Contributor: Recent Episodes
Eric Anderson
Andrew Smith (Github: @asmith-plainsight) dives deep into OpenFilter, the open-source framework for building computer vision workflows. Andrew is the CTO of Plainsight which is a leader in modern computer vision infrastructure. Tune in to find out how OpenFilter is simplifying and revolutionizing computer vision applications.
Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications!
In this episode we discuss:
- The challenges in deploying computer vision, particularly in edge environments
- How Andrew’s time at Google influenced the development of OpenFilter
- Three problems Andrew sought to solve before open-sourcing the project
- Best use cases for OpenFilter
- The surprising nascence of computer vision applications
Links:
- OpenFilter
- Plainsight
- OpenLineage
People mentioned:
- Kit Merker (@KitMerker)
- Willy Lulciuc (@wslulciuc)
Pete Hunt (@floydophone) joins Eric Anderson (@ericmander) to talk about Dagster, the open-source data orchestration platform built for productivity. In 2021, Eric interviewed Dagster’s founder, Nick Schrock, about an earlier iteration of the product. Now, four years later, Pete has become the CEO of Dagster Labs and has all the updates on how this platform has changed along with the industry and the world.
Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications!
In this episode we discuss:
- How and why Dagster has invested in software-defined data assets
- Nailing a layered approach between full-code engineering and low-code solutions
- The changing role of AI in data pipelines
- Dagster’s renewed effort to build observability tools
Links:
- Dagster
People mentioned:
- Nick Schrock (@schrockn)
Other episodes:
- Dagster with Nick Schrock
Mark Fussell (@mfussell) is the co-creator of Dapr, the open-source runtime system designed to support cloud native and serverless computing. Dapr provides APIs that simplify the development of distributed applications, providing essential functionalities like service invocation, pub/sub messaging, and observability.
Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications!
In this episode we discuss:
- The difference between Dapr and a service mesh
- How Dapr is beneficial for platform engineering teams
- From Microsoft to Diagrid in the startup world
- The significance of Dapr’s graduation from the CNCF
Links:
- Dapr
- Diagrid
- KEDA
People mentioned:
- Yaron Schneider (@yaronschneider)
Other episodes:
- Istio with Sven Mawson
- LinkerD with William Morgan
- Robust Observability: OpenTelemetry with Austin Parker
Kee Jefferys (@JefferysKee) is the technical co-founder of Session, the end-to-end encrypted messenger that emphasizes user confidentiality and anonymity. Session uses a blockchain-based decentralized network for message transmission and is open-source, so the system can be run entirely by its community. In this episode, Kee explains the importance of reducing metadata, the challenges of centralization, and the role of incentives in creating a decentralized network.
Contributor is looking for a community manager! If you want to know more, shoot us an email at eric@scalevp.com.
Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications!
In this episode we discuss:
- Why the demand for better privacy has increased
- How Session differs from other encrypted messaging platforms
- Combining encryption and incentive models
- Why open-source is so critical to messaging applications trying to prove their security
- How Session could outlast its developers
Links:
- Session
Clément Salaün (@superzamp) is the co-founder and CTO of Formance, the open-source platform which is building an agnostic infrastructure for the future of the financial Internet. Formance is divided into several modules which allow fintech engineers to build and operate complex flow of funds, weaving together multiple payment rails with internal ledger accounts. Tune in to find out what it takes to build a scalable and extensible financial core system.
Contributor is looking for a community manager! If you want to know more, shoot us an email at eric@scalevp.com.
Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications!
In this episode we discuss:
- How Clem got into fintech through Minecraft
- Thoughts on the European open-source scene
- Formance’s ratio of community size to Github stars
- The influence of crypto on Formance
- What it means to split an open-source project into many repositories
Links:
- Formance
Gideon Mendels (Github: @gidim) is the co-founder and CEO of Comet, the end-to-end model evaluation platform for AI developers. Among the tools in the Comet ecosystem is Opik, an open-source solution for evaluating, testing and monitoring LLM applications. Opik allows users to log traces and spans, define and compute evaluation metrics, score LLM outputs, compare performance across app versions, and more. As a true open-source project, its full featureset is available for use by anyone, completely free.
Contributor is looking for a community manager! If you want to know more, shoot us an email at eric@scalevp.com.
Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications!
In this episode we discuss:
- How Opik’s popularity blew up beyond the Comet team’s expectations
- Why CI/CD is especially important in an end-to-end platform
- Gideon’s “severe allergy” to “fake open-source” offerings
- Why the number of dedicated machine learning engineers is actually going down
- Eric’s thoughts on what it means for venture capital to invest in the LLM space
Links:
- Opik
- Comet
Hanson Ho (@bidetofevil) is an Android Architect at Embrace, the mobile-first observability solution built on OpenTelemetry. Embrace began as a proprietary platform but went open-source at the end of 2023. Hanson shares about how the project is still at the beginning of its open-source journey and why his team is committed to collaborative development with the larger community of OpenTelemetry.
Contributor is looking for a community manager! If you want to know more, shoot us an email at eric@scalevp.com.
Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications!
In this episode we discuss:
- The missing piece in mobile observability tooling
- How Embrace switched its perspective after going open-source
- 3 use cases for Embrace
Links:
- Embrace
- OpenTelemetry
Other Episodes:
- Robust Observability: OpenTelemetry with Austin Parker
Shirshanka Das (@shirshanka) is the CTO of Acryl Data and founder of DataHub, which bills itself as the #1 open-source metadata platform. It enables data discovery, data observability and federated governance to help tame complex data ecosystems. Shirshanka first developed DataHub while at LinkedIn, but has grown it into an independent project with a thriving community.
Contributor is looking for a community manager! If you want to know more, shoot us an email at eric@scalevp.com.
Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications!
In this episode we discuss:
- How DataHub differs from traditional data catalogs
- Themes around why community members get involved and stick with the project
- Partnering with Netflix to develop runtime metadata model extensibility
- The influence of the pandemic on DataHub’s open-sourcing
- Dealing with the future of a project with big community and unlimited scope
Links:
- DataHub
- The History of DataHub
After his first child was born, Matt Wonlaw (@tantaman) imagined giving his son life advice. What kind of life did he want his kid to lead? At the time, he was working for Facebook, and he decided that his own life needed a change in direction. So Matt started vlcn, aka Vulcan Labs, a research company that develops open-source projects like CR-SQLite and Materialite. vlcn has an unusual business model – Matt receives donations and sponsorships from users and clients. It’s all part of his mission to rethink the modern data stack for writing rich and complex applications.
Contributor is looking for a community manager! If you want to know more, shoot us an email at eric@scalevp.com.
Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications!
In this episode we discuss:
- One reason that software is still too hard to write: Object orientations
- How CR-SQLite allows databases to be merged together and Materialite provides Incremental View Maintenance for JavaScript
- Why coding directly to relations can provide a more flexible and efficient approach to building applications
- Matt’s decision to build vlcn as a research lab rather than as a startup
- Thoughts for the future on PGLite
Links:
- vlcn (Vulcan Labs)
- CR-SQLite
- Materialite
- fly.io
- PGLite
People mentioned:
- Johannes Schickling (@schickling)
Amplication is an open-source development platform for scalable and secure Node.js applications. It allows engineers to skip writing boilerplate code and offers the flexibility to customize and add components. Amplification was created by Yuval Hazaz (@Yuvalhazaz1), a veteran developer who determined that low-code platforms save time but restrict freedom. Instead, Amplication uses code generation to reliably and consistently build robust production‑ready backend services.
Contributor is looking for a community manager! If you want to know more, shoot us an email at eric@scalevp.com.
Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications!
In this episode we discuss:
- Yuval’s “secret sauce” for building an open-source community
- How platform engineers can use Amplication for company-wide standardization
- A baseline organic growth rate for open-source projects
- The role of generative AI in code modernization
Links:
- Amplication
OpenBB is an open-source investment research platform created by Didier Lopes (@didier_lopes). OpenBB grew out of a project called Gamestonk Terminal that Didier began working on shortly before the Gamestop short squeeze in January 2021. Today, OpenBB has evolved into an infrastructure platform that allows users to build extensions and access financial data with automation and customization.
Contributor is looking for a community manager! If you want to know more, shoot us an email at eric@scalevp.com.
Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications!
In this episode we discuss:
- What Vice Media got wrong about OpenBB
- Some major contributors to the project and the features or directions that they proposed
- How a machine learning engineer from Bloomberg reached out about OpenBB
- Different types of OpenBB users – students, retail investors, and other financial professionals
- OpenBB’s exciting AI roadmap
Links:
- OpenBB
People mentioned:
- James Maslek (@jmaslek11
- Artem Veremey (@artemvv)
OpenTelemetry is an open-source observability framework for collecting and managing telemetry data. OpenTelemetry has been more successful than expected, becoming the second fastest growing project in the CNCF. It allows for flexibility and avoids vendor lock-in, making it attractive to startups and large enterprises alike. On today’s show, Eric (@ericmander) sits down with Austin Parker (@austinlparker), director of open-source at Honeycomb.
Contributor is looking for a community manager! If you want to know more, shoot us an email at eric@scalevp.com.
Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications!
