Software Huddle

Today, we have Dax Raad on the show. Dax is a must-follow on tech Twitter, known for his blend of humor and insightful tech opinions.

We talked a lot about SST, which is the infrastructure as code tool that he works on.

They've got a new engine called Ion that's releasing. So we talked about what that looks like and how that's going to help users.

We picked his brain on questions like, "Which cloud providers do you trust?" "Which services do you rely on?" and touched on topics like frontend development, databases, and more.

We also talked about marketing to developers, he's got a unique take on that. So a lot of interesting stuff here.

Today, we have Manny Silva, Head of Docs at Skyflow, on the show to talk about two open source projects he created, Docs as Tests and Doc Detective. Docs as Tests is a framework to make sure that your docs are in sync with your product. It's essentially a way to test your docs just like engineers test their code, and Doc Detective is Manny's implementation of that framework.

We discuss the history and motivation behind the projects, what they enable, and how people are using it today.

Timestamps

01:57 Intro

06:51 Testing Documentation

09:26 Competing Against

11:26 Docs as Tests & Doc Detective

13:32 How does one apply these ideas?

16:49 How does test writing work?

19:26 Out of the box checks

23:15 Configurations Structure to create tests

24:28 Integration with the normal flow

28:20 Freshness

29:13 Tools used to build it

32:02 Open Source

33:27 Limitations

35:31 MongoDB's version of Docs as tests

36:42 Innovation Engine by Azure

37:27 Teams using Doc Detective

38:12 At Skyflow

40:52 Future

41:41 How to get started

45:18 Rapid Fire

Links

Docs as Tests: https://www.docsastests.com/

Doc Detective: https://doc-detective.com/

This week on the show, we talk with Bill Tarr, Principal Solutions Architect at AWS SaaS Factory. He's a super thoughtful guy, expert in SaaS architecture and architectural patterns. We talk about tenancy, infrastructure decisions, SaaS gotchas, security, permissioning, and even dip into technical challenges of building Gen AI into SaaS.

Timestamps

00:01:29 Background

00:07:26 Common Challenges

00:11:46 Infrastructure Choices

00:14:29 Missteps

00:18:57 Control Plane & Application Plane

00:25:52 Permissioning in a Multi-tenant setup

00:32:54 Gen AI & SaaS

00:35:07 Amazon Bedrock

00:49:27 Quickfire questions

01:01:17 Security In SaaS

In this episode, Kyle Galbraith tells us about his company, Depot.dev, which is a way to make Docker builds and GitHub action runners complete much faster with basically no changes to your build step. Depot is growing like crazy and just surpassed *one million* builds per month. We looked at how he found the idea for Depot and some of the technology underlying the service.

Kyle also shares a ton of wisdom about building a company and specifically a developer tools company. This includes his experience in YC (including how hard he worked on his YC application) and the importance of having "model companies" that are a few steps ahead of you in the process. We talk about how the funding market has change and how he thinks about hiring, fundraising, and profitability.

His advice on company building and the focus on what's important is super helpful to those in a similar position.

Database performance is likely the biggest factor in whether your application is slow or not, and yet too many developers don't take the time to properly understand how their database works. In today's episode, we have Andrew Atkinson who just released a new book, High Performance PostgreSQL for Rails. Andrew is one of those "Accidental DBAs" that fell into learning about database optimization at his job and ended up getting pretty dang good at it.

In this episode, We hit Andrew with a bunch of questions about using Postgres properly, including how tight to your schema should be, how to handle Postgres operations, and how to think about performance testing with Postgres. We also got into some aspects about the process of writing a book and what he recommends for others.

If you're building an application with a relational database, this book will help you. It has real code repositories so you can walk through the steps yourself, and it teaches the concepts in addition to the practical aspects so you understand what's happening.

ParadeDB is Postgres for search and analytics. As Postgres continues to rise in popularity, the "Just Use Postgres'' movement is getting stronger and stronger. Yet there are still things that standard Postgres doesn't do well, and advanced search and analytics functionality is near the top of the list.

