Kelsey Hightower - On retiring as Distinguished Engineer from Google at 42 (Part 2)

More from Software Misadventures All episodes →

1. 

   12 Dec 2023 · 1 hr 2 min

   Automating away your job as a Data Scientist | Melissa Runfeldt (Salesforce, CueIn)

   Before joining CueIn last year as a Founding Data Scientist, Melissa was a Lead Data Scientist at Salesforce working on the Einstein Platform that focused on automating Data Science workflows. In this conversation we dive into Melissa's unique journey, what to do in the face of increasing job automation and explore the latest developments in practical AI. Segments: [00:02:13] Melissa's background in computational neuroscience [00:06:08] 7 years at Salesforce vs startup [00:11:31] Joining CueIn [00:19:30] Chatbot observability [00:28:16] Feedback loops [00:33:10] Use LLM to observe.. LLMs?…

2. 

   E26 · 28 Nov 2023 · 1 hr 1 min

   Open sourcing LinkedIn's Derived Data Platform | Felix GV (LinkedIn)

   What's it like to open source an internal project at a big tech company like LinkedIn? When should a company open source a project and what are the benefits and challenges that come along with it? If you want to open source an internal project, how should you go about advocating for it? Félix is a Principal Staff Engineer at LinkedIn where he works on the data infrastructure team that builds Venice. Venice is a distributed derived data store which LinkedIn open sourced in the fall of 2022. He joins the show to chat about his experiences leading the open source efforts for Venice , as well as…

3. 

   7 Nov 2023 · 1 hr 18 min

   When enough was enough - practical and emotional drivers for leaving big tech to bootstrap Metacast | Arnab Deka & Ilya Bezdelev (AWS, Google)

   Should engineers and product managers "stay in their lanes"? What big company habits should you keep vs unlearn when transitioning to working at a start-up? Could an ayahuasca retreat give you more clarity on your career goals? Ilya and Arnab join the show to share their journey quitting big tech to bootstrap a podcasting startup. Arnab and Ilya are the co-founders of Metacast. Before starting the company, Arnab was a Principal Engineer at AWS while Ilya was a Sr. Product Manager at Google and Principal PM at Amazon before that. While at Amazon, Arnab and Ilya worked together on various…

4. 

   23 Oct 2023 · 43 min

   Pete Warden - On launching "AI in a Box" and building a hardware edge AI company - #24

   What's "AI in a Box"? Pete Warden joins the show to share a new project he recently launched that encapulates Language Transcription/Translation and Question Answering capabilities into a wallet-sized board running locally without internet, as well as stories and learnings from building his new company, Useful Sensors, after 7 years of leading the tensorflow mobile project at Google. Pete is the CEO of Useful Sensors. After founding his own company Jetpac and selling it to Google in 2014, he became a staff research engineer at Google, where he led the TensorFlow Mobile team. Pete is also the…

5. 

   22 Sep 2023 · 1 hr 33 min

   Nathan Marz - On changing the economics of building large-scale software with Rama - #23

   What does it mean to change the economics of software development? Nathan Marz joins the show to share how they reduced the cost of building Mastodon at Twitter-scale by 100X and the 10 years journey to build Rama, a new programming platform that made this feat possible. Nathan is the founder of Red Planet Labs. Prior to RPL, he led engineering for BackType which was acquired by Twitter in 2011. Nathan created the Apache Storm project and wrote the book Big Data: Principles and best practices of scalable realtime data systems. Outside of working, Nathan is a private pilot, loves going to…

6. 

   24 Jul 2023 · 1 hr 6 min

   Kelsey Hightower - On retiring as Distinguished Engineer from Google at 42 (Part 1)

   Kelsey Hightower was a Distinguished Engineer at Google, where he worked on Google Cloud Platform. In this first part of the conversation, we delve into pivotal moments in Kelsey's career journey ranging from buying his first car by working at mcdonald's after school, to starting his own computer store that turned into a music studio after 6pm, to hacking on python infrastructure with the core developers. Through these stories, we learned a ton about how Kelsey thinks about acquiring new skills - getting paid for it, breaking into the world of open source, navigating corporate politics,…

7. 

   E20 · 27 Jun 2023 · 57 min

   Julie Amundson - Career breaks, job search amidst hiring freezes, positioning yourself and much more - #20

   Julie Amundson is a Sr Staff Software Engineer at Google working on Machine Learning Infrastructure. Prior to Google, she was the Director of Machine Learning Infrastructure at Netflix. Julie decided to take a career break last year when she was affected by mass layoffs. In this conversation, we talk to her about what it was like to find a job during hiring freezes, what it was like to position herself in this market, whether the interviewers cared about the career break she took and how the career break changed her perspective towards work and life.

8. 

   E19 · 3 Jun 2022 · 1 hr 20 min

   Chris Pruett - On deciding to leave LinkedIn and co-founding Jam, values based decision making and compassionate leadership - #19

   Chris Pruett is the CTO and Co-founder of Jam - a new way to share and listen to bite-sized audio. Prior to Jam, Chris spent 9+ years at LinkedIn growing from an engineering manager to VP of Engineering. During his tenure at LinkedIn, he worked on almost all aspects of the app and towards the end, led an org of 500+ engineers working on Feed, Messaging, Identity and Search. In this episode, we discuss how he made the decision to leave his leadership position at LinkedIn and co-found Jam. We also spoke about his time at LinkedIn and how he developed the practice to make value based decisions…

9. 

   S1 · 25 Mar 2022 · 8 min

   Software Misadventures Update and Plans for 2022

   Short episode about reflections on the past year and plans for 2022.

10. 

    E19 · 25 Feb 2022 · 1 hr 38 min

    Kailash Nadh - On being an absurdist and building the tech team at Zerodha, India's largest stock broker - #18

    Kailash is the CTO at Zerodha , the largest stock broker in India. In this conversation, we speak with him about absurdism - a philosophy that guides his personal and professional worldview. We discuss how he built Zerodha's tech team, their team culture and how the team operates so efficiently while being so lean. We also discuss why Zerodha self-hosts all of their tech stack, what they look for when hiring engineers and how their systems scaled when the user base grew from 2 to 8 million in 18 months.