Hannah Clayton-Langton: 0:04

Hello world and welcome to the Tech Overflow Podcast. I'm Hannah Clayton Mangon.

Hugh Williams: 0:09

And I'm Hugh Williams, and we're the podcast that explains technical concepts to smart people. How are you, Hannah?

Hannah Clayton-Langton: 0:15

I'm great. I am recording on the moves, so once again, getting on a train, this time at least on a plane with my microphone. Um recording on a Saturday night, so that's a first. How are you doing?

Hugh Williams: 0:25

I'm I'm good, I'm good. And it's the end of the series. We've made it to uh the bonus episode 11.

Hannah Clayton-Langton: 0:31

We did it, and it's been a lot of fun. I wonder if maybe we should just do some quick reflections while we're getting nostalgic, because people keep asking me how it's been. Um so how have you found it? Like what has surprised you? What have you enjoyed? What have what has been more challenging?

Hugh Williams: 0:45

I've enjoyed it a lot, actually. I think I've I've learnt a ton, and I think it's uh you know good for your brain to keep it plastic, learning new things. Um so I've I've learned a ton. I also think um what I've learned is that podcasting is a lot more work than perhaps the as a listener I would have I would have perceived, for sure.

Hannah Clayton-Langton: 1:03

Yeah, totally. I would agree. I also would say, oh, and I say this to friends that ask, is that at the very beginning we were learning how to podcast. We were like understanding our topic and our mission and sort of codifying that. And actually when I think back, we were like really getting to know each other, like we've known each other for a while, but it was like a a different level of sort of partnership and like co-hosting. And so we were doing all three at once, which was pretty intense at the beginning.

Hugh Williams: 1:31

Yeah, absolutely. I feel like we figured it out now, and uh, I'm up for a series two.

Hannah Clayton-Langton: 1:36

Well I think we should do it. I think we should too.

Hugh Williams: 1:38

We've hit our OKR, so we'll have to have a new OKR for series two, maybe maybe double the number of listens or something like that.

Hannah Clayton-Langton: 1:46

Guys, Hugh, as we know, he's very successful, and now I know why, because he is very he's like ambitious, he like sends me the stats every day, he's all over it. So um, if he's gonna double the OKR, I better up my game. Um, one final, one final reflection from me. I, as you know, came up with the idea for the pod on the basis of wanting to understand tech concepts as like a non-engineer. I have learned so much through series one, like aside from learning how to podcast, like actually about technology, things that come up at work all the time that before must have just like gone over my head, things that come up outside of work all the time in the sort of tech first world that we're increasingly living in. And on that personal level, when I think about that mission, that is just a really awesome benefit for me, and I hope at least a few other people that listen in to the podcast every week.

Hugh Williams: 2:37

I've heard the same from folks. I've heard quite a few of our listeners say that uh they've learned a ton and they feel a bit smarter in you know their everyday interactions and at work. Did you have a favorite episode, by the way? I meant to ask you that.

Hannah Clayton-Langton: 2:50

Ooh. I think for me, Hannah, someone that wanted to learn about tech, our deep dive on how LLM's work was just like blew up my brain in a really awesome way, but it's quite a technical episode. I think when it comes to like listening to the episodes and how they went, for me, the outages episode was a really good one. I don't know, but what do you think?

Hugh Williams: 3:12

Yeah, I was gonna say the outages one, actually. I really enjoyed that. I mean, I liked uh I liked pulling apart the CrowdStrike debacle, that was fun, and then you know, towards the end, got to tell a couple of personal stories, and you know, we talked about bugs, and I felt like that episode had a little bit of a little bit of everything in it.

Hannah Clayton-Langton: 3:28

While we're on the topic of good episodes, obviously Jonathan and Nick, our interviewees, were awesome too. And I think we're gonna do more interviews in season two, and guys, Hugh's black book of contacts is really good. So send us who you want to hear from, and he probably knows them.

Hugh Williams: 3:43

Yeah, that was fun. It was also fun to just get reacquainted with those guys and uh, you know, do some prep for the episode with them and then sort of have the conversation and then again see what the output looked like. Uh I I thought it was great. Having somebody else on the pod's fun.

