Alexa's Input (AI)
By Alexa Griffith
~Opinions are my own~
Twitter: @lexal0u
Other links: linktr.ee/alexagriffith
Alexa's Input (AI) Apr 30, 2023
Platform Engineering with Mauricio (Salaboy) Salatino (Part 1)
Mauricio (Salaboy) Salatino is a Senior Software Engineer II at Diagrid, author of Platform Engineering on Kubernetes, blogger, and involved in multiple open source projects like Knative, Dapr, vcluster, and Crossplane. In part one of this podcast, Mauricio and I discuss all things platform engineering - how he came about writing a book, the state of platform engineering today, continuous delivery practices, Kubernetes abstractions, cloud-native application challenges, and much more!
Find Mauricio's: blog, linkedin, twitter
You can support this podcast on the anchor page. Make sure to subscribe and follow Alexa's Input Twitter account to get notified when a new podcast episode comes out.
Networking with Alex Saroyan (Part 2)
Alex Saroyan, CEO and Co-Founder of Netris, joins me in this episode (part 2) to continue our discussion on a host of networking topics - programmable network services, firewalls, smart NICs, networking in hybrid cloud, the evolution of networking and much more!
You can find Alex on Twitter: @alex_saroyan
You can support this podcast on the anchor page. Make sure to subscribe and follow Alexa's Input Twitter account to get notified when a new podcast episode comes out.
Networking with Alex Saroyan (Part 1)
Alex Saroyan, CEO and Co-Founder of Netris, joins me in this episode to discuss a host of networking topics - how he got into networking, how Netris was founded, what is networking, how public cloud changed networking and how it differs from on premise infrastructure, various networking topics, and much more!
You can support this podcast on the anchor page. Make sure to subscribe and follow Alexa's Input Twitter account to get notified when a new podcast episode comes out.
Kubeflow with Josh Bottum
Josh Bottum, Product Manager for the Kubeflow community, joins me in this episode to discuss all things Kubeflow related - how the project got started, what problems Kubeflow solves, supported features, how Kubeflow differentiates itself from other products, the future of the project, open source experiences and learnings, and much more!
You can support this podcast on the anchor page. Make sure to subscribe and follow Alexa's Input Twitter account to get notified when a new podcast episode comes out.
All Things Serverless and Knative with Evan Anderson (Part 2)
Evan Anderson, Senior Staff Engineer at VMWare, joins me on part 2 of this episode to discuss Istio's role in Knative, Knative's goals, features, requirements and dependencies, provisioning resources in a serverless world, the future of serverless, removing barriers for developers and much more!
Evan graduated with a degree in Computer Science from Dartmouth College. He worked at Google for 15 years and left as a Senior Staff Software Engineer. He now works at VMWare as a Senior Staff Engineer and manages the open-source project Knative.
Links:
Evan's twitter, linkedin, Knative's YouTube
You can support this podcast on the anchor page. Make sure to subscribe and follow Alexa's Input Twitter account to get notified when a new podcast episode comes out.
All Things Serverless and Knative with Evan Anderson (Part 1)
Evan Anderson, Senior Staff Engineer at VMWare, joins me on this episode to discuss the meaning of "serverless", his work experience at Google, the development of projects like Kubernetes and Knative, his thoughts around the cloud, managing an open-source project, and much more!
Evan graduated with a degree in Computer Science from Dartmouth College. He worked at Google for 15 years and left as a Senior Staff Software Engineer. He now works at VMWare as a Senior Staff Engineer and manages the open-source project Knative.
Links:
Evan's twitter, linkedin, Knative's YouTube
You can support this podcast on the anchor page. Make sure to subscribe and follow Alexa's Input Twitter account to get notified when a new podcast episode comes out.
Kafka Streaming and Confluent with Danica Fine
Danica Fine, Senior Developer Advocate at Confluent, joins this episode to talk about how Confluent provides tools for creating a streaming data platform. We discuss what Confluent is and the problems it solves, Confluent Cloud, Kafka, some interesting use cases and much more!