In this episode we discuss:
- How Austin’s interest in complex systems led him to the observability field and developer relations
- An X argument that contributed to the merger of OpenTelemetry and OpenCensus
- Why foundations help maintainers to strike a balance with their contributors
- Austin’s opinion on the secret to OpenTelemetry’s success
Links:
- OpenTelemetry
- Honeycomb
People mentioned:
- Charity Majors (@mipsytipsy)
- Christine Yen (@cyen)
OPAL is an open-source administration layer for Policy Engines such as Open Policy Agent (OPA). OPAL provides the necessary infrastructure to load policy and data into multiple policy engines, ensuring they have the information they need to make decisions. Today, we’re talking to Or Weis (@OrWeis), co-creator of OPAL and co-founder of Permit, the end-to-end authorization platform that envisions a world where developers never have to build permissions again.
Contributor is looking for a community manager! If you want to know more, shoot us an email at eric@scalevp.com.
Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications!
In this episode we discuss:
- History of Permit and OPAL
- The benefits of an open-foundation model rather than open-core
- RBAC vs ABAC vs ReBAC
- Why developers would prefer to not have to deal with authorization
- Or’s own podcast, Command+Shift+Left
Links:
- OPAL
- Permit
- Command+Shift+Left
- Terraform
People mentioned:
- Asaf Cohen (@asafchn)
- Filip Grebowski (@developerfilip)
Other episodes:
- Open Policy Agent with Torin Sandall
- Community Driven IaC: OpenTofu with Kuba Martin
FerretDB enables users to run MongoDB applications on existing Postgres infrastructure. Peter Farkas (@FarkasP), co-founder and CEO of FerretDB, explains the need for an open source interface for document databases. Peter also discusses the licensing change of MongoDB and the uncertainty it created for users. He emphasizes the importance of open standards and collaboration among MongoDB alternatives to provide users with choice and interoperability.
Contributor is looking for a community manager! If you want to know more, shoot us an email at eric@scalevp.com.
Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications!
In this episode we discuss:
- The epic mountain adventure that inspired FerretDB
- Why commercial open-source can be additive rather than extractive
- How compatibility and open standards drives innovation and competition
- PDFs as an example of corporation-supported standards
- Three tenets for building a successful open source project
Links:
- FerretDB
- Percona
People:
- Peter Zaitsev (@PeterZaitsev)
Ben Johnson (@benbjohnson) is the creator of Litestream and LiteFS, two open-source disaster recovery solution for SQLite. Litestream is designed to provide continuous backups for SQLite databases by streaming incremental changes, allowing for easy data recovery in the event of a server crash. LiteFS, on the other hand, is built on LiteStream but uses transactional control to focus on replication and high availability. Join us as Ben discusses the challenges and trade-offs of open source contributions and the future of databases.
Contributor is looking for a community manager! If you want to know more, shoot us an email at eric@scalevp.com.
Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications!
In this episode we discuss:
- The history of how Ben got involved in SQLite development out of “spite”
- How Litestream “works on a fluke”
- Different use cases for Litestream vs LiteFS
- Why fully open contributions isn’t always Ben’s style
- The greater server-side SQLite landscape
Links:
- Litestream
- LiteFS
- Fly.io
- BoltDB
People mentioned:
- Philip O’Toole (@general_order24)
Other episodes:
- The Social Miracle: rqlite with Philip O’Toole
- The Big Fork: libSQL with Glauber Costa
Tonic is a native gRPC implementation in Rust that allows users to easily build gRPC servers and clients without extensive async experience. Tonic is part of the Tokio stack, which is a library that provides an asynchronous runtime for Rust and more tools to write async applications. Today, Lucio Franco (@lucio_d_franco) of Turso joins the podcast to discuss his unique experience maintaining Tonic and contributing to the asynchronous Rust ecosystem.
Contributor is looking for a community manager! If you want to know more, shoot us an email at eric@scalevp.com.
Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications!
In this episode we discuss:
- The challenges of async Rust and ways the community has addressed them
- Lucio’s plan on how to get a job in distributed databases
- How the Tokio team avoided power dynamics
- Problems around working on open-source in the corporate world
- Why Lucio encouraged a collaborator to go on without him
Links:
- Tonic
- Tokio
- Turso
- Tower
People:
- Carl Lerche (@carllerche)
Other episodes:
- The Big Fork: libSQL with Glauber Costa
rqlite is a lightweight, distributed relational database built on Raft and SQLite. Founder Philip O’Toole (@general_order24) decided to combine these technologies while working at a startup years ago. The startup no longer exists, but rqlite is going strong. Today, Philip is an engineering manager at Google, while he continues to be the driving force behind the open development of rqlite.
Contributor is looking for a community manager! If you want to know more, shoot us an email at eric@scalevp.com.
Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications!
In this episode we discuss:
- The biggest misconceptions about how rqlite differs from SQLite
- Why writing databases is more interesting than new programmers might think
- The tradeoff between a large community versus smaller, more focused leadership
- Reasons why open-source development progresses in bursts of energy
- How to really pronounce “rqlite”
Links:
- rqlite
- InfluxData
- dqlite
- Litestream
- libSQL
- Turso
- OpenTelemetry
People:
- Ben Johnson (@benbjohnson)
Other episodes:
- libSQL with Glauber Costa
Kuba Martin (@cube2222_2) is Software Engineering Team Lead at Spacelift and Interim Tech Lead of OpenTofu, the open-source fork of Terraform. Terraform is a declarative infrastructure-as-code (IaC) tool that recently switched to a source-available license. Spacelift and other companies that heavily relied on Terraform came together to fork it into a community-driven project originally called OpenTF, which has now become OpenTofu and is governed by the Linux Foundation.
Contributor is looking for a community manager! If you want to know more, shoot us an email at eric@scalevp.com.
Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications!
In this episode we discuss:
- Two kinds of forks
- How OpenTofu handled the opportunity to rethink their licensing and copyright
- Finding hundreds of pledges to the OpenTF Manifesto
- The benefits of a technical steering committee
- Recreating the community registry
Links:
- OpenTofu
- Spacelift
- Terraform
- Gruntwork
- Harness
- env0
- Scalr
Ry Walker (@rywalker) is the founder and CEO of Tembo, the Postgres developer platform for building any and every data service. To Ry, the full capabilities of Postgres appear underappreciated and underused for most users. Tembo is an attempt to harness the large ecosystem of Postgres extensions, and ultimately collapse the database sprawl of the modern data stack.
Contributor is looking for a community manager! If you want to know more, shoot us an email at eric@scalevp.com.
Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications!
In this episode we discuss:
- Taking the “red pill” of using Postgres for everything
- Providing universal support for Postgres extensions
- Why Ry dislikes the current state of the modern data stack
- How databases across the board have mostly changed into application platforms
- What makes Tembo “Startup Mt. Everest”
Links:
- Tembo
- OSSRank
- Citus Data
- Modal
- Supabase Wrappers
People mentioned:
- Erik Bernhardsson (@bernhardsson)
Other episodes:
- Clickhouse with Alexey Milovidov and Ivan Blinkov
Jan Oberhauser (@JanOberhauser) is the founder and CEO of n8n, the free and source-available workflow automation tool for technical users. n8n's flexible architecture allows users to avoid the limitations of other automation tools, while also opening doors for complex automation scenarios. The project has garnered over 30,000 GitHub stars and a thriving community of 55,000+ members.
Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications, and join our Slack community!
In this episode we discuss:
- How Jan’s background in film effects laid the groundwork for n8n
- Why n8n uses a forum over Discord or Slack for a community platform
- Use cases from scheduling fitness classes to upgrading financial mainframes
- How n8n might stack up against the well-thought out Python script
- Why n8n uses a fair-code license rather than open-source
Links:
- n8n
- n8n Community
Other episodes:
- Temporal with Maxim Fateev
- From Orchestration to Building Applications: Conductor with Jeu George
- Rethinking the Workflow Problem: Windmill with Ruben Fiszel
Glauber Costa (@glcst) is the founder of Turso and the co-creator of libSQL, an open source, open contribution fork of the database engine library, SQLite. Most people believe that SQLite is open-source software, but it actually exists in the public domain and doesn’t accept external contributions. With their big fork, Glauber and his team have set out to evolve SQLite into a modern database with support for distributed data, an asynchronous interface, compatibility with WASM and Linux, and more.
Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications, and join our Slack community!
In this episode we discuss:
- Community reactions to forking SQLite
- How Glauber was spoiled by starting his career developing for Linux
- The controversial decision to launch libSQL without writing a single line of code
- The plan for incorporating upstream changes from SQLite
- Examples of how application developers need to move code “to the edge”
Links:
- libSQL
- SQLite
- Turso
- LiteFS
- Litestream
- rqlite
- VLCN
People mentioned:
- Avi Kivity (@AviKivity)
- Dor Laor (@DorLaor)
- Ben Johnson (@benbjohnson)
- Phillip O’Toole (@general_order24)
- Matt Tantaman (@tantaman)
Other episodes:
- Scylla with Dor Laor
- Apache Cassandra with Patrick McFadin
Ruben Fiszel (@rubenfiszel) is the creator of Windmill, the open-source developer platform that lets users easily turn scripts into workflows and internal apps with auto-generated UIs. Windmill doesn’t force engineers to change their coding style or adopt a convoluted API, and its low-code design makes it accessible to non-technical users. Tune in to find out how Windmill offers speed, performance and flexibility, while avoiding the limitations of rigid tools.
Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications, and join our Slack community!
