Show Notes* (01:55) Alex reflected on his upbringing as an immigrant moving from Colombia to the US at 14. * (07:06) Alex recalled his undergraduate experience at NYU’s Polytechnic School of Engineering. where he study Computer Science and do research in cryptography. * (16:40) Alex went over his first job working as a software engineer at FactSet Research System. * (20:13) Alex walked through his time as the first employee and the first engineer at YieldMo. * (24:30) Alex talked about his hiring philosophy for engineers who care about their craft. * (28:03) Alex touched on the backstory behind the creation of Concord, with Shinji Kim and Robert Blafford, while working at YieldMo. * (32:26) Alex shared lessons learned from his first-time founder experience with Concord. * (35:22) Alex went over his two years at Akamai as a Platform Infrastructure Engineer after the Concord acquisition. * (40:01) Alex introduced his work on SMF, an RPC framework designed for microsecond tail latency. * (43:41) Alex shared the story behind the founding of Redpanda Data, which builds a high-performance, Apache Kafka-compatible data streaming platform for mission-critical workloads. * (47:19) Alex walked through the major benefits of choosing Redpanda over Kafka. * (51:03) Alex explained his decision to open-source Redpanda in November 2020 under the Source Available License BSL. * (56:08) Alex mentioned successful tactics his team employed in order to raise the adoption and contribution to the open-source library. * (01:01:13) Alex unpacked the design of Redpanda's Intelligent Data API. * (01:08:55) Alex provided his perspective on the modern streaming data architecture. * (01:13:24) Alex shared valuable hiring lessons to attract the right people who are excited about Redpanda’s mission. * (01:18:30) Alex talked about his experience choosing customers for Redpanda. * (01:20:33) Alex shared fundraising advice to founders who are seeking the right investors for their startups. * (01:23:23) Alex gave advice to a smart, driven minority who aspires to work on ambitious, technically deep, and challenging problems. * (01:28:18) Closing segment.
Alex's Contact Info* LinkedIn * Twitter * Website * GitHub
Redpanda's Resources* Website | Twitter | LinkedIn | Slack | GitHub | Contributing Doc * About Redpanda | Platform Capabilities | Customers * Docs | Redpanda University * Reports and Guides | Benchmarks * Hack The Planet Scholarship
Mentioned ContentBlog Posts* Redpanda raison d'etre (Feb 2019) * Thread-per-core buffer management for a modern Kafka-API storage system (Sep 2020) * Redpanda is now free and Source Available (Nov 2020) * Redpanda creates Redpanda, the Intelligent Data API Platform, backed by $15.5M initial funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners and GV (Jan 2021) * The Intelligent Data API (Jan 2021) * Redpanda Wasm engine architecture (June 2021) * We raised an additional $50M to drive the future of streaming data. Join us! (Feb 2022) * Redpanda gives Kafka a Run for Its Money (InfoWorld, May 2022) * Alex Gallego Builds Redpanda To Simplify And Unify Real-Time Streaming Data (Forbes, June 2022)
Talks* Distributed Stream Processing over thousands of Datacenters (GeeCON, Aug 2017) * How to Build the Fastest RPC (Nov 2017) * Co-designing Raft + thread-per-core execution model for the Kafka-API (Dec 2021)
People1. Andy Pavlo 2. Leslie Lamport 3. Kyle Kingsbury
NotesMy conversation with Alex was recorded back in August 2022. Since then, I recommend checking out these resources: