Insightful conversations. Less snark.

Here on “Screaming” we like to shine the light on peoples’ best work, but with folks like Sam Ramji, Chief Strategy Officer at DataStax, the question is where to start? From early days at Microsoft, to throwing his weight into leading DevOps management at Google Cloud, Sam has a storied career. Now, Sam is leaning even more into his education and learning more about cognition within an organization. Sam’s offerings on how to build out what he calls “distributed cognition” are fascinating. For Sam there are ways for the systems you are building out to reflect how larger groups think across an organization. Sam discusses the importance of open source technologies and the influence he had in Microsoft in that space. From the intersection of money and the cloud, to audits, to cross cloud capabilities—these unruly subjects are just the beginning! Tune in for Sam’s, counter to Corey’s line, serious observations!

This week Aparna Sinha, Director of Product Management at Google Cloud, is here fresh off the back end of Google Next. Aparna works alongside former “Screaming” two timer Richard Seroter, and both of them are taking measures with their teams to catapult Google Cloud forward. Aparna joins Corey to talk about GCP and how Corey was surprised to find that, in some ways, it was “its own universe.” Aparna offers up why folks can expect a developer user-friendly experience when using GCP, and how it differentiates them from the litany of cloud providers out there. From focusing on developing, to a vast array of costumers, GCP is bringing their best forward. Check out their conversation on how GCP is keeping their focus on the user!

For various reasons folks tend to associate companies with one personality, but as we all know there are a plethora of folks behind the curtain who make everything tick. This week Duckbill Group’s very own CFO, Dan Shapiro, and unofficial “adult supervisor” joins us to talk about what exactly needs to happen behind said curtain to make a company work. Dan talks about when he landed at Duckbill and the finance brevity he was able to level. Dan talks about what exactly a CFO does, and couples that with his definitions of finance and accounting. Dan offers ways to improve our own literacy with business finance alongside other valuable takes. Tune for some financial savvy!

If you need a point of contact for all things networking, then look no further than Ivan Pepelnjak. Ivan is the webinar author at ipSpace.net where he is working on making networking an approachable subject for everyone. From teaching, to writing books, Ivan has been at it for a long and storied career, and as a de fact go to for networking knowledge, you can’t beat him. Ivan and Corey discuss Ivan’s status as a CCIE Emeritus, and the old days of Cisco. Ivan also levels his network engineering expertise, and helps Corey to answer some questions about BGP and its implementation. Ivan aptly narrows it down into “layers” that he kindly runs us through. So tune in for a Dante-esque decent into BGP, DNS and Facebook, seeing out the graybeards of tech and more!

Clinton Herget, Principal Solutions Engineer at Snyk, is here to chat about all things security. Clinton has joined Corey and the reverie of the re:Invent/Quinnvent week to chat about what Snyk has been up to. For starters, how exactly the company moniker is pronounced! Clinton talks about Snyk’s success in raising $1.4 billion! He also lets us know why they’re not planning on buying vowels anytime soon. Clinton and Corey take a deep and technical look into Snyk’s offerings, starting with security and safely speeding up the developer process. They’re conversation ranges from the challenges that Snyk is taking on, and the litany of security options, to their exciting announcement about their partnership with Amazon Inspector. And, of course, a chat about their pricing. Check out this round re:Quinnvent “Screaming”!

Brian Mullen, Chief Marketing Officer at InfluxData, sat down with Corey before the madness of re:Quinnvent to chat about re:Invent—but more importantly, the work that Brian and the folks at InfluxData are up to! For starters, they’ve just launched a cloud platform, which Brian divulges some intriguing information on. Brian chats about his bio, which starts with deal maker, then goes on to cover an extensive list that ranges over multiple business partnerships. Brian offers up his take on how to cultivate successful connections with individuals, groups and companies to find a shared objective, then how to best reach that objective. Brian also talks about the innovation that is going on at InfluxData and the ways they are expanding how to work with time-series data, and the offerings they are providing their customers. Given his deal making expertise, he has a lot to offer.