Hannah Clayton-Langton: 3:57

Yeah, definitely. More of that to come. Okay, so for our special bonus episode, we've asked you, the listeners, to send us some QA. So we've got some good QA lined up. And for those of you who have been for the ride from day one, you may remember Tech Trivia, which turned out to be more divisive than we expected.

Hugh Williams: 4:19

Some people said really love the tech trivia, that was awesome. And some people are like, please never do that again. It interrupts the flow of the show.

Hannah Clayton-Langton: 4:24

Yes. Yeah, exactly. Do you know in the UK we use the phrase like it's very marmite, which is like you love it or you hate it. I don't know if the Australian equivalent would be it's very vegemite.

Hugh Williams: 4:34

Very vegemite. If you said that to an Australian, if you said it's kind of like Vegemite, um, I guess they go, What you what do you mean? But uh if you said kind of you like it or you hate it, I go, Oh, it makes sense.

Hannah Clayton-Langton: 4:43

There was like a very successful, there was a very successful um marmite marketing campaign like 15 years ago that's really stuck in the psyche of the British public. But anyway, tech trive is marmite. I've got some, I've only got like four or five, and we'll see what makes the final cut. But they are good guys. Oh, and the first round of tech trivia, Hugh knew everything. And I, if you know all of these, I'm gonna be very impressed.

Hugh Williams: 5:02

Let's see how I go. I've got a feeling you've you've gone for the hard stuff. I think I'm probably in trouble, but we'll see how we go.

Hannah Clayton-Langton: 5:07

Okay, so should we get into the questions?

Hugh Williams: 5:09

Yeah, so we've got one here from Toby in St Albans, and I'm pretty sure that's not St Albans in Melbourne, it's probably uh the beautiful St Albans north of London, is my guess, is where Toby is. And he wants us to do a little bit of uh jargon busting for common tech acronyms like we did for GPT. So do you want to you want to hit the acronyms, Hannah, and I'll uh do my best to demystify them.

Hannah Clayton-Langton: 5:28

Yes, perfect. So the first one is VPN. So I as a lay person know a VPN is this thing that you use to log in to, well, I mainly use it to log into like streaming networks and watch Netflix stuff that is only available in the US or in Australia. Oh, I've said this already. I use it to watch Mappress.

Hugh Williams: 5:46

Yeah, you end up to this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. VPN, virtual private network. Uh, and I think look, the simplest way to describe it would be to say it's a safe tunnel that connects your device to other devices. And so we I think when we were doing our second hacking episode, which must have been episode nine, I think we briefly mentioned VPNs. And so a VPN is a way to encrypt all of the traffic that leaves your device and have it arrive encrypted at the known destination where the the destination can decrypt the the content. Um, it also allows you to disguise where you are coming from, and so that's what a lot of people use it for. So that's how you're able to watch uh Married at First Sight Australia Hannah by uh by pretending you are in Australia. So you can pretend you're somewhere and your traffic is encrypted. So a really good safe way to uh be connected to the internet.

Hannah Clayton-Langton: 6:36

Okay, so other than disguising your location, what else would someone be using encryption for?

Hugh Williams: 6:42

Do you remember we talked about man in the middle attacks back in episode nine? So that that's the issue where somebody in between you and the destination um is looking at the traffic that's passing by, or they could even be modifying the traffic that that passes by. And remember also back in episode nine, I said, look, if there's a padlock next to your web address in your browser, then it's encrypted. So if you want everything to be encrypted, so you don't want to ever have to worry about the traffic that's going out of your machine and heading off to some destination, then you can use a VPN. So if you use a VPN, then everything that leaves your machine is encrypted, and that means that man-in-the-middle attacks are impossible or very, very difficult.

Hannah Clayton-Langton: 7:20

Okay, so like the CIA probably uses a VPN.

Hugh Williams: 7:23

Yeah, I'd say most uh most folks are using VPNs who are worried about you know their traffic being intercepted. I'd say good practice is find a reputable VPN and and use the VPN whenever you're out and about.

