Contributor

By Eric AndersonTechnology

Contributor episodes

July 14, 2021Sanity with Magnus Hillestad and Even Westvang
Eric Anderson (@ericmander) sits down with Magnus Hillestad (@MHillestad) and Even Westvang (@even), co-founders of the unified content platform Sanity. The team at Sanity helps businesses organize their structured content as data, allowing distribution from a single source of truth. Tune in today’s episode to learn how Sanity aims to change the way people think about content.
In this episode we discuss:
The open-source editing environment and CMS, Sanity Studio

From content as data, to coffee table books

How Sanity differs from a traditional CMS

Why the Sanity team turned down a contract with the United Nations

Building a team that can scale to a vision of ubiquity
Links:
Sanity

Sanity Studio

Figma

Brex

Netlify
People mentioned:
Simen Svale Skogsrud (@svale)

Øyvind Rostad (@rostad)
41 min
June 30, 2021Teleport with Ev Kontsevoy
Eric Anderson (@ericmander) and Ev Kontsevoy (@kontsevoy) talk about Teleport, the open-source tool for instant access to cloud resources. These include SSH servers, Kubernetes clusters, databases and more. Teleport was inspired by the growing complexity of cloud environments, and aims to make engineers feel like all their cloud applications are in the same room together.
In this episode we discuss:
How Teleport grew from a side project to Gravity, the open-source toolkit for packaging and running applications autonomously

Unifying and consolidating modern access methods and industry best practices

Bringing identity to a protocol-level

An early community use case for Teleport in the cattle industry

Engaging with outside contributions while balancing security constraints
Links:
Teleport

Gravity

Mailgun
34 min
June 16, 2021Rook with Travis Nielsen
Eric Anderson (@ericmander) and Travis Nielsen (@STravisNielsen) talk about Rook, the open-source storage orchestrator for Kubernetes. Travis is a Senior Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat, and maintainer of Rook. Join us to dive deep into the story of Rook, from Microsoft, to Quantum, to Red Hat.
In this episode we discuss:
Ceph + Kubernetes = Rook

The difficulty and importance of a stable storage solution for stateless applications

How Rook leverages Kubernetes CRDs

Why the Rook team decided to work with the CNCF

Red Hat’s philosophy and approach to open-source
Links:
Rook

Red Hat

Upbound

Quantum

CNCF
People mentioned:
Bassam Tabbara (@bassamtabbara)

Jared Watts (@jbw976)
33 min
June 02, 2021Apache Cassandra with Patrick McFadin
Eric Anderson (@ericmander) and Patrick McFadin (@PatrickMcFadin) delve into the history of Apache Cassandra, the open-source NoSQL database born and bred around cloud over a decade ago. Patrick is the VP of Developer Relations at DataStax, and a member of the Cassandra Project Management Committee. On today’s episode, Patrick shares his philosophy on developer advocacy and experience in open-source.
In this episode we discuss:
Behind the NoSQL explosion that made Cassandra the darling of the valley

Comparing different eras of commercializing open-source, then and now

How Patrick became a pioneer in evangelizing and community-building

The two kinds of people to recruit for developer relations

Why Patrick says open-source is going to “start eating clouds”
Links:
Apache Cassandra

Datastax

Datastax Astra
People mentioned:
Avinash Lakshman (@HedvigEng)

Prashant Malik (@pmalik)

Adrian Cawcroft (@adrianco)

Kelsey Hightower (@kelseyhightower)
Other episodes:
Chef with Adam Jacob
35 min
May 19, 2021Dagster with Nick Schrock
Eric Anderson (@ericmander) interviews Nick Schrock (@schrockn) about Dagster, the open-source data orchestrator for machine learning, analytics, and ETL. Nick is the founder and CEO of Elementl, and is well-known for creating the Project Infrastructure group at Facebook, which spawned GraphQL and React. On today’s episode of Contributor, Nick explains how he set out to fix an inefficiency he identified amongst the complexity of the data infrastructure domain.
In this episode we discuss:
Dagster’s place in the industry shift towards thinking of data as a software engineering discipline

Why Nick believes it’s time for the term “data cleaning” to be retired

The empowerment of Dagster’s instantaneous spin-up process and local development experience

How a partner integrated Dagster into workflow for ops workers on the warehouse floor

One user’s testimony that, “what dbt did for our SQL, Dagster did for our Python”
Links:
Dagster

Elementl

GraphQL

React

dbt

Snowflake

Apache Airflow
People mentioned:
Lee Byron (@leeb)

Dan Schafer (@dlschafer)

Abe Gong (@AbeGong)
35 min
May 05, 2021Hasura with Tanmai Gopal
Eric Anderson (@ericmander) and Tanmai Gopal (@tanmaigo) dive into the open-source Hasura GraphQL Engine and the wider Hasura community. Hasura provides real-time GraphQL APIs for databases, so developers can focus on building applications without worrying about infrastructure. Tune in to hear the full story about how Tanmai and his team are helping engineers unlock the dream of self-serve data access.
In this episode we discuss:
How the early Hasura team created their own version of GraphQL in parallel

