Craft of Code

From humble BlogSpot beginnings to millions of pageviews a month, TechRaptor has grown beyond CEO and Founder Rutledge Daugette’s expectations.

We sit down with Rutledge in this episode of the Craft of Code podcast to hear his story, including all the challenges he’s come up against while scaling his website. After experiencing hosting issues thanks to his fast traffic growth, Rutledge turned to Linode for its flexibility, cost, and support.

In this episode, he explains what it’s been like working with Linode and why having a slow and steady approach to scaling has been key to his success.

In this episode, we discussed:

• How TechRaptor first began
• Rutledge’s early goals for the website
• The problems in the gaming website industry
• How TechRaptor navigated hosting and traffic challenges
• How Rutledge built a virtual private server as a solution
• Why Rutledge picked Linode to partner with
• Why using Linode has enabled TechRaptor to grow
• Advice for other content creators
• Why Rutledge prefers to pick partners over vendors

Large organizations use multiple cloud providers to meet increasingly growing needs for things like better economics and redundancy and find a better fit for their application and data workloads. But smaller organizations don’t have the budget or resources to manage custom-built platforms that make multicloud possible. So what can they do?

That’s where Zeet comes in. Zeet launched to help developers create reusable, self-serve cloud infrastructure. CEO and Co-Founder Johnny Dallas joined the Craft of Code podcast to tell us all about it.

Johnny explores the idea of the multicloud, how his users build multicloud solutions, why platform engineering is so important, and how Zeet worked closely with LiveKit. We also hear his top advice for anyone working in the DevOps or platform engineering space on how to combat multicloud challenges.

In this episode, we discussed:

• How Zeet first got started
• Why Zeet takes an unorthodox approach to multicloud
• What platform engineering is and how it differs from DevOps
• Different ways Zeet clients are using multicloud
• How Zeet worked with LiveKit to deliver the performance they needed
• Johnny’s advice for clients and those facing multicloud challenges

Think about the last time you went online to ship a package. You begin to enter your address at checkout and BAM…the address bar auto-populates.

Things have changed since the early days of e-commerce and your favorite companies are using sophisticated data intelligence technology to pinpoint your exact address and provide their best possible service. Many are doing this with a platform called Smarty.

Founded in 2011 as Smarty Streets, they are used by huge corporations like Microsoft, Netflix and even NASA to process “colossal amounts of location data at breakneck speed”, as explained on their website.

In season 3, episode 7, we are joined by Smarty’s founder, CEO and CTO, Jonathan Oliver.

Jonathan discusses how he began coding at age 8, his route into the industry and how the industry has evolved since the 1990s.

Plus, he takes us back to the early days of Smarty and mapping technology and touches on Smarty’s partnership with Linode.

In this episode, we discuss:

• How Jonathan was introduced to coding at age 8
• How the industry has changed since the 1990s
• Challenges Jonathan faces in his job
• How he started Smarty Streets
• Why the company rebranded to Smarty
• Smarty’s involvement with Linode
• Smarty’s tech choices

Enterprises face a huge data management challenge today. But, as AI continues to create an overwhelming amount of data for companies to manage and analyze, it begs the question…

…who is in charge of all this data and how do they keep it safe?

Privacy is at the top of everyone’s watchlist right now, and this Craft of Code guest understands the challenges we face all too well.

Daphne Muller, Manager of Alliances, Ecosystem & Support at Nextcloud, joins the show to discuss what Nextcloud are doing to give organizations more private collaboration tools based on open source technology.

Plus, she explains her thoughts on the unnecessary collection of data, data decentralization, and why Linode and Nextcloud are a match made in heaven.

In this episode, we discussed:

• Why Daphne wrote her thesis on unnecessary data collection
• How decentralization links to innovation, privacy, and price
• Why organizations want to take back control of their data
• The real reason alternatives are so hot right now
• Why big tech is “shaking” – the four pillars
• Daphne’s thoughts on what companies should be wary of
• What makes Nextcloud so different

When developer Savvas Agisilaou, aka Savvy, wanted an easier way to moderate images in Discord chats, he set about to develop DeGore.

DeGore is an AI-powered image moderation bot that helps users take a break from manual moderation of images, GIFs, image links, and thumbnails sent in Discord servers.

Being an ambitious developer, Savvas wanted to scale his project but ran into issues with other hosting providers. That’s when he turned to Linode. With the power of Linode, Savvas was able to scale DeGore’s capabilities and keep up with demand. In this episode of the Craft of Code podcast, he explains how Linode’s features support DeGore, why he first developed it, and his big plans for the future.

In this episode, we discussed:

• Why Savvas developed DeGore
• The top challenges he faced in the early days
• How DeGore is different from other moderation bots
• Why Savvas chose the cloud to develop and host DeGore
• Savvas’ top Linode features and how they support DeGore’s needs
• What Savvas looks for in a hosting provider’s support
• Savvas’ top advice for other developers and entrepreneurs