Where to start: a guide to the Space Welders archive
"Begin at the beginning," the King said gravely, "and go on till you come to the end: then stop." — Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)
The full run is back online: ninety-one episodes of technology, programming, gaming and science, recorded between 2015 and 2017. That's a wall of audio. Here's how to climb it.
Start at the beginning
If you like origin stories, just press play on Episode 1, "Hello World" and go in order. The chemistry between Mike and Steve is there from minute one, and you get the news cycle of 2015 unfolding in real time, which is its own kind of time capsule.
If you want the guests
Some of the best episodes bring a third voice into the studio:
- Episode 3, "Comes with Cogs" — with Leon Bambrick (secretgeek), on Star Trek, the "Google Tax", and autonomous cars.
- Episode 10 — with Dale Rankine of Future Now Ventures, on startups and the IoT scene.
If you're here for a theme
- Space: try "Australian Astronauts" and "Get your ass to Mars" — the episodes where the show fully embraces its name.
- Security & privacy: "Impractical Attack Vector" covers the Cloudflare leak and SHA-1 falling.
- The classics of the era: anything covering Oculus, E3, or the great "teaching kids to code" debate that ran across several episodes.
If you just want the vibe
Pick a title that makes you laugh and trust it. "You have to commit to a Chupa-Chup." "I don't read anything that doesn't have spank in the title." "Cucumbers with anxiety." The show never took itself too seriously, and the episode names are a reliable mood ring.
Search it
Every episode now has show notes — and a growing number have transcripts — so the episodes page is fully searchable. Type a topic, a year, or a guest and follow the thread.
Welcome aboard. Strap in.
References
- Bambrick, L. (2003–present). secretGeek.net. Self-published. — Episode 3's guest, still shipping blog posts a decade of internet later, which counts as a longevity record in this medium.
- Graham-Cumming, J. (2017, February 23). "Incident report on memory leak caused by Cloudflare parser bug". Cloudflare Blog. — The Cloudbleed post-mortem, in which one pointer error sprays other people's cookies across the internet at a rate of 1 in 3.3 million requests.
- Stevens, M., Bursztein, E., Karpman, P., Albertini, A., & Markov, Y. (2017). SHAttered: The first collision for full SHA-1. Google & CWI Amsterdam. — Two PDFs, one hash, and a polite academic way of telling the entire industry to stop using SHA-1 immediately.
