Daniel Steinberg interviews Chad Fowler on a wide range of topics including programming, music, math, the C64, Ruby, Rails, electronics, hooking up the real world to the computer, the Principle of Agreement, the dangers of stagnation, invigorating your career and globalization.

Pragmatic editor Susannah Pfalzer interviews Travis Swicegood, author of “Pragmatic Version Control using Git.” Travis tells us about distributed version control in general, when to use it—and when not to. He also describes how Git works, and walks through the daily Git workflow. Travis reminds us that code is never perfect, and describes how to track changes in a distributed environment. He’ll show how to selectively push repositories to different people on your team, and how to use gitosis.

Pragmatic editor Susannah Pflazer interviews Mike Mangino, author of “Developing Facebook Platform Applications with Rails.” Mike describes how Facebook works, and talks about using facebooker for Ruby on Rails to provide helpers, handle authentication, and more.

Mike walks through developing an application in Facebook, describes the parts of Facebook, as well as messaging, testing, and engaging users. Find out about the magic 8-second rule and the key aspects of a successful Facebook application.

Join us as Daniel Steinberg interviews Pragmatic co-founder Andy Hunt. Andy describes his journey from the techniques in The Pragmatic Programmer, the programming language Ruby and the Agile development movement, to looking at wetware—the stuff in our heads. Andy discusses the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition, lateral specialization in the brain, mindmaps and more. You’ll find out why sometimes the best thing you can do is to step away from the keyboard.

Venkat Subramaniam, author of “Programming Groovy: Dynamic Productivity for the Java Developer” talks at length with Daniel Steinberg about coding in Groovy, metaprogramming, and choosing a language. You’ll learn when Groovy is a great choice, and when it’s not. Venkat shares how to use builders to relieve the tedium of XML processing, explains why metaprogramming is so hard in Java, and why type-safety isn’t what you think. Finally, Venkat explains how programming is a lot like a chainsaw.