Developing community with ease of onboarding and radical transparency

Transitioning community events into the COVID world, and looking to a future beyond travel

Hasura’s secret sauce: the authorization framework
Links:
Hasura

Hasura Con’21

DigitalOcean
People mentioned:
Rajoshi Ghosh (@rajoshighosh)
37 min
April 21, 2021MindsDB with Jorge Torres and Adam Carrigan
Eric Anderson (@ericmander) is joined by the co-founders of MindsDB, Jorge Torres (@JorgeTorresAI) and Adam Carrigan (@AdamMCarrigan). MindsDB is an open-source AI layer that integrates with existing databases, from MySQL to Clickhouse. Tune in to learn how these two former college roommates are working to bring machine learning into the mainstream.
In this episode we discuss:
Why it makes sense to run machine learning models in the database

Partnering with Kafka, Looker, and more

MindsDB’s initial adoption by students at Berkeley

Different applications for MindsDB and machine learning in ecommerce, finance, and more

The moment Jorge knew he had to get into business with Adam
Links:
MindsDB

RedisConf 2021

Looker

Apache Kafka

ClickHouse
Other episodes
ClickHouse with Alexey Milovidov and Ivan Blinkov
30 min
April 07, 2021Anaconda with Peter Wang
Eric Anderson (@ericmander) welcomes Peter Wang (@pwang) for a conversation about the Python ecosystem and the open-source communities that have built it. Peter is the creator of Anaconda, the near-essential Python distribution for scientific computing that makes managing packages a lot more manageable. In today’s episode, Peter offers a unique and powerful perspective on how to make the economics of open-source work for everyone.
In this episode we discuss:
The paradox of the PVM and Python’s packaging difficulties

How Guido van Rossum implied permission for Anaconda and the open-source Python movement

Python as the lingua franca of a new professional class

Looking to Roblox for inspiration for a scientific computing creator community

Giving back to open-source communities through the NumFOCUS Foundation
Links:
Anaconda

NumFOCUS

NumPy

SciPy

Enthought

Jupyter

TensorFlow

MicroPython

scikit-learn

pandas

Quansight

Red Hat

Roblox
People mentioned:
Travis Oliphant (@teoliphant)

Fernando Pérez (@fperez_org)

Brian Granger (@ellisonbg)

Min Ragan-Kelley (@minrk)

Guido van Rossum (@gvanrossum)

James Currier (@JamesCurrier)
Other episodes:
NumPy & SciPy with Travis Oliphant

TensorFlow with Rajat Monga
35 min
March 24, 2021Redpanda with Alexander Gallego
Eric Anderson (@ericmander) is joined by Alexander Gallego (@emaxerrno) for an examination of Redpanda, the source available event streaming platform designed as a drop-in replacement for Kafka. Redpanda’s storage engine is attractive to developers for its performance and simplicity, removing the complexity of running Kafka to scale and deploying with a single binary. Listen to today’s episode to learn more about how Alexander and the team at Vectorized are looking to advance the conversation around streaming into the future.
In this episode we discuss:
What Alexander means when he says that hardware is the platform for data streaming

The 3 things that turn a data stream into a data product

Comparing Redpanda to Kafka and Pulsar

A difference in product philosophy between selling to data teams vs app developers

How Alexander approached the challenge of monetizing data infrastructure
Links:
Redpanda

Vectorized

Apache Kafka

Apache Pulsar

Apache Spark

Apache Beam

Apache Storm

Apache Flink

Elastic

CockroachDB
Other episodes:
TensorFlow with Rajat Monga

Scylla with Dor Laor
34 min
March 10, 2021Storybook with Zoltan Olah
Eric Anderson (@ericmander) and Zoltan Olah (@zqzoltan) discuss Storybook, the open-source UI component development tool. Storybook supports all the most popular frontend frameworks and libraries such as React, Vue and Angular, but allows users to test and develop components in isolation. In today’s episode, learn more about the early days of the component-driven development methodology and how Storybook was saved by a passionate community of engineers.
In this episode we discuss:
Storybook as an integral part of UI design workflow

How Zoltan and his team inherited Storybook and saved it from being “left out to dry”

Solving a pain point for front-end engineers with Chromatic’s UI regression testing, built on top of Storybook

Why Zoltan compares components to APIs, and Storybook to a service mesh

What’s happening today in the world of open-source design systems
Links:
Storybook

Chromatic

Meteor

GraphQL

React

Tailwind

Selenium

Cypress

Material-UI

Figma

Learn Storybook
People mentioned:
Dominic Nguyen (@domyen)

Tom Coleman (@tmeasday)

Arunoda Susiripala (@arunoda)

Norbert de Langen (@NorbertdeLangen)

Michael Shilman (@mshilman)
28 min