Software Huddle

• Powered by Neurons with Ewelina Kurtys

  Today we have Dr. Ewelina Kurtys on the show. Ewelina has a background in Neuroscience and is currently working at FinalSpark. FinalSpark is using live Neurons for computations instead of traditional electric CPUs. The advantage is that live Neurons are significantly more energy efficient than traditional computing, and given all the energy concerns right now with regards to running AI workloads and data centers, this seems quite relevant, even though bioprocessors are still very much in the research phase.

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• Lessons from Building AI Agents with Rafal Wilinski

  Today we're talking with one of our favorite engineers, Rafal Wilinski. Rafal has been on the cutting edge of AI development in the last few years as he has led AI teams at Zapier and Vendr. Rafal walks us through the hard-won lessons about actually integrating AI tools into the applications you're building. One of the hardest things in integrating these AI tools is how to ensure you're getting better and not regressing as you improve your prompts and upgrade your models. He shows how using evals is one part of the story along with deeply investigating customer signals to see how they are or aren't succeeding with AI. Along the way, we also talk about RAG, his favorite models, his AI development toolset, and why Poland has been killing it lately. Check it out and be sure to follow Rafal if you want to learn more on building with AI.

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• Building a High-Ownership Engineering Culture with Matt Watson

  If you’ve ever felt like engineering teams are stuck in execution mode—heads down, building what they’re told—then today’s episode is for you. We're talking about what it really takes to build high ownership engineering cultures where devs aren't simply just shipping code, but they're helping shape the product. And our guest this week is Matt Watson. He's a long time founder, engineer, and now the CEO of Full Scale, a company that helps startups and scale ups, grow their engineering teams with top talent from the Philippines. Matt's also the author of a book called Product Driven that shows how engineers can build with more clarity, purpose, customer focus and we get into some of the details in that book during this podcast. So in this episode, we get into everything from the downsides of specialization to the importance of empathy, to why code shipped isn't the same as value delivered. We hope you enjoy it.

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• Building CI for the age of AI Agents with Aayush Shah

  Today's episode is with Aayush Shah. Aayush is one of the co-founders of Blacksmith, which is a CI compute platform. Basically, Blacksmith will run your GitHub Actions jobs faster and with more visibility with the standard GitHub Actions CI runners. The founding team has a fun background doing systems work at Cockroach and Faire, and they're taking on a big problem in running this massive CI fleet. The explosion in AI agents has really changed the CI world. CI is more useful than ever, as you want to be sure the changes from your agents aren't breaking your existing functionality. At the same time, there's a huge increase in demand and spikiness of CI workloads as developers can fire off multiple agents to work in parallel, each needing to run the CI suite before merging. Aayush talked about how they're handling this load and facilitating visibility into test failures. We also covered cloud economics. Aayush said the traditional cloud-based storage options don't work for them -- EBS and locally attached SSDs are too expensive for their workloads where they don't need the standard durability guarantees. He walks us through building their own fleet outside the hyperscalers and the plans going forward, along with some of the economics of multi-tenancy that Blacksmith has previously written about.

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• Valkey After the Fork: A Conversation with Madelyn Olson

  Today, we're talking Valkey, Redis, and all things caching. Our guest is Madelyn Olson, who is a principal engineer at AWS working on Elasticache and is one of the most well-known people in the caching community. She was a core maintainer of Redis prior to the fork and was one of the creators of Valkey, an open-source fork of Redis. In this episode, we talk about Madelyn's road to becoming a Redis maintainer and how she found out about the March 2024 license change. Then, Madelyn shares the story of Valkey being created, philosophical differences between the projects, and her reaction to re-relicensing of Redis in May 2025. Next, we dive into the performance improvements of recent Valkey releases, including the I/O threads improvements and the new hash table layout. Along the way, Madelyn dispels the notion that the single-threaded nature of Redis / Valkey is that big of a hindrance for most workloads. Finally, she compares some of the Valkey improvements to some of the other recent cache competitors in the space.

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