Weekly interviews w/ top technical founders + leaders, to stay fresh on how software + AI actually work. Hosted by @meganreyno, new eps every Thursday ↓
Joined January 2020
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it seems like every week the AI wave exposes a new set of technical terms that we should know about.
so we phoned a friend (@meganreyno), and this Thursday we’re launching Technically Speaking - bringing in technical founders & leaders to break down the technical problem they’ve spent years obsessing over.
the Season 1 lineup is downright effervescent:
- Michael Grinich (WorkOS) on Auth
- Jonathan Frankle (Databricks) on AI research
- Julien Launay and Sesh Nalla (Datadog) on RL
- Jake Cooper (Railway) on Cloud
- and five (5!) more special guests to be announced
new episodes posting every Thursday until the holidays.
who should we have on next?
"You never quite know what you're going to get when you push the frontier."
But what does pushing the frontier actually look like day-to-day? What do AI researchers...actually do?
On Ep 2 of Technically Speaking, @jefrankle (Chief AI Scientist @databricks) & @meganreyno get into it:
→ How he runs his team: "If I don't have numbers, I don't believe you."
→ Why you should ship before you feel ready: "you need to ship the best of what you have at any given time"
→ Who he hires: "people who are never quite satisfied"
🎬 Watch the full episode: youtu.be/Qz58c13N7ms
Presented by our friends at @Railway.
Stay tuned for some of our favorite moments...
Show me the numbers!
"If I don't have numbers, I don't believe you. Like, why should I believe you?"
"I would start this exact company today, right now, to do the same thing for agents. The opportunity for us and the TAM has gotten larger and larger. I think that's mostly luck. I did not anticipate that, to be clear."
- @grinich, Founder & CEO at @WorkOS, on Technically Speaking
Watch the full episode: youtu.be/2I8pJt9kXa8
"If you start building a product and everybody is building the same thing and it's like consensus, there's no way you can survive. You need to be kind of misunderstood for a while."
- @grinich on ep 1 of Technically Speaking
📌 Watch the full episode: youtu.be/2I8pJt9kXa8
"How many people do you need on your team?"
Michael Grinich (@grinich), Founder & CEO at @WorkOS, on how they hired a head of finance:
"'I have, like, eight or nine people.' And then they'd kind of say under their breath, 'But I think I can do it with just two.' It just means we won't have an entire floor in an office building full of people just doing calculations, like we used to for bookkeeping."
Watch the full episode: youtu.be/2I8pJt9kXa8
"In practice, it needs access to everything. But also nothing."
We thought access control was a solved problem, then agents showed up.
On ep 1 of Technically Speaking, @grinich (founder of @WorkOS) & @meganreyno discuss:
→ Why AI agents require rethinking Auth: "It's kind of like spawning new people in your organization very quickly."
→ What's stopping companies from letting agents cook (it's not the quality of models or harnesses): "To err is human, but to screw up 10,000 times per second you need a computer."
→ How Michael is hiring differently bc of AI
🎥 Watch the full episode: youtu.be/2I8pJt9kXa8
Presented by our friends at @Railway.
Original music by The Jazz Boys (don't sleep on them).
ai writes code at light speed now, so github invented a way for humans to pretend they're keeping up
Databases aren't glamorous, but they're the most likely piece of the stack to ruin the launch of your vibe-coded app.
- A database is like a spreadsheet, except with more rules on how to interact with it.
- The schema is the rulebook: what every column can hold, and how tables connect to each other.
- Changing it on a live app is a migration, which must be done with care.
- Big files don't go in the database, they go into object storage.
Learn more about the care and feeding of databases in pt 2 of our series "Software Engineering for Vibe Coders": technically.dev/posts/databa…
