AI-powered projects to help storytellers, screenwriters, game designers, and other story-driven creators.

In this episode I speak with Fabia Q Veit, CEO of make.com, a long established automation platform, that like many others has moved into AI orchestration.

Another great interview for Web Summit 2025, where I speak with Avery Pennarun of Tailscale, a product I use all the time to connect to my remote machines.

In this episode, I speak with Dana Lawson, CTO of Netlify, about the journey of the company so far, where they're heading and how it fits into the company's predictions on the future of the web.

In this episode, I speak with Nancy Wang, at the time SVP of engineering at 1Password, now Chief Technology Officer, and we talk about the growth of the company and how they plan to keep serving consumer and business needs.

In this episode, I speak with Ellen from Keyfactor about digital trust in the age of agentic AI and how the company uses their knowledge and history to help organisations, no matter the new challenges they face.

In this episode, I speak with John Buck about the book "Inventing the Future" about Apple's advanced technology group and the myriad technologies they created.

I speak with with Jonas van den Bogaard of Alliander about the Linux Foundation's energy community that fosters open source energy generation and distribution

In this episode, I speak with Lydia Pintscher and Daniel Stenberg from the European Open Source Academy and their efforts to highlight excellence in European open source communities.

Selvaraaju Murugesan of Kovai and I speak about the future of AI in tech writing.

I speak with Daniel Temkin about his book, Fourty-Four EsoLangs and about the world of esoteric programming languages. Formed the basis of this article: https://spectrum.ieee.org/esoteric-programming-languages-daniel-temkin

Cate and Chris recap a month of events, including IFA, the Bologna Gathering, LF Energy, IT Arena, and How to Web.

I speak with Sagar Batchu about Speakeasy, the platform for crafting API experiences from simple definition files, including exposing them as MCP servers.

In this episode, I speak with Romain Bouqueau of Motion Spell about GPAC, an open source framework that has revolutionized the way we handle audio-video streaming, transcoding and packaging.

I am joined by Ed of Cribl, an observability and telemetry platform for security tracking and teams.

In this episode, I speak with Peter Zaitsev of Percona about the history of MySQL, his history with the venerable database, and his history with Percona.

I speak with Vadym Grin about his forthcoming book on good, bad, and ugly design for digital products and services.

In this episode, Cate and Chris discuss some of the recent downsizing of European tech media and ask how we got here, what's next, and what does it all mean for the European tech industry.

A packed container of an episode where I speak with Madhura Maskasky of Platform9 about their long-running container management platform and efforts to help people migrate from VMware and John Amaral of root.

Fast rewind back to February and I had some fascinating conversations with various projects at FOSDEM in Brussels, including the Rust Foundation, Sysdig about StratoShark, Nextcloud, and Mastodon.

I spoke with Dom Weatherbee of Regenx to discuss their precious metal recovery technology and how it can benefit the circular economy for new gadgets and devices.

In this episode, Cate and Chris discuss a flurry of events over the past months, including Deep Tech Momentum, Gitex, London Tech Week, Super Invest, and more!

I speak with Daniela Miao of Momento to discuss her journey from DynamoDB at AWS to creating an alternative caching platform for large scale real time applications.

In this episode, Chris and Cate speak with Jessica Baladad, of feelforyourlife.com, an advocacy platform that utilizes digital and print resources for better breast health.

Two interviews from Web Summit 2024… Corynne McSherry from the EFF and Nick Durkin from Harness.

In this episode, Cate discusses the state of Italian tech, and Chris and Cate discuss the recent Opera Days announcements.

I speak with Kyle from Depot.dev, which promise to speed up your your Docker image builds and GitHub Actions workflows. Depot easily integrates with your existing CI provider and dev workflows to save hours of build time.

I speak with Will of Northflank, a self-service developer platform for apps, databases, and jobs. Start with one workload, scale to hundreds on compute or GPUs.

In this episode, I speak with Chad Whitacre of Sentry about their functional software license and the open-source pledge.

In this episode, I speak with Vinoth Chandar about Onehouse, a Universal Data Lakehouse and the only data platform instantly accessible from any engine, from BI to AI.

In this episode Cate talks about the state of European medical tech and Chris talks about the recent FOSSBackstage event that covered topics around open source software that aren't development.

I speak with the infamous Dave Thomas about his programming journey, his book, the pragmatic programmer and his publishing history, and much more!

In this episode Cate and Chris talk about the future of European tech in the wake of the many challenges the block faces from the US, Russia, China, and more.

I speak with Nikola Pavesic about Infobip's global startup program, Tribe.