Hannah Clayton-Langton: 7:35

Oh, okay. Do you do that?

Hugh Williams: 7:36

Yep. Yep. I use a company called NordVPN, who I quite like.

Hannah Clayton-Langton: 7:41

Oh, there you go. Another top privacy tip. Okay, speaking about traffic, um, what does URL stand for?

Hugh Williams: 7:48

Uh uniform resource locator, I think, is what it stands for. You might want to you might want to wanna check. I haven't checked that abbreviation in a long time. I haven't thought about that one in 30 years, but that's a that effectively means with a web address. So when you uh when you go up in your web browser and you type in something like you know, gmail.com or instagram.com or whatever it is, that is a URL. So that's that's what it's that's what it's technically called.

Hannah Clayton-Langton: 8:10

That is correct. I have fat checked. Awesome. And last one of this ilk, HTTP or HTTPS. What's that for?

Hugh Williams: 8:19

That's hypertext transfer protocol. And with the S on the end, it means secure. Um, and that is basically the what we call a protocol in computer science that's used for in web browsers and web servers. So so when you're when you're in your web browser, Chrome or Edge or Firefox, whatever it is, Safari, and you type a web address. Often people will type http colon slash slash and then the web address, and that just means it's a web protocol. Um these days you can get away without typing it in most browsers, so you can just type gmail.com and press enter, and you'll it'll turn it into https colon slash slash gmail.com. But uh https is the way that web browsers talk to web servers.

Hannah Clayton-Langton: 8:58

Okay, so it's always there, even if you don't put it in, it will just get loaded in by the browser you're using.

Hugh Williams: 9:03

Yep, that's it.

Hannah Clayton-Langton: 9:04

Okay, SQL. I'm very because we talked about SQL injection in the hacking episode, so but I actually don't know what it sounds for.

Hugh Williams: 9:11

So I always say SQL, you'll find a lot of people will say SQL. So you'll hear people you'll hear people use the phrase SQL, and that's just them trying to pronounce SQL as a word. It stands for structured query language. And it's basically a a language where you declare what information you want from a database. So let's imagine I think we use the example, you know, you're on the web and you want to update your address at your fitness app, and probably behind the scenes at your fitness app is uh a database, and that database stores all the names and addresses of all the people who are you know using the fitness app. And when you update your address, there's some SQL that actually does that. So it might say, you know, update your address. So it's a database language, uh, it's the most popular database language, and it's used whenever there's you know structured storage in any software product that's built. It's a common thing that a lot of people understand. You'll find like um finance people often can write SQL. Uh, you'll often find the analytics team. If you if you work in a business that has analytics, will be really good at SQL. And anybody who does computer science at university for sure would have done a database course, and they probably did that in the second year of their computer science degree, and that would have had SQL Square Center in it for sure.

Hannah Clayton-Langton: 10:22

I've written a tiny bit of SQL, but I didn't realize that it doesn't stand for SQL. So that was structured query language, is that right?

Hugh Williams: 10:28

That's it. Yeah, often pronounced SQL.

Hannah Clayton-Langton: 10:31

I'm gonna be the annoying person at work next time someone says SQL. Okay, um CSV. So like CSV is a file type, right?

Hugh Williams: 10:40

Yeah, so it's um I think it just stands for comma-separated values. If you've got a plain text file on your computer and it's got information in it, um often you'll find that information is stored in a CSV format, which simply means that there's commas between each of the fields. So imagine we've got names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, and we've got a big file of those. What you might find is that there's one person per line, and each one of those lines has the name, a comma, the address, a comma. You'll find that most spreadsheet software can import and export CSV files. So very common way to get data into Excel and out of Excel or into Google Sheets and out of Google Sheets.

Hannah Clayton-Langton: 11:20

And that is comma delimited values, is like a phrase I've heard, which is like the same thing.

Hugh Williams: 11:27

Same thing.

Hannah Clayton-Langton: 11:28

Okay. And then I've got LAN and WAN, which I assume are somehow different versions of a similar concept.

