Software Huddle

Today we have Emanuel Lacić on the  show. He was in academia for a while. Now he’s been working at Infobip for the last couple of years, building some of this AI stuff and putting it into production. We picked his brain about the best practices when it comes to AI and what we can expect to see over the next couple of years.

Today, on the show we have Christine Spang, Co-founder and CTO of Nylas. Christine was the keynote at the recent Shift Developer Conference in Miami, and we caught up with her there. Nylas is a unified API for email, calendar, and contacts. We talked to Christine about why she started Nylas, and the challenges with building an API for email.

Email is this massive distributed system with a very diverse set of implementations, it's a super gnarly ecosystem going back decades. It's generally not something you want to spend a lot of time on if you don't have to. Christine was a lot of fun to have on the show.

Follow Christine: https://twitter.com/spang

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

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

Nylas: https://www.nylas.com/

Software Huddle ⤵︎

X: https://twitter.com/SoftwareHuddle

Substack: https://softwarehuddle.substack.com

Today’s guest is Ivan Burazin, the co-founder and CEO of Daytona, an actual creator of the Shift Developer Conference that he sold some time ago to Infobip. Ivan has tons of experience building developer tools, he has been working on dev environments for over a decade.

In this interview, we talk about another company he founded called CodeAnywhere that eventually led to the founding of Daytona. Daytona is a dev environment management platform. It sits between your IDE and the cloud, taking care of standardizing your dev environments, regardless of whether you're building on your desktop or deploying to production.

They're taking the best of what leading technology companies like Google, Uber, and Meta have built internally and bringing that to the rest of the world.

Software Huddle ⤵︎

X: https://twitter.com/SoftwareHuddle

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

Today's episode is with Nikhil Benesch, who's the co-founder and CTO at Materialize, an Operational Data Warehouse. Materialize gets you the best of both worlds, combining the capabilities of your data warehouse with the immediacy of streaming. This fusion allows businesses to operate with data in real-time.

We discussed the data infrastructure stuff of it, how they built it, how they think about billing, how they think about cloud primitives and what they wish they had.

Today's episode is with Khawaja Shams. Khawaja is the CEO and co-founder of Momento, which is a Serverless Cache. 

He used to lead the DynamoDB team at AWS and now he's doing Memento. We talk about a lot of different things, including multi-tenancy and cellular architecture and what it's like to build on AWS and sell infrastructure products to end customers and just a lot of other really good stuff.

We hope you enjoy this episode.

01:12 Introduction

03:38 multi-tenancy

08:13 S3 and Tigris

15:09 Aurora

19:11 Momento

31:21 Cellular Architecture

41:16 Most people are doing cross-AZ wrong

52:23 Elasticsearch

01:03:08 Rapid Fire

In today's episode with Tim McNamara, we talk all about Rust. Tim is one of the leading educators in the whole Rust educational space. He wrote the Rust in Action book, which is probably the best Rust book out there. He has a YouTube channel, he taught and did a lot of educational work on Rust at Amazon AWS.

We talked about object ownership and object lifetimes and just all these interesting things that Rust has and why is this language loved by so many and why it's continuing to grow.

He also gets into what it's like being an independent educator, creator, and some of the difficulties with that, how to get started, and how he deals with doubt.

Today, we have Kent C Dodds on the show. If you don't know Kent, he's a well known expert in JavaScript, Web Development and Teaching. His courses like Testing JavaScript, Epic React, and Epic Web Dev have helped countless developers uplevel their skills and develop whole new ones.

During our conversation, we discussed how he got to start in creating courses in the background on his latest project, Epic Web Dev. We also picked his brain about JavaScript. Why the heck do we have so many JavaScript frameworks? Are we just perpetually dissatisfied with what we have? Or is there a fundamental problem with how the web is actually designed?

There's a lot of meat in the bone on this one, and we hope you enjoy it.

