Software Huddle

Software Huddle
Software Huddle

Join Alex DeBrie and Sean Falconer in insightful and in-depth interviews with tech experts, covering software development, entrepreneurship, and technology trends. Alex is the author of The DynamoDB Book and a DynamoDB expert as well as AWS Data Hero. Sean Falconer has over 20 years of experience working in research and technology as an engineer, founder, and marketing executive. Sean is a Snowflake Data Superhero. For more on Software Huddle, visit softwarehuddle.com or contact team@softwarehuddle.com.

  1. MAY 13

    It's time to build Jarvis with Kent C. Dodds

    Today we have the excellent Kent C. Dodds on the program. Kent is an amazing teacher in the web development space, and I've learned a ton from him about React, JavaScript testing, and general web dev. Lately, Kent has been going all-in on AI, especially with the model context protocol (MCP) space. He's sharing a ton of useful material in this area as he works on a new course. We spent a lot of time going over what MCP is, why it's useful, and why Kent thinks our own personal Jarvis is the next step. We cover a bunch of other topics too, like what it's like putting on a conference (Epic Web Conf) plus how AI has changed the educational space. Check it out! *Timestamps* 01:12 Start 06:52 The pitch for MCP 14:30 Where does MCP architecturally sit? 17:27 Contrasting with REST 23:07 Should I be building these now? 23:47 Are there any frameworks? 26:31 Why Cloudflare 34:10 MCP Spec 35:35 Authentication 38:29 A2A by Google 41:50 What caught Kent's attention? 44:28 What got Kent interested in React? 46:16 Jarvis 47:44 Frontend Development in the long run 51:44 What needs to get better for this to happen? 57:42 How has AI impacted education landscape? 01:04:46 Like the travel? 01:12:35 App Stack 01:13:48 React Server Components Follow Kent: https://twitter.com/kentcdodds Follow Alex: https://twitter.com/alexbdebrie Follow Sean: https://twitter.com/seanfalconer *Software Huddle ⤵︎* X: https://twitter.com/SoftwareHuddle

    1h 21m

  2. MAY 6

    Rewriting in Rust + Being a Learning Machine with AJ Stuyvenberg

    Today's guest is AJ Stuyvenberg, a Staff Engineer at Datadog working on their Serverless observability project. He had a great article recently about how they rewrote their AWS Lambda extension in Rust. It's a really interesting look at a big, hard project, from thinking about when it's a good idea to do a rewrite to talking about their focus on performance and reliability above all else and what he thinks about the Rust ecosystem. Beyond that, AJ is just a learning machine, so I got his thoughts on all kinds of software development topics, from underrated AWS services and our favorite databases to the AWS Free Tier and the annoyances of a new AWS account. Finally, AJ dishes out some career advice for curious, ambitious developers.

    1h 22m

  3. APR 29

    Software Reliability Agents with Amal Kiran

    So if you're writing code or keeping systems running, you probably know the drill. Late night pages, chasing down weird bugs, dealing with alert storms. It's tough! It costs money when things break, and honestly, nobody loves that experience. So the big question is, can we actually use something like AI, AI agents in particular, to make reliability less painful, more systematic? That's what we're talking about today. We have on the show with us Amal Kiran, the CEO and Co-founder of Temperstack. They're building tools aimed at automating SRE tasks, think, automatically finding monitoring gaps, alerts, helping with root cause analysis, even generating Runbooks using AI.  So if you wanna hear about applying AI to real world SRE problems and all the tech behind it, we think you're gonna enjoy this.

    51 min

  4. APR 22

    From ORM to Infra: Prisma Postgres with Søren Bramer Schmidt

    Today we have Søren from Prisma on the show. Prisma has been the most popular ORM in the TypeScript world for a while, and now they’re moving more into hosted infrastructure. We spend a lot of time talking about their new offering called Prisma Postgres, which is this unikernel-based Postgres offering. It’s a really unique offering from both a technical and a product perspective. On the technical side, they’re doing some interesting work compared to other Postgres providers. They’re running on bare metal in a colocation facility rather than the default public clouds like AWS, GCP, and Azure. Further, they’re using unikernels in a Firecracker VM, giving them unique startup and security characteristics. These technical decisions give them unique economics compared to standard providers, so they’re able to have a generous free tier and a unique billing model that works great for serverless applications with spiky workloads. Around all of this, it’s very interesting to see a company with such a unique spread of products — a popular, mature open-source library paired with a mission-critical infrastructure service offering. We talked about the difficulties in building a company that accommodates these two very different products. Timestamps 01:51 Start 06:08 Prisma Postgres 09:10 Accelerate 11:39 Why Postgres 17:32 How Prisma Postgres Works 21:32 Colocation Facility 22:05 Unikernels 27:56 CoLo vs Public Cloud 29:11 Building the team 31:46 Missing Features that are being worked on 32:31 Use Cases 33:37 Colo Locations 34:53 Cloudflare 35:42 Biggest surprises since release 37:34 More Unikernel adoption? 39:08 Supporting Prisma ORM 46:43 Mongo 47:51 Life as A CEO 53:04 MCP 57:23 Søren Questions Alex Software Huddle ⤵︎ X: https://twitter.com/SoftwareHuddle Substack: https://softwarehuddle.substack.com

