Category: 3-SometimeTechTalk

Spriha Baruah Tucker has spent time in a number of places - growing up in India, attending boarding school in Singapore, and now living in San Francisco. She spent many years at Google, before founding her own startup called Aviator. Outside of tech, she really likes music, having a soft spot in her heart for Bollywood, but really digging into the jazz world these days. She enjoys the guilty pleasure of trashy romance TV, and tends to travel to get the best food - her favorite being Nashville.

Spriha was a founder at Aviator, and was made aware of her current company while serving her customers. He noticed that all of her customers who used this platform absolutely adored it, to the tune of making infomercials for the platform. She reached out to the founder to let him know... and the rest is history.

This is Spriha's creation story at Buildkite.

Sponsors

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Links

• https://buildkite.com/
• https://www.aviator.co/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/spriha-tucker/

Ryan is joined by Outshift by Cisco’s VP of Engineering Guillaume De Saint Marc to discuss the future of multi-agent architectures as microservices, the challenges and limitations of the infrastructure for these multi-agent systems, and the importance of communication protocols and interoperability in order to build decentralized and scalable architectures. 

Episode notes:

Outshift is Cisco’s tech incubator that pursues emerging technologies like agentic AI, quantum computing, and next-gen infrastructure. Learn more about multi-agent architecture at their open-source collective AGNTCY.

Connect with Guillaume on Linkedin. 

Today we’re shouting out a Socratic badge winner, Avraam Mavridis, who won the badge for asking well received questions on 100 separate days.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Gajus Kuizinas lives in Mexico City, and travels between there, New York and San Francisco. He had a non-traditional upbringing for an engineer, as all of his family were into the arts - so he had to make his own way. He started in Lithuania, and eventually was recruiting to setup computers and networks for dating platforms. Eventually, he got into freelancing, and started his first startup in the UK. Outside of tech, he has a garden, which doubles as an ecosystem for his free roaming hedgehog and bunny.

Gajus started to think about the arc of becoming a freelancer. He realized that everyone who goes through a journey as a freelancer feels like a cog in the machine, and falls off the marketplaces out there. He realized that there was a massive vacuum and gap in the internet for these folks that needed to be filled.

This is the creation story of Contra.

Sponsors

• Incogni
• NordProtect
• Vention
• CodeCrafters helps you become a better engineer by building real-world, production-grade projects. Learn hands-on by creating your own Git, Redis, HTTP server, SQLite, or DNS server from scratch. Sign up for free today using this link and enjoy 40% off.
• Full Scale
• Paddle.com
• Sema Software
• PropelAuth
• Postman
• Meilisearch

Links

• https://contra.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/gajus/

Evan Hubinger is Anthropic’s alignment stress test lead. Monte MacDiarmid is a researcher in misalignment science at Anthropic.The two join Big Technology to discuss their new research on reward hacking and emergent misalignment in large language models. Tune in to hear how cheating on coding tests can spiral into models faking alignment, blackmailing fictional CEOs, sabotaging safety tools, and even developing apparent “self-preservation” drives. We also cover Anthropic’s mitigation strategies like inoculation prompting, whether today’s failures are a preview of something far worse, how much to trust labs to police themselves, and what it really means to talk about an AI’s “psychology.” Hit play for a clear-eyed, concrete, and unnervingly fun tour through the frontier of AI safety.

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Today, we are dropping our final episode in the series "The Railsware Way", sponsored by our good friends at Railsware. Railsware is a leading product studio with two main focuses - services and products. They have created amazing products like Mailtrap, Coupler and TitanApps, while also partnering with teams like Calendly and Bright Bytes. They deliver amazing products, and have happy customers to prove it.

In this series, we are digging into the company's methods around product engineering and development. In particular, we will cover relevant topics to not only highlight their expertise, but to educate you on industry trends alongside their experience.

In today's episode, we are speaking with Oleksii Ianchuk, Product Lead at Railsware, specifically for Mailtrap. Thought he doesn't like to limit his activities to product development, Oleksii has spent six years in product and project management, and is keen on searching for insights and putting them to work, as well as gauging the effects of his input.

