Best Jan Baran Podcasts (2024)

1
A Supreme Path: From Latin to Campaign Finance Law, to 38 Oral Arguments – Kannon Shanmugam 44:38

14d ago44:38

44:38

Arguing before the Supreme Court increasingly has become a specialty of an elite group of lawyers. A former Scalia judicial law clerk, Kannon Shanmugam has argued 38 cases at the court. In this episode, Jan speaks with Kannon about his Midwest upbringing, his route to being a lawyer, his exceptional career, and his times before the Supreme Court. T…

1
Ground Control: Lunar with Eyal Solomon 27:17

29d ago27:17

27:17

Eyal Solomon (@EyalSolomo44643) is the CEO and co-founder of Lunar, an open-source platform which bills itself as the “first reverse API gateway.” Lunar allows engineering teams to monitor, manage, and optimize API consumption. According to Eyal, it’s very easy to integrate with APIs, but difficult to keep them maintained, and there was a clear nee…

1
Ambassador Jim Gilmore: From the Popular Virginia Car Tax Reimbursements to Current Foreign Affairs 37:22

1M ago37:22

37:22

In this episode of Early Returns, Jan Baran speaks with Former Virginia Governor and U.S. Ambassador, Jim Gilmore. They discuss his career in public service, his rise in Republican politics with the popular Virginia car tax reimbursement, and staying true to his roots and passion for foreign affairs and policy. As Ambassador to the Organization for…

1
Metadata Management: DataHub with Shirshanka Das 36:56

2M ago36:56

36:56

Shirshanka Das (@shirshanka) is the CTO of Acryl Data and founder of DataHub, which bills itself as the #1 open-source metadata platform. It enables data discovery, data observability and federated governance to help tame complex data ecosystems. Shirshanka first developed DataHub while at LinkedIn, but has grown it into an independent project with…

1
Take Your Own Advice: vlcn with Matt Wonlaw 31:58

2M ago31:58

31:58

After his first child was born, Matt Wonlaw (@tantaman) imagined giving his son life advice. What kind of life did he want his kid to lead? At the time, he was working for Facebook, and he decided that his own life needed a change in direction. So Matt started vlcn, aka Vulcan Labs, a research company that develops open-source projects like CR-SQLi…

1
Secret Sauce: Amplication with Yuval Hazaz 31:22

2M ago31:22

31:22

Amplication is an open-source development platform for scalable and secure Node.js applications. It allows engineers to skip writing boilerplate code and offers the flexibility to customize and add components. Amplification was created by Yuval Hazaz (@Yuvalhazaz1), a veteran developer who determined that low-code platforms save time but restrict f…

1
To the Moon: OpenBB with Didier Lopes 39:41

3M ago39:41

39:41

OpenBB is an open-source investment research platform created by Didier Lopes (@didier_lopes). OpenBB grew out of a project called Gamestonk Terminal that Didier began working on shortly before the Gamestop short squeeze in January 2021. Today, OpenBB has evolved into an infrastructure platform that allows users to build extensions and access finan…

1
Robust Observability: OpenTelemetry with Austin Parker 35:01

3M ago35:01

35:01

OpenTelemetry is an open-source observability framework for collecting and managing telemetry data. OpenTelemetry has been more successful than expected, becoming the second fastest growing project in the CNCF. It allows for flexibility and avoids vendor lock-in, making it attractive to startups and large enterprises alike. On today’s show, Eric (@…

1
Deciphering Election 2024 with Charlie Cook 48:19

4M ago48:19

48:19

At this point in a presidential election year, the national conversation would usually be focused on which candidates are wrestling for their party nomination. But, as we know, this year is different. Even though primary elections still remain and the nominating conventions won’t occur until late summer, the 2024 candidates for president appear to …

1
Never Build Permissions Again: OPAL with Or Weis 37:15

4M ago37:15

37:15

OPAL is an open-source administration layer for Policy Engines such as Open Policy Agent (OPA). OPAL provides the necessary infrastructure to load policy and data into multiple policy engines, ensuring they have the information they need to make decisions. Today, we’re talking to Or Weis (@OrWeis), co-creator of OPAL and co-founder of Permit, the e…

