Emre Baran (@emre) is the CEO and co-founder of Cerbos, the open-source authorization layer for implementing roles and permissions. Cerbos allows developers to decouple authorization logic from core code into its own centrally distributed component. Easier said than done, perhaps - but Cerbos is secure, intentionally simple to implement, and developer-focused. Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications, and join our Slack community! In this episode we discuss: The difference between authentication and authorization Why Cerbos is language-agnostic Authorization patterns in a single application versus a larger network The reason most devs start out trying to do authorization themselves, and sometimes give up How the upcoming Cerbos Cloud will empower less technical users to deploy and manage policies and logs Links: Cerbos Cerbos Cloud Beta Zanzibar: Google’s Consistent, Global Authorization System People mentioned: Charith Ellawala (Github: @charithe) Other episodes: Open Policy Agent with Torin Sandall

Eric Anderson (@ericmander) has a conversation with Liam Randall (@Hectaman) and Bailey Hayes (@baihay) of Cosmonic, the platform-as-a-service environment for building cloud-native applications using WebAssembly. Bailey is also on the steering committee for the Bytecode Alliance, which stewards WebAssembly. In 2021, Cosmonic donated their WebAssembly runtime, wasmCloud, to the CNCF as an open-source project. Today, Liam and Bailey trace the history of WebAssembly, and their personal paths alongside it. Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications, and join our Slack community! In this episode we discuss: How WebAssembly came together over the last decade to become the fourth standardized language of the web The moments when Bailey and Liam both realized they might be changing the future of computing Modding Microsoft Flight Simulator with Wasm modules Liam’s thoughts on how WebAssembly will affect business models going forward Links: Cosmonic WebAssembly Bytecode Alliance CNCF wasmCloud Wasmtime WAMR Better together: A Kubernetes and Wasm case study Spin People mentioned: Kevin Hoffman (@KevinHoffman) Kelsey Hightower (@kelseyhightower) Guy Bedford (@guybedford) Peter Huene (@peterhuene) Chris Aniszczyk (@cra) Other episodes: Envoy Proxy with Matt Klein Suborbital with Connor Hicks

Eric Anderson (@ericmander) is joined by Milos Rusic (@rusic_milos) to discuss Haystack, the open-source NLP framework for leveraging Transformer models and building intelligent search systems. Milos and his colleagues at deepset were early contributors to Hugging Face’s Transformer models, and began building pipelines for searching large document stores. Today, Haystack is wildly popular, with an active Discord community and over 6,000 GitHub stars. Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications, and join our Slack community! In this episode we discuss: A deep dive into how Haystack works and its many use cases How a customer demo with one-minute long queries helped inspire Haystack Marketing open-source projects vs word of mouth NLP applications working with structured data and translating between types of data Imagining a world where every person has their own personal ChatGPT Links: Haystack deepset Hugging Face Notion Other episodes: Milvus with Frank Liu

Eric Anderson (@ericmander) talks with Artyom Keydunov (@keydunov) about Cube, the semantic layer for building data applications. Cube helps engineers bridge data warehouses and data experiences, and provides access control, security, caching, and more helpful features. The project began in open-source and has evolved quite a lot over the last few years with a ton of community support. Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications, and join our Slack community! In this episode we discuss: What is a semantic layer? Coming up with the idea to open-source during a game of ping pong Setting a ten-company-deployment goal Using Cube to track COVID stats in lockdown How one contributor built a GraphQL API Links: Cube Superset Metabase Observable Streamlit People mentioned: Pavel Tiunov (@paveltiunov87)

Eric Anderson (@ericmander) and Erika Hokanson (@erikawh0) remember the life of Jeff Meyerson, creator of the influential podcast Software Engineering Daily. He passed during the summer of 2022. Still, his work lives on - thousands of episodes, talks, music, a book, and a community of dedicated listeners and engineers whose lives were touched by Jeff’s dreams. Software Engineering Daily is still running, and you can listen to new episodes right here or wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications, and join our Slack community! Links: Software Engineering Daily Software Engineering Radio The Prion (Soundcloud) (Spotify) You Are Not A Commodity Move Fast: How Facebook Builds Software People mentioned: Pranay Mohan (@pranaymohan)