I speak with Rachel Lapidow about tips and tricks for copy editing role play and board game rules.

In this episode, Cate and Chris discuss the state of education tech in Europe, and as the open source community gears up for FOSDEM and side events week, how does open source look in Europe?

I speak with the CPTO of Apica, Ranjan Parthasarathy, about how they bring AI to the big and busy world of telemetry and observability data.

A few weeks late but what they hey. In this episode Cate and Chris share their tech trends and predictions for 2025.

I speak with Stacey and Phil of the newly launched Developer Relations Foundation, recognising the work of tech workers with community, marketing, and relations roles.

In this episode, I speak with Oleg of Testcontainers, an open source library for providing throwaway, lightweight instances of databases, message brokers, web browsers, or just about anything that can run in a Docker container.

In this episode Cate and Chris discuss recent tech layoffs and how to handle them better, plus what even is tech anyway?

In this episode, I speak with Elian Van Cutsem about one of my favourite web frameworks and what I use for my own website, Astro. We talk generally about the project, its history, and version 5, which was released this week!

I speak with Joe Fitzsimmons of Horizon Quantum, who are attempting make the move from traditional computer programming easier.

In this deep dive episode Cate and Chris dig into circular economy startups and how all the alternatives to Twitter/X/Twix compare.

I speak with Michael Hunger of neo4j about the history of graph databases and how they are finding new use cases with the current wave of generative AI tools.

In this topic deep dive, Cate and I discuss government bailouts for tech companies, EU investment in tech companies, and the possible manipulation of US politics by tech companies and cybercrime.

I speak with Stephen Hood of Mozilla about their joint efforts with the Open Source Initiative to create a definition of open source AI.

I speak with Mike McQuaid, long-term maintainer of Homebrew, the macOS package manager, about Workbrew, a new commercial version of Homebrew that brings extra security and governance features to Homebrew.

In this episode, Cate and Chris dive into tech events. The different types, how they work, how they feel, and how they've changed the past few years.

Corey from Crowdbotics joins me in the Tech Lounge to talk about their six year journey in creating an AI-powered code reuse platform, long before others jumped on the bandwagon.

This episode is all about WASM at KubeCon EU 2024 way back in March. I speak with WASMEdge and Cosmonic to find out what they bring and their thoughts on WASM.

It's a discussion episode! And this time, Cate Lawrence from Tech.eu joins me to talk about alternative meats and proteins, and I ask in a sea of jargon and hype, what really is artificial intelligence?

In the tech lounge this episode, I have Leonard Pahlke talking about bringing sustainability to infrastructure and the work of the CNCF sustainability TAG and Dedy Kredo from Codium AI talking about their AI-powered IDE and text editor extension.

No real episode, but rather a small update on some changes coming to the show.

My news episode featuring AI crawlers roaming wild, classic MacOS tools, Tech Crunch loses its way, and more!

More interviews from KubeCon Paris. This time, Matt Wilson, a colleague from Docker Build Cloud, and Sebastian Blanc of Aiven.

Cracking open LLMs, 45 years of the Walkman, How the UK's new Government plans to invest in tech, and more!

In this episode, I speak with Dinesh from CIVO, a European cloud-native hosting company, and Thierry of the Open Infrastructure Foundation, whose projects typically power data centres. This episode is powered by magic mind, a little green bottle of goodness that helps your focus and energy. Head over to magicmind.com/chinchillasqueaks and use the code "CHINCHILLASQUEAKS20" for 48% of subscriptions or 20% off one-time purchases.

There is a good dose of retro computing, tech trends, and edge technologies in this issue, so let's dive in. I am literally powered by Magic Mind right now. It's helping me focus and keep going in some tough weeks of poor sleep and too much to do. If you also need that helping hand, head over to magicmind.com/chinchillasqueaks and use the code "CHINCHILLASQUEAKS20" for 48% of subscriptions or 20% off one time purchases.

Two of my interviews from the State of Open Con in London back in February. Featuring Lorna Mitchell, VP of developer experience at Redocly and Amanda Brock, CEO of open UK.

I am back from Melbourne with a good dose of developer news, AI, and computing history

I spoke with Kalyan of Datacebo, a company that creates open-source and enterprise tools for generating synthetic data for testing, load testing, and more.

I speak with Saravana Kumar of Document 360 about their enterprise-level solution for documentation and knowledge management and what AI could mean for the industry.

In this episode, I look at the history of Dell, Apple, and Nokia, as well as current efforts to stop the AI machine from gobbling all and sundry.

