Alexa's Input (AI)

Brent Lassi and special guest Mike Hurwitz join me again for part II on security. Brent Lassi co-founded one of the first AppSec companies called Apex, and he now works as the CISO at Bluecore. Mike Hurwitz is a Principal Engineer at Bluecore and has previously worked at Tumblr and Shutterstock. In this episode we talk more about the evolution of security in the last few years-- both about the advantages of the cloud and the lessons learned. We discuss what enterprise viability means for both software engineers and security professionals, and how people play a big part. We talk about some recent events, like the SolarWinds hack, and what we can learn from them.  Click here to read a little bit about what I learned from this episode. The intro music was made by my talented friend Brendan McMahon. Check out his soundcloud.

Brent Lassi and special guest Mike Hurwitz join me on this episode to talk about security. Brent Lassi co-founded one of the first AppSec companies called Apex, and he now works as the CISO at Bluecore. Brent explains his day-to-day and his journey in his field. He also teaches me about infosec, differences in privacy and security, and what security engineers must do to ensure that software is safe. We discuss handling attacks and threats and the immense impact that the advent of cloud computing has had on application security. And much more! Brent is a great storyteller with a sense of humor, so I promise you won't be bored listening to this one.. and you may actually learn a few things like I did.  The intro music was made by my talented friend Brendan McMahon. Check out his soundcloud. 

Jason Reid, Director of Data Science and Engineering at Netflix, joins me on this episode to discuss Netflix's culture. We discuss the topics in the book No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention and his personal experiences at Netflix. We have a great talk about the Keeper Test, career growth, titles, paying top of personal market, mentorship, diversity, and much more! The opinions in this podcast are Jason's own and do not express the opinions of Netflix.

Bahar Shah joins me in this episode to talk about the very beginning stages of a startup. She graduated from MIT, worked at Microsoft as a software engineer, then went to Bluecore where she became a director of engineering, and now she is in the very early stages of a startup she co-founded called Tell. We discuss how Tell began, creating culture, setting values early on, funding, and much more!  Link to the beta version of the Tell app: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/tell/id1465678780

David Dyar joined IBM in their heyday and moved on to help other startups grow as a Senior Vice President (currently at DailyPay). In this episode, he shares his experiences along the way and the lessons he has learned from them. David discusses his various roles, diversity in the workplace, what kinds of people he looks for within organizations, challenges coming into companies, maintaining workplace culture through growth, being an intermediary between engineering and the business, and much more! 

On this episode we talk with Evan Jones (www.evanjones.ca or Twitter: @epcjones), who works at Datadog and previously worked at Bluecore, Twitter, Mitro (his own startup), Infix, Google, and received a PhD from MIT. We discuss server reliability, learning from a cloud provider outage, the difficulties of scaling systems, how to address failures due to overloading your systems, and much more! 

Kelsey Hightower (Twitter: @kelseyhightower), Principal Engineer at Google Cloud and a well-known open-source contributor, joins me on this episode to discuss a variety of topics concerning cloud development, tools, and experiences. Kelsey shares some of his personal experiences about learning and growth, and we discuss some challenges we face today like identity and observability, and how to navigate through all the new technologies and ideas coming out of the serverless community.  

In the second part of the database discussion with Mike Hurwitz (Twitter: @dngrmike), we discuss distributed databases. Mike talks about what guarantees one can make about distributed data stores. Like, what guarantees can you make with updates? and what happens when a 6-year-old runs into a datacenter with a squirt gun and sets your machine into a pile of sparks and flames? do we really get a choice between availability and consistency? We also discuss consensus, latencies, and how access patterns rule everything. A fun conversation including laughter. 

Michael Hurwitz (Twitter: @dngrmike) is a Principal Software Engineer on Bluecore's Data Science Infrastructure team and is an expert when it comes to databases. He previously worked at Blink Health, Shutterstock, and Tumblr. In this entertaining episode, Mike covers the basics of different types of databases. We discuss B+ trees, the differences in columnar- and row-stores, caching, indexes, and much, much more!  

John Hymel is a Ph.D. student at Georgia Tech. In this episode, he answers the question "what is computational chemistry?" and dives into basic concepts and applications. We also discuss the types of projects and workflows John uses. John is passionate about what he does, and it is always fun to talk to him.