Jeff Meyerson:
Open source is a tremendous opportunity and we should really recognize how important the open-source tooling that we have today is. That is a tremendous accomplishment for the software engineering community.
I think employees should be allowed to spend 20% of their time working on something that contributes to the company, or maybe doesn't contribute to the company. Maybe it's art, maybe it's music, maybe it's writing their own software that they're going to build a company based off of. But the companies should encourage this. You should give your employees creative freedom because nobody else is encouraging creative freedom. Even in everyday life, societally, we suppress creative freedom.

Eric Anderson:
Today we want to remember Jeff Meyerson, the creator of Software Engineering Daily, who passed away this summer. He was a friend of mine and Erika Hokanson, who is joining us here on the show. Software Engineering Daily was the preeminent software engineering podcast. It's been around for at least five years, created thousands of episodes, and that content lives on today. The podcast still runs and there's a site full of technical material beyond the episodes. Erika played a critical role in building that business, so we're excited to have her here to share her experience with Jeff and with Software Engineering Daily. Welcome, Erika.

Erika Hokanson:
Thanks so much for having me, Eric. Yeah, I love your show, and it's a pleasure to be on and celebrate Jeff's life.

Eric Anderson:
Yeah, let's figure out how we both first met Jeff. I was working at Google on a product called Dataflow, and as a product manager, I was trying to generate some interest in the product and thought I should go on this podcast, which seemed like the top podcast at the time, called Software Engineering Radio. Contacted the organizers, who put me in touch with Jeff to do an interview. Jeff was working at Amazon and so we went through the podcast experience and then Jeff was like, "Eric, we should just meet up for lunch," and so we ended up eating at a Google cafeteria.
Pretty quickly, Jeff gets into, "Hey, Eric, I think we should start a podcast." This is a guy who I've maybe had an hour conversation with before, but Jeff was one to make you feel comfortable that you were friends with, and I was like, "Yeah, maybe we should," and so we jammed on that idea for a while, which is a thing Jeff and I would do quite a bit in the future, we would jam on ideas. He was basically pitching, which I didn't realize that at the time on how this could totally happen, and I was like, "This totally could. We should totally do it." That was the end of the lunch and I never thought about it for a second more. I think that was how conversations like that go. You jam and then you move on. But clearly, Jeff was much more committed, and I think I saw within a few months that he had launched Software Engineering Daily.

Erika Hokanson:
Nice, nice. Well, Jeff was clearly inspired from that experience and saw this great need for a daily technical podcast. I know that Jeff started the podcast with a man named Pranay and they got the thing up and running quickly, a daily cadence. Jeff had left his job at Amazon and was really excited to be covering all the technical content in the community and turned that into a business and a great source of information for the community. I was going to a coding bootcamp in Seattle and I was listening to every technical podcast I could find. I was kind of a podcast junkie, so I was an early fan of Software Engineering Daily, which I think had been running for maybe five or six months, and I would tune in every day on my commute.
I saw a Twitter post from Jeff that there was an upcoming meetup at Google in Seattle, and I didn't even know that Jeff lived in Seattle, but that's also where I was at the time. I went to meet up at Google and I'm looking around, and the talk was very good, but Jeff was quite busy. I recognized him and I wanted to say hi, but he was too engaged in all these conversations. I didn't get to meet him. Later after the meetup, he was like, "Hey, what did everybody think of that talk?" I wrote on the public Slack channel, "I thought it was really great and I was sorry we didn't get to meet."
I sort of joked about wanting to intern for Software Engineering Daily. I was like, "Huge fan of the show. What could I do?" It was kind of a joke at the time because I couldn't really imagine doing that, but then I was like, "Wait a second. I really should offer to intern for Jeff at Software Engineering Daily. Wouldn't that be fun?" I'd learn a lot, and I was studying for technical interviews at the time and looking at different internships I could do to become a software developer, so I offered to meet up with Jeff.
We met and had some coffee and I had done all this research about, of course, more episodes of Software Engineering Daily than I had ever listened to, as well as Jeff's other writing. He was a very prolific writer on Quora and on his blog and he just had so many ideas. I sat down with Jeff and I said, "Jeff, I see that you are an artist. You are so prolific in creating music, writing, the podcast. You are just a content machine." I was like, "I think I see what you're doing and I want to help you. Here are all the things I could do to help grow your business. Wouldn't that be fun?" Jeff was very amused by this. He was very entertained. He couldn't believe I'd listened to any of his music, which was really kind of quirky electronic stuff with a pop sensibility.
But I felt like we had a great conversation and that we could be friends and work together, so I went on to work with Jeff for over five years, just the two of us working remotely, plus a couple of contractors. My primary role as it developed was as director of operations and sales, so pretty much everything besides the actual podcast interviews is what I was up to. The show went on as a daily show Monday through Friday for many, many years, and I'm so glad to have been there from the early days and helped it grow so much.

