GOTO - The Brightest Minds in Tech

This interview was recorded for GOTO Unscripted.
https://gotopia.tech

Will McGugan - Creator of Toad & the Python Packages, Rich, Textual & PyFilesystem
Olimpiu Pop - Technologist & Tech Journalist

ORIGINAL TALK TITLE
The Python Dev Who Built Rich, Textual & now Toad Just Redesigned How You Talk to AI

Check out more here:
https://gotopia.tech/articles/437

RESOURCES
Will
https://mastodon.social/@willmcgugan
https://x.com/willmcgugan
https://bsky.app/profile/willmcgugan.bsky.social
https://github.com/willmcgugan
https://www.linkedin.com/in/willmcgugan
https://willmcgugan.github.io

Olimpiu
https://x.com/olimpiupop
https://github.com/zroll
https://www.linkedin.com/in/olimpiupop

Links
https://www.textualize.io
https://www.batrachian.ai
https://github.com/textualize/rich
https://github.com/Textualize/textual
https://zed.dev
https://willmcgugan.github.io/toad-released
https://willmcgugan.github.io/announcing-toad

DESCRIPTION
In this GOTO Unscripted episode, Olimpiu Pop sits down with Will McGugan — Python PSF Fellow and creator of Rich (4+ billion downloads) and Textual — to demo his sabbatical project: Toad, a slick terminal-based universal frontend for AI coding agents.
Will's frustration was simple and justified: every major AI coding tool (Claude Code, Gemini, Codex) was built on top-tier models but wrapped in a UI that looked like it was designed in 2004. Toad fixes that by using the Agent Client Protocol (ACP) as a standardized plug-in layer, giving users elegant prompt editing, proper streaming markdown rendering, beautiful tables, syntax highlighting, and a hybrid shell-plus-AI interface — all in the terminal, where developers already live.

The conversation gets sharply honest when the topic turns to AI and developer craft. Will — a 30-year coding veteran who admits it's not instinctive for him to reach for AI — shares a clear-eyed view of its strengths and limits: AI is extraordinarily fast at anything well-defined and unambiguous, but still struggles with genuinely novel problems.

His conclusion?
Most of what software developers do day-to-day isn't actually novel — it's pattern assembly — and that's precisely where AI shines. The future of coding isn't replacement; it's liberation from the mechanical grind. Oh, and the podcast host literally reading out "music intro here" because stage directions ended up in the transcript? That one's a cautionary tale for the ages.

RECOMMENDED BOOKS
Will McGugan • Beginning Python Games Development 2nd ed. • https://amzn.to/4ebBfxu
Will McGugan • Beginning Game Development with Python and Pygame • https://amzn.to/4cyVdB3
Sam Keen • Clean Architecture with Python • https://amzn.to/4pBT5g0
Eric Evans • Domain-Driven Design • https://amzn.to/3tnGhwm
Naomi Ceder • The Quick Python Book • https://amzn.to/3zwdDOa
Bluesky
Instagram
LinkedIn
Facebook

CHANNEL MEMBERSHIP BONUS
Join this channel to get early access to videos & other perks:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs_tLP3AiwYKwdUHpltJPuA/join

Looking for a unique learning experience?
Attend the next GOTO conference near you! Get your ticket: gotopia.tech

SUBSCRIBE TO OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL - new videos posted daily!

