Software Engineering Radio

I second the praise for Robert Blumen’s interviews. Some of the other SE-Radio stuff can be a bit cringeworthy – the interviewer often seems more interested in expressing his own opinions than those of the interviewees. Robert does a great job of keeping it interesting – both the Voldemort and the Spring AOP interviews I heard so far from him were excellent. Keep up the good work!

[...] Episode 162: Project Voldemort with Jay Kreps | Software Engineering Radio [...]

Hi guys, I think there’s a problem with the download:

wget http://media.libsyn.com/media/seradio/seradio-episode162-projectVoldemort.mp3
–2010-05-23 20:36:41– http://media.libsyn.com/media/seradio/seradio-episode162-projectVoldemort.mp3
Resolving media.libsyn.com… 38.100.193.81, 205.234.249.196
Connecting to media.libsyn.com|38.100.193.81|:80… connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response… 500 Internal Server Error
2010-05-23 20:36:41 ERROR 500: Internal Server Error.

Very interessting topic since I have to do a seminar on a related topic (cloud databases). The interviewer asked the right questions. If the sound quality would be a bit better, it would much more pleasure to listen.
What about a flattr button for this page? I would definitly click on it.

That was fast, and i am number two who flattered you

Is there a reason (I assume it is) why you called it “Project Voldemort”?

The answer is at the end of a blog post by the guest: http://blog.linkedin.com/2009/04/01/project-voldemort-part-ii-how-it-works/

Picking A Name

I should probably also mention how it got its name, since that is something I got a lot of questions about. I wanted to come up with a name that was distinctive and a little self-deprecating (projects shouldn’t take themselves too seriously). At the time I was reading the last Harry Potter book, and Voldemort had split himself into many pieces each of which had to be destroyed to kill him. I thought, “that sounds like a distributed system”. I don’t know whether it is nerdier to be reading Harry Potter or to be wondering what kind of consistency protocol Voldemort uses when keeping all his pieces up-to-date, but regardless, the name stuck.

I have to say that the interviewer did an extraordinary job. The episode was content-dense because the interviewer had really prepared, and kept things going with good, solid questions.