Developer Interviews
This is where CodeWalkers sits down with the people who built the things you build with. Not launch announcements or press quotes, but real conversations with the founders, maintainers, and working developers behind the languages, databases, and tools that ended up on everyone's machine. The interesting part is rarely the feature list. It is the decision that felt small at the time and turned out to shape a generation of software.
CodeWalkers has been doing this since the early 2000s, back when the questions came from readers and got mailed off to the person who wrote the code. We are picking that thread back up, and this section is where it lives.
Zeev Suraski and the PHP Engine Story
An original CodeWalkers profile of Zeev Suraski, PHP 3 co-creator and Zend Technologies co-founder, with the original 2002 interview reproduced from the Internet Archive alongside modern context.
February 20, 2026 02Michael 'Monty' Widenius and the MySQL Story
An original CodeWalkers profile of Michael 'Monty' Widenius, the MySQL and MariaDB creator, with the original 2002 interview reproduced from the Internet Archive alongside modern context.
January 29, 2026What to Expect
Every interview here follows the same honest shape: a written question-and-answer format, long enough to actually get somewhere, paired with the history you need to understand why the answers mattered. We do not sand the edges off. When someone was cautious about a prediction, or wrong about one, that stays in. The archived interviews are reproduced unedited, with new writing clearly marked as ours and their words clearly marked as theirs.
We ordered the series by when each conversation happened, and numbering stays chronological as it grows, not by who is most famous this week.
Where This Is Going
The series is open-ended on purpose. We want the people who built the foundations, the maintainers keeping widely used projects alive right now, and working developers with a hard-won opinion about where their corner of the industry is heading. Some will be archival restorations like the first two. Most will be new conversations. If the format earns it, we would like to take some of them to audio down the line, but we are not promising a podcast we have not made yet.
We Want to Hear from You
This section is not only for names you already know. If you are building something, we would like to talk to you about the app you shipped, the site you run, the portfolio piece you are proud of, or a genuinely considered opinion about where technology is going next. First-time founders and twenty-year maintainers are equally welcome.
Get in touch through our contact page → and tell us what you are working on and what you would want to talk about. We read everything that comes in. The next interview in this section could be yours.