Shows
Optimize All The ThingsTom Wilkie’s Path to CTO at Grafana Labs: Startups, Pivots, and PerseveranceTom Wilkie, the CTO of Grafana Labs, talks to us about his professional journey. We cover how he got into software engineering, his first startup, working as an EM at Google, and what motivated him to go back to an IC role. We talk about his time at Grafana from when they were only 25 people to now when Grafana Labs has more than a thousand employees. Tom’s journey cannot be told without diving deeper into the technical side of things - we discuss observability, distributed systems, and hard technical problems.Where to find more ab...
2024-09-271h 11Optimize All The ThingsDatabases, Drive, and Diversity - Lessons from Xata's CEO Monica SarbuMonica Sarbu, the CEO and founder of Xata.io, talks to us about her inspiring journey from getting into tech to building Xata - the serverless database platform for modern apps. We chat about the founding of her first company, Packetbeat, its acquisition by Elastic, and her time as a director there. We talk about mentoring, diversity, and hiring engineers that have high agency. We also cover some of the technical decisions at Xata - we even chat a bit about the Zig programming language :)Where to find more about Monica and Xata:...
2024-07-231h 02Optimize All The ThingsBuilding a Global Scale Authorization Startup: The Story of AuthZed's Co-Founder Jimmy ZelinskieIn this episode, we talk with Jimmy Zelinskie, co-founder and CPO of AuthZed, about his journey in building a global scale OSS authorization startup. Jimmy shares insights into the creation and evolution of SpiceDB, an open-source database optimized for authorization decisions. We chat about Jimmy’s story of transitioning from an engineer to a product manager, the importance of open-source in building the business, and the strategies that helped AuthZed find its first customers. Jimmy also discusses the inspiration behind AuthZed, Google’s Zanzibar paper, and the unique challenges of building a startup grounded in cutting-edge research.
2024-07-101h 04Optimize All The ThingsThe Open Source Data Movement Unicorn: Michel Tricot's Airbyte StoryIn this episode, we talk with Michel Tricot, co-founder and CEO of Airbyte, about his journey in building a successful open-source data movement platform, the challenges faced during the COVID-19 pandemic, and insights into startup culture and balancing work with family life. Michel shares his experiences from being a software engineer to leading a unicorn company, emphasizing the importance of community, open-source, and the strategic pivots that led to Airbyte's success.Where to find more about Michel and Airbyte:LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/micheltricot/X - https://x.com/micheltricotAirbyte...
2024-06-2551 minOptimize All The ThingsProfiling, AI, and Creating a Startup Culture: Insights from PolarSignals' Founder Frederic BranczykIn this episode, we sit down with Frederic Branczyk, founder of PolarSignals, to explore the intersection of advanced profiling techniques, AI-driven optimizations, and the nuances of building a successful startup culture. Frederic shares his journey from a technical contributor to a startup leader, offering insights into both the technological and business aspects of running a tech company.Where to find more about Frederic and Polar Signals:LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/frederic-branczyk/X - https://x.com/fredbranczMastodon - https://hachyderm.io/@branczPolar Signals - https://www.polarsignals.com/Parca - https...
2024-06-0356 minOptimize All The ThingsOptimizing SW Adoption & Maintenance: API Compatibility Guarantees with Björn RabensteinToday we have a very special guest, Björn Rabenstein, ultra experienced engineer, long time Prometheus maintainer. In this episode we touch on the topic of versioning and backward or forward compatibility of software APIs and interfaces. Learn how to make your code nice for others or use versioned components effectively for yourself. We discuss semver, and why you also seen many projects, escaping this model with lifetime version of v0. The main topic starts at 18m35s. References:No lens camera: https://futurism.com/the-byte/camera-no-lens-location-aiCrab: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36122270
2023-06-271h 22Optimize All The ThingsOptimizing Productivity with Mindfulness, Self-Compassion & MotivationIn this episode we discuss an important topic of productivity in our live and work. We explore often forgotten topic of motivation for our work, self-compassion, energy balance to tackle tedious tasks and healthy habits for software development, meetings and more! We also touch on the topic of social media use. References:Amazon Prime moving out of AWS Lambda: https://www.primevideotech.com/video-streaming/scaling-up-the-prime-video-audio-video-monitoring-service-and-reducing-costs-by-90Leaked memo, AI alone is not a moat: https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-neitherEpic, inspiring episode about embracing death (Limitless): https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11714334/
2023-06-081h 20Optimize All The ThingsOptimizing Freedom as a Digital Nomad with Becky PauleyWorking from a tent, prioritizing your electricity between your monitor or cooking dinner, canal boat life, and more. These are some of the things we talked about with Becky Pauley at KubeCon Europe 2023. This episode covers all the great things about the digital nomad lifestyle, but also dives into some of the challenges. Join us for the interesting story and stay for the helpful tips. As always, before the main part we cover some of the news that got our attention in the previous weeks.References:Our amazing guest, Becky Pauley: https://twitter.com/BeckyPauley...
