Big Ideas in App Architecture

Building the software behind life insurance systems is a complicated endeavor. Organizations need to consider the need to keep millions of data records with decades-long histories, factor in the many variables for individual policies, and comply with legal regulations that can vary from state to state.In this special bonus episode with our former host Tim Veil, Tim examines the intricacies of the life insurance industry with Mike Murphy, Corporate Vice President, Life Insurance Domain Architect at New York Life for a fascinating technical conversation.Join as we discuss: Effectively writing software for insurance policiesThe problem with sequential IDsSoft-coded vs hard-coded practicesThe challenges of horizontal scale for insurance application architecture

We delve into the journey of Arjun Narayan , Co-Founder and CEO of Materialize, a streaming SQL database for real-time applications, live dashboards, and streaming data pipelines. He shares his personal experiences in the field of data analytics, his fascination with distributed systems, and his passion for working with databases. Arjun shares how his mind was blown by the Spanner paper back in 2012 and its impact on prevailing notions of weak isolation and consistency. We also explore the challenges of building complex systems, the evolution of streaming systems, and the practical applications of Materialize in real-world scenarios.Join us as we discuss:How Materialize simplifies the communication of its technology to usersThe value of Materialize's join capabilityThe challenges of streaming and the importance of state managementHow to survive backlash from Hacker News comments

“My goal is to basically be AWS, but for the developers in the sense that like, my five man SRE team can support 10 developers, it can support 1000 developers” - Hans Knecht, Platform EngineerHans Knecht has over 10+ years in the industry at companies including Mission Lane and Capital One. Whether he is designing self-serving platforms, creating comprehensive documentation, or providing technical recommendations, his efforts ultimately help developers take the tedium out of building great applications.Join as we discuss:The importance of good documentation, and why the phrase “They don’t quit a bad job, they quit a bad manager” can also apply to platforms with poor documentation.The terrifying moment when a mistake in a piece of code was pushed to production (And how his team got everything back up and running).Why technical conversations are actually business conversations.Why Hans thinks everyone should learn Kubernetes.

Brian Chambers began his Chick-fil-A journey behind the counter. Today, he is the Chief Architect at Chick-fil-A Corporate, where he oversees the teams building the infrastructure that powers every step of the customer journey, from mobile ordering to quality control.Behind its speedy service and chicken sandwiches, is a state-of-the-art architecture that collects over 1 billion data points per month. From its cloud infrastructure to the edge compute clusters running Kubernetes in each Chick-fil-A restaurant, the customer experience is the result of a thoughtfully designed, cloud-first, and zero-touch approach.Join as we discuss:The internal innovation process at Chick-fil-A and how great ideas can come from anywhere in the company.How edge computing helps Chick-fil-A solve capacity challenges, collect telemetry data, ensure high quality food, and drive better restaurant worker and customer experiences.How Chick-fil-A’s engineers designed a high availability system capable of withstanding spiky events such as lunch rushes and promotions.Why Kubernetes is a no-brainer for their use-cases.

Chris Stura, Director of PwC UK has had over 20+ years in the world of software, wearing many hats from Software Engineer to Chief Architect to Director of Technology Delivery. During his time at PwC, Chris’ projects have spanned helping banks migrate from legacy systems to modern architecture, working on the performance analytics software Cloud Cost Assurance, and technical consulting for financial services and capital markets.Join as we discuss:How a passion for video games at a young age ultimately kickstarted a decades-long career in software architectureWhat enterprises and architects should know before migrating from legacy systems to distributed architectureChris’ thoughts on serverless, open source, Kubernetes, generative AI, and moreWhy Chris thinks the base requirements for knative are too high

In the latest episode of "Big Ideas in App Architecture," we dive into the world of utility facilities and their app architecture with guest Grant Muller, Vice President of Applications and Technology Architecture at Xylem. Grant shares valuable insights on bridging end-to-end solutions while focusing on energy efficiency and data collection in utility facilities.Grant explains IoT standards in utility facilities and the importance of SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) systems for device automation and control. He emphasizes the need to address cyber security concerns and highlights the significance of dividing the workload through a robust architecture.The conversation then delves into data management, with a focus on understanding data lakehouse patterns and motivating the centralization of data locations. Grant also gets into his thoughts on Data Mesh and its usage in managing and scaling data effectively.Join as we discuss:IoT data on the edgeCyber security risk managementData lakehouse patterns and the expansion of data meshesBe sure to rate the podcast 5-stars on your favorite podcast platform like Apple and Spotify. You can also watch every episode on YouTube!

This week, Mattias Sio Fjellvang, CTO and Co-Founder of Doubble, joins to discuss the technical challenges he’s faced while building a "double dating" application. Mattias discusses tech stack decisions, developing with a completely distributed team, and the incredible month-to-month growth of the application.Mattias talks about what it was like for ‘a React guy’ to develop using Dart and Flutter. Taking a prototype built on MongoDB and flipping it to CockroachDB to solve the scalability, reliability, and data compliance issues challenges. Join as we discuss:The application design of a double-dating applicationCockroachDB vs MongoThe use of Github’s co-pilot developmentHow Doubble handles downtimeBe sure to rate the podcast 5-stars on your favorite podcast platform like Apple and Spotify. You can also watch every episode on YouTube!

In this episode, Adam Koch, Systems Engineering Fellow at Paycor, discusses transitioning from legacy systems to the cloud and its impact on application architecture.Adam draws on his wealth of knowledge and experience in the field to help frame the evolution of data architecture and infrastructure. He shares his perspective on the limitless possibilities that cloud scale brings, while also giving an honest accounting of the challenges that come with it.Additional topics include:Maintaining boundaries on acquired domainsEnsuring effective master data authenticationStrategies to address and prevent downtimeBuilding effective teams for effective architectureBe sure to rate and review the podcast on your favorite podcast platform like Apple and Spotify. You can also watch every episode on our YouTube channel.

“Aside from math and physics, there are no laws in software engineering.” In this episode, Joe Lynch, a technical leader with decades of experience (Google, Twilio…), discusses the fundamental principles of building software efficiently; and the human obstacles that get in our way. Joe explains the difference between "laws" and tendencies in software engineering and how understanding Conway's law can lead to better organizational structure, better peer review practices, and better software design.We also address pressure on engineers to get things right and the danger of striving for perfection, which can be the enemy of good. He stresses the importance of setting up a "problem space" to identify problems before you start “solutioning”. Join as we discuss:A satirical Grand Unified Theory of software engineeringHow to properly understand a problem before solving itThe impact of humanity in software engineeringBe weary of Kubernetes. It is not a silver bullet.

In today's episode, we're joined by Yolanda Davis, Principal Software Engineer at Cloudera, to talk about Apache NiFi and its role in streamlining data transfers.Yolanda explains the architecture of Cloudera’s Apache NiFi and the UI developers use of the tool to design and manage dataflows. She also shares how Kubernetes has changed the game in terms of efficiency and scalability (while acknowledging the occasionally immense challenge of growing K8s).We delve into the challenges of observability and monitoring in the cloud. And how Cloudera is using the insights gathered from monitoring. Yolanda also shares some unique observations about the way she sees the public cloud being leveraged for scaling efficiently for performance and cost savings.Join as we discuss:Cloudera’s Apache NiFi and how it streamlines data transfers, operates within the cloud, and deploys dataflowExploring the combination of observability and AIScaling efficiently for performance and cost efficiency