In July of 2020, Joran Dirk Greef stumbled into a fundamental limitation in the general-purpose database design for transaction processing. This sent him on a path that ended with TigerBeetle, a redesigned distributed database for financial transactions that yielded three orders of magnitude faster OLTP performance over the usual (general-purpose) suspects.

On this episode, Joran joins Jerod to explain how TigerBeetle got so fast, to defend its resilience and durability claims as a new market entrant, and to stake his claim at the intersection of open source and business. Oh, plus the age old question: Why Zig?

This week we’re bringing you a remaster of our epic 2021interview with Lara Hogan – author of Resilient Management and management coach / trainer for the tech industry.

The majority of our conversation focuses on the four primary hats leaders and managers end up wearing; mentoring, coaching, sponsoring, and delivering feedback. We also talk about knowing when you’re ready to lead, empathy and compassion, and learning to lead.

Ilya Grigorik and his team at Shopify has been hard at work securing ecommerce checkouts from sophisticated news attacks (such as digital skimming) and he’s here to share all the technical intricacies and far-reaching implications of this work.

Beyang Liu, the CTO & Co-founder of Sourcegraph is back on the pod. Adam and Beyang go deep on the idea of “industrializing software development” using AI agents, using AI in general, using code generation. So much is happening in and around AI and Sourcegraph continues to innovate again and again. From their editor assistant called Cody, to Code Search, to AI agents, to Batch Changes, they’re really helping software teams to industrialize the process, the inner and the outer loop, of being a software developer on high performance teams with large codebases.

Antirez has returned to Redis! Yes, Salvatore Sanfilippo (aka Antirez), the creator of Redis has returned to Redis and he joined us to share the backstory on Redis, what’s going on with the tech and the company, the possible (likely) move back to open source via the AGPL license, the new possibilities of AI and vector embeddings in Redis, and some good ’ol LLM inference discussions.

Anurag Goel, Founder/CEO of Render, joins Adam to discuss what they’re doing to solve cloud problems for application developers. They just raised $80M they don’t even need and they’re poised to solve boring problems like object storage, and less boring things like building for the AI era.

For the past year, David Crawshaw has intentionally sought ways to use LLMs while programming, in order to learn about them. He now regularly use LLMs while working and considers their benefits a net-positive on his productivity. David wrote down his experience, which we found both practical and insightful. Hopefully you will too!

Arun Gupta is back, this time with his latest book in hand titled “Fostering Open Source Culture” to share his wisdom and experiences of fostering open source culture. BTW you can use the code OSCULTURE20 to get 20% off (both print and e-book). Use this link and enjoy.

After 30+ years in the software industry, Bert Hubert has experienced a lot. He founded PowerDNS, published articles for places like IETF / IEEE, and built his own parliament monitoring system. That just scratches the surface.

Recently, Bert wrote about what it takes to build software for the long term. Let’s dig in.

Glauber Costa, co-founder and CEO of Turso, joins us to discuss libSQL, Limbo, and how they’re rewriting SQLite in Rust. We discuss their efforts with libSQL, the challenge of SQLite being in the public domain but not being open for contribution, their choice to rewrite everything with Limbo, how this all plays into the future of the Turso platform, how they test Limbo with Deterministic Simulation Testing (DST), and their plan to replace SQLite.

Ashley Jeffs shares his journey with Benthos, an open source stream processor that was acquired by Redpanda. We talk about the evolution of data streaming technologies, the challenges he faced while growing the project, the decision to bootstrap versus seek venture capital, and what ultimately led to the acquisition. We discuss reactions to licensing changes, what it’s like to have your thing acquired, the challenging yet fulfilling nature of open source work, what’s next for Benthos, and what it takes to enjoy the journey.

Elecia White, host of Embedded.fm and author of Making Embedded Systems, joins us to discuss all things embedded systems. We discuss programming non-computers, open source resources for embedded, self-driving cars, embedded system like the GoPro, Traeger smokers, and even birthday cards. According to Elecia, embedded is going everywhere.

Rachel Plotnick joins us for the first show of 2025 to discuss her book “Power Button” and the research she did, and why we love/hate buttons so much. We also discuss her upcoming book “License to Spill” as well as the research she’s doing on energy drinks.

Mitchell Hashimoto joins the show to discuss Ghostty, the newest terminal in town. Mitchell co-founded HashiCorp, took it all the way to IPO, exited in 2023—and now he’s working on a terminal emulator called Ghostty. Ghostty is set to 1.0 this month, so we sat down to talk through all the details.

Kurt Mackey is back for a deep dive into what it takes to build the developer cloud. Kurt joins Adam to discuss the alliance between companies and cloud, something Kurt refers to as the “Rebel Alliance,” cloud complexity vs usability, Fly’s future with Postgres and why they’ve waited, thoughts on Neon and Supabase (Kurt shares a hot take), and our CDN saga and plan to build a simple CDN on Fly called Pipely (still a Pipedream).

Jerod is joined by Hack Clubber Acon, who is fresh off the GitHub Universe stage and ready to tell us all about High Seas, a new initiative by Zach Latta and the Hack Club crew that’s incentivizing teens to build cool personal projects by giving away free stuff.

