The New Stack Podcast

In the early 2000s, Charity Majors was a homeschooled kid who’d gotten a scholarship to study classical piano performance at the University of Idaho.   “I realized, over the course of that first year, that music majors tended to still be hanging around the music department in their 30s and 40s,” she said. “And nobody really had very much money, and they were all doing it for the love of the game....

Idit Levine’s tech journey originated in an unexpected place: a basketball court. As a seventh grader in Israel, playing in hoops  tournaments definitely sparked her competitive side.   “I was basically going to compete with all my international friends for two minutes without parents, without anything,” Levine said. “I think it made me who I am today. It’s really giving you a lot of confidence to...

Aerospike Founder Srini Srinivasan had just finished his Ph. D. at the University of Wisconsin when he joined IBM and worked under Don Haderle , the creator of DB2, the first commercial relational database management system.   Haderle became a major influencer on Srinivasan when he started Aerospike, a real-time data platform. To this day, Haderle is an advisor to Aerospike.   "He was the first on...

Ask a developer about how they got into programming, and you learn so much about them.   In this week's episode of The New Stack Makers, Chainguard founder Dan Lorenc said he got into programming halfway through college while studying mechanical engineering.   "I got into programming because we had to do simulations and stuff in MATLAB," Lorenc said. And then I switched over to Python because it w...

In the early 1990s, many kids got into programming video games. Tina Huang enjoyed developing her GeoCities site but not making games. Huang loved automating her website.   "It is not a lie to say that what got me excited about coding was automation," said Huang, co-founder of Transposit, in this week's episode of The New Stack Makers as part of our Tech Founder Series. "Now, you're probably going...

Welcome to the first in our series on The New Stack Makers about technical founders, those engineers who have moved from engineering jobs to running a company of their own. What we want to know is what that's like for the founder. How is it to be an engineer turned entrepreneur?   We like to ask technologists about their first computer or when they started programming. We always find a connection...

Web Application Firewalls (WAF) first emerged in the late 1990s as Web server attacks became more common. Today, in the context of cloud native technologies, there’s an ongoing rethinking of how a WAF should be applied.   No longer is it solely static applications sitting behind a WAF, said Tigera CEO Ratan Tipirneni, President & CEO of Tigera in this episode of The New Stack Makers.   “With cloud...

Passage adds device native biometric authorization to web sites to allow passwordless security on devices with or without Touch ID.   In this episode of The New Stack Makers, Passage Co-Founders Cole Hecht and Anna Pobletts talk about how the service works for developers to offer users its biometric service.   Hecht and Pobletts have worked in product security for many years and the recurring prob...

In this episode of The New Stack’s On the Road show at Open Source Summit in Austin, Webb Brown , CEO and co-founder of KubeCost , talked with The New Stack about opening up the black box on how much Kubernetes is really costing.  Whether we’re talking about cloud costs in general or the costs specifically associated with Kubernetes, the problem teams complain about is lack of visibility. This is...

In this episode of The New Stack’s On the Road show at Open Source Summit in Austin, Amanda Brock , CEO and founder of OpenUK , talked with The New Stack about revenue models for open source and how those fit into building a sustainable project. Funding an open source project has to be part of the sustainability question — open source requires humans to contribute, and those humans have bills to p...

AUSTIN, TEX. — In one of the most compelling keynote addresses at The Linux Foundation’s Open Source Summit North America, held here in June, Aeva Black , a veteran of the open source community, said that a friend of theirs recently commented that, “I feel like all the trans women I know on Twitter, are software developers.”   There’s a reason for that, Black said. It’s called “survivor bias”: The...

AUSTIN, TEX. —What’s the future of WebAssembly — Wasm, to its friends — the binary instruction format for a stack-based virtual machine that allows developers to build in their favorite programming language and run their code anywhere? For Matt Butcher , CEO and founder of Fermyon Technologies, the future of Wasm lies in running it outside of the browser and running it inside of everything, from p...

