Software Huddle

Today we have Brian Rinaldi from LaunchDarkly on the show. This is the final episode of our in person coverage at the SHIFT Conference in Miami. And although Brian works at LaunchDarkly, we actually didn't talk at all about his employer and instead chatted about Jamstack. Brian has a long history with Jamstack, has written a lot about it. Jamstack was popularized and created by Netlify. And there's been a lot of history of controversy with the term. Some people think of it's merely a branding ploy or a marketing thing, and others find it simply confusing because we have terms like LAMP stack, MEAN stack and MERN stack. So Jamstack automatically gets lumped in with those, but it's not actually a technology stack. It's an architectural pattern. Recently, Jamstack has been giving away to what is known as composable frontends and we picked Brian's brain on this and what this means not only for Jamstack, but also the future web development.

Today we have Emanuel Lacić on the  show. He was in academia for a while. Now he’s been working at Infobip for the last couple of years, building some of this AI stuff and putting it into production. We picked his brain about the best practices when it comes to AI and what we can expect to see over the next couple of years.

Today, on the show we have Christine Spang, Co-founder and CTO of Nylas. Christine was the keynote at the recent Shift Developer Conference in Miami, and we caught up with her there. Nylas is a unified API for email, calendar, and contacts. We talked to Christine about why she started Nylas, and the challenges with building an API for email. Email is this massive distributed system with a very diverse set of implementations, it's a super gnarly ecosystem going back decades. It's generally not something you want to spend a lot of time on if you don't have to. Christine was a lot of fun to have on the show. Follow Christine: https://twitter.com/spang Follow Sean: https://twitter.com/seanfalconer Follow Alex: https://twitter.com/alexbdebrie Nylas: https://www.nylas.com/ Software Huddle ⤵︎ X: https://twitter.com/SoftwareHuddle Substack: https://softwarehuddle.substack.com

Today’s guest is Ivan Burazin, the co-founder and CEO of Daytona, an actual creator of the Shift Developer Conference that he sold some time ago to Infobip. Ivan has tons of experience building developer tools, he has been working on dev environments for over a decade. In this interview, we talk about another company he founded called CodeAnywhere that eventually led to the founding of Daytona. Daytona is a dev environment management platform. It sits between your IDE and the cloud, taking care of standardizing your dev environments, regardless of whether you're building on your desktop or deploying to production. They're taking the best of what leading technology companies like Google, Uber, and Meta have built internally and bringing that to the rest of the world. Software Huddle ⤵︎ X: https://twitter.com/SoftwareHuddle Substack: https://softwarehuddle.substack.com/

Today's episode is with Nikhil Benesch, who's the co-founder and CTO at Materialize, an Operational Data Warehouse. Materialize gets you the best of both worlds, combining the capabilities of your data warehouse with the immediacy of streaming. This fusion allows businesses to operate with data in real-time. We discussed the data infrastructure stuff of it, how they built it, how they think about billing, how they think about cloud primitives and what they wish they had.

Today's episode is with Khawaja Shams. Khawaja is the CEO and co-founder of Momento, which is a Serverless Cache.  He used to lead the DynamoDB team at AWS and now he's doing Memento. We talk about a lot of different things, including multi-tenancy and cellular architecture and what it's like to build on AWS and sell infrastructure products to end customers and just a lot of other really good stuff. We hope you enjoy this episode. 01:12 Introduction 03:38 multi-tenancy 08:13 S3 and Tigris 15:09 Aurora 19:11 Momento 31:21 Cellular Architecture 41:16 Most people are doing cross-AZ wrong 52:23 Elasticsearch 01:03:08 Rapid Fire

In today's episode with Tim McNamara, we talk all about Rust. Tim is one of the leading educators in the whole Rust educational space. He wrote the Rust in Action book, which is probably the best Rust book out there. He has a YouTube channel, he taught and did a lot of educational work on Rust at Amazon AWS. We talked about object ownership and object lifetimes and just all these interesting things that Rust has and why is this language loved by so many and why it's continuing to grow. He also gets into what it's like being an independent educator, creator, and some of the difficulties with that, how to get started, and how he deals with doubt.