Danica graduated with a B.A. in Logic, Information, and Computation and a Masters of Science in Engineering in Scientific Computing from the University of Pennsylvania. Danica worked as a software engineer for almost 5 years at Bloomberg, where she worked on streaming infrastructure. Danica has been working at Confluent as a Senior Developer Advocate for a little over one year.
Links:
Danica's twitter, Confluent's YouTube channel, Confluent's engineering blog
You can support this podcast on the anchor page. Make sure to subscribe and follow Alexa's Input Twitter account to get notified when a new podcast episode comes out.
Nontraditional Backgrounds, Workplace Environments and Being a Woman in Tech with Donna Hutchinson
In this episode, Donna Hutchinson, Senior Software Engineer at CircleCI, joins me to discuss her path into tech as someone with a nontraditional background, her experiences with workspace environments and how to make sure that you are in a space where you are supported and can grow, how being a woman has affected her career as a software engineer, and much more!
Donna graduated from Queen's University Belfast with First Class Honours in BSc Business Information Technology. She then went to work for JP Morgan Chase & Co. before transitioning to CircleCI, working as a Senior Software Engineer.
You can find my Kubecon EU talk here: Exploring ML Model Serving with KServe (with fun drawings) - Alexa Nicole Griffith, Bloomberg
You can support this podcast on the anchor page. Make sure to subscribe and follow Alexa's Input Twitter account to get notified when a new podcast episode comes out.
Talks with Founders - Daniel Berlind
Daniel Berlind, co-founder/CEO of Snappt Inc and President of Berlind Properties, joins me on this episode to discuss his experience founding his first tech startup. We talk about what he learned from being a professional baseball player, cofounder relationships, success that comes through failure, experiencing two accelerators, when to pivot your business and find product-market fit, pitching to VCs and choosing the right ones help build the company, aligning on values and culture, and much more!
You can support this podcast on the anchor page. Make sure to subscribe and follow Alexa's Input Twitter account to get notified when a new podcast episode comes out.
To Leave or Not to Leave? with Anna Rosenthal
Anna Rosenthal, Software Engineer at Github, joins me in this episode to talk about leaving a company. We discuss a variety of topics including work relationships, when to leave, reasons for/against leaving, learning and pay, interviewing, recruiters, rejections, offers, and much more!
Anna's links: Twitter and Substack
You can support this podcast on the anchor page. Make sure to subscribe and follow Alexa's Input Twitter account to get notified when a new podcast episode comes out.
Talks with Founders- Mahmoud Arram
Mahmoud Arram, co-founder and CTO of Bluecore, joins me on this episode to discuss the importance of having a co-founder you trust, his previous startup ideas and side projects, how he got into e-commerce and the idea for Bluecore developed, the process of pitching their idea and going through Techstars, how his role has changed throughout time, scaling while maintaining innovation, and much more!
You can support this podcast on the anchor page. Make sure to subscribe and follow Alexa's Input Twitter account to get notified when a new podcast episode comes out.
Talks with Founders - Tameem Iftikhar
Tameem Iftikhar joins me on this talks with founders episode to discuss his career path, his experiences working in early-stage startups and being a co-founder, the tech stars program, and much more! While Tameem was getting his degree from the University of Toronto, he participated in a co-op at IBM and worked for the startup Nightly.to. After graduating he worked for SurfEasy and then Symantec as a Principal Engineer when it was acquired. Now, he is the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Flywheel.
You can support this podcast on the anchor page. Make sure to subscribe and follow Alexa's Input Twitter account to get notified when a new podcast episode comes out.
Talks with Founders - Memo Sanchez
Guillermo (Memo) Sanchez joins this episode to talk about being a tech founder. After working at FactSet for over 5 years, he co-founded Reonomy. Then, he was a manager at Blink Health and VP of Engineering at DelShah Capital before co-founding another startup, Pragmic that was recently acquired by dev01. Memo discusses getting into tech, his first startup and the lessons he learned, navigating co-founder relationships, going through an acquisition, why he went to a bigger company after his first startup, the advice he has for anyone looking to found a startup now, and much more!