VALENCIA, Spain —  WebAssembly (Wasm) is among the more hot topics under the CNCF project umbrella.  In this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, recorded on the show floor of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2022 , Liam Randall , CEO and co-founder, Cosmonic, and Colin Murphy, senior software engineer, Adobe , discuss why Wasm’s future looks bright.  A quintessential feature of Wasm is that it...

In this episode of The New Stack’s On the Road show at Open Source Summit in Austin, Julia Ferraioli , open source technical leader at Cisco’s open source programs office, spoke with The New Stack about some alternative ways to define what is and is not ‘open source.’ When someone says, well, that’s ‘technically’ open source, it’s usually to be snarky about a project that meets the legal criteria...

AUSTIN, TEX. — How safe is the open source software that virtually every organization uses? You might not want to know, according to the results of a survey released by The Linux Foundation and Snyk, a cloud native cybersecurity company, at the foundation’s annual Open Source Summit North America , held here in June.   Forty-one percent of the more than 500 organizations surveyed don’t have high c...

AUSTIN, TEX. —Forty-one percent of organizations in a new survey said they expect to increase hiring for open source roles this year . But the study, released in June by the Linux Foundation and online learning platform edX during the foundation’s Open Source Summit North America , also found that 93% of employers surveyed said they struggle to find the talent to fill those roles. At the Austin su...

In this episode of The New Stack’s On the Road show at Open Source Summit in Austin, Matt Yonkovit , Head of Open Source at Percona , shared his thoughts on how economic uncertainty could affect the open source ecosystem. Open source, of course, is free. So what role does the economic play in whether or not open source software is contributed to, downloaded and used in production? “Generally, open...

AUSTIN, TEX. —Everyone uses open source software — and it’s become increasingly apparent that not nearly enough attention has been paid to the security of that software . In a survey released by The Linux Foundation and Synk at the foundation’s Open Source Summit in Austin, Tex.,  this month, 41% of organizations said they aren’t confident in the security of the open source software they use. At t...

  British telecommunications provider, Vodafone, which owns and operates networks in over 20 countries and is on a journey to become a tech company focused around digital services, has plans to hire thousands of software engineers and developers that can help put the company on the cloud-native track and utilize their network through API’s. In this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast at MongoD...

VALENCIA – The goal of DevOps was to break down silos between software development and operations. The side effect has become the blurring of lines between dev and ops. For better or for worse. Because the role of software developer is just continuously expanding causing cognitive overload and burnout. This is why the developer tooling market has exploded to automate and assist developers right wh...

Proper tooling is perhaps the primary key to unlocking developer productivity. With the right tools and frameworks, developers can be productive in minutes versus having to toil over boilerplate code. And as data-hungry use cases such as AI and machine learning emerge, data tooling is becoming paramount.   This was evident at the recent MongoDB World conference in New York City where TNS Founder a...

"Developers aren't cryptographers. We can only do so much security training, and frankly, they shouldn't have to make hard choices about this encryption mode or that encryption mode. It should just, like, work," said Kenneth White ,  a security principal at MongoDB, explaining the need for MongoDB's new Queryable Encryption feature.    In this latest edition of The New Stack Makers podcast, we dis...

For the past six years, WSO2 has been developing Ballerina, an open-source programming language that streamlines the writing of new services and APIs. It aims to simplify the process of being able to use, combine, and create network services and get highly distributed applications to work together toward a determined outcome. In this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast Eric Newcomer , Chief Te...

VALENCIA – Open source code is part of at least 70% of enterprise stacks. Yet, a lot of open source contributors are still unpaid volunteers. Even more than tech as a whole, the future of open source relies on the community. Unless you're among the top tier funded open source projects, your sustainability replies on building a community – whether you want to or not – and cultivating project leader...

VALENCIA, SPAIN —Managing the cloud virtual machines (VMs) your containers run on. Running data-intensive workloads . Scaling services in response to spikes in traffic — but doing so in a way that doesn’t jack up your organization’s cloud spend. Kubernetes (K8s) seems so easy at the beginning, but it brings challenges that rachet up complexity as you go.   The cloud native ecosystem is filling up...