Aravind was a Staff Software Engineer at Uber, and currently works at OpenAI. Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts Edited Transcript Can you tell us about the scale of data Uber was dealing with when you joined in 2018, and how it evolved? When I joined Uber in mid-2018, we were handling a few petabytes of data. The company was going through a significant scaling journey, both in terms of launching in new cities and the corresponding increase in data volume. By the time I left, our data ha...
Aug 05, 2024•35 min
Nora is the CEO and co-founder of Jeli , an incident management platform. Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts Nora provides an in-depth look into incident management within the software industry and discusses the incident management platform Jeli. Nora's fascination with risk and its influence on human behavior stems from her early career in hardware and her involvement with a home security company. These experiences revealed the high stakes associated with software failures, uncovering t...
Jul 05, 2023•44 min
Abi Noda is the CEO and co-founder of DX , a developer productivity platform. Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts My view on developer experience and productivity measurement aligns extremely closely with DX’s view. The productivity of a group of engineers cannot be measured by tools alone - there’s too many qualitative factors like cross-functional stakeholder beuracracy or inefficiency, and inherent domain/codebase complexity that cannot be measured by tools. At the same time, there are...
Jun 13, 2023•49 min
Robert Cooke is the CTO and co-founder of 3Forge , a real-time data visualization platform. Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts In this episode, we delve into Wall Street's high-frequency trading evolution and the importance of high-volume trading data observability. We examine traditional software observability tools, such as Datadog, and contrast them with 3Forge’s financial observability platform, AMI. GPT-4 generated summary In this episode of the Software at Scale podcast, Robert Coo...
May 16, 2023•56 min
Roi Rav-Hon is the co-founder and CEO of Finout, a SaaS cost management platform. Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts In this episode, we review the challenge of maintaining reasonable SaaS costs for tech companies. Usage-based pricing models of infrastructure costs lead to a gradual ramp-up of costs and always have sneakily come up as a priority in my career as an infrastructure/platform engineer. So I’m particularly interested in how engineering teams can better understand, track, and “...
Apr 17, 2023•28 min
Ben Ofiri is the CEO and Co-Founder of Komodor, a Kubernetes troubleshooting platform. Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts We had an episode with the other founder of Komodor, Itiel, in 2021, and I thought it would be fun to revisit the topic. Highlights (ChatGPT Generated) [0:00] Introduction to the Software At Scale podcast and the guest speaker, Ben Ofiri, CEO and co-founder of Komodor. - Discussion of why Ben decided to work on a Kubernetes platform and the potential impact of Kuberne...
Mar 15, 2023•44 min
Vikas Agarwal is an engineering leader with over twenty years of experience leading engineering teams. We focused this episode on his experience as the Head of Community Trust at Amazon and dealing with the various challenges of fake reviews on Amazon products. Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts Highlights (GPT-3 generated) [0:00:17] Vikas Agarwal's origin story. [0:00:52] How Vikas learned to code. [0:03:24] Vikas's first job out of college. [0:04:30] Vikas' experience with the review b...
Feb 01, 2023•41 min
Mike Bland is a software instigator - he helped drive adoption of automated testing at Google , and the Quality Culture Initiative at Apple . Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts Mike’s blog was instrumental towards my decision to pick a job in developer productivity/platform engineering. We talk about the Rainbow of Death - the idea of driving cultural change in large engineering organizations - one of the key challenges of platform engineering teams. And we deep dive into the value and c...
Dec 28, 2022•1 hr 7 min
Benjy Weinberger is the co-founder of Toolchain , a build tool platform. He is one of the creators of the original Pants, an in-house Twitter build system focused on Scala, and was the VP of Infrastructure at Foursquare. Toolchain now focuses on Pants 2 , a revamped build system. Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts In this episode, we go back to the basics, and discuss the technical details of scalable build systems, like Pants , Bazel and Buck . A common challenge with these build system...
Nov 17, 2022•1 hr 3 min
Puneet Gupta is the co-founder and CEO of Amberflo , a cloud metering and usage based pricing platform. Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts In this episode, we discuss Puneet’s fascinating background early at AWS as a GM and his early experience at Oracle Cloud. We initially discuss why AWS shipped S3 as its first product before any other services. After, we go over the cultural differences between AWS and Oracle, and how usage based pricing and sales tied into the organization’s culture ...
Oct 13, 2022•1 hr 5 min
Akshay Buddiga is the co-founder and CTO of Traba, a labor management platform. Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts Sorry for the long hiatus in episodes! Today’s episode covers a myriad of interesting topics - from being the star of one of the internet’s first viral videos , to experiencing the hyper-growth at the somewhat controversial Zenefits, scaling out the technology platform at Fanatics, starting a company, picking an accelerator, only permitting in-person work, facilitating caree...
Sep 08, 2022•1 hr 16 min
James Cowling is the co-founder of Convex , a state management platform for web developers. Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts We discuss the state of web development in the industry today, and the various different approaches to make it easier. Contrasting the Hasura and Convex approach as a good way to illustrate some of the ideas. Hasura lets you skip the web-app, and run queries against the database through GraphQL queries. Convex, on the other hand, helps you stop worrying about dat...
Jun 23, 2022•53 min
Josh Twist is the co-founder and CEO of Zuplo , a programmable, developer friendly API Gateway Management Platform. Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts We discuss a new category of developer tools startups - API Gateway Management Platforms. We go over what an API Gateway is, why do companies use gateways, common pain-points in gateway management, building reliable systems that serve billions of requests at scale. But most importantly, we dive into the story of Josh’s UK Developer of the ...
