The Peterman Pod

John Myles White recently left his role as a director of engineering at Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL) so we spoke freely about promo culture, how big tech has changed, and how his career grew.

𝗣𝗼𝗱𝗰𝗮𝘀𝘁 𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗸𝘀:

• YouTube: https://youtu.be/aPfnP4iAIH8
• Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-peterman-pod/id1777363835
• Transcript: https://www.developing.dev/p/msl-eng-director-promo-hacking-industry

𝗕𝗿𝗼𝘂𝗴𝗵𝘁 𝘁𝗼 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗯𝘆:

• Cursor 3: a unified workspace for building software with agents, check it out at https://cursor.com/
• My ergonomic keyboard project, you can follow along here: https://read.compose.llc/

𝗧𝗶𝗺𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗺𝗽𝘀:

0:00 - Intro
0:54 - Is he bullish on MSL
5:23 - Running promotions at Meta
15:15 - Growing at Meta
22:22 - Julia core language contributor
29:24 - Academics failing into industry
31:48 - Stats book recommendations
38:02 - Biggest career regret
41:05 - Advice for his younger self
42:46 - Outro

𝗪𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝗳𝗶𝗻𝗱 𝗝𝗼𝗵𝗻:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-myles-white-115697180/
• X/Twitter: https://x.com/johnmyleswhite
• Personal Website: https://www.johnmyleswhite.com/
• Github: https://github.com/johnmyleswhite

𝗪𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝗳𝗶𝗻𝗱 𝗥𝘆𝗮𝗻:

• Newsletter: https://www.developing.dev/
• X/Twitter: https://x.com/ryanlpeterman
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanlpeterman/
• Threads: https://www.threads.com/@ryanlpeterman
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ryanlpeterman
• TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@ryanlpeterman

𝗥𝗲𝗳𝗲𝗿𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲𝗱 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗲𝗽𝗶𝘀𝗼𝗱𝗲:

• Evaluating the design of the R language - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/240040602_Evaluating_the_Design_of_the_R_Language
• Stats book he mentioned (not affiliate link) - https://www.amazon.com/Foundations-Agnostic-Statistics-Peter-Aronow/dp/1316631141
• Stats book he mentioned (not affiliate link) - https://www.amazon.com/All-Statistics-Statistical-Inference-Springer/dp/0387402721

Barbara Liskov is a Turing Award winner known for her work in programming languages and distributed systems. We discussed the major problems she solved in her career, stories about Dijkstra, getting rejected from Princeton because she was a woman and misc topics around her work.

🔸 My keyboard Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ryanlpeterman/compose-simple-ergonomics-beautifully-done

𝗣𝗼𝗱𝗰𝗮𝘀𝘁 𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗸𝘀:

• YouTube: https://youtu.be/T9CGjbPZeaM
• Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-peterman-pod/id1777363835
• Transcript: https://www.developing.dev/p/turing-award-winner-data-abstraction

𝗘𝗽𝗶𝘀𝗼𝗱𝗲 𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗸𝘀:

• Go To Statement Considered Harmful: https://homepages.cwi.nl/~storm/teaching/reader/Dijkstra68.pdf
• Viewstamped Replication: https://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/fall09/cos518/papers/viewstamped.pdf

𝗧𝗶𝗺𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗺𝗽𝘀:

0:00 - Intro
1:00 - Getting rejected from Princeton
2:53 - The software crisis
9:03 - The drawbacks of Python
10:17 - Getting into distributed computing
13:09 - Paxos vs Viewstamped replication
21:44 - The significance of Dijkstras letter
25:04 - Why she stayed in academia
30:39 - Why her award was questioned
33:51 - Outro

𝗪𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝗳𝗶𝗻𝗱 𝗕𝗮𝗿𝗯𝗮𝗿𝗮:

• Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Liskov

𝗪𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝗳𝗶𝗻𝗱 𝗥𝘆𝗮𝗻:

• Newsletter: https://www.developing.dev/
• X/Twitter: https://x.com/ryanlpeterman
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanlpeterman/
• Threads: https://www.threads.com/@ryanlpeterman
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ryanlpeterman
• TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@ryanlpeterman

Mike Stonebraker is a Turing Award winner famous for his contributions to fundamental database technologies. We discussed the story behind building Postgres, where he disagrees with Google/Amazon on databases, and what he's working on now.

