Today we have Mark Huang on the show. Mark has previously held roles in Data Science and ML at companies like Box and Splunk and is now the co-founder and chief architect of Gradient, an enterprise AI platform to build and deploy autonomous assistants. In our chat, we get into some of the stuff he’s seeing around autonomous AI agents and why people are so excited about that space. Mark and his team has also recently been working on a project to extend the Llama-3 context window. They were...

Today we have Bob van Luijt, the CEO and founder of Weaviate on the show. Bob talks about building AI native applications and what that means, the role a vector database will play in the future of AI applications, and how Weaviate works under the hood. We also get into why a specialized vector database is needed versus using vectors as a feature within conventional databases. Bob van Luijt: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bobvanluijt/ Sean on X: https://x.com/seanfalconer Software Huddle...

Today, we have Talia Nassi on the show. Talia’s been leading Developer Advocacy at Akamai. Akamai is in a really interesting space where they've been around for a long time, as a CDN provider, as a security provider, and now they acquired Linode, and acquired a bunch of other companies which has expanded them into more of like a full fledged cloud provider. We had a really interesting discussion talking about the expansion, we also talked about her thoughts on infrastructure as code, multi...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...