Big Ideas in App Architecture

Big Ideas in App Architecture

By Cockroach LabsBusiness
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Big Ideas in App Architecture episodes

  • Can 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.
    1 hr 7 min
  • The 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
    59 min
  • A 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.
    1 hr 25 min
  • From 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
    57 min
  • Building 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
    1 hr
  • Modernizing 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
    45 min
  • 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
    1 hr 15 min
  • Stories 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.
    56 min
  • Inside 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.
    57 min
  • Modernizing from the Mainframe: An Exploration of Distributed Systems
    Chris Stura, Director of PwC UK has had over 20+ years in the world of software, wearing many hats from Software Engineer to Chief Architect to Director of Technology Delivery.

    During his time at PwC, Chris’ projects have spanned helping banks migrate from legacy systems to modern architecture, working on the performance analytics software Cloud Cost Assurance, and technical consulting for financial services and capital markets.

    Join as we discuss:
    • How a passion for video games at a young age ultimately kickstarted a decades-long career in software architecture
    • What enterprises and architects should know before migrating from legacy systems to distributed architecture
    • Chris’ thoughts on serverless, open source, Kubernetes, generative AI, and more
    • Why Chris thinks the base requirements for knative are too high
    47 min

About Big Ideas in App Architecture

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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…