2023-05-0956 minOptimize All The ThingsOptimizing Cloud Native by Interviewing KubeCon EU Attendees: Efficiency, AI adoption, WASM, eBPF In this episode we do a little retrospective on the last week KubeCon EU 2023 in Amsterdam. We also share and discuss amazing answers from a few quick interviews Bartek performed with epic KubeCon attendees. You won't believe what we learned! Big THANKS to all interviewees for amazing answers: Christina, Harsh, Michael, Jimmy and Raphaël!References:KubeCon EU: https://events.linuxfoundation.org/kubecon-cloudnativecon-europe/Observability Day: https://events.linuxfoundation.org/kubecon-cloudnativecon-europe/co-located-events/observability-day/ You Tube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLj6h78yzYM2ORxwcjTn4RLAOQOYjvQ2A3Efficient Go book: https://bwplotka.d...
2023-04-2852 minOptimize All The ThingsOptimizing SRE Productivity with AI feat. Alex Jones, founder of k8sgptAI is already changing how different industries operate with tools like ChatGPT and Github Copilot. Today we talk about a new tool, k8sgpt, that gives you SRE superpowers using AI. We are joined by its creator, Alex Jones - Director of Kubernetes Engineering at Canonical. We talk about how tools that utilize AI are built, how they change our day to day work, and what the future might hold for AI in the workplace. And as always we cover the news of the week before we dive into the interview.References:Alex Jones...
2023-04-171h 10Optimize All The ThingsOptimizing DevOps and Organizational Structure: Solving The Phoenix ProjectIn this episode Ivan asks Bartek to solve the problems presented in the book "The Phoenix Project". We talk about DevOps, organizational structures, the mythical 10x engineer, the value of mentors, and why Kubernetes does not just magically solve all of the above. No prior reading of "The Phoenix Project" required - we also try to keep spoilers to the minimum. As always, we also cover some of the news that got our attention this week. Show notes:The Phoenix Project: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/17255186Twitter Open Sources their algorithm: https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm & https://www...
2023-04-111h 06Optimize All The ThingsOptimizing Prometheus Efficiency with Bryan BorehamHave you ever wondered how people find performance bottlenecks and improve them in complex systems? What tools and techniques work in real life applications? When should you stop optimizing? Well, this is the episode for you. Our first ever guest, Bryan Boreham from Grafana Labs, sits down with us and walks us over his experience of optimizing the popular open-source project Prometheus. Before the super insightful discussion on this topic, we cover the tech news from the week that got our attention. Show notes:Bryan Boreham - follow at @bborehamPrometheus - https://github.com...
2023-04-021h 18Optimize All The ThingsOptimizing Cognitive Load with Middlewares and Tripperwaresepisode{pod="oat"} 0 # Welcome to our first, number 0 (ofc, arrays always start from zero), episode! The first episode is about something very hands-down and actionable in the software--the middleware coding pattern! What is it? Is it under-hyped? What are the alternatives? Before the main topic, Ivan & Bartek discuss (20m) some exciting tech news from the last week. Want to ask a question or give feedback? Use this form: https://forms.gle/NmUGeqMtyP6H6mMP9
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