Thomas Hazel, CTO of ChaosSearch, is here to justify why they keep working with Corey and Duckbill Group! We kid. What Thomas is actually here to do is go into the specifics of ChaosSearch and their many offerings. Notably, solving the expensive problem of data movement and querying. Alongside being the CTO, Thomas is also the Chief Scientist, and self proclaimed Chief Nerd, at ChaosSearch. He talks about how their team is building data science driven methodologies, and their innovation in regard to databases in general. Thomas offers up some well earned opinions on how some data lakes become data swamps, AWS Glue, and much more! Tune in for their wide ranging, data centric, conversation.

Welcome to the week of re:Quinnvent! Starting off this week's special 5 day run of "Screaming" is Rachel Stephens, who has returned for another round. Rachel, a Senior Analyst with RedMonk, catches up with Corey about what has been going on at RedMonk since her last visit. A visit that was right before the pandemic, so needless to say a lot has changed. Rachel is here to tell us how RedMonk has been dealing with these unforeseen shifts! Rachel entered the lockdown finding out she was pregnant, so “change” took on an even deeper meaning for her! Rachel walks us through her own journey of having her second child, and the intricacies of being a parent and a mom. Rachel offers a lot of insight into the state of the tech world and its thus far lacking track record when it comes to accounting for parenthood. But her observations don’t end there. Rachel has a lot to say about the cloud as well. Check out her take!

(Que Vince Guaraldi Quintet) Welcome to a very special “Banksgiving” episode of Screaming in the Cloud! For the opening salvo of the holiday season Corey is joined by Tim Banks, Principal Cloud Economist here at the Duckbill Group. Why typically named based puns aren’t in Corey’s repertoire, Tim suggested this one whole heartedly. Tim and Corey sit down for a pleasant conversation about the things that folks in tech can be thankful for. For starters, the folks themselves. While there are a few figures more public and in the spotlight, it is the ones behind the curtains that deserve even more credit. Join the conversation as they pay tribute to the unsung heroes who keep the tech world intact!

Stephanie Wong, Head of Developer Engagement at Google, joins Corey this week to chat about her wide ranging work. Of which a significant and perhaps more interesting amount occurs outside the walls of Google. While Stephanie is certainly a key player at such a massive company, her passion lies in her own advocacy for women in tech as well as making tech more approachable to larger audiences. Stephanie is not one to put her job title first. Her bio covers the spread from dancer, to hip-hop medalist, to podcast host. Stephanie gives us the birds eye view on her own non-traditional and interdisciplinary path that led to her work both in and outside of Google. Stephanie’s focus on producing content that reaches across a wide spectrum of participants is crucial to how she has broken the mold on what tech can do, and her lessons are ones we can all learn from.

This week Corey is joined by someone he has been antagonizing for years now. Brian Hall, VP of Product and Industry Marketing at Google Cloud, is here to chat about a disagreement that he and Corey had on the long worn question; how much time should one spend in a job? But thankfully, their conversation doesn’t limit itself to just that! Corey and Brian chat about how Twitter’s failure to capture nuance and context can lead to some unfortunate mis-interpretations. Brian offers some insight on his significant amount of time spent at Microsoft under various roles. He gives his perspective on how one should optimize their career path for where they want to go, and not just follow the money. Tune in to see how Corey and Brian let the dust settle, and develop what was a disagreement into a well rounded conversation.

Micheal Benedict, head of Engineering Productivity at Pinterest, is back again! After such a long and intensive conversation last time, Corey had to have Micheal back to take an even deeper dive. For starters, Micheal tells us what exactly his team is doing, and what exactly it means to lead engineering productivity. Micheal divulges more details on productivity engineering and what they’re doing at Pinterest. He traces the history of productivity engineering at Pinterest and offers some distinct observations on building out internal teams. Micheal talks about what it is like in his day to day complexities of working in AWS. Tune in for Micheal’s take on the specific details of productivity and the cloud.