Episode · Developer Voices
What If Every SQL Query Could Update Incrementally? (with Lalith Suresh)
8 Jul 2026 · 1 hr 5 min
Episode · Developer Voices
8 Jul 2026 · 1 hr 5 min
There's a problem that's bugged the database industry since the 1980s: you run an expensive query over millions of rows, cache the result, and then a single new row arrives. Logically that's one small update, but most engines throw the cached answer away and recompute everything from scratch. Some will handle changes incrementally, but only for "simple" queries - and the rules for what counts as simple are arbitrary and brittle. So can you incrementally maintain *any* SQL query, no matter how complex? For decades the answer was no. Then an award-winning paper called DBSP proved that the…
by Kris Jenkins · English · Tech & Science
Deep-dive discussions with the smartest developers we know, explaining what they're working on, how they're trying to move the industry forward, and what we can learn from them. You might find the solution to your next architectural headache, pick up a new programming language, or just hear some…
25 Sep 2026 · 2 hr 22 min
How would you manage 30 million lines of PHP? You can't rewrite it - you'd be fired long before you delivered. That was the problem facing Facebook around 2011, and their answer was to add a type system, giving birth to the Hack language. But adding types to PHP turned out to be the easy part. The hard part was building a type checker that developers used to "edit, save, refresh" would actually tolerate. So how do you type-check tens of millions of lines of code fast enough that nobody notices? Julien Verlaguet co-designed Hack at Facebook, and has spent the fifteen years since chasing a…
26 Aug 2026 · 1 hr 46 min
Building something people actually want is supposed to be the happy ending. But it arrives with a bill attached: feature requests you didn't ask for, pull requests you'd rather not maintain forever, users demanding the one thing you swore you'd never build, and — if you're unlucky — a company where the sales team quietly starts deciding what engineering works on. DuckDB has spent the last two and a half years working through that list. So how do you stay a database engineering team when success keeps trying to turn you into something else? Hannes Mühleisen, co-creator of DuckDB, is back to…
12 Aug 2026 · 1 hr 2 min
My guest this week is James Brown, an engineering lead at Schroders, and that's a useful vantage point — asset managers carry all the regulation and organisational weight of a bank, mixed with the first-to-market pressure of a startup. James starts with his own "Claude mania": months of agents running around the clock, and the wave of anxiety that hit him one morning walking to the shop without one running at home. From there, Clair — the plugin he's building to give coding agents proximal awareness of each other, using git orphan branches as a zero-infrastructure message bus; why AI behaves…
26 Mar 2026 · 1 hr 40 min
AI is changing the way we all build software — that much seems clear. But the landscape is moving so fast that even the people paid to keep up are struggling. MCP or skills? Fine-tune or just prompt? LangChain or let a thousand agents loose? With almost 70 competing technologies and a shelf life of maybe six months on any advice, how do you figure out what's actually worth your time? Henry Garner is CTO of JUXT, a consultancy with about 150 senior engineers working at the coalface of AI-assisted development, including building AI platforms for tier-one banks. JUXT publishes a quarterly AI…
19 Feb 2026 · 1 hr 27 min
I have a theory that only bad projects get finished — good ones keep finding new things to do. Asciinema is a case in point. What started as a way to share terminal sessions with friends has, over 14 years, grown into a full suite of tools covering recording, hosting, playback, and live streaming — and been rebuilt multiple times along the way. So what does it actually take to record and replay a terminal session faithfully in a browser? Joining us for this conversation is Marcin Kulik, Asciinema's creator. The project's architecture has passed through almost every interesting corner of…
4 Feb 2026 · 1 hr 41 min
Eighteen months ago, Tyler Cloutier appeared on the show with what sounded like an ambitious (some might say crazy) plan: build a new distributed database from scratch, then use it to power a massively multiplayer online game. That's two of the hardest problems in software, tackled simultaneously. But sometimes the best infrastructure comes from solving your own impossible problems. The game, Bitcraft, has now launched on Steam. SpacetimeDB has hit version 1.0. And Tyler returns to share what actually happened when theory met production reality. We cover the launch day performance disasters…
11 Dec 2025 · 1 hr 51 min
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…
20 Nov 2025 · 1 hr 5 min
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…
31 Oct 2025 · 1 hr 11 min
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…
9 Oct 2025 · 1 hr 12 min
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…