We’re kicking off the new year with a conversation between Eric Anderson (@ericmander), Sergei Egorov (@bsideup) and Eli Aleyner (@ealeyner). Sergei and Eli founded AtomicJar to maintain Testcontainers, the family of open-source libraries that allow developers to write and run integration tests locally, and treat them as unit tests. Testcontainers is wildly popular, with over six thousand GitHub stars (and climbing!). Tune in to find out how Sergei and Eli are helping people test their software quicker, easier, and more efficiently. Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications, and join our Slack community! In this episode we discuss: How Testcontainers solves the problem of confidence The value of Github’s networking effect Inspiration from Amazon’s S3 “test bunny” Consequences of Docker’s over- and under-adoption Replicating success in other languages besides Java Links: Testcontainers AtomicJar Spring Quarkus Micronaut How We Maintain Security Testing within the Software Development Life Cycle People mentioned: Richard North (@whichrich) Kevin Wittek (@Kiview) Martin Fowler (@martinfowler)

Eric Anderson (@ericmander) is joined by Nate Rush (@naterush1997) and Aaron Diamond-Reivich (@_aaronDR) to talk about Mito, the open-source spreadsheet that generates Python code for data analysts. Mito is a Python library and acts as an extension to a Jupyter Notebook. Tune in to find out how the Mito team is bridging the gap in data science between spreadsheets and programming. Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications, and join our Slack community! In this episode we discuss: How Nate, Aaron and Aaron’s fraternal twin brother Jake have been friends since middle school Programming tools for spreadsheet users vs spreadsheet tools for people who are trying to become programmers Advantages to integrating into other open-source projects Reflecting on the hype around Python data science Python needs for Mito’s enterprise customers Links: Mito Project Jupyter pandas Superhuman Streamlit People mentioned: Jacob Diamond-Reivich (@Jake_Stack808)

Eric Anderson (@ericmander) and Simba Khadder (@simba_khadder) explore Featureform, the “virtual” feature store platform that aims to standardize data pipelines for machine learning. Contributor is no stranger to feature stores, but Simba has a broader definition than most. Join us to learn how Featureform enables data scientists and machine learning practitioners to solve a common, but rarely addressed organizational problem. Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications, and join our Slack community! In this episode we discuss: How there is no standard or north star for MLOps Why enterprise is where Featureform’s value shines MLPlatform problems vs MLOps problems Why copy/paste and Git don’t cut it Deploying MLOps solutions that make data scientists and everyone else happy Links: Featureform Terraform Apache Spark Feathr Other episodes: Tensorflow with Rajat Monga

Eric Anderson (@ericmander) hosts Ben Haynes (@benhaynes), CEO and co-founder of Directus. Directus is an open-source data platform that layers on SQL databases to provide an instant API, and includes a no-code data studio interface. Listen in to find out how Directus is aiming to democratize the modern data stack for everyone. Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications, and join our Slack community! In this episode we discuss: The inspiration to create an “admin interface on steroids” Reflecting on Directus’ unusual linear growth trend How Directus powers digital experiences, applications, and internal dev tools Ben’s thoughts on maintaining a sustainable, premium open-source experience Automated data processing with Directus Flows Links: Directus Supabase Other episodes: Chef with Adam Jacob

Eric Anderson (@ericmander) chats with Toni de la Fuente (@ToniBlyx) about how he created Prowler, an open source security tool for AWS. Toni talks about taking Prowler from a nights-and-weekends project to his current full-time job, managing a team of four. They discuss transitioning from primarily coding to primarily managing tickets and users, as well as being “client zero” and bringing the project to big companies. Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications, and join our Slack community! In this episode we discuss: The roadmap from open source Prowler to Prowler Pro Prowler’s diverse set of users What Toni learned from quitting an earlier open source project The differences between Prowler and other security services for AWS Links: Prowler on Github Prowler Pro Verica Black Hat People mentioned: Aaron Rinehart Casey Rosenthal