Eric Anderson:
Wow, that's the first time I've heard that story, Erika. That's fantastic. It's funny that you framed it originally as maybe a joke that you would work with him because I think that's how I interpreted Jeff's idea that he would leave Amazon. I mean, here we are, we're both at big tech companies, cushy jobs, and he is like, "Let's leave it and start a podcast." I think that's a conversation that happens once a week and you're like, "Totally, let's do it," and then we go our separate ways.
Then I see on LinkedIn that Jeff's started a podcast. I'm like, "Oh, look. He's doing that thing." Then he's left Amazon. Then I'm like, "Wow, he's really going for it." Our relationship was such where we would see each other once a year at the random conference, a CubeCon or a re:Invent. I think what was striking about Jeff is that things would just pick up where they left off. It was like we had talked a year ago and he was like, "Hey, how's that one deal?" and I would ask him how the podcast is going and we'd immediately jump into ideas.

Erika Hokanson:
Hmm. Yeah, that's a really great point. Jeff did have an incredible memory and I think really valued every conversation that he had with people. I think, as I mentioned, when I first met him, I found Jeff to be just oozing with charisma. That was very inspiring to people. He was really funny. He had this infectious laugh and he would often laugh during the podcast interviews. I think a lot of people had an affinity for his personality in this aspect of finding joy in his life, even for being somebody who was so highly intelligent and self-aware and also making a technical podcast a little bit more lighthearted and having some personal elements. There's humans building all this software.
I realized it was hard for Jeff to have a normal back-and-forth conversation, that he was always interviewing you, and he did have that great memory. I don't know if he was born and interviewer or grew into that over time, but he was just so curious about the world and he asked lots of questions and he was also just so good at seeing how things worked at a high level and simplifying them and that translated into being a really top-notch technical podcast host.

Eric Anderson:
I was interviewed, I was on his show once or twice, and then on Software Engineering Radio once. He had developed his own way of doing a podcast interview. There's a lot of these very casual ones. They start out with people just bantering. I think that's supposed to generate goodwill among listeners, but Jeff would jump right into the content. If he were to talk about Apache Beam or Dataflow, it would be like, "Apache Beam is a stream processing and batch processing in one unified service," value add in the first five seconds as he explains something to you. I'm not sure how he arrived at that, but it seemed unique to him.

Erika Hokanson:
Yeah, that's a great compliment, and yeah, I think a testimonial to his ability to condense all this information from the entire industry into these digestible pieces for people who are listening to the show. I think that was a great talent of his

Eric Anderson:
Maybe moving away from the podcasting, do you have any recollection, Erika, on Jeff's personal life, what hobbies or things he did in his spare time?

Erika Hokanson:
Yeah, there were a few things that he did talk about now and then on the podcast that he had enjoyed in the past, for example, gambling, Magic: The Gathering, writing on Quora, I think also basketball he talked about a little bit as well, and he listened to a ton of other podcasts to keep up on the news, and he loved audiobooks, so he was definitely always consuming information. He was really into fitness. Then sometimes he'd spend a chunk of a few months working on a new album in his free time. Some of the albums are almost like concept albums and they're sort of snapshots of what he was going through in his life at that time.
Jeff also, as far as other hobbies go, Jeff was really into working. He hardly ever took a day off. He was really into the 996 work culture that is popular in China, like working 9:00 AM to 9:00 PM six days a week. He stuck to that. Sometimes I'd notice him starting to get a little stressed and I'd say, "Jeff, maybe it'd be good to go sit on the beach in Tahiti and kick back for a little while." But I mean, he thought that would be lonely. He loved talking to people and he just had this endless curiosity about humans and their nature.

Eric Anderson:
I mean, you speak to the work ethic. When he originally had thought of doing the daily podcast episode, that's the first thing I thought of was, "That's a lot of work mean to generate the pipeline of podcasts, presumably take some time, and then the actual recording and coordinating of the recordings take some time." You probably were more familiar with the cadence than I. From what I can tell, he mostly stuck to that daily releases.

Erika Hokanson:
Yeah, about 20 episodes a month. Sometimes there'd be a special edition, more editorial piece on a weekend that would come out. I remember he did one about Istio and some of the different competitors at that time. Sometimes he'd also release one that was more about his music, like he'd release an album on a Saturday sometimes. Yeah, that was a very rigid schedule that we stuck to for many years.

Eric Anderson:
Amazing. On the personal life, any funny stories that we didn't cover that we should?

