Software Huddle

Today on the show, we have the founder and CEO of Akita Software and now head of product at Postman, Dr. Professor Jean Yang. Jean has a super interesting background, a former computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University with a focus on programming language research.She then went on to found Akita Software, which was focused on solving hard problems around the API observability space. And last year, the company was acquired by Postman. And during the interview, we covered a lot of ground talking about Jean's academic experience, motivations for starting a company, and the problem Akita set out to work on.01:05 Intro06:40 Software as a Social Problem12:10 Over engineering20:44 Motivation25:22 The problems32:10 Existing methods to solve36:21 Some other similar systems36:21 Packet to Reconstruction39:43 Aha moments for customers41:33 Why sell to Postman47:23 Would you do it again?52:03 Rapid Fire

Today's guest is a legend in the distributed systems community. Stephan Ewan was one of the creators of Apache Flink, a stream processing engine that took off with the rise of Apache Kafka. Stephan is now working on core transactional problems by building a durable async/await system that integrates with any programming language. It's designed to help with a number of difficult problems in transactional processing, including idempotency, dual writes, distributed locks, and even simple retries and cancellation.In this episode, we get into the details of how Restate works and what it does. We cover core use cases and how people are solving these problems today. Then, we dive into the core of the Restate engine to learn why they're building on a log-based system. Finally, we cover lessons learned from Stephan's time with Flink and what's next for Restate.

Today's guest is Bain Capital partner Rak Garg. Rak is a super smart guy that's worked as an ML researcher. Then he was in product at Atlassian before moving over to the venture capital side of the world.In this episode, we talk about BCV Labs, an AI incubator and community for AI founders that Rak helped establish. Rak shares his thoughts on the big opportunities he sees in AI and how it's going to impact the world, both in the short and long term, and how BCV Labs is helping support AI founders bring these visions to reality.There's a huge amount of opportunity to automate away a lot of manual tasks across industries like legal, insurance, and healthcare. But of course, there's a lot of complexity with actually bringing this technology to market.

In this episode, We spoke with the founders of WarpStream Labs, Richard Artoul and Ryan Worl.WarpStream is a fascinating rethink of Kafka -- how could you simplify and improve the Kafka design by slightly tweaking your constraints? The result is very compelling -- a Kafka-compatible API that bypasses local disk by writing everything directly to S3. For the tradeoff of a slightly higher end-to-end latency, you can get a Kafka cluster that's much cheaper and way easier to operate.Richie and Ryan have been working on high-scale data systems for years and were the engineers behind Husky, Datadog's custom-built database for logs and metrics. In this episode, they walk us through their experience building WarpStream. They touch on all the hard parts of building your own system (including why it's gotten easier!), as well as some of the difficult problems they had to solve for full compatibility with existing Kafka client libraries. They also touch on using FoundationDB, their thoughts on S3 Express One Zone, and whether AWS's cross-AZ network costs are a scam.Lots of interesting thoughts here from a really sharp team.

Today, we have Cassidy Williams, CTO of Contenda. Contenda unbelievably started as a sticker distribution platform that pivoted into a product that converts podcasts and videos into various other forms of written content via AI. But in our conversation with Cassidy today, we talk about their latest pivot to a product called Brainstory, which is an AI based brainstorming application. We talked through some of their product choices around focusing on speech as the main input mechanism, some of the technical challenges they've had to overcome, how they're using multiple AI models in the backend to make all this magic happen, and where they're seeing initial product traction. If you're a founder or thinking of starting a company, we think you'll find this conversation super interesting.Check Out Brainstory: https://www.brainstory.ai/Software Huddle: https://twitter.com/SoftwareHuddleCassidy: https://twitter.com/cassidooSean: https://twitter.com/seanfalconer

In this special end of the year clips episode of Software Huddle, we took some time to highlight some of our favorite clips from our interviews since we launched the show back in August.Software Huddle: https://twitter.com/SoftwareHuddleAlex: https://twitter.com/alexbdebrieSean: https://twitter.com/seanfalconer

