Optimize All The Things

Tom Wilkie, the CTO of Grafana Labs, talks to us about his professional journey. We cover how he got into software engineering, his first startup, working as an EM at Google, and what motivated him to go back to an IC role. We talk about his time at Grafana from when they were only 25 people to now when Grafana Labs has more than a thousand employees. Tom’s journey cannot be told without diving de...

Monica Sarbu, the CEO and founder of Xata.io , talks to us about her inspiring journey from getting into tech to building Xata - the serverless database platform for modern apps. We chat about the founding of her first company, Packetbeat, its acquisition by Elastic, and her time as a director there. We talk about mentoring, diversity, and hiring engineers that have high agency. We also cover some...

In this episode, we talk with Jimmy Zelinskie, co-founder and CPO of AuthZed, about his journey in building a global scale OSS authorization startup. Jimmy shares insights into the creation and evolution of SpiceDB, an open-source database optimized for authorization decisions. We chat about Jimmy’s story of transitioning from an engineer to a product manager, the importance of open-source in buil...

In this episode, we talk with Michel Tricot, co-founder and CEO of Airbyte, about his journey in building a successful open-source data movement platform, the challenges faced during the COVID-19 pandemic, and insights into startup culture and balancing work with family life. Michel shares his experiences from being a software engineer to leading a unicorn company, emphasizing the importance of co...

In this episode, we sit down with Frederic Branczyk, founder of PolarSignals, to explore the intersection of advanced profiling techniques, AI-driven optimizations, and the nuances of building a successful startup culture. Frederic shares his journey from a technical contributor to a startup leader, offering insights into both the technological and business aspects of running a tech company. Where...

Today we have a very special guest, Björn Rabenstein, ultra experienced engineer, long time Prometheus maintainer. In this episode we touch on the topic of versioning and backward or forward compatibility of software APIs and interfaces. Learn how to make your code nice for others or use versioned components effectively for yourself. We discuss semver, and why you also seen many projects, escaping...

In this episode we discuss an important topic of productivity in our live and work. We explore often forgotten topic of motivation for our work, self-compassion, energy balance to tackle tedious tasks and healthy habits for software development, meetings and more! We also touch on the topic of social media use. References: Amazon Prime moving out of AWS Lambda: https://www.primevideotech.com/video...

Working from a tent, prioritizing your electricity between your monitor or cooking dinner, canal boat life, and more. These are some of the things we talked about with Becky Pauley at KubeCon Europe 2023. This episode covers all the great things about the digital nomad lifestyle, but also dives into some of the challenges. Join us for the interesting story and stay for the helpful tips. As always,...

In this episode we do a little retrospective on the last week KubeCon EU 2023 in Amsterdam. We also share and discuss amazing answers from a few quick interviews Bartek performed with epic KubeCon attendees. You won't believe what we learned! Big THANKS to all interviewees for amazing answers: Christina, Harsh, Michael, Jimmy and Raphaël! References: KubeCon EU: https://events.linuxfoundation.org/...

AI is already changing how different industries operate with tools like ChatGPT and Github Copilot. Today we talk about a new tool, k8sgpt, that gives you SRE superpowers using AI. We are joined by its creator, Alex Jones - Director of Kubernetes Engineering at Canonical. We talk about how tools that utilize AI are built, how they change our day to day work, and what the future might hold for AI i...

In this episode Ivan asks Bartek to solve the problems presented in the book "The Phoenix Project". We talk about DevOps, organizational structures, the mythical 10x engineer, the value of mentors, and why Kubernetes does not just magically solve all of the above. No prior reading of "The Phoenix Project" required - we also try to keep spoilers to the minimum. As always, we also cover some of the...

Have you ever wondered how people find performance bottlenecks and improve them in complex systems? What tools and techniques work in real life applications? When should you stop optimizing? Well, this is the episode for you. Our first ever guest, Bryan Boreham from Grafana Labs, sits down with us and walks us over his experience of optimizing the popular open-source project Prometheus. Before the...

episode{pod="oat"} 0 # Welcome to our first, number 0 (ofc, arrays always start from zero), episode! The first episode is about something very hands-down and actionable in the software--the middleware coding pattern! What is it? Is it under-hyped? What are the alternatives? Before the main topic, Ivan & Bartek discuss (20m) some exciting tech news from the last week. Want to ask a question or...