Everyone has a digital footprint. No matter how careful you are about what you say and where you say it, there’s no guarantee that the “delete” button will prevent your digital messages from being stored, screenshot and shared, even to unintended recipients.

In Episode 2 of the The New Builders, the developers behind Cyber Dust – Ryan Ozonian, CEO and Co-Founder, and Rohit Kotian, Lead Engineer – stopped by to explain how they built an in-memory messaging service that their users trust.

Even though the Cyber Dust team prefers more ephemeral digital conversations, they were nice enough to allow us to record our chat. We discussed how the idea for the app was born out of an insider trading case the SEC pursued against eventual Cyber Dust backer (and frequent user) Mark Cuban (8:20), how the dev team deployed a highly queryable and scalable cache to make sure messages were never stored on a hard drive (11:33), and why the appeal of “starting with something you know works” pushed the Cyber Dust team toward a mobile development approach using elements of both prototype and agile methodologies (22:04).

You can find new episodes of The New Builders on developerWorks TV and SoundCloud. Find out more about IBM Cloud Data Services at IBM.biz/forbuilders. Contact hosts Doug Flora and Jim Young on Twitter (@DSFlora, @JW_Young) or email ([email protected], [email protected]).

The show’s music is provided by School for Robots. Check them out at schoolforrobots.bandcamp.com!