    1h 2m

  5. APR 8

    Fast Inference with Hassan El Mghari

    Today we have Hassan back on the show. Hassan was one of our first guests for Huddle when he was working at Vercel, but since then, he's joined Together AI, one of the hottest companies in the world. They just raised a massive series B round. Hassan joins us to talk about Together AI, inference optimization and building AI applications. We touch on a bunch of topics like customer uses of AI, best practices for building apps, and what's next for Together AI. Timestamps 01:42 Opportunity at Together AI 04:26 Together raised a big round 06:06 Vision Behind Together AI 08:32 Problems in running Open Source Models 11:40 Speed For Inference 14:24 Fine Tuning 19:23 One or Two Models or a Combination of them 21:32 Serverless 22:21 Cold Start issues? 27:46 How much data do you need? 30:00 Balancing Reliability and Cost 34:07 How customers are using Together 42:36 Agent Recipes 47:03 Typical Mistakes buiilding AI apps

    53 min

  6. MAR 13

    Seattle Startups, AI’s Future & Big Acquisitions with Yujian Tang

    Today on the show, we talked with Yujian Tang. He was on the show previously when he worked at Zilliz, when we talked about vector databases and RAG. He's since branched out on his own, building the tech startup scene in Seattle and organizing AI events all over the place. We talk about his latest venture, the Seattle Startup Summit, coming up on March 28th. They're still Early Bird Tickets available if you're interested. We also talk about AI models, the impact AI is having on programming, including our own programming projects and share our takes on some of the recent acquisitions that have happened in tech, including Voyage AI.

    1h 3m

  7. MAR 11

    Faster & Cheaper on PlanetScale Metal with Sam Lambert

    Today, we have Sam Lambert back on the show! Sam is the CEO of PlanetScale, and if you follow him on X, you know he’s one of the sharpest voices in the database space—cutting through the hype with deep experience and a no-nonsense approach. In this episode, we dive into PlanetScale’s new Metal offering, which has been battle-tested with PlanetScale’s high-scale cloud business partners and is now GA. Sam also shares why staying profitable is crucial—not just for the business but for the stability and reliability it guarantees for customers. While many cloud infrastructure companies chase the next hype cycle, Sam prefers to keep it boring—delivering rock-solid performance with no surprises Finally, we close with Sam's thoughts on other happenings in the database space -- Aurora DSQL, Aurora Limitless, MySQL benchmarks, and multi-region strong consistency. Tune in for a deep dive into databases, cloud infrastructure, and what it takes to build a sustainable, high-performance tech company. Timestamps 01:34 Start 06:42 PlanetScale Metal 11:15 The problem with separation of storage and compute 15:02 EBS Tax 17:32 How does Vitess handle durability 22:58 Metal recommended for all PlanetScale users? 27:20 The hidden expense of IOPS for cloud databases 37:41 Timeline of creating PlanetScale Metal 41:32 Focus on profitability 47:52 Removal of hobby plan 57:45 Deprecation of PlanetScale Boost 01:00:24 DSQL 01:01:51 Aurora Limitless 01:04:15 AWS as a partner 01:07:00 The spectacle of AWS re:Invent 01:12:22 Benchmarks and benchmarketing 01:15:51 AWS Databases + multi-region strong consistency

    1h 20m

  8. MAR 4

    Redis but Faster With Roman Gershman

    Redis is consistently one of the most beloved pieces of infrastructure for developers. And in the last few years, we've seen a number of new Redis-compatible projects that aim to improve on the core of Redis in some way. One of those projects is DragonflyDB, a multi-threaded version of Redis that allows for significantly higher throughput on a single instance. Roman Gershman is the co-founder and CTO at Dragonfly, and he has a fascinating background. Roman initially worked at Google and then was a frustrated user of Redis while working as an engineer at a fast-growing startup. He did a stint on the ElastiCache team at AWS but struck off on his own to make a new, faster version of Redis. In this episode, we talk through the improvements that Dragonfly makes to Redis and why it matters to high-scale users. We go through the different needs and requirements of high-scale cache applications and what Roman learned at AWS. We also go through the Redis licensing drama and how to attract developer attention in 2025.

    1h 1m
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Ratings & Reviews

5
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4 Ratings

About

Join Alex DeBrie and Sean Falconer in insightful and in-depth interviews with tech experts, covering software development, entrepreneurship, and technology trends. Alex is the author of The DynamoDB Book and a DynamoDB expert as well as AWS Data Hero. Sean Falconer has over 20 years of experience working in research and technology as an engineer, founder, and marketing executive. Sean is a Snowflake Data Superhero. For more on Software Huddle, visit softwarehuddle.com or contact team@softwarehuddle.com.

Information

  • Creator
    Software Huddle
  • Years Active
    2023 - 2025
  • Episodes
    69
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Show Website
    Software Huddle

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