Erika Hokanson:
Let me see. Jeff was just so funny and quirky, as I think I've shared. We went to a lot of conferences together. You mentioned CubeCon or Google Cloud, and of course, we worked remotely, so I would only see Jeff maybe once a year because after a while we lived in different cities even. We'd of course talk on Slack every day. When we liked what the other person had said, we'd use the grape emoji, like the fruit, like, "That's grape. I dig it." That was our interpersonal thumbs up on that idea.
Then in different business situations, we'd have a call and decide who was going to play a bad cop or a good cop. We'd want to get a deal done, for example, in sales. Jeff usually volunteered to be the bad cop, which I appreciated because I'm too kind to a fault. But that tended to work out. Then we'd laugh afterward about the dynamics.
Another phrase we would use, Jeff would be interested in pursuing other areas of interest at different points, even while the business was getting really successful. He'd say, "Okay, Erika, you run the business like it's wheels on the bus." That would be our mantra, "Let's just keep this going. The things we're doing are really working. Let's just dial it in, make it really tight." Then later during some more difficult times, I told him, I'd keep things going but, "Okay, Jeff, now it's wheels on the rickshaw," and he thought that was hilarious, so we'd laugh about wheels on different automobiles and vehicles and things.
Going back to Jeff's music, one year for his birthday, he booked some time at a recording studio in L.A. and I think he had hired a couple of singers to work over some beats he had created in advance. This was his dream come true. He's projecting to the top of his musical dreams.

Eric Anderson:
Wow. I wasn't aware that the music was a long-term interest of his.

Erika Hokanson:
Yeah, huge passion of his. Some people never finish something because they're like, "Oh, it's not done yet. I still have to edit that track or change those vocals," but Jeff was still on that move-fast, software-release mentality. It's time to just create the thing and publish it and keep going. I admired that about him.
I think Jeff's creative energy was truly inspiring. We've talked a lot about that in this conversation. Jeff never had any shortage of ideas. He had at least, I want to say, eight other app ideas and software company ideas that I can think of from over the years. He was so passionate about pursuing all of those. At some of the different points, I thought, "Maybe it'd be better to do more market research about some of this stuff. Do people actually want this app? Would they use it? Are these features helpful?" But I loved that he just had this endless flow of ideas.
That's also why we ended up being good business partners, because Jeff had a lot of these great ideas, or sometimes mediocre ideas, or what have you, depending on your opinion, but that I could sort of slow down and zoom out and develop the plan and make things happen. That was super inspiring to me.
Then listeners would write in to tell us, "Thank you," that certain episodes had helped them get jobs, or escape from poverty, or give back to their communities in different parts of the world, and find meaningful careers, so that really kept us going for a lot of years. That was incredible. Some people would write in and say, "Oh, I just binge listened to all your episodes about a certain kind of database and it helped me pass these interviews," so that was very rewarding.
Jeff often reached out to other tech podcasters, he'd appear on their show or they'd come on our show. He loved learning about the different aspects of podcasting as a business and technology reporting and keeping up on just what other humans are doing and creating and covering. I thought it was so brave that Jeff went ahead and he saw this need for a daily technical podcast, he went for it, and it became wildly successful. Both his personality and his work ethic and his creativity, all those things were truly admirable. That's how I want to remember Jeff, as somebody who wouldn't slow down, and as somebody who wanted to provide the tech community with free education and the huge body of work that he created. How about you? What things about Jeff would you say have influenced you or inspired you in long-term ways?

Eric Anderson:
I don't think I would have this podcast without Jeff because there was no part of me that thought I wanted to be a podcaster until Jeff made me think I could be, until Jeff was like, "We should do this together," and I was like, "Me? What? Why?" Then to see him pull it off, I was like, "Yeah, maybe there's a way I can contribute in this world to podcasting."
Another way he's influenced me is now that as a venture investor, I have to find people who can become preeminent in their field in a five-year period, go from nothing to something quite meaningful. I think you meet these people that are normal and you think, "How could they become super normal?" It was neat to have seen that very really through Jeff. On one level, he seemed like a very normal person, and on yet another level, he excelled at building this community in a way that I think others have tried and maybe not done as well, so it's helped me appreciate the awesomeness maybe in each of us. There was this thing in Jeff that was unique and he was able to show the world and so now I can meet other people and think, "Maybe there's a bit of Jeff in them, too," and give them a chance.

Erika Hokanson:
Oh, I love that. That's wonderful.

Eric Anderson:
Erika, anything you wanted to add that we didn't cover yet today?

Erika Hokanson:
I think that's all, Eric. I really appreciate you having me on. Really neat reflecting on Software Engineering Daily and all those years working with Jeff. I really appreciate you taking the time to share this with your audience. Thank you so much.