This interview was recorded for the GOTO Book Club.
http://gotopia.tech/bookclub

Ian F. Darwin - Java, Android & Unix Developer, Trainer, Mentor & Author of "Java Cookbook"
Jeanne Boyarsky - Oracle Java Champion, Co-Author of "Real-World Java" & "OCP 21 Java Cert Book"

Check out more here:
https://gotopia.tech/episodes/438

RESOURCES
Ian
https://fosstodon.org/@IanDarwin
https://x.com/Ian_Darwin
https://github.com/IanDarwin
https://www.linkedin.com/in/idarwin
https://www.darwinsys.com

Jeanne
https://bsky.app/profile/jeanneboyarsky.bsky.social
https://mastodon.social/@jeanneboyarsky
https://x.com/jeanneboyarsky
https://github.com/boyarsky
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeanne-boyarsky
https://sites.google.com/view/jeanneboyarsky
https://www.selikoff.net

Links
https://javacookbook.org
https://dev.java/community/jcs

DESCRIPTION
In this GOTO Book Club, Java Champion Jeanne Boyarsky interviews Ian F. Darwin — author of one of Java's most enduring reference books, Java Cookbook, now in its fifth edition covering up to Java 25. The conversation traces Ian's extraordinary journey: from writing Java's first commercial training course outside of Sun Microsystems, to meeting Tim O'Reilly at a Unix conference and handing him a chapter on lint, to delivering a class in Houston where the entire room had just been laid off and were using the course as their golden handshake into a new career. Ian talks about the philosophy behind the book — culling a peak 900-page beast down to a tight 600 pages, anchoring tool choices on proven, battle-tested picks like JUnit, Mockito, and logging — and shares his three favourite chapters: Regular Expressions, Object-Oriented Techniques, and Reflection.

The conversation gets sharply honest about AI and the future of the industry. Ian — who uses Claude as his coding assistant and does vibe code — warns that his greatest fear isn't AI taking over the world, but something subtler and more dangerous: companies stopping junior hires because AI can do the work, leaving no one to grow into the deep expertise that retires with the current generation. The parallel risk for books is equally candid: AI was trained on older editions, so the fifth edition is genuinely new and un-scraped territory.

His advice for anyone who has learned the basics of Java?
Don't ask an AI — buy the cookbook, save yourself years of trial and error, and for goodness' sake, read the code before you deploy it. "It's like building an airplane and putting passengers on it without flight testing."

RECOMMENDED BOOKS
Ian F. Darwin • Java Cookbook 5th ed. • https://amzn.to/3QH0NZy
Ian F. Darwin • Java Cookbook 1st ed. • https://amzn.to/4sUpPlL
Ian F. Darwin • Checking C Programs with Lint • https://amzn.to/3Q2C69Y
Victor Grazi & Jeanne Boyarsky • Real-World Java • https://amzn.to/4oCEeBR
Jeanne Boyarsky & Scott Selikoff • OCP 21 Java Cert Book • https://amzn.to/4lF8OIC
Bluesky
Instagram
LinkedIn
Facebook

CHANNEL MEMBERSHIP BONUS
Join this channel to get early access to videos & other perks:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs_tLP3AiwYKwdUHpltJPuA/join

Looking for a unique learning experience?
Attend the next GOTO conference near you! Get your ticket: gotopia.tech

SUBSCRIBE TO OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL - new videos posted daily!

This interview was recorded for GOTO Unscripted.
https://gotopia.tech

Marcin Grzejszczak - Software Engineer at HeroDevs & Java Champion
Jakub Pilimon - Software Architect at jPilo & Software Consultant at Bottega IT Minds

ORIGINAL TALK TITLE
The Typo That Broke Production — And Accidentally Created Spring Cloud Contract

Check out more here:
https://gotopia.tech/articles/435

RESOURCES
Marcin
https://bsky.app/profile/toomuchcoding.com
https://mastodon.social/@[email protected]
https://twitter.com/MGrzejszczak
https://github.com/marcingrzejszczak
https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcin-grzejszczak-15565119
https://toomuchcoding.com

Jakub
https://twitter.com/JakubPilimon
https://github.com/pilloPl
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jakub-pilimon-449b7984
http://pillopl.github.io

Links
https://toomuchcoding.com/post
https://martinfowler.com/articles/consumerDrivenContracts.html
https://www.tomakehurst.com

DESCRIPTION
In this GOTO Unscripted episode, Jakub Pilimon sits down with Marcin Grzejszczak — Java Champion, Spring Cloud Contract contributor, author, mentor, and founder of a rural housewives' circle (yes, really) — to trace a 15+ year career that went from C++ on the Côte d'Azur to becoming one of the key architects of Spring Cloud Contract and the Micrometer Observation API. Marcin shares how real production pain — a junior dev fixing a typo in an API that silently broke every client — gave birth to what would become Spring Cloud Contract, and how he's never shy about calling out his own embarrassing code (complete with a Javadoc that opens with "I'm sorry").

