Software Misadventures
Activity Overview
Episode publication activity over the past year
Episodes
Podcast update and news!
08 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Some reflections on running the podcast and Ronak has some eggciting news to share :) Music: Vlad Gluschenko — Forest License: Creative Commons A...
Uncrating the Oxide Rack | Bryan Cantrill, Steve Tuck (Oxide)
24 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Oxide co-founders Bryan and Steve are back on the show to give an impromptu peek at the Oxide server rack and to chat about writing their own manufact...
LLMs are like your weird, over-confident intern | Simon Willison (Datasette)
10 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Known for co-creating Django and Datasette, as well as his thoughtful writing on LLMs, Simon Willison joins the show to chat about blogging as an acco...
From "AI mid-life crisis" to the "time of my life" | Steve Yegge (Sourcegraph)
27 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
A Silicon Valley veteran and known for his writings like "The Death of the Junior Developer", Steve Yegge joins the show to chat about his "AI Midlife...
Early Twitter's fail-whale wars | Dmitriy Ryaboy
13 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
A veteran of early Twitter's fail whale wars, Dmitriy joins the show to chat about the time when 70% of the Hadoop cluster got accidentally deleted, t...
Discovering the power of story-telling in engineering | Adam Gordon Bell (CoRecursive)
06 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Known for hosting the CoRecursive podcast, which dives into the stories behind the code, Adam joins the show to chat about discovering that the great ...
Behind designing Kubernetes' APIs | Brian Grant (Google)
30 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
As the original architect and API design lead of Kubernetes, Brian joins the show to chat about why "APIs are forever", the keys to evangelizing impac...
Ditching the rules to build a team that lasts | Bryan Cantrill, Steve Tuck (Oxide)
23 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
From building a new kind of server to building a new kind of company, co-founders Bryan and Steve join the show to chat about their "meet cute" and th...
Grokking Synthetic Biology | Dmitriy Ryaboy (Twitter, Ginkgo Bioworks)
16 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
From building a data platform and Parquet at Twitter to using AI to make biology easier to engineer at Ginkgo Bioworks, Dmitriy joins the show to chat...
Growing and selling an indie business | Michael Lynch (TinyPilot)
09 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Having quit Google in 2018 to bootstrap indie software businesses, Michael is known for writing very transparently about the ups and downs of his jour...
Breaking distributed systems for fun and profit | Kyle Kingsbury (Jepsen)
02 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Well-known for his insightful and meticulous write-ups on testing distributed systems, Kyle (aka Aphyr) joins the show to chat about the origins of Je...
The 3 traps of open source funding models | Wes McKinney (pandas, Voltron Data, Posit)
25 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
From creating one of the Python's most influential libraries to co-founding Voltron Data, Wes joins the show to chat about why the book cover of the p...
Impact Driven Development | Matt Klein (Envoy, bitdrift)
18 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
From creating Envoy to co-founding bitdrift to reimagine mobile observability, Matt joins the show to chat about being told to simply "write some prox...
Build the scary stuff | Bryan Cantrill (Oxide)
11 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
From being a distinguished engineer at Sun Microsystems to co-founding Oxide Computer Company to build a new kind of server, Bryan joins the show to c...
Lessons from the early days building Kafka and Confluent | Jay Kreps
04 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
From writing the first lines of Kafka over a Christmas break as a LinkedIn engineer to running a public company as the CEO of Confluent, Jay joins the...
Building 2 Iconic OSSs Back-to-Back | Maxime Beauchemin (Airflow, Preset)
21 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
If you've worked on data problems, you probably have heard of Airflow and Superset, two powerful tools that have cemented their place in the data ecos...
Become a LLM-ready Engineer | Maxime Beauchemin (Airflow, Preset)
14 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
If you've worked on data problems, you probably have heard of Airflow and Superset, two powerful tools that have cemented their place in the data ecos...
Life as a Distinguished Engineer | Joakim Recht (Uber)
30 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Out of thousands of engineers at Uber, there's only a handful of Distinguished Engineers and Joakim was one of them. In this conversation we chat abou...
Learning in public | Kelsey Hightower
16 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
We're super excited to have Kelsey back on the show! Our last conversation was around his incredible career journey - from working at McDonald's after...
