Software Huddle

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.

Today, we have Cassidy Williams, CTO of Contenda. Contenda unbelievably started as a sticker distribution platform that pivoted into a product that converts podcasts and videos into various other forms of written content via AI. But in our conversation with Cassidy today, we talk about their latest pivot to a product called Brainstory, which is an AI based brainstorming application.

We talked through some of their product choices around focusing on speech as the main input mechanism, some of the technical challenges they've had to overcome, how they're using multiple AI models in the backend to make all this magic happen, and where they're seeing initial product traction. If you're a founder or thinking of starting a company, we think you'll find this conversation super interesting.

Check Out Brainstory: https://www.brainstory.ai/

Software Huddle: https://twitter.com/SoftwareHuddle

Cassidy: https://twitter.com/cassidoo

Sean: https://twitter.com/seanfalconer

In this special end of the year clips episode of Software Huddle, we took some time to highlight some of our favorite clips from our interviews since we launched the show back in August.

Software Huddle: https://twitter.com/SoftwareHuddle

Alex: https://twitter.com/alexbdebrie

Sean: https://twitter.com/seanfalconer

On today's show, we have quite the lineup. We have Rizel Scarlett, Leandro Margulis and Katherine Miller all joining Sean to talk about AI for developers. This came together because the four of them had participated on a conference panel earlier this year discussing the topic.

We discuss our impressions of AI for developers, what impact it may or may not have, privacy and security, ethics concerns, what the future might look like, and a whole lot more. Today’s guests have a diverse set of roles spanning product, marketing, and developer relations, so we think we were able to bring a lot of different perspectives to the topic.

Timestamps:

02:25 Introduction

05:45 Will AI's net impact be positive?

11:10 Customer support chatbots

17:18 Speed of Innovation

26:15 Safeguarding Sensitive Data

28:47 Creating your own Models

31:55 Using LLMs responsibly

41:27 Everything GPT

45:08 Existential Risk

51:17 Psychological Safety

Links:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wh02qPQasfk

In this episode, we spoke with Vino Duraisamy, Developer advocate at Snowflake. Vino has been working as a data and AI engineer for her entire career across companies like Apple, Treeverse, and now Snowflake. And in this episode, we dive into her thoughts on what's happening in AI right now and what a practical LLM strategy for a company should look like.

We discussed the hard, unsolved problems in the space like privacy, hallucinations, transparency, testing, and bias. There's a lot of problems. We're very much in the Wild West days of AI, and it still takes a ton of work to move beyond prototype to production with any AI application.

There's lots of hype, but not necessarily that many enterprises actually launching products that take advantage of these generative AI systems yet. We thought Vino had a lot of real world perspective to share, and we think you're going to enjoy the conversation.

Follow Vino: https://twitter.com/vinodhini_sd

Follow Sean: https://twitter.com/seanfalconer

Today we have the former CEO of Snowflake, a 23 year veteran of Microsoft, Bob Muglia on the show. In this interview, we discuss Bob's book, Datapreneurs, which takes you on a journey about the people behind the first relational databases in the 1970s and early 80s, to Bob's experience launching Microsoft SQL Server and a ton of other products, developing the Data Cloud at Snowflake, and to the future of data and AI.

We cover a lot of ground, including some of his experience working alongside the likes of Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer.

Timestamps:

02:24 Introduction

04:53 Relational Databases

18:43 Speed of Innovations

24:30 Keeping the Early Stage Culture

31:04 Most successful leaders are difficult to deal with

34:31 Setting up Cloud Data Center at home

36:25 Joining Snowflake as the CEO

38:54 AWS made Snowflake happen

42:18 Google, AWS Missing the Snowflake Opportunity

46:13 Impact On Jobs

50:48 Existential Risk

52:28 Staying Optimistic

Links:

The Datapreneurs: The Promise of AI and the Creators Building Our Future

https://www.thedatapreneurs.com/

Follow Bob: https://twitter.com/Bob_Muglia

Follow Sean: https://twitter.com/seanfalconer

Software Huddle ⤵︎

X: https://twitter.com/SoftwareHuddle

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/softwarehuddle/

Substack: https://softwarehuddle.substack.com/

Our special episode is back, and we have a special guest this time. Join Sean, Alex & Merritt in this fun conversation.

