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Staff

Ben Popper

Mobile Observability: monitoring performance through cracked screens, old batteries, and crappy Wi-Fi

Today we chat with Austin Emmons, an iOS developer at Embrace, where he spent time rebuilding their SDK to work with OpenTelemetry. He discusses the challenge of tracking performance and watching for edge cases when your app is deployed across dozens of devices with enormous variability in their hardware, software, and network capabilities.

Where does Postgres fit in a world of GenAI and vector databases?

Today we chat with Avthar Sewrathan, AI Lead at Timescale, about adapting developers’ favorite database management system, Postgres, to support a range of new technologies involved in the GenAI ecosystem, especially vector databases. Avthar details his long history with Postgres and how clients are weighing the build vs. buy question when it comes to choosing a database to support their newly minted GenAI initiatives.

From PHP to JavaScript to Kubernetes: how one backend engineer evolved over time

On today’s episode, we chat with a listener, Geshan Manandhar, who has been working in the world of software engineering for two decades. He started programming in Kathmandu during the days of dial-up. Since then he’s worked across three continents and today is a senior software engineer at Simply Wall Street. He gives his advice on how developers can change with the times and what it’s like to move into the era of serverless containers.

Battling ticket bots and untangling taxes at the frontiers of e-commerce

On today's episode we chat with Ilya Grigorik, a Distinguished Engineer and Technical Advisor to the CEO at Shopify. From battling hordes of bots trying to scalp seats before humans can get their hands on concert tickets, to automatically handling relevant tax codes and regulations across countries and states so small merchants can focus on their business, Ilya shares some of the projects he enjoys most and the challenges that make e-commerce interesting for software developers.

How to build open-source apps in a highly regulated industry

Today we chat with Reshma Khilnani, co-founder and CEO of Medplum, an open-source platform enabling companies to build healthcare applications like EHRs and patient portals. She discusses how to iterate rapidly in an industry where SOC2 compliance is just the beginning (one of the compliance tests is named after Dante’s epic poem depicting the nine circles of hell, if that gives you an idea).

Say goodbye to "junior" engineering roles

We chat with Kirimgeray Kirimli, a director at Flatiron Software and CEO of Snapshot Reviews, a tool that measures developer productivity based on activity from Github, Jira, standups, and more. Kirimli explains how Snapshot Reviews tries to measure a developer's true impact, not just the volume of their activity. Plus, why "junior engineer" is not likely to be a job available to humans for much longer.

Making ETL pipelines a thing of the past

On today’s episode we chat with Cassandra Shum, VP of Field Engineering at RelationalAI, about her company’s efforts to create what it calls the industry’s first coprocessor for data clouds and language models. The goal is to allow companies to keep all their data where it is today while still tapping into the capabilities of the latest generation of AI tools.

This startup uses a team of AI agents to write and review their pull requests

In this episode we chat with Saumil Patel, co-founder and CEO of Squire AI. The company uses an agentic workflow to automatically review your code, write your pull requests, and even review and provide opinions on other people’s PRs. Different AI systems with specific capabilities work together as a mixture of experts, following a chain of thought approach to provide recommendations on security, code quality, error handling, performance, scalability, and more.