Ben Haynes, CEO and co-founder of Directus, discusses the inspiration behind Directus, its growth trend, power in digital experiences, sustainable open-source experience, and automated data processing with Directus Flows.

Eric Anderson (@ericmander) chats with Toni de la Fuente (@ToniBlyx) about how he created Prowler, an open source security tool for AWS. Toni talks about taking Prowler from a nights-and-weekends project to his current full-time job, managing a team of four. They discuss transitioning from primarily coding to primarily managing tickets and users, as well as being “client zero” and bringing the project to big companies. Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications, and join our Slack community! In this episode we discuss: The roadmap from open source Prowler to Prowler Pro Prowler’s diverse set of users What Toni learned from quitting an earlier open source project The differences between Prowler and other security services for AWS Links: Prowler on Github Prowler Pro Verica Black Hat People mentioned: Aaron Rinehart Casey Rosenthal

Eric Anderson (@ericmander) meets legendary open-source developer Max Howell (@mxcl) to talk about tea, a decentralized protocol for remunerating the open-source ecosystem. Max is the creator of Homebrew, and he chats about his exit from the project. The conversation turns to his newest project, tea, which is an evolution of Brew, and takes inspiration from blockchain technology. They also discuss Max’s famous interview at Google and his time working for Apple. Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications, and join our Slack community! In this episode we discuss: Max’s experience creating Homebrew, one of the largest open-source projects ever The utility of Web3 beyond decentralized finance Writing a white paper for tea, “just like everyone else” Why Max wants a global team, with people in every time zone How tea ensures a sustainable future for open-source Links: Homebrew tea.xyz tea white paper Bitcoin white paper Max’s Google interview tweet Log4j vulnerability “Nebraska” XKCD comic Nix OS People mentioned: Timothy Lewis

Eric Anderson (@ericmander) and Connor Hicks (@cohix) launch into detail on Suborbital, an open-source project that allows developers to create WebAssembly projects embedded in other applications. Connor conceived of Suborbital while frustrated with the cold start problem that can impact Function-as-a-Service platforms. Today, Suborbital collaborates with companies like Microsoft on a community called Wasm Builders, dedicated to sharing and developing innovations in WebAssembly applications. Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications, and join our Slack community! In this episode we discuss: The three tentpoles of WebAssembly that make it a useful foundation for Suborbital Surprising niche use cases for WebAssembly like IoT and data modeling Open-source tools in the Suborbital ecosystem Putting focus on building a larger Wasm Builders community Connor’s thoughts on how WebAssembly can improve edge computing Links: Suborbital WebAssembly Suborbital Compute Atmo Reactr Subo  Sat Firecracker

Eric Anderson (@ericmander) and Frank Liu (@frankzliu) talk about Milvus, the open-source vector database built for scalable similarity search. Vector databases are built to search, index and store embeddings, a requirement for powerful AI applications. Frank is Director of Operations at Zilliz, the company that stewards the project. Tune in to find out how Milvus is the database for the AI era. Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications, and join our Slack community! In this episode we discuss: A crash course on embeddings and vector databases Using Milvus for logo search, crypto predictions, drug discovery, and more Other open-source projects at Zilliz that complement Milvus “Embedding Everything” How Milvus incorporates tunable consistency to its search process Links: Milvus Zilliz Towhee Attu Feder Other episodes: Clickhouse with Alexey Milovidov and Ivan Blinkov Correction: Milvus is based on a “shared storage” architecture, not “shared nothing.”

