Beyond the Noise: Signals, Stories, and Spicy Takes

bitdrift
  • 5.0 (7)
  • TECHNOLOGY

Hosted by Matt Klein, creator of Envoy and co-founder of bitdrift, Beyond the Noise goes inside the minds of the engineers, founders, and technical leaders defining the next era of app-based computing. Forget the buzzwords — this is where the people shaping modern systems share how they really build, debug, and scale.

Episodes

  1. FEB 10

    More Code, More Problems: Keeping Mobile Apps Fast, Small, and Reliable with Phil Rabin

    Phil Rabin, Engineering Director at SoFi, joins Matt Klein to trace a career that starts in the wild west of early web dev - ActionScript, Flash, IE6 hacks, and DIY “learn it from books” grit - and lands at the sharp edge of modern mobile platform engineering. Phil shares how a government broadcaster in Canada nearly built “Spotify before Spotify,” what it felt like to watch the world pivot from web-first to mobile-first, and why the frontend/mobile craft is still wildly underestimated in complexity. Phil discusses what it was like in the early days at Uber: building “Muber” (a mobile web stopgap), shipping the first Android experiences, and eventually confronting the brutal math of scale: massive binaries, toolchains buckling, and the moment you realize you can’t “code your way out” of an architecture that no longer fits. Phil digs into what changes when your app becomes mission-critical infrastructure, and brings the story to SoFi, discussing how they achieve reliability & consistent incident management, and what it’s like to run one of the world’s largest Flutter apps. Phil and Matt close out the conversation with a forward-looking discussion on AI’s growing role in developer workflows and the next frontier: agents that don’t just help you write code, but help you determine whether it’s actually working.

    53 min

  2. JAN 26

    Why Mobile Releases Still Feel Like Chaos, with Runway CEO Gabriel Savit

    In this episode, Matt Klein sits down with Gabriel Savit, former iOS engineer and now co-founder & CEO of Runway, to unpack why mobile release processes remain painfully manual and coordination-heavy, even for world-class teams. Gabriel traces his path into mobile: from a scrappy, early startup experiment, to building an iPhone-powered “flight computer” for a DIY drone air-traffic-control project, to shipping at scale at Rent the Runway. Gabriel talks about how his experience with endless release runbooks, Slack ping-pong, rotating “release captain” dread, and the haunting realization that updating the checklist doesn’t fix the underlying chaos led to the creation of Runway. Gabriel shares how Runway evolved around a plug-and-play integration model (rather than replacing your toolchain), why Apple/Google leave so many gaps for growing teams, and how the future, including AI, will increase the need for visibility and coordination, not reduce it. They close the episode with a spicy take on what Gabriel calls the 'automation paradox' which describes why teams with more automation often report wasting the same amount of time per release as teams with less, because speeding up the machine can also expand the black box.

    48 min

  3. JAN 12

    Scaling Mobile at Uber: Ty Smith on Community, Toolchains, and the Next Dev Productivity Wave

    In this episode of Beyond the Noise, Matt Klein sits down with Ty Smith, Principal Engineer at Uber and a longtime pillar of the Android community, to trace a career that started with tinkering on a Pentium at age six and accelerated through an unusually deep high school CS track, full-time engineering work during college, and early wild west Android days shipping apps when the toolchain was still a mess of platform bugs and improvised best practices. Along the way, Ty shares how devrel mentors helped him overcome public-speaking nerves, why Android’s community spirit has historically felt stronger than iOS, and how open source and community building create value that doesn’t show up cleanly in short-term spreadsheets. Ty discusses what it actually means to build and ship at Uber’s scale, where mobile teams routinely hit constraints that Apple/Google tooling was never designed for. Ty breaks down the real bottlenecks: massive build graphs, IDE performance, architectural isolation, and why mobile monoliths behave so differently. Finally, Ty and Matt dig into the next era: AI-driven development, faster iteration loops, the coming validation/observability crunch, and how the “software engineer” role itself may evolve into a more end-to-end product builder over the next 5–10 years.

    58 min

  4. 12/15/2025

    Bazel Keith and the Quest for Better Builds

    In this episode of Beyond the Noise, Matt Klein sits down with Keith Smiley, aka “Bazel Keith,” to talk all things Bazel and iOS tooling. Keith shares how hacking on Objective-C in high school, contributing to CocoaPods in college, and joining Lyft as an early mobile engineer all stacked up to push him toward dev experience and infrastructure. Along the way, you’ll hear war stories about compiler bugs, massive Swift codebases, and what it actually took to get Bazel’s Apple rules into production shape at Lyft. Keith and Matt also discuss his current work at Modular, where he’s applying the same principles to a very different stack: C++, GPUs, a new language (Mojo), and Python interop, all held together by Bazel. He and Matt get candid about why build systems still feel so hostile to end users, why Apple and Google don’t solve large-team DX problems out of the box, and how remote caching, open source funding, and newcomers like Buck2 might reshape the next decade of builds.

    53 min

  5. 12/02/2025

    In Praise of Bugs: P-Y Ricau on the Joy of Breaking Things

    In this episode of Beyond the Noise, host Matt Klein talks with P-Y Ricau, Principal Engineer at Block (formerly Square) and a legend in the Android community, about his journey from open-source tinkerer to one of mobile’s most respected engineers. P-Y shares how a GitHub issue led him to Square, reflects on the company’s early open-source culture, and unpacks the real challenges of mobile development, from race conditions and memory leaks to performance tuning and observability gaps. He and Matt explore the rise of AI-assisted coding, its impact on debugging, and why P-Y believes loving bugs, and learning from them, is the key to great engineering in an increasingly AI-driven world.

    53 min

  6. 11/10/2025

    From Droid Days to DraftKings: Hemant Garg on Velocity with Guardrails

    From shipping the first Droid phone to running multi-app, multi-state platforms, Hemant Garg, VP of Engineering at DraftKings, unpacks how to ship monthly with higher quality, define “success” beyond crash rate, and what it takes to move fast in a highly regulated industry.

    53 min

  7. 10/21/2025

    From Razr to Smart Carts: Building the Future of Payments & Retail Tech

    From Google’s face ID payments to Instacart’s Caper carts, Senior Staff Software Engineer, Michal Palczewski, shares the war stories, logs, and growth levers that turn prototypes into products.

    53 min

  8. 10/18/2025

    From Hacking Modems to Rewriting Lyft: Martin’s Journey to bitdrift

    In the first episode of Beyond the Noise, Matt Klein sits down with bitdrift co-founder Martin to trace his path from hacking assembly code as a teen to pioneering Swift at Lyft — and why he believes crash reporting is dead and mobile observability needs a reset.

    43 min
  • 8 Episodes

Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
7 Ratings

About

Hosted by Matt Klein, creator of Envoy and co-founder of bitdrift, Beyond the Noise goes inside the minds of the engineers, founders, and technical leaders defining the next era of app-based computing. Forget the buzzwords — this is where the people shaping modern systems share how they really build, debug, and scale.

Information

  • Creator
    bitdrift
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    8
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 bitdrift