An airhacks.fm conversation with Jonathan Ellis (@spyced) about:

Jonathan's first computer experiences with IBM PC 8086 and Thinkpad laptop with Red Hat Linux,

becoming a key contributor to Apache Cassandra and founding datastax,

starting DataStax to provide commercial support for Cassandra,

early experiences with Java, C++, and python,

discussion about the evolution of Java and its ecosystem,

the importance of vector databases for semantic search and retrieval augmented generation,

the development of JVector for high-performance vector search in Java,

the potential of integrating JVector with LangChain for Java / langchain4j and quarkus for serverless deployment,

the advantages of Java's productivity and performance for building concurrent data structures,

the shift from locally installed software to cloud-based services,

the challenges of being a manager and the benefits of taking a sabbatical to focus on creative pursuits,

the importance of separating storage and compute in cloud databases,

Cassandra's write-optimized architecture and improvements in read performance,

DataStax's investment in Apache Pulsar for stream processing,

the llama2java project for high-performance language models in Java