In this episode we discuss:
- Why many engineers try to reinvent the wheel when it comes to workflow engines
- When Ruben first saw the need for a platform like Windmill while working at Palantir
- “Today is the nicest period to build open-source…”
- Ruben’s incredible presence with support and bug fixes
- Windmill’s generous open-source offerings and the future of the business
Links:
- Windmill
- Retool
- Tokio
- Apache Airflow
- Apache Spark
Other episodes:
- Prefect with Jeremiah Lowin
- Dagster with Nick Schrock
- Temporal with Maxim Fateev
- Temporal (Part 2) with Maxim Fateev and Dominik Tornow
- Apache Cassandra with Patrick McFadin
Jesse Clark (@jn2clark) is a co-founder of Marqo, the end-to-end, multimodal vector search engine. Vector search has exploded along with the rise of generative AI models, so Marqo’s arrival has had excellent timing. The project has quickly grown to almost 3000 GitHub stars, despite being less than a year old. Jesse and his team weren’t exactly expecting this level of immediate success, but they are well-positioned to continue developing Marqo as a fixture in the worlds of information retrieval and machine learning.
Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications, and join our Slack community!
In this episode we discuss:
- Jesse’s journey from physics research, to Stitch Fix, Amazon, and finally starting Marqo
- Industry vs academia in the cutting edge of machine learning
- Why “almost any organization in the world would benefit from Marqo”
- Talking about machine learning language - tensors, vectors, embeddings
- How Jesse deals with the stress of knowing how fast the AI space is innovating
Links:
- Marqo
People mentioned:
- Katrina Lake (@kmlake)
- Eric Colson (@ericcolson)
Jeu George (@jeugeorge) is the co-creator of Conductor, the open-source application building platform. Conductor began as a workflow orchestrator and was originally developed at Netflix. Jeu also co-founded Orkes, a company which offers a cloud product based on Conductor. Tune in to find out how Conductor has evolved into an open-source, battle-tested distributed application platform.
Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications, and join our Slack community!
In this episode we discuss:
- The core tenets of building Conductor - reliability, language and cloud agnosticism
- How Conductor enables teams to share and manage their custom modules
- The role of Conductor in Netflix’s switch from licensed to original content
- Jeu’s journey from Netflix, to Uber, and finally to Orkes
- How Orkes is focusing on integrations and AI orchestration moving forward
Links:
- Conductor
- Orkes
People mentioned:
- Viren Baraiya (@virenbaraiya)
- Boney Sekh (@boneyorkes)
- Dilip Lukose (@diliplukose)
Jeu George (@jeugeorge) is the co-creator of Conductor, the open-source application building platform. Conductor began as a workflow orchestrator and was originally developed at Netflix. Jeu also co-founded Orkes, a company which offers a cloud product based on Conductor. Tune in to find out how Conductor has evolved into an open-source, battle-tested distributed application platform.
Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications, and join our Slack community!
In this episode we discuss:
- The core tenets of building Conductor - reliability, language and cloud agnosticism
- How Conductor enables teams to share and manage their custom modules
- The role of Conductor in Netflix’s switch from licensed to original content
- Jeu’s journey from Netflix, to Uber, and finally to Orkes
- How Orkes is focusing on integrations and AI orchestration moving forward
Links:
- Conductor
- Orkes
People mentioned:
- Viren Baraiya (@virenbaraiya)
- Boney Sekh (@boneyorkes)
- Dilip Lukose (@diliplukose)
Advait Ruia (@Advait_Ruia) is the co-founder of SuperTokens, the open-source user authentication and authorization framework. SuperTokens integrates natively into both your front-end client and your backend endpoint. This approach gives developers more control over the user experience and allows for custom workflows. Tune in to find out why SuperTokens aims to be the best of both the build and the buy argument for authentication solutions.
Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications, and join our Slack community!
In this episode we discuss:
- How SuperTokens evolved from a blog post on session management into a full-fledged infrastructure company
- Why there is increasing demand for authentication providers
- Do founders need to be in the Bay Area?
- Advait’s advice for building community and providing support
- Areas where SuperTokens could use outside contributions
Links:
- SuperTokens
- SuperTokens Product Roadmap
People mentioned:
- Rishabh Poddar (@rishpoddar)
Other episodes:
- Hasura with Tanmai Gopal
Loris Degioanni (@lorisdegio) joins Eric Anderson (@ericmander) to chat about Falco, the open-source runtime security tool for modern cloud infrastructures. Loris is the founder and CTO of Sysdig, and co-creator of Wireshark, the legendary open-source packet analysis tool. Today, Loris talks about all these projects and more - tune in to learn about some deep history and Loris’ predictions for the future.
Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications, and join our Slack community!
In this episode we discuss:
- How Loris began working with Gerald Combs as a student in Italy
- Why Loris’ teams name their products after animals
- The new non-profit Wireshark Foundation
- Parallel development of cloud technology and containers during Loris’ career
- The little things that make open-source projects go viral
Links:
- Falco
- Sysdig
- Wireshark
People mentioned:
- Solomon Hykes (@solomonhykes)
Emre Baran (@emre) is the CEO and co-founder of Cerbos, the open-source authorization layer for implementing roles and permissions. Cerbos allows developers to decouple authorization logic from core code into its own centrally distributed component. Easier said than done, perhaps - but Cerbos is secure, intentionally simple to implement, and developer-focused.
Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications, and join our Slack community!
In this episode we discuss:
- The difference between authentication and authorization
- Why Cerbos is language-agnostic
- Authorization patterns in a single application versus a larger network
- The reason most devs start out trying to do authorization themselves, and sometimes give up
- How the upcoming Cerbos Cloud will empower less technical users to deploy and manage policies and logs
Links:
- Cerbos
- Cerbos Cloud Beta
- Zanzibar: Google’s Consistent, Global Authorization System
People mentioned:
- Charith Ellawala (Github: @charithe)
Other episodes:
- Open Policy Agent with Torin Sandall
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.
Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications, and join our Slack community!
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:
- Cosmonic
- WebAssembly
- Bytecode Alliance
- CNCF wasmCloud
- Wasmtime
- WAMR
- Better together: A Kubernetes and Wasm case study
- Spin
People mentioned:
- Kevin Hoffman (@KevinHoffman)
- Kelsey Hightower (@kelseyhightower)
- Guy Bedford (@guybedford)
- Peter Huene (@peterhuene)
- Chris Aniszczyk (@cra)
Other episodes:
- Envoy Proxy with Matt Klein
- Suborbital with Connor Hicks
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.
Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications, and join our Slack community!
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:
- Haystack
- deepset
- Hugging Face
- Notion
Other episodes:
- Milvus with Frank Liu
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.
Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications, and join our Slack community!
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:
- Cube
- Superset
- Metabase
- Observable
- Streamlit
People mentioned:
- Pavel Tiunov (@paveltiunov87)
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.
Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications, and join our Slack community!
Links:
- Software Engineering Daily
- Software Engineering Radio
- The Prion (Soundcloud) (Spotify)
- You Are Not A Commodity
- Move Fast: How Facebook Builds Software
People mentioned:
- Pranay Mohan (@pranaymohan)
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.
Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications, and join our Slack community!
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:
- Testcontainers
- AtomicJar
- Spring
- Quarkus
- Micronaut
- How We Maintain Security Testing within the Software Development Life Cycle
People mentioned:
- Richard North (@whichrich)
- Kevin Wittek (@Kiview)
- Martin Fowler (@martinfowler)
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.
Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications, and join our Slack community!
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:
- Mito
- Project Jupyter
- pandas
- Superhuman
- Streamlit
People mentioned:
- Jacob Diamond-Reivich (@Jake_Stack808)
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.
Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications, and join our Slack community!
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:
- Mito
- Project Jupyter
- pandas
- Superhuman
- Streamlit
People mentioned:
- Jacob Diamond-Reivich (@Jake_Stack808)
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.
Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications, and join our Slack community!
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:
- Featureform
- Terraform
- Apache Spark
- Feathr
Other episodes:
- Tensorflow with Rajat Monga
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.
Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications, and join our Slack community!
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:
- Directus
- Supabase
Other episodes:
- Chef with Adam Jacob
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.
Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications, and join our Slack community!
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:
- Prowler on Github
- Prowler Pro
- Verica
- Black Hat
People mentioned:
- Aaron Rinehart
- Casey Rosenthal
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.
Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications, and join our Slack community!
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:
- Homebrew
- tea.xyz
- tea white paper
- Bitcoin white paper
- Max’s Google interview tweet
- Log4j vulnerability
- “Nebraska” XKCD comic
- Nix OS
People mentioned:
- Timothy Lewis
Eric Anderson (@ericmander) and Connor Hicks (@cohix) launch into detail on Suborbital, an open-source project that allows developers to create WebAssembly projects embedded in other applications. Connor conceived of Suborbital while frustrated with the cold start problem that can impact Function-as-a-Service platforms. Today, Suborbital collaborates with companies like Microsoft on a community called Wasm Builders, dedicated to sharing and developing innovations in WebAssembly applications.
Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications, and join our Slack community!
In this episode we discuss:
- The three tentpoles of WebAssembly that make it a useful foundation for Suborbital
- Surprising niche use cases for WebAssembly like IoT and data modeling
- Open-source tools in the Suborbital ecosystem
- Putting focus on building a larger Wasm Builders community
- Connor’s thoughts on how WebAssembly can improve edge computing
Links:
- Suborbital
- WebAssembly
- Suborbital Compute
- Atmo
- Reactr
- Subo
- Sat
- Firecracker
Eric Anderson (@ericmander) and Connor Hicks (@cohix) launch into detail on Suborbital, an open-source project that allows developers to create WebAssembly projects embedded in other applications. Connor conceived of Suborbital while frustrated with the cold start problem that can impact Function-as-a-Service platforms. Today, Suborbital collaborates with companies like Microsoft on a community called Wasm Builders, dedicated to sharing and developing innovations in WebAssembly applications.
Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications, and join our Slack community!
