Contributor

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

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