Eric Anderson (@ericmander) meets legendary open-source developer Max Howell (@mxcl) to talk about tea, a decentralized protocol for remunerating the open-source ecosystem. Max is the creator of Homebrew, and he chats about his exit from the project. The conversation turns to his newest project, tea, which is an evolution of Brew, and takes inspiration from blockchain technology. They also discuss Max’s famous interview at Google and his time working for Apple. Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications, and join our Slack community! In this episode we discuss: Max’s experience creating Homebrew, one of the largest open-source projects ever The utility of Web3 beyond decentralized finance Writing a white paper for tea, “just like everyone else” Why Max wants a global team, with people in every time zone How tea ensures a sustainable future for open-source Links: Homebrew tea.xyz tea white paper Bitcoin white paper Max’s Google interview tweet Log4j vulnerability “Nebraska” XKCD comic Nix OS People mentioned: Timothy Lewis

Eric Anderson (@ericmander) and Connor Hicks (@cohix) launch into detail on Suborbital, an open-source project that allows developers to create WebAssembly projects embedded in other applications. Connor conceived of Suborbital while frustrated with the cold start problem that can impact Function-as-a-Service platforms. Today, Suborbital collaborates with companies like Microsoft on a community called Wasm Builders, dedicated to sharing and developing innovations in WebAssembly applications. Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications, and join our Slack community! In this episode we discuss: The three tentpoles of WebAssembly that make it a useful foundation for Suborbital Surprising niche use cases for WebAssembly like IoT and data modeling Open-source tools in the Suborbital ecosystem Putting focus on building a larger Wasm Builders community Connor’s thoughts on how WebAssembly can improve edge computing Links: Suborbital WebAssembly Suborbital Compute Atmo Reactr Subo  Sat Firecracker

Eric Anderson (@ericmander) and Frank Liu (@frankzliu) talk about Milvus, the open-source vector database built for scalable similarity search. Vector databases are built to search, index and store embeddings, a requirement for powerful AI applications. Frank is Director of Operations at Zilliz, the company that stewards the project. Tune in to find out how Milvus is the database for the AI era. Subscribe to Contributor on Substack for email notifications, and join our Slack community! In this episode we discuss: A crash course on embeddings and vector databases Using Milvus for logo search, crypto predictions, drug discovery, and more Other open-source projects at Zilliz that complement Milvus “Embedding Everything” How Milvus incorporates tunable consistency to its search process Links: Milvus Zilliz Towhee Attu Feder Other episodes: Clickhouse with Alexey Milovidov and Ivan Blinkov Correction: Milvus is based on a “shared storage” architecture, not “shared nothing.”

Eric Anderson (@ericmander) reunites with old colleagues Kenn Knowles (@KennKnowles) and Pablo Estrada (@polecitoem) for a conversation on Apache Beam, the open-source programming model for data processing. The trio once worked together at Google, and Beam was a turning point in the history of open-source there. Today, both Kenn and Pablo are members of the Beam PMC, and join the show with the inside scoop on Beam’s past, present and future. In this episode we discuss: Transitioning Beam to the Apache Way How “inner source” works at Google Thoughts on the relationship between batch processing and streaming Some ways that community “power users” have contributed to Beam Information on Beam Summit 2022, the first onsite summit since COVID began The first few people to register can use code BEAM_POD_INV for a discount on tickets! Links: Apache Beam Apache Spark Apache Flink Apache Nemo Apache Samza Apache Crunch MapReduce paper  MillWheel paper FlumeJava paper Dataflow paper Beam Summit 2022 Website Other episodes: TensorFlow with Rajat Monga

Eric Anderson (@ericmander) returns to Temporal with co-founder Maxim Fateev (@mfateev) and principal engineer Dominik Tornow (@DominikTornow). When Maxim joined us in September of 2020, the company called their project a “workflow orchestrator.” Today, Temporal has grown in popularity and usability, but the terminology around that abstraction has changed. Tune in to track the evolution of what Maxim calls a genuinely “new category of software.” In this episode we discuss: New features and developments in the last 2 years The proper way to pronounce “Temporal” How Temporal guarantees that workflow execution actually runs to execution Describing Temporal as a new pair of glasses Replay, Temporal’s first developer conference on August 25-26, in Seattle Links: Temporal Cadence Apache Cassandra Replay People mentioned: Samar Abbas (@samarabbas77) Other episodes: Temporal with Maxim Fateev Apache Cassandra with Patrick McFadin