Eric Anderson (@ericmander) reunites with old colleagues Kenn Knowles (@KennKnowles) and Pablo Estrada (@polecitoem) for a conversation on Apache Beam, the open-source programming model for data processing. The trio once worked together at Google, and Beam was a turning point in the history of open-source there. Today, both Kenn and Pablo are members of the Beam PMC, and join the show with the inside scoop on Beam’s past, present and future. In this episode we discuss: Transitioning Beam to the Apache Way How “inner source” works at Google Thoughts on the relationship between batch processing and streaming Some ways that community “power users” have contributed to Beam Information on Beam Summit 2022, the first onsite summit since COVID began The first few people to register can use code BEAM_POD_INV for a discount on tickets! Links: Apache Beam Apache Spark Apache Flink Apache Nemo Apache Samza Apache Crunch MapReduce paper  MillWheel paper FlumeJava paper Dataflow paper Beam Summit 2022 Website Other episodes: TensorFlow with Rajat Monga

Eric Anderson (@ericmander) returns to Temporal with co-founder Maxim Fateev (@mfateev) and principal engineer Dominik Tornow (@DominikTornow). When Maxim joined us in September of 2020, the company called their project a “workflow orchestrator.” Today, Temporal has grown in popularity and usability, but the terminology around that abstraction has changed. Tune in to track the evolution of what Maxim calls a genuinely “new category of software.” In this episode we discuss: New features and developments in the last 2 years The proper way to pronounce “Temporal” How Temporal guarantees that workflow execution actually runs to execution Describing Temporal as a new pair of glasses Replay, Temporal’s first developer conference on August 25-26, in Seattle Links: Temporal Cadence Apache Cassandra Replay People mentioned: Samar Abbas (@samarabbas77) Other episodes: Temporal with Maxim Fateev Apache Cassandra with Patrick McFadin

Eric Anderson (@ericmander) interviews Avi Press (@avi_press) about Scarf, the distribution platform for open-source software that facilitates analytics and commercialization. Scarf offers a set of tools that allows founders and maintainers to understand adoption of their products, including Scarf Gateway, which provides a central access point to containers and packages. From there, open-source developers can connect with the people that rely on their work. In this episode we discuss: Why you can’t rely on Github as a source of comprehensive data about open-source software Tracing a user’s journey interacting with a project across multiple platforms How better observability allows maintainers to make better software Inspiring indie maintainers to commercialize their projects The privilege of being able to work in open-source, and how Scarf can enable a more inclusive developer community Links: Scarf Tidelift Gitcoin OpenTeams Aviyel

Eric Anderson (@ericmander) and Patrick Dougherty (@cpdough) talk about Rasgo, the data transformation platform for MLOps that makes generating SQL easy. The team at Rasgo recently open-sourced a package called RasgoQL, that allows users to execute SQL queries against a data warehouse using Python syntax. Tune in to find out how Rasgo aims to bridge an important gap in the Modern Data Stack. In this episode we discuss: The advantages of offering both a low-code/no-code UI and a Python interface "How can a data scientist, without needing full-time resources from data engineering, be somewhat self-sufficient in data prep and able to deliver those insights without a massive human capital investment needed?" Where Rasgo fits into the world of feature stores Why one Rasgo user took a trip to a wind farm in Texas Eric’s predictions for the future of data prep and transformation Links: Rasgo RasgoQL DuckDB Delta Lake People mentioned: Jared Parker (@jaredtparker_)

Eric Anderson (@ericmander) and Willem Pienaar (@willpienaar) talk about Feast, the open-source feature store for machine learning. Feature stores act as a bridge between models and data, and allow data scientists to ship features into production without the need for engineers. Willem co-created Feast at Gojek, and later teamed up with the folks at Tecton to back the project. In this episode we discuss: The value of feature stores in MLOps What happens when you open-source too early Why most open-source code has nothing to hide Bringing an open-source project to an existing company Good and bad use cases for a feature store Links: Feast Tecton Turing Merlin Kubeflow apply() Conference People mentioned: Mike Del Balso Kevin Stumpf (@kevinmstumpf) Ajey Gore (@AjeyGore) Demetrios Brinkmann (@Dpbrinkm) Wes McKinney (@wesmckinn) Other episodes: Flyte with Ketan Umare Great Expectations with Abe Gong and Kyle Eaton