Ryan Peterman

I quit the best job I ever had to try and build what I wish existed in the world. Two projects I'm working on now:

1. The Peterman Pod - When I first started at Meta, the career stories of incredible engineers always inspired me. I aim to share transparent career stories that I wish I had more of back in the day.

There are still many engineers who are heros to me that I'd love to bring on the show one day!

2. Compose - I could never really find what I wanted so I'm building the ergonomic keyboard I wish existed. Pictures of our prototype here: read.compose.llc/p/our-keyboard…

I've earmarked ~6 months of living expenses to fund this new career direction. I'm going to give it my all to see if it's sustainable.

Thank you for your support, working on my passion projects is something I’m only lucky enough to consider because of you all 🙏

More detail here: x.com/ryanlpeterman/…

What is the most interesting question you could ask anyone?

Want to improve the questions I ask for my podcast. Most questions are tailored to the guest but some questions like "what's your top book recommendation" are more general

I asked ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini for their top ideas:

ChatGPT: "What's a question you've spent years thinking about but still don't know the answer to?"

Gemini: "What is a deeply held belief you had for years that you recently completely reversed your position on?"

Claude: "What’s something you were confidently wrong about for years, and what finally made it click?"

Gemini/Claude recs feel a little cliche, the ChatGPT one does make me curious though for guests at the frontier

Open to feedback and ideas, I will factor your replies into my future questions

I get 2x more work done with the latest models, but the % of my time I waste has gone up

It nets out ahead but the low priority work I didn't need to do is a subtle tax on real work

Best fix I've found is keeping a daily checklist of tasks that matter on a small notebook

Brian Kernighan (Princeton CS professor, ex-Bell Labs) on Princeton's computer science majors falling by half or more:

"In computer science in particular, enrollments are down. We have many fewer computer science majors than we did a few years ago. The classes are smaller, and that means there's more contact with the students, and I think that's good.

Our numbers, I think they're more extreme for some unknown reason, but the class that just graduated in the spring of 2026 was a little over 200 computer science majors. The class that will graduate 2 years later is probably gonna be less than half that.

Maybe even down to a third. We don't know, because there's a staggered way in which majors appear, but I would guess that if it was 200, it'll be 80-ish, 90-ish. Pure guesswork, but quite a bit lower.

Those people have gone to electrical and computer engineering and mechanical and aerospace engineering, because those, I think, are more concrete, hardware-oriented, less likely to be replaced by large language models.

So the kids are voting with their feet. I think to some extent that's totally understandable. I think they may be overreacting. But I don't know.

If you just read the popular press, my God, we don't need programmers anymore. I think that's fortunately oversimplified. But it's not my problem in the sense that I have a job, and they quite rightly are worried about what they're gonna do when they get outta here."

In NYC, trying Uber Eats through Amazon app vs without

Ignoring the $20 and $8 discounts, through Amazon is $5.68 more expensive for the same order