Software Huddle

In today's episode with Tim McNamara, we talk all about Rust. Tim is one of the leading educators in the whole Rust educational space. He wrote the Rust in Action book, which is probably the best Rust book out there. He has a YouTube channel, he taught and did a lot of educational work on Rust at Amazon AWS.We talked about object ownership and object lifetimes and just all these interesting things that Rust has and why is this language loved by so many and why it's continuing to grow.He also gets into what it's like being an independent educator, creator, and some of the difficulties with that, how to get started, and how he deals with doubt.

Kent C Dodds, a renowned JavaScript and web development expert, dives into his transformative journey from engineer to educator. He discusses the creation of his Epic Web Dev platform, focusing on hands-on learning. The conversation reveals why so many JavaScript frameworks exist and how they reflect developer dissatisfaction. Kent also shares insights on the importance of pacing in learning and the evolution of web architecture, introducing his innovative PESPA concept. Tune in for quick-fire tech preferences and exciting future events!

Welcome back to an episode where we're talking Vectors, Vector Databases, and AI with Linpeng Tang, CTO and co-founder of MyScale. MyScale is a super interesting technology. They're combining the best of OLAP databases with Vector Search. The project started back in 2019 where they forked ClickHouse and then adapted it to support Vector Storage, Indexing, and Search.The really unique and cool thing is you get the familiarity and usability of SQL with the power of being able to compare the similarity between unstructured data.We think this has really fascinating use cases for analytics well beyond what we're seeing with other vector database technology that's mostly restricted to building RAG models for LLMs. Also, because it's built on ClickHouse, MyScale is massively scalable, which is an area that many of the dedicated vector databases actually struggle with.We cover a lot about how vector databases work, why they decided to build off of ClickHouse, and how they plan to open source the database.Timestamps02:29 Introduction 06:22 Value of a Vector Database 12:40 Forking ClickHouse 18:53 Transforming Clickhouse into a SQL vector database 32:08 Data modeling 32:56 What data can be Vectorized 38:37 Indexing 43:35 Achieving Scale 46:35 Bottlenecks 48:41 MyScale vs other dedicated Vector Databases 51:38 Going Open Source 56:04 Closing thoughts

Today's guest is Yujian Tang from Zilliz, one of the big players in the vector database market. This is the first episode in a series of episodes we’re doing on vectors and vector databases. We start with the basics, what is a vector? What are vector embeddings? How does vector search work? And why the heck do I even need a vector database? RAG models for customizing LLMs is where vector databases are getting a lot of their use. On the surface, it seems pretty simple, but in reality, there's a lot of tinkering that goes into taking RAG to production.Yujian explains some of the tripwires that you might run into and how to think through those problems. We think you're going to really enjoy this episode.Timestamps02:08 Introduction03:16 What is a Vector?07:01 How does Vector Search work?14:08 Why need a Vector database?15:11 Use Cases17:37 What is RAG?20:34 RAG vs fine-tuning29:51 Measuring Performance32:32 Is RAG here to stay?35:43 Milvus37:17 History of Milvus47:44 Rapid FireXhttps://twitter.com/yujian_tanghttps://twitter.com/seanfalconer

Tyler Wells, CTO and co-founder at Propel, discusses building data platforms at Twilio and Skype. Topics include real-time analytics challenges, Propel's solutions, infrastructure development insights, S3's importance, and the impact of AI on software engineering.

Head of DevRel for Elastic, Philipp Krenn, discusses Elasticsearch fundamentals covering topics like Use Cases, Indexing, Shards, Replicas, and Bottlenecks. He also touches on where not to use Elasticsearch and the process of upgrading an Elasticsearch Cluster.

Zig is a new programming language with big ambitions: to be a better C.Loris Cro is the VP of Community at the Zig Software Foundation, and he takes us through the ins and outs of Zig -- how was it created, what problems is it trying to solve, and where is it being used. We heard Joran Dirk Greef rave about Zig during our TigerBeetle episode, and there are a lot of passionate Zig fans out there. Zig has some really unique aspects, particularly the comptime keyword that allows for running arbitrary code at compile time.We also talk about Loris's background and his rapid rise to lead marketing for a software foundation. Loris talks about how he got there, how Zig things about community, and how they're working to make Zig sustainable.

In this engaging interview, Joe Reis, co-author of 'Fundamentals of Data Engineering,' shares his wealth of knowledge in the data engineering space. He discusses the vital role data engineers play in organizations and contrasts it with roles in data science. Joe dives into the dangers of chasing trendy technologies, the importance of mastering foundational principles, and the complexities of data governance in today’s AI-driven world. Listeners will appreciate his insights into resource constraints and the nuances of managing data integrity across various platforms.

Our special episode is back! Join Sean, Alex & Vino in this fun conversation.00:00 Introduction10:08 Sora by OpenAi16:11 Google Gemini 1.522:05 Mixture-of-Experts38:02 Nvidia’s Valuation40:19 Apple Vision Pro49:05 Tech Layoffs

Today's episode is with Craig Kerstiens, Craig has been in the Postgres space for a long time. First at Heroku, doing Heroku Postgres. Then at Citus, doing Distributed Postgres. Now at Crunchy Data, he's Chief Product Officer there.He's done a lot of Postgres advocacy and a lot of interesting stuff. In this episode we'll talk about the Postgres ecosystem, some of the Postgres features, some of the naysayers about Postgres, and just get Craig's thoughts on those.