Code with Jason
Jason Swett
On the Code with Jason podcast I discuss technical topics with interesting people. Guests include people from companies like GitHub, Google and Stripe.
- 1 hour 24 minutes308 - Christian and Jason Fail to Talk About AI
In this episode I talk with Christian Genco about IQ, the pros and cons of high intelligence, the Big Five personality traits, evolutionary differences between men and women, hypergamy, the origins of money, and whether Yuval Harari's "shared fiction" concept holds up. We never got to the AI topic we planned.
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3 February 2026, 2:00 pm - 1 hour 23 minutes307 - Kody Kendall, Co-Founder and CEO of LlamaPress AI
In this episode I talk with Cody Kendall about building software for his dad's HVAC business, learning usability testing, pivoting from contractor software to AI-generated code, and why he built LlamaPress.
25 January 2026, 3:00 pm - 59 minutes 3 seconds306 - Steve Pike, Co-Founder of Infield
In this episode I talk with Steve Pike, founder of Infield, about dependency management and automated Rails upgrades. We discuss the tradeoffs of taking on dependencies, authorization libraries like CanCanCan versus Pundit, open source maintainer obligations, and how AI is changing the upgrade automation landscape.
23 January 2026, 9:00 pm - 1 hour 10 minutes305 - Sean Schertell, CEO and Founder of Codepilot
In this episode I talk with Sean Schertell about his return to Rails after many years in JavaScript, the pain of node module hell, Kamal for deployment, and Sean's new startup ZiaMap for land surveyors.
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15 January 2026, 3:00 am - 1 hour 20 minutes304 - Abstraction and Consciousness with Christian Genco
In this episode I talk with Christian Jenko for round two. We explore abstraction as the most important idea in software, Michael Singer's philosophy on consciousness and thoughts, whether AI can become conscious, and how our mental abstractions shape what we see in reality.
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- Designing Object-Oriented Software by Rebecca Wirfs-Brock
- The Surrender Experiment by Michael A. Singer
- The Untethered Soul by Michael A. Singer
- Living Untethered by Michael A. Singer
- I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter
- A Thousand Brains by Jeff Hawkins
- Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain by David Eagleman
- The Emperor's New Mind by Roger Penrose
- Conjectures and Refutations by Karl Popper
- Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again by Andy Clark
- On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes by Alexandra Horowitz
14 January 2026, 2:00 am - 1 hour 11 minutes303 - Christian Genco, Founder of Fileinbox
In this episode I talk with Christian Genko, founder of Fileinbox. We discuss bootstrapping SaaS products, finding business ideas through openness rather than forcing, how LLMs have changed development workflows, TDD with Claude Code, and the enduring value of taste and abstractions in software.
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13 January 2026, 1:00 pm - 59 minutes 46 seconds302 - Miles Woodroffe, CTO of Mindful Chef
In this episode I talk with Miles Woodroffe, CTO of Mindful Chef. We discuss his music career touring with The Specials and working with Bob Dylan and Ray Charles, how he transitioned into tech, building great teams, and finding people who enjoy working together.
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12 January 2026, 10:00 pm - 1 hour 25 minutes300 - TDD and AI with Paul Hammond
In this episode I talk with Paul Hammond about TDD as a discoverable principle—something alien programmers would independently arrive at. We discuss my "specify, encode, fulfill" formulation, why programming needs theory instead of rules of thumb, and the business payoff of technical quality: Paul returned to a well-built project after 18 months and delivered months of planned work before Christmas.
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2 January 2026, 1:00 am - 52 minutes 35 seconds301 - Bekki Freeman, Staff Software Engineer at Caribou and Co-Organizer of Rocky Mountain Ruby
In this episode I talk with Becky Freeman, staff engineer at Caribou and co-organizer of Rocky Mountain Ruby, about legacy code, refactoring long-running applications, and the psychological skills required to get team buy-in for technical improvements.
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2 January 2026, 1:00 am - 1 hour 18 minutes294 - The Dubious Idea of Code Reuse with Dave Thomas
In this episode I talk with Dave Thomas about why code reuse is overrated, the economics of programming principles, and why we can't empirically test whether practices work—we have to scrutinize the arguments behind them. Dave also discusses his new book Simplicity and his "developer without portfolio" concept.
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2 January 2026, 12:00 am - 1 hour 5 minutes295 - Freelancing and Consulting with Wale Olaleye
In this episode I talk with Wale Olaleye about finding consulting clients through referrals and word of mouth. We discuss the "hunting vs farming" analogy for marketing, simplifying your pitch, filtering clients with deposits, and how genuine community relationships lead to business over time.
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2 January 2026, 12:00 am - More Episodes? Get the App