Debug Available Again
For years Rene Ritchie and I co-hosted the Debug podcast. It was an interview show for developers with a focus on Apple and iOS history. We had many fantastic guests and it was an honour to be able to capture some primary accounts of the early days of technologies that have changed the world.
After I joined Apple we stopped recording Debug. Nobody at Apple asked me to stop and, indeed, a few people I met asked me why we had stopped. But it would have blunted my ability to ask questions and follow my curiosity if I’d been worried about not leaning on insider knowledge. If it couldn’t be done properly while I honour my commitments then I shouldn’t be the one doing it. (I did ask one person if they’d like to take it over but they kindly declined explaining it was my thing to care about).
Sometime after this, iMore closed down and Debug was no longer hosted and available to the public. This was quite sad as I believed that many of the episodes capture fascinating details of computer history that I’d feared had been lost to the digital tides. Thankfully a very kind listener had managed to keep a copy of all the audio and sent it to me for safe keeping. I’ve been sitting on it for a while as we made sure we were allowed to publish it again. I had thought of hosting it myself but hadn’t found the time to get around to doing it.
Enter Jason Snell of Six Colours and the wonderful people at Relay.fm. Jason and Myke are embarking on a project covering Apple over its fifty years and I reached out to offer the Debug recordings as sources they may find useful. They’ve gone a step further than that and have been so kind as to provide a new home for Debug on the open web!
Thank you so much to Jason, Myke, and the great team at Relay.fm for their work bringing Debug back for the public. They have fixed our somewhat haphazard numbering scheme and correctly identified a popular recurring guest who had been operating under a code-name at the time.
I am deeply proud of some episodes of Debug—not because of what Rene or I contributed, but because we managed to create a space where people could share their stories from a time when truly remarkable work was being done. It makes me very happy, and grateful, to have these episodes made available to the public again.