Summary Steve Klabnik has spent the last 15 years shaping how developers write code—from teaching Ruby on Rails to stewarding Rust’s explosive growth. In this wide-ranging conversation, Steve joins Kostas and Nitay to unpack the forces behind Rust’s rise and the blueprint for developer-first tooling. From Rails to Rust: How a web-framework luminary fell for a brand-new systems language and helped turn it into today’s go-to for memory-safe, zero-cost abstractions. Community as UX: The inside stor...
Jul 28, 2025•59 min•Ep. 20
Summary Josh Howard, Senior Engineering Manager at Cloudflare, joins Kostas and Nitay to discuss Cloudflare's innovative serverless platform, Durable Objects, and Workers. Learn how Cloudflare enables developers to build stateful applications with global scale, consistency, and simplicity at the network edge. Chapters 00:00 Introduction and Background 02:01 Journey into Storage Systems 04:24 Cloudflare's Evolution and Developer Platform 06:29 Understanding Durable Objects 08:57 Durable Objects i...
Jun 05, 2025•52 min•Ep. 19
Summary In this episode, Erik reflects on his long and storied tech career—from the days of punch cards to founding multiple startups, including a stint at Splunk. At 61, he offers a unique perspective on how the industry has evolved and shares candid insights into what it takes to build a successful company. He discusses the evolution from building simple tools to creating comprehensive solutions and eventually platforms, emphasizing the importance of starting with a “hammer”—a focused, simple ...
May 08, 2025•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 18
Summary In this episode, Gilad Kleinman, co-founder of Epsio, shares his unique journey from PHP development to low-level kernel programming and how that evolution led him to build an innovative incremental views engine. Gilad explains that Epsio tackles a common challenge in databases: making heavy, complex queries faster and more efficient through incremental materialization. He describes how traditional materialized views fall short—often requiring full refreshes—and how Epsio seamlessly inte...
Apr 24, 2025•52 min•Ep. 17
Summary In this episode, Viktor Kessler shares his journey and insights from his extensive experience in data management—from building risk management systems and data warehouses to working as a solutions architect at MongoDB and Dremio, and now co-founding a startup. Initially exploring data mesh concepts, Viktor explains how real-world challenges—such as the disconnect between technical data models and business needs, inconsistent definitions across departments, and the difficulty in managing ...
Mar 21, 2025•57 min•Ep. 16
Summary In this episode, Apurva Mehta, co-founder and CEO of Responsive, recounts his extensive journey in stream processing—from his early work at LinkedIn and Confluent to his current venture at Responsive. He explains how stream processing evolved from simple event ingestion and graph indexing to powering complex, stateful applications such as search indexing, inventory management, and trade settlement. Apurva clarifies the often-misunderstood concept of “real time,” arguing that low latency ...
Mar 06, 2025•58 min•Ep. 15
In this episode, we chat with David Jayatillake, VP of AI at Cube, about semantic layers and their crucial role in making AI work reliably with data. We explore how semantic layers act as a bridge between raw data and business meaning, and why they're more practical than pure knowledge graphs. David shares insights from his experience at Delphi Labs, where they achieved 100% accuracy in natural language data queries by combining semantic layers with AI, compared to just 16% accuracy with direct ...
Feb 20, 2025•59 min•Ep. 14
In this episode, we chat with Yaron Hadad, a fascinating individual who transitioned from theoretical physics to entrepreneurship. We explore his groundbreaking work on black holes and gravitational waves, and learn about the Ramanujan Machine - an algorithmic system he helped develop that discovers new mathematical formulas and democratizes mathematical research. We'll hear about the scientific community's mixed reactions to this innovative approach. The conversation then shifts to his work wit...
Feb 04, 2025•59 min•Ep. 13
In this episode, we chat with Philippe Noël, founder of ParadeDB, about building an Elasticsearch alternative natively on PostgreSQL. We explore the challenges and benefits of extending PostgreSQL versus building a separate system, diving into topics like full-text search, faceted analytics, and why organizations need these capabilities. We discuss the emerging bring-your-own-cloud deployment model, the state of the PostgreSQL extension ecosystem, and what makes a truly production-ready database...
Jan 16, 2025•1 hr•Ep. 12
In this episode, we chat with Ben, founder of Espresso AI, about his journey from building Excel Python integrations to optimizing data warehouse compute costs. We explore his experience at companies like Uber and Google, where he worked on everything from distributed systems to ML and storage infrastructure. We learn about the evolution of his latest venture, which started as a C++ compiler optimization project and transformed into a system for optimizing Snowflake workloads using ML. Ben share...
