From Unit Tests to Whole Universe Tests (with Will Wilson)

More from Developer Voices All episodes →

1. 

   11 Dec 2025 · 1 hr 51 min

   Will Turso Be The Better SQLite? (with Glauber Costa)

   SQLite is embedded everywhere - phones, browsers, IoT devices. It's reliable, battle-tested, and feature-rich. But what if you want concurrent writes? Or CDC for streaming changes? Or vector indexes for AI workloads? The SQLite codebase isn't accepting new contributors, and the test suite that makes it so reliable is proprietary. So how do you evolve an embedded database that's effectively frozen? Glauber Costa spent a decade contributing to the Linux kernel at Red Hat, then helped build Scylla, a high-performance rewrite of Cassandra. Now he's applying those lessons to SQLite. After…

2. 

   20 Nov 2025 · 1 hr 5 min

   Can Google's ADK Replace LangChain and MCP? (with Christina Lin)

   How do you build systems with AI? Not code-generating assistants, but production systems that use LLMs as part of their processing pipeline. When should you chain multiple agent calls together versus just making one LLM request? And how do you debug, test, and deploy these things? The industry is clearly in exploration mode—we're seeing good ideas implemented badly and expensive mistakes made at scale. But Google needs to get this right more than most companies, because AI is both their biggest opportunity and an existential threat to their search-based business model. Christina Lin from…

3. 

   31 Oct 2025 · 1 hr 11 min

   Building Observable Systems with eBPF and Linux (with Mohammed Aboullaite)

   How do you monitor distributed systems that span dozens of microservices, multiple languages, and different databases? The old approach of gathering logs from different machines and recompiling apps with profiling flags doesn't scale when you're running thousands of servers. You need a unified strategy that works everywhere, on every component, in every language—and that means tackling the problem from the kernel level up. Mohammed Aboullaite is a backend engineer at Spotify, and he joins us to explore the latest in continuous profiling and observability using eBPF. We dive into how eBPF…

4. 

   9 Oct 2025 · 1 hr 12 min

   Solving Git's Pain Points with Jujutsu (with Martin von Zweigbergk)

   Git might be the most ubiquitous tool in software development, but that doesn't mean it's perfect. What if we could keep Git compatibility while fixing its most frustrating aspects—painful merges, scary rebases, being stuck in conflict states, and the confusing staging area? This week we're joined by Martin von Zweigbergk, creator of Jujutsu (JJ), a Git-compatible version control system that takes a fundamentally different approach. Starting from a simple idea—automatically snapshotting your working copy—Martin has built a tool that reimagines how we interact with version control. We explore…

5. 

   24 Sep 2025 · 1 hr 5 min

   Getting New Technology Adopted (with Dov Katz)

   Getting new technology adopted in a large organization can feel like pushing water uphill. The best tools in the world are useless if we're not allowed to use them, and as companies grow, their habits turn into inertia, then into "the way we've always done things." So how do you break through that resistance and get meaningful change to happen? This week's guest is Dov Katz from Morgan Stanley, who specializes in exactly this challenge - driving developer productivity and getting new practices adopted across thousands of developers. We explore the art of organizational change from every…

6. 

   22 Aug 2025 · 1 hr 25 min

   Building Render: Inside a Modern Cloud Platform (with Anurag Goel)

   How would you build a Heroku-like platform from scratch? This week we're diving deep into the world of cloud platforms and infrastructure with Anurag Goel, founder and CEO of Render. Starting from the seemingly simple task of hosting a web service, we quickly discover why building a production-ready platform is far more complex than it appears. Why is hosting a Postgres database so challenging? How do you handle millions of users asking for thousands of different features? And what's the secret to building infrastructure that developers actually want to use? We explore the technical…

7. 

   30 Jul 2025 · 1 hr 49 min

   InfluxDB: The Evolution of a Time Series Database (with Paul Dix)

   How hard is it to write a good database engine? Hard enough that sometimes it takes several versions to get it just right. Paul Dix joins us this week to talk about his journey building InfluxDB, and he's refreshingly frank about what went right, and what went wrong. Sometimes the real database is the knowledge you pick up along the way.... Paul walks us through InfluxDB's evolution from error logging system to time-series datasbase, and from Go to Rust, with unflinching honesty about the major lessons they learnt along the way. We cover technical details like Time-Structure Merge Trees, to…

8. 

   17 Jul 2025 · 1 hr 18 min

   Beyond AI Hype, What Will Developers Actually Use? (with Zach Lloyd)

   If AI coding tools are here to stay, what form will they take? How will we use them? Will they be just another window in our IDE, will they push their way to the centre of our development experience, displacing the editor? No one knows, but Zach Lloyd is making a very interesting bet with the latest version of Warp. In this deep dive, Zach walks us through the technical architecture behind agentic development, and how it's completely changed what he & his team have been building. Warp has gone from a terminal built from scratch, to what they're calling an "agentic development environment" -…

9. 

   4 Jul 2025 · 1 hr 32 min

   The $500 Billion Integration Problem, And One Possible Solution (with Marty Pitt)

   Ever wondered why data integration is still such a nightmare in 2025? Marty Pitt has built something that might finally solve it. TaxiQL isn't just another query language - it's a semantic layer that lets you query across any system without caring about field names, API differences, or where the data actually lives. Instead of writing endless mapping code between your microservices, databases, and APIs, you describe what your data *means* and let TaxiQL figure out how to get it. In this conversation, Marty walks through the "All Powerful Spreadsheet" moment that sparked TaxiQL, how semantic…

10. 

    19 Jun 2025 · 57 min

    Making Software Crash Before It Breaks (with Isaac Van Doren)

    At 23, Isaac is already jaded about software reliability - and frankly, he's got good reason to be. When your grandmother can't access her medical records because a username change broke the entire system, when bugs routinely make people's lives harder, you start to wonder: why do we just accept that software is broken most of the time? Isaac's answer isn't just better testing - it's a whole toolkit of techniques working together. He's advocating for scattering "little bombs" throughout your code via runtime assertions, adding in the right amount of static typing, building feedback loops…