Software Huddle

Hassan El Mghari, an AI expert from Together AI, dives into the exciting world of inference optimization. He discusses the rapid growth of Together AI and its hefty series B funding. Listeners will learn about customer applications of AI, the challenges and best practices in building AI apps, and the importance of speed in inference engines. Hassan also explores model fine-tuning techniques, serverless architectures, and common pitfalls in AI app development. This episode is a treasure trove for anyone interested in cutting-edge AI innovations!

Today on the show, we talked with Yujian Tang. He was on the show previously when he worked at Zilliz, when we talked about vector databases and RAG. He's since branched out on his own, building the tech startup scene in Seattle and organizing AI events all over the place.We talk about his latest venture, the Seattle Startup Summit, coming up on March 28th. They're still Early Bird Tickets available if you're interested. We also talk about AI models, the impact AI is having on programming, including our own programming projects and share our takes on some of the recent acquisitions that have happened in tech, including Voyage AI.

Today, we have Sam Lambert back on the show! Sam is the CEO of PlanetScale, and if you follow him on X, you know he’s one of the sharpest voices in the database space—cutting through the hype with deep experience and a no-nonsense approach.In this episode, we dive into PlanetScale’s new Metal offering, which has been battle-tested with PlanetScale’s high-scale cloud business partners and is now GA.Sam also shares why staying profitable is crucial—not just for the business but for the stability and reliability it guarantees for customers. While many cloud infrastructure companies chase the next hype cycle, Sam prefers to keep it boring—delivering rock-solid performance with no surprisesFinally, we close with Sam's thoughts on other happenings in the database space -- Aurora DSQL, Aurora Limitless, MySQL benchmarks, and multi-region strong consistency.Tune in for a deep dive into databases, cloud infrastructure, and what it takes to build a sustainable, high-performance tech company.Timestamps01:34 Start06:42 PlanetScale Metal11:15 The problem with separation of storage and compute15:02 EBS Tax17:32 How does Vitess handle durability22:58 Metal recommended for all PlanetScale users?27:20 The hidden expense of IOPS for cloud databases37:41 Timeline of creating PlanetScale Metal41:32 Focus on profitability47:52 Removal of hobby plan57:45 Deprecation of PlanetScale Boost01:00:24 DSQL01:01:51 Aurora Limitless01:04:15 AWS as a partner01:07:00 The spectacle of AWS re:Invent01:12:22 Benchmarks and benchmarketing01:15:51 AWS Databases + multi-region strong consistency

Redis is consistently one of the most beloved pieces of infrastructure for developers. And in the last few years, we've seen a number of new Redis-compatible projects that aim to improve on the core of Redis in some way.One of those projects is DragonflyDB, a multi-threaded version of Redis that allows for significantly higher throughput on a single instance. Roman Gershman is the co-founder and CTO at Dragonfly, and he has a fascinating background. Roman initially worked at Google and then was a frustrated user of Redis while working as an engineer at a fast-growing startup. He did a stint on the ElastiCache team at AWS but struck off on his own to make a new, faster version of Redis.In this episode, we talk through the improvements that Dragonfly makes to Redis and why it matters to high-scale users. We go through the different needs and requirements of high-scale cache applications and what Roman learned at AWS. We also go through the Redis licensing drama and how to attract developer attention in 2025.

Join Johann Schleier-Smith, co-founder of Tagged and CEO of CrystalDBA, as he shares his unique journey from building a social discovery platform with 300 million members to harnessing AI for database optimization. He reflects on the early days of social media, the challenges of growth, and the parallels with today's advancements in generative AI. Johann reveals insights on navigating technical hurdles and the evolution of database management, highlighting the impact of AI in making advanced solutions more accessible for developers.

David Cramer, Co-founder and CPO of Sentry, shares insights on building robust application monitoring tools. He discusses Sentry's evolution from a simple error manager to a cloud-based powerhouse handling 300,000 events per second. Cramer highlights the unique challenges of open-source projects, such as balancing community interests with funding needs. He also reveals innovative marketing strategies, like investing in developer engagement and sponsoring podcasts, to foster a genuine connection with users in a competitive landscape.

Join Philip Kiely as he unpacks the intricacies of inference optimization for AI workloads. He discusses the hype of Compound AI and how to choose the right model and inference engine. Learn about optimization techniques like quantization and speculative decoding that maximize GPU efficiency. Explore the role of multi-model AI systems and the challenges of model routing, network latency, and performance tooling. Discover practical insights on enhancing inference in large language models while balancing latency, throughput, and cost.

In this discussion, Kevin Dubois, a Senior Principal Developer Advocate at Red Hat and a Java Champion, shares his journey with Java and its evolution into the AI landscape. He dives into how Java integrates with AI, particularly using frameworks like Quarkus and LangChain4j, highlighting the mindset shifts needed for generative AI development. The conversation also emphasizes the parallels between programming and human languages and critiques the balance between open-source and proprietary models. Kevin's insights reveal Java's unique strengths in AI applications within enterprise settings.

Today we have Glauber Costa on the show, who's the CEO and founder at Turso. They provide a managed SQLite service with some really interesting capabilities that's changing some of the application patterns you can do. He shares a lot of really good technical stuff on Twitter. He worked in the kernel, he worked on high-performance databases at ScyllaDB, and now he's working on Turso. He also has a great and interesting podcast, the Save File, which is about developers and religion.Glauber had some great thoughts on the future of databases, including what the future of NoSQL is like and whether we'll see vector databases as a separate category or as a feature of general-purpose databases. We’ve seen arguments both ways, but he was the most effective at changing our mind.

Today, we have Mike Buckbee on the show. Mike is the co-founder of Wafris, and he wrote a really insightful article last week about moving from Redis to SQLite for an aspect of their architecture. The article was nuanced in describing why it worked for their specific needs, and it has some surprising takeaways, including that SQLite was 3x faster than a local Redis instance for their workload.Mike has built a few different WAF (Web Application Firewall) products, so we covered that area as well. He's seen a lot here, so we walked through all the nefarious traffic patterns and the speed in which these bots adapt to new vulnerabilities.Finally, Mike has a wide-ranging skillset that includes marketing. Developers are notoriously tricky to market to, so we talked about his experience in effective marketing to developers without being disingenuous.LinksBlog Post: https://wafris.org/blog/rearchitecting-for-sqliteFor A Good Strftime: www.foragoodstrftime.comIP Lookup: wafris.org/ip-lookupTimestamps01:11 Start03:41 Wafris 07:22 Redis and SQLite19:09 Flatfile21:50 Knowatoa28:22 Web Application Firewalls46:21 Jumpstart Pro48:11 Marketing to Developers