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 how to explore what the right position is for someone, what drives their success, how to drive impact as a...
Aug 18, 2021•53 min
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 at PayPal and YouTube, their initial scalability problems, the technology that helped them scale out th...
Aug 04, 2021•1 hr 13 min
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 Ocean. Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts In this episode, we talk about reliability engineerin...
Jul 27, 2021•58 min
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. Highlights 9:30 - When should a startup consider using a more heavy-duty system like Kubernetes, vs. mana...
Jul 15, 2021•44 min
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 like PCI , and complex requirements like data locality laws. Highlights 05:00 - Growth at Stripe 09:00 - A ...
Jul 07, 2021•1 hr 4 min
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 Podcasts In this episode, we discuss the nuances and technology behind search systems. We go over search ...
Jun 25, 2021•52 min
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 wrap things up with slightly philosophical points on the relationship between security and regulation. Hi...
Jun 17, 2021•52 min
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 development workflow today 12:00 - The compounding nature of CI requirements 14:00 - Workflow inflection...
Jun 10, 2021•1 hr
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 decide to stop using S3 and store data in your own data centers? (the “ Epic Exodus ” story) 11:00 - Perfect ...
Jun 02, 2021•1 hr 6 min
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 signing off on pull requests. Colin was previously the CTO of ParseHub and a software design lecturer at t...
May 19, 2021•57 min
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 of a large monolith with hundreds of weekly contributors, and the eventual decision to “componentize...
May 12, 2021•1 hr 3 min
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. Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts This episode is special because of two reasons: I curren...
May 04, 2021•59 min
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 Principal Software Engineer at Akamai systems and the creator of the Concord Framework , a distribute...
Apr 27, 2021•1 hr 2 min
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 and at Facebook, and his observations through customers of Kintaba. We explore the stage at which a com...
Apr 20, 2021•58 min
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 worked with Nipunn in 2020, and we discovered interesting but unsurprising similarities between the soft...
Apr 13, 2021•1 hr 15 min
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 practice. Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts Video Highlights Transcript [Intro] [00:00]: We...
Apr 04, 2021•54 min
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 “inspect logs” experience that is standard industry practice today. I’d encourage checking out the demo ...
Mar 23, 2021•40 min
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 these systems look like today, some of the tools/frameworks that work well, hiring the right engineers...
Mar 21, 2021•41 min
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 episode is extremely technical. We talk about the management of CI servers and systems in large com...
Mar 13, 2021•2 hr 35 min
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 story and history of BridgeCrew. 9:30 - Why should engineers run both Checkov and BridgeCrew checks in t...
Mar 04, 2021•38 min
David Cramer is the co-founder and CTO of Sentry , a monitoring platform helps every developer diagnose, fix, and optimize the performance of their applications. Before this, he worked at Dropbox and Disqus. Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts We discuss the evolution of Sentry from both a technical and business perspective: the architecture, some outages, hiring, improving the customer experience, and more. Highlights Notes are highlighted 0:00 - The history of Sentry 10:00 - The initial...
Feb 24, 2021•1 hr 13 min
Beyang Liu is the CTO and co-founder of Sourcegraph , a code search and intelligence tool for developers. He used to be a software engineer at Palantir, and a research assistant at Stanford University. Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts Highlights 1:00 - The story behind Sourcegraph 6:12 - How is Sourcegraph different from a tool like grep (or ripgrep )? 14:25 - Social code search via links are a bigger deal than one might imagine 17:00 - Engineering challenges in building Sourcegraph. 2...
Feb 15, 2021•1 hr 22 min
Farhan Thawar is VP Engineering for Channels and Mobile at Shopify. Previously he was the CTO and Co-Founder at Helpful, CTO Mobile at Pivotal and VP, Engineering at Pivotal Labs. He was named one of Toronto's 25 most powerful people. Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts We discussed frameworks for making life decisions, the structure of engineering organizations, setting up successful hiring pipelines and healthy organizations, committing to large engineering decisions (like React Native ...
Feb 01, 2021•1 hr 18 min
Charity Majors is the CTO of Honeycomb , a platform that helps engineers understand their own production systems through observability. Honeycomb is very different from traditional monitoring tools like Wavefront as it is built for data with high cardinality and high dimensionality, which can instantly speed up debugging of many problems. Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts NOTE: This episode has some explicit language. We talk about observability, monitoring, building your own database f...
Jan 25, 2021
Indranil Gupta (Indy) is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign. He leads the DPRG (Distributed Protocols Research Group) and runs popular Cloud Computing MOOCs on Coursera . His work has inspired software that runs in many production services, like Serf in Nomad by Hashicorp. and Uber’s Ringpop . Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts We discussed how academia drives progress in distributed systems, a bit of blockchains, distributed systems and machi...
Jan 16, 2021•1 hr 19 min
Kyle is a Software Engineer at Dropbox. He’s currently working in the Core Sync area in charge of the Dropbox Sync Engine and other related components. He was previously the tech lead of the Build Infrastructure team, the tech lead of the Android team at Dropbox, and a senior engineer at Google. Kyle has been thinking about developer productivity for a while, and his tenure at Dropbox (~9 years) gives him a unique insight into the origins and consequences of some large technical decisions, the v...
Jan 09, 2021
Akshay Shekhar is a software engineer working on Amazon HoneyCode , a no code tool to build applications. He’s been in a few different teams at Amazon, and he used to be a maintainer of Elementary OS (and his name is still on the team page ). We talk about the experience of being an open source developer, working in startups, corporate tech blogs, evaluating starting a startup vs. staying in a tech company, moving from India to Canada, AWS organizational structure, a comparison between technolog...
Dec 26, 2020•1 hr 20 min
Bharat Mediratta was a Distinguished Engineer at Google, CTO at Altschool, and CTO at Dropbox. At Google, he worked on GWS (Google Web Server), a system that I’ve always been curious about, especially since its Wikipedia entry calls it “one of the most guarded components of Google's infrastructure”. In this podcast, we discuss GWS, bootstrapping a culture of testing at Google, breaking up services to be more manageable, monorepos, build systems, the ethics of software at scale, and more. We spen...
Dec 19, 2020•2 hr 32 min
This episode contains an interview with Christine Dodrill , ex Senior Software Reliability Expert at Lightspeed. We discuss Kubernetes, Spectre/Meltdown, configuration languages, a controversial testing philosophy, autoscaling (auto-failing), technical problems vs social problems, monoliths, Conway’s Law and Canada. Listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify . Highlights Notes are italicized. 5:34 - Stack Overflow might become actively harmful if you’re working on WebAssembly or something sufficiently ...
Dec 07, 2020•1 hr 10 min
Welcome to the first Software at Scale podcast. This episode contains an interview with Alexey Ivanov , Principal Engineer, Infrastructure at Dropbox. The motivation for yet another software podcast is to let software builders share technical decisions, opinions, and stories in an informal way. Personal blogs and corporate engineering blogs are extremely informative, but often require high activation energy to be published. This podcast instead tries to replicate bar conversations with grizzled ...
Dec 06, 2020•50 min