Hugh Williams: 11:34

Yeah, that's fair. Um, so LAN is local area network. So, you know, if you're in a building, you've got Wi-Fi, you've got some cables running around the building, could be a house, could be where you work, that that would be called a LAN. So it's basically the network that is within your building. And then a wide area network is you know the bigger version of that, right? So that's something that a company might use to connect two campuses together. Or, you know, you've you've got some infrastructure out in out in the field somewhere and you want that connected back to the the head office, then that would be a wide area network that you'd be using to connect all of your infrastructure together. So folks like Google, Amazon, you know, those kinds of folks have very, very large, sophisticated WANs that connect together all their infrastructure, including all of their data centers, warehouses, offices, all these kinds of things are all connected together on a giant network that you'd call a WAN.

Hannah Clayton-Langton: 12:21

Okay, cool. So WAN and LAN, local area network, wide area network. So do you know, Hugh, what Wi-Fi stands for?

Hugh Williams: 12:31

That's a good question. I mean, I'm I'm guessing like wide and fidelity, but I but that doesn't make sense as two words to put together. So I'm not sure. No, I don't think I do, Hannah.

Hannah Clayton-Langton: 12:42

Well, there is a common misconception according to ChatGPT, sorry, it's a misconception that it stands for wireless fidelity, but actually ChatGPT told me that it was just a catchy name that was like made up, and then some people have retrofitted the meaning of wireless fidelity, but it's actually just Wi-Fi, it's just Wi-Fi. They just came up with a name that sounded cool.

Hugh Williams: 13:05

It does sound cool. I don't know if I get a point or half a point or no points for that. What do you think?

Hannah Clayton-Langton: 13:09

I'll give you half a point. Our next question comes from Ruby in Edinburgh, and she's asking about the cloud. So she says, the cloud feels quite mystical in general. I would agree with that. Why choose Google Cloud versus AWS, for example? What do people use before the cloud?

Hugh Williams: 13:26

Oh, yeah, that is a great question, Ruby. Thanks for asking. Maybe, maybe let's start with what did people use before the cloud? Because I think that motivates the cloud. Back in the old days when I was uh when I was at Microsoft, um, so we're talking sort of you know 2005 to 2009, uh, we were building Bing the search engine, and we built all of our infrastructure by ourselves. So we'd we'd very literally, you know, go and find uh some land, uh, we'd put down some concrete, we'd build some walls, and we'd fill this uh this giant warehouse that we built with computers and we'd wire them all up, we'd cool them and we'd get power. And that was you know the infrastructure that we used to build Bing. Later on, Microsoft realized that all the work we'd done in building that infrastructure and building the software to run that infrastructure, and the software to run that infrastructure is pretty complex, they realized that that was a pretty valuable asset, and that became Azure, which Microsoft now sells as their cloud product. So the the origins of the cloud product at Microsoft are in fact the work that was done at Bing. And the same story is true at Amazon, actually, is that they built all of this infrastructure to run Amazon the store. You know, Amazon the store is very complex, needed a lot of software, you know, does all this logistics and whatever else it is. And then they realized, hang on a minute, you know, this is something that other companies around the world are going to do. So they branded that as Amazon Web Services or AWS and started selling that to everybody. So these big pieces of infrastructure that became the cloud infrastructure were things that were built by these organizations to solve internal problems. Same at Google. Google Cloud was the infrastructure that was used to build Google search. You know, the world changed a lot when these when this infrastructure became available. And so instead of having a team of, let's say, 20 people at our startup to even get started, we could probably now have a team of one or two and actually get get started. So really today, you know, three people in a garage can build a startup where you know that wasn't possible before the the cloud came along.

Hannah Clayton-Langton: 15:16

Okay, so the cloud is still connected to physical computers, it's just done in a massive aggregate, which is why we have these huge data centers.

Hugh Williams: 15:25

Yeah, exactly. And look, you know, we won't won't talk too much about sort of what is a virtual computer and these kinds of things, but you know, you could you're effectively getting access to computers that uh exist within a within a warehouse somewhere.

Hannah Clayton-Langton: 15:36

And presumably there's like economies of scale generally and having that all aggregated in some place for loads of different companies than if everyone did it individually.

