Been listening to a few episodes of the Datanauts podcast, and as I anticipated, the material is right up my alley. Actually, the hosts Ethan C. Banks and Chris Wahl really impressed me in a discussion of Apache Geode, an in-memory data grid (IMDG). While Banks and Wahl clearly aren’t distributed systems researchers / hackers, they asked exceptionally good, fundamental questions about how Geode fares under various conditions (e.g, network partitions).
So far, so good. I can recommend a subscription in your podcatcher to the Datanauts.