Today, we’re joined by Johann Schleier-Smith. Johann co-founded Tagged during the early days of social media, a time when building scalable systems for the web was uncharted territory. Back then, cloud computing didn’t exist—everything ran on on-premises servers or in co-located data centers.

We discuss the challenges of scaling Tagged and draw parallels to the current wave of innovation around Generative AI and large language models. Johann shares how building with these technologies feels like a similar uphill climb.

We also dive into his new venture, CrystalDBA, and how it’s leveraging AI to optimize databases, making advanced database management accessible to everyone.

Today, we have David Cramer on the show. David is one of the co-founders of Sentry, an application monitoring tool that's one of the most widely-adopted tools for developers. Sentry does over 300,000 events per second on average, and there's a lot of fancy work to process these application errors, from rate limiting to fingerprinting to counting to source map unminifying.

We walk through some of the architectural changes and systems design work here, including some of David's thoughts on shipping.

David and Sentry also have a unique approach to developer marketing. They do some cool things -- sponsoring and then buying the amazing SyntaxFM podcast, sending $100k of free gifts to developers, and launching the Open Source Pledge with $500k donated to open source developers.

Today we have Philip Kiely from Baseten on the show. Baseten is a Series B startup focused on providing infrastructure for AI workloads.

We go deep on Inference Optimization. We cover choosing a model, discuss the hype around Compound AI, choosing an Inference Engine, Optimization Techniques like Quantization and Speculative Decoding all the way down to your GPU choice.

Today on the show, we have Kevin Dubois. Kevin is a Senior Principal Developer Advocate at Red Hat, Java Champion, and well known open source contributor.

In our conversation with Kevin, we talk about his history with Java and the evolution of the language and where it now fits within the world of AI. Kevin's been building AI applications with Java using Quarkus andLangChain4j. Kevin's a java expert. He's not an AI expert.

It's amazing to see how much he's building with AI even without having that background. We also talk a lot about the mindset shift you need to successfully build with generative AI models.

Today we have Glauber Costa on the show, who's the CEO and founder at Turso. They provide a managed SQLite service with some really interesting capabilities that's changing some of the application patterns you can do.

He shares a lot of really good technical stuff on Twitter. He worked in the kernel, he worked on high-performance databases at ScyllaDB, and now he's working on Turso. He also has a great and interesting podcast, the Save File, which is about developers and religion.

Glauber had some great thoughts on the future of databases, including what the future of NoSQL is like and whether we'll see vector databases as a separate category or as a feature of general-purpose databases. We’ve seen arguments both ways, but he was the most effective at changing our mind.

Today, we have Mike Buckbee on the show. Mike is the co-founder of Wafris, and he wrote a really insightful article last week about moving from Redis to SQLite for an aspect of their architecture. The article was nuanced in describing why it worked for their specific needs, and it has some surprising takeaways, including that SQLite was 3x faster than a local Redis instance for their workload.

Mike has built a few different WAF (Web Application Firewall) products, so we covered that area as well. He's seen a lot here, so we walked through all the nefarious traffic patterns and the speed in which these bots adapt to new vulnerabilities.

Finally, Mike has a wide-ranging skillset that includes marketing. Developers are notoriously tricky to market to, so we talked about his experience in effective marketing to developers without being disingenuous.

Links

Blog Post: https://wafris.org/blog/rearchitecting-for-sqlite

For A Good Strftime: www.foragoodstrftime.com

IP Lookup: wafris.org/ip-lookup

Timestamps

01:11 Start

03:41 Wafris

07:22 Redis and SQLite

19:09 Flatfile

21:50 Knowatoa

28:22 Web Application Firewalls

46:21 Jumpstart Pro

48:11 Marketing to Developers

Today we have Tejas Kumar on the show. Tejas is part of the Developer Relations team at Datastax.

He's really good at frontend, got a great podcast and he has written a book called Fluent React.

He spoke recently at the Shift Conference in Croatia, where he talked about AI engineering and what that means.

So we talked about AI Engineering, we talked about React, content creation, education, and much more.

This episode is full of value and we think you'd love this one.

Today on the show, we have Peter Hanssens, the CEO and founder of Cloud Shuttle and creator of the DataEngBytes Conference.

Peter has helped build an incredible data engineering community in Australia. He runs meetups, user groups, luncheons, and entire conferences. And he's also super knowledgeable. He's been working in the data space for a long time. We picked his brain about the history of data tooling, trends he's seeing in the industry and the relationship between data engineers and other types of engineering. Even if you aren't in the data world, we think you will enjoy the conversation.

Today we have a special guest. We have Jeremy Daly, who’s been in the cloud space for a while.

Jeremy is the co-founder of Ampt, which is building an abstraction infrastructure layer on top of AWS, just to make it simpler to sift through all the different options and develop on AWS and do best practices there. So we wanted to get his opinions on a lot of different infrastructure stuff that he's seeing and how AI is changing development.

We even talk about some front end stuff at the end and HTMX and whether it's real, whether it's a troll. So lots of good stuff in this episode.

Timestamps

01:56 Start

04:28 Jeremy's Background

07:26 Hard things about building ampt

11:59 Infrastructure from Code

17:07 App Runner

20:10 Comparing ampt and PaaS

27:22 Managing a lot of AWS accounts

30:46 Better than AWS

35:27 Thoughts on AWS deprecating services

47:11 Using AI

57:20 ChatGPT Adoption - Non Programmers

01:06:19 AI affecting the job market

01:18:37 HTMX

Software Huddle ⤵︎

X: https://twitter.com/SoftwareHuddle

Substack: https://softwarehuddle.substack.com/

Today we have Stephen Chin, VP of developer relations at Neo4j on the show. Stephen is an author, speaker, and Java expert, we’ll actually be crossing paths in person at the upcoming Infobip Shift conference in September.

We got together to talk about GraphRAG. His CTO recently wrote an article titled The GraphRAG Manifesto, and Stephen joined us to explain how a knowledge graph can be used to improve performance over traditional RAG architectures. It also helps address some of the fundamental limitations to LLM adoption from enterprises today, like hallucinations and explainability.

GraphRAG is relatively new, but looks like a very promising approach to improving performance for certain generative AI use cases, like customer support.