Hugh Williams: 15:44

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Um I mean, even if you just think about the people involved, right? Like, you know, our little startup would need 20 people and we'd have to go buy some computers and wire them up somewhere in some data center. We'd probably rent some space in a data center and get them working and run all the cabling and maintain those computers when they break and all those kinds of things. Now we we just don't need to do that, you know, Amazon or whoever is doing that for us. And as you say, there's giant economies of scale. So every startup that starts today is a lot smaller than every startup that started before the cloud.

Hannah Clayton-Langton: 16:13

Interesting. And of Azure, Google Cloud, and AWS, which is Amazon Web Services, are those like the three main ones? And which one's the biggest?

Hugh Williams: 16:22

Uh AWS is the biggest, followed by Azure, followed by Google Cloud, but Google Cloud has really got its act together in the last few years and is really coming at the other two. You you could argue from one perspective that they're commodities at some level, like they're interchangeable. And I think when you're an executive in a large company that's not a tech company, you know, being in that position, you try and play them off against each other. So you kind of say, hey, if you don't do me a great deal, uh, I'm gonna go to one of your competitors, and you try and run the argument that you know you guys are just a commodity and it's easy to switch between you. It's not actually easy to switch between them, they are quite different, and so there's a lot of work that you need to do to switch between them. But often the cloud provider that you're thinking about going to will offer to do a lot of that work for you, right? So let's imagine we're on AWS and we get a better deal from Google. Um, Google is probably going to offer to help us migrate everything that we had running on AWS over to Google and give us ultimately a better deal if we sign up for a nice long contract. So they're a little bit different. It's a bit like saying, you know, using a Mac is different to using Windows, right? Like, you know, at some level, if you zoom out enough, they're the same. But if you zoom in, it's different enough that it'll require some work to move something from one place to another. People often these days just choose them on price, you know, you go talk to all three of them and figure out who's got the best deal and pick the best one on price. But I'd also say that each of them is better at something than the others are, and worse at something than the others are. So, you know, if you've got a particular uh thing that you're trying to build, you know, you might find that one of the cloud providers is better at that than one of the others. So there's there's technical reasons to choose one over the other, but I'd say they're converging quite quickly over time to being, you know, something that you can switch between.

Hannah Clayton-Langton: 18:04

It's a really good question from Ruby because I would say uh that someone who never thought about data centers for most of their life, they feel like they're coming up more in the public domain. So, like famously uh there was a DNS related issue at an Amazon data center fairly recently that took down a bunch of services. And a few years ago, I was working for a tech company uh on like the client-facing side, and an Amazon data center went down and that was disrupting our service, and they were pretty annoyed about that. Um, and there's a lot of chat about data centers and how much heat they generate as well. So it could be interesting to do a deeper dive on data centers at some point in a future season because they've suddenly become something that people care about.

Hugh Williams: 18:45

I might uh I might share a couple of pictures on socials of me walking around data centers with some big data center infrastructure from the old days, you know, lots of blinking lights, cables, really cold, fluorescent lights. And they're gigantic pieces of infrastructure. I mean, they're some of the biggest warehouses you will ever see, just completely filled with computers. It's it's very, very cool.

Hannah Clayton-Langton: 19:02

Interesting. And they're like in random places where there's like loads of land available, right?

Hugh Williams: 19:07

Yeah, yeah. And you might put it next to a hydropower station or somewhere where there's a lot of solar available, or perhaps, you know, nuclear energy or whatever it is, because they do use a lot of power to basically to run the infrastructure and keep the infrastructure cool, because you know, all of these CPUs and GPUs get very, very hot, and so you need a lot of cooling. And so, you know, they'll put them next to rivers and pump cold water through them, all sorts of interesting things. So they're in very interesting locations, often hard to get to.

Hannah Clayton-Langton: 19:31

Okay, Sylvia from Barcelona wants to know if companies use different coding languages, how do they actually speak to each other on the same tech platform? So I think it's in our like inaugural episode on the basics of coding. I think you said that good practice in a large tech company is a single-digit number of coding languages being used only. And I'm really excited because I think I might know that this answer has something to do with APIs, which is not an acronym that we went into. And if it is part of the answer, maybe you can explain. But is that right? There's like APIs are like the interface.

