Reliable software shouldn't be an accident, but for most developers it is. Jeremy Edberg, CEO of DBOS and the guy who scaled Reddit and Netflix, joins Corey Quinn to talk about his wild idea of saving your entire app into a database so it can never really break. They chat about Jeremy's "build for three" rule, a plan for scale without going crazy, why he set Reddit's servers to Arizona time to dodge daylight saving time, and how DBOS makes your app as tough as your data. Plus, Jeremy shares his brutally honest take on distributed systems cargo cult, autonomous AI testing, and why making it easy for customers to leave actually keeps them around.
Public Bio:
Jeremy is an angel investor and advisor for various incubators and startups, and the CEO of DBOS. He was the founding Reliability Engineer for Netflix and before that he ran ops for reddit as its first engineering hire. Jeremy also tech-edited the highly acclaimed AWS for Dummies, and he is one of the six original AWS Heroes. He is a noted speaker in serverless computing, distributed computing, availability, rapid scaling, and cloud computing, and holds a Cognitive Science degree from UC Berkeley.
Show Highlights
(02:08) - What DBOS actually does
(04:08) - "Everything as a database" philosophy and why it works
(08:26) - "95% of people will never outgrow one Postgres machine"
(10:13) - Jeremy's Arizona time zone hack at Reddit (and whether it still exists)
(11:22) - "Build for three" philosophy without over-engineering
(17:16) - Extracting data from mainframes older than the founders
(19:00) - Autonomous testing with AI trained on your app's history
(20:07) - The hardest part of dev tools
(22:00) - Corey's brutal pricing page audit methodology
(27:15) - Why making it easy to leave keeps customers around
(34:11) - Learn more about DBOS
Links
DBOS website: https://dbos.dev
DBOS documentation: https://docs.dbos.dev
DBOS GitHub: https://github.com/dbos-inc
DBOS Discord community: https://discord.gg/fMqo9kD
Jeremy Edberg on Twitter: https://x.com/jedberg?lang=en
AWS Heroes program: https://aws.amazon.com/developer/community/heroes/