In this episode we discuss:
- The three tentpoles of WebAssembly that make it a useful foundation for Suborbital
- Surprising niche use cases for WebAssembly like IoT and data modeling
- Open-source tools in the Suborbital ecosystem
- Putting focus on building a larger Wasm Builders community
- Connor’s thoughts on how WebAssembly can improve edge computing
Links:
- Suborbital
- WebAssembly
- Suborbital Compute
- Atmo
- Reactr
- Subo
- Sat
- Firecracker
Eric Anderson (@ericmander) and Frank Liu (@frankzliu) talk about Milvus, the open-source vector database built for scalable similarity search. Vector databases are built to search, index and store embeddings, a requirement for powerful AI applications. Frank is Director of Operations at Zilliz, the company that stewards the project. Tune in to find out how Milvus is the database for the AI era.
Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications, and join our Slack community!
In this episode we discuss:
- A crash course on embeddings and vector databases
- Using Milvus for logo search, crypto predictions, drug discovery, and more
- Other open-source projects at Zilliz that complement Milvus
- “Embedding Everything”
- How Milvus incorporates tunable consistency to its search process
Links:
- Milvus
- Zilliz
- Towhee
- Attu
- Feder
Other episodes:
- Clickhouse with Alexey Milovidov and Ivan Blinkov
Correction:
- Milvus is based on a “shared storage” architecture, not “shared nothing.”
Eric Anderson (@ericmander) reunites with old colleagues Kenn Knowles (@KennKnowles) and Pablo Estrada (@polecitoem) for a conversation on Apache Beam, the open-source programming model for data processing. The trio once worked together at Google, and Beam was a turning point in the history of open-source there. Today, both Kenn and Pablo are members of the Beam PMC, and join the show with the inside scoop on Beam’s past, present and future.
In this episode we discuss:
- Transitioning Beam to the Apache Way
- How “inner source” works at Google
- Thoughts on the relationship between batch processing and streaming
- Some ways that community “power users” have contributed to Beam
- Information on Beam Summit 2022, the first onsite summit since COVID began
- The first few people to register can use code BEAM_POD_INV for a discount on tickets!
Links:
- Apache Beam
- Apache Spark
- Apache Flink
- Apache Nemo
- Apache Samza
- Apache Crunch
- MapReduce paper
- MillWheel paper
- FlumeJava paper
- Dataflow paper
- Beam Summit 2022 Website
Other episodes:
- TensorFlow with Rajat Monga
Eric Anderson (@ericmander) returns to Temporal with co-founder Maxim Fateev (@mfateev) and principal engineer Dominik Tornow (@DominikTornow). When Maxim joined us in September of 2020, the company called their project a “workflow orchestrator.” Today, Temporal has grown in popularity and usability, but the terminology around that abstraction has changed. Tune in to track the evolution of what Maxim calls a genuinely “new category of software.”
In this episode we discuss:
- New features and developments in the last 2 years
- The proper way to pronounce “Temporal”
- How Temporal guarantees that workflow execution actually runs to execution
- Describing Temporal as a new pair of glasses
- Replay, Temporal’s first developer conference on August 25-26, in Seattle
Links:
- Temporal
- Cadence
- Apache Cassandra
- Replay
People mentioned:
- Samar Abbas (@samarabbas77)
Other episodes:
- Temporal with Maxim Fateev
- Apache Cassandra with Patrick McFadin
Eric Anderson (@ericmander) interviews Avi Press (@avi_press) about Scarf, the distribution platform for open-source software that facilitates analytics and commercialization. Scarf offers a set of tools that allows founders and maintainers to understand adoption of their products, including Scarf Gateway, which provides a central access point to containers and packages. From there, open-source developers can connect with the people that rely on their work.
In this episode we discuss:
- Why you can’t rely on Github as a source of comprehensive data about open-source software
- Tracing a user’s journey interacting with a project across multiple platforms
- How better observability allows maintainers to make better software
- Inspiring indie maintainers to commercialize their projects
- The privilege of being able to work in open-source, and how Scarf can enable a more inclusive developer community
Links:
- Scarf
- Tidelift
- Gitcoin
- OpenTeams
Eric Anderson (@ericmander) and Patrick Dougherty (@cpdough) talk about Rasgo, the data transformation platform for MLOps that makes generating SQL easy. The team at Rasgo recently open-sourced a package called RasgoQL, that allows users to execute SQL queries against a data warehouse using Python syntax. Tune in to find out how Rasgo aims to bridge an important gap in the Modern Data Stack.
In this episode we discuss:
- The advantages of offering both a low-code/no-code UI and a Python interface
- "How can a data scientist, without needing full-time resources from data engineering, be somewhat self-sufficient in data prep and able to deliver those insights without a massive human capital investment needed?"
- Where Rasgo fits into the world of feature stores
- Why one Rasgo user took a trip to a wind farm in Texas
- Eric’s predictions for the future of data prep and transformation
Links:
- Rasgo
- RasgoQL
- DuckDB
- Delta Lake
People mentioned:
- Jared Parker (@jaredtparker_)
Eric Anderson (@ericmander) and Patrick Dougherty (@cpdough) talk about Rasgo, the data transformation platform for MLOps that makes generating SQL easy. The team at Rasgo recently open-sourced a package called RasgoQL, that allows users to execute SQL queries against a data warehouse using Python syntax. Tune in to find out how Rasgo aims to bridge an important gap in the Modern Data Stack.
In this episode we discuss:
- The advantages of offering both a low-code/no-code UI and a Python interface
- "How can a data scientist, without needing full-time resources from data engineering, be somewhat self-sufficient in data prep and able to deliver those insights without a massive human capital investment needed?"
- Where Rasgo fits into the world of feature stores
- Why one Rasgo user took a trip to a wind farm in Texas
- Eric’s predictions for the future of data prep and transformation
Links:
- Rasgo
- RasgoQL
- DuckDB
- Delta Lake
People mentioned:
- Jared Parker (@jaredtparker_)
Eric Anderson (@ericmander) and Willem Pienaar (@willpienaar) talk about Feast, the open-source feature store for machine learning. Feature stores act as a bridge between models and data, and allow data scientists to ship features into production without the need for engineers. Willem co-created Feast at Gojek, and later teamed up with the folks at Tecton to back the project.
In this episode we discuss:
- The value of feature stores in MLOps
- What happens when you open-source too early
- Why most open-source code has nothing to hide
- Bringing an open-source project to an existing company
- Good and bad use cases for a feature store
Links:
- Feast
- Tecton
- Turing
- Merlin
- Kubeflow
- apply() Conference
People mentioned:
- Mike Del Balso
- Kevin Stumpf (@kevinmstumpf)
- Ajey Gore (@AjeyGore)
- Demetrios Brinkmann (@Dpbrinkm)
- Wes McKinney (@wesmckinn)
Other episodes:
- Flyte with Ketan Umare
- Great Expectations with Abe Gong and Kyle Eaton
Eric Anderson (@ericmander) and Ketan Umare (@ketanumare) discuss Flyte, the open-source workflow automation platform for large-scale machine learning and data use cases. Ketan is a former engineer at Lyft, where he created Flyte to help models in Pricing, Locations, ETA, and more. Today, the project allows machine learning developers everywhere to bring their ideas from conception to production.
In this episode we discuss:
- How Flyte combines compute with parts of a workflow engine in a way that is best for the user
- The importance of reliable fares and ETA predictions at a ride-sharing app
- A progenitor to Flyte called “Better Airflow”
- Ketan’s innovative approach to bringing typing to machine learning workloads
- Why Flyte landed at the Linux Foundation
Links:
- Flyte
- Union.ai
- Apache Airflow
- Kubeflow
- Luigi
- MLTwist
Other episodes:
- Great Expectations with Abe Gong and Kyle Eaton
- Envoy Proxy with Matt Klein
Eric Anderson (@ericmander) meets with Davit Buniatyan (@DBuniatyan) of Activeloop, the database for AI. Davit was inspired to found Activeloop while working on large datasets in a neuroscience research lab at Princeton. Powering the technology at Activeloop is Hub, the open-source dataset format for AI applications. Join us to learn how Hub promises to enhance and expand various verticals in deep learning.
In this episode we discuss:
- Reconfiguring traditional ML tooling for the cloud
- Connectomics - working with thin slices of a mouse brain with neuroscientist Sebastian Seung
- Choosing between university, a start-up, and open-source
- Davit’s original product, that ran computation on crypto mining GPUs on a distributed scale
- Focusing on different data modalities for computer vision
Links:
- Activeloop
- Activeloop Hub
- Apache Parquet
- Apache Spark
- TensorFlow
- Snowflake
- Databricks
- Timescale
People mentioned:
- Sebastian Seung (@SebastianSeung)
Other episodes:
- TensorFlow with Rajat Monga
Eric Anderson (@ericmander), Alexander Jung (@nderjung) and Simon Kuenzer (Github: @skuenzer) get technical on Unikraft, the open-source unikernel development kit. Unikernels are specialized, high performing OS images that have the potential to revolutionize virtualization. Unikraft makes unikernels easy to use by prioritizing modularity, security, and POSIX-compatibility.
In this episode we discuss:
- How Unikraft seeks wider adoption of unikernels in real-world applications
- Unikraft’s background in research and academia
- Bottom-up as well as top-down specialization
- Building a community with a large proportion of students
Links:
- Unikraft
- Unikraft: Fast, Specialized Unikernels the Easy Way
- Xen Project
- MirageOS
- HermitCore
- Firecracker
Eric Anderson (@ericmander) has a conversation with Yury Selivanov (@1st1), the co-founder of EdgeDB. EdgeDB is the world’s first “graph-relational database.” It’s a term coined specifically for this new type of database, designed to ease the pain of dealing with the usual relational and NoSQL models. And no, EdgeDB is NOT a graph database!
