Software Huddle

Today we're talking with one of our favorite engineers, Rafal Wilinski. Rafal has been on the cutting edge of AI development in the last few years as he has led AI teams at Zapier and Vendr. Rafal walks us through the hard-won lessons about actually integrating AI tools into the applications you're building. One of the hardest things in integrating these AI tools is how to ensure you're getting better and not regressing as you improve your prompts and upgrade your models. He shows how using evals is one part of the story along with deeply investigating customer signals to see how they are or aren't succeeding with AI. Along the way, we also talk about RAG, his favorite models, his AI development toolset, and why Poland has been killing it lately. Check it out and be sure to follow Rafal if you want to learn more on building with AI.

Matt Watson, CEO of Full Scale and author of the book Product Driven, dives into transforming engineering cultures. He discusses the pitfalls of engineers being stuck in execution mode and emphasizes the importance of ownership and empathy in development. Watson shares insights on bridging communication gaps, particularly in remote settings, and the value of customer interaction. He also highlights how successful companies cultivate high-ownership cultures and empower their engineers, fostering innovation and collaboration within teams.

Aayush Shah, co-founder of Blacksmith and a systems expert from Cockroach Labs and Faire, dives into the evolving world of CI in the age of AI. He discusses how the surge of AI agents is reshaping CI workloads and the need for improved visibility in testing. Aayush shares insights on their innovative approach to cloud economics, revealing how traditional storage isn't cutting it for their unique demands. He also highlights Blacksmith's capabilities in handling multi-tenancy and resource allocation, all while navigating the challenges of continuous integration.

Today, we're talking Valkey, Redis, and all things caching. Our guest is Madelyn Olson, who is a principal engineer at AWS working on Elasticache and is one of the most well-known people in the caching community. She was a core maintainer of Redis prior to the fork and was one of the creators of Valkey, an open-source fork of Redis. In this episode, we talk about Madelyn's road to becoming a Redis maintainer and how she found out about the March 2024 license change. Then, Madelyn shares the story of Valkey being created, philosophical differences between the projects, and her reaction to re-relicensing of Redis in May 2025. Next, we dive into the performance improvements of recent Valkey releases, including the I/O threads improvements and the new hash table layout. Along the way, Madelyn dispels the notion that the single-threaded nature of Redis / Valkey is that big of a hindrance for most workloads. Finally, she compares some of the Valkey improvements to some of the other recent cache competitors in the space.

Sam Lambert from Planetscale, an expert in database technology, returns with captivating insights about their new Postgres offering. He shares the story behind the transition from MySQL to Postgres, revealing surprising demand and the importance of operational excellence. The discussion covers navigating database management in AI environments, strategies for scalability, and the innovative sharded project, Nova. Sam emphasizes the value of community feedback in enhancing features and the challenges faced in balancing security with user flexibility.

Big time guest today as Arvid Kahl joins us. Arvid is my favorite type of guest -- a deeply technical founder that can talk about both the technical and business challenges of a startup. Lots to enjoy from this episode. Arvid is known as the Bootstrapped Founder and has documented his path to selling Feedback Panda back in 2019. He's now building Podscan and sharing his journey as he goes. Podscan is a fascinating project. It's making the content of *every* podcast episode around the world fully searchable. He currently has 3.5 million episodes transcribed and adds another 30,000 - 50,000 episodes every day. This involves a ton of technical challenges, including how to get the best transcription results from the latest LLMs, whether you should use APIs from public providers or run your own LLMs, and how to efficiently provide full-text search across terabytes of transcription data. Arvid shares the lessons he's learned and the various strategies he's tried over the years. But there are also unique business challenges. For most technical businesses, your infrastructure costs grow in line with your customers. More customers == more data == more servers. With Podscan, Arvid has to index the entire podcast ecosystem regardless of his customers. This means a lot of upfront investment as he looks to grow his customer base. Arvid tells us how he's optimized his infrastructure to account for this unique challenge.

Kent C. Dodds, a web development educator known for his work with React and JavaScript testing, dives into the fascinating world of AI. He discusses the emerging Model Context Protocol (MCP), its advantages over traditional REST APIs, and his vision of creating a personal Jarvis. Kent shares insights on the impact of AI on education, the evolution of JavaScript frameworks, and the challenges of organizing the Epic WebConf. His passion for blending technology with teaching shines through, making this conversation enlightening and engaging.

AJ Stuyvenberg, a Staff Engineer at Datadog, discusses the intriguing transition from Go to Rust while rewriting AWS Lambda extensions. He emphasizes the importance of performance and reliability, diving into the complexities of integrating third-party solutions. AJ shares insights on gaining project approval and the benefits of extensive performance optimization in serverless environments. He also offers practical advice for developers navigating the AWS ecosystem and the evolving landscape of database technologies.

Amal Kiran, CEO and Co-founder of Temperstack, is transforming the landscape of Site Reliability Engineering with AI-driven solutions. He discusses the potential of AI agents to automate tedious tasks, reducing the stress of late-night bug fixes. The conversation covers the hidden costs of software downtime and the risks of relying too heavily on individual experts. Kiran also highlights the functionality of Tempurstack in enhancing alert management and incident response, and the importance of building trust in automated systems for better performance.

Today we have Søren from Prisma on the show. Prisma has been the most popular ORM in the TypeScript world for a while, and now they’re moving more into hosted infrastructure.We spend a lot of time talking about their new offering called Prisma Postgres, which is this unikernel-based Postgres offering. It’s a really unique offering from both a technical and a product perspective.On the technical side, they’re doing some interesting work compared to other Postgres providers. They’re running on bare metal in a colocation facility rather than the default public clouds like AWS, GCP, and Azure. Further, they’re using unikernels in a Firecracker VM, giving them unique startup and security characteristics.These technical decisions give them unique economics compared to standard providers, so they’re able to have a generous free tier and a unique billing model that works great for serverless applications with spiky workloads.Around all of this, it’s very interesting to see a company with such a unique spread of products — a popular, mature open-source library paired with a mission-critical infrastructure service offering. We talked about the difficulties in building a company that accommodates these two very different products.Timestamps01:51 Start06:08 Prisma Postgres09:10 Accelerate11:39 Why Postgres17:32 How Prisma Postgres Works21:32 Colocation Facility22:05 Unikernels27:56 CoLo vs Public Cloud29:11 Building the team31:46 Missing Features that are being worked on32:31 Use Cases33:37 Colo Locations34:53 Cloudflare35:42 Biggest surprises since release37:34 More Unikernel adoption?39:08 Supporting Prisma ORM46:43 Mongo47:51 Life as A CEO53:04 MCP57:23 Søren Questions AlexSoftware Huddle ⤵︎X: https://twitter.com/SoftwareHuddleSubstack: https://softwarehuddle.substack.com