Engineer's guide to startup advising | Kelsey Hightower
02 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
We're super excited to have Kelsey back on the show! Our last conversation was around his incredible career journey - from working at McDonald's after...
The hard power of management and the soft power of senior ICs | Josh Wills
19 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
As a self-described "gainfully unemployed data person", Josh Wills is an angel investor and has worked on and led data teams at Slack, Cloudera, Weave...
From High School Suspension to US Chief Data Scientist | DJ Patil
05 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Known for coining the term "Data Scientist", DJ is a renowned technologist with a diverse background spanning academia, industry, and government. Havi...
Building Diverse Engineering Teams | Erica Lockheimer
20 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Erica is a former VP of Engineering at LinkedIn. Having almost dropped out of college, Erica's journey in tech is a testament to her perseverance and ...
Stories behind building HashiCorp | Mitchell Hashimoto
30 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Mitchell co-founded HashiCorp in 2012 and created many important infrastructure tools, such as Terraform, Vagrant, Packer, and Consul. In addition to ...
Practical Guide to More Effective Mentorship | Dave O'Connor (Google, Twilio, Elastic)
16 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
After 17 years building SRE teams at Google and serving as the Site Lead for Engineering in Dublin, Dave joined Elastic as the Sr Director of Engineer...
War stories from early days of engineering at LinkedIn | David Henke (LinkedIn, Yahoo)
04 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
At the personal request of Reid Hoffman to emerge from early retirement, David joined LinkedIn in 2009 during a period of rapid growth to help stabili...
Automating away your job as a Data Scientist | Melissa Runfeldt (Salesforce, CueIn)
12 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Before joining CueIn last year as a Founding Data Scientist, Melissa was a Lead Data Scientist at Salesforce working on the Einstein Platform that foc...
Open sourcing LinkedIn's Derived Data Platform | Felix GV (LinkedIn)
28 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
What's it like to open source an internal project at a big tech company like LinkedIn? When should a company open source a project and what are the be...
When enough was enough - practical and emotional drivers for leaving big tech to bootstrap Metacast | Arnab Deka & Ilya Bezdelev (AWS, Google)
07 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Should engineers and product managers "stay in their lanes"? What big company habits should you keep vs unlearn when transitioning to working at a sta...
Pete Warden - On launching "AI in a Box" and building a hardware edge AI company - #24
23 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
What's "AI in a Box"? Pete Warden joins the show to share a new project he recently launched that encapulates Language Transcription/Translation and Q...
Nathan Marz - On changing the economics of building large-scale software with Rama - #23
22 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
What does it mean to change the economics of software development? Nathan Marz joins the show to share how they reduced the cost of building Mastodon ...
Kelsey Hightower - On retiring as Distinguished Engineer from Google at 42 (Part 2)
03 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Kelsey Hightower was a Distinguished Engineer at Google, where he worked on Google Cloud Platform. In this second part of the conversation, we focus o...
Kelsey Hightower - On retiring as Distinguished Engineer from Google at 42 (Part 1)
24 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Kelsey Hightower was a Distinguished Engineer at Google, where he worked on Google Cloud Platform. In this first part of the conversation, we delve in...
Julie Amundson - Career breaks, job search amidst hiring freezes, positioning yourself and much more - #20
27 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Julie Amundson is a Sr Staff Software Engineer at Google working on Machine Learning Infrastructure. Prior to Google, she was the Director of Machine...
Chris Pruett - On deciding to leave LinkedIn and co-founding Jam, values based decision making and compassionate leadership - #19
03 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Chris Pruett is the CTO and Co-founder of Jam - a new way to share and listen to bite-sized audio. Prior to Jam, Chris spent 9+ years at LinkedIn gro...
Software Misadventures Update and Plans for 2022
25 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Short episode about reflections on the past year and plans for 2022.
Kailash Nadh - On being an absurdist and building the tech team at Zerodha, India's largest stock broker - #18
25 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Kailash is the CTO at Zerodha, the largest stock broker in India. In this conversation, we speak with him about absurdism - a philosophy that guides ...
Michael Lynch - On quitting google for indie hacking, bootstrapping to $450K+ ARR in public, writing personal retrospectives and more - #17
14 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Michael Lynch is the founder of TinyPilot. After doing software engineering at Microsoft and Google for 7 years, Michael decided in 2018 to quit and s...
