I recently talked with Julien Verlaguet. Julien is the founder of SkipLabs, a company building infrastructure for reactive applications. Before SkipLabs, Julien spent 9 years at Facebook, where he was a tech lead for Hack and Skiplang.

In this interview, we discuss SkipLabs's foundational components: SKDB, SkipStorage, and Skiplang. SKDB is built as a reactive database that features performant materialized views, diffing between databases, and streaming via ephemeral tables. SkipStorage and Skiplang serve as building blocks for SKDB.

By the time you hear this, SkipLabs will have launched, so I invite you to check skiplabs.io and skdb.io for more details. In the meantime, please enjoy the following conversation with Julien.

Oh, and one final note: I apologize for the tin-can sound from my microphone. Since this recording, I've purchased a better mic, and future recordings will have better audio.

Note: I am investor in WarpStream [$], which I mention in this podcast.

You can support me by purchasing The Missing README: A Guide for the New Software Engineer for yourself or gifting it to new software engineers that you know.

I occasionally invest in infrastructure startups. Companies that I’ve invested in are marked with a [$] in this newsletter. See my LinkedIn profile for a complete list.

I recently talked with Frederic Branczyk. Fredric is the founder of Polar Signals, a new always-on, zero-instrumentation profiler. Before Polar Signals, Fredric spent time at Red Hat and CoreOS, where he worked on Kubernetes and Prometheus.

In this interview, Frederic and I break down Polar Signals’s architecture and its main components: Parca and FrostDB. Parca is of particular interest; it is able to achieve its minimally invasive profiling claims by using an eBPF filter that samples the entire OS’s stack at 19hz. Data is then passed to a server and stored into FrostDB, an embedded storage engine built on Datafusion and Parquet.

During the discussion, Frederic mentions several influential papers:

* Google-Wide Profiling: A Continuous Profiling Infrastructure for Data Centers

* BOLT: A Practical Binary Optimizer for Data Centers and Beyond

* Propeller: A Profile Guided, Relinking Optimizer for Warehouse-Scale Applications

* Large-scale Incremental Processing Using Distributed Transactions and Notifications

You can support me by purchasing The Missing README: A Guide for the New Software Engineer for yourself or gifting it to new software engineers that you know.

I occasionally invest in infrastructure startups. Companies that I’ve invested in are marked with a [$] in this newsletter. See my LinkedIn profile for a complete list.