Software Huddle

Exponential Engineers with Ashmeet Sidana Today on the show, we have a special guest — Ashmeet Sidana, the founder of Engineering Capital. Ashmeet started his career as an engineer at some great companies like Hewlett-Packard and Silicon Graphics before founding his own company, getting it acquired, and eventually starting his venture capital firm, Engineering Capital. With his strong engineering background, Ashmeet looks for startups that have a technical insight — something unique that gives them an edge over their competitors. This focus on technical insight sets Engineering Capital apart from other VC firms that often emphasize market insight or distribution insight or some other kind of advantage. We talked about AI, Exponential Engineers, Entrepreneurship, and had a lot of fun. Watch on YouTube: youtu.be/UdZzE_H7taU @ashmeetsidana | @alexbdebrie | @seanfalconer

Will you be there? 🌳🌲 KubeCon | CloudNativeCon North America 2025 📍 Atlanta Register Here: events.linuxfoundation.org/kubecon-cloudn… @linuxfoundation | @CloudNativeFdn

Powered by Neurons with Ewelina Kurtys Today we have Dr. Ewelina Kurtys on the show. Ewelina has a background in Neuroscience and is currently working at @finalsparkai. FinalSpark is using live Neurons for computations instead of traditional electric CPUs. The advantage is that live Neurons are significantly more energy efficient than traditional computing, and given all the energy concerns right now with regards to running AI workloads and data centers, this seems quite relevant, even though bioprocessors are still very much in the research phase. Watch On YouTube: youtu.be/-9i9Qi9u1fc @seanfalconer | @alexbdebrie

@samlambert pls send one 🥲

Neki figure wen?

@jorandirkgreef we sent u a dm :)

We had @rafalwilinski on Software Huddle to talk about AI Agents and building with AI. Watch on Youtube: youtu.be/oZbKtwS5YXM - @zapier Agents - How does it differ from previous workflows? - Does text transform into a workflow? - Using Zapier's existing tools to power Agents? - Agents are given a only set of actions from which they can choose - Browser related stuff? - Choosing a model - Different prompts for different models? - Most often used models - TypeScript or Python - Cost - Less talk about non AI stuff - On regular devs building with AI - Protecting against user behaviour - Future of RAG - Is AI progress slowing down? - Personal AI tools - Losing understanding of repos? - Would you need Software Background in a few years? - GitHub Actions @alexbdebrie | @seanfalconer

Serious question for @samlambert: Does @planetscale run on Tabs… or Spaces?

Let's build AI Agents 🏗️ Lessons from Building AI Agents with Rafal Wilinski 🎉 Today we're talking with one of our favorite engineers, @rafalwilinski. Rafal has been on the cutting edge of AI development in the last few years as he has led AI teams at Zapier and Vendr. Rafal walks us through the hard-won lessons about actually integrating AI tools into the applications you're building. One of the hardest things in integrating these AI tools is how to ensure you're getting better and not regressing as you improve your prompts and upgrade your models. He shows how using evals is one part of the story along with deeply investigating customer signals to see how they are or aren't succeeding with AI. Along the way, we also talk about RAG, his favorite models, his AI development toolset, and why Poland has been killing it lately. Check it out and be sure to follow Rafal if you want to learn more on building with AI. Watch on YoutTube: youtu.be/oZbKtwS5YXM @alexbdebrie | @seanfalconer

the key to scale is doing simple things many times

Postgres to @samlambert

@PS_Neki hlo

hello world neki.dev

CI is evolving fast as AI Agents take over — and Blacksmith is on the frontlines. You can meet the @useblacksmith team at KubeCon | CloudNativeCon North America 2025 in Atlanta this November. Register Here: events.linuxfoundation.org/kubecon-cloudn…

The explosion in AI agents has really changed the CI world. CI is more useful than ever, as you want to be sure the changes from your agents aren't breaking your existing functionality. At the same time, there's a huge increase in demand and spikiness of CI workloads as developers can fire off multiple agents to work in parallel, each needing to run the CI suite before merging. @aayush_shah15 from @useblacksmith talked about how they're handling this load and facilitating visibility into test failures. Watch on YouTube: youtu.be/5-2GM-PD9JE

