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Today we have Mark Huang on the show. Mark has previously held roles in Data Science and ML at companies like Box and Splunk and is now the co-founder and chief architect of Gradient, an enterprise AI platform to build and deploy autonomous assistants.

In our chat, we get into some of the stuff he’s seeing around autonomous AI agents and why people are so excited about that space. Mark and his team has also recently been working on a project to extend the Llama-3 context window. They were able to extend the model from 8K tokens all the way to 1 million through a technique called theta-scaling. He walks us through the details of this project and how longer context windows will impact the types of use cases we can serve with LLMs.

Follow Mark: https://x.com/markatgradient
Follow Sean: https://x.com/seanfalconer

Today we have Bob van Luijt, the CEO and founder of Weaviate on the show. Bob talks about building AI native applications and what that means, the role a vector database will play in the future of AI applications, and how Weaviate works under the hood.

We also get into why a specialized vector database is needed versus using vectors as a feature within conventional databases.

Bob van Luijt: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bobvanluijt/
Sean on X: https://x.com/seanfalconer

Software Huddle ⤵︎
X: https://twitter.com/SoftwareHuddle
Substack: https://softwarehuddle.substack.com/

Today, we have Talia Nassi on the show. Talia’s been leading Developer Advocacy at Akamai.
Akamai is in a really interesting space where they've been around for a long time, as a CDN provider, as a security provider, and now they acquired Linode, and acquired a bunch of other companies which has expanded them into more of like a full fledged cloud provider.
We had a really interesting discussion talking about the expansion, we also talked about her thoughts on infrastructure as code, multi cloud, and just getting into DevRel and what that experience has been like for her.

Today we have Brian Rinaldi from LaunchDarkly on the show. This is the final episode of our in person coverage at the SHIFT Conference in Miami. And although Brian works at LaunchDarkly, we actually didn't talk at all about his employer and instead chatted about Jamstack. Brian has a long history with Jamstack, has written a lot about it.
Jamstack was popularized and created by Netlify. And there's been a lot of history of controversy with the term. Some people think of it's merely a branding ploy or a marketing thing, and others find it simply confusing because we have terms like LAMP stack, MEAN stack and MERN stack.
So Jamstack automatically gets lumped in with those, but it's not actually a technology stack. It's an architectural pattern. Recently, Jamstack has been giving away to what is known as composable frontends and we picked Brian's brain on this and what this means not only for Jamstack, but also the future web development.

Today we have Emanuel Lacić on the  show. He was in academia for a while. Now he’s been working at Infobip for the last couple of years, building some of this AI stuff and putting it into production. We picked his brain about the best practices when it comes to AI and what we can expect to see over the next couple of years.

Today, on the show we have Christine Spang, Co-founder and CTO of Nylas. Christine was the keynote at the recent Shift Developer Conference in Miami, and we caught up with her there. Nylas is a unified API for email, calendar, and contacts. We talked to Christine about why she started Nylas, and the challenges with building an API for email.

Email is this massive distributed system with a very diverse set of implementations, it's a super gnarly ecosystem going back decades. It's generally not something you want to spend a lot of time on if you don't have to. Christine was a lot of fun to have on the show.

Follow Christine: https://twitter.com/spang
Follow Sean: https://twitter.com/seanfalconer
Follow Alex: https://twitter.com/alexbdebrie

Nylas: https://www.nylas.com/

Software Huddle ⤵︎
X: https://twitter.com/SoftwareHuddle
Substack: https://softwarehuddle.substack.com