Hugh Williams: 20:02

Yeah, that's good. I like that a lot. And I want to apologize to Sylvia for torturing the uh the it's just like human languages analogy in the first episode because I think it breaks at some point. So uh we joke that it'd be hard to be in a company that had everybody spoke a different language and it'd be hard to communicate and things. So I think I I probably caused this question to happen. But the languages don't speak to each other, I guess, is is the punchline, right? So you might write code in Java, you might have some other folks writing code in Python, you might have some other folks writing code in C or whatever it is, but the the actual code doesn't speak to the code that's written in the other language. That's that's not exactly how it works. So a couple of things could happen. APIs is definitely one of them, Hannah. So that's a that's a good call out. So let's imagine, for example, that you and I are building an online shop. We might, in the cloud, and we just talked about the cloud, we might have some some back-end services running, and let's say that they were written in Java, right? Pick a random language, and then we might go and build some web stuff so that people can see our store in their web browser, so they can open up a store and it has some interactivity where you can hover over the menus and whatever else it is, and that code that's running in the browser might be written in JavaScript. And Java and JavaScript have got nothing to do with each other. I think we talked about that back in the first episode. But the way that your web browser talks to the code that's running in the cloud is via what's called an API, right? So a variant of that. What that means is that there's there's some way that the code that's running in the cloud can receive input from the code that's running in your browser, and so you can pass in things like values. So you could pass in a name and an address, and the next action you want to take, literally, those values would be passed into the code that's running in the server. So APIs are a way where, you know, it's like a channel, if you like, where one piece of software can communicate with another. So that's that's one way to do it. The other way to do it is we talked about compilers back in the very first episode. So ultimately, you know, you write the code in this English-like language, and that ultimately gets turned into executable code that's you know, sort of much lower level in nature. And so that code can write out files, read in files, these kinds of things, and those, you know, those can be accessed by other executables that might be written in a different language. So we could write out a file using, you know, some code that was compiled from one language, and then we could read in that file with some code that was compiled from a from a different language. So ultimately they use intermediaries in some way, and there's lots of different ways to do that.

Hannah Clayton-Langton: 22:39

Interesting. I had kind of forgotten about the compiler, but that makes sense. If you break them back down into something that's closer to ones and zeros, then they're probably a lot closer to each other than the actual code as it's written, technically.

Hugh Williams: 22:51

Yeah, so they can talk via files, they could talk via the memory in the computer. Um, there's lots of lots of different ways via an API, but effectively there's some common way that they can quote unquote talk to each other, but you know, via some asset that that exists in the computer that's common between them.

Hannah Clayton-Langton: 23:07

Okay, and API, I've just done a quick search, application programming interface, which is kind of self-evident, self-explanatory, is a yeah. Okay, awesome. Um, we had so many listener questions, and they're all really, really good. They've actually mostly given us inspiration for season two. So it's a little bit of a cop-out. Um, that's where we're gonna call it here on the listener questions, but some really interesting topics on the roster for season two, including things like Bitcoin mining, quantum computing, and chip fabrication, which all three sound super relevant, um, but probably too complex to try and break down in a quick QA. But I do have some final tech trivia points. I'll give you one which you already know and two which I think you don't know. The one that now doesn't surprise me at all, but probably would have surprised me before we started, is that a smartphone like a smartphone that we all have in our pocket has more computing power than the computers that were used for the Apollo moon landings.

Hugh Williams: 24:04

Yeah, and I think astoundingly more now. I I don't know if we can we can do it in sort of orders of magnitude, but it'd be have to be 10x to 100x more computing power in a smartphone than would have been in the the computers in that we used in the Lunar Landers, for sure.

Hannah Clayton-Langton: 24:19

Now that I know that all our smartphones have like barometers and magnetometers, if you've not listened to our apps episode, episode three, I think, we go into it there, but that doesn't surprise me. Um okay, so did you know this is a a callback to our Tinder episode, which this is a good test, episode five, I think it was, with Jonathan Bedin. So YouTube was first invented as a dating app. Did you know that?