Cory Watson - Leading observability teams at Twitter & Stripe, how to succeed in a new org, effective ways to advocate for your team and more - #16
12 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Cory is currently a Solutions Engineer at Jeli.io and very well known in the community for his work on Observability. His career in observability beg...
Ashwin Kumar - On learning new things by breaking them down, the secret to winning >$100k from hackathons, the art of storytelling, and much more - #15
12 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Ashwin is a Startup Partnership Lead at Stripe. From web development to co-founding a YC startup, to deep learning, Ashwin has a knack for picking up ...
Bruno Connelly - Building and leading the global SRE org at LinkedIn - #14
12 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Bruno Connelly is a VP of Engineering at LinkedIn. He leads the Site Engineering org responsible for LinkedIn's production infrastructure. He joins t...
Lorin Hochstein - On how Netflix learns from incidents, software as socio-technical systems, writing persuasively and more - #13
14 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
With 5+ years of experience building resilient systems at the Netflix scale, Lorin joins the show to chat about his favorite incident story, the path ...
Spoons (Daniel Spoonhower) - On building Lightstep, being customer focused, developing systems at Google scale and much more - #12
09 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Spoons is the Co-founder and Chief Architect of Lightstep. He joins the show to talk about building systems at Google scale and various aspects that ...
Emmanuel Ameisen - On production ML at Stripe scale, leading 100+ ML projects, iterating fast, and much more - #11
11 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Having led 100+ ML projects at Insight and built ML systems at Stripe scale, Emmanuel joins the show to chat about how to build useful ML products and...
Todd Underwood - On lessons from running ML systems at Google for a decade, what it takes to be a ML SRE, challenges with generalized ML platforms and much more - #10
07 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Todd is a Sr Director of Engineering at Google where he leads Site Reliability Engineering teams for Machine Learning. Having recently presented on ho...
Evan Estola - On recommendation systems going bad, hiring ML engineers, giving constructive feedback, filter bubbles and much more - #9
23 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Evan Estola (https://twitter.com/estola) is a Director of Engineering at Flatiron Health where he's leading software engineering teams focused on buil...
Uma Chingunde - On managing migrations, growing engineering teams and much more - #8
09 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Uma is a VP of Engineering at Render. In this episode, she shared with us her insights on how to successfully manage infrastructure migrations. We dis...
Charity Majors - On database outages, journey as a co-founder, thriving under pressure and growing as an engineer - #7
20 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Charity Majors (https://twitter.com/mipsytipsy) is the co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb.io. Before this she worked at Facebook, Parse and Linden Lab o...
Tammy Bryant Butow - On failure injection, chaos engineering, extreme sports and being curious - #6
07 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Tammy Bryant Butow is a Principal SRE at Gremlin where she works on Chaos Engineering. In this episode, we discuss how her curiosity led her to the w...
Oliver Leaver-Smith - On how "just a monitoring change" took down the entire site and resilience engineering - #5
19 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Oliver Leaver-Smith, better known as Ols, is a Senior Devops Engineer at Sky Betting and Gaming. In this episode, we discuss how a seemingly simple m...
Ryan Underwood - On debugging the Linux kernel - #4
06 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Ryan Underwood is a Staff SRE and tech lead on the Helix and Zookeeper SRE team at LinkedIn. Prior to LinkedIn, he was an SRE at Machine Zone and Goog...
David Henke - On building a culture of "Site Up" at LinkedIn and Yahoo! - #3
23 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
David is LinkedIn's former SVP of Engineering and Operations. He came out of retirement to join LinkedIn in 2009 during a time of rapid growth. After ...
Julia Evans - On kubernetes scheduler bugs, TCP performance regressions and debugging tips - #2
06 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, we speak with Julia Evans. Julia runs a programming zines business, called Wizard Zines (https://wizardzines.com/), where she creates...
Kelsey Hightower - On ways kubernetes can break, being an effective leader and much more - #1
04 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, we speak with Kelsey Hightower who is currently a Principal Developer Advocate at Google and one of the most influential individuals ...
Introducing Software Misadventures Podcast - #0
28 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, Ronak, Austin and Guang share the origin story - who they are, what this podcast is about and why they are doing this. They've see...