In this episode we discuss:
- A glitch at EdgeDB’s Matrix-inspired launch event
- Origin of the term and design philosophy, “graph-relational”
- What to know about becoming a Python core developer
- How EdgeDB’s next-gen query language compares to GraphQL and SQL
Links:
- EdgeDB
- magicstack
- uvloop
People mentioned:
- Elvis Pranskevichus (@elprans)
- Colin McDonnell (@colinhacks)
- Victor Petrovykh (Github: @vpetrovykh)
- Dan Abramov (@dan_abramov)
- Brett Cannon (@brettsky)
- Daniel Levine (@daniel_levine)
Other episodes:
- Hasura with Tanmai Gopal
- Dgraph with Manish Jain
Eric Anderson (@ericmander) sits down with Pete Goddard (@pete_paco) to talk about Deephaven, the open-core query engine built for real-time streams and batch data. Pete is the CEO of Deephaven Data Labs, and comes to the data world from a background in capital markets trading. Deephaven originally addressed a need for real-time data infrastructure in the finance world, but the team realized how useful their technology could be in a wider variety of verticals. Join us for Pete’s unique perspective on reaching out into alternate industries and use cases through community development.
In this episode we discuss:
- How Pete transitioned from Wall Street to open-source software
- Selling investors on open-source
- Two questions people always ask Pete
- The luxury of Deephaven’s incremental update model
- Barrage, Deephaven’s API for streaming tables that extends Apache Arrow Flight
Links:
- Deephaven
- Barrage
- Apache Kafka
- Apache Arrow Flight
- Eclipse Jetty
Other episodes:
TensorFlow with Rajat Monga
Eric Anderson (@ericmander) and Douwe Maan (@DouweM) chat about Meltano, the open-source DataOps operating system. Meltano provides the connective tissue that allows teams to treat their data stack as a single software development project. Tune in to learn how Meltano is trying to bring software development best practices into the data world.
In this episode we discuss:
- Meltano’s origins as a side project at GitLab
- How Meltano glues together open-source technologies like Singer, dbt and Airflow
- Douwe’s experience wearing many different hats in the early days of Meltano
- Meltano’s shift from an ELT solution to an operating system
- The Love-Tap Fest community event, starting right after this episode’s release!
Links:
- Meltano
- Love-Tap Fest - February 17-24th, 2022
- GitLab
- Singer
- dbt
- Apache Airflow
- Apache Superset
- Terraform
People mentioned:
- Taylor Murphy (@tayloramurphy)
- AJ Steers (@aaronsteers)
Other episodes:
- Great Expectations with Abe Gong and Kyle Eaton
- Dagster with Nick Schrock
- Prefect with Jeremiah Lowin
Eric Anderson (@ericmander) and Pablo Ruiz-Múzquiz (@diacritica) examine the intersection of open-source, agile development, and UI/UX design at the heart of two applications, Penpot and Taiga. Penpot is a design and prototyping platform intended for cross-domain teams, while Taiga is a popular agile project management software. These products comprise the heart of Pablo’s innovative company, Kaleidos Open Source, which was founded in Spain more than a decade ago. Listen to today’s episode for one of the industry’s most unique perspectives on open-source code and design.
In this episode we discuss:
- An internal crisis and a major pivot for Kaleidos
- How Penpot was born from Kaleidos’ signature personal innovation week
- Designing a design tool that can be used to design itself
- Bringing design, code and people closer together
- Why Pablo asserts that designers care about open-source
Links:
- Penpot
- Taiga
- Kaleidos Open Source
Other episodes:
- Blender with Dalai Felinto
Eric Anderson (@ericmander) and Kyle Quest (@kcqon) discuss DockerSlim, the open-source optimization and security tool for Docker container images. Kyle initially created DockerSlim as a humble hackathon project, and now supports it with his company, Slim.AI. Tune in to learn how DockerSlim is redefining DevOps with application intelligence and a backwards compatible vision of the future.
In this episode we discuss:
- Bridging the gap between application and infrastructure
- Emerging from the cloud native stone age
- Application intelligence rather than artificial intelligence in Slim.AI
- DockerSlim integrated into CI/CD pipelines, embedded systems, and robots
- How Slim.AI aims to become ‘Google for containers’
Links:
- DockerSlim
- Slim.AI
- Terraform
- Serverless
- Sigstore
Eric Anderson (@ericmander) is joined by Egil (@EgilCo) and Ivar Østhus (@ivarconr), brothers and co-creators of the open-source feature management platform, Unleash. It’s a real family business, with Egil acting as CEO and Ivar the CTO of the company. Over beers and burgers, the two decided to bring their strengths together for a feature toggle tool that transforms DevOps and continuous deployment pipelines.
In this episode we discuss:
- Ivar as a pioneer in the trunk-based development space
- Word of mouth and old colleagues bringing Unleash to new companies
- Assessing a contributor’s personality and mindset
- Resolving a deadlock scenario on a feature launch day without impacting customers
- Why feature flagging is fundamental to true DevOps
Links:
- Unleash
Eric Anderson (@ericmander) invites Shauli Rozen (@shaulir) to share about his work on Kubescape, the first open-source Kubernetes security testing tool that is compliant with NSA & CISA hardening guidelines. Despite the project’s recency, Kubescape has seen explosive growth on Github and recognition from the Kubernetes community. Tune in to learn how the team at ARMO built a successful open-source security tool for DevOps.
In this episode we discuss:
- Why Kubescape uses guidance from the NSA & CISA
- Correcting the misconception that developers don’t care about security
- Providing value in the first five minutes of using the tool
- ARMO’s detailed approach to community feedback
- Shauli’s thoughts on security roles of the future
Links:
- ARMO
- Kubescape
- Terraform
Eric Anderson (@ericmander) connects with Dalai Felinto (@dfelinto), development coordinator at Blender. Blender is a free and open-source 3D graphics toolset with a unique story spanning nearly 30 years. The project is used professionally for animation, video games, scientific visualization, and much more. Join us for a very special episode of Contributor as we take a deep dive into one of the most dedicated, robust communities in open-source history.
In this episode we discuss:
- When the dotcom crash landed Blender in the hands of community members
- Taking open-source beyond the toolset with open movie projects
- Dalai’s transition from burgeoning architect to Blender developer
- How you can use Blender’s new Geometry Nodes for AI training
- Solving organizational challenges with full-time staff and contributors
Links:
- Blender
- Blender Studio
- Big Buck Bunny
- Elephants Dream
- Sprite Fright
People mentioned:
Ton Roosendaal (@tonroosendaal)
Eric Anderson (@ericmander) interviews Abe Gong (@AbeGong) and Kyle Eaton (@SuperCoKyle) about Great Expectations, the open-source framework that aims to create a shared standard for data quality. Abe is a core contributor to the project, and the CEO and co-founder of Superconductive, the team backing Great Expectations. Kyle is Growth Lead at Superconductive, and Community Manager of Great Expectations. The team at Superconductive have just launched the new Expectation Gallery to connect contributors and carve out vertical spaces in this ecosystem. Tune in to find out why Great Expectations is the leading open-source project for eliminating pipeline debt.
In this episode we discuss:
- How the Expectation Gallery enables new modes of community engagement
- Superconductive’s pivot from healthcare data consulting to open-source data validation
- Collaborative conversations with other data companies
- Abe’s advice to future open-source founders on segmenting value
- The vision of Great Expectations as a protocol-level open standard
Links:
- Great Expectations
- Superconductive
- Down with Pipeline debt
- Cascade Data Labs
- Flyte
- Dagster
- Databricks
- pandas
People mentioned:
- James Campbell (@jpcampbell42)
Other episodes:
- Dagster with Nick Schrock
Eric Anderson (@ericmander) sits down with Abhishek Dubey (@abhishekdubey), co-creator of Bolster, the fraud prevention platform powered by deep-learning. Bolster is used by clients like LinkedIn, Uber and Dropbox for its cutting-edge detection and takedown technology. Abhishek and his co-founder built Bolster around the real-time URL-scanning tool CheckPhish, which analyzes phishing sites for free. On today’s episode, learn how Abhishek and the team at Bolster have found success by focusing on building their business out of passion, and giving back to the community.
In this episode we discuss:
- A second mortgage and a startup garage
- Discovering 100 Fortune 500 companies were using CheckPhish
- How Bolster snagged LinkedIn without a proof of concept
- Bolster’s secret sauce, that sets them apart from other security companies
- Comparing the community focus of Bolster to a traditional open-source model
Links:
- Bolster
- CheckPhish
- Hacker Dojo
- Twilio
People mentioned:
- Shashi Prakash (@skiddzo)
Eric Anderson (@ericmander) sits down with Magnus Hillestad (@MHillestad) and Even Westvang (@even), co-founders of the unified content platform Sanity. The team at Sanity helps businesses organize their structured content as data, allowing distribution from a single source of truth. Tune in today’s episode to learn how Sanity aims to change the way people think about content.
