The Data Stack Show - The PRQL: WebAssembly: The Future of Cloud Workloads Made Simple with Matt Butcher of Fermyon Technologies

Episode Date: January 8, 2024

In this bonus episode, Eric and Kostas preview their upcoming conversation with Matt Butcher of Fermyon Technologies.

Welcome to the Data Stack Show prequel. This is a short bonus episode where we preview the upcoming show. You'll get to meet our guest and hear about the topics we're going to cover. If they're interesting to you, you can catch the full-length show when it drops on Wednesday. We are here with Matt Butcher from Fermion. Matt, welcome to the Data Stack Show. We're thrilled to have you as a guest. Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm looking forward to this. Oh man, so much to talk about. So give us a quick background on sort of where you came from and what you're doing at Fermion.

Yep. So if we were to rewind to my high school career time, I would have told you that when I grew up, I wanted to be a philosopher. So when I started college, that's what I was setting out to do. But I had sort of gotten a job on the side doing some computer stuff. And philosophy degrees are expensive, especially when you're going to do a bachelor's then a master's then a PhD. And so I ended up kind of paying my way through by writing software and doing stuff like that. And at some point, I realized that software was a lot more fun than philosophy and kind of switched career tracks. Of course, after I'd incurred lots of debt, I really went from there. And I first got interested in content management systems and did a lot of work in the Drupal ecosystem. By that point, I'd learned like Java and PHP and languages like that. Then I got working at HP Cloud originally to do their documentation. And as soon as I got kind of

a taste of cloud technologies and what was going to be popular or possible and what, you know, I kind of had one of those moments where I saw a glimpse of the future and I was like, I want to be part of that. And that really shifted my career. And I've gone on from there into, you know, through Microsoft, through Google and on into starting up Fermion a couple of weeks ago, a couple of weeks ago, a couple of years ago. Yeah, it's been a fast couple of years. A fast couple of years. Very cool. And give us just a quick overview of what Fernion is. side, and that was WebAssembly. So we've been kind of doing the thing that we do best, and that's building an open source tool and toolkit that developers can use to get started, and then building a hosted cloud platform and a server-side Kubernetes-style application platform where people can run these things in their cloud.

That's amazing, Martin. I'd love to get more into this because WebAssembly has been around for a while now. We've heard many things about it, many different use cases. It has been used in some cases also as part of products and stuff like that. But we still get this feeling that we are still not there with like Wemba Assembly like there's a lot of promise and we're still like looking like to see how it gets delivered right like so one of the things that I definitely want like to go through like during our conversation is about that and I'm sure that you're going like to help us like understand

what's going on with the ecosystem today. But what about you? What are a couple of things that you're looking forward to talk about during our recording? Yeah, that one. I mean, you just hit one of my favorite topics, which is I think WebAssembly, it has shown promise in a lot of different areas. But until, I don't know, maybe a couple of weeks ago, some of the most exciting pieces of WebAssembly were not yet accessible to the general developer. It was all very R&D and a little rough around the edges. And now with the component model landing and being supported, suddenly we've got a whole

bunch of new and interesting things that we can build with WebAssembly. And to me, the future that opens up out of WebAssembly and the component model is just so exciting. There are so many interesting things we'll be able to do from, you know, true polyglot programming to being able to overlay security models and things like that in ways we've never been able to do before. So I'm looking forward to talking about this. I think it's going to be a lot of fun.

Yeah, 100%. Let's go and do it. All right. That's a wrap for the prequel. The full-length episode will drop Wednesday morning. Subscribe now so you don't miss it.