Hugh Williams: 24:43

I did not. No, no, I did not know that. I'm a bit disturbed by the fact it's called YouTube, but anyway.

Hannah Clayton-Langton: 24:50

I think it was called something different, to be fair. I think I read that it had a different name. But the the concept in like 2005 was that people would it was like a dating site where people would upload videos about themselves, like really short ones, and it just turned out not to get much traction and people were a little bit shy, which is funny because I think probably now that dating apps are more commonly used, they might be less shy in that regard. But yeah, it I think they called it pretty quickly, but they realized that they'd kind of created some cool tech that could upload videos anyway, and they went a different way, and it's obviously ended very well for them.

Hugh Williams: 25:23

Yeah, indeed. Indeed. Google bought it, and the rest is history.

Hannah Clayton-Langton: 25:27

And the last one, which like genuinely Actually, I got a question for you. Okay.

Hugh Williams: 25:31

Do you know which of the following gets the more queries, YouTube or Google search?

Hannah Clayton-Langton: 25:36

I I wanna say like my answer would be Google, except I feel like you're asking me the question because it's YouTube.

Hugh Williams: 25:42

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I I've heard that down the grapevine a few times. Um, probably not something that Google's gonna say out loud, but um, YouTube is a bigger property than Google Search these days.

Hannah Clayton-Langton: 25:50

It's kind of scary that, but fine. And I wonder how it would, if you layer it in chat GPT now, like what the what the usership would be.

Hugh Williams: 25:59

Yeah, I think layer in TikTok too, and uh, I think it'd be a very interesting story.

Hannah Clayton-Langton: 26:03

Oh god, probably depressing. Okay, last one, yeah. This last one genuinely feels like fake news, but I'm gonna say it and you can just tell me it was that really good. So, according to my LLM research on tech facts, Bluetooth is named after a 10th century Danish king who was called Harold. Well, it translates to Harold Bluetooth, but actually Blatand was his nickname, which I assume means Bluetooth in whatever ancient Danish uh was being spoken at the time because he apparently had like a dead tooth, which is a bit gross. But it was literally named after him. Um, first of all, did you know that?

Hugh Williams: 26:40

No, no, I didn't, but um, that seems appropriate for what a crap protocol it is that it's named after dead tooth.

Hannah Clayton-Langton: 26:46

Okay, well, that's not how they talk about it. So it was a it was um he apparently united different kingdoms together, and Bluetooth was meant to unite different communication protocols. It was the project name for it when I guess it was like a new exciting project. And then they couldn't so they couldn't think of a better name. And then if this is ChatGPT feeding me fake news, then this is astonishing because I think this sounds really legit. So the Bluetooth logo, I don't know if you can imagine it, like we see it all the time when we're connecting like headphones to our phones and stuff.

Hugh Williams: 27:16

Well, look, it does, it does look like a rune.

Hannah Clayton-Langton: 27:18

Yeah, it's a rune. It's two runes, allegedly an H and a B. I don't know if it's exactly an H and a B, but to me it sort of tracks. So it was named after this guy, he united different kingdoms. It was an original project code name, which I don't know if anyone listening has ever had to come up with project code names. It's my least favourite part of doing cool projects, is coming up with a name. And you're always looking for like a tenuous link. And this is kind of a tenuous link, but it yeah, so next time you connect your headphones to Bluetooth, you can think about that.

Hugh Williams: 27:46

Yeah, it does look like a rune. I believe the story. I believe the story. When I was at Microsoft, we um when I was first at Microsoft, we were able to name projects after anything you wanted. So I could call it Project Hannah or whatever it is. At some point while I was there, there was a big edict that came down from the very top of the company that said projects can now only be named after cities. So thank you very much. There will be no more crazy project names um that are going to leak out into the media and people are gonna read things into. So I think you know, we we had a big project at Bing that was called Project Rome and then you know Project Copenhagen and whatever else. So it suddenly got very, very sanitized. So cities I would recommend as project names.