In this episode we discuss:
- The open-source editing environment and CMS, Sanity Studio
- From content as data, to coffee table books
- How Sanity differs from a traditional CMS
- Why the Sanity team turned down a contract with the United Nations
- Building a team that can scale to a vision of ubiquity
Links:
- Sanity
- Sanity Studio
- Figma
- Brex
- Netlify
People mentioned:
- Simen Svale Skogsrud (@svale)
- Øyvind Rostad (@rostad)
Eric Anderson (@ericmander) and Ev Kontsevoy (@kontsevoy) talk about Teleport, the open-source tool for instant access to cloud resources. These include SSH servers, Kubernetes clusters, databases and more. Teleport was inspired by the growing complexity of cloud environments, and aims to make engineers feel like all their cloud applications are in the same room together.
In this episode we discuss:
- How Teleport grew from a side project to Gravity, the open-source toolkit for packaging and running applications autonomously
- Unifying and consolidating modern access methods and industry best practices
- Bringing identity to a protocol-level
- An early community use case for Teleport in the cattle industry
- Engaging with outside contributions while balancing security constraints
Links:
- Teleport
- Gravity
- Mailgun
Eric Anderson (@ericmander) and Travis Nielsen (@STravisNielsen) talk about Rook, the open-source storage orchestrator for Kubernetes. Travis is a Senior Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat, and maintainer of Rook. Join us to dive deep into the story of Rook, from Microsoft, to Quantum, to Red Hat.
In this episode we discuss:
- Ceph + Kubernetes = Rook
- The difficulty and importance of a stable storage solution for stateless applications
- How Rook leverages Kubernetes CRDs
- Why the Rook team decided to work with the CNCF
- Red Hat’s philosophy and approach to open-source
Links:
- Rook
- Red Hat
- Upbound
- Quantum
- CNCF
People mentioned:
- Bassam Tabbara (@bassamtabbara)
- Jared Watts (@jbw976)
Eric Anderson (@ericmander) and Patrick McFadin (@PatrickMcFadin) delve into the history of Apache Cassandra, the open-source NoSQL database born and bred around cloud over a decade ago. Patrick is the VP of Developer Relations at DataStax, and a member of the Cassandra Project Management Committee. On today’s episode, Patrick shares his philosophy on developer advocacy and experience in open-source.
In this episode we discuss:
- Behind the NoSQL explosion that made Cassandra the darling of the valley
- Comparing different eras of commercializing open-source, then and now
- How Patrick became a pioneer in evangelizing and community-building
- The two kinds of people to recruit for developer relations
- Why Patrick says open-source is going to “start eating clouds”
Links:
- Apache Cassandra
- Datastax
- Datastax Astra
People mentioned:
- Avinash Lakshman (@HedvigEng)
- Prashant Malik (@pmalik)
- Adrian Cawcroft (@adrianco)
- Kelsey Hightower (@kelseyhightower)
Other episodes:
- Chef with Adam Jacob
Eric Anderson (@ericmander) interviews Nick Schrock (@schrockn) about Dagster, the open-source data orchestrator for machine learning, analytics, and ETL. Nick is the founder and CEO of Elementl, and is well-known for creating the Project Infrastructure group at Facebook, which spawned GraphQL and React. On today’s episode of Contributor, Nick explains how he set out to fix an inefficiency he identified amongst the complexity of the data infrastructure domain.
In this episode we discuss:
- Dagster’s place in the industry shift towards thinking of data as a software engineering discipline
- Why Nick believes it’s time for the term “data cleaning” to be retired
- The empowerment of Dagster’s instantaneous spin-up process and local development experience
- How a partner integrated Dagster into workflow for ops workers on the warehouse floor
- One user’s testimony that, “what dbt did for our SQL, Dagster did for our Python”
Links:
- Dagster
- Elementl
- GraphQL
- React
- dbt
- Snowflake
- Apache Airflow
People mentioned:
- Lee Byron (@leeb)
- Dan Schafer (@dlschafer)
- Abe Gong (@AbeGong)
Eric Anderson (@ericmander) and Tanmai Gopal (@tanmaigo) dive into the open-source Hasura GraphQL Engine and the wider Hasura community. Hasura provides real-time GraphQL APIs for databases, so developers can focus on building applications without worrying about infrastructure. Tune in to hear the full story about how Tanmai and his team are helping engineers unlock the dream of self-serve data access.
In this episode we discuss:
- How the early Hasura team created their own version of GraphQL in parallel
- Developing community with ease of onboarding and radical transparency
- Transitioning community events into the COVID world, and looking to a future beyond travel
- Hasura’s secret sauce: the authorization framework
Links:
- Hasura
- Hasura Con’21
- DigitalOcean
People mentioned:
- Rajoshi Ghosh (@rajoshighosh)
Eric Anderson (@ericmander) is joined by the co-founders of MindsDB, Jorge Torres (@JorgeTorresAI) and Adam Carrigan (@AdamMCarrigan). MindsDB is an open-source AI layer that integrates with existing databases, from MySQL to Clickhouse. Tune in to learn how these two former college roommates are working to bring machine learning into the mainstream.
In this episode we discuss:
- Why it makes sense to run machine learning models in the database
- Partnering with Kafka, Looker, and more
- MindsDB’s initial adoption by students at Berkeley
- Different applications for MindsDB and machine learning in ecommerce, finance, and more
- The moment Jorge knew he had to get into business with Adam
Links:
- MindsDB
- RedisConf 2021
- Looker
- Apache Kafka
- ClickHouse
Other episodes
- ClickHouse with Alexey Milovidov and Ivan Blinkov
Eric Anderson (@ericmander) welcomes Peter Wang (@pwang) for a conversation about the Python ecosystem and the open-source communities that have built it. Peter is the creator of Anaconda, the near-essential Python distribution for scientific computing that makes managing packages a lot more manageable. In today’s episode, Peter offers a unique and powerful perspective on how to make the economics of open-source work for everyone.
In this episode we discuss:
- The paradox of the PVM and Python’s packaging difficulties
- How Guido van Rossum implied permission for Anaconda and the open-source Python movement
- Python as the lingua franca of a new professional class
- Looking to Roblox for inspiration for a scientific computing creator community
- Giving back to open-source communities through the NumFOCUS Foundation
Links:
- Anaconda
- NumFOCUS
- NumPy
- SciPy
- Enthought
- Jupyter
- TensorFlow
- MicroPython
- scikit-learn
- pandas
- Quansight
- Red Hat
- Roblox
People mentioned:
- Travis Oliphant (@teoliphant)
- Fernando Pérez (@fperez_org)
- Brian Granger (@ellisonbg)
- Min Ragan-Kelley (@minrk)
- Guido van Rossum (@gvanrossum)
- James Currier (@JamesCurrier)
Other episodes:
- NumPy & SciPy with Travis Oliphant
- TensorFlow with Rajat Monga
Eric Anderson (@ericmander) is joined by Alexander Gallego (@emaxerrno) for an examination of Redpanda, the source available event streaming platform designed as a drop-in replacement for Kafka. Redpanda’s storage engine is attractive to developers for its performance and simplicity, removing the complexity of running Kafka to scale and deploying with a single binary. Listen to today’s episode to learn more about how Alexander and the team at Vectorized are looking to advance the conversation around streaming into the future.
In this episode we discuss:
- What Alexander means when he says that hardware is the platform for data streaming
- The 3 things that turn a data stream into a data product
- Comparing Redpanda to Kafka and Pulsar
- A difference in product philosophy between selling to data teams vs app developers
- How Alexander approached the challenge of monetizing data infrastructure
Links:
- Redpanda
- Vectorized
- Apache Kafka
- Apache Pulsar
- Apache Spark
- Apache Beam
- Apache Storm
- Apache Flink
- Elastic
- CockroachDB
Other episodes:
- TensorFlow with Rajat Monga
- Scylla with Dor Laor
Eric Anderson (@ericmander) and Zoltan Olah (@zqzoltan) discuss Storybook, the open-source UI component development tool. Storybook supports all the most popular frontend frameworks and libraries such as React, Vue and Angular, but allows users to test and develop components in isolation. In today’s episode, learn more about the early days of the component-driven development methodology and how Storybook was saved by a passionate community of engineers.
In this episode we discuss:
- Storybook as an integral part of UI design workflow
- How Zoltan and his team inherited Storybook and saved it from being “left out to dry”
- Solving a pain point for front-end engineers with Chromatic’s UI regression testing, built on top of Storybook
- Why Zoltan compares components to APIs, and Storybook to a service mesh
- What’s happening today in the world of open-source design systems
Links:
- Storybook
- Chromatic
- Meteor
- GraphQL
- React
- Tailwind
- Selenium
- Cypress
- Material-UI
- Figma
- Learn Storybook
People mentioned:
- Dominic Nguyen (@domyen)
- Tom Coleman (@tmeasday)
- Arunoda Susiripala (@arunoda)
- Norbert de Langen (@NorbertdeLangen)
- Michael Shilman (@mshilman)
Eric Anderson (@ericmander) and Sheng Wu (@wusheng1108) discuss Apache SkyWalking, an open-source APM tool focusing on cloud-native and distributed systems. SkyWalking was originally developed in 2012 as a training tool for developers new to distributed systems architecture, but it became Sheng’s pet project for several years until he brought it to the Apache Incubator program. Listen to today’s episode for the inside scoop of how this “hidden gem” fits into the Apache network of open-source software projects.