1
Oxygen Deprivation: FerretDB with Peter Farkas 33:55

4M ago33:55

33:55

FerretDB enables users to run MongoDB applications on existing Postgres infrastructure. Peter Farkas (@FarkasP), co-founder and CEO of FerretDB, explains the need for an open source interface for document databases. Peter also discusses the licensing change of MongoDB and the uncertainty it created for users. He emphasizes the importance of open st…

1
The Duke of SQLite: Litestream with Ben Johnson 34:14

5M ago34:14

34:14

Ben Johnson (@benbjohnson) is the creator of Litestream and LiteFS, two open-source disaster recovery solution for SQLite. Litestream is designed to provide continuous backups for SQLite databases by streaming incremental changes, allowing for easy data recovery in the event of a server crash. LiteFS, on the other hand, is built on LiteStream but u…

1
Rust Never Sleeps: Tonic with Lucio Franco 36:24

5M ago36:24

36:24

Tonic is a native gRPC implementation in Rust that allows users to easily build gRPC servers and clients without extensive async experience. Tonic is part of the Tokio stack, which is a library that provides an asynchronous runtime for Rust and more tools to write async applications. Today, Lucio Franco (@lucio_d_franco) of Turso joins the podcast …

1
Sean Cooksey Shares FEC Menu for 2024 49:29

6M ago49:29

49:29

As with the previous two season kick-offs of Early Returns, we welcome the third season with the newly elected 2024 chair of the Federal Election Commission, Sean Cooksey, who is a republican. The FEC consists of six bipartisan commissioners with no more than three from the same political party. It takes the vote of four commissioners to take any m…

1
The Social Miracle: rqlite with Philip O’Toole 43:02

6M ago43:02

43:02

rqlite is a lightweight, distributed relational database built on Raft and SQLite. Founder Philip O’Toole (@general_order24) decided to combine these technologies while working at a startup years ago. The startup no longer exists, but rqlite is going strong. Today, Philip is an engineering manager at Google, while he continues to be the driving for…

1
Community Driven IaC: OpenTofu with Kuba Martin 33:11

8M ago33:11

33:11

Kuba Martin (@cube2222_2) is Software Engineering Team Lead at Spacelift and Interim Tech Lead of OpenTofu, the open-source fork of Terraform. Terraform is a declarative infrastructure-as-code (IaC) tool that recently switched to a source-available license. Spacelift and other companies that heavily relied on Terraform came together to fork it into…

1
Postgres for Everything: Tembo with Ry Walker 32:03

9M ago32:03

32:03

Ry Walker (@rywalker) is the founder and CEO of Tembo, the Postgres developer platform for building any and every data service. To Ry, the full capabilities of Postgres appear underappreciated and underused for most users. Tembo is an attempt to harness the large ecosystem of Postgres extensions, and ultimately collapse the database sprawl of the m…

1
Automation for Technical People: n8n with Jan Oberhauser 40:04

10M ago40:04

40:04

Jan Oberhauser (@JanOberhauser) is the founder and CEO of n8n, the free and source-available workflow automation tool for technical users. n8n's flexible architecture allows users to avoid the limitations of other automation tools, while also opening doors for complex automation scenarios. The project has garnered over 30,000 GitHub stars and a thr…

1
Bradley Smith – Deregulating Political Speech Through Campaign Finance 48:07

11M ago48:07

48:07

In this episode of Early Returns, Jan speaks with Bradley Smith, professor at Capital Law School, former Federal Election Commission (“FEC”) Chair, nationally recognized expert on campaign finance and the First Amendment, and the Founder and Chairman of the Institute for Free Speech (“IFS”). IFS defends rights guaranteed by the first amendment of t…

1
The Big Fork: libSQL with Glauber Costa 32:20

11M ago32:20

32:20

Glauber Costa (@glcst) is the founder of Turso and the co-creator of libSQL, an open source, open contribution fork of the database engine library, SQLite. Most people believe that SQLite is open-source software, but it actually exists in the public domain and doesn’t accept external contributions. With their big fork, Glauber and his team have set…

