Software Huddle

Today we're talking with Kolton Andrus, the Founder and CEO of Gremlin, about what happens to reliability when AI is writing most of the code. Kolton helped build the Chaos Engineering practice of both Amazon and Netflix before starting Gremlin. In our conversation we talk about scar tissue, the intuition engineers develop from being woken up at 3:00 AM to fix production outages and how AI doesn't...

Today we are talking with Andre Elizondo, the Director of Innovation at Mezmo about their open source agentic harness for SREs called AURA. Mezmo got their start handling observability data at scale. Logs, traces, metrics, the usual stuff. AURA is their answer to a growing problem, as system complexity outpaces humans' ability to make sense of all that data, how do you actually make it actionable...

Today on the show, we have a special guest — Ashmeet Sidana, the founder of Engineering Capital. Ashmeet started his career as an engineer at some great companies like Hewlett-Packard and Silicon Graphics before founding his own company, getting it acquired, and eventually starting his venture capital firm, Engineering Capital. With his strong engineering background, Ashmeet looks for startups tha...

Today we have Dr. Ewelina Kurtys on the show. Ewelina has a background in Neuroscience and is currently working at FinalSpark. FinalSpark is using live Neurons for computations instead of traditional electric CPUs. The advantage is that live Neurons are significantly more energy efficient than traditional computing, and given all the energy concerns right now with regards to running AI workloads a...

Today we're talking with one of our favorite engineers, Rafal Wilinski. Rafal has been on the cutting edge of AI development in the last few years as he has led AI teams at Zapier and Vendr. Rafal walks us through the hard-won lessons about actually integrating AI tools into the applications you're building. One of the hardest things in integrating these AI tools is how to ensure you're getting be...

If you’ve ever felt like engineering teams are stuck in execution mode—heads down, building what they’re told—then today’s episode is for you. We're talking about what it really takes to build high ownership engineering cultures where devs aren't simply just shipping code, but they're helping shape the product. And our guest this week is Matt Watson. He's a long time founder, engineer, and now the...

Today's episode is with Aayush Shah. Aayush is one of the co-founders of Blacksmith, which is a CI compute platform. Basically, Blacksmith will run your GitHub Actions jobs faster and with more visibility with the standard GitHub Actions CI runners. The founding team has a fun background doing systems work at Cockroach and Faire, and they're taking on a big problem in running this massive CI fleet...

Today, we're talking Valkey, Redis, and all things caching. Our guest is Madelyn Olson, who is a principal engineer at AWS working on Elasticache and is one of the most well-known people in the caching community. She was a core maintainer of Redis prior to the fork and was one of the creators of Valkey, an open-source fork of Redis. In this episode, we talk about Madelyn's road to becoming a Redis...

Today, Sam Lambert from Planetscale is back for a third time. Planetscale just announced Planetscale Postgres, so we had to get Sam back to tell us how and why they decided to add support for Postgres. It's always great to have Sam on -- he brings great stories about real customers and honest insight about the state of the database industry. In this episode, we talk about the road to Postgres and...

Big time guest today as Arvid Kahl joins us. Arvid is my favorite type of guest -- a deeply technical founder that can talk about both the technical and business challenges of a startup. Lots to enjoy from this episode. Arvid is known as the Bootstrapped Founder and has documented his path to selling Feedback Panda back in 2019. He's now building Podscan and sharing his journey as he goes. Podscan...

Today we have the excellent Kent C. Dodds on the program. Kent is an amazing teacher in the web development space, and I've learned a ton from him about React, JavaScript testing, and general web dev. Lately, Kent has been going all-in on AI, especially with the model context protocol (MCP) space. He's sharing a ton of useful material in this area as he works on a new course. We spent a lot of tim...

Today's guest is AJ Stuyvenberg, a Staff Engineer at Datadog working on their Serverless observability project. He had a great article recently about how they rewrote their AWS Lambda extension in Rust. It's a really interesting look at a big, hard project, from thinking about when it's a good idea to do a rewrite to talking about their focus on performance and reliability above all else and what...

So if you're writing code or keeping systems running, you probably know the drill. Late night pages, chasing down weird bugs, dealing with alert storms. It's tough! It costs money when things break, and honestly, nobody loves that experience. So the big question is, can we actually use something like AI, AI agents in particular, to make reliability less painful, more systematic? That's what we're...

Today we have Søren from Prisma on the show. Prisma has been the most popular ORM in the TypeScript world for a while, and now they’re moving more into hosted infrastructure. We spend a lot of time talking about their new offering called Prisma Postgres, which is this unikernel-based Postgres offering. It’s a really unique offering from both a technical and a product perspective. On the technical...

Today we have Hassan back on the show. Hassan was one of our first guests for Huddle when he was working at Vercel, but since then, he's joined Together AI, one of the hottest companies in the world. They just raised a massive series B round. Hassan joins us to talk about Together AI, inference optimization and building AI applications. We touch on a bunch of topics like customer uses of AI, best...

Today on the show, we talked with Yujian Tang. He was on the show previously when he worked at Zilliz, when we talked about vector databases and RAG. He's since branched out on his own, building the tech startup scene in Seattle and organizing AI events all over the place. We talk about his latest venture, the Seattle Startup Summit, coming up on March 28th. They're still Early Bird Tickets availa...

Today, we have Sam Lambert back on the show! Sam is the CEO of PlanetScale, and if you follow him on X, you know he’s one of the sharpest voices in the database space—cutting through the hype with deep experience and a no-nonsense approach. In this episode, we dive into PlanetScale’s new Metal offering, which has been battle-tested with PlanetScale’s high-scale cloud business partners and is now G...

Redis is consistently one of the most beloved pieces of infrastructure for developers. And in the last few years, we've seen a number of new Redis-compatible projects that aim to improve on the core of Redis in some way. One of those projects is DragonflyDB, a multi-threaded version of Redis that allows for significantly higher throughput on a single instance. Roman Gershman is the co-founder and...

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 Ge...

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 t...

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 expe...

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...

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. Mik...

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 mu...