On today's show, we have quite the lineup. We have Rizel Scarlett, Leandro Margulis and Katherine Miller all joining Sean to talk about AI for developers. This came together because the four of them had participated on a conference panel earlier this year discussing the topic.We discuss our impressions of AI for developers, what impact it may or may not have, privacy and security, ethics concerns, what the future might look like, and a whole lot more. Today’s guests have a diverse set of roles spanning product, marketing, and developer relations, so we think we were able to bring a lot of different perspectives to the topic.Timestamps:02:25 Introduction 05:45 Will AI's net impact be positive? 11:10 Customer support chatbots 17:18 Speed of Innovation 26:15 Safeguarding Sensitive Data 28:47 Creating your own Models 31:55 Using LLMs responsibly 41:27 Everything GPT45:08 Existential Risk51:17 Psychological SafetyLinks:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wh02qPQasfk

In this episode, we spoke with Vino Duraisamy, Developer advocate at Snowflake. Vino has been working as a data and AI engineer for her entire career across companies like Apple, Treeverse, and now Snowflake. And in this episode, we dive into her thoughts on what's happening in AI right now and what a practical LLM strategy for a company should look like.We discussed the hard, unsolved problems in the space like privacy, hallucinations, transparency, testing, and bias. There's a lot of problems. We're very much in the Wild West days of AI, and it still takes a ton of work to move beyond prototype to production with any AI application.There's lots of hype, but not necessarily that many enterprises actually launching products that take advantage of these generative AI systems yet. We thought Vino had a lot of real world perspective to share, and we think you're going to enjoy the conversation.Follow Vino: https://twitter.com/vinodhini_sdFollow Sean: https://twitter.com/seanfalconer

Today we have the former CEO of Snowflake, a 23 year veteran of Microsoft, Bob Muglia on the show. In this interview, we discuss Bob's book, Datapreneurs, which takes you on a journey about the people behind the first relational databases in the 1970s and early 80s, to Bob's experience launching Microsoft SQL Server and a ton of other products, developing the Data Cloud at Snowflake, and to the future of data and AI.We cover a lot of ground, including some of his experience working alongside the likes of Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer.Timestamps:02:24 Introduction 04:53 Relational Databases 18:43 Speed of Innovations24:30 Keeping the Early Stage Culture 31:04 Most successful leaders are difficult to deal with 34:31 Setting up Cloud Data Center at home 36:25 Joining Snowflake as the CEO 38:54 AWS made Snowflake happen42:18 Google, AWS Missing the Snowflake Opportunity 46:13 Impact On Jobs 50:48 Existential Risk 52:28 Staying Optimistic Links:The Datapreneurs: The Promise of AI and the Creators Building Our Futurehttps://www.thedatapreneurs.com/Follow Bob: https://twitter.com/Bob_MugliaFollow Sean: https://twitter.com/seanfalconerSoftware Huddle ⤵︎X: https://twitter.com/SoftwareHuddleLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/softwarehuddle/Substack: https://softwarehuddle.substack.com/

Our special episode is back, and we have a special guest this time. Join Sean, Alex & Merritt in this fun conversation.Timestamps:00:00 Introduction 01:19 What is a CISO 08:10 Balance of Power 13:50 reInvent BTS 19:45 Sam Altman 32:29 SEC & SolarWinds 38:40 iPhones will support RCS 49:04 Meet us at reInvent Links:Factors to consider in relation to the SEC Materiality Frameworkhttps://www.lacework.com/resource/sec-materiality-framework.htmlOpenAI announces leadership transitionhttps://openai.com/blog/openai-announces-leadership-transitionAWS reInvent 2023https://reinvent.awsevents.com/Follow Merritt: https://twitter.com/MerrittBaerFollow Alex: https://twitter.com/alexbdebrieFollow Sean: https://twitter.com/seanfalconer