**UPDATE** - Apollo GraphQL has kindly offered us a few free passes to join them at the GraphQL Summit in San Francisco, October 6-8, 2025. If you are interested in going, the code is: PodcastSummit25

What if your API layer could help you ship faster today and make tomorrow’s AI workflows safer and easier to build?

Apollo CEO Matt DeBergalis explains how GraphQL became a practical standard for unifying messy backends, why declarative schemas and strong types are the “bedrock” for agentic systems, and where MCP fits when you want agents to call business data safely. You’ll hear real examples of speeding up frontends, tightening observability, and running focused personalization without “fat” APIs.

What you’ll learn:

• A plain-language model for GraphQL and why it decouples frontend needs from backend services
• How typing, schema docs, and field-level telemetry reduce risk and enable LLM-driven tooling
• Practical ways to expose queries as MCP tools and start with internal “agentic DevOps”
• Tactics for experiments and personalization that stay fast and measurable at scale
• Why an end-to-end approach (client and server) matters for reliability and speed

Guest: Matt DeBergalis, CEO and Co-Founder of Apollo GraphQL

Matt DeBergalis is the Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Apollo GraphQL, focused on bringing the popular GraphQL technology to the enterprise. He previously served as Apollo's CTO, leading product and engineering. Matt's longtime focus has been in open source and platforms: he co-founded Meteor.js, which grew to become one of the most popular open-source projects in the world for developing full-stack web apps with JavaScript, as well as ActBlue, the American political fundraising platform that revolutionized grassroots political giving. He attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and resides in the San Francisco Bay Area with his family. In his spare time, Matt enjoys taking to the air and flying his 1966 Beechcraft Baron.

Apollo GraphQL, website

Apollo GraphQL, GitHub

Apollo GraphQL, LinkedIn

Apollo GraphQL, X

Apollo GraphQL, YouTube

Links to interesting things from this episode:

• Free Software Foundation
• Cursor
• Motley Fool podcast
• GraphQL Summit

Ever wondered how many “perfect” candidates simply learned the test—or how many great engineers get filtered out by bad interview design? Mike Mroczka, interview coach and ex-Googler, shares what really goes on behind technical hiring and how to navigate it to your advantage.

What you’ll learn:

• How leaked question banks and standardized puzzles can distort hiring signals - and where they still help
• Practical ways companies can make interviews fairer and harder to game, both on-site and remote
• A balanced take on data structures and algorithms: when they’re useful and when they’re noise
• Tactics to spot and reduce cheating without turning interviews into surveillance
• How to structure interviews for different seniority levels so you measure the right skills
• Salary negotiation playbook: timing, leverage, and common pitfalls that cost candidates real money
• Getting past the application black hole: skipping recruiters, networking that works, and coordinating offers

Who this helps:

• Engineers tired of grinding puzzles who want a smarter prep plan
• Hiring managers looking to improve signal and reduce false negatives
• Anyone preparing to negotiate an offer with confidence

Guest: Mike Mroczka, Primary author of Beyond Cracking the Coding Interview, Ex-Google

Mike Mroczka, a former senior SWE (Google, Salesforce, GE), is now a tech consultant with a decade of experience helping engineers land their dream jobs. He’s a top-rated mentor (interviewing.io, Karat, Pathrise, Skilledinc) and the author of viral technical content on system design and technical interview strategies featured on HackerNews, Business Insider, and Wired.

Mike Mroczka, website

Beyond Cracking the Coding Interview

Links to interesting things from this episode:

• Cracking the Coding Interview by Gayle Laakmann McDowell
• HackerOne
• Interviewing.io
• Cluely
• Google glass
• Ray-Ban
• HackerRank⁠
• CodeSignal⁠

Is Postgres actually a better message queue than Kafka? This provocative question is just one of many insights Pete Hunt shares in this conversation about data orchestration, platform engineering, and the evolution of infrastructure.

Pete Hunt, CEO of Dagster Labs and former React co-founder at Facebook, brings his unique perspective from working at tech giants like Instagram and Twitter to discuss how different platform team approaches impact product development. Having witnessed both Facebook's clear delineation between product and infrastructure teams and Twitter's DevOps-style ownership model, Pete offers valuable comparisons of these contrasting philosophies.

The conversation explores:

• How Dagster provides a higher-level abstraction for data teams, making it easier to track and debug data assets rather than just managing workflows
• The challenges of modern data platforms and why many organizations struggle with complex, distributed systems that could be simplified
• A practical approach to migrating from Airflow to Dagster with their "Airlift" toolkit that allows for incremental, low-risk transitions
• How AI development is fueling demand for better data orchestration as companies build applications that rely on properly managed data pipelines

Pete also shares his thoughtful approach to balancing technical debt and product development with a "quarter on, quarter off" cadence that allows teams to both ship features and clean up the inevitable corners that get cut under deadline pressure.

For platform engineers, data teams, and technical leaders navigating the intersection of infrastructure and AI, this episode provides practical insights on creating abstractions that deliver real operational value without unnecessary complexity.

Guest: Pete Hunt, CEO of Dagster

Pete is the CEO of Dagster Labs, where he first joined as Head of Engineering in early 2022 and transitioned into the CEO role later that same year. Before Dagster, Pete co-founded Smyte, an anti-abuse startup acquired by Twitter, where he continued as a senior staff engineer.

Earlier in his career, Pete was one of the first engineers to work on Instagram after its acquisition by Facebook in 2012. There, he led development on Instagram’s web and analytics teams and became a co-founder of the React.js project, helping transform an internal experiment into one of the most widely used front-end frameworks in the world. He was also part of the early community around GraphQL and has remained deeply engaged in open source and developer tooling.

Pete brings a pragmatic, hands-on perspective to modern data infrastructure. Having been both a founder and an engineer, he focuses on reducing complexity and fatigue in data teams by building tools that actually work together. At Dagster, he remains close to the code and actively involved in technical decisions, combining leadership with deep technical fluency.

Pete Hunt, X

Dagster

Dagster Pipes

Dagster Airlift

Links to interesting things from this episode:

• React
• “Postgres: a Better Message Queue than Kafka?”