Timestamps:

00:00 Introduction

01:19 What is a CISO

08:10 Balance of Power

13:50 reInvent BTS

19:45 Sam Altman

32:29 SEC & SolarWinds

38:40 iPhones will support RCS

49:04 Meet us at reInvent

Links:

Factors to consider in relation to the SEC Materiality Framework

https://www.lacework.com/resource/sec-materiality-framework.html

OpenAI announces leadership transition

https://openai.com/blog/openai-announces-leadership-transition

AWS reInvent 2023

https://reinvent.awsevents.com/

Follow Merritt: https://twitter.com/MerrittBaer

Follow Alex: https://twitter.com/alexbdebrie

Follow Sean: https://twitter.com/seanfalconer

 Today's episode is all about Incident Management. We have two amazing guests, Nora Jones, founder and CEO of Jeli, and Dan McCall, the VP and GM of Incident Management at PagerDuty. There's of course a technical aspect to managing incidents that PagerDuty excels at, very well known for, and there's also a human side, like how do you learn from an incident so it doesn't happen again in the future, and this is where Jeli steps in.

In the episode, Nora and Dan talk through the evolution of incident management, the hard problems in the space, and a future that leverages AI with a human in the loop component to scalably and proactively manage incidents and reduce outages. We also touch on the recent announcement that Jeli was acquired by PagerDuty.

PolyScale is a database cache, specifically designed to cache just your database. It is completely Plug and Play and it allows you to scale a database without a huge amount of effort, cost, and complexity. PolyScale currently supports Postgres, MySQL, MariaDB, MS SQL and MongoDB.

In this episode, we spoke with Ben Hagan, Founder & CEO at PolyScale. We discuss AI-driven caching, edge network advantages, use-cases, and PolyScale's future direction and growth.

Follow Ben:  https://twitter.com/ben_hagan

Follow Alex: https://twitter.com/alexbdebrie

PolyScale

Website: https://www.polyscale.ai/

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@polyscale

Software Huddle ⤵︎

X:  https://twitter.com/SoftwareHuddle

In this episode, we spoke with Mario Žagar, a Distinguished Engineer at Infobip. Infobip is a tech unicorn based out of Croatia that is a global leader in omnichannel communication, bootstrapping its way to a staggering $1B+ in revenue.

We discussed the super early days of engineering at Infobit when they were running a monolith on a single server to today running a hybrid cloud containerized infrastructure with thousands of databases serving billions of requests. It's a really fascinating look and deep dive into the evolution of engineering over the past 15 years and the challenges of essentially architecting for scale.

Follow Mario: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mzagar/

Follow Sean: https://twitter.com/seanfalconer

Software Huddle ⤵︎

X: https://twitter.com/SoftwareHuddle

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/softwarehuddle/

Substack: https://softwarehuddle.substack.com/

Our special episode is back, and it's all about the latest news. Join Sean and Alex for an in-depth discussion.

Timestamps:

00:00 Introduction 

02:55 Tech Adoption in Japan 

06:36 Infobip 

09:34 Product Marketing at Rockset

14:38 Trust from your initial customers and early adopters

20:01 Nile - Serverless Postgres for modern SaaS

29:29 AI Models Can Now Selectively Forget

36:46 Oxide’s Racked Hardware

45:03 Quantum Computing

Follow Alex: https://twitter.com/alexbdebrie

Follow Sean: https://twitter.com/seanfalconer

In this episode we spoke with Joran Dirk Greef, who's the co-founder at TigerBeetle. TigerBeetle is a Financial Transactions Database that's focused on correctness and safety while hitting orders of magnitude more performance than other solutions in the space.

We touch on various topics like what makes TigerBeetle orders of magnitude more performant, io_uring, the choice of Zig for TigerBeetle, protocol aware recovery, VOPR and so on.

In this episode, we spoke with Evis Drenova, CEO and co-founder of Nucleus, a Y Combinator graduate from 2022 focused on making it easy to deploy, build, and manage on Kubernetes. Evis left Skyflow, where he was one of the product leads, to build Nucleus.

In this conversation, we talked through his first year as CEO of a startup, how he got into Y Combinator, what that experience was like, and how he's been building the company since. This is a really interesting conversation for anyone who's ever thought about starting their own company.

In this episode, we spoke with Dhruba Borthakur, Dhruba is the CTO and Co-founder at Rockset. Rockset is a search and analytics database hosted on the cloud.

Dhruba was the founding engineer of the RocksDB project at Facebook and the Principal Architect for HDFS for a while. In this episode, we discuss RocksDB and compare it with LevelDB. We also discuss in detail the Aggregator Leaf Tailer architecture, which started at Facebook and is now powering Rockset.

