Migrating Ruby Monoliths to Java, Agentic AI Foundation and MCP

About this episode

The episode features a conversation with Manik Surtani about his experiences in software development, including migrating Ruby monoliths to Java and contributions to open source projects.

An airhacks.fm conversation with Manik Surtani ( @maniksurtani ) about: programming on the BBC Micro with Basic and writing a Trojan horse, GW BASIC and Turbo Pascal on PC, Space Invaders-style games, C++ neural network simulating bat learning behavior at university, PHP e-commerce startup Silk Road Software competing with Intershop in the late 1990s, multi-tenant web shops for UK customers, the dot-com crash and startup failure, first Java job building Virgin Atlantic online check-in and airport kiosks on WebLogic and Oracle, demonstrating a JBoss and MySQL and Linux open source stack to the Virgin Atlantic CTO, contributing to JGroups at the Financial Times and meeting Bela Ban, JBoss Cache tree structure limitations and concurrency issues, rewriting JBoss Cache into Infinispan as a HashMap-based distributed cache, removing reflection overhead and pluggable serialization with Protocol Buffers support, the Hot Rod client-server protocol, joining Square via Bob Lee to migrate a Ruby on Rails monolith to Java microservices for Starbucks payments, multi-DC high availability architecture with red-green deployments, shutting down the Rails monolith with zero downtime using double…

People in this episode

Host: Adam Bien

Guest: Manik Surtani

Topics covered

• Ruby to Java migration
• Open source development
• Microservices architecture
• Software engineering history
• Distributed systems
• Programming languages

Keywords

• Ruby on Rails
• Java microservices
• open source
• software development
• programming history
• distributed cache
• multi-tenant web shops
• gRPC
• Infinispan
• blockchain

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: BBC, Virgin Atlantic, Financial Times, Square, Block, Google

Products: Infinispan, Goose, gRPC, Protocol Buffers, Java, Ruby, PHP, Turbo Pascal, GW BASIC, MySQL

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