In this episode we discuss:
- Why open-source APMs are not very common
- SkyWalking’s focus on attracting more contributors rather than users
- How a conflict of interest at Huawei led to a “bake-off” between Apache and CNCF
- The impact of Elastic changing their license on the open-source community
- The name “Skywalking,” its sources of inspiration, and an easter egg
Links:
- Apache SkyWalking
- Kubernetes
- The Apache Incubator
- CNCF
- Tetrate
- Apache ShardingSphere
- Apache APISIX
- Envoy Proxy
- Apache Airflow
- Apache Beam
- Dynatrace
- New Relic
- Elastic
- Helm
- Zipkin
Other episodes:
- Envoy Proxy with Matt Klein
Eric Anderson (@ericmander) and Fred K. Schott (@FredKSchott) dive into the world of Snowpack, an open-source, frontend build tool for web developers. Snowpack is special because it uses Javascript’s ES module system to instantly write file changes to the browser. Fred created Snowpack and the Skypack CDN to fulfill his vision of the future of the web, which he first recognized while trying to advance the Javascript ecosystem with an earlier project called Pika. On today’s episode, find out how Fred rejected the pain of modern web development, and came up with a better solution.
In this episode we discuss:
- Reconfiguring old ideas for today’s web development landscape
- How Snowpack and Skypack lighten the load when it comes to Node modules and storage space
- Questioning what it means to build a modern application that works for developers and users alike
- Skypack and the future of shared dependencies across different sites
- Why Snowpack is using an open governance framework
Links:
- Snowpack
- Skypack
- OCTO Speaker Series - Fred K. Schott
- Svelte
- React
- Ripple
- Microsite
- Deno
- Next.js
- esbuild
- webpack
People mentioned:
- Rich Harris (@Rich_Harris)
- Nate Moore (@n_moore)
Eric Anderson (@ericmander) and Travis Oliphant (@teoliphant) take a far-reaching tour through the history of the Python data community. Travis has had a hand in the creation of many open-source projects, most notably the influential libraries, NumPy and SciPy, which helped cement Python as the standard for scientific computing. Join us for the story of a fledgling community from a time “before open-source was cool,” and their lessons for today’s open-source landscape.
In this episode we discuss:
- How biomedical engineering, MRIs, and an unhappy tenure committee led to NumPy and SciPy
- Overcoming early challenges of distribution with Python
- What Travis would have done differently when he wrote NumPy
- Successfully solving the “two-option split” by adding a third option
- Community-driven open-source interacting with company-backed open-source
Links:
- NumPy
- SciPy
- Anaconda
- Quansight
- Conda
- Matplotlib
- Enthought
- TensorFlow
- PyTorch
- MXNet
- PyPi
- Jupyter
- pandas
People mentioned:
- Guido van Rossum (@gvanrossum)
- Robert Kern (Github: @rkern)
- Pearu Peterson (Github: @pearu)
- Wes McKinney (@wesmckinn)
- Charles Harris (Github: @charris)
- Francesc Alted (@francescalted)
- Fernando Perez (@fperez_org)
- Brian Granger (@ellisonbg)
Other episodes:
- TensorFlow with Rajat Monga
Eric Anderson (@ericmander) and Dor Laor (@DorLaor) go under the hood of Scylla, the open-source NoSQL database designed for low latency and high throughput in big data applications. Dor and his team have reimplemented Apache Cassandra in C++ from scratch, with additional compatibility for DynamoDB. In today’s episode, Dor shares details on the exciting work coming out of ScyllaDB, including Seastar, their open-source C++ framework. Also, check out Scylla Summit 2021 to learn what’s next for Scylla.
In this episode we discuss:
- Enabling Scylla to “gain control” by implementing Apache Cassandra in C++
- How Dor and his co-founder were ahead of the curve with their vision for virtualization
- Scylla’s unique shard-per-core architecture
- Working with distributed teams, even before the COVID-19 pandemic
- The growing significance of separating the interface from the engine in open-source
- Learn about Project Circe, which is being featured at Scylla Summit 2021 right now
Links:
- Scylla
- Seastar
- Scylla Summit 2021
- Apache Cassandra
- DynamoDB
- MongoDB
- Redhat
- QEMU
- Redis
- Vectorized
- Apache Hadoop
- Apache HBase
- Apache Beam
- Apache Flink
- Apache Spark
People mentioned:
- Avi Kivity (@AviKivity)
Eric Anderson (@ericmander) chats with Sven Efftinge (@svenefftinge), Christian Weichel (@csweichel) and Gero Posmyk-Leinemann (Github: @geropl) about their work on Gitpod, an open-source Kubernetes application that allows engineers to spin up a server-side dev-environment from a Git repository, all within their browser. The three team members are part of TypeFox, a consulting firm that specialized in developer tools for different companies before branching out into open-source projects. Upon Gero’s hiring at TypeFox, he was tasked with creating a minimum viable product for the idea that would eventually become Gitpod. Tune in to hear how shifting from consulting to working on their own open-source projects was a breath of fresh air for the developers at TypeFox.
In this episode we discuss:
- How Gitpod solves the problem of switching between multiple dev environments, and improves deep code review
- The trap that many open-source founders fall into
- Why TypeFox wanted to switch from a consulting firm to a product shop
- Details on how Gitpod handles licensing
- Learn how you can instantly try out a Gitpod environment for any existing Github repository
Links:
- Gitpod
- TypeFox
- Theia
- Kubernetes
People mentioned:
- Anton Kosyakov (@akosyakov)
- Sid Sijbrandij (@sytses)
Eric Anderson (@ericmander) interviews Graham Neray (@grahamneray) about oso, the open-source policy engine for authorization. oso was originally born from a desire to make infrastructure and security easier for developers, which is why Graham and his company describe themselves as being in the “friction-removal business.” Listen to today’s episode to learn how the team at oso are working to put security in the hands of developers.
In this episode we discuss:
- Developers building RBAC (role-based access control) systems over and over again
- Why open-source is the best way to handle authorization logic
- The history behind oso’s core policy language, Polar
- How someone beat Graham to the punch submitting oso to a Python newsletter
- Comparing oso and OPA (Open Policy Agent)
Links:
- oso
- Stripe
- Trulioo
- MongoDB
- Auth0
- Show HN
- OPA
- Polar Adventure
People mentioned:
- Sam Scott (@samososos)
- Alex Plotnick (Github: @plotnick)
- Stephen Olsen (@olsenator4)
Other episodes:
- Presto on Contributor
- OPA on Contributor
Eric Anderson (@ericmander) is joined by Rajat Monga (@rajatmonga), a co-creator of TensorFlow. Originally developed by the Google Brain team, TensorFlow is now one of the most popular open-source libraries for machine learning. The team at TensorFlow seek to “democratize” the world of AI as we know it, and by all accounts, they are succeeding. Listen to today’s episode to get inside one of the largest and most exciting open-source projects of the decade.
In this episode we discuss:
- How TensorFlow compares to other open-source projects at Google
- Taking bets on launch day numbers
- Balancing the demands of different kinds of TensorFlow users
- Lessons from Keras and PyTorch
Links:
- TensorFlow
- Keras
- PyTorch
- Kafka
- Kubernetes
- MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters
- Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data
People mentioned:
- Jeff Dean (@JeffDean)
- Andrew Ng (@AndrewYNg)
- François Chollet (@fchollet)
Eric Anderson (@ericmander) and Frank McSherry (@frankmcsherry) dive into Materialize, a source-available streaming database that lets engineers build real-time applications. Frank is a data processing expert whose work at Microsoft Research on the Timely and Differential Dataflow models culminated in the Materialize project. Tune in to today’s episode to learn how the team at Materialize are making the technology from cutting-edge data research accessible to a wider swath of users.
In this episode we discuss:
- Sharing early ideas with an “academic open source” approach
- How Materialize made a commitment to correctness
- Frank’s developmental philosophy of iterative thinking
- Novel applications for the Materialize community
- Changing the way we approach problems with real-time data processing
Links:
- Materialize
- Naiad: A Timely Dataflow System
- DryadLINQ
- Apache Arrow
People mentioned:
- Arjun Narayan (@narayanarjun)
- Derek Murray (@mrry)
Eric Anderson (@ericmander) speaks with Thomas Graf (@tgraf__) about Cilium, the open-source networking, observability, and security software for cloud-native applications based on eBPF. Thomas is the co-founder and CTO of Isovalent, which maintains both eBPF and Cilium. Listen to today’s episode for a discussion of how Thomas’ work has leveled up the Linux kernel and the possibilities of network infrastructure in a cloud-native world.
In this episode we discuss:
- The impact of simultaneous development on Cilium and eBPF
- Google’s incorporation of Cilium
- Shortening the gap between writing kernel code and its deployment
- What JavaScript and eBPF have in common
- Cilium’s sister project, Hubble
Links:
- Cilium
- eBPF
- Isovalent
- Red Hat
- OpenShift
- Kubernetes
- Docker
- New GKE Dataplane V2 increases security and visibility for containers
- SPIFFE
- Istio
People mentioned:
- Brendan Gregg (@brendangregg)
Other episodes:
- Istio on Contributor
Eric Anderson (@ericmander) and Jeremiah Lowin (@jlowin) discuss Prefect, a workflow management system and data orchestration tool under development as an open-source project. Jeremiah initially created Prefect to solve a technical challenge specific to his own work, but soon realized that it was appealing to a very wide range of different clients. Listen to today’s episode to learn why Jeremiah believes most attempts to build a unified framework for solving data orchestration fail.
In this episode we discuss:
- Solving the “negative engineering problem”
- Learning from the complaints of data engineers at Apache Airflow
- The difficulty of having a product that serves two masters
- How COVID changed the direction of Prefect
Links:
- Prefect
- Apache Airflow
- Why Not Airflow?
People mentioned:
- Jim O'Shaughnessy (@jposhaughnessy)
- Patrick O’Shaughnessy (@patrick_oshag)
Eric Anderson (@ericmander) catches up with Torin Sandall (@sometorin), co-creator of Open Policy Agent (OPA), the open-source, general-purpose policy engine. By focusing on demonstrating OPA’s value through case studies, targeted interviews, and word-of-mouth, Torin and the folks at Styra were able to grow OPA into the emerging standard for unified policy enforcement across the cloud-native stack.
