Migrating Ruby Monoliths to Java, Agentic AI Foundation and MCP

from airhacks.fm podcast with adam bien · host adam-bien.com

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 writes and gradual traffic migration, Block as a polyglot environment with Java and Kotlin and Ruby and Go and python, the Head of Open Source role at Block and establishing an Open Source Programs Office, inner sourcing practices, co-designing gRPC with Google, building and open-sourcing Goose as a coding agent predating Claude Code and Codex, co-designing MCP with Anthropic, founding the Agentic AI Foundation with Anthropic and OpenAI and AWS and Google and Microsoft and Cloudflare and Bloomberg, Block Open Source projects including OkHttp and OkIO and Retrofit, LLMs generating better code with type-safe compiled languages like Java, grounding LLMs against Jakarta EE APIs to reduce hallucinations, Block business units including Square, Cash App, Afterpay and Tidal Manik Surtani on twitter: @maniksurtani

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This episode was published on April 28, 2026.

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