Hi there 👋

I'm Gwen Shapira. Currently a co-founder of Nile: https://www.thenile.dev If you want to contact me or learn a bit more about me, my Bento is a good starting point: https://bento.me/gwenshap

I plan to add here a bunch of links to things I wrote, presented or recorded. I worked on a bunch of different areas over the years and I figured its time to pull things together in one place.

Nile

Blogs

• Transaction Isolation in Postgres, explained - probably my most popular blog, ever.
• Things DBs don't do - but should - my thoughts on where databases are going
• Tenant virtualization in 5 lines of code - trying to explain the value of Nile with one short code snippet
• Hacking SaaS - Monthly newsletter where I curate good links for SaaS developers
• I used to maintain a personal blog where I shared lessons learned while building various bits of Nile. The one about troubleshooting misconfigured network on AWS is my favorite.

Videos and Presentations

• Collections of videos where I explain how to use Nile in different languages and frameworks
• Videos for the SaaS developer community - mostly interviews with interesting people
• Keynote for Real Time Analytics Summit 2023 - Modern SaaS is Real Time SaaS
• Things Databases Don't Do, But Should - Keynote at Scale by the Bay
• P99 talk about performance engineering for early stage startups - slides
• Interview with DataStax, at DataDay Texas

Kafka, event streams and microservices

Blogs

• From 2016 to 2019 I maintained a personal blog on Medium. It is not very technical, just random thoughts about communities, careers, work, etc.

Videos and presentations

• Keynote at Kafka Summit 2020 - Kafka's New Architecture
• Beyond Microservices - Streams, State and Scalability - Probably my favorite talk. I discuss the evolution of microservices and how I see it evolve in the future. I was wrong about the future, but still great overview on the state of Microservices. I presented it at Goto Chicago (slides, video) and at QCon SF.
• Monitor disk space and other ways to keep Apache Kafka happy - a talk I gave at Velocity, a devops conference. One of the very few devops talks I gave.
• Magic Rebalance Protocol of Apache Kafka - it was a joy and an honor to give a talk at StrangeLoop. I also think it is a pretty fun talk. Goes deep into internals and not super practical, but lots of fun.
• Spark Summit: Stream All Things - Patterns of Data Integration
• Ask Confluent Series - For 3 years, I've answered Kafka questions and interviewed experts on Confluent's YouTube channel.

Cloudera and Hadoop

• Scaling ETL with Hadoop

Oracle

Recording Setup

A lot of folks asked for it, so here we go:

• Camera:
  • Sony FX30, recording directly to my laptop via USB.
  • Lens: Sigma 16mm f/1.4 DC DN Contemporary Lens (Sony E)
  • Camera tripod is on my desk: Oben CTT-1000 Carbon Fiber Tabletop Tripod (I tried about 100 tripods and setups. This one works. Barely).
• Lights:
  • I have two warm, bright lights (4000k): one to my front and right, showing my face, and the other on my back and left, bouncing off a wall and my hair. The technically correct setup has two front lights, but I ran out of room.
  • Both are: Amaran COB 60x S Bi-Color LED Monolight
  • Front light has a softbox: Aputure Light Dome Mini III (22.8")
  • Front light has a heavy-duty stand: Impact Folding Wheeled Base Stand (Black/Chrome-plated, 11')
  • Back light is connected to the ceiling (my cats kept jarring the stand)
  • The orange decorative light on my back right side is: Aputure MC RGBWW LED Light
  • I got blackout curtains for my office to make the lighting consistent.
• Audio:
  • Rode Procaster mic
  • Mic arm: Elgato Wave LP (low profile). I also tried the Rode mic arm; it is great, but low profile doesn't get in the way. I have very limited space.
  • Rode PSM1 shock mount (important if you wave your arms like me)
  • Triton Fet head booster (so I can move the mic away from my face)
  • Vocaster two interface. I keep getting tempted to buy a fancier one, but I resist. This one is just fine.
• No desktop controllers. I tried one from Elgato. It looks like a good idea. But didn't work for me.
• Process:
  • This went through many iterations, but this one seems to stick.
  • Record with ScreenFlow (currently v10)
  • Rough edit with Screenflow. Cut out the sections that didn't work. Right screen size, zoom-in and out, callouts, transitions between me and the screen recording.
  • Fine tune with Descript. Mostly cut out all the "ehhh". Also do captions if I feel like having captions.