Building a High-Ownership Engineering Culture with Matt Watson If you’ve ever felt like engineering teams are stuck in execution mode—heads down, building what they’re told—then today’s episode is for you. We're talking about what it really takes to build high ownership engineering cultures where devs aren't simply just shipping code, but they're helping shape the product. And our guest this week is Matt Watson. He's a long time founder, engineer, and now the CEO of @fullscalekc, a company that helps startups and scale ups, grow their engineering teams with top talent from the Philippines. Matt's also the author of a book called Product Driven that shows how engineers can build with more clarity, purpose, customer focus and we get into some of the details in that book during this podcast. So in this episode, we get into everything from the downsides of specialization to the importance of empathy, to why code shipped isn't the same as value delivered. We hope you enjoy it. Watch On Youtube: youtu.be/ePwYxWCQyQY @mattwatsonkc | @seanfalconer | @alexbdebrie

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Building CI for the Age of AI Agents with Aayush Shah 🎉 Today's episode is with Aayush Shah. Aayush is one of the co-founders of @useblacksmith, which is a CI compute platform. Basically, Blacksmith will run your GitHub Actions jobs faster and with more visibility with the standard GitHub Actions CI runners. The founding team has a fun background doing systems work at Cockroach and Faire, and they're taking on a big problem in running this massive CI fleet. The explosion in AI agents has really changed the CI world. CI is more useful than ever, as you want to be sure the changes from your agents aren't breaking your existing functionality. At the same time, there's a huge increase in demand and spikiness of CI workloads as developers can fire off multiple agents to work in parallel, each needing to run the CI suite before merging. Aayush talked about how they're handling this load and facilitating visibility into test failures. We also covered cloud economics. Aayush said the traditional cloud-based storage options don't work for them -- EBS and locally attached SSDs are too expensive for their workloads where they don't need the standard durability guarantees. He walks us through building their own fleet outside the hyperscalers and the plans going forward, along with some of the economics of multi-tenancy that Blacksmith has previously written about. Watch On Youtube: youtu.be/5-2GM-PD9JE @alexbdebrie | @seanfalconer

We have the awesome Sam Lambert [@samlambert] from @PlanetScale back for a third time. Operational Excellence Is the Moat with Sam Lambert 🎉 Planetscale just announced Planetscale Postgres, so we had to get Sam back to tell us how and why they decided to add support for Postgres. It's always great to have Sam on -- he brings great stories about real customers and honest insight about the state of the database industry. In this episode, we talk about the road to Postgres and how operational excellence is the only true advantage in database providers. Sam walks us through the current Planetscale Postgres offering, along with details on Nova, a new sharded Postgres project that Planetscale is working on. Along the way, we get updates on Planetscale Metal, how demand has been for Planetscale Postgres, and future plans for Planetscale. Watch on Youtube: youtu.be/JAw9sgsCZRI @alexbdebrie | @seanfalconer

Great opportunity for Gophers!

Lessons from Transcribing and Indexing 3.5 Million Podcasts with Arvid Kahl Big time guest today as Arvid Kahl [@arvidkahl] joins us. Arvid is my favorite type of guest -- a deeply technical founder that can talk about both the technical and business challenges of a startup. Lots to enjoy from this episode. Arvid is known as the Bootstrapped Founder and has documented his path to selling Feedback Panda back in 2019. He's now building Podscan and sharing his journey as he goes. Podscan is a fascinating project. It's making the content of "every podcast episode" around the world fully searchable. He currently has 3.5 million episodes transcribed and adds another 30,000 - 50,000 episodes every day. This involves a ton of technical challenges, including how to get the best transcription results from the latest LLMs, whether you should use APIs from public providers or run your own LLMs, and how to efficiently provide full-text search across terabytes of transcription data. Arvid shares the lessons he's learned and the various strategies he's tried over the years. But there are also unique business challenges. For most technical businesses, your infrastructure costs grow in line with your customers. More customers == more data == more servers. With Podscan, Arvid has to index the entire podcast ecosystem regardless of his customers. This means a lot of upfront investment as he looks to grow his customer base. Arvid tells us how he's optimized his infrastructure to account for this unique challenge. Watch on Youtube: youtu.be/Bpi9owrV3yA @alexbdebrie | @seanfalconer

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