1
Rethinking the Workflow Problem: Windmill with Ruben Fiszel 26:49

11M ago26:49

26:49

Ruben Fiszel (@rubenfiszel) is the creator of Windmill, the open-source developer platform that lets users easily turn scripts into workflows and internal apps with auto-generated UIs. Windmill doesn’t force engineers to change their coding style or adopt a convoluted API, and its low-code design makes it accessible to non-technical users. Tune in …

1
Vector Search for Humans: Marqo with Jesse Clark 34:17

12M ago34:17

34:17

Jesse Clark (@jn2clark) is a co-founder of Marqo, the end-to-end, multimodal vector search engine. Vector search has exploded along with the rise of generative AI models, so Marqo’s arrival has had excellent timing. The project has quickly grown to almost 3000 GitHub stars, despite being less than a year old. Jesse and his team weren’t exactly expe…

1
From Orchestration to Building Applications: Conductor with Jeu George 33:48

12M ago33:48

33:48

Jeu George (@jeugeorge) is the co-creator of Conductor, the open-source application building platform. Conductor began as a workflow orchestrator and was originally developed at Netflix. Jeu also co-founded Orkes, a company which offers a cloud product based on Conductor. Tune in to find out how Conductor has evolved into an open-source, battle-tes…

1
Jill Holtzman Vogel – A Trailblazing Woman in Politics and the Law 43:38

1y ago43:38

43:38

In this episode, Jan speaks with Jill Holtzman Vogel, the managing partner of Holtzman Vogel and a Virginia State Senator. Jill started her law firm 21 years ago as a sole practitioner specializing in political law. It now has over 40 lawyers in four states. Jill also has devoted 16 years of public service in the Virginia Senate. Jill speaks openly…

1
Opening Up Authentication: SuperTokens with Advait Ruia 29:35

1y ago29:35

29:35

Advait Ruia (@Advait_Ruia) is the co-founder of SuperTokens, the open-source user authentication and authorization framework. SuperTokens integrates natively into both your front-end client and your backend endpoint. This approach gives developers more control over the user experience and allows for custom workflows. Tune in to find out why SuperTo…

1
The Honorable Thomas Griffith – Judiciously Ruling in the Face of Politics 1:06:14

1y ago1:06:14

1:06:14

It appears that policy changes are being resolved in the courts, and most specifically at the Supreme Court. If we look at recent court decisions involving abortion, the Affordable Care Act, Environmental Protection Act and gun rights, many people believe these decisions are politically motivated, especially when the politicians and media help to p…

1
Open-Source Runtime Security: Falco with Loris Degioanni 33:36

1y ago33:36

33:36

Loris Degioanni (@lorisdegio) joins Eric Anderson (@ericmander) to chat about Falco, the open-source runtime security tool for modern cloud infrastructures. Loris is the founder and CTO of Sysdig, and co-creator of Wireshark, the legendary open-source packet analysis tool. Today, Loris talks about all these projects and more - tune in to learn abou…

1
Donald Palmer and the U.S. Elections Assistance Commission’s Role in the Integrity of the Voting Process 42:42

1y ago42:42

42:42

This episode examines an important government agency that helps keep our voting systems current, transparent, and reliable. The U.S. Elections Assistance Commission (“EAC”) has existed for a little over 20 years. It was created in the aftermath of the 2000 presidential election and the Florida vote recount. In today’s political climate of distrust …

1
Decoupling Authorization: Cerbos with Emre Baran 29:02

1y ago29:02

29:02

Emre Baran (@emre) is the CEO and co-founder of Cerbos, the open-source authorization layer for implementing roles and permissions. Cerbos allows developers to decouple authorization logic from core code into its own centrally distributed component. Easier said than done, perhaps - but Cerbos is secure, intentionally simple to implement, and develo…

1
Cosmonic and WebAssembly with Liam Randall and Bailey Hayes 37:17

1+ y ago37:17

37:17

Eric Anderson (@ericmander) has a conversation with Liam Randall (@Hectaman) and Bailey Hayes (@baihay) of Cosmonic, the platform-as-a-service environment for building cloud-native applications using WebAssembly. Bailey is also on the steering committee for the Bytecode Alliance, which stewards WebAssembly. In 2021, Cosmonic donated their WebAssemb…

