Lessons from Production

I spoke with Tom Wilkie, CTO of Grafana about what it’s like scaling open source projects while building a commercial company around them. Discussed the challenges, lessons, and what goes on behind the scenes of a tool so many of us use. Want to be a guest on the show? I’m always looking to chat with builders, founders, and engineers working on interesting problems. Connect with me at contact@techwithkunal.com, I’d love to hear your story.

In this episode of Lessons from Production, I’m joined by Bhanu from TiDB and Nikhil from ElasticRun. We dive into what it really takes to run open source databases at scale, from architecture choices to reliability challenges, performance tuning, and real-world war stories. Whether you're managing distributed systems or just curious about how companies like ElasticRun use TiDB in production, there's a lot to learn from this one. TiDB Cloud free trial here. Shoutout to them for sponsoring th...

Observability has been the buzzword across the stack, and businesses are toiling hard to achieve end-to-end visibility. While tech observability is fairly mature, cloud cost observability remains a missing link. In this episode of Lessons from Production, I spoke with Ananth from Zoho (sponsoring this episode) as we dive into what cloud cost observability really means, how it's different from tech-stack observability, best practices to achieve it, and real-world case studies that show how it...

In this episode of Lessons from Production, I sit down with Mark Mishaev, Chief Architect at Checkmarx (shoutout for sponsoring this episode), to talk about what it really takes to make DevSecOps work. We dive into the ongoing challenge of balancing speed, security, and scale; and why getting that balance right is key to building software that can grow and evolve safely. From culture to tooling to team alignment, this conversation offers practical insights for anyone working to embed se...

Sanskar started his journey as an open source contributor in India, moved to London to work at Bloomberg, and recently quit his job to move to San Francisco and build his own AI startup, Amurex. In this episode, we talk about that journey; and what it takes to build an AI assistant that’s actually helpful, personal, and respectful of your space. We also chat about how to make AI more transparent, how to deal with messy data, and how they keep up with the fast-changing AI world. If you're curi...

Google Sheets and Excel have been the default for decades. But why haven’t spreadsheets really evolved, even though millions rely on them every day? And what does it actually take to build a better one in 2025? In this first episode of Lessons from Production, I speak to David Kircos, founder of Quadratic (shoutout for sponsoring this episode), a modern spreadsheet tool, about the real challenges behind rethinking such a deeply embedded product. From scaling real-time collaboration to ch...