Software at Scale

Johannes Schindelin is the maintainer (BDFL) of Git for Windows. Apple Podcasts  |  Spotify  |  Google Podcasts Git is a fundamental piece of the software community, and we get to learn the history and inner workings of the project in this episode. Maintaining a widely-used open source project involves a ton of expected complexity around handling bug reports, deprecations, and inclusive culture, b...

Guido van Rossum is the creator of the Python programming language and a Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft. Apple Podcasts  |  Spotify  |  Google Podcasts We discuss Guido’s new work on making CPython faster ( PEP 659 ), Tiers of Python Interpreter Execution , and high impact, low hanging fruit performance improvements. Highlights (an edited summary) [00:21] What got you interested in working on...

Abhay Venkatesh is a Software Engineer at Anduril Industries where he focuses on infrastructure and platform engineering. Apple Podcasts  |  Spotify  |  Google Podcasts We focus this episode on drone engineering - exploring the theme of “If I wanted to start my own technology project/company that manages drones, what technology bits would I need to know?” We discuss the commoditization of drone ha...

Derrick Stolee is a Principal Software Engineer at GitHub, where he focuses on the client experience of large Git repositories. Apple Podcasts  |  Spotify  |  Google Podcasts Subscribers might be aware that I’ve done some work on client-side Git in the past, so I was pretty excited for this episode. We discuss the Microsoft Windows and Office repository’s migrations to Git, recent performance impr...

Maju Kuruvilla is the CTO and COO of Bolt , a startup that offers quick online checkout technology to retailers. Previously, he was VP and GM at Amazon Global Mile, in charge of Amazon’s global logistics and Amazon Prime fulfillment operations amongst other things. Apple Podcasts  |  Spotify  |  Google Podcasts Highlights 00:30 - What does a VP at Amazon even do? The day-to-day experience of a VP/...

Bharat Mediratta is the first Coinbase Fellow . Previously, he was a Distinguished Engineer at Google, CTO at AltSchool , and CTO at Dropbox. Apple Podcasts  |  Spotify  |  Google Podcasts We focus this episode on the role of a senior technical individual contributor in a technology company and contrast that with the role of a technology executive (like a CTO) in a public company. We talk about ho...

Sugu Sougoumarane is the CTO and Co-Founder of PlanetScale , a database as a service platform company. Previously, he worked at PayPal and YouTube on databases and other scalability problems, and he’s one of the creators of Vitess , a graduated CNCF database project that served as YouTube’s metadata storage for several years. Apple Podcasts  |  Spotify  |  Google Podcasts We discuss his early days...

Tammy Butow is a Principal SRE at Gremlin , an enterprise Chaos Engineering platform that makes it easy to build more reliable applications in order to prevent outages, innovate faster, and earn customer trust. She’s also the co-founder of Girl Geek Academy , an organization to encourage women to learn technology skills. She previously held IC and management roles in SRE at Dropbox and Digital Oce...

Itiel Schwartz is the CTO and Co-Founder of Komodor, a Kubernetes troubleshooting platform. Previously, he was one of the founding engineers at Rookout . Apple Podcasts  |  Spotify  |  Google Podcasts We discuss two major themes in this episode: the rise of Kubernetes as a popular orchestration platform, and the need for using an integrated service to understand and debug Kubernetes deployments. H...

Tramale Turner is the Head of Engineering, Traffic at Stripe. Previously, he was a Senior Engineering Manager at F5 Networks and a Senior Manager at Nintendo. Apple Podcasts  |  Spotify  |  Google Podcasts This episode has an unexpectedly deep dive into security and compliance at Stripe. We discuss Stripe’s philosophy and approach towards building secure systems, achieving compliance standards lik...

Rajesh Venkataraman is a Senior Staff Engineer at Google where he works on Privacy and Personalization at Google Pay. He’s had experience building and maintaining search systems for a large part of his career. He worked on natural language processing at Microsoft, the cloud inference team at Google, and released parts of the search infrastructure at Dropbox. Apple Podcasts  |  Spotify  |  Google P...

Devdatta Akhawe is the Head of Security at Figma . Previously, he was Director of Security Engineering at Dropbox, where he led multiple teams on product security and abuse prevention. Apple Podcasts  |  Spotify  |  Google Podcasts In this episode, we discuss security for startups, as well as dive deep into some interesting new developments in the security realm like WebAuthn and BeyondCorp . We w...

