Reimagining Back End Development through General Models and Flexible Indexing

What does it mean to change the economics of software development? Nathan Marz joins the show to share how they reduced the cost of building Mastodon at Twitter-scale by 100X and the 10 years journey to build Rama, a new programming platform that made this feat possible.

Nathan is the founder of Red Planet Labs. Prior to RPL, he led engineering for BackType which was acquired by Twitter in 2011. Nathan created the Apache Storm project and wrote the book Big Data: Principles and best practices of scalable realtime data systems. Outside of working, Nathan is a private pilot, loves going to stand-up comedy shows, and is forever trying to teach his dog new tricks.

Show Notes:

• Nathan’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/nathanmarz
• What is Rama? https://redplanetlabs.com/learn-rama
• Reducing the cost of building Mastodon at Twitter-scale by 100X: https://blog.redplanetlabs.com/2023/08/15/how-we-reduced-the-cost-of-building-twitter-at-twitter-scale-by-100x/

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Segments:

[0:00] flying

[0:07] inefficiencies of backend software development

[0:17] suffering oriented programming

[0:23] AI programming?

[0:25] RAMA’s programming model

[0:33] deployment & monitoring with RAMA

[0:36] building a twitter clone at scale with RAMA

[0:43] migrations with RAMA

[0:54] driving adoption for RAMA

[1:01] fundraising

[1:15] building a fully remote team