Roblox is a gaming platform with a large ecosystem of players, creators, game designers, and entrepreneurs. The world of Roblox is a three-dimensional environment where characters and objects interact through a physics engine. Roblox is multiplayer, and users can interact with each other over the Internet. Roblox is not one single game—it is a system

Originally published November 4, 2016 Indie Hackers is a website that profiles independent developers who have made profitable software projects, usually without raising any money. These projects make anywhere from a few hundred dollars a month to more than $100,000 as in the case with park.io, one of the services profiled by Indie Hackers. Courtland

Key Values is a platform where companies are profiled with descriptions of their company values. These profiles describe features such as work-life balance, company culture, daily routines, and strategy. Lynne Tye created Key Values with the goal of building a small business that would make money through connecting job seekers to companies with a culture

FindCollabs is a platform for finding collaborators and building projects. Three months ago we had our first hackathon, with lots of projects being created and collaborated on. In an earlier episode, we showcased the first place winner ARhythm.  Today’s show features two more interviews with winners from the first FindCollabs hackathon. Kitspace is an open

Gaming is becoming mainstream. Popular multiplayer games such as Fortnite and Minecraft present players with a massive virtual world to explore, build, and compete within. Turn-based games such as Hearthstone and Magic are breeding a new generation of board game and card game aficionados. Social media networks like Twitch and YouTube have turned gaming into

Africa is rapidly adopting the same software and hardware technologies that have transformed the western world over the last few decades. But access to computers and technology education is still uneven. Where there is access to computers, smartphone adoption often comes before access to laptops or desktop computers. Nelly Cheboi is the founder of TechLit

Modern software consists of sprawling international networks of servers. Users contact these servers to access applications. Microservices talk to each other to fulfill complicated requests. Databases and machine learning frameworks crunch terabytes of information to provide complicated answers. Across this infrastructure, there is a lot of different activities–and a lot of vulnerabilities. Without a reliable

Apple operating systems are closed source. This closed source nature gives Apple an extremely successful business model–and a very different software developer ecosystem than Linux-based systems. Since Linux is open source, the information on how to manipulate the system at a low level is very public. The lack of information about low-level programming in Apple

If you operate a restaurant, you want to know how many people are inside your restaurant at any given time. You also want to be able to know your occupancy if you operate a movie theater, coffee shop, or apparel store. Knowing how many people are in your building can answer several business-related questions. Do

Napster, Kazaa, and Bittorrent are peer-to-peer file sharing systems. In these P2P systems, nodes need to find each other. Users need to be able to search for files that exist across the system. P2P systems are decentralized, so these routing problems must be solved without a centralized service in the middle. Without a centralized service

Crocodile Browser is a fast browser built by Osine and Anesi Ikhianosime, a pair of brothers from Nigeria. I interviewed them 3 years ago, and in this episode I caught up with Osine to learn what he and his brother have been working on since then. Osine and Anesi have become friends of mine since

In the tech industry, we have all grown to fear “lock-in.” Lock-in is a situation in which you have no choice but to pay a certain provider for some aspect of your computer services. Since computers are so fundamental to our lives, we sometimes have no choice but to pay the provider of that lock-in

Ad blockers in the browser protect us from the most annoying marketing messages that the Internet tries to serve to us. But we still pay a price for these ads. We pay the bandwidth costs of requesting these pages. Our browsers are slowed down by these extra requests. Pi Hole is a hardware based ad

Functional programming can improve the overall design of an application architecture. Runar Bjarnason has been exploring how writing in a functional style increases modularity and compositionality of software for many years. He is co-author of Functional Programming in Scala, a book that explores the relationship between functional programming and software design. In this interview with

Originally published October 22, 2015 “The official motto that we have in our help manual is ‘Losing is fun!’ ” Dwarf Fortress is a construction and management simulation computer game set in a procedurally generated fantasy world in which the player indirectly controls a group of dwarves, and attempts to construct a successful underground fortress.

Originally published January 6, 2016 “The best computer science is the kind where the theory is inspired by some practical problem, you develop a better theoretical understanding of what you want to do, and that feeds back into better practice.” Brian Kernighan is a professor of computer science at Princeton University and the author of

Wearables are everywhere. In the medical field they are transforming lives. Haiyan Zhang, Innovation Director at Microsoft Research, created a wearable for a young graphic designer that developed Parkinson’s. Parkinson’s is a condition that inhibits movement, and this wearable allows the Parkinson’s patient to write and draw again. Haiyan explained the research process and the

Professional hackathon programmers travel around the hackathon circuit, winning merchandise and small cash prizes. There are enough hackathons that some programmers actually do this as a full-time job. For example, Peter Ma, a programmer who describes himself as a “rapid prototype specialist.” Peter is a great programmer, and he has received lots of offers to