Questions:

• The story of Mailtrap starts with accidentally sending test emails to real users in 2011. How did Mailtrap evolve from an internal "fail" to a platform serving hundreds of thousands of users? How did that mistake spark the creation of Mailtrap, and what lessons did you learn about turning problems into opportunities?
• What made you decide to expand from email testing into Email API/SMTP delivery - and why was it harder than expected? What specific challenges around deliverability, spam fighting, and infrastructure caught you off guard?
• Can you walk us through the "splitting the product" mistake and its long-term consequences? Your team decided to separate testing and sending into different repositories and isolated VPC projects. What seemed like a good engineering decision at the time - how did this create problems as you scaled, and what would you do differently?
• You spent a year struggling with Redshift before switching to Elasticsearch - what did that teach you about technology decisions? You ran tests, evaluated alternatives, and still picked the wrong database for your use case. How do you balance thorough research with the reality that you can't always predict what will work until you're in production?
• When do you buy external expertise versus rely on your internal team? How do you decide when to hire outside knowledge, and how do you find the right consultants for niche problems?
• Why didn't existing Mailtrap users immediately adopt the Email API/SMTP feature, and what did that teach you?
• You expected current users to quickly transition to the new sending functionality. What did you learn about switching costs, user perception, and the challenge of changing how people think about your product?
• What business insights around deliverability, spam prevention, and compliance surprised you most?
• Email delivery isn't just about infrastructure - there's a whole ecosystem of postmasters, anti-spam systems, and compliance requirements. What aspects of this business were most unexpected, and how did they shape your product strategy?
• Looking at Mailtrap's 13-year journey, what's your philosophy on "failing fast" versus "building solid foundations"?

Links

• https://railsware.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/yanch/

Raj Dosanjh grew up in Coventry, which he calls the Detroit of the UK. He still enjoys following the football team, and hopes they rejuvenate the city some. He eventually left for University and moved to London. He likes to dig into how people think and how things are built. Outside of tech, he is engaged to be married in 2026. As such, he has recently taking up physical training - which results in a lot of working out, and meals filled with chicken.

In the past, Raj's now co-founder reached out to him, post shutting the doors on his prior startup. After they had felt out the market to see if a solution for billing could fit, they moved forward and eventually started enabling revenue streams for AI agents.

This is the creation of Paid.

Sponsors

• Incogni
• NordProtect
• Vention
• CodeCrafters helps you become a better engineer by building real-world, production-grade projects. Learn hands-on by creating your own Git, Redis, HTTP server, SQLite, or DNS server from scratch. Sign up for free today using this link and enjoy 40% off.
• Full Scale
• Paddle.com
• Sema Software
• PropelAuth
• Postman
• Meilisearch

Links

• https://paid.ai/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/rdosanjh/

Ryan welcomes Simone Kalmakis, VP of Engineering at Viam, to dive into how her team is bridging the gap between software and robotics, the importance of abstraction layers in making robotics more accessible, and the real-world applications of robotics from lobster traps to industrial sanding robots.

Episode notes:

Viam is a robotics platform that brings modern software development tools into hardware applications. 

Connect with Simone on Linkedin. 

This week’s shoutout goes to Lifejacket winner Sergey Kalinichenko for their answer to How does this K&R code for reading an int work?.

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M.G. Siegler of Spyglass is back for our monthly tech news discussion. Today we dig into whether Tim Cook will retire in 2026, what his legacy will be, and who will likely succeed him as Apple CEO. We also touch on the various Big Tech companies jostling for the title of largest company in the world and what it says about the AI race. Finally, we cover Anthropic's push to become profitable by 2028 and what it says about the state of the AI race.

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M.G. Siegler of Spyglass is back for our monthly tech news discussion. Today we dig into whether Tim Cook will retire in 2026, what his legacy will be, and who will likely succeed him as Apple CEO. We also touch on the various Big Tech companies jostling for the title of largest company in the world and what it says about the AI race. Finally, we cover Anthropic's push to become profitable by 2028 and what it says about the state of the AI race.

---

Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice.

Want a discount for Big Technology on Substack + Discord? Here’s 25% off for the first year: https://www.bigtechnology.com/subscribe?coupon=0843016b

Questions? Feedback? Write to: bigtechnologypodcast@gmail.com

Wealthfront.com/bigtech. If eligible for the overall boosted 4.15% rate offered with this promo, your boosted rate is subject to change if the 3.50% base rate decreases during the 3-month promo period.

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