The conversation pivots sharply into 2025 territory, with Marcin sketching out an AI-powered future for contract testing: instead of manually writing contracts (which developers routinely abandon), capture live production traffic, let AI generate the contracts, and let humans do what they're actually good at — reviewing and approving. Wrapping up with observability, Marcin argues the most underrated pillar isn't logs, metrics, or traces — it's context. Without knowing why something happened (a deployment, a business event), raw telemetry data is just noise. Practical, honest, and occasionally self-deprecating: a thoroughly human conversation in the age of AI.

RECOMMENDED BOOKS
Marcin Grzejszczak • Mockito Cookbook • https://amzn.to/4rXOrtf
Marcin Grzejszczak • Instant Mockito • https://amzn.to/4lV2ePQ
Sam Newman • Building Microservices • https://amzn.to/3dMPbOs
Sam Newman • Monolith to Microservices • https://amzn.to/2Nml96E
Roy Osherove • The Art of Unit Testing • https://bit.ly/3obiKNB
Charity Majors, Liz Fong-Jones & George Miranda • Observability Engineering • https://amzn.to/38scbma
Bluesky
Instagram
LinkedIn
Facebook

CHANNEL MEMBERSHIP BONUS
Join this channel to get early access to videos & other perks:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs_tLP3AiwYKwdUHpltJPuA/join

Looking for a unique learning experience?
Attend the next GOTO conference near you! Get your ticket: gotopia.tech

SUBSCRIBE TO OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL - new videos posted daily!

This interview was recorded for the GOTO Book Club.
http://gotopia.tech/bookclub

Lukasz Dynowski - Independent Consultant & Co-Author of "Learning API Styles"
Sam Newman - Author of "Building Microservices" & "Monolith to Microservices"

Check out more here:
https://gotopia.tech/episodes/436

RESOURCES
Lukasz
https://github.com/ludyn-leo
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ldynia
https://learningapistyles.com

Sam
https://twitter.com/samnewman
https://github.com/snewman
https://www.linkedin.com/in/samnewman
http://samnewman.io
http://samnewman.io/blog

Links
https://www.youtube.com/@ldynia1
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRkB-vSK4koOHYIhpKXuXpipVpByEKuPu
https://learningapistyles.com
https://github.com/ldynia/learning-api-styles
https://nordicapis.com/the-bezos-api-mandate-amazons-manifesto-for-externalization
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1176617.1176622

DESCRIPTION
In this GOTO Book Club episode, Sam Newman — author of "Building Microservices" — sits down with Lukasz Dynowski, co-author of "Learning API Styles", for a refreshingly low-level deep dive into a subject most developers think they already understand. The book deliberately starts from the network layer up — transmission modes, TCP, protocol stacks — rather than jumping straight to REST and GraphQL, because, as Lukasz explains, most API problems only become visible when you understand the substrate beneath them. The conversation covers the full spectrum: public vs internal APIs, the Bezos API Mandate moment, why treating your API as a product is non-negotiable, and why the choice between binary and textual protocols is never as obvious as performance benchmarks suggest.

The real gold comes in two moments. First, Lukasz lays out a crisp checklist for what makes a good API — audience-awareness, maintainability, efficiency, intuitiveness, resilience, security, testability, and documentation that actually matches behavior. Second, Sam shares a war story about a credit derivative system where the only way to figure out who was accessing the database was to turn off the credentials and wait for angry phone calls.
The lesson: context shapes every trade-off, there's no universal right answer between REST, gRPC, WebSockets, or messaging, and the best API decision is the one that fits your situation — not the one that fits the conference talk.

