

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.
Episodes
Mentioned books

Dec 19, 2023 • 56min
AI for Developers with Rizel Scarlett, Leandro Margulis and Katherine Miller
On today's show, we have quite the lineup. We have Rizel Scarlett, Leandro Margulis and Katherine Miller all joining Sean to talk about AI for developers. This came together because the four of them had participated on a conference panel earlier this year discussing the topic.We discuss our impressions of AI for developers, what impact it may or may not have, privacy and security, ethics concerns, what the future might look like, and a whole lot more. Today’s guests have a diverse set of roles spanning product, marketing, and developer relations, so we think we were able to bring a lot of different perspectives to the topic.Timestamps:02:25 Introduction 05:45 Will AI's net impact be positive? 11:10 Customer support chatbots 17:18 Speed of Innovation 26:15 Safeguarding Sensitive Data 28:47 Creating your own Models 31:55 Using LLMs responsibly 41:27 Everything GPT45:08 Existential Risk51:17 Psychological SafetyLinks:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wh02qPQasfk

Dec 12, 2023 • 60min
Navigating Large Language Models with Vino Duraisamy from Snowflake
In this episode, we spoke with Vino Duraisamy, Developer advocate at Snowflake. Vino has been working as a data and AI engineer for her entire career across companies like Apple, Treeverse, and now Snowflake. And in this episode, we dive into her thoughts on what's happening in AI right now and what a practical LLM strategy for a company should look like.We discussed the hard, unsolved problems in the space like privacy, hallucinations, transparency, testing, and bias. There's a lot of problems. We're very much in the Wild West days of AI, and it still takes a ton of work to move beyond prototype to production with any AI application.There's lots of hype, but not necessarily that many enterprises actually launching products that take advantage of these generative AI systems yet. We thought Vino had a lot of real world perspective to share, and we think you're going to enjoy the conversation.Follow Vino: https://twitter.com/vinodhini_sdFollow Sean: https://twitter.com/seanfalconer

Dec 5, 2023 • 59min
AGI is Surely Coming with Former Snowflake CEO Bob Muglia
Today we have the former CEO of Snowflake, a 23 year veteran of Microsoft, Bob Muglia on the show. In this interview, we discuss Bob's book, Datapreneurs, which takes you on a journey about the people behind the first relational databases in the 1970s and early 80s, to Bob's experience launching Microsoft SQL Server and a ton of other products, developing the Data Cloud at Snowflake, and to the future of data and AI.We cover a lot of ground, including some of his experience working alongside the likes of Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer.Timestamps:02:24 Introduction 04:53 Relational Databases 18:43 Speed of Innovations24:30 Keeping the Early Stage Culture 31:04 Most successful leaders are difficult to deal with 34:31 Setting up Cloud Data Center at home 36:25 Joining Snowflake as the CEO 38:54 AWS made Snowflake happen42:18 Google, AWS Missing the Snowflake Opportunity 46:13 Impact On Jobs 50:48 Existential Risk 52:28 Staying Optimistic Links:The Datapreneurs: The Promise of AI and the Creators Building Our Futurehttps://www.thedatapreneurs.com/Follow Bob: https://twitter.com/Bob_MugliaFollow Sean: https://twitter.com/seanfalconerSoftware Huddle ⤵︎X: https://twitter.com/SoftwareHuddleLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/softwarehuddle/Substack: https://softwarehuddle.substack.com/

Nov 28, 2023 • 51min
reInvent BTS, Sam Altman, SEC on Solarwinds, Apple RCS, and more
Our special episode is back, and we have a special guest this time. Join Sean, Alex & Merritt in this fun conversation.Timestamps:00:00 Introduction 01:19 What is a CISO 08:10 Balance of Power 13:50 reInvent BTS 19:45 Sam Altman 32:29 SEC & SolarWinds 38:40 iPhones will support RCS 49:04 Meet us at reInvent Links:Factors to consider in relation to the SEC Materiality Frameworkhttps://www.lacework.com/resource/sec-materiality-framework.htmlOpenAI announces leadership transitionhttps://openai.com/blog/openai-announces-leadership-transitionAWS reInvent 2023https://reinvent.awsevents.com/Follow Merritt: https://twitter.com/MerrittBaerFollow Alex: https://twitter.com/alexbdebrieFollow Sean: https://twitter.com/seanfalconer