Hannah Clayton-Langton: 28:22

Yeah, that that's a good one. It's like literally the worst part whenever I get given something that is normally a super exciting project because you have to give it a name. I'm like, oh god, what am I gonna call it? And as you say, people read into what you've called it. Okay, well, thank you very much to the large language models who produced the alleged facts for today's tech trivia. And I think in the first episode, you knew literally everything. So these have gotten a little bit kookier.

Hugh Williams: 28:47

That's it, that's it, that's the end of tech trivia, we're never doing it again.

Hannah Clayton-Langton: 28:50

Yeah, we're never, don't worry, it will not, it will not persist into season two. Um, okay. Well, speaking of season two, uh, we're gonna take a little break. We thank you so much to everyone who has tuned in for this inaugural season of Tech Overflow. It's been so much fun.

Hugh Williams: 29:05

Yeah, it's been fabulous. Thank you to all of our listeners. Um I love just waking up in the morning and seeing how many folks listen to our shows and think about how many hours of listening that was and all the hard work that went into it. Uh, and I hope we've uh I hope we've made you a little bit smarter. That was our that was our plan all along. And um thank you so so much for listening.

Hannah Clayton-Langton: 29:23

Yeah, we've had thousands of listens in this season, but I think we'd like to make that tens of thousands or more in future. So if you've liked what you've listened to this season, please, please, please share word of mouth, like and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, tell your colleagues, tell your friends, because we really want to keep coming back and doing episodes which we know you guys are enjoying.

Hugh Williams: 29:42

And when will series two come out, Hannah?

Hannah Clayton-Langton: 29:45

Oh well, I'm looking at flights to Melbourne in February, so I guess maybe like end of Q1 2026.

Hugh Williams: 29:53

Yeah, awesome. Hopefully, March, maybe.

Hannah Clayton-Langton: 29:55

See how we go. Yeah, see Hugh, see guys, Hugh is like very bold. Yeah, yeah, March sounds. Great, yeah.

Hugh Williams: 30:01

Sounds good. Just keep an eye on the socials, and uh we'll let you know when series two will be out, which will be super super exciting.

Hannah Clayton-Langton: 30:07

And what are you gonna be doing between now and March, Hugh, besides prepping season two?

Hugh Williams: 30:12

Yeah, look, I'll just basically just focused on that. That's the only thing I'll be doing. Um, no, uh, I'm gonna I'm gonna do a high rox, Hannah. That's that's my plan in December, and then um maybe more fitness in 2026, so getting getting into good shape again.

Hannah Clayton-Langton: 30:27

Guys, I'm telling you, Hugh has no chill. Like, you're literally like, what are you doing over Christmas? And he's like, I'm doing a high rox. If you don't know what a high rox is, look it up. It's like a gruelling physical activity.

Hugh Williams: 30:37

Yeah, it should be fun. Should be fun. I'll talk you into it, Hannah.

Hannah Clayton-Langton: 30:40

Yeah, I'm up for it, and Hugh did try and get me to come down for a Hyrox in December, but it's just, yeah, it was gonna be a little bit too much for me in 2025, I have to say.

Hugh Williams: 30:48

And what about you?

Hannah Clayton-Langton: 30:49

Well, I'm about to go into the depths of British winter, so it's not gonna be as fun as that. I'll probably be mostly planning my trip to Melbourne in February.

Hugh Williams: 30:59

Sounds good. Well, I hope you have a good holiday season anyway. I know that at least um at least the UK does a very festive December. So I hope you enjoy that and have a really, really good holiday season and we'll uh we'll kick off again the new year with some prep and look forward to recording in February.

Hannah Clayton-Langton: 31:12

This has been season one of the Tech Overflow Podcast.

Hugh Williams: 31:15

Yeah, and if you've enjoyed it, then you can uh always learn more. Go back, listen to old episodes, share with your friends TechOverflowpodcast.com. We're also available on LinkedIn where we'll uh we'll keep posting and also on Instagram and X.

Hannah Clayton-Langton: 31:28

All right, that's a wrap. Season one.

Hugh Williams: 31:30

Thanks again, everybody. We'll see you for series two in 2026.

Hannah Clayton-Langton: 31:34

See you next year. Bye.