Alexa's Input (AI)

Matthew Gerstman joins me in this episode to discuss the history of the web. Matthew has worked in frontend development at Dropbox, and now he is a Staff Engineer at Bluecore. Inspired by a post he recently made, we discuss a variety of topics relating to the evolution of the web-- including HTML, document object models, PHP,  javascript, web 2.0, CSS, ECMA scripts,  cross-browser bugs / different implementations of javascript, the evolution of browsers, the downfall of internet explorer,  jQuery,  REST, typescript, future of frontend, and much more! Make sure to listen to this great overview of all things web/frontend! Links: History of the web part 1 blog post Matthew Gerstman (LinkedIn, Twitter, website) Alexa's Input Twitter

Michael Hurwitz (Twitter: @dngrmike), a Principal Software Engineer on Bluecore's Data Science Infrastructure team, joins me on this podcast to talk about all things caching, including his open-source caching library LazyLRU (find it on GitHub here and read a blog about it here). The first part of the episode is focused on the basics of caching, what it is used for, and caching policies and patterns. In the second part, we focus on his caching implementation, why he wrote it, and what use cases it is good for.  find notes on this podcast here

Computational astrophysicist Bronson Messer joins me on this episode to talk about computers and science. Bronson got his PhD in Astrophysics from the University of Tennessee, and he now works at Oak Ridge National Library as the Director of Science of the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility. We discuss how he uses the worlds most powerful supercomputers to simulate supernovas blowing up, what it means to be exascale, coding on GPUs, coding practices in the scientific computing community, and much more! To read the article mentioned in the episode about Bronson click here.

In this episode, Bruno Aziza, Head of Data & Analytics at Google Cloud, discusses everything Data & Analytics. From startups to big companies, Bruno has learned a lot along the way and has seen shifts in the field. He discusses those learnings, along with what is coming next. Listen to hear about the importance of his role with the community and going beyond the bytes, the state of Data & Analytics today, the challenges we will face in the near future, and what we can do now.  Link to youtube video Link to notes (coming soon)  Twitter: @alexasinput other ways to find me

Brent Lassi and special guest Mike Hurwitz join me again for part II on security. Brent Lassi co-founded one of the first AppSec companies called Apex, and he now works as the CISO at Bluecore. Mike Hurwitz is a Principal Engineer at Bluecore and has previously worked at Tumblr and Shutterstock. In this episode we talk more about the evolution of security in the last few years-- both about the advantages of the cloud and the lessons learned. We discuss what enterprise viability means for both software engineers and security professionals, and how people play a big part. We talk about some recent events, like the SolarWinds hack, and what we can learn from them.  Click here to read a little bit about what I learned from this episode. The intro music was made by my talented friend Brendan McMahon. Check out his soundcloud.

Brent Lassi and special guest Mike Hurwitz join me on this episode to talk about security. Brent Lassi co-founded one of the first AppSec companies called Apex, and he now works as the CISO at Bluecore. Brent explains his day-to-day and his journey in his field. He also teaches me about infosec, differences in privacy and security, and what security engineers must do to ensure that software is safe. We discuss handling attacks and threats and the immense impact that the advent of cloud computing has had on application security. And much more! Brent is a great storyteller with a sense of humor, so I promise you won't be bored listening to this one.. and you may actually learn a few things like I did.  The intro music was made by my talented friend Brendan McMahon. Check out his soundcloud. 

Jason Reid, Director of Data Science and Engineering at Netflix, joins me on this episode to discuss Netflix's culture. We discuss the topics in the book No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention and his personal experiences at Netflix. We have a great talk about the Keeper Test, career growth, titles, paying top of personal market, mentorship, diversity, and much more! The opinions in this podcast are Jason's own and do not express the opinions of Netflix.

Bahar Shah joins me in this episode to talk about the very beginning stages of a startup. She graduated from MIT, worked at Microsoft as a software engineer, then went to Bluecore where she became a director of engineering, and now she is in the very early stages of a startup she co-founded called Tell. We discuss how Tell began, creating culture, setting values early on, funding, and much more!  Link to the beta version of the Tell app: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/tell/id1465678780

David Dyar joined IBM in their heyday and moved on to help other startups grow as a Senior Vice President (currently at DailyPay). In this episode, he shares his experiences along the way and the lessons he has learned from them. David discusses his various roles, diversity in the workplace, what kinds of people he looks for within organizations, challenges coming into companies, maintaining workplace culture through growth, being an intermediary between engineering and the business, and much more! 

On this episode we talk with Evan Jones (www.evanjones.ca or Twitter: @epcjones), who works at Datadog and previously worked at Bluecore, Twitter, Mitro (his own startup), Infix, Google, and received a PhD from MIT. We discuss server reliability, learning from a cloud provider outage, the difficulties of scaling systems, how to address failures due to overloading your systems, and much more!