Shall We Play A Game?

Shall We Play A Game?

From Fallthrough by Fallthrough Media

June 13, 2026 · 48 min · Episode 75

About this episode

Matt and Kris discuss SAD Servers with its creator Fernando Duran, exploring its purpose, infrastructure, and implications for technical interviews.

Matt and Kris welcome Fernando Duran, the creator of SAD Servers, the site that drops you onto a broken Linux box over SSH with a timer running and dares you to fix it. They go through what SAD Servers is, the spite-fueled interview story that started it all, how companies use it to hire, and the surprisingly lean infrastructure (plus the tiny Go "checker") that makes the whole thing work. We've got supporter content, of course! This week that includes why technical interviews are broken and the spite that turned one into a business, taking the number two spot on Hacker News without toppling over and the layers that keep the bad actors out, why three availability zones might just be expensive cargo-culting, the metrics that quietly lie to you (from Google-style error budgets to mean time to recovery versus mean time between failures), and the company that accidentally spent half a billion dollars on tokens. Not a supporter yet? Fix that today by heading over to https://fallthrough.fm/subscribe where you'll get not only extra content but also higher quality audio. Sign up today! If you prefer to watch this episode, you can view it on YouTube. No episode of the aftershow this week…

People in this episode

Hosts: Matt, Kris

Guest: Fernando Duran

Topics covered

  • SAD Servers
  • technical interviews
  • Linux
  • infrastructure
  • metrics
  • hiring

Keywords

  • SAD Servers
  • Linux
  • technical interviews
  • hiring
  • metrics
  • infrastructure
  • error budgets

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: SAD Servers, Google, Hacker News, Fallthrough Media

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