Advait Ruia, Co-founder of SuperTokens, discusses the evolution of SuperTokens from a blog post to an infrastructure company offering user authentication and authorization solutions. Topics include the demand for authentication providers, the need for founders to be in the Bay Area, building community support, and areas for outside contributions.

Loris Degioanni (@lorisdegio) joins Eric Anderson (@ericmander) to chat about Falco, the open-source runtime security tool for modern cloud infrastructures. Loris is the founder and CTO of Sysdig, and co-creator of Wireshark, the legendary open-source packet analysis tool. Today, Loris talks about all these projects and more - tune in to learn about some deep history and Loris’ predictions for the future. Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications, and join our Slack community! In this episode we discuss: How Loris began working with Gerald Combs as a student in Italy Why Loris’ teams name their products after animals The new non-profit Wireshark Foundation Parallel development of cloud technology and containers during Loris’ career The little things that make open-source projects go viral Links: Falco Sysdig Wireshark People mentioned: Solomon Hykes (@solomonhykes)

Emre Baran (@emre) is the CEO and co-founder of Cerbos, the open-source authorization layer for implementing roles and permissions. Cerbos allows developers to decouple authorization logic from core code into its own centrally distributed component. Easier said than done, perhaps - but Cerbos is secure, intentionally simple to implement, and developer-focused. Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications, and join our Slack community! In this episode we discuss: The difference between authentication and authorization Why Cerbos is language-agnostic Authorization patterns in a single application versus a larger network The reason most devs start out trying to do authorization themselves, and sometimes give up How the upcoming Cerbos Cloud will empower less technical users to deploy and manage policies and logs Links: Cerbos Cerbos Cloud Beta Zanzibar: Google’s Consistent, Global Authorization System People mentioned: Charith Ellawala (Github: @charithe) Other episodes: Open Policy Agent with Torin Sandall

Eric Anderson (@ericmander) has a conversation with Liam Randall (@Hectaman) and Bailey Hayes (@baihay) of Cosmonic, the platform-as-a-service environment for building cloud-native applications using WebAssembly. Bailey is also on the steering committee for the Bytecode Alliance, which stewards WebAssembly. In 2021, Cosmonic donated their WebAssembly runtime, wasmCloud, to the CNCF as an open-source project. Today, Liam and Bailey trace the history of WebAssembly, and their personal paths alongside it. Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications, and join our Slack community! In this episode we discuss: How WebAssembly came together over the last decade to become the fourth standardized language of the web The moments when Bailey and Liam both realized they might be changing the future of computing Modding Microsoft Flight Simulator with Wasm modules Liam’s thoughts on how WebAssembly will affect business models going forward Links: Cosmonic WebAssembly Bytecode Alliance CNCF wasmCloud Wasmtime WAMR Better together: A Kubernetes and Wasm case study Spin People mentioned: Kevin Hoffman (@KevinHoffman) Kelsey Hightower (@kelseyhightower) Guy Bedford (@guybedford) Peter Huene (@peterhuene) Chris Aniszczyk (@cra) Other episodes: Envoy Proxy with Matt Klein Suborbital with Connor Hicks

Eric Anderson (@ericmander) is joined by Milos Rusic (@rusic_milos) to discuss Haystack, the open-source NLP framework for leveraging Transformer models and building intelligent search systems. Milos and his colleagues at deepset were early contributors to Hugging Face’s Transformer models, and began building pipelines for searching large document stores. Today, Haystack is wildly popular, with an active Discord community and over 6,000 GitHub stars. Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications, and join our Slack community! In this episode we discuss: A deep dive into how Haystack works and its many use cases How a customer demo with one-minute long queries helped inspire Haystack Marketing open-source projects vs word of mouth NLP applications working with structured data and translating between types of data Imagining a world where every person has their own personal ChatGPT Links: Haystack deepset Hugging Face Notion Other episodes: Milvus with Frank Liu