You can support this podcast on the anchor page. Make sure to subscribe and follow Alexa's Input Twitter account to get notified when a new podcast episode comes out.
Managing, Frontend, and Creating a Brand with Harry Wolff
Harry Wolff, Director of Engineering at MongoDB, discusses his experiences as a manager and director, his career as a frontend developer, frontend engineering at MongoDB, how he shares knowledge and content through his YouTube channel, and much more. You can check out Harry Wolff's content on his website here and his YouTube channel here -- make sure to subscribe to his channel!
You can support this podcast on the anchor page. Make sure to subscribe and follow Alexa's Input Twitter account to get notified when a new podcast episode comes out.
History of the Web with Matthew Gerstman
Matthew Gerstman joins me in this episode to discuss the history of the web. Matthew has worked in frontend development at Dropbox, and now he is a Staff Engineer at Bluecore. Inspired by a post he recently made, we discuss a variety of topics relating to the evolution of the web-- including HTML, document object models, PHP, javascript, web 2.0, CSS, ECMA scripts, cross-browser bugs / different implementations of javascript, the evolution of browsers, the downfall of internet explorer, jQuery, REST, typescript, future of frontend, and much more! Make sure to listen to this great overview of all things web/frontend!
Links:
History of the web part 1 blog post
Matthew Gerstman (LinkedIn, Twitter, website)
Cache Only with Mike Hurwitz
Michael Hurwitz (Twitter: @dngrmike), a Principal Software Engineer on Bluecore's Data Science Infrastructure team, joins me on this podcast to talk about all things caching, including his open-source caching library LazyLRU (find it on GitHub here and read a blog about it here). The first part of the episode is focused on the basics of caching, what it is used for, and caching policies and patterns. In the second part, we focus on his caching implementation, why he wrote it, and what use cases it is good for.
find notes on this podcast here
Blowing Up Supernovas on Supercomputers with Bronson Messer
Computational astrophysicist Bronson Messer joins me on this episode to talk about computers and science. Bronson got his PhD in Astrophysics from the University of Tennessee, and he now works at Oak Ridge National Library as the Director of Science of the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility. We discuss how he uses the worlds most powerful supercomputers to simulate supernovas blowing up, what it means to be exascale, coding on GPUs, coding practices in the scientific computing community, and much more!
To read the article mentioned in the episode about Bronson click here.
Data and Analytics with Bruno Aziza
In this episode, Bruno Aziza, Head of Data & Analytics at Google Cloud, discusses everything Data & Analytics. From startups to big companies, Bruno has learned a lot along the way and has seen shifts in the field. He discusses those learnings, along with what is coming next. Listen to hear about the importance of his role with the community and going beyond the bytes, the state of Data & Analytics today, the challenges we will face in the near future, and what we can do now.
Link to notes (coming soon)
Twitter: @alexasinput
Security with Brent Lassi and Mike Hurwitz (Part II)
Brent Lassi and special guest Mike Hurwitz join me again for part II on security. Brent Lassi co-founded one of the first AppSec companies called Apex, and he now works as the CISO at Bluecore. Mike Hurwitz is a Principal Engineer at Bluecore and has previously worked at Tumblr and Shutterstock. In this episode we talk more about the evolution of security in the last few years-- both about the advantages of the cloud and the lessons learned. We discuss what enterprise viability means for both software engineers and security professionals, and how people play a big part. We talk about some recent events, like the SolarWinds hack, and what we can learn from them.
Click here to read a little bit about what I learned from this episode.
The intro music was made by my talented friend Brendan McMahon. Check out his soundcloud.
Security with Brent Lassi and Mike Hurwitz
Brent Lassi and special guest Mike Hurwitz join me on this episode to talk about security. Brent Lassi co-founded one of the first AppSec companies called Apex, and he now works as the CISO at Bluecore. Brent explains his day-to-day and his journey in his field. He also teaches me about infosec, differences in privacy and security, and what security engineers must do to ensure that software is safe. We discuss handling attacks and threats and the immense impact that the advent of cloud computing has had on application security. And much more! Brent is a great storyteller with a sense of humor, so I promise you won't be bored listening to this one.. and you may actually learn a few things like I did.
