Alexa's Input (AI)

This episode is joined by Max Bennett, entrepreneur and author at the intersection of AI and neuroscience, to unravel the complexities behind artificial intelligence and human cognition. Max recounts his evolution from a career in finance to innovations in AI, and his path from conceptual frameworks to the creation of Alby, the AI shopping assistant that's redefining consumer experiences. He delves into his critically acclaimed book, 'A Brief History of Intelligence,' drawing parallels between evolutionary biology and the development of AI. Listen in as we discuss AI possibilities, ethical dilemmas, and the future of personalized learning and healthcare. This episode is a good listen for those interested in the merging lanes of technology, science, and the fabric of human intelligence.

Links:

website: https://www.abriefhistoryofintelligence.com/book

X: https://twitter.com/maxsbennett?lang=en

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bennettmax/

Medium: https://medium.com/@max.bennett

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.

In this episode, we welcome Mike Hamrah, CTO of Flowcode, to discuss the transformative role of QR technology in connecting fans and brands. Mike shares his journey from the dot-com bubble's challenges to leading innovation at Flowcode. He offers insights into the rise of QR codes, the nuances of building a strong engineering culture, and the importance of company values in team dynamics. Join us as we explore the intersection of technology and leadership with a key figure in the tech industry. This conversation is a valuable listen for anyone interested in tech trends and effective team management.

find out more about mike hamrah -

linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hamrah/

X: https://twitter.com/mhamrah

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.

In this insightful podcast episode, join prominent tech education figure and software engineer/site reliability engineer ⁠Ivan Velichko⁠ as he delves into the creation of his innovative learning platform, ⁠iximiuz labs⁠. We discuss the platform's structured learning path, emphasizing the importance of fundamentals and practical applications, the significance of hands-on experience and the limitations of random blog posts in skill mastery. Discover Ivan's unique approach to learning and the challenges he faced in developing this platform. Ivan Velichko's story to becoming a tech education content creator comes to life as he shares his wisdom and expertise. Don't miss this episode as we navigate the world of Kubernetes and cloud-native technologies learning with a dedicated tech educator and industry influencer!

find out more about Ivan - https://iximiuz.com/en/about/

X: https://twitter.com/iximiuz

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/iximiuz/

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.

About the guest Ivan Velichko:

(04:03) - Ivan’s self introduction.

(04:41) - How Ivan got into the tech world.

(05:56) - Ivan is a workaholic, when he is doing the programming job.

(06:29) - Ivan’s first job after college, outsourcing work for major companies like Coca cola, Philips, etc.

Ivan’s educational journey as the content and the platform creator:

(07:30) - Thoughts on the appropriate approach for learning, making it a project!

(09:00) - Ivan’s journey with Kubernetes.

(10:20) - Ivan’s experience with solving five hundreds of Leetcode problems. How does it sound to you, if you’re actively on the tech market?

(12:43) - Ivan’s thoughts on knowing about underlying Kubernetes layers. What has changed? What has not compared to the past? Fundamental is a key focus.

(15:25) - How Ivan made the decision on how to pick up something to investigate and how.

(17:42) - How to turn the learning into the content: blog posts.

(19:20) - The quote “You don’t know how much you don’t know the topic until you write about it“. Fill in the gaps during the writing.

(20:09) - How Ivan launched the idea of creating courses.

(23:14) - How much effort it took and what technology was used to create the learning platform: both back-end and front-end experiences.

(25:12) - The most rewarding way for Ivan to deliver the content: building playgrounds & connecting them into a course, differentiating/producing the challenges, keeping the content structured, internalizing the skills, not just understanding them. Must-listen part!

(31:05) - Users’ feedback on what approaches/courses they love to take. Wow, 1500 challenges! Memory and practice. Must-listen part!

(35:34) - Ivan’s thoughts on the improvement in terms of the content collection and delivery.

(38:27) - Ivan’s thoughts on his Twitter/X following.

(39:57) - Ivan’s plan about the next step: create more content, open his learning platform to other content creators targeting H2 of this year. Stay tuned!

(41:23) - Ivan’s curtain call for the audience.

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 - tooling around multicloud infrastructure, the complexities and challenges for developers building on multicloud, measuring platform performance, changes and advancements in the space 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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)

Alexa's Input Twitter

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

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.

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 youtube video

Link to notes (coming soon) 

Twitter: @alexasinput

other ways to find me

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.

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. 

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

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.