Episodes
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...
Published 01/09/24
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
Published 12/26/23
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...
Published 12/19/23
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...
Published 12/12/23
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...
Published 12/05/23
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...
Published 11/28/23
 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...
Published 11/21/23
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...
Published 11/14/23
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...
Published 11/07/23
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:...
Published 10/31/23
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.
Published 10/24/23
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...
Published 10/17/23
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:...
Published 10/10/23
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...
Published 10/03/23
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...
Published 09/26/23
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/
Published 09/19/23
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...
Published 09/12/23
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...
Published 09/05/23
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...
Published 08/30/23
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...
Published 08/30/23
Welcome to the trailer episode for Software Huddle. YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@SoftwareHuddle/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/SoftwareHuddle
Published 07/25/23