The Sourcegraph Podcast

Pydantic is a Python library for typed validation of external data that has experienced exponential growth since 2020. We’ll hear the story of what motivated Samuel to create Pydantic, the most common ways people use it, and the success and growth of FastAPI with Pydantic. Also, Pydantic V2 has not been released yet, but we’ll learn what motivated Samuel to rewrite it in Rust, besides being faster and some other things happening with it.  And if you’re interested, Samuel is always looking for contributors to Pydantic!  Go ahead and download this episode now to hear more!  Highlights[00:00:59] Beyang gives us his understanding of what Pydantic does, and Samuel tells us two things that people appreciate about Pydantic.[00:02:48] Samuel tells the story of what motivated him to create Pydantic, what the state of the world was at the time, and how it started. [00:04:11] When Samuel first created Pydantic, he tells us if he had a particular use case in mind, and we hear the most common way people use Pydantic and other ways it’s used. [00:05:46] Beyang is looking at the Pydantic docs and goes over an example of how you use the base model today. Samuel talks about the new Pydantic V2.[00:07:23] We hear about Samuel's interaction with the FastAPI maintainers. Did he know them, and why does he think they selected Pydantic for their core piece of framework? Samuel mentions Django Ninja, which integrates Pydantic and Django, and Beyang mentions there are many highly starred cool projects using Pydantic and Django.[00:11:53] The new version of Pydantic is written almost completely in Rust, so Samuel reveals why he decided to do the rewrite and what motivated him to use Rust.[00:15:09] Beyang and Samuel discuss some of the Rust bindings so you can see what invoking Python from Rust looks like.[00:21:03] The aspect of Pydantic, which is about translating from Python-type annotations into the core schema, Beyang wonders if that’s changing from Pydantic V1 to V2, and Samuel explains that it’s all rebuilt.[00:24:03] Beyang wonders if anyone is using the not yet released Pydantic V2 yet. Samuel’s response: “I hope for nothing serious because it will change a lot!”[00:24:40] A question in the chat came up for Samuel on Twitch: What motivated you to make the default behavior coercion rather than throwing an error? [00:27:52] Will there be any changes to the public API from Pydantic V1 to V2? Samuel tells us there’s one thing that’s probably going to make people angry and he explains.[00:29:33] Samuel gives an example of the output from serialization. Beyang wants to help Samuel out and tells him how Sourcegraph can potentially help him. [00:34:25] There are some exciting things coming up for Pydantic that Samuel can’t announce quite yet, but he is excited about Pydantic V2 being released. Also, we hear they have GitHub sponsors, but another announcement about sponsors is coming soon.[00:35:35] Samuel announces he would love for you to come and contribute to Pydantic.

In this episode, we are honored to have Daniel Stenberg, the founder and lead developer of cURL, as our guest. cURL is a ubiquitous data transfer utility that grew into a robust library used in billions of applications worldwide. Daniel is a Swedish developer who has been involved in open source for decades. He is also the recipient of the Polhem Prize 2017 for his work on cURL. Join us as we talk to Daniel about his journey with cURL, his passion for open source, and everything in between.

Beyang sits down with John Kodumal, CTO and co-founder of LaunchDarkly. LaunchDarkly is a SaaS feature management platform for developers that allows them to iterate and get code into production quickly and safely by separating feature rollout and code deployment. John begins by talking about his first experiences with computers and programing in the 80s, including teaching himself to us a Dvorak keyboard in the first grade, experimenting with BBS in elementary school, and programming his TI-92 in BASIC to make a shell program so that he could use Reverse Polish Notation (RPN) on it in high school. John shares how he pursued his interest in programming languages throughout higher education and then discusses his employment experiences at Coverity and Atlassian. He talks about how the lessons and experiences from his prior jobs ultimately led him to found LaunchDarkly in 2014 with former classmate, Edith Harbaugh. John dives into how did he first got into feature toggles and feature flags, and then talks about the engineering challenges LaunchDarkly has encountered. John concludes by sharing how he has witnessed LaunchDarkly impact the developer experience and the ongoing, transformational benefits of utilizing their feature management platform.Sourcegraph: https://about.sourcegraph.com 

Beyang talks with Ravi Parikh, founder and CEO of Airplane. Airplane is a developer tool for turning one-off scripts into internal mini-apps that can be used by technical and non-technical users across the company.Ravi shares his journey as a programmer, how he got into computers at a young age, took a brief detour to become a professional musician, and then started his first software company, Heap Analytics, with his friend Matin Movassate. Beyang and Ravi discuss what took Heap from idea to billion dollar company. Ravi discusses founder-led support and the ways he and Matin managed Heap’s growth from an analytics tool geared towards developers to a full-fledged analytics platform with users across product, sales, and marketing.Ravi explains the seed concepts that led to the founding of Airplane and then demos how to use Airplane to turn a one-off support script into an internal mini-app that you can reuse again and again. The conversation concludes with a discussion of what’s next for Ravi and Airplane. Show notes & transcript: https://about.sourcegraph.com/podcast/ravi-parikhSourcegraph: https://about.sourcegraph.com 

Beyang talks with Max Howell, creator of Homebrew, about his new package manager, Tea, which aims to solve the problem of open-source funding.Max shares his beginnings in programming and what led him to work on early music players in Linux, Last.fm, and eventually get into Mac development. Max discusses the frustrations he experienced in cross-platform development that were the impetus for the creation of Homebrew and explains how Homebrew became the de facto package manager for macOS.Max talks about his latest project, Tea, a successor to Homebrew that aims to solve the open-source funding problem with a decentralized protocol that uses NFTs and an understanding of the package dependency graph to distribute funding to open-source maintainers.Show notes & transcript: https://about.sourcegraph.com/podcast/max-howell Sourcegraph: https://about.sourcegraph.com 

Why can’t one CI scale alongside a company–from startup to enterprise? In this episode, Fedor Korotkov, founder and CTO of CirrusLabs, joins Beyang Liu, co-founder and CTO of Sourcegraph, to talk about how, as a student back in 2009, he developed a photo app that earned him almost $2,000 a month, share the time he applied to be an intern at Twitter but ended up with a full-time job, and explain how six months of “funemployment” led to the building and founding of Cirrus CI–the one CI to rule them all. Along the way, Fedor explains how Cirrus CI, with Kubernetes, can spin up a new container in two seconds.Show notes & transcript: https://about.sourcegraph.com/podcast/fedor-korotkov/Sourcegraph: https://about.sourcegraph.com

Why is the software industry now willing and excited to buy developer tools instead of building them internally? In this episode, Kelly Norton, principal software engineer at Mailchimp and creator of open-source code search engine Hound, joins Beyang Liu, co-founder and CTO of Sourcegraph, to talk about his work on the controversial project that would become Google Web Toolkit, share his experience trying to build an ecosystem of tooling, which resulted in Google Dart, and explain how the company he founded, FullStory, pioneered user testing. Along the way, Kelly describes how and why he developed Hound at Etsy and shares his thoughts on the developer tools market.Show notes & transcript: https://about.sourcegraph.com/podcast/kelly-norton/Sourcegraph: https://about.sourcegraph.com