Animating the Stack with Sam Rose

02/21/25 • 74 min

This episode is stacked with information. You could even say “full stacked.” Sam has built and run some large scale systems as a SRE at Google, now building backend services at Budibase, and he spends his free time teaching others how systems work at understandable scale. We dive into what makes Google SRE different from other companies, what it’s like to be a parent, and how Sam got started with building animations for his blog. Don’t forget to visit and check out the easter eggs he’s hidden throughout.

Show Highlights

0:00 - Intro
2:00 - Sam’s background
6:00 - How Google did SRE
15:00 - Importance of docs
19:00 - The problems with Java
26:00 - Budibase
32:00 - Borg vs Kubernetes
39:00 - Building animations
46:00 - Being a better teacher
56:00 - Art in the age of AI
1:00:00 - What’s next

Links Referenced

SRE book https://sre.google/books/
Sam’s Blog https://samwho.dev/
Budibase - https://budibase.com/
Bartosz Ciechanowski’s website - https://ciechanow.ski/
Life Animated book - https://www.amazon.com/Life-Animated-Sidekicks-Heroes-Autism/dp/1484741234
Andy Matuschak’s website - https://andymatuschak.org/
Southern California Linux Expo (SCaLE) - https://www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale/22x

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Show Highlights

Links Referenced

SRE book https://sre.google/books/
Sam’s Blog https://samwho.dev/
Budibase - https://budibase.com/
Bartosz Ciechanowski’s website - https://ciechanow.ski/
Life Animated book - https://www.amazon.com/Life-Animated-Sidekicks-Heroes-Autism/dp/1484741234
Andy Matuschak’s website - https://andymatuschak.org/
Southern California Linux Expo (SCaLE) - https://www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale/22x

Sponsor

The sponsor for this week is YOU!

Please share and rate this episode!

https://fafo.fm/sponsor

Previous Episode

Predicting Bluesky’s Scale with Jaz

Bluesky has been on a roller coaster of growth for over a year. From the early days of figuring out a new distributed social protocol—AT protocol—to actually building it and inviting 30 million of their closest friends. Not only has the site gone through tremendous growth, the team has been optimizing, re-architecting, and adding features the entire time.

Jaz is a software engineer focused on the infrastructure at Bluesky, and they share how they achieved exponential growth without exponential costs. We cover some of the key components of the protocol and how that affects the architecture.

There’s some amazing advice from the trenches we know you’ll enjoy.

Show Highlights
(0:00) Intro
(5:00) Jaz’s background
(12:30) Bluesky Infrastructure
(17:00) Predicting the future
(20:00) What is a PDS?
(22:30) Relay and firehose
(26:00) Work queues
(30:00) Scaling physical servers
(37:00) How do you handle incidents?
(41:00) Where’s Kubernetes?
(43:30) How video changes
(45:00) Data locality
(46:30) Hardware decisions
(53:00) What bad decisions?
(57:00) Launching video
(1:00:00) What’s next?

About Jaz

Jaz is a software engineer who learned from on-the-job experience. They have a background with hardware which makes them better with software. If they’re not drinking Monster they’re building a single purpose database, or maybe they’re doing both. Jaz went from building with AT protocol to building AT protocol in a matter of months. They also have an impressive collection of plushies and power tools.

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Next Episode

FAFO Live with Sam Rose

Sam is back with us for a live episode where we discuss important questions such as “is coffee is good?”, “are people on the Internet good writers?”, and “is content creation consistency actually important?” We also share links about turning your hand writing into a font and hacking McDonald’s delivery app. Finally, we wrap up with a new game FAANG GANG.

Chapters

(0:00) Intro
(9:00) Codifying your handwriting
(10:30) I’m loving it
(27:00) Consistency in content
(39:00) FAANG gang game

Links Shared