Episode 121: High-Performance Processing Engine, Modern Data Streaming, and Propelling Minority in Tech with Alex Gallego

Show Notes(01:55) Alex reflected on his upbringing as an immigrant moving from Colombia to the US at 14.(07:06) Alex recalled his undergraduate experience at NYU’s Polytechnic School of Engineering. where he study Computer Science and do research in cryptography.(16:40) Alex went over his first job working as a software engineer at FactSet Research System.(20:13) Alex walked through his time as the first employee and the first engineer at YieldMo.(24:30) Alex talked about his hiring philosophy for engineers who care about their craft.(28:03) Alex touched on the backstory behind the creation of Concord, with Shinji Kim and Robert Blafford, while working at YieldMo.(32:26) Alex shared lessons learned from his first-time founder experience with Concord.(35:22) Alex went over his two years at Akamai as a Platform Infrastructure Engineer after the Concord acquisition.(40:01) Alex introduced his work on SMF, an RPC framework designed for microsecond tail latency.(43:41) Alex shared the story behind the founding of Redpanda Data, which builds a high-performance, Apache Kafka-compatible data streaming platform for mission-critical workloads.(47:19) Alex walked through the major benefits of choosing Redpanda over Kafka.(51:03) Alex explained his decision to open-source Redpanda in November 2020 under the Source Available License BSL.(56:08) Alex mentioned successful tactics his team employed in order to raise the adoption and contribution to the open-source library.(01:01:13) Alex unpacked the design of Redpanda's Intelligent Data API.(01:08:55) Alex provided his perspective on the modern streaming data architecture.(01:13:24) Alex shared valuable hiring lessons to attract the right people who are excited about Redpanda’s mission.(01:18:30) Alex talked about his experience choosing customers for Redpanda.(01:20:33) Alex shared fundraising advice to founders who are seeking the right investors for their startups.(01:23:23) Alex gave advice to a smart, driven minority who aspires to work on ambitious, technically deep, and challenging problems.(01:28:18) Closing segment.Alex's Contact InfoLinkedInTwitterWebsiteGitHubRedpanda's ResourcesWebsite | Twitter | LinkedIn | Slack | GitHub | Contributing DocAbout Redpanda | Platform Capabilities | CustomersDocs | Redpanda UniversityReports and Guides | BenchmarksHack The Planet ScholarshipMentioned ContentBlog PostsRedpanda raison d'etre (Feb 2019)Thread-per-core buffer management for a modern Kafka-API storage system (Sep 2020)Redpanda is now free and Source Available (Nov 2020)Redpanda creates Redpanda, the Intelligent Data API Platform, backed by $15.5M initial funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners and GV (Jan 2021)The Intelligent Data API (Jan 2021)Redpanda Wasm engine architecture (June 2021)We raised an additional $50M to drive the future of streaming data. Join us! (Feb 2022)Redpanda gives Kafka a Run for Its Money (InfoWorld, May 2022)Alex Gallego Builds Redpanda To Simplify And Unify Real-Time Streaming Data (Forbes, June 2022)TalksDistributed Stream Processing over thousands of Datacenters (GeeCON, Aug 2017)How to Build the Fastest RPC (Nov 2017)Co-designing Raft + thread-per-core execution model for the Kafka-API (Dec 2021)PeopleAndy PavloLeslie LamportKyle KingsburyNotes

My conversation with Alex was recorded back in August 2022. Since then, I recommend checking out these resources:

Datacast features long-form, in-depth conversations with practitioners and researchers in the data community to walk through their professional journeys and unpack the lessons learned along the way. I invite guests coming from a wide range of career paths — from scientists and analysts to founders and investors — to analyze the case for using data in the real world and extract their mental models (“the WHY and the HOW”) behind their pursuits. Hopefully, these conversations can serve as valuable tools for early-stage data professionals as they navigate their own careers in the exciting data universe.

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