The ParadeDB team provides a pair of Postgres extensions. The first, pg_search, brings a more performant and full-featured search experience to Postgres. It uses Tantivy (think: Lucene but Rust) as the search engine and provides advanced ranking and querying functionality. The second, pg_lakehouse, allows you to perform large analytical queries over object store data. Together, these provide compelling new features wrapped in a familiar operational package.

Philippe Noël is one of the founders of ParadeDB. In this episode, we talk about why these extensions were needed, why the 'Just Use Postgres' movement exists, and where ParadeDB fits in your architecture.

Follow Philippe: https://x.com/philippemnoel

Follow Alex: https://x.com/alexbdebrie

Follow Sean: https://x.com/seanfalconer

Check Out ParadeDB: https://www.paradedb.com/

Timestamps

01:50:18 Intro

04:30:23 Where does seach on Postgres fall down?

05:33:09 BM25 and TF-IDF

07:23:03 Postgres Tipping Point

10:05:08 Tantivy

11:50:14 Tantivy vs Lucene

13:07:06 vs ZomboDB

15:35:21 Just Use Postgres for Everything?

17:57:17 Developing a Postgres Extension

19:26:03 Arvid's Problem

20:27:08 Postgres and Log Data

23:28:01 Separate OLTP and Search Instances

28:32:01 Search Nodes vs OLTP Nodes

30:02:12 ParadeDB Analytics

35:27:05 Hosted Service

39:03:15 Stumbling upon the Idea

39:51:22 Community

41:01:15 Getting Started with ParadeDB

Today we have Mark Huang on the show. Mark has previously held roles in Data Science and ML at companies like Box and Splunk and is now the co-founder and chief architect of Gradient, an enterprise AI platform to build and deploy autonomous assistants.

In our chat, we get into some of the stuff he’s seeing around autonomous AI agents and why people are so excited about that space. Mark and his team has also recently been working on a project to extend the Llama-3 context window. They were able to extend the model from 8K tokens all the way to 1 million through a technique called theta-scaling. He walks us through the details of this project and how longer context windows will impact the types of use cases we can serve with LLMs.

Follow Mark: https://x.com/markatgradient

Follow Sean: https://x.com/seanfalconer

Today we have Bob van Luijt, the CEO and founder of Weaviate on the show. Bob talks about building AI native applications and what that means, the role a vector database will play in the future of AI applications, and how Weaviate works under the hood.

We also get into why a specialized vector database is needed versus using vectors as a feature within conventional databases.

Bob van Luijt: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bobvanluijt/

Sean on X: https://x.com/seanfalconer

Software Huddle ⤵︎

X: https://twitter.com/SoftwareHuddle

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

Today, we have Talia Nassi on the show. Talia’s been leading Developer Advocacy at Akamai.

Akamai is in a really interesting space where they've been around for a long time, as a CDN provider, as a security provider, and now they acquired Linode, and acquired a bunch of other companies which has expanded them into more of like a full fledged cloud provider.

We had a really interesting discussion talking about the expansion, we also talked about her thoughts on infrastructure as code, multi cloud, and just getting into DevRel and what that experience has been like for her.

Today we have Brian Rinaldi from LaunchDarkly on the show. This is the final episode of our in person coverage at the SHIFT Conference in Miami. And although Brian works at LaunchDarkly, we actually didn't talk at all about his employer and instead chatted about Jamstack. Brian has a long history with Jamstack, has written a lot about it.

Jamstack was popularized and created by Netlify. And there's been a lot of history of controversy with the term. Some people think of it's merely a branding ploy or a marketing thing, and others find it simply confusing because we have terms like LAMP stack, MEAN stack and MERN stack.

So Jamstack automatically gets lumped in with those, but it's not actually a technology stack. It's an architectural pattern. Recently, Jamstack has been giving away to what is known as composable frontends and we picked Brian's brain on this and what this means not only for Jamstack, but also the future web development.