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

More from Software Misadventures

1. 

   E28 · 4 Jan 2024 · 57 min

   War stories from early days of engineering at LinkedIn | David Henke (LinkedIn, Yahoo)

   At the personal request of Reid Hoffman to emerge from early retirement, David joined LinkedIn in 2009 during a period of rapid growth to help stabilize the chaos, cultivating a much-needed culture of "Site Up and Secure." Before this, David served as SVP of Engineering and Operations at Yahoo!, overseeing their Search Marketing organization and the Production Operations infrastructure for the entire company. Throughout his career, David has held multiple leadership positions and is recognized as one of the top operations executives. David's intensity, passion, courage and commitment to work…

2. 

   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?…

3. 

   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…

4. 

   E53 · 8 Oct 2024 · 14 min

   Podcast update and news!

   Some reflections on running the podcast and Ronak has some eggciting news to share :) Music: Vlad Gluschenko — Forest License: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

5. 

   E52 · 24 Sep 2024 · 1 hr 27 min

   Uncrating the Oxide Rack | Bryan Cantrill, Steve Tuck (Oxide)

   Oxide co-founders Bryan and Steve are back on the show to give an impromptu peek at the Oxide server rack and to chat about writing their own manufacturing software, overcoming false summits before shipping the first rack, the #1 reason startups fail and more. Don't miss the full-circle moment on their "meet cute" story from last time, shared at the end of the conversation :) Segments: (00:00:00) The Oxide rack uncrating experience (00:02:40) The office tour (00:04:03) Challenges of shipping and unboxing hardware (00:11:04) Hybrid hardware company? (00:13:38) Custom designing a crate for the…

6. 

   E51 · 10 Sep 2024 · 1 hr 56 min

   LLMs are like your weird, over-confident intern | Simon Willison (Datasette)

   Known for co-creating Django and Datasette, as well as his thoughtful writing on LLMs, Simon Willison joins the show to chat about blogging as an accountability mechanism, how to build intuition with LLMs, building a startup with his partner on their honeymoon, and more. Segments: (00:00:00) The weird intern (00:01:50) The early days of LLMs (00:04:59) Blogging as an accountability mechanism (00:09:24) The low-pressure approach to blogging (00:11:47) GitHub issues as a system of records (00:16:15) Temporal documentation and design docs (00:18:19) GitHub issues for team collaboration…

7. 

   E50 · 27 Aug 2024 · 1 hr 26 min

   From "AI mid-life crisis" to the "time of my life" | Steve Yegge (Sourcegraph)

   A Silicon Valley veteran and known for his writings like "The Death of the Junior Developer", Steve Yegge joins the show to chat about his "AI Midlife Crisis", the unique writing process he employs, and building the future of coding assistants. Segments: (00:00:00) The AI Midlife Crisis (00:04:53) The power of rants (00:09:55) "You gotta be able to make yourself laugh" (00:11:46) Steve's writing process (00:14:10) "I published them… and nothing happened for six months" (00:17:30) Key to perseverance in writing? Get pissed. (00:23:24) Writing in one sitting (00:29:05) The AI Midlife Crisis…

8. 

   E49 · 13 Aug 2024 · 1 hr 9 min

   Early Twitter's fail-whale wars | Dmitriy Ryaboy

   A veteran of early Twitter's fail whale wars, Dmitriy joins the show to chat about the time when 70% of the Hadoop cluster got accidentally deleted, the financial reality of writing a book, and how to navigate acquisitions. Segments: (00:00:00) The Infamous Hadoop Outage (00:02:36) War Stories from Twitter's Early Days (00:04:47) The Fail Whale Era (00:06:48) The Hadoop Cluster Shutdown (00:12:20) "First Restore the Service Then Fix the Problem. Not the Other Way Around." (00:14:10) War Rooms and Organic Decision-Making (00:16:16) The Importance of Communication in Incident Management…

9. 

   E48 · 6 Aug 2024 · 1 hr 2 min

   Discovering the power of story-telling in engineering | Adam Gordon Bell (CoRecursive)

   Known for hosting the CoRecursive podcast, which dives into the stories behind the code, Adam joins the show to chat about discovering that the great engineers he had looked up to are actually great communicators, his framework for building one of the best storytelling engineering podcasts, and the journey getting into DevRel. Chapters: (00:00:00) Highlights (00:04:23) The power of casual conversations (00:07:08) Taking the leap into podcasting (00:10:34) The hardest part of running a podcast (00:14:03) Learning to follow up (00:16:26) Storytelling in podcasting (00:20:36) The evolution of…

10. 

    E47 · 30 Jul 2024 · 2 hr 11 min

    Behind designing Kubernetes' APIs | Brian Grant (Google)

    As the original architect and API design lead of Kubernetes, Brian joins the show to chat about why "APIs are forever", the keys to evangelizing impactful projects, and being an Uber Tech at Google, and more. Segments: (00:03:01) Internship with Mark Ewing (00:07:10) "Mark and Brian's Excellent Environment" manual (00:11:58) Poker on VT100 terminals (00:14:46) Grad school and research (00:17:23) The value of studying computer science (00:21:07) Intuition and learning (00:24:06) Reflecting on career patterns (00:26:37) Hypergrowth and learning at Transmeta (00:28:37) Debugging at the atomic…

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