If you’re a hacker, you’ll probably like our show 
TechZing is an informal chat show hosted by Justin Vincent & Jason Roberts. We release two shows per week.
- Weekend Show – We have a ‘no agenda’ style discussion ruminating on tech, startups and other HN-like topics, we’ll even on occasion take a risk and venture into the unknown. We also talk about the progression of our businesses Pluggio, AppIgnite & Swarm SG.
Here’s some of our shows that we recommend as a crash course in TechZing!
Interview Shows
Discussion Shows
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Justin and Jason interview Jessica Mah (CEO and co-founder of InDinero) about her recent Y-Combinator experience and how she was able to raise over a million in seed round funding from a group of top tier angel investors.
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Justin and Jason discuss the show’s recent growth, Jason’s frustration with his new iMac and the death of his VPS, selecting development tools for OSX and setting up a local LAMP stack, localizing Pluggio and the effect of eliminating the free version, the status of Swarm’s AI and creating a networked version of the game, the downside to radical transparency and reasons not to disclose your product roadmap, Cargo Cultism on Hacker News, India’s red rain and Panspermia, ACH (Analysis of Competitiing Hypotheses) and whether the concept could work as a web application, whether Einstein was a superman or just super stubborn, using Rocket Engine to build a browser based game, the current app bubble and whether the future belongs to the web or platform specific apps, debugging web code in an IDE versus just using print statements, the variance in the cost of living across the country and why crime rates are so localized.
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Justin and Jason discuss why Inception is the ultimate programmer’s movie,
eight things to know before starting a business,
Datasift – like Yahoo Pipes for Twitter, why Jason can’t read books anymore,
engineering a dinosaur, the limits of Jasonism, how structuring your day increases efficiency, the
Pomodoro technique, the
six keys to being excellent at anything,
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Justin and Jason interview serial entrepreneur and angel investor Travis Kalanick about his initial success co-founding the Scour multimedia search engine and how it got sued out of existence by the MPAA, RIAA and NMPA, how within weeks of it’s demise he was able to flip the dead concept into a new venture called Red Swoosh that was eventually acquired by Akamai Technologies for $19 million, and how he harnesses his entrepreneurial experience in his new role as an angel investor.
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Justin (the Englishman) and Jason (the American) discuss whether Jason is awake enough to record shows in the morning and his new love of Instapaper, John McDowall’s blog post about TechZing and Jason’s heretical views, how much time should be spent making versus promoting, the difficulty of getting started writing a blog and whether or not Twitter is worth the time, why most startups will fail, Jason’s technique for displaying an HTML grid with a huge number of rows, the need to sometimes write substandard code and the psychological payoff of refactoring, how the key to winning fans is great customer support and whether Hacker News is a cargo cult.
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Justin and Jason discuss the naming of the podcast and the mailing list, Guy Kawasaki’s marketing strategy of positioning your startup against a leader in the space, the three C’s of startup founders, whether it’s the idea or the execution, using a blog engine versus straight HTML (rehashed), AppInventor and whether there’s a limit to how much programming can be simplified, finding and building a core user base, the two quotes for the week, jQuery Mobile, Jason’s trick for pasting a large dataset into a JavaScript app, the surprising power of an iMac with an i7 processor and an SSD (as reported by Sébastien), a statistical analysis of Hacker News titles, John Carmack’s Rage demo for the iPhone, the flow experience of optimizing code, asynchronous file upoading with progress feedback (using Xupload or PHPFileUploader) and an update on the Swarm AI.
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Justin and Jason speak with Peter Cooper about how he started and sold Code Snippets and FeedDigest (now Feed Informer) and what he learned in the process, why he prefers to work on multiple projects and why he’ll give up on a project if it doesn’t show traction early, the story and technology behind Coder I/O and his strategy going forward, why he uses a rules engine for tagging posts and the possibility of augmenting it with a Bayes classifier, how he accumulated over ten-thousand points on Hacker News, why he was approached by Apress to write Beginning Ruby, the reasons for his upcoming tour of California and why he’s starting a video blog.
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Justin and Jason discuss why GIT (the distributed version control system) is cool, the progress of Swarm and the Swarm AI – Cerebro, ideas for the TechZing newsletter, creating wildcard accounts in gmail, an impromptu La Critique of coder.io, the death of Google Wave, an overview of the audio technology used for the production of the podcast, Rob Walling’s book on bootstrapping, why Jason refuses to use blogging software for the new AppIgnite blog, how Rails was under development for a year before it was released, reasons to seek funding or not, when F*** U money can be less valuable than F*** U influence, how to increase your luck surface area, the quote of the week, how your personality defines your path, exploration vs exploitation, the use of Flex and Ajax in myVBO, how regular exercise is good for your brain and why Justin is going caveman, how new ideas can kill a startup, playing small and going big, Jason’s Javascript grid and his Javascript library – j(ason)Query, some responses to listener comments and the guiding principles behind AppIgnite.
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Justin and Jason (along with guest host Sébastien Arnaud) interview David Fogel about his background in machine learning, his experience evolving the grandmaster level checkers playing algorithm Blondie 24, his thoughts on the applicability of various machine learning techniques, his ideas on how to develop a competitive AI for Swarm, his experience with Natural Selection, Inc., a company he co-founded with his father, and why he believes it’s important to work on things that interest you.
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Justin and Jason discuss the status of the Swarm SG AI, ideas for increasing the TechZing listener base and why they’re launching a mailing list, whether or not Jason should buy a Mac, the need to improve the design of the TechZing website, potential names for Jason’s new blog, whether advice offered by 37 Signals is relevant, Jason’s thoughts on applying to TechCrunch Disrupt, coder.io as an alternative to Hacker News, Justin’s desire for telepresence, balancing pragmatism with thinking big, the physical consequences of sitting all day and not getting enough sunlight and whether Justin is replacing fat with muscle or vice versa.