Today, we have Kent C Dodds on the show. If you don't know Kent, he's a well known expert in JavaScript, Web Development and Teaching. His courses like Testing JavaScript, Epic React, and Epic Web Dev have helped countless developers uplevel their skills and develop whole new ones. During our conversation, we discussed how he got to start in creating courses in the background on his latest project, Epic Web Dev. We also picked his brain about JavaScript. Why the heck do we have so many JavaScript frameworks? Are we just perpetually dissatisfied with what we have? Or is there a fundamental problem with how the web is actually designed? There's a lot of meat in the bone on this one, and we hope you enjoy it. Show Notes: The Web’s Next Transition https://www.epicweb.dev/the-webs-next-transition Epic Web Conference 2024 CONFERENCE DAY April 11th, 2024 WORKSHOP DAY April 10th, 2024 https://www.epicweb.dev/conf Timestamps 01:46 Kent’s Background 05:38 Epic Web Dev 15:07 Creating an engaging course 19:07 How long does it take to finish the course 23:01 JavaScript and CS 25:47 Things that you should know 29:09 JS frameworks 36:28 Re-building the Web from Scratch? 42:59 PESPA Architecture 53:04 Rapid Fire

Welcome back to an episode where we're talking Vectors, Vector Databases, and AI with Linpeng Tang, CTO and co-founder of MyScale. MyScale is a super interesting technology. They're combining the best of OLAP databases with Vector Search. The project started back in 2019 where they forked ClickHouse and then adapted it to support Vector Storage, Indexing, and Search. The really unique and cool thing is you get the familiarity and usability of SQL with the power of being able to compare the similarity between unstructured data. We think this has really fascinating use cases for analytics well beyond what we're seeing with other vector database technology that's mostly restricted to building RAG models for LLMs. Also, because it's built on ClickHouse, MyScale is massively scalable, which is an area that many of the dedicated vector databases actually struggle with. We cover a lot about how vector databases work, why they decided to build off of ClickHouse, and how they plan to open source the database. Timestamps 02:29 Introduction 06:22 Value of a Vector Database 12:40 Forking ClickHouse 18:53 Transforming Clickhouse into a SQL vector database 32:08 Data modeling 32:56 What data can be Vectorized 38:37 Indexing 43:35 Achieving Scale 46:35 Bottlenecks 48:41 MyScale vs other dedicated Vector Databases 51:38 Going Open Source 56:04 Closing thoughts

Today's guest is Yujian Tang from Zilliz, one of the big players in the vector database market. This is the first episode in a series of episodes we’re doing on vectors and vector databases. We start with the basics, what is a vector? What are vector embeddings? How does vector search work? And why the heck do I even need a vector database? RAG models for customizing LLMs is where vector databases are getting a lot of their use. On the surface, it seems pretty simple, but in reality, there's a lot of tinkering that goes into taking RAG to production. Yujian explains some of the tripwires that you might run into and how to think through those problems. We think you're going to really enjoy this episode. Timestamps 02:08 Introduction 03:16 What is a Vector? 07:01 How does Vector Search work? 14:08 Why need a Vector database? 15:11 Use Cases 17:37 What is RAG? 20:34 RAG vs fine-tuning 29:51 Measuring Performance 32:32 Is RAG here to stay? 35:43 Milvus 37:17 History of Milvus 47:44 Rapid Fire X https://twitter.com/yujian_tang https://twitter.com/seanfalconer

Today's episode is with Tyler Wells. Tyler is the CTO and co-founder at Propel. He was an early employee at Skype (and Microsoft after the acquisition) as well as Twilio. While at Twilio, Tyler helped build a data platform to power customer-facing analytics for a major Twilio feature. Propel is the productized version of that for other teams looking to build similar experiences. In this episode, we see how this real-time, flexible analytics problem is tricky for a lot of teams, as well as how Propel is helping to solve the problem. We also cover some of Alex's favorite hobby horses for infrastructure developers -- what it's like building infrastructure services, how to think about billing, how S3 is becoming ubiquitous, and what to do about cross-AZ network costs. Timestamps 02:29 Introduction 08:05 What is Propel? 22:28 ClickHouse 29:15 Target Customers 30:28 Billing Model 35:10 S3 becoming a key part? 36:47 Cross AZ Network Costs 41:56 Current Support 51:39 Access Policies 55:39 Rapid Fire 01:03:16 AI replacing Software Engineers? Show Notes Data Chaos Podcast https://www.propeldata.com/

Today, we have Philipp Krenn on the show. He's the head of DevRel for Elastic, and we took a deep dive on all the Elasticsearch stuff like Indexes, Mappings, Shards and Replicas and how to think about performance and all that stuff. We also discussed the Use Cases and applications where Elastic is not suitable to use. This episode is packed with fundamentals and we think you'd love it. Timestamps 02:00 Introduction 04:13 What is Elasticsearch 05:33 Use Cases 11:25 Where not to use Elasticsearch 13:51 Index 16:44 Shards 23:29 Routing 33:57 Replicas 41:08 Bottlenecks 01:02:30 Upgrading an Elasticsearch Cluster 01:06:12 Rapid Fire

Zig is a new programming language with big ambitions: to be a better C. Loris Cro is the VP of Community at the Zig Software Foundation, and he takes us through the ins and outs of Zig -- how was it created, what problems is it trying to solve, and where is it being used. We heard Joran Dirk Greef rave about Zig during our TigerBeetle episode, and there are a lot of passionate Zig fans out there. Zig has some really unique aspects, particularly the comptime keyword that allows for running arbitrary code at compile time. We also talk about Loris's background and his rapid rise to lead marketing for a software foundation. Loris talks about how he got there, how Zig things about community, and how they're working to make Zig sustainable.