In the first round-up of interviews from KubeCon EU 2024 in Paris, I focus on developer platform-related tools and productivity. The episode features interviews with Humanitec, Scalr, and Dagger.

I cover AI's limitations in understanding sheet music, musicians facing financial challenges while touring, and share updates on my recent Medium post and YouTube interview with Sysdig.

I speak with Asif Awan of AppCD about their generative AI tool that creates the infrastructure as code configuration you need based on application code.

In this episode, I discuss how Mcdonald's inspires good management, alcohol and other vices, AI, and more!

I have Venkat from Rockset back to discuss their search and analytics database built for the cloud, with real-time indexing and full-featured SQL on JSON, time series, geospatial and vector data.

I speak with Feross Aboukhadijeh of Socket.dev about their smarter and more considered solution for securing software supply chains.

A light news show where I cover the growing need to label what "open" AI really is, local LLMS reprised, and long live the Twiggy drive!

In this episode, I speak with Atlas about their AI tool for generating 3D assets for games and architectural use and with Gathers about their AI tool for market research and competitive analysis. Generative AI tools all the way down! https://www.atlasai.co/ https://gathers.ai/

I am back with my fortnightly round-up of interesting links and resources, AI (of course), music, and SciFi this issue.

In this episode I speak with Corey Harrison of Flip.ai, one of a handful of new companies bringing generative AI to the DevOps space. In Flip.ai's case, this is leveraging to bring intelligence and flexibility to observability data.

In this episode I speak with Simon Wistow of Fastly about their work to keep the internet running and Christian Nielsen of BevArt who aim to keep cultural artefacts in museums and galleries lasting for as long as possible.

I have a fascinating conversation with Alex from Respeecher, a Ukranian startup whose work you have probably heard in high-profile games, movies, and campaigns.

Two interviews from Web Summit 2023 in this episode. First, with Irina and Dmitri of Datuum, an interesting data processing platform powered by AI. Second, Anna from Viseven, where we talk about Ukraine's DIA app and how the company she works for handles marketing with the pharmaceutical industry.

In this episode, I speak with Anna Skoulikari about her new book, "Learn Git" from O'Reilly. https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/learning-git/9781098133900/ Use the code "learngit23" for a 30% discount!

In this episode, I finish up my interviews from last year's Open Source Summit with two amazing interviews. First is Leszek Manicki, engineering manager at the Wikimedia Foundation Second is Jessica Tegner an advocate for diversity, inclusivity, and equity in open source

In this episode, I finish up my interviews from We Are Developers earlier in the year and speak with Filip Hrick about testing websites with Cypress and Dennie Declercq about creating vision-accessible websites. Enjoy! Full show notes at: http://chrischinchilla.com/podcast/

I speak with Chris Adams, the director of the Green Web Foundation.  We discuss their mission, tools, programs, and plans for making the online world as sustainable as possible. https://www.thegreenwebfoundation.org https://www.linkedin.com/in/mrchrisadams/

In this episode, I share interviews from the IT Arena event in Lviv, Ukraine. As I dive into conversations with tech innovators from around the world, we discusses a range of topics, from a digital platform for airports to remote hiring of developers and the future of education in tech. I also explores the state of the tech industry in Ukraine, the influence of artificial intelligence, and my own journey in the tech world.

I speak with Ricarhd Roger of VoxGig to discuss what exactly developer relations is, its history, future, and potential impact. Show notes: chrischinchilla.com/podcasts

I'm back with a great interview covering Sysdig and its journey in helping secure cloud computing. Accompanied by a healthy dose of news. We speak about the history of the company, Falco, eBPF, and cloud security and observability from a person who has been involved in the ecosystem for some time. Full notes: https://chrischinchilla.com/podcast/

This episode is another round of interviews from OSS Summit in Bilbao and features interviews with Gab Columbro, the general manager of LF Europe and Dawn Foster of the CHAOSS project. We talk about open source strategy and challenges in Europe and measuring the health of large and small open source projects. It also features more announcements from Canonical, a round-up of less well-known audio editors, and getting ready for Halloween… Mystical texts. https://chrischinchilla.com/podcast/oss-summit-linux-foundation-europe-and-open-source-metrics

In this episode, I speak about the sustainability of cloud-native workloads and infrastructure and how the Linux Foundation spearheads efforts for open-source energy generation, distribution, and monitoring. Also features links to the latest Ubuntu and Canonical releases, the death of Unity, how the US military wants to understand Linux, and much more! Full notes: https://chinchillasqueaks.substack.com/p/f91ef238-6636-4ab5-9090-5ca46f7d8d91