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. 5D AGO

    Building a High-Ownership Engineering Culture with Matt Watson

    If you’ve ever felt like engineering teams are stuck in execution mode—heads down, building what they’re told—then today’s episode is for you. We're talking about what it really takes to build high ownership engineering cultures where devs aren't simply just shipping code, but they're helping shape the product. And our guest this week is Matt Watson. He's a long time founder, engineer, and now the CEO of Full Scale, a company that helps startups and scale ups, grow their engineering teams with top talent from the Philippines. Matt's also the author of a book called Product Driven that shows how engineers can build with more clarity, purpose, customer focus and we get into some of the details in that book during this podcast. So in this episode, we get into everything from the downsides of specialization to the importance of empathy, to why code shipped isn't the same as value delivered. We hope you enjoy it.

    52 min

  2. JUL 22

    Building CI for the age of AI Agents with Aayush Shah

    Today's episode is with Aayush Shah. Aayush is one of the co-founders of Blacksmith, which is a CI compute platform. Basically, Blacksmith will run your GitHub Actions jobs faster and with more visibility with the standard GitHub Actions CI runners. The founding team has a fun background doing systems work at Cockroach and Faire, and they're taking on a big problem in running this massive CI fleet. The explosion in AI agents has really changed the CI world. CI is more useful than ever, as you want to be sure the changes from your agents aren't breaking your existing functionality. At the same time, there's a huge increase in demand and spikiness of CI workloads as developers can fire off multiple agents to work in parallel, each needing to run the CI suite before merging. Aayush talked about how they're handling this load and facilitating visibility into test failures. We also covered cloud economics. Aayush said the traditional cloud-based storage options don't work for them -- EBS and locally attached SSDs are too expensive for their workloads where they don't need the standard durability guarantees. He walks us through building their own fleet outside the hyperscalers and the plans going forward, along with some of the economics of multi-tenancy that Blacksmith has previously written about.

    1h 4m

  3. JUL 16

    Valkey After the Fork: A Conversation with Madelyn Olson

    Today, we're talking Valkey, Redis, and all things caching. Our guest is Madelyn Olson, who is a principal engineer at AWS working on Elasticache and is one of the most well-known people in the caching community. She was a core maintainer of Redis prior to the fork and was one of the creators of Valkey, an open-source fork of Redis. In this episode, we talk about Madelyn's road to becoming a Redis maintainer and how she found out about the March 2024 license change. Then, Madelyn shares the story of Valkey being created, philosophical differences between the projects, and her reaction to re-relicensing of Redis in May 2025. Next, we dive into the performance improvements of recent Valkey releases, including the I/O threads improvements and the new hash table layout. Along the way, Madelyn dispels the notion that the single-threaded nature of Redis / Valkey is that big of a hindrance for most workloads. Finally, she compares some of the Valkey improvements to some of the other recent cache competitors in the space.

    1h 21m

  4. JUL 15

    Operational Excellence Is the Moat with Sam Lambert

    Today, Sam Lambert from Planetscale is back for a third time. Planetscale just announced Planetscale Postgres, so we had to get Sam back to tell us how and why they decided to add support for Postgres. It's always great to have Sam on -- he brings great stories about real customers and honest insight about the state of the database industry. In this episode, we talk about the road to Postgres and how operational excellence is the only true advantage in database providers. Sam walks us through the current Planetscale Postgres offering, along with details on Nova, a new sharded Postgres project that Planetscale is working on. Along the way, we get updates on Planetscale Metal, how demand has been for Planetscale Postgres, and future plans for Planetscale.

    1h 6m

  5. JUL 8

    Lessons from Transcribing and Indexing 3.5 Million Podcasts with Arvid Kahl

    Big time guest today as Arvid Kahl joins us. Arvid is my favorite type of guest -- a deeply technical founder that can talk about both the technical and business challenges of a startup. Lots to enjoy from this episode. Arvid is known as the Bootstrapped Founder and has documented his path to selling Feedback Panda back in 2019. He's now building Podscan and sharing his journey as he goes. Podscan is a fascinating project. It's making the content of *every* podcast episode around the world fully searchable. He currently has 3.5 million episodes transcribed and adds another 30,000 - 50,000 episodes every day. This involves a ton of technical challenges, including how to get the best transcription results from the latest LLMs, whether you should use APIs from public providers or run your own LLMs, and how to efficiently provide full-text search across terabytes of transcription data. Arvid shares the lessons he's learned and the various strategies he's tried over the years. But there are also unique business challenges. For most technical businesses, your infrastructure costs grow in line with your customers. More customers == more data == more servers. With Podscan, Arvid has to index the entire podcast ecosystem regardless of his customers. This means a lot of upfront investment as he looks to grow his customer base. Arvid tells us how he's optimized his infrastructure to account for this unique challenge.

    1h 18m

  6. 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

  7. 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

  8. 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
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Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
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
    74
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Show Website
    Software Huddle

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