Eric Anderson (@ericmander) connects with Dalai Felinto (@dfelinto), development coordinator at Blender. Blender is a free and open-source 3D graphics toolset with a unique story spanning nearly 30 years. The project is used professionally for animation, video games, scientific visualization, and much more. Join us for a very special episode of Contributor as we take a deep dive into one of the most dedicated, robust communities in open-source history. In this episode we discuss: When the dotcom crash landed Blender in the hands of community members Taking open-source beyond the toolset with open movie projects Dalai’s transition from burgeoning architect to Blender developer How you can use Blender’s new Geometry Nodes for AI training Solving organizational challenges with full-time staff and contributors Links: Blender Blender Studio Big Buck Bunny Elephants Dream Sprite Fright People mentioned: Ton Roosendaal (@tonroosendaal)

Eric Anderson (@ericmander) interviews Abe Gong (@AbeGong) and Kyle Eaton (@SuperCoKyle) about Great Expectations, the open-source framework that aims to create a shared standard for data quality. Abe is a core contributor to the project, and the CEO and co-founder of Superconductive, the team backing Great Expectations. Kyle is Growth Lead at Superconductive, and Community Manager of Great Expectations. The team at Superconductive have just launched the new Expectation Gallery to connect contributors and carve out vertical spaces in this ecosystem. Tune in to find out why Great Expectations is the leading open-source project for eliminating pipeline debt. In this episode we discuss: How the Expectation Gallery enables new modes of community engagement Superconductive’s pivot from healthcare data consulting to open-source data validation Collaborative conversations with other data companies Abe’s advice to future open-source founders on segmenting value The vision of Great Expectations as a protocol-level open standard Links: Great Expectations Superconductive Down with Pipeline debt Cascade Data Labs Flyte Dagster Databricks pandas People mentioned: James Campbell (@jpcampbell42) Other episodes: Dagster with Nick Schrock

Eric Anderson (@ericmander) sits down with Abhishek Dubey (@abhishekdubey), co-creator of Bolster, the fraud prevention platform powered by deep-learning. Bolster is used by clients like LinkedIn, Uber and Dropbox for its cutting-edge detection and takedown technology. Abhishek and his co-founder built Bolster around the real-time URL-scanning tool CheckPhish, which analyzes phishing sites for free. On today’s episode, learn how Abhishek and the team at Bolster have found success by focusing on building their business out of passion, and giving back to the community. In this episode we discuss: A second mortgage and a startup garage Discovering 100 Fortune 500 companies were using CheckPhish How Bolster snagged LinkedIn without a proof of concept Bolster’s secret sauce, that sets them apart from other security companies Comparing the community focus of Bolster to a traditional open-source model Links: Bolster CheckPhish Hacker Dojo Twilio People mentioned: Shashi Prakash (@skiddzo)

Eric Anderson (@ericmander) sits down with Magnus Hillestad (@MHillestad) and Even Westvang (@even), co-founders of the unified content platform Sanity. The team at Sanity helps businesses organize their structured content as data, allowing distribution from a single source of truth. Tune in today’s episode to learn how Sanity aims to change the way people think about content. In this episode we discuss: The open-source editing environment and CMS, Sanity Studio From content as data, to coffee table books How Sanity differs from a traditional CMS Why the Sanity team turned down a contract with the United Nations Building a team that can scale to a vision of ubiquity Links: Sanity Sanity Studio Figma Brex Netlify People mentioned: Simen Svale Skogsrud (@svale) Øyvind Rostad (@rostad)

Eric Anderson (@ericmander) and Ev Kontsevoy (@kontsevoy) talk about Teleport, the open-source tool for instant access to cloud resources. These include SSH servers, Kubernetes clusters, databases and more. Teleport was inspired by the growing complexity of cloud environments, and aims to make engineers feel like all their cloud applications are in the same room together. In this episode we discuss: How Teleport grew from a side project to Gravity, the open-source toolkit for packaging and running applications autonomously Unifying and consolidating modern access methods and industry best practices Bringing identity to a protocol-level An early community use case for Teleport in the cattle industry Engaging with outside contributions while balancing security constraints Links: Teleport Gravity Mailgun