Eric Anderson (@ericmander) talks with Artyom Keydunov (@keydunov) about Cube, the semantic layer for building data applications. Cube helps engineers bridge data warehouses and data experiences, and provides access control, security, caching, and more helpful features. The project began in open-source and has evolved quite a lot over the last few years with a ton of community support. Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications, and join our Slack community! In this episode we discuss: What is a semantic layer? Coming up with the idea to open-source during a game of ping pong Setting a ten-company-deployment goal Using Cube to track COVID stats in lockdown How one contributor built a GraphQL API Links: Cube Superset Metabase Observable Streamlit People mentioned: Pavel Tiunov (@paveltiunov87)

Eric Anderson (@ericmander) and Erika Hokanson (@erikawh0) remember the life of Jeff Meyerson, creator of the influential podcast Software Engineering Daily. He passed during the summer of 2022. Still, his work lives on - thousands of episodes, talks, music, a book, and a community of dedicated listeners and engineers whose lives were touched by Jeff’s dreams. Software Engineering Daily is still running, and you can listen to new episodes right here or wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications, and join our Slack community! Links: Software Engineering Daily Software Engineering Radio The Prion (Soundcloud) (Spotify) You Are Not A Commodity Move Fast: How Facebook Builds Software People mentioned: Pranay Mohan (@pranaymohan)

We’re kicking off the new year with a conversation between Eric Anderson (@ericmander), Sergei Egorov (@bsideup) and Eli Aleyner (@ealeyner). Sergei and Eli founded AtomicJar to maintain Testcontainers, the family of open-source libraries that allow developers to write and run integration tests locally, and treat them as unit tests. Testcontainers is wildly popular, with over six thousand GitHub stars (and climbing!). Tune in to find out how Sergei and Eli are helping people test their software quicker, easier, and more efficiently. Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications, and join our Slack community! In this episode we discuss: How Testcontainers solves the problem of confidence The value of Github’s networking effect Inspiration from Amazon’s S3 “test bunny” Consequences of Docker’s over- and under-adoption Replicating success in other languages besides Java Links: Testcontainers AtomicJar Spring Quarkus Micronaut How We Maintain Security Testing within the Software Development Life Cycle People mentioned: Richard North (@whichrich) Kevin Wittek (@Kiview) Martin Fowler (@martinfowler)

Eric Anderson (@ericmander) is joined by Nate Rush (@naterush1997) and Aaron Diamond-Reivich (@_aaronDR) to talk about Mito, the open-source spreadsheet that generates Python code for data analysts. Mito is a Python library and acts as an extension to a Jupyter Notebook. Tune in to find out how the Mito team is bridging the gap in data science between spreadsheets and programming. Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications, and join our Slack community! In this episode we discuss: How Nate, Aaron and Aaron’s fraternal twin brother Jake have been friends since middle school Programming tools for spreadsheet users vs spreadsheet tools for people who are trying to become programmers Advantages to integrating into other open-source projects Reflecting on the hype around Python data science Python needs for Mito’s enterprise customers Links: Mito Project Jupyter pandas Superhuman Streamlit People mentioned: Jacob Diamond-Reivich (@Jake_Stack808)

Eric Anderson (@ericmander) and Simba Khadder (@simba_khadder) explore Featureform, the “virtual” feature store platform that aims to standardize data pipelines for machine learning. Contributor is no stranger to feature stores, but Simba has a broader definition than most. Join us to learn how Featureform enables data scientists and machine learning practitioners to solve a common, but rarely addressed organizational problem. Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications, and join our Slack community! In this episode we discuss: How there is no standard or north star for MLOps Why enterprise is where Featureform’s value shines MLPlatform problems vs MLOps problems Why copy/paste and Git don’t cut it Deploying MLOps solutions that make data scientists and everyone else happy Links: Featureform Terraform Apache Spark Feathr Other episodes: Tensorflow with Rajat Monga