Eric Anderson (@ericmander) interviews Avi Press (@avi_press) about Scarf, the distribution platform for open-source software that facilitates analytics and commercialization. Scarf offers a set of tools that allows founders and maintainers to understand adoption of their products, including Scarf Gateway, which provides a central access point to containers and packages. From there, open-source developers can connect with the people that rely on their work. In this episode we discuss: Why you can’t rely on Github as a source of comprehensive data about open-source software Tracing a user’s journey interacting with a project across multiple platforms How better observability allows maintainers to make better software Inspiring indie maintainers to commercialize their projects The privilege of being able to work in open-source, and how Scarf can enable a more inclusive developer community Links: Scarf Tidelift Gitcoin OpenTeams Aviyel

Eric Anderson (@ericmander) and Patrick Dougherty (@cpdough) talk about Rasgo, the data transformation platform for MLOps that makes generating SQL easy. The team at Rasgo recently open-sourced a package called RasgoQL, that allows users to execute SQL queries against a data warehouse using Python syntax. Tune in to find out how Rasgo aims to bridge an important gap in the Modern Data Stack. In this episode we discuss: The advantages of offering both a low-code/no-code UI and a Python interface "How can a data scientist, without needing full-time resources from data engineering, be somewhat self-sufficient in data prep and able to deliver those insights without a massive human capital investment needed?" Where Rasgo fits into the world of feature stores Why one Rasgo user took a trip to a wind farm in Texas Eric’s predictions for the future of data prep and transformation Links: Rasgo RasgoQL DuckDB Delta Lake People mentioned: Jared Parker (@jaredtparker_)

Eric Anderson (@ericmander) and Willem Pienaar (@willpienaar) talk about Feast, the open-source feature store for machine learning. Feature stores act as a bridge between models and data, and allow data scientists to ship features into production without the need for engineers. Willem co-created Feast at Gojek, and later teamed up with the folks at Tecton to back the project. In this episode we discuss: The value of feature stores in MLOps What happens when you open-source too early Why most open-source code has nothing to hide Bringing an open-source project to an existing company Good and bad use cases for a feature store Links: Feast Tecton Turing Merlin Kubeflow apply() Conference People mentioned: Mike Del Balso Kevin Stumpf (@kevinmstumpf) Ajey Gore (@AjeyGore) Demetrios Brinkmann (@Dpbrinkm) Wes McKinney (@wesmckinn) Other episodes: Flyte with Ketan Umare Great Expectations with Abe Gong and Kyle Eaton

Eric Anderson (@ericmander) and Ketan Umare (@ketanumare) discuss Flyte, the open-source workflow automation platform for large-scale machine learning and data use cases. Ketan is a former engineer at Lyft, where he created Flyte to help models in Pricing, Locations, ETA, and more. Today, the project allows machine learning developers everywhere to bring their ideas from conception to production. In this episode we discuss: How Flyte combines compute with parts of a workflow engine in a way that is best for the user The importance of reliable fares and ETA predictions at a ride-sharing app A progenitor to Flyte called “Better Airflow” Ketan’s innovative approach to bringing typing to machine learning workloads Why Flyte landed at the Linux Foundation Links: Flyte Union.ai Apache Airflow Kubeflow Luigi MLTwist Other episodes: Great Expectations with Abe Gong and Kyle Eaton Envoy Proxy with Matt Klein

Eric Anderson (@ericmander) meets with Davit Buniatyan (@DBuniatyan) of Activeloop, the database for AI. Davit was inspired to found Activeloop while working on large datasets in a neuroscience research lab at Princeton. Powering the technology at Activeloop is Hub, the open-source dataset format for AI applications. Join us to learn how Hub promises to enhance and expand various verticals in deep learning. In this episode we discuss: Reconfiguring traditional ML tooling for the cloud Connectomics - working with thin slices of a mouse brain with neuroscientist Sebastian Seung Choosing between university, a start-up, and open-source Davit’s original product, that ran computation on crypto mining GPUs on a distributed scale Focusing on different data modalities for computer vision Links: Activeloop Activeloop Hub Apache Parquet Apache Spark TensorFlow Snowflake Databricks Timescale People mentioned: Sebastian Seung (@SebastianSeung) Other episodes: TensorFlow with Rajat Monga