Eric Anderson (@ericmander) and Travis Nielsen (@STravisNielsen) talk about Rook, the open-source storage orchestrator for Kubernetes. Travis is a Senior Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat, and maintainer of Rook. Join us to dive deep into the story of Rook, from Microsoft, to Quantum, to Red Hat. In this episode we discuss: Ceph + Kubernetes = Rook The difficulty and importance of a stable storage solution for stateless applications How Rook leverages Kubernetes CRDs Why the Rook team decided to work with the CNCF Red Hat’s philosophy and approach to open-source Links: Rook Red Hat Upbound Quantum CNCF People mentioned: Bassam Tabbara (@bassamtabbara) Jared Watts (@jbw976)

Eric Anderson (@ericmander) and Patrick McFadin (@PatrickMcFadin) delve into the history of Apache Cassandra, the open-source NoSQL database born and bred around cloud over a decade ago. Patrick is the VP of Developer Relations at DataStax, and a member of the Cassandra Project Management Committee. On today’s episode, Patrick shares his philosophy on developer advocacy and experience in open-source. In this episode we discuss: Behind the NoSQL explosion that made Cassandra the darling of the valley Comparing different eras of commercializing open-source, then and now How Patrick became a pioneer in evangelizing and community-building The two kinds of people to recruit for developer relations Why Patrick says open-source is going to “start eating clouds” Links: Apache Cassandra Datastax Datastax Astra People mentioned: Avinash Lakshman (@HedvigEng) Prashant Malik (@pmalik) Adrian Cawcroft (@adrianco) Kelsey Hightower (@kelseyhightower) Other episodes: Chef with Adam Jacob

Eric Anderson (@ericmander) interviews Nick Schrock (@schrockn) about Dagster, the open-source data orchestrator for machine learning, analytics, and ETL. Nick is the founder and CEO of Elementl, and is well-known for creating the Project Infrastructure group at Facebook, which spawned GraphQL and React. On today’s episode of Contributor, Nick explains how he set out to fix an inefficiency he identified amongst the complexity of the data infrastructure domain. In this episode we discuss: Dagster’s place in the industry shift towards thinking of data as a software engineering discipline Why Nick believes it’s time for the term “data cleaning” to be retired The empowerment of Dagster’s instantaneous spin-up process and local development experience How a partner integrated Dagster into workflow for ops workers on the warehouse floor One user’s testimony that, “what dbt did for our SQL, Dagster did for our Python” Links: Dagster Elementl GraphQL React dbt Snowflake Apache Airflow People mentioned: Lee Byron (@leeb) Dan Schafer (@dlschafer) Abe Gong (@AbeGong)

Eric Anderson (@ericmander) and Tanmai Gopal (@tanmaigo) dive into the open-source Hasura GraphQL Engine and the wider Hasura community. Hasura provides real-time GraphQL APIs for databases, so developers can focus on building applications without worrying about infrastructure. Tune in to hear the full story about how Tanmai and his team are helping engineers unlock the dream of self-serve data access. In this episode we discuss: How the early Hasura team created their own version of GraphQL in parallel Developing community with ease of onboarding and radical transparency Transitioning community events into the COVID world, and looking to a future beyond travel Hasura’s secret sauce: the authorization framework Links: Hasura Hasura Con’21 DigitalOcean People mentioned: Rajoshi Ghosh (@rajoshighosh)

Eric Anderson (@ericmander) is joined by the co-founders of MindsDB, Jorge Torres (@JorgeTorresAI) and Adam Carrigan (@AdamMCarrigan). MindsDB is an open-source AI layer that integrates with existing databases, from MySQL to Clickhouse. Tune in to learn how these two former college roommates are working to bring machine learning into the mainstream. In this episode we discuss: Why it makes sense to run machine learning models in the database Partnering with Kafka, Looker, and more MindsDB’s initial adoption by students at Berkeley Different applications for MindsDB and machine learning in ecommerce, finance, and more The moment Jorge knew he had to get into business with Adam Links: MindsDB RedisConf 2021 Looker Apache Kafka ClickHouse Other episodes ClickHouse with Alexey Milovidov and Ivan Blinkov