Software Huddle - Welcome to Software Huddle with Alex DeBrie and Sean Falconer

Episode Date: July 25, 2023

Welcome to the trailer episode for Software Huddle. YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@SoftwareHuddle/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/SoftwareHuddle

Hello, everyone. Welcome to the pilot episode of Software Huddle. My name is Sean Faulkner and my co-host and partner in crime is Alex Debris. Alex, would you like to say hi? Hey, Sean. Good to be here. Excited for the first episode here. Yes, awesome. So the goal of today's episode is really to cover why we are starting a show about software engineering and related topics. We can host a couple other podcasts. So why this show at this time? And just starting with myself, I'm really interested in bringing people together to share their knowledge, expertise, challenges around technology and software engineering. This is something I've been doing throughout my career. I love going deep with experts and kind of diving into their world. And as I interview those experts and learn from them, I get a chance to kind of pass those learnings along to you, the listener. And my hope is to be able to share practical advice based on the conversations we have on the show to make the listener, you, a better technologist, a better engineer, and so on. Maybe, Alex, do you want to chime in with

your reasons why you're interested in doing this? Yeah, absolutely. I'd say for me, like I, this is more selfish, like I just love learning about new tech. And you know, I'm based in Omaha, Nebraska. So there's not like a huge tech scene here. But this is like a really good excuse to like, talk with with smart founders in like, databases or AI or like all these different areas and just be like, Hey, I have a podcast. Do you want to spend an hour talking about your thing with me? And they're like, go deep. And then again, you know, it can be shared and everyone can learn with that as well. But it's just like a way for me to, to sort of, you know, have a reason to talk to, to these people and learn some cool stuff. Yeah. And, uh, you know, I recently, someone asked me a question

about like, how do I, you know, learn sort of new concepts as I've moved my career more onto the marketing side of a business? You know, how do I learn different parts of functional areas of marketing, even though I don't have formal training in that area? And they asked for what book recommendations I have. And honestly, I have no book recommendations. I have lots of podcast recommendations, essentially, because that is the main way that I learn and consume information. And even before I ended up working at Google a number of years ago, part of the way I prepped for those interviews was actually listening to tons and tons of podcasts because you can really get, from an engineering perspective, like deep dives from experts in the field about how did they do, you know, architect the system

to handle unbelievable scale. And it's really, really hard to get access to people like that outside of something like, like a podcast, which is amazing. And one of the reasons why I love hosting these types of shows. Yeah, absolutely. And you get a little more of like an unscripted feel, right? Where if you go see a conference talk, or even a blog post or a book, especially like, you get like the happy path, pretty version a lot of times, whereas like if you can talk to them one-on-one it's, it's unscripted and things like that. You can see like, uh, you know, it's a little hairy or under the scenes, right. This is what was difficult.

And, and some of that, that roughness and rawness and just the difficulty and things like that. Yeah, absolutely. You get the Instagram version at a, at a conference talk. It's like, Oh, we were an overnight success. And you don't see the eight years that they were crawling on their belly in the dirt trying to make this thing work. Yeah, absolutely.

All right. So why don't we get into talking a little bit about what the structure of these different episodes are going to be like. So each episode is we're going to feature a guest and one of us, either Alex or myself, will be leading those episodes and we'll dive into the background and, you know, particular technology, engineering project or concept.

And as a teaser from a couple of episodes that I have planned, I'll be talking to Nick Hodges from Checkmarks, which I actually just saw. I actually met him in person at a conference two days ago, just a sort of fortuitous meeting. And we're going to be talking about application security testing, getting in the weeds of dynamic and static security testing, and why should you even care about these types of things. I'm also talking to Craig Dennis from Twilio, which I also met at an event a couple of months ago about developer education. He leads a lot of their developer education programs. And then one episode I'm super excited about is with Wacos and Blockdoom, who runs community and developer relations at Snowflake. And we'll be going through all the big Snowflake Summit announcements and dig into what they mean for people building on Snowflake. Alex, what do you have coming up?

Yeah, for me, I really want to organize this into series where I look at a particular area and maybe talk to a bunch of guests in that same area. So the first thing I really want to look at is like either what I call like database foundations or maybe like cloud native databases, where I think you're seeing this explosion of new databases that are really taking advantage of the cloud, the elasticity of the cloud, the sort of hosted SaaS version of databases as well, and what that looks like. So I want to talk to people from like, you planet scale um tiger beetle pink cap tigris like there's just a lot of like interesting database stuff going on right now and just you know seeing the different approaches the trade-offs like where they work for different things torso is another one right which is like distributed sqlite all around the globe like just a lot of

amazing cool database stuff going on i want to talk to founders in those areas and learn like hey what's hard about building a database system? What's changed that makes your technology viable compared to what was in the past and just like, hey, what are the trade-offs you're making in designing your services? Yeah, that's awesome. And that'll probably be a real refresher or palette cleanser for those that are steep deep in GPT, LLM world right now, which completely dominates everything that's in the news, everything that's on my Twitter feed and pretty much everything in my podcast feed at the moment. It's true. And then like, I want to do more on that category too. It's hard because like you say, it's like so busy, but you know, the tooling is just changing all the time and just getting a

sense of like how people are building, what tools are using, what's working, what's not working. Like there's a lot of cool stuff there as well. Yeah. It's definitely an exciting time to be involved in technology, working as an engineer or working for any technology company. Because there's just such an explosion right now and a real transformation shift that's happening in the world of AI. And I'm sure we're going to cover lots of those different topics and talk to lots of different technology leaders that are doing really, really interesting, cool stuff in that space. Yep, absolutely. I'm excited. Awesome. So we are not going to drag this out too much.

This is just a pilot episode. So if any of this sounds appealing and make sure you hit the subscribe button so you can get every episode, we'll be releasing episodes on a weekly basis. And if you want to keep the conversation going or passively participate, totally up to you. You can join our community and keep up to date on the latest episodes at softwarehuddle.com.

And also follow us on Twitter at Software Huddle. Alex, anything you want to sign off with? No, absolutely. I'm excited to get started. Yeah. If you have recommendations for like series or episodes or founders or anyone that you want on, feel free to hit either one of us up and we'll see what we can do there. Awesome. All right. So that's all for now. We hope to hear from you. I'm Canadian. Alex is from the Midwest. So together, we're probably extremely friendly and probably apologize a lot. So come say hi, and I hope you enjoy the show. Absolutely. Thanks, Sean.