The intro music was made by my talented friend Brendan McMahon. Check out his soundcloud.
Netflix's Culture with Jason Reid
Jason Reid, Director of Data Science and Engineering at Netflix, joins me on this episode to discuss Netflix's culture. We discuss the topics in the book No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention and his personal experiences at Netflix. We have a great talk about the Keeper Test, career growth, titles, paying top of personal market, mentorship, diversity, and much more!
The opinions in this podcast are Jason's own and do not express the opinions of Netflix.
Starting a Startup with Bahar Shah
Bahar Shah joins me in this episode to talk about the very beginning stages of a startup. She graduated from MIT, worked at Microsoft as a software engineer, then went to Bluecore where she became a director of engineering, and now she is in the very early stages of a startup she co-founded called Tell. We discuss how Tell began, creating culture, setting values early on, funding, and much more!
Link to the beta version of the Tell app: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/tell/id1465678780
From IBM to startup SVP: David Dyar's career and lessons learned along the way
David Dyar joined IBM in their heyday and moved on to help other startups grow as a Senior Vice President (currently at DailyPay). In this episode, he shares his experiences along the way and the lessons he has learned from them. David discusses his various roles, diversity in the workplace, what kinds of people he looks for within organizations, challenges coming into companies, maintaining workplace culture through growth, being an intermediary between engineering and the business, and much more!
Managing and Maintaining Distributed Systems with Evan Jones
On this episode we talk with Evan Jones (www.evanjones.ca or Twitter: @epcjones), who works at Datadog and previously worked at Bluecore, Twitter, Mitro (his own startup), Infix, Google, and received a PhD from MIT. We discuss server reliability, learning from a cloud provider outage, the difficulties of scaling systems, how to address failures due to overloading your systems, and much more!
In the Clouds with Kelsey Hightower
Kelsey Hightower (Twitter: @kelseyhightower), Principal Engineer at Google Cloud and a well-known open-source contributor, joins me on this episode to discuss a variety of topics concerning cloud development, tools, and experiences. Kelsey shares some of his personal experiences about learning and growth, and we discuss some challenges we face today like identity and observability, and how to navigate through all the new technologies and ideas coming out of the serverless community.
Distributed Databases and Danger (Part 2)
In the second part of the database discussion with Mike Hurwitz (Twitter: @dngrmike), we discuss distributed databases. Mike talks about what guarantees one can make about distributed data stores. Like, what guarantees can you make with updates? and what happens when a 6-year-old runs into a datacenter with a squirt gun and sets your machine into a pile of sparks and flames? do we really get a choice between availability and consistency? We also discuss consensus, latencies, and how access patterns rule everything. A fun conversation including laughter.
Databases and Danger (Part 1)
Michael Hurwitz (Twitter: @dngrmike) is a Principal Software Engineer on Bluecore's Data Science Infrastructure team and is an expert when it comes to databases. He previously worked at Blink Health, Shutterstock, and Tumblr. In this entertaining episode, Mike covers the basics of different types of databases. We discuss B+ trees, the differences in columnar- and row-stores, caching, indexes, and much, much more!
Chemistry and Computers with John Hymel
John Hymel is a Ph.D. student at Georgia Tech. In this episode, he answers the question "what is computational chemistry?" and dives into basic concepts and applications. We also discuss the types of projects and workflows John uses. John is passionate about what he does, and it is always fun to talk to him.
Front-end and Fun with Jason Deng
In this episode, I learn about Jason Deng (Twitter: @jasondengster & more https://linktr.ee/jasondeng), a tech lead at Bluecore, and his experience as a front-end dev. He explains different aspects of his job and the tools he uses. We talk about tech debt, current front-end tech usage, and the future of front-end. Jason explains Typescript, React, Redux, and GraphQL. We also discuss cultural and social topics around the workplace.