Laurent Ploix is an engineering manager on the Platform Insights team at Spotify . Previously, he was responsible for CI/CD at several Swedish companies, most recently as a Product Manager at Spotify, and a Continuous Integration Manager at Sungard . Apple Podcasts  |  Spotify  |  Google Podcasts Highlights 05:40 - How CI/CD has evolved from a niche practice to a standard and expected part of the...

Sujay Jayakar was a Software Engineer at Microsoft Research where he worked on kernel bypass networking . He was previously a Principal Engineer at Dropbox where he worked on the migration of user data from S3 to the internal storage system ( Magic Pocket ), and the sync engine deployed to clients. Apple Podcasts  |  Spotify  |  Google Podcasts Highlights 05:00 - What framework do you use to decid...

Colin Chartier is the co-founder and CEO of  LayerCI . LayerCI speeds up web developers by providing unique VM-like environments for every commit to a codebase, which enables developers, product managers, QA, and other stakeholders to preview code changes extremely quickly and removes the need to spin up a local environment to showcase demos. This enables interesting workflows like designers signi...

Naphat Sanguansin was the former TL of the Server Platform SRE and Application Services teams at Dropbox, where he led efforts to improve Dropbox’s availability SLA and set a long-term vision for server development. This episode is more conversational than regular episodes since I was on the same team as Naphat and we worked on a few initiatives together. We share the story behind the reliability...

Christina Cacioppo and Robbie Ostrow work at Vanta , an automated security and compliance company with a mission to secure the internet. Vanta sets up monitoring via a set of continuous tests to ensure basic security best practices, like mandatory MFA for employees. Each test bubbles up to one or more compliance standards like SOC-2 so that companies can rapidly move their audits and unlock deals....

Alexander Gallego is the founder and CEO of Vectorized . Vectorized offers a product called RedPanda , an Apache Kafka-compatible event streaming platform that’s significantly faster and easier to operate than Kafka. We talk about the increasing ubiquity of streaming platforms, what they’re used for, why Kafka is slow, and how to safely and effectively build a replacement. Previously, Alex was a P...

John Egan  is the CEO and Co-Founder of  Kintaba , an incident management platform. He was the co-creator of  Workplace by Facebook, and previously built Caffeinated Mind , a file transfer company, which was acquired by Facebook. In this episode, our focus is on incident management tools and culture. We discuss learnings about incident management through John’s personal experiences at his startup...

Nipunn Koorapati was a Software Engineer at Dropbox, where he worked on two distinct areas - Developer Productivity and Client Sync. He drove many initiatives like consolidating various repositories into a server-side monorepo ( read more here ), and was part of a high leverage project to rewrite the sync engine , a core part of Dropbox’s business. Apple Podcasts  |  Spotify  |  Google Podcasts I...

Ben Sigelman is the CEO and Co-Founder of Lightstep , a DevOps observability platform. He was the co-creator of Dapper - Google’s distributed tracing system and Monarch - an in-memory time-series database for metrics. Finally, he’s also the co-creator of the OpenTelemetry and OpenTracing standards. We spent this episode discussing Dapper and Monarch - their design, rollout, and lessons learned in...

Liran Haimovitch is the Co-Founder and CTO of Rookout , a new style debugging tool that enables developers to debug web applications by adding debugger style breakpoints in production (without actually stopping the application). Apple Podcasts  |  Spotify  |  Google Podcasts Rookout belongs to a new class of developer tools that aim to make application debugging more interactive than the standard...

Emma Tang was the Engineering Manager of the Data Infrastructure team at Stripe. She was also a Lead Software Engineer at Aggregate Knowledge , where she worked on the data platform. We explore the technological and organizational challenges of maintaining big data platforms. We discuss when a company would require a “Big Data” system, what the properties of a good system look like, how some of th...

John Micco is a Cloud Transformation Architect at VMWare, where he works on CI/CD systems. He’s worked in the CI/CD space for nearly twenty years at various companies like Netflix and Google, he’s authored several research papers , and was a keynote speaker at the International Conference of Software Testing and Verification (ICST). Our collaboration helped shape my work on Athena at Dropbox. This...

Barak Schoster is the CEO of BridgeCrew , a cloud security platform that was just acquired by Palo Alto Networks. He’s also the maintainer of Checkov , a popular static code analysis tool for infrastructure-as-code. In this episode, we discuss both aspects - the experience running a DevOps company and a popular open-source tool. Apple Podcasts  |  Spotify  |  Google Podcasts Highlights 1:40 - The...