Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots

Latest Episodes:

89: Moving Beyond The Wheel (Mahmoud Abdelkader) Mar 09, 2014

Show notes

This week on Giant Robots, Mahmoud Abdelkader of Balanced joins Ben to talk the priorities in ones career trajectory, the role of a successful CTO, and the benefits of radically open transparency.

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88: Prospering Communities (Kyle Bragger) Mar 02, 2014

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This week Ben Talks with Kyle Bragger of Elepath, Inc on the nature of online community building, advertising vs subscription revenue models and the importance of continued creative output (and actually releasing it to the world).

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87: Monitoring the Bathrooms (Tony DiPasquale) Feb 23, 2014

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This week on Giant Robots, Ben chats with Tony DiPasquale on utilizing Arduino engineering to solve 0th world problems.

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86: Humility and Patience (Peter Reinhardt) Feb 16, 2014

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In this week's episode, we're joined by Peter Reinhardt, Co-founder and CEO of Segment.io. Ben and Peter discuss the product, their tech stack, the companies big pivot to Segment.io, their growth and future plans. They also discuss leaving MIT to start a company, getting along with your co-founders, nuclear reactors, hiking, and much more.

Follow @thoughtbot, @r00k, and @reinpk on twitter.

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85: I Want These Ideas To Be Free (Max Temkin) Feb 09, 2014

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This week, Ben is joined by Max Temkin, creator of Cards Against Humanity and Humans vs. Zombies. Max talks about his success with Cards Against Humanity and his feelings of impostor syndrome. He talks about some of his other projects including his first indie game, Humans vs. Zombies. Most recently Max had a multiplayer PC game published called Samurai Gunn. Max talks about the "open source" nature of his games. They discuss money, sustainability, kickstarter, and much more.

Follow @thoughtbot, @r00k, and @MaxTemkin on twitter.

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84: The Bus Number (Harper Reed) Feb 02, 2014

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On this week's episode, Ben talks with Harper Reed, former CTO of Threadless, former CTO of Obama for America, and currently CEO of Modest. Harper talks about management and his "cabal" of people that he likes to work with. He also discusses his experience on the campaign, healthcare.gov, and procurement laws. When asked about his playbook for success, Harper talks about networking strategies, the use of different languages for different problems, craziness, and much more.

Follow @thoughtbot, @r00k, and @harper on twitter.

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83: Turning the Tables (Ben Orenstein) Jan 26, 2014

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On this week's special episode, Chad Pytel turns the tables and interviews host Ben Orenstein. They discuss the process of running the podcast and Ben's roots in programming and computer science. Ben talks about his Vim mastery, how he got into public speaking, and his experiences speaking at RailsConf. This year Ben is organizing the live coding track at RailConf. Ben describes his strategies for learning programming, how he's getting into Clojure, and much more!

Follow @thoughtbot, @r00k, and @cpytel on twitter.

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82: Teach all the things (Matt Knox) Jan 19, 2014

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This week's episode features Matt Knox of Twitter. Matt is a part of Twitter's university team which teaches new Twitter recruits about the company. He works as an engineer as well in order to stay current. Matt discusses his background as an engineer, and how he got into teaching. He discusses using Storm, essentially a real-time Hadoop, for Twitter. Ben and Matt talk about the importance of keeping a portfolio as a programmer and deliberate practice routines for coding, and more.

Follow @thoughtbot, @r00k, and @mattknox on twitter.

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81: An Agent of Change (Seth Godin) Jan 12, 2014

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In this week's episode, Ben Orenstein is joined by best selling author, Seth Godin. Seth describes himself as an entrepreneur, a blogger, and an agent of change. They discuss art, frustration, and the endless pursuit of perfection as an artist. In his newest book, The Icarus Deception, Seth discusses seeking art in your work and looking beyond standards and production. They talk about the importance of finding connections with other artists and people who can provide meaningful feedback. They discuss several of Seth's blog posts which are linked below, and much more.