44. Idea to Product: Choices made by the founders of Typesense Search

How do you assess the merit of an idea? How do you decide whether you want to work on building the idea into a product and when and whether you must quit your day job to follow your passion? How do you monetize your ideas?

Kishore Nallan and Jason Bosco, Founders of Typesense search, answer these questions and share many personal learnings from their journey of 15 years in startups and big companies.

Kishore and Jason have had very successful careers working at many well known startups. Jason was VP of Engineering at Dollar Shave Club and Verishop and Kishore was a Senior SRE at Zapier and cofounded Wreally. They worked on Typesense for 4 years along with their full time jobs, until the search engine gained traction before they quit their jobs to focus on TypeSense full time.

ShowNotes

Kishore's Linkedin Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kishorenallan/

Jason's Linkedin Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonbosco/

Episode length: 34 min | Listen on: Spotify | Google | Apple | More options

Mentioned in this episode

1. Typesense Search: https://typesense.org/

2. Kishore's blog: https://typesense.org/blog/the-unreasonable-effectiveness-of-just-showing-up-everyday/

3. Open Core Model: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-core_model

4. B2B: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/btob.asp

5. B2C: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/btoc.asp

6. B2C vs B2B: https://www.bluecart.com/blog/b2b-vs-b2c

7. Hacker News post announcing Typesense: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22181437

43. A Career in Systems Programming

What does building system software feel like? What does a long term career in Systems Programming look like? What kind of mindset and skills are required to succeed here? What are some misconceptions about this field? ​

We discuss all this with Arun Raghavan. Arun runs a system software consultancy called Asymptotic.io. He has been a long term contributor to multimedia frameworks like GStreamer and PulseAudio. He has been developing software for over 15 years and has worked at companies like Nvidia and Collabora.

Arun's LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/arunsraghavan/

Episode length: 34 min | Listen on: Spotify | Google | Apple | More options

Mentioned in this episode

1. Systems Programming - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_programming

2. GStreamer - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GStreamer

3. PulseAudio - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PulseAudio

4. PipeWire - https://pipewire.org/

5. Collabora - https://www.collabora.com/

6. Asymptotic.io - https://asymptotic.io/

7. Electronic Design Automation - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_design_automation

8. Bit banging - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit_banging

9. I-square C - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%C2%B2C

10. System on a Chip - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_on_a_chip

11. DLNA - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Living_Network_Alliance

12. H.264 - https://www.haivision.com/resources/streaming-video-definitions/h-264/

13. Abhinav Sarkar - https://abhinavsarkar.net/

14. V8 Javascript Engine - https://v8.dev/

15. libuv - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libuv

16. NodeJS - https://nodejs.org/en/about/

17. Rust - https://www.rust-lang.org/

18. Lua - https://www.lua.org/about.html

19. Haskell - https://www.haskell.org/

20. NeoVim - https://neovim.io/

21. Arun's Twitter id - https://twitter.com/louiswu

22. Arun's email - arun@asymptotic.io

42. Technical Leadership: A Principal Engineer's view

How does one get into positions of leadership and influence, while staying on a technical career path? What does a Principal Engineer bring to the table at a top tier technology company like Amazon? To share his perspective, we have with us Saurabh Shrivastava, Principal Engineer at Amazon.

Saurabh has two decades of experience in roles spanning software engineering and management. Most recently, he was a Director at Nuage Networks before joining Amazon. He has a unique point of view on leadership in both the technical and management ladders.

Saurabh's LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gokodo/

Episode length: 21 min | Listen on: Spotify | Google | Apple | More options

Mentioned in this episode:

1. Decentralized Finance: https://defi-learning.org/

2. MIT Undergraduate Course in AI: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-034-artificial-intelligence-spring-2005/

3. Nuage Networks: https://www.nuagenetworks.net/

4. At Scale Conference: https://atscaleconference.com/

5. NSDI Conference: https://www.usenix.org/conference/nsdi21

6. HotOS Conference: https://sigops.org/s/conferences/hotos/2021/index.html

7. Andrej Karpathy, Director of AI at Tesla: https://twitter.com/karpathy