Nov 21, 2023 • 56min
From Code Red to Green: Incident Management with Nora Jones of Jeli and Dan McCall from PagerDuty
Today's episode is all about Incident Management. We have two amazing guests, Nora Jones, founder and CEO of Jeli, and Dan McCall, the VP and GM of Incident Management at PagerDuty. There's of course a technical aspect to managing incidents that PagerDuty excels at, very well known for, and there's also a human side, like how do you learn from an incident so it doesn't happen again in the future, and this is where Jeli steps in.In the episode, Nora and Dan talk through the evolution of incident management, the hard problems in the space, and a future that leverages AI with a human in the loop component to scalably and proactively manage incidents and reduce outages. We also touch on the recent announcement that Jeli was acquired by PagerDuty.

Nov 14, 2023 • 57min
AI-driven Database Cache with Ben Hagan from PolyScale
PolyScale is a database cache, specifically designed to cache just your database. It is completely Plug and Play and it allows you to scale a database without a huge amount of effort, cost, and complexity. PolyScale currently supports Postgres, MySQL, MariaDB, MS SQL and MongoDB.In this episode, we spoke with Ben Hagan, Founder & CEO at PolyScale. We discuss AI-driven caching, edge network advantages, use-cases, and PolyScale's future direction and growth.Follow Ben: https://twitter.com/ben_haganFollow Alex: https://twitter.com/alexbdebriePolyScaleWebsite: https://www.polyscale.ai/Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@polyscaleSoftware Huddle ⤵︎X: https://twitter.com/SoftwareHuddle

Nov 7, 2023 • 50min
Building for Scale with Mario Žagar from Infobip
Mario Žagar, Distinguished Engineer at Infobip, discusses the evolution of engineering at Infobit over the past 15 years and shares insights on architecting for scale. Topics include the early days of Infobip, progressive rollouts, scaling teams, open sourcing Kafka topic management, and engineering challenges in scalability and stability.

Oct 31, 2023 • 56min
Nile, Racked Hardware, Quantum Computing, Getting Customers Trust, & more
Our special episode is back, and it's all about the latest news. Join Sean and Alex for an in-depth discussion.Timestamps:00:00 Introduction 02:55 Tech Adoption in Japan 06:36 Infobip 09:34 Product Marketing at Rockset14:38 Trust from your initial customers and early adopters20:01 Nile - Serverless Postgres for modern SaaS29:29 AI Models Can Now Selectively Forget36:46 Oxide’s Racked Hardware45:03 Quantum ComputingFollow Alex: https://twitter.com/alexbdebrieFollow Sean: https://twitter.com/seanfalconer

Oct 24, 2023 • 1h 4min
Distributed Financial Databases with Joran Dirk Greef of TigerBeetle
In this episode we spoke with Joran Dirk Greef, who's the co-founder at TigerBeetle. TigerBeetle is a Financial Transactions Database that's focused on correctness and safety while hitting orders of magnitude more performance than other solutions in the space.We touch on various topics like what makes TigerBeetle orders of magnitude more performant, io_uring, the choice of Zig for TigerBeetle, protocol aware recovery, VOPR and so on.

Oct 17, 2023 • 45min
First Year as a Startup Founder and CEO with Nucleus's Evis Drenova
In this episode, we spoke with Evis Drenova, CEO and co-founder of Nucleus, a Y Combinator graduate from 2022 focused on making it easy to deploy, build, and manage on Kubernetes. Evis left Skyflow, where he was one of the product leads, to build Nucleus.In this conversation, we talked through his first year as CEO of a startup, how he got into Y Combinator, what that experience was like, and how he's been building the company since. This is a really interesting conversation for anyone who's ever thought about starting their own company.