Follow Dhruba: https://twitter.com/dhruba_rocks

Follow Alex: https://twitter.com/alexbdebrie

In this episode, We spoke with Craig Dennis from Twilio about developer education and training. Craig's been working in the developer education space for a long time and has a ton of experience. And, of course, Twilio is a company well known for having a heavy investment in Developer relations and fantastic developer resources and learning resources. 

We get into a bunch of things around Twilio's developer education programs. Why Twilio, from a strategy standpoint, has invested so heavily in this and how teaching developers might actually be different than teaching regular people? We hope you enjoy the episode. 

If you've been involved with the Snowflake world, today's guest probably can skip an introduction as he is the demo king from the Snowflake Summit and well-known within the Snowflake builder community.

We're talking about Dash Desai, Developer Advocate at Snowflake. The background on this episode is that Sean's been part of the Snowflake Data Superhero Program and also involved in the community for a few years, and Sean has spoken at the last two Snowflake Summits. And after the past event in June, he got this idea that it might make for a fun podcast to go back through some of the announcements from the events and discuss what they might mean for those building with Snowflake, and maybe even get some of those building with Snowflake excited about it.

So even if you're not working with Snowflake, we keep things pretty high level during this interview. And we think there's probably something for everyone. Snowflake is clearly making this big push around supporting LLMs and generative AI workloads with things like Snowpark, containers, document AI and native support for NVIDIA NeMo and a bunch of other things that we get into today.

There's been a ton of announcements even since the Summit in this space with things that Snowflake is coming out with, and we'll cover some of that stuff down the road. Anyway, we hope you enjoy the show. 

Our special episode is here, and it's all about the latest news. Join Sean and Alex for an in-depth discussion.

Follow Alex: https://twitter.com/alexbdebrie

Follow Sean: https://twitter.com/seanfalconer

Software Huddle ⤵︎

X: https://twitter.com/SoftwareHuddle

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/softwarehuddle

Substack: https://softwarehuddle.substack.com/

Startups can be a ton of fun. Also, it is sometimes very stressful and ultimately a very different experience than working at a company like Google, Meta Apple and so on.

Benjamin Popper is the Senior Director of Content at Stack Overflow and is our guest on the show today.

The background on today's episode is that both Ben and Sean have worked for startups as well as in Big Tech, and they have lots of friends and former colleagues who have struggled with navigating and thinking through the transition from big tech to startups, particularly for engineering roles.

In today's show, we walk through the choices faced while making such a transition. We focus on what are the options you have and how can you align these options with the ultimate goal of becoming the best software engineer you could be.

Follow Ben: https://twitter.com/benpopper

Follow Sean: https://twitter.com/seanfalconer

Software Huddle ⤵︎

X: https://twitter.com/SoftwareHuddle

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/softwarehuddle/

Substack: https://softwarehuddle.substack.com/

Amazon's DynamoDB serves some of the highest workloads on the planet with predictable, single-digit millisecond latency regardless of data size or concurrent operations. Like many NoSQL databases, DynamoDB did not offer support for transactions at first but added support for ACID transactions in 2018. Akshat Vig and Somu Perianayagam are two Senior Principal Engineers on the DynamoDB team and are here to talk about the team's Usenix research paper describing how they implemented support for transactions while maintaining the core performance characteristics of DynamoDB.

In this show, we talk about DynamoDB transaction internals, performing user research to focus on core user needs, and staying on top of cutting-edge research as a Principal Engineer.

Over the past couple of months, Generative AI has taken the world by storm. OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT was a turning point. With each iteration, the Transformer has improved its capabilities while the underlying compute power needed to do the same task has seen massive efficiency gains. This trend has fueled a rise in the series of apps powered by Generative AI.

Hassan is a Senior Developer Advocate at Vercel, the company behind the famous Next.js framework. In this episode, we discuss interesting AI projects that Hassan has worked on. We talk about the future of generative AI, the impact it will have on developers, and Hassan shares his advice for newcomers in this space.

What would it look like if databases were built for developers rather than operators? Sam Lambert is the CEO of PlanetScale, a company that provides a managed MySQL database solution. PlanetScale uses Vitess, a database clustering system that allows for horizontal scaling of MySQL. MySQL powers an incredible amount of the internet, and Vitess is behind enormous MySQL installs at YouTube, Slack, GitHub, and more. 

In this show, we talk about the architecture of Vitess, what it's like to manage upgrades and releases of high-scale databases, and how to maintain a high-performance culture.

Welcome to the trailer episode for Software Huddle.

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@SoftwareHuddle/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/SoftwareHuddle