The show that allows professional sports Mascots to reveal their bizarre, funny, and inspirational stories from behind the mask and give exclusive insight on what it's like behind the scenes and between the fur of the pro Mascot world. Hosted by NBA Mascot Performer Kenn Solomon. For fans of sports, entertainment, and those looking for a good laugh!
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Curtis Dvorak, the original Jaxson de Ville, of the Jacksonville Jaguars, for 19 years. Curtis shares unforgettable behind-the-scenes stories, from supportive management, to pushing the boundaries of ever-changing NFL rules. He dives into his infamous beefs with NFL players and his legendary feud with coach Bill Cowher. Curtis discusses why he beli…
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Mark Randall shares his journey from aspiring athlete to NBA player to Mascot Assistant. Mark takes us behind the scenes of a unique and unexpected chapter in his life working with Rocky, and the Denver Nuggets. Discover how this unexpected duo brought energy, entertainment, and unforgettable moments to fans and the community. FOLLOW: 🔥 Kenn Solom…
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Austin Fritts, the high-flying professional dunker and social media sensation. With over 3 billion views in just three years and close to one million followers online, Austin has become a household name in the realm of basketball entertainment. Austin shares his incredible journey from local courts to the grand stages of the NBA, including Denver N…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Journey back to the early days of NBA mascots, where Kenn Solomon and his assistant Scott Strate formed an inseparable team, mastering the art of Mascot mind-reading, improved performances, and thriving under intense pressure. Beyond the success of their performances, Scott's unwavering support and keen intuition not only ensured Kenn's well-being …
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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…
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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 (@…
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Kenn sits down with John Nunez, the former embodiment of the iconic "Benny The Bull" Mascot for eight thrilling years. From donning the beloved costume at a young age to facing the intense pressure of maintaining a character with an immense reputation, John shares the highs and lows of his journey as the famous Mascot. FOLLOW: 🔥 Kenn Solomon 🔥 John…
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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…
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Today's episode is with Tom Burgoyne. Dive into the fascinating world of pro Mascots as Kenn chats with the iconic Phillie Phanatic performer about the art of keeping traditions alive and maintaining the magic that fans cherish. Discover the artistry, dedication, and the fascinating stories behind the unwavering consistency in the realm of Mascots.…
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Episode #64. In this inspiring episode we dive into the remarkable journey of Mike Walsh, the former mascot for the Colorado Rapids, known as Rapidman. Despite facing the challenges of hearing impairment since childhood and the gradual loss of his vision, Mike has turned adversity into opportunity. Discover the incredible story of how Mike not only…
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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…
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Episode #63 Meet today's guest Trey Humphreys, formerly the force behind the Atlanta Falcons Mascot persona "Freddie The Falcon". Trey has evolved into a multifaceted individual, now making waves as an accomplished author of the book "Love is Bananas", personal branding strategist, and international speaker.In every endeavor, Trey continues to embo…
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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…
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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 …
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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…
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Episode #62: Step into the locker room of nostalgia as Kenn Solomon, Bob Woolf, and Jon Absey share untold stories, explore the evolution of mascots from whimsical characters to integral parts of the NBA experience, and discuss the impact these fuzzy entertainers have had on fans and the game itself. Sponsored by Burr Bottles: https://burrbottles.c…
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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…
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Episode #61: NBA Mascot Performers Rob Wicall and Kenn Solomon share their expertise on Pro Sports Mascots as they recount their time in the league.Sponsored by burr bottles 💦 BURR BOTTLES: https://burrbottles.com/ Follow: @superkenn1 @whycallrob
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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 …
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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 …
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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 …
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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…
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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 …
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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…
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Kenn and Tim Derk traveled the world! While dunking Kenn hyperextended his knee, dislocated his shoulder and hip, Tim is left performing solo for the next 6 minutes in a sold out arena. Tim Derk was the original Spurs Coyote & put this iconic character into the spotlight in the early days of the NBA. 🧢 MERCH: https://linktr.ee/superkenn 🌴 Cool Prop…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Episode #60: Pro Mascot performer for the Houston Astros Kyle Hamsher sheds light on the return of the beloved character Orbit and shares an incredible moment with a blind man. Kyle is a passionate performer with a lot of character and a unique approach to working a crowd. Follow: @superkenn, @kylethehammer 🧢 MERCH: https://linktr.ee/superkenn 🌴 Co…
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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…
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Episode #59: Currant Texans Mascot performer Andrew Johnson, was inspired to chase a Mascot career after witnessing Dan Meers ("KC Wolf") unveil himself at his elementary school. Kenn and Andrew exchange their most memorable and inspirational moments from their careers. Follow: @superkenn1 @andrewpjohnson MERCH: https://linktr.ee/superkenn…
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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…
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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…
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Episode #58: What are NBA Mascot's kids up to? Garett Solomon, Jon Absey and Kenn share some of their best memories growing up/raising kids while performing and traveling the world as a professional Mascot. Jon Absey - Utah Jazz | Kenn Solomon - Denver Nuggets | Garett Solomon - Current NBA Mascot Follow: @superkenn1, @jon_absey, @gsolo22 Merch: ht…
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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…
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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 …
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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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