Show Notes:

The Web’s Next Transition

https://www.epicweb.dev/the-webs-next-transition

Epic Web Conference 2024

CONFERENCE DAY April 11th, 2024

WORKSHOP DAY April 10th, 2024

https://www.epicweb.dev/conf

Timestamps

01:46 Kent’s Background

05:38 Epic Web Dev

15:07 Creating an engaging course

19:07 How long does it take to finish the course

23:01 JavaScript and CS

25:47 Things that you should know

29:09 JS frameworks

36:28 Re-building the Web from Scratch?

42:59 PESPA Architecture

53:04 Rapid Fire

Welcome back to an episode where we're talking Vectors, Vector Databases, and AI with Linpeng Tang, CTO and co-founder of MyScale. MyScale is a super interesting technology. They're combining the best of OLAP databases with Vector Search. The project started back in 2019 where they forked ClickHouse and then adapted it to support Vector Storage, Indexing, and Search.

The really unique and cool thing is you get the familiarity and usability of SQL with the power of being able to compare the similarity between unstructured data.

We think this has really fascinating use cases for analytics well beyond what we're seeing with other vector database technology that's mostly restricted to building RAG models for LLMs. Also, because it's built on ClickHouse, MyScale is massively scalable, which is an area that many of the dedicated vector databases actually struggle with.

We cover a lot about how vector databases work, why they decided to build off of ClickHouse, and how they plan to open source the database.

Timestamps

02:29 Introduction

06:22 Value of a Vector Database

12:40 Forking ClickHouse

18:53 Transforming Clickhouse into a SQL vector database

32:08 Data modeling

32:56 What data can be Vectorized

38:37 Indexing

43:35 Achieving Scale

46:35 Bottlenecks

48:41 MyScale vs other dedicated Vector Databases

51:38 Going Open Source

56:04 Closing thoughts

Today's guest is Yujian Tang from Zilliz, one of the big players in the vector database market. This is the first episode in a series of episodes we’re doing on vectors and vector databases. We start with the basics, what is a vector? What are vector embeddings? How does vector search work? And why the heck do I even need a vector database?

RAG models for customizing LLMs is where vector databases are getting a lot of their use. On the surface, it seems pretty simple, but in reality, there's a lot of tinkering that goes into taking RAG to production.

Yujian explains some of the tripwires that you might run into and how to think through those problems. We think you're going to really enjoy this episode.

Timestamps

02:08 Introduction

03:16 What is a Vector?

07:01 How does Vector Search work?

14:08 Why need a Vector database?

15:11 Use Cases

17:37 What is RAG?

20:34 RAG vs fine-tuning

29:51 Measuring Performance

32:32 Is RAG here to stay?

35:43 Milvus

37:17 History of Milvus

47:44 Rapid Fire

X

https://twitter.com/yujian_tang

https://twitter.com/seanfalconer

Today's episode is with Tyler Wells. Tyler is the CTO and co-founder at Propel. He was an early employee at Skype (and Microsoft after the acquisition) as well as Twilio. While at Twilio, Tyler helped build a data platform to power customer-facing analytics for a major Twilio feature. Propel is the productized version of that for other teams looking to build similar experiences.

In this episode, we see how this real-time, flexible analytics problem is tricky for a lot of teams, as well as how Propel is helping to solve the problem. We also cover some of Alex's favorite hobby horses for infrastructure developers -- what it's like building infrastructure services, how to think about billing, how S3 is becoming ubiquitous, and what to do about cross-AZ network costs.

Timestamps

02:29 Introduction

08:05 What is Propel?

22:28 ClickHouse

29:15 Target Customers

30:28 Billing Model

35:10 S3 becoming a key part?

36:47 Cross AZ Network Costs

41:56 Current Support

51:39 Access Policies

55:39 Rapid Fire

01:03:16 AI replacing Software Engineers?

Show Notes

Data Chaos Podcast

https://www.propeldata.com/