In this episode we discuss:
- When Netflix stumbled across OPA and delivered its “Cinderella moment”
- Why OPA was designed to be developer-centric
- The value of demonstrating OPA’s use cases to the industry
- How one user created an RPG engine with OPA
Links:
- Open Policy Agent
- Styra
- OpenStack
- LinkerD
- Hacker News
- Kubernetes
- KubeCon
- OPA Gatekeeper
- conftest
- Corrupting the Open Policy Agent to Run My Games
- Envoy
- Styra Academy
People mentioned:
- Tim Hinrichs (@tlhinrchs)
- William Morgan (@wm)
- Kevin Hoffman (@kevinhoffman)
Other episodes:
- LinkerD on Contributor
- Envoy on Contributor
Eric Anderson (@ericmander) and Maxim Fateev (@mfateev) trace the development of Temporal, an open-source workflow orchestration engine. At Uber, Maxim co-created the project’s predecessor, Cadence, but Temporal’s roots stretch farther back to include lessons learned at Amazon and Microsoft. In this episode, learn how 18 years of experience in asynchronous messaging and workflows culminated in the foundation of Temporal.
In this episode we discuss:
- Why Maxim quit Uber to start his own company
- Differences between Temporal and Cadence
- How Uber is filling the position that Google once had incubating open-source projects
- Maxim’s advice for aspiring open-source founders
Related Links:
- Temporal
- Cadence
- Kafka
- HashiCorp
- BanzaiCloud
- Hacker News
- Andreesen Horowitz
- TChannel
- Hadoop
People mentioned:
- Samar Abbas (@samarabbas77)
Eric Anderson (@ericmander) and Manish Jain (@manishrjain) discuss the impact of Dgraph, an open-source database with a graph backend that Manish describes as “a search engine acting as a database.” Manish took a gamble when he chose GraphQL as his project’s query language shortly after its release by Facebook in 2015. Now, GraphQL has grown immensely in popularity and the bet has paid off, as Dgraph leads the cutting edge of databases in this new space. Make sure to check out the Dgraph team’s conference, “GraphQL In Space,” which will be held virtually on September 10th at graphqlcon.space.
In this episode we discuss:
- How Manish was ahead of the curve at Google
- The chance circumstances in the Australian job market that led to Dgraph
- Building trust between open-source developers and their community
- Why the Dgraph team decided to hold their upcoming conference “In Space”
- The future of databases and GraphQL
Related Links:
- Dgraph
- GraphQL In Space
- GraphQL
- Badger
- MongoDB
- BigTable
- Cassandra
- Spanner
- Elasticsearch
People mentioned:
- Scott Kelly (@StationCDRKelly)
Eric Anderson (@ericmander) talks to Martin Traverso (@mtraverso), Dain Sundstrom (@daindumb) and David Phillips (@electrum32) about their collaboration on Presto, an open-source distributed SQL query engine for big data. The three engineers worked together at three different companies before deciding to solve an efficiency problem for data analytics at Facebook in 2012. Listen to today’s episode to learn about the careful planning and technical philosophy behind the development and design of Presto.
In this episode we discuss:
- Starting an open-source project at Facebook in the early 2010s
- The importance of making Presto “dirt simple to install”
- What is “documentation driven development”
- Bootstrapping the growth of an open-source community
- How a single query caused a brownout across Facebook infrastructure
Related Links:
- Presto
- Starburst
- Ning
- Netezza
- ProofPoint
- Hadoop
- Postgres
- Hive
- OpenCompute
- @Scale
- Arm Treasure Data
- Qubole
People mentioned:
- Jay Parikh (@jayparikh)
Nathan Killoran (@co9olguy) guides Eric Anderson (@ericmander) through the cutting-edge world of quantum machine learning at Xanadu, a quantum computing company that is innovating with its use of photonics. Nathan is Xanadu’s Head of Software, Algorithms, & Quantum Machine Learning, and has detailed insight on their main open-source software projects, StrawberryFields and PennyLane. On today’s episode, Nathan explains how the barrier to contributing may be lower than you think, even if you don’t have a PhD in quantum physics.
In this episode we discuss:
- Designing software for Xanadu’s unique approach to quantum computing
- Machine learning, differentiable programming and more in the quantum domain
- How even high school students can contribute to an open-source quantum computing project
- Is there a road map for quantum machine learning?
- Nathan’s “blue sky” interview questions
Links:
- Xanadu
- StrawberryFields
- PennyLane
- ProjectQ
- TensorFlow Quantum
- PyTorch
- Qiskit
- Pyquil
- Cirq
- Alpine Quantum Technologies
- Quantum Open Source Foundation
- Unitary Fund
People mentioned:
- Christian Weedbrook, CEO of Xanadu (@_cweedbrook)
Eric Anderson (@ericmander) talks to Alexey Milovidov (@alexey-milovidov) and Ivan Blinkov (@blinkov) about their work on Clickhouse, an open source analytical database from the team at Yandex. Originally designed to support Yandex.Metrica, word of this powerful tool spread rapidly inside the company, and the idea was hatched to make Clickhouse into a truly open source project. Tune in to learn about how Alexey petitioned management to accept what initially seemed like a “crazy” idea - and how the risk paid off.
In this episode we discuss:
- Differences between Clickhouse and similar products
- Why some open source projects are more successful than others
- The history of open source at Yandex
- What makes a good open source developer
- Building an international community
Links:
- Clickhouse
- Yandex.Metrica
- Altinity
- Postgres
- Oracle
- Infobright
- InfinityDB
- MongoDB
- Vertica
- Dremel: Interactive Analysis of Web-Scale Datasets (2010)
- CatBoost
- BEM
- Presto
- Druid
- Greenplum
- Apache Spark
Eric Anderson (@ericmander) chats with William Morgan (@wm), CEO of Buoyant and a creator of the open source service mesh, LinkerD. As a former infrastructure engineer at Twitter, William leveraged his experience there to help develop what would become effectively the first service mesh. Listen to today’s episode to find out how the team at Buoyant originally coined the term, and are continuing to define the concept today.
In this episode we discuss:
- Pioneering the very first service mesh
- Why Buoyant rejected the open core model
- How the industry is shifting away from the “nights and weekends” community
- Rewriting LinkerD from scratch
Links:
- LinkerD
- Buoyant
- Dive
- Kubernetes
- Docker
- Finagle
- HAProxy
- NGINX
- CNCF
- Prometheus
- Cisco Webex
- Istio
- Full show notes and transcript.
Eric Anderson (@ericmander) welcomes Chef co-founder Adam Jacob (@adamhjk) to talk about the popular open source service. He and co-founder Nathan Haneysmith originally started the company as a way to sell automation services to startups, but wanted to expand their abilities to serve more clients. From naming the company to governance and engaging with contributors, Adam dives into why it was important to him to go the open source route and how the business model works.
In this episode we discuss:
- How Chef got started
- The decision to be open source
- What the business model looks like
- Contributors and community members
- Where Chef is today and where it’s headed
Links
- Chef
- Puppet
- The Apache Software Foundation
- Docker
- Perl
- Full show notes and transcript.
Eric Anderson (@ericmander) and Sven Mawson (@smawson) dive into the past, present and future of Istio, an open source service mesh born of collaboration between IBM and Google. Sven is a Senior Staff Engineer at Google and co-founder of the Istio project. In today’s episode, he shares the story of how two titans came together for a tool that anyone can use and contribute to.
In this episode we discuss:
- How Google asked IBM to drop their Amalgam8 project
- The involvement of Lyft, Envoy and Matt Klein (@mattklein123)
- Making moves at QCon
- A counter-intuitive marketing strategy
- What work still needs to be done
Links
- Istio
- Google Cloud Endpoints
- Kubernetes
- Envoy
- QCon
- NGinX
- Full show notes and transcript.
Eric Anderson (@ericmander) and Matt Klein (@mattklein123) discuss the beginnings of Envoy Proxy, an open source proxy now governed by the CNCF. Matt is a software engineer at Lyft and creator of the Envoy. On today’s episode, Matt gives the inside scoop on the benefits and challenges of cultivating a self-sustaining open source community.
In this episode we discuss:
- How Matt’s experience at Twitter informed development of Envoy
- Working with Google
- The role of marketing in Envoy’s success
- Why building an open source community is like “total controlled anarchy”
- Finding the right contributors and maintainers
Links:
- Envoy Proxy
- Finagle
- Hystrix
- NginX
- HA Proxy
- Istio
- CNCF
- Full show notes and transcript.
Eric Anderson (@ericmander) hosts Haoyuan Li (@haoyuan), also known as H.Y., creator of Spark Streaming as well as the open source data orchestration system, Alluxio. H.Y. founded Alluxio, Inc. to further develop the research project that he first created as a doctoral student at UC Berkeley’s AMPLab. Listen to today’s episode to learn more about how H.Y. identified an opportunity to disrupt cloud storage with an open source project as his Ph.D. thesis.
In this episode we discuss:
- H.Y.’s analysis of the data storage industry’s cyclical history
- How H.Y. balanced academics with the Alluxio community
- The 3 types of Alluxio contributors
- Use cases for Alluxio
Links:
- Alluxio
- Spark Streaming
- Kubernetes
- Presto
- TensorFlow
- AMPLab
Learn about Contributor, a podcast about the best open source projects and the communities that build them.