Big Ideas in App Architecture

By Cockroach Labs

Cockroach Lab’s Big Ideas in App Architecture is a podcast for architects and engineers building modern data-intensive applications and systems. In every weekly episode, an innovator joins the show to... more

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FAQs about Big Ideas in App Architecture:

How many episodes does Big Ideas in App Architecture have?

The podcast currently has 68 episodes available.

Big Ideas in App Architecture episodes:

October 10, 2023Engineering resilient systems: Rescuing old treasures and unleashing modern capabilities
Are legacy systems just outdated systems? The answer is, it’s complicated…
In this episode, we’re joined by Marianne Bellotti, author of “Kill It With Fire”. Marianne has built data infrastructure for the United Nations and tackled some of the oldest and most complicated computer systems in the world as part of the United States Digital Service.

Join as we discuss:
Marianne’s fascinating and often surprising insights from the field.
The art of balancing innovation with preserving the best of legacy systems.
Managing technology deployments, pushing back on load test results, and setting realistic expectations throughout a modernization project.
Why AI has potential to change the world of software engineering.
...more
55min
September 26, 2023Can I take your order? Building conversational AI to improve the customer experience
Indecisiveness at the drive-through is just one of the many factors that ConverseNow’s conversational AI software for restaurants has to design for. To see what tools, programming languages, and more go into enabling a successful automated food order, we sat down with Akshay Kayastha, Senior Engineering Manager at ConverseNow.

Join as we discuss:
How to design systems with good customer service as the key objective.
Tackling technical challenges in speech-to-text transcription such as low audio quality, background noises, and more.
Building for Super Bowl scale while achieving low latency.
Why Akshay’s team took a Kubernetes-first approach from Day 1.
...more
1h 7min
September 19, 2023The Full Package: How Route architects its all-in-one post-purchase platform
A purchase may seem complete after a user checks out, but the package itself still needs to make the voyage to the customer’s doorstep. Route’s post-purchase platform is designed to handle every step of this journey from offering package insurance to providing transparent tracking information, and is currently used by big companies including Alo Yoga and Cotopaxi.

Route’s astounding 98.1% customer retention rate is the result of a feedback-driven and cross-departmental culture that translates data into actionable improvements. To learn about the engineering and architecture that makes better customer experiences possible, our host David Joy sat down with their Engineering Manager, Siddhartha Sandhu.

Join as we discuss:
The power of customer-centric product development
Why the best way to improve your product is to use it
How to choose tooling that will enable faster product growth
...more
59min
September 12, 2023A historical journey in developer technologies with the CTO at Spark Labs
As the CTO at development agency Spark Labs, Mike Willbanks gets the opportunity to work with every technology under the sun. This episode is a free-flowing conversation about the trends that have defined the modern developer experience as well as what’s next.

Join as we discuss:
The biggest challenges that come with building applications including authentication and payment processing.
Why enterprises are responding to the serverless paradigm.
How Mike’s team uses Copilot and ChatGPT Pro and what the benefits & limitations are.
Why the world of databases will always be a wild west.
...more
1h 25min
September 05, 2023From Legacy to Cloud: Success stories from migrating mission-critical applications
At Ameren, resilient infrastructure is what keeps the lights on for millions of residents across the Midwest. We caught up with Kishore Koduri, Ameren’s Senior Director of Enterprise Architecture to hear about what goes into modernizing such critical applications as well as what any enterprise can learn from his experiences.

Join as we discuss:
How to build roadmaps, create migration plans, and monitor progress during large-scale digital transformation projects
The challenges of breaking down a monolithic application into microservices
Why you shouldn’t just implement new technology for the sake of it
Fascinating practical use cases for ChatGPT and Google Bard
...more
57min
August 29, 2023Building purpose-driven engineering cultures with BNY Mellon’s Head of Engineering Enablement
“Successful platforming means getting real product managers involved, promoting reuse, and measuring happiness and success. Letting the voice of the customer guide us is essential – we want to be a respected and effective platform”

Jason Valentino, Head of Engineering Enablement at BNY Mellon sat down with us to share his highlights and valuable insights from his 10+ year history leading engineering teams at companies including Capital One Labs and Peloton.

