Big Ideas in App Architecture

Revolutionizing education with technology, and classrooms in particular, is no easy lift. But the right interactive tools and the ability to navigate the complexities of scaling in a market driven by digital advancements, is essential for success.

We hear all about the transformative journey of Kami, an education technology company, from Founder and CTO Jordan Thoms. He shares the company's evolution story in New Zealand, its early focus on teacher empowerment, and the pivotal moments in adapting its product direction based on the needs of the education community.

Join us as we discuss:

• The iterative process of product development and adaptation to meet the evolving needs of teachers and students
• Challenges faced in scaling a startup, including balancing team size, retaining company culture, and delivering a high-quality product.
• Discussing the value AI brings for education.

In this best of 2023 episode, David Joy sits down with Brian Chambers, Chief Architect at Chick-fil-A Corporate.

Behind Chick-fil-A’s 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.

In this best of 2023 episode, Tim Veil talks to Peter Mattis, Co-founder and CTO at Cockroach Labs.
In this conversation, Peter goes way under the hood to talk about how CockroachDB is architected, how that architecture has evolved, and how the architecture will continue to evolve to make developers’ lives easier.
Join us as we discuss:

• The origins of GIMP and early days at Google
• How Peter built Pebble & how it compares to RocksDB
• Lessons learned building Postgres compatibility
• What the future of “serverless” databases will look like

Meg Adams has had a remarkable journey to tech leader — from special education teacher, to retail sales manager at Victoria's Secret and learning to code, to managing teams at Etsy at Condé Nast — and now, her current role as Executive Director of Platform Engineering at Estée Lauder.


To learn about her approaches to leadership, the intricacies of managing cloud infrastructure and analytics, and what it takes to build powerful platforms and top-tier teams, our host David
Joy catches Meg for a first-ever in-person recording.

Join as we discuss:

• Implementing engineering best practices and testing to ensure uptime and performance on a singular platform.
• The pivotal shift from on-premises infrastructure to the cloud for ease of use and scalability.
• Career advice from Meg's incredible journey into the tech world.

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.