1
Haystack and Intelligent Search with Milos Rusic 30:32

1+ y ago30:32

30:32

Eric Anderson (@ericmander) is joined by Milos Rusic (@rusic_milos) to discuss Haystack, the open-source NLP framework for leveraging Transformer models and building intelligent search systems. Milos and his colleagues at deepset were early contributors to Hugging Face’s Transformer models, and began building pipelines for searching large document …

1
Cube and the Semantic Layer with Artyom Keydunov 23:39

1+ y ago23:39

23:39

Eric Anderson (@ericmander) talks with Artyom Keydunov (@keydunov) about Cube, the semantic layer for building data applications. Cube helps engineers bridge data warehouses and data experiences, and provides access control, security, caching, and more helpful features. The project began in open-source and has evolved quite a lot over the last few …

1
Wes Bizzell: The Role of Corporate America and Associations in Politics 40:18

1+ y ago40:18

40:18

Political activity and lobbying have become not only full time, but also highly regulated. That also means that election campaigns as well as lobbying activities are getting under way for the next election cycle. To talk about the demands and challenges of advising companies on political law, Jan speaks with Wesley Bizzell, a lawyer who has spent o…

1
Remembering Jeff Meyerson with Erika Hokanson 18:42

1+ y ago18:42

18:42

Eric Anderson (@ericmander) and Erika Hokanson (@erikawh0) remember the life of Jeff Meyerson, creator of the influential podcast Software Engineering Daily. He passed during the summer of 2022. Still, his work lives on - thousands of episodes, talks, music, a book, and a community of dedicated listeners and engineers whose lives were touched by Je…

1
Testcontainers and Confidence with Sergei Egorov and Eli Aleyner 40:33

1+ y ago40:33

40:33

We’re kicking off the new year with a conversation between Eric Anderson (@ericmander), Sergei Egorov (@bsideup) and Eli Aleyner (@ealeyner). Sergei and Eli founded AtomicJar to maintain Testcontainers, the family of open-source libraries that allow developers to write and run integration tests locally, and treat them as unit tests. Testcontainers …

1
There's a New Chair in Town – Dara Lindenbaum and the FEC Agenda Looking Towards 2024 38:39

1+ y ago38:39

38:39

This episode marks the start of the second season of Early Returns. We have been privileged to interview interesting guests and welcome a large and growing audience of listeners. We have discussed laws about foreign election interference, representation of the president during the Mueller investigation, the perspective of a journalist who covers le…

1
Jessica Furst Johnson and Jason Torchinsky - Political Lawyers Take a Deeper Dive into 2022 Elections and Look Ahead to 2024 51:00

1+ y ago51:00

51:00

The lead up to the 2022 election cycle was a very active two years, coming off of a very divisive 2020 election which included pandemic-related election changes and election deniers. Our guests, Jessica Furst Johnson and Jason Torchinsky, both political law partners at Holtzman Vogel, join Jan to review the legal issues that arose during this recen…

1
Mito and Smarter Spreadsheets with Nate Rush and Aaron Diamond-Reivich 30:21

1+ y ago30:21

30:21

Eric Anderson (@ericmander) is joined by Nate Rush (@naterush1997) and Aaron Diamond-Reivich (@_aaronDR) to talk about Mito, the open-source spreadsheet that generates Python code for data analysts. Mito is a Python library and acts as an extension to a Jupyter Notebook. Tune in to find out how the Mito team is bridging the gap in data science betw…

1
Featureform and the Future of MLOps with Simba Khadder 32:14

1+ y ago32:14

32:14

Eric Anderson (@ericmander) and Simba Khadder (@simba_khadder) explore Featureform, the “virtual” feature store platform that aims to standardize data pipelines for machine learning. Contributor is no stranger to feature stores, but Simba has a broader definition than most. Join us to learn how Featureform enables data scientists and machine learni…

1
Evan and Oscie Thomas on Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, the Supreme Court Then and Today 1:01:59

1+ y ago1:01:59

1:01:59

The first Monday in October is the traditional beginning of a new Supreme Court term. This week the nine justices began hearing cases that involve our constitutional rights and that shape U.S. law. Each term, the Supreme Court seems to be tackling the big issues including abortion, gun rights, voting rights, affirmative action and the checks and ba…

