Stories From the Workshop:

A Podcast About Software, and the People Who Build It.

What do TV broadcasting, furniture catalogs and telecomms fraud have in common?

Experts are solving problems in all these fields, and more, by building web apps with Anvil. Which means we get to talk to them! Each episode, we ask an expert in some interesting field to tell us about what they do, and how they’re building software to solve their problems. We’re calling it Stories from the Workshop.

Join us as we talk to everyone from data scientists to startup founders, from broadcast engineers to educators. Pick an episode from the archives, or subscribe by searching for Stories from the Workshop wherever you get your podcasts.

Previous Episodes

2nd February 2022

CS In Schools

Australia is missing thousands of programmers. There will be over 100,000 new IT jobs created in Australia by 2024, but overwhelmingly Australians aren’t choosing to study Computer Science related subjects. CS In Schools is a charity aiming to tackle this problem at its source, partnering with schools to give young students positive formative experiences with coding.
12th November 2021

7Q1: Simplifying Supply Chains with AI

Supply chains can be incredibly complex and fragile. Events such as the Covid-19 pandemic and the Suez Canal blockage have a domino effect on supply chains and manufacturing. 7Q1 has built a tool for companies to quickly find the best fitting suppliers, so that they can easily adapt to changes in their supply chain.
13th October 2021

Mark.One: An AI for Smarter Baking

Bakeries waste tons of food every day because demand is extremely hard to predict. In this episode of Stories from the Workshop, Meredydd speaks to Mark Breuß who grew up in the bakery business and saw a need for software that uses data to help bakers make better decisions.
9th August 2021

Custom-Made Financial Tools for the Modern World

When you’re dealing with billions of dollars, small mistakes can have big consequences. Traditional tools for tracking, valuing and analyzing financial data rely heavily on Excel and manual operations. BasisPoint realised it was time for investment to enter the modern world.
12th August 2020

Fighting for Consumer Rights with FairShake

Since 2011, it’s been harder for consumers in the US to pursue big companies for compensation when things go wrong.

Meredydd spoke to Teel and Brian from FairShake about how their consumer rights service is levelling the playing field between everyday people and big companies. And how Anvil helps them to move faster!

1st July 2020

Hunting the Coronavirus with Anvil

The Australian public health system is on red alert. Meredydd spoke to Anders, from Melbourne’s MDU Public Health Lab, about how they detect, track and share information about outbreaks: They’re smashing up DNA, doing ancestry tests on viruses, and – of course – writing plenty of Python.
3rd June 2020

Tracking the Iron Dog Race with Python

It’s a two-thousand-mile race, across some of the most remote terrain in America. So how do you bring the action to the spectators?

We learned how this massive enterprise is coordinated – and how they use web apps to bring the audience along for the ride.

29th April 2020

Mongolian Data Science Adventures

What can data science do for Mongolia? Robert Ritz moved from Texas to Mongolia and started the LETU Mongolia business school. In this special double-length episode, he talks to Meredydd about speech recognition, pollution measurements, and what makes Mongolia different.
19th March 2020

Data Science Goes to School

Why does a school board need a data scientist? In this episode of the Anvil podcast, Allan Campopiano talks to Meredydd about how his school board uses data – and how that has changed as the senior leadership saw what was possible.
6th January 2020

Retail Data: It's Worse Than You Think

In this episode of the Anvil podcast, Kevin Dalias talks to Meredydd about why retail data is so messy, why something as simple as a digital product catalog is so hard for many stores, and how he founded Ruchomi to get a grip on it.
4th September 2019

How does digital broadcasting work?

Meredydd talks to Anders Kalland, who leads the internet broadcast team at Norway’s RiksTV network, and Anders tells us about the software he built to diagnose customer problems in real time.
1st July 2019

Stories from the Workshop #2: Lightning AI

Meredydd talks to Colette Nataf, founder of Lightning AI, about her somewhat unorthodox journey to being the technical founder of a Silicon Valley startup.
20th May, 2019

Stories from the Workshop #1: Telemix

In the first episode of a new series, Meredydd talks to David Wylie, founder of Telemix, about the ups, downs, stories and scams of his life in telecoms.