RECOMMENDED BOOKS
Lukasz Dynowski • Learning API Styles • https://amzn.to/3PFembK
Sam Newman • Building Resilient Distributed Systems • https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/building-resilient-distributed/9781098163532
Sam Newman • Monolith to Microservices • https://amzn.to/2Nml96E
Sam Newman • Building Microservices • https://amzn.to/3dMPbOs
Ronnie Mitra & Irakli Nadareishvili • Microservices: Up and Running• https://amzn.to/3c4HmmL
Bluesky
Instagram
LinkedIn
Facebook

CHANNEL MEMBERSHIP BONUS
Join this channel to get early access to videos & other perks:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs_tLP3AiwYKwdUHpltJPuA/join

Looking for a unique learning experience?
Attend the next GOTO conference near you! Get your ticket: gotopia.tech

SUBSCRIBE TO OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL - new videos posted daily!

This interview was recorded for the GOTO Book Club.
http://gotopia.tech/bookclub

Jay Wengrow - Author of “A Common-Sense Guide to AI Engineering” & CEO of Actualize
Kris Jenkins - Lifelong Computer Geek and Podcast Host

RESOURCES
Jay
https://x.com/jaywengrow
https://github.com/jaywengrow
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaywengrow
https://www.commonsensedev.com

Kris
https://bsky.app/profile/krisajenkins.bsky.social
https://twitter.com/krisajenkins
https://www.linkedin.com/in/krisjenkins
https://github.com/krisajenkins
http://blog.jenkster.com

DESCRIPTION
In this GOTO Book Club episode, host Kris Jenkins sits down with Jay Wengrow — founder of coding bootcamp Actualize and author of the bestselling Common-Sense Guide to Data Structures and Algorithms — to dig into his latest book, A Common-Sense Guide to AI Engineering. Jay demystifies how AI agents actually work: at heart, they're a clever hack where your code intercepts an LLM's text output, watches for special notation, and triggers real functions when it spots them. From there, the conversation expands into guardrails (regex, judge LLMs, and specialist ML models), multi-agent architectures for complex tasks, and a hands-on example of a 150-line podcast-generating app built entirely from scratch — no framework required.

The real throughline is a pragmatic, sceptical take on the current AI tooling landscape. Jay argues that frameworks can lock you into patterns that haven't been proven yet, and that the field is too new to know which abstractions are genuinely worth having. His rule of thumb: reach for a framework only when it will do something meaningfully better than you can — not just faster. The book was deliberately written around fundamentals rather than specific tools, so it ages well even as the ecosystem moves at breakneck speed. The conclusion is refreshingly grounded: understand the LLM's inherent limitations, build the middle layer thoughtfully, and don't outsource your system prompts to anyone — or anything.

RECOMMENDED BOOKS
Jay Wengrow • A Common-Sense Guide to AI Engineering • https://pragprog.com/titles/jwpaieng
Jay Wengrow • A Common-Sense Guide to Data Structures and Algorithms • https://amzn.to/4bPiTjd
Jay Wengrow • A Common-Sense Guide to Data Structures & Algorithms in Python • https://amzn.to/3PpwtlT
Jay Wengrow • A Common-Sense Guide to Data Structures and Algorithms in JavaScript • https://amzn.to/4dDSZBl
Bluesky
Instagram
LinkedIn
Facebook

CHANNEL MEMBERSHIP BONUS
Join this channel to get early access to videos & other perks:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs_tLP3AiwYKwdUHpltJPuA/join

Looking for a unique learning experience?
Attend the next GOTO conference near you! Get your ticket: gotopia.tech

SUBSCRIBE TO OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL - new videos posted daily!