1
Directus with Ben Haynes 32:01

1+ y ago32:01

32:01

Eric Anderson (@ericmander) hosts Ben Haynes (@benhaynes), CEO and co-founder of Directus. Directus is an open-source data platform that layers on SQL databases to provide an instant API, and includes a no-code data studio interface. Listen in to find out how Directus is aiming to democratize the modern data stack for everyone. Subscribe to Contrib…

1
Prowler with Toni de la Fuente 31:37

2y ago31:37

31:37

Eric Anderson (@ericmander) chats with Toni de la Fuente (@ToniBlyx) about how he created Prowler, an open source security tool for AWS. Toni talks about taking Prowler from a nights-and-weekends project to his current full-time job, managing a team of four. They discuss transitioning from primarily coding to primarily managing tickets and users, a…

1
tea with Max Howell 37:59

2y ago37:59

37:59

Eric Anderson (@ericmander) meets legendary open-source developer Max Howell (@mxcl) to talk about tea, a decentralized protocol for remunerating the open-source ecosystem. Max is the creator of Homebrew, and he chats about his exit from the project. The conversation turns to his newest project, tea, which is an evolution of Brew, and takes inspira…

1
Suborbital with Connor Hicks 38:52

2y ago38:52

38:52

Eric Anderson (@ericmander) and Connor Hicks (@cohix) launch into detail on Suborbital, an open-source project that allows developers to create WebAssembly projects embedded in other applications. Connor conceived of Suborbital while frustrated with the cold start problem that can impact Function-as-a-Service platforms. Today, Suborbital collaborat…

1
Nathan Gonzales: Nationally Respected Nonpartisan Voting Analyst’s Approach to Predicting Prior and Upcoming Mid-Term Elections 48:58

2y ago48:58

48:58

The 2022 mid-term elections will decide the fate of 435 House seats and 33 Senate seats. With 90 days remaining before election day, Early Returns welcomes nationally respected nonpartisan voting analyst, Nathan Gonzales. As editor and publisher of Inside Elections, Nathan has studied and analyzed campaigns and elections for over 20 years. He share…

1
Milvus with Frank Liu 27:45

2y ago27:45

27:45

Eric Anderson (@ericmander) and Frank Liu (@frankzliu) talk about Milvus, the open-source vector database built for scalable similarity search. Vector databases are built to search, index and store embeddings, a requirement for powerful AI applications. Frank is Director of Operations at Zilliz, the company that stewards the project. Tune in to fin…

1
Apache Beam with Kenn Knowles and Pablo Estrada 38:18

2y ago38:18

38:18

Eric Anderson (@ericmander) reunites with old colleagues Kenn Knowles (@KennKnowles) and Pablo Estrada (@polecitoem) for a conversation on Apache Beam, the open-source programming model for data processing. The trio once worked together at Google, and Beam was a turning point in the history of open-source there. Today, both Kenn and Pablo are membe…

1
Evan Thomas: Did Watergate Change America or Does History Repeat Itself? 48:11

2y ago48:11

48:11

Fifty years ago, on June 17, 1972, a group of men were arrested here in Washington for breaking into the offices of the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate office building. The event was seen as odd. It was not heavily reported at first; but, it unleashed, over the following two years, major congressional and grand jury investigations, n…

1
Temporal (Part 2) with Maxim Fateev and Dominik Tornow 40:44

2y ago40:44

40:44

Eric Anderson (@ericmander) returns to Temporal with co-founder Maxim Fateev (@mfateev) and principal engineer Dominik Tornow (@DominikTornow). When Maxim joined us in September of 2020, the company called their project a “workflow orchestrator.” Today, Temporal has grown in popularity and usability, but the terminology around that abstraction has …

1
Scarf with Avi Press 28:21

2y ago28:21

28:21

Eric Anderson (@ericmander) interviews Avi Press (@avi_press) about Scarf, the distribution platform for open-source software that facilitates analytics and commercialization. Scarf offers a set of tools that allows founders and maintainers to understand adoption of their products, including Scarf Gateway, which provides a central access point to c…

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