Beyond the Noise: Signals, Stories, and Spicy Takes

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.