Contributor

Latest Episodes:

Cosmonic and WebAssembly with Liam Randall and Bailey Hayes Mar 08, 2023

Show notes

Eric Anderson (@ericmander) has a conversation with Liam Randall (@Hectaman) and Bailey Hayes (@baihay) of Cosmonic, the platform-as-a-service environment for building cloud-native applications using WebAssembly. Bailey is also on the steering committee for the Bytecode Alliance, which stewards WebAssembly. In 2021, Cosmonic donated their WebAssembly runtime, wasmCloud, to the CNCF as an open-source project. Today, Liam and Bailey trace the history of WebAssembly, and their personal paths alongside it.

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In this episode we discuss:

How WebAssembly came together over the last decade to become the fourth standardized language of the web
The moments when Bailey and Liam both realized they might be changing the future of computing
Modding Microsoft Flight Simulator with Wasm modules
Liam’s thoughts on how WebAssembly will affect business models going forward

Links:

People mentioned:

Kevin Hoffman (@KevinHoffman)
Kelsey Hightower (@kelseyhightower)
Guy Bedford (@guybedford)
Peter Huene (@peterhuene)
Chris Aniszczyk (@cra)

Other episodes:

Haystack and Intelligent Search with Milos Rusic Feb 22, 2023

Show notes

Eric Anderson (@ericmander) is joined by Milos Rusic (@rusic_milos) to discuss Haystack, the open-source NLP framework for leveraging Transformer models and building intelligent search systems. Milos and his colleagues at deepset were early contributors to Hugging Face’s Transformer models, and began building pipelines for searching large document stores. Today, Haystack is wildly popular, with an active Discord community and over 6,000 GitHub stars.

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In this episode we discuss:

A deep dive into how Haystack works and its many use cases
How a customer demo with one-minute long queries helped inspire Haystack
Marketing open-source projects vs word of mouth
NLP applications working with structured data and translating between types of data
Imagining a world where every person has their own personal ChatGPT

Links:

Other episodes:

Milvus with Frank Liu

Cube and the Semantic Layer with Artyom Keydunov Feb 08, 2023

Show notes

Eric Anderson (@ericmander) talks with Artyom Keydunov (@keydunov) about Cube, the semantic layer for building data applications. Cube helps engineers bridge data warehouses and data experiences, and provides access control, security, caching, and more helpful features. The project began in open-source and has evolved quite a lot over the last few years with a ton of community support.

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In this episode we discuss:

What is a semantic layer?
Coming up with the idea to open-source during a game of ping pong
Setting a ten-company-deployment goal
Using Cube to track COVID stats in lockdown
How one contributor built a GraphQL API

Links:

People mentioned:

Pavel Tiunov (@paveltiunov87)

Remembering Jeff Meyerson with Erika Hokanson Jan 25, 2023

Show notes

Eric Anderson (@ericmander) and Erika Hokanson (@erikawh0) remember the life of Jeff Meyerson, creator of the influential podcast Software Engineering Daily. He passed during the summer of 2022. Still, his work lives on - thousands of episodes, talks, music, a book, and a community of dedicated listeners and engineers whose lives were touched by Jeff’s dreams.

Software Engineering Daily is still running, and you can listen to new episodes right here or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Links:

People mentioned:

Pranay Mohan (@pranaymohan)

Testcontainers and Confidence with Sergei Egorov and Eli Aleyner Jan 11, 2023

Show notes

We’re kicking off the new year with a conversation between Eric Anderson (@ericmander), Sergei Egorov (@bsideup) and Eli Aleyner (@ealeyner). Sergei and Eli founded AtomicJar to maintain Testcontainers, the family of open-source libraries that allow developers to write and run integration tests locally, and treat them as unit tests. Testcontainers is wildly popular, with over six thousand GitHub stars (and climbing!). Tune in to find out how Sergei and Eli are helping people test their software quicker, easier, and more efficiently.