Join us as we discuss:
Why it’s critical for enterprises to focus on good developer experiences
The incubation projects that evolved into shipped-to-production products
Creative ways to keep engineering teams aligned on the latest technical trends
Why Jason thinks GitHub is the most game changing engineering tool of the last decade
...more
1h
August 22, 2023Modernizing Insurance Application Architecture at New York Life
Building the software behind life insurance systems is a complicated endeavor. Organizations need to consider the need to keep millions of data records with decades-long histories, factor in the many variables for individual policies, and comply with legal regulations that can vary from state to state.

In this special bonus episode with our former host Tim Veil, Tim examines the intricacies of the life insurance industry with Mike Murphy, Corporate Vice President, Life Insurance Domain Architect at New York Life for a fascinating technical conversation.Join as we discuss:
Effectively writing software for insurance policies
The problem with sequential IDs
Soft-coded vs hard-coded practices
The challenges of horizontal scale for insurance application architecture
...more
45min
August 01, 2023 Innovation and Disruption: How Materialize Pioneered a New Era in Data Streaming
We delve into the journey of Arjun Narayan , Co-Founder and CEO of Materialize, a streaming SQL database for real-time applications, live dashboards, and streaming data pipelines. He shares his personal experiences in the field of data analytics, his fascination with distributed systems, and his passion for working with databases.

Arjun shares how his mind was blown by the Spanner paper back in 2012 and its impact on prevailing notions of weak isolation and consistency. We also explore the challenges of building complex systems, the evolution of streaming systems, and the practical applications of Materialize in real-world scenarios.

Join us as we discuss:

How Materialize simplifies the communication of its technology to users

The value of Materialize's join capability

The challenges of streaming and the importance of state management

How to survive backlash from Hacker News comments
...more
1h 15min
July 25, 2023Stories from an SRE: How Hans Knecht builds better developer experiences
“My goal is to basically be AWS, but for the developers in the sense that like, my five man SRE team can support 10 developers, it can support 1000 developers” - Hans Knecht, Platform Engineer

Hans Knecht has over 10+ years in the industry at companies including Mission Lane and Capital One. Whether he is designing self-serving platforms, creating comprehensive documentation, or providing technical recommendations, his efforts ultimately help developers take the tedium out of building great applications.

Join as we discuss:
The importance of good documentation, and why the phrase “They don’t quit a bad job, they quit a bad manager” can also apply to platforms with poor documentation.
The terrifying moment when a mistake in a piece of code was pushed to production (And how his team got everything back up and running).
Why technical conversations are actually business conversations.
Why Hans thinks everyone should learn Kubernetes.
...more
56min
July 18, 2023Inside Chick-fil-A’s infrastructure recipe for a perfect customer experience
Brian Chambers began his Chick-fil-A journey behind the counter. Today, he is the Chief Architect at Chick-fil-A Corporate, where he oversees the teams building the infrastructure that powers every step of the customer journey, from mobile ordering to quality control.

Behind its speedy service and chicken sandwiches, is a state-of-the-art architecture that collects over 1 billion data points per month. From its cloud infrastructure to the edge compute clusters running Kubernetes in each Chick-fil-A restaurant, the customer experience is the result of a thoughtfully designed, cloud-first, and zero-touch approach.

Join as we discuss:
The internal innovation process at Chick-fil-A and how great ideas can come from anywhere in the company.
How edge computing helps Chick-fil-A solve capacity challenges, collect telemetry data, ensure high quality food, and drive better restaurant worker and customer experiences.
How Chick-fil-A’s engineers designed a high availability system capable of withstanding spiky events such as lunch rushes and promotions.
Why Kubernetes is a no-brainer for their use-cases.
...more
57min

FAQs about Big Ideas in App Architecture:

How many episodes does Big Ideas in App Architecture have?

The podcast currently has 68 episodes available.