Jun 09, 2022•50 min
Ted Young is the Director of Developer Education at Lightstep and a co-founder of the OpenTelemetry project. Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts This episode dives deep into the history of OpenTelemetry, why we need a new telemetry standard, all the work that goes into building generic telemetry processing infrastructure, and the vision for unified logging, metrics and traces. Episode Reading List Instead of highlights, I’ve attached links to some of our discussion points. * HTTP Trace Co...
May 26, 2022•2 hr 34 min
Or Weis is the CEO and founder of Permit.io , a Permission as a Service platform. Previously, he founded Rookout , a cloud-debugging tool. Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts Many of us have struggled (or are struggling) with permission management in the various applications we’ve built. The complexity of these systems always tends to increase through business requirements - for example, some content should only be accessed by paid users or users in a certain geography. Certain architectu...
May 10, 2022•49 min
Jon Skeet is a Staff Developer Platform Engineer at Google, working on Google Cloud Platform client libraries for .NET. He's best known for contributions to Stack Overflow as well as his book, C# in Depth . Additionally he is the primary maintainer of the Noda Time date/time library for .NET. You may also be interested in Jon Skeet Facts . Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts We discuss the intricacies of timezones, how to attempt to store time correctly, how storing UTC is not a silver bu...
Apr 20, 2022•50 min
Lee Byron is the co-creator of GraphQL , a senior engineering manager at Robinhood , and the executive director of the GraphQL foundation . Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts We discuss the GraphQL origin story, early technical decisions at Facebook, the experience of deploying GraphQL today, and the future of the project. Highlights (some tidbits) [01:00] - The origin story of GraphQL. Initially, the Facebook application was an HTML web-view wrapper. It seemed like the right choice at t...
Mar 22, 2022•1 hr 5 min
Harshyt Goel is a founding engineer and engineering manager of Platform and Integrations at Loom , a video-messaging tool for workplaces. He’s also an angel investor, so if you’re looking for startup advice, investments, hiring advice, or a software engineering job, please reach out to him on Twitter . Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts We discuss Loom’s story, from when it had six people and a completely different product, to the unicorn it is today. We focus on driving growth, complica...
Mar 01, 2022•44 min
Daniel Stenberg is the founder and lead developer of curl and libcurl. Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts This episode, along with others like this one , reminds me of this XKCD: We dive into all the complexity of transferring data across the internet. Highlights [00:30] - The complexity behind HTTP. What goes on behind the scenes when I make a web request? [11:30] - The organizational work behind internet-wide RFCs, like HTTP/3. [20:00] - Rust in curl. The developer experience, and the ...
Feb 10, 2022•47 min
Sahil Lavingia is the founder of Gumroad , an e-commerce platform that helps you sell digital services. He also runs SHL Capital , a rolling fund for early-stage startups. Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts Sahil’s recent book, Minimal Entrepreneurship , explores a framework for building profitable, sustainable companies. I’ve often explored the trade-off between software engineering and trying to build and launch my own company, so this conversation takes up that theme and explores what...
Jan 25, 2022•59 min
Nikita Gupta is a Co-Founder & CTO at Symba , a platform that helps manage talent development programs like internships. Internships are one of the most effective ways for hiring at a software company, but there’s a lot of work that goes into managing successful interns. With hiring getting harder across the industry due to increased competition and funding, I thought it would be interesting to dive into understanding how to manage successful internship programs. Highlights 0:30 - What is Symba?...
Jan 07, 2022•36 min
Guy Eisenkot is a Senior Director of Product Management at BridgeCrew by Prisma Cloud and was the co-founder of BridgeCrew, an infrastructure security platform. We deep dive into infrastructure security, Checkov , and BridgeCrew in this episode. I’ve personally been writing Terraform for the last few weeks, and it often feels like I’m flying blind from a reliability/security perspective. For example, it’s all too easy to create an unencrypted S3 bucket in Terraform which you’ll only find out abo...
Dec 16, 2021•45 min
Tanmai Gopal is the founder of Hasura , an API as a service platform. Hasura lets you skip writing API layers and exposes automatic GraphQL APIs that talk to your database, trigger external actions, and much more. We talk about the implementation of a “compiler as a service”, the implications of primarily having a Haskell production codebase, their experience with GraphQL, hiring product managers technical enough to build useful features, some new and upcoming Hasura features, and riff about the...
Dec 02, 2021•1 hr 9 min
Kailash Nadh is the CTO of Zerodha , India’s largest retail stockbroker. Zerodha powers a large volume of stock trades - ~15-20% of India’s daily volume which is significantly more daily transactions than Robinhood . Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts The focus of this episode is the technology and mindset behind Zerodha - the key technology choices, challenges faced, and lessons learned while building the platform over several years. As described on the company’s tech blog , Zerodha has...
Nov 16, 2021•49 min
Ganesh Datta is the CTO and co-founder of Cortex , a microservice management platform. Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts We continue the age-old monolith/microservice debate and dig into why companies seem to like services so much ( I’m generally cautious about such migrations ). Ganesh has a ton of insights into developer productivity and tooling to make engineering teams successful that we dive into. Highlights 00:00 - Why solve the service management problem? 06:00 - When to drive a ...
Nov 02, 2021•43 min
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, but also requires management of inter-personal relationships, ease of contribution, and other aspects tha...
Oct 20, 2021•56 min
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 Python performance? Guido: In some sense, it was probably a topic that was fairly comfortable to me bec...
Oct 05, 2021•31 min
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 hardware, the perception stack, testing and release cycles, simulation software, software invariants, defe...
Sep 28, 2021•41 min
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 improvements to Git for large monorepo, and more. Highlights lightly edited [06:00] Utsav: How and why did y...
Sep 15, 2021•1 hr 7 min
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/GM at Amazon. I think I’ve asked enough people this question that I finally have a vague sense of what t...
Sep 02, 2021•58 min
