Akita is a monitoring and observability platform that watches API traffic live and automatically infers endpoint structure.
Jean, who comes from a family of computer scientists, earned a PhD from MIT and taught in the CS department at Carnegie Mellon University before founding Akita.
Naré Vardanyan has a statistically unlikely story. She grew up in Armenia, without electricity during a war. She recalls that her parents gamified the experience, which allowed her to experience it much differently than the hardship it was. Her upbringing was very community driven, focused on caring for others. Eventually, she went to work for the United Nations, in her words, so she could save the world - though eventually she was disillusioned by how slow things moved. It was at this point, where she shifted over to tech. Outside of tech, she used to love reading, but now that she has a child, she sticks to audiobooks. And, she thoroughly enjoys art, specifically, 20th century Russian-Jewish artists.
When Naré started to travel abroad, she noticed that for some folks, the ability to obtain things in life, like a Visa or Passport, was a given. Yet, others were not enabled to obtain these types of things, as the process was much more difficult or unavailable. She set out to create the great equalizer, through enriched financial data.
Congressman Ro Khanna represents California's 17th congressional district. He joins Big Technology Podcast fresh off a visit to Taiwan, where he visited with Taiwan Semiconductor leadership and Taiwan government officials. In this episode, we discuss TSMC's strategic importance to the global economy, the prospect of conflict in Taiwan, and the U.S. effort to build manufacturing capacity at home. Stay tuned for the second half where we discuss why Big Tech regulation has stalled, the latest on TikTok, SVB, and plenty more.
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Ron Richardson studied robotics and embedded systems in Arizona, and is a former Marine - which is where he got his start in logistics. His biggest influence has been his parents. He mentioned his Mom introduced him to a personal website builder, which kicked off his learning into HTML, PHP and JavaScript. Outside of tech, he has a passion for traveling, and is big into horror games and movies. One of his favorite horror games is Amnesia, and movie is Insidious. He actually built an app to have an ongoing curated playlist for his fans.
Ron previously co-founded a startup in the eCommerce space, focusing on fulfillment in Asia. While he was building the backend for this solution, he noticed there weren't any developer tools for logistics and supply chain. He built an API solution and SDK to help implement common design features for this industry.
A common refrain you’ll hear these days is that servers should be scaled out, easy to replace, and interchangeable—cattle, not pets. But for the ops folks who run those servers the opposite is true. You can’t just throw any of them into an incident where they may not know the stack or system and expect everything to work out. Every operator has a set of skills that they’ve built up through research or experience, and teams should value them as such. They’re people, not pets, and certainly not cattle—you can’t just get a new one when you burn out your existing ones.
On this episode of the podcast—sponsored by Chronosphere—we talk with Paige Cruz, Senior Developer Advocate at Chronosphere, about how teams can reduce the cognitive load on ops, the best ways to prepare for inevitable failures, and where the worst place to page Paige is.
Episode notes:
Chronosphere provides an observability platform for ops people, so naturally, the company has an interest in the happiness of those people.
If you’re interested in the history of the pets vs. cattle concept , this covers it pretty well.
Before Sargun Kaur got into tech, she was anti-wanting to be in tech. Her Dad was an engineer, and she thought the work he did was super boring. She pursued journalism, marine biology, and found her self changing interests a lot as she got bored. Now, she came over to the dark side, and jokes that she is no longer interesting because she is so immersed in what she does. Outside of tech, she loves to travel, building community, and hosting. This boils down to loving bringing people together through multiple means. And finally, she jokes that she is a mediocre instagram poet, enjoying writing semi-deep posts on the platform.
When Sargun was applying at Google, she went through their normal engineering interview process - IE five whiteboard sessions back to back. After getting hired at Google, she struggled with the industry standard for interview questions, via algorithmic riddles, that didn't mirror the actual job. These types of interviews weren't only not fair, but left many great candidates out in the cold.
Alura is a Portuguese-language edtech platform where users can learn programming, backend and mobile development, data science, design and UX, DevOps, and more.
Paulo and Stack Overflow Director of Engineering Roberta Arcoverde cohost a popular Portuguese-language podcast about programming, design, startups, and technology.
Simone Giertz is an inventor, designer, engineer, and roboticist famous for a combination of humor and brilliant creative design in the systems and products she creates. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
– MasterClass: https://masterclass.com/lex to get 15% off
– InsideTracker: https://insidetracker.com/lex to get 20% off
– Athletic Greens: https://athleticgreens.com/lex to get 1 month of fish oil
OUTLINE:
Here’s the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time.
(00:00) – Introduction
(06:49) – Early creations
(23:42) – Sh*tty Robots
(38:40) – Robots and human connection
(40:55) – Dating AI
(44:14) – Proud parent machine
(46:05) – Creative process
(47:31) – Bubble wrap music box
(52:53) – Education
(58:27) – Difficult projects
(59:56) – TED talk
(1:06:13) – Brain tumor
(1:14:51) – Fear of death
(1:19:15) – Mass production
(1:34:40) – Truckla
(1:39:29) – Weapons
(1:43:29) – Consciousness
(1:45:33) – MMA
(1:49:36) – China, Kenya, and USA
(1:54:29) – Advice for young people
(1:58:21) – Meaning of life