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In this episode we discuss:

How Testcontainers solves the problem of confidence
The value of Github’s networking effect
Inspiration from Amazon’s S3 “test bunny”
Consequences of Docker’s over- and under-adoption
Replicating success in other languages besides Java

Links:

People mentioned:

Richard North (@whichrich)
Kevin Wittek (@Kiview)
Martin Fowler (@martinfowler)

Mito and Smarter Spreadsheets with Nate Rush and Aaron Diamond-Reivich Nov 09, 2022

Show notes

Eric Anderson (@ericmander) is joined by Nate Rush (@naterush1997) and Aaron Diamond-Reivich (@_aaronDR) to talk about Mito, the open-source spreadsheet that generates Python code for data analysts. Mito is a Python library and acts as an extension to a Jupyter Notebook. Tune in to find out how the Mito team is bridging the gap in data science between spreadsheets and programming.

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In this episode we discuss:

How Nate, Aaron and Aaron’s fraternal twin brother Jake have been friends since middle school
Programming tools for spreadsheet users vs spreadsheet tools for people who are trying to become programmers
Advantages to integrating into other open-source projects
Reflecting on the hype around Python data science
Python needs for Mito’s enterprise customers

Links:

People mentioned:

Jacob Diamond-Reivich (@Jake_Stack808)

Featureform and the Future of MLOps with Simba Khadder Oct 19, 2022

Show notes

Eric Anderson (@ericmander) and Simba Khadder (@simba_khadder) explore Featureform, the “virtual” feature store platform that aims to standardize data pipelines for machine learning. Contributor is no stranger to feature stores, but Simba has a broader definition than most. Join us to learn how Featureform enables data scientists and machine learning practitioners to solve a common, but rarely addressed organizational problem.

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In this episode we discuss:

How there is no standard or north star for MLOps
Why enterprise is where Featureform’s value shines
MLPlatform problems vs MLOps problems
Why copy/paste and Git don’t cut it
Deploying MLOps solutions that make data scientists and everyone else happy

Links:

Other episodes:

Tensorflow with Rajat Monga

Directus with Ben Haynes Sep 14, 2022

Show notes

Eric Anderson (@ericmander) hosts Ben Haynes (@benhaynes), CEO and co-founder of Directus. Directus is an open-source data platform that layers on SQL databases to provide an instant API, and includes a no-code data studio interface. Listen in to find out how Directus is aiming to democratize the modern data stack for everyone.

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In this episode we discuss:

The inspiration to create an “admin interface on steroids”
Reflecting on Directus’ unusual linear growth trend
How Directus powers digital experiences, applications, and internal dev tools
Ben’s thoughts on maintaining a sustainable, premium open-source experience
Automated data processing with Directus Flows

Links:

Other episodes:

Chef with Adam Jacob

Prowler with Toni de la Fuente Aug 31, 2022

Show notes

Eric Anderson (@ericmander) chats with Toni de la Fuente (@ToniBlyx) about how he created Prowler, an open source security tool for AWS. Toni talks about taking Prowler from a nights-and-weekends project to his current full-time job, managing a team of four. They discuss transitioning from primarily coding to primarily managing tickets and users, as well as being “client zero” and bringing the project to big companies.

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In this episode we discuss:

The roadmap from open source Prowler to Prowler Pro
Prowler’s diverse set of users
What Toni learned from quitting an earlier open source project
The differences between Prowler and other security services for AWS

Links:

People mentioned:

tea with Max Howell Aug 17, 2022

Show notes

Eric Anderson (@ericmander) meets legendary open-source developer Max Howell (@mxcl) to talk about tea, a decentralized protocol for remunerating the open-source ecosystem. Max is the creator of Homebrew, and he chats about his exit from the project. The conversation turns to his newest project, tea, which is an evolution of Brew, and takes inspiration from blockchain technology. They also discuss Max’s famous interview at Google and his time working for Apple.

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In this episode we discuss:

Max’s experience creating Homebrew, one of the largest open-source projects ever
The utility of Web3 beyond decentralized finance
Writing a white paper for tea, “just like everyone else”
Why Max wants a global team, with people in every time zone
How tea ensures a sustainable future for open-source

Links:

People mentioned:

Timothy Lewis

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