Today, we have Joe Reis on the show. Joe is the co author of the book, Fundamentals of Data Engineering, probably the best and most comprehensive book on data engineering you could think to read. We talk about the culture of Data Engineering, Relationship with Data Science, the downside of chasing bleeding edge technology in approaches to Data Modeling. Joe's got lots to say, lots of opinions and is super knowledgeable. So even if Data Engineering, Data Science isn't your thing. We think you're still going to really enjoy listening to the interview.

Our special episode is back! Join Sean, Alex & Vino in this fun conversation. 00:00 Introduction 10:08 Sora by OpenAi 16:11 Google Gemini 1.5 22:05 Mixture-of-Experts 38:02 Nvidia’s Valuation 40:19 Apple Vision Pro 49:05 Tech Layoffs

Today's episode is with Craig Kerstiens, Craig has been in the Postgres space for a long time. First at Heroku, doing Heroku Postgres. Then at Citus, doing Distributed Postgres. Now at Crunchy Data, he's Chief Product Officer there. He's done a lot of Postgres advocacy and a lot of interesting stuff. In this episode we'll talk about the Postgres ecosystem, some of the Postgres features, some of the naysayers about Postgres, and just get Craig's thoughts on those.

Today on the show, we have the founder and CEO of Akita Software and now head of product at Postman, Dr. Professor Jean Yang. Jean has a super interesting background, a former computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University with a focus on programming language research. She then went on to found Akita Software, which was focused on solving hard problems around the API observability space. And last year, the company was acquired by Postman. And during the interview, we covered a lot of ground talking about Jean's academic experience, motivations for starting a company, and the problem Akita set out to work on. 01:05 Intro 06:40 Software as a Social Problem 12:10 Over engineering 20:44 Motivation 25:22 The problems 32:10 Existing methods to solve 36:21 Some other similar systems 36:21 Packet to Reconstruction 39:43 Aha moments for customers 41:33 Why sell to Postman 47:23 Would you do it again? 52:03 Rapid Fire

Today's guest is a legend in the distributed systems community. Stephan Ewan was one of the creators of Apache Flink, a stream processing engine that took off with the rise of Apache Kafka. Stephan is now working on core transactional problems by building a durable async/await system that integrates with any programming language. It's designed to help with a number of difficult problems in transactional processing, including idempotency, dual writes, distributed locks, and even simple retries and cancellation. In this episode, we get into the details of how Restate works and what it does. We cover core use cases and how people are solving these problems today. Then, we dive into the core of the Restate engine to learn why they're building on a log-based system. Finally, we cover lessons learned from Stephan's time with Flink and what's next for Restate.

Today's guest is Bain Capital partner Rak Garg. Rak is a super smart guy that's worked as an ML researcher. Then he was in product at Atlassian before moving over to the venture capital side of the world. In this episode, we talk about BCV Labs, an AI incubator and community for AI founders that Rak helped establish. Rak shares his thoughts on the big opportunities he sees in AI and how it's going to impact the world, both in the short and long term, and how BCV Labs is helping support AI founders bring these visions to reality. There's a huge amount of opportunity to automate away a lot of manual tasks across industries like legal, insurance, and healthcare. But of course, there's a lot of complexity with actually bringing this technology to market.

In this episode, We spoke with the founders of WarpStream Labs, Richard Artoul and Ryan Worl. WarpStream is a fascinating rethink of Kafka -- how could you simplify and improve the Kafka design by slightly tweaking your constraints? The result is very compelling -- a Kafka-compatible API that bypasses local disk by writing everything directly to S3. For the tradeoff of a slightly higher end-to-end latency, you can get a Kafka cluster that's much cheaper and way easier to operate. Richie and Ryan have been working on high-scale data systems for years and were the engineers behind Husky, Datadog's custom-built database for logs and metrics. In this episode, they walk us through their experience building WarpStream. They touch on all the hard parts of building your own system (including why it's gotten easier!), as well as some of the difficult problems they had to solve for full compatibility with existing Kafka client libraries. They also touch on using FoundationDB, their thoughts on S3 Express One Zone, and whether AWS's cross-AZ network costs are a scam. Lots of interesting thoughts here from a really sharp team.