Nick Sweeting joins Adam and Jerod to talk about the importance of archiving digital content, his work on ArchiveBox to make it easier, the challenges faced by Archive.org and the Wayback Machine, and the need for both centralized and distributed archiving solutions.

Today we’re joined by a dynamic duo, Helena Zhang & Tobias Fried, who team up on all sorts of digital passion projects. This includes the wildly popular Phosphor Icons plus their latest joint, Departure Mono, a monospaced pixel font with a lo-fi technical vibe… that both Adam & Jerod are pretty much in love with. We discuss their tastes & inspirations, how they collab, making money on passion projects like these, velvet ropes & so much more.

We’re on the main stage at THAT Conference with Danny Thompson. He has an amazing story and journey into tech. Thanks to our friends at Cloudflare for helping us get to THAT Conference earlier this year to enable this conversation.

Special thanks to Nick Nisi and Clark Sell for coming in clutch and getting us the audio to ship this show!

The hallway track at All Things Open 2024 — features Carl George, Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat for a discussion on the state of open source enterprise linux and RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux), Max Howell, creator of Homebrew and tea.xyz which offers rewards and recognition to open source maintainers, and Chad Whitacre, Head of Open Source at Sentry about the launch of Open Source Pledge and their plans to helps businesses and orgs to do the right thing and support open source.

(Includes expletives) David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH), creator of Ruby on Rails and co-owner of 37signals, joined the show to discuss this Rails moment and renewed excitement for Rails. We discuss hard opinions, developers being cooked too long in the JavaScript soup, finding developer joy, the pros and cons of the BDFL, the ongoing WordPress drama with WP Engine, and what’s to come in Rails 8.

Shay Banon, the creator of Elasticsearch, joins us to discuss pulling off a reverse rug pull. Yes, Elasticsearch is open source, again! We discuss the complexities surrounding open source licensing and what made Elastic change their license, the implications of trademark law, the personal and business impact of moving away from open source, and ultimately what made them hit rewind and return to open source.

This week we’re going back in time to one of our top performing shows of all time where we talk with Matt Rickard about his blog post Reflections on 10,000 Hours of Programming. These reflections are about deliberately writing code for 10,000 hours. Most don’t apply to beginners. He was clear to mention that these reflections are purely about coding, not career advice or soft skills. If you count the reflections we cover on the show and be the first to comment the amount of reflections on this thread in Zulip, we’ll give you a coupon code to use for a 100% free t-shirt from the merch store. Good luck…

John Nunemaker joins us to share his new thesis for acquiring Rails based SaaS apps. He’s early days on his next big thing called Very Good Software and recently acquired Fireside, a podcast hosting service started by Dan Benjamin. This comes after many years since John’s acquisition of a lifetime of Speakerdeck to GitHub, which laid the foundation for these moves.

Jerod is joined by the co-hosts of core.py , Pablo Galindo & Łukasz Langa, a podcast about Python internals by people who work on Python internals. Python 3.13 is right around the corner, which means the Global Interpeter Lock (GIL) is now experimentally optional! This is a huge deal as Python is finally free-threaded. There’s more to discuss, of course, so we get into all the gory details.

Jerod is joined by Ryan Dahl to discuss his second take on leveling up JavaScript developers all around the world. Jerod asks Ryan why not try to fix or fork Node instead of starting fresh, how Deno (the open source project) can avoid the all too common rug pull (not cool) scenario, what’s new in Deno 2 & their pragmatic decision to support npm, they talk JSR, they talk Deno KV & SQLite, they even talk about Ryan’s open letter to Oracle in an attempt to free the unused “JavaScript” trademark from the giant’s clutches.

Jimmy Miller talks to us about his experience with a legacy codebase at his first job as a programmer. The codebase was massive, with hundreds of thousands of lines of C# and Visual Basic, and a database with over 1,000 columns. Let’s just say Jimmy got into some stuff. There’s even a Gilfoyle involved. This episode is all about his adventures while working there.

Erez Zukerman shares the story of launching the ErgoDox EZ on Indiegogo (May 2015), what it takes to create customizable ergonomic keyboards, the benefits of split keyboards and custom key layouts, repairability and longevity, community engagement, and the attention to detail required in everything they create. We talk through their keyboard lineup, our personal experience with how we mouse and keyboard…we cover it all.

We’re joined by Alya Abbott from Zulip, the open source, organized, threaded, team chat for distributed teams of all sizes. We talk about Zulip’s origins, how it’s open source, the way it’s led, no VC funding, what makes it different/better, how you can self-host it or use their cloud, moving to Zulip, contributing and being a part of the community…all the things.

Ryan Worl, Co-founder and CTO at WarpStream, joins us to talk about the world of Kafka and data streaming and how WarpStream redesigned the idea of Kafka to run in modern cloud environments directly on top of object storage. Last year they posted a blog titled, “Kafka is dead, long live Kafka” that hit the top of Hacker News to put WarpStream on the map. We get the backstory on Kafka and why it’s so widely used, who created it and for what purpose, and the behind the scenes on all things WarpStream.