Jan 03, 2025•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 11
In this episode, we chat with David Mytton, founder and CEO of Arcjet and creator of console.dev. We explore his journey from building a cloud monitoring startup to founding a security-as-code company. David shares fascinating insights about bot detection, the challenges of securing modern applications, and why traditional security approaches often fail to meet developers' needs. We discuss the innovative use of WebAssembly for high-performance security checks, the importance of developer experi...
Dec 19, 2024•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 10
In this episode, we chat with Ivan, co-founder and CEO of Daytona, about the evolution of developer environments and tooling. We explore his journey from founding CodeAnywhere in 2009, one of the first browser-based IDEs, to creating the popular Shift developer conference, and now building Daytona's dev environment automation platform. We discuss the changing landscape of development environments, from local-only setups to today's complex hybrid configurations, and why managing these environment...
Dec 04, 2024•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 9
In this episode, we chat with Roy Ben-Alta, co-founder of Oakminer AI and former director at Meta AI Research, about his fascinating journey through the evolution of data infrastructure and AI. We explore his early days at AWS when cloud adoption was still controversial, his experience building large language models at Meta, and the challenges of training and deploying AI systems at scale. Roy shares valuable insights about the future of data warehouses, the emergence of knowledge-centric system...
Nov 21, 2024•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 8
In this episode, we chat with Nitzan Shapira, co-founder and former CEO of Epsagon, which was acquired by Cisco in 2021. We explore Nitzan's journey from working in cybersecurity to building an observability platform for cloud applications, particularly focused on serverless architectures. We learn about the early days of serverless adoption, the challenges in making observability tools developer-friendly, and why distributed tracing was a key differentiator for Epsagon. We discuss the evolution...
Nov 06, 2024•58 min•Ep. 7
From GPU computing pioneer to Kubernetes architect, Brian Grant takes us on a fascinating journey through his career at the forefront of systems engineering. In this episode, we explore his early work on GPU compilers in the pre-CUDA era, where he tackled unique challenges in high-performance computing when graphics cards weren't yet designed for general computation. Brian then shares insights from his time at Google, where he helped develop Borg and later became the original lead architect of K...
Oct 22, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 6
In this episode, we chat with JP, creator of FizzBee, about formal methods and their application in software engineering. We explore the differences between coding and engineering, discussing how formal methods can improve system design and reliability. JP shares insights from his time at Google and explains why tools like FizzBee are crucial for distributed systems. We delve into the challenges of adopting formal methods in industry, the potential of FizzBee to make these techniques more access...
Oct 08, 2024•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 5
In this episode, we chat with Dean Pleban, CEO of DagsHub, about machine learning operations. We explore the differences between DevOps and MLOps, focusing on data management and experiment tracking. Dean shares insights on versioning various components in ML projects and discusses the importance of user experience in MLOps tools. We also touch on DagsHub's integration of AI in their product and Dean's vision for the future of AI and machine learning in industry. Links DagsHub The MLOps Podcast ...
Sep 27, 2024•54 min•Ep. 4
In this episode, Kostas and Nitay are joined by Amey Chaugule and Matt Green, co-founders of Denormalized. They delve into how Denormalized is building an embedded stream processing engine—think “DuckDB for streaming”—to simplify real-time data workloads. Drawing from their extensive backgrounds at companies like Uber, Lyft, Stripe, and Coinbase. Amey and Matt discuss the challenges of existing stream processing systems like Spark, Flink, and Kafka. They explain how their approach leverages Apac...
Sep 13, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 3
In this episode, we dive deep into the future of data infrastructure for AI and ML with Nikhil Simha and Varant Zanoyan, two seasoned engineers from Airbnb and Facebook. Nikhil and Varant share their journey from building real-time data systems and ML infrastructure at tech giants to launching their own venture. The conversation explores the intricacies of designing developer-friendly APIs, the complexities of handling both batch and streaming data, and the delicate balance between customer need...
Aug 30, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 2
In this episode, we chat with Chris Riccomini about the evolution of stream processing and the challenges in building applications on streaming systems. We also chat about leaky abstractions, good and bad API designs, what Chris loves and hates about Rust and finally about his exciting new project that involves object storage and LSMs. Connect with Chris at: LinkedIn X Blog Materialized View Newsletter - His newsletter The missing README - His book SlateDB - His latest OSS Project Chapters 00:00...
Aug 23, 2024•53 min•Ep. 1