🔸 My keyboard Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ryanlpeterman/compose-simple-ergonomics-beautifully-done

𝗣𝗼𝗱𝗰𝗮𝘀𝘁 𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗸𝘀:

• YouTube: https://youtu.be/YPObBOwIrHk
• Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-peterman-pod/id1777363835
• Transcript: https://www.developing.dev/p/turing-award-winner-postgres-disagreeing

𝗘𝗽𝗶𝘀𝗼𝗱𝗲 𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗸𝘀:

• Red book of database readings: http://www.redbook.io/
• BEAVER: An Enterprise Benchmark for Text-to-SQL: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.02038

𝗧𝗶𝗺𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗺𝗽𝘀:

0:00 - Intro
1:03 - How he got into databases
6:43 - Competing with Oracle
9:07 - What made Postgres special
15:55 - One size fits none
21:37 - Why he disagreed with Google
29:14 - Why he chose academia over big tech
30:58 - Replacing state in an OS with a DB
42:02 - Future problems in databases
51:36 - Technical book recommendations to learn databases
52:20 - Advice for younger self
55:52 - Outro

𝗪𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝗳𝗶𝗻𝗱 𝗠𝗶𝗸𝗲:

• His current company DBOS: https://dbos.dev/

𝗪𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝗳𝗶𝗻𝗱 𝗥𝘆𝗮𝗻:

• Newsletter: https://www.developing.dev/
• X/Twitter: https://x.com/ryanlpeterman
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanlpeterman/
• Threads: https://www.threads.com/@ryanlpeterman
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ryanlpeterman
• TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@ryanlpeterman

In this episode, I talked to Marc Brooker, a distinguished engineer at AWS who started there as a new grad and rose through the ranks. We discussed technical learnings from 3,000+ cloud system postmortems, how software engineering is changing with AI, how to find impactful problems and much more.

🔶 My keyboard Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ryanlpeterman/compose-simple-ergonomics-beautifully-done

𝗣𝗼𝗱𝗰𝗮𝘀𝘁 𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗸𝘀:

• YouTube: https://youtu.be/u3GjIXP9N0s
• Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1qX2GfpbzxzGpGvDZVINdO?si=wsDGZo9PTbCNalKVybFVnA
• Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-peterman-pod/id1777363835
• Transcript: https://www.developing.dev/p/aws-distinguished-eng-learnings-from

𝗘𝗽𝗶𝘀𝗼𝗱𝗲 𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗸𝘀:

• Post we discussed on hobbies and apparent expertise: https://brooker.co.za/blog/2023/04/20/hobbies.html
• Post on software engineering changing: https://brooker.co.za/blog/2026/02/07/you-are-here.html
• Post about Senior engineers and AI: https://brooker.co.za/blog/2026/03/20/ic-leadership.html
• Post on Junior engineers and AI: https://brooker.co.za/blog/2026/03/25/ic-junior.html

𝗧𝗶𝗺𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗺𝗽𝘀:

0:00 - Intro
1:27 - Finding problems that matter
11:42 - Learnings from 3000 postmortems
23:58 - Why caches are bad
29:37 - How AI will change software engineering
36:49 - Advice for junior engineers given AI
44:02 - Thoughts for senior engineers
49:59 - Why engineers should write
57:51 - Visibility and apparent expertise
1:04:23 - AWS engineers he admires
1:06:53 - Technical book recommendations
1:09:06 - Advice for his younger self
1:10:37 - Outro

𝗪𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝗳𝗶𝗻𝗱 𝗠𝗮𝗿𝗰:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marc-brooker-b431772b/
• Twitter/X: https://x.com/MarcJBrooker
• Personal Blog: https://brooker.co.za/blog/

𝗪𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝗳𝗶𝗻𝗱 𝗥𝘆𝗮𝗻:

• Newsletter: https://www.developing.dev/
• X/Twitter: https://x.com/ryanlpeterman
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanlpeterman/
• Threads: https://www.threads.com/@ryanlpeterman
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ryanlpeterman
• TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@ryanlpeterman

This is James Everingham, former head of engineering at Instagram and a veteran of the tech world with experience at Netscape. We talked about his unconventional start in the industry, learnings from every leg of his career, and regrets he has looking back.

𝗣𝗼𝗱𝗰𝗮𝘀𝘁 𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗸𝘀:
• YouTube: https://youtu.be/VIF5Fm8NdE8
• Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-peterman-pod/id1777363835
• Transcript: https://www.developing.dev/p/ex-head-of-eng-at-instagram-career

𝗧𝗶𝗺𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗺𝗽𝘀:
0:00 - Intro
0:57 - Kicked out of college
5:35 - FBI showed up at his house
7:43 - Pre-IPO Netscape experience
25:19 - Joining Instagram as head of eng
29:12 - Why shrinking teams improves velocity
32:59 - Working with Mike Krieger
37:16 - Leading Cryptocurrency project at Meta
42:30 - What he is working on now
54:29 - Career regrets
56:27 - Advice for his younger self
57:42 - Outro

𝗪𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝗳𝗶𝗻𝗱 𝗝𝗮𝗺𝗲𝘀:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jevering/
• Twitter/X: https://x.com/jevering
• Threads: https://www.threads.com/@jevering

𝗪𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝗳𝗶𝗻𝗱 𝗥𝘆𝗮𝗻:

• Newsletter: https://www.developing.dev/
• X/Twitter: https://x.com/ryanlpeterman
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanlpeterman/
• Threads: https://www.threads.com/@ryanlpeterman
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ryanlpeterman
• TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@ryanlpeterman