Insightful conversations. Less snark.

Dan Woods, CISO and VP of Cybersecurity for Shipt (a Target subsidiary), has joined this Corey this week for a round of “Screaming.” Dan has recently come off an impressive stint as the CTO of the Biden campaign—the second staffer to join the “Screaming” line up! Dan has been at Target for years, which ended up serving as an experience that set him up for success in the political realm. Dan discusses his history at Target and the accolade of being a distinguished engineer. Dan goes into the challenges of tech leadership in the political sphere, where those under you are volunteers. He discusses some of the technical challenges they faced, which compliments well the insight of previous guest Jackie Singh. Dan breaks down the IC (individual contributor) role and how it has influenced his own leadership, and how he balanced it with his work in tech.

After crossing paths at Monktoberfest, Julia Ferraioli, co-founder of Open Source Stories, has been politely badgered by Core to come on the show. Now she has set down to chat with Corey to cover the open source spread. From her own work, to things that need change, to what works, Julia has a lot to offer! Julia talks about the general project at Open Source Stories, and the ways they are making the user a primary motivation when building out products. She and Corey reflect on the open source community and what her definition of open source is. They take a deep dive into some of the nuances of open source and Julia’s observations are articulate, well thought out, and worthwhile.

From across the pond in jolly old England we are joined by Jake Hendy, a Technical Lead at the Met Office, to inform us about what it is like to work on the cloud for a government. Avoid the knee jerk reaction of “should governments be working on things that crash all the time?” and take a moment to hear Jake’s take. Jake discusses his work at the UK’s National Meteorological Service and the wide array of work they do, and the various organizations they do that work with. From NATO to airlines to supermarkets, the Met Office and Jake’s work is a pretty fascinating space to keep an eye on. Jake goes into how institutional figures like his own office are using the cloud, and the possibilities that they can leverage to the field.

Almost everyone is using Slack, and a lot of that is because of the work of those like Frank Chen, Slack’s Senior Staff Software Engineer. Frank is here to tell us how Slack keeps us all angrily typing. But equally as important is his own trajectory which is multifaceted to say the least. Frank discusses the common thread with the many places where he has worked, which for Frank is fun and exciting people. Frank offers up some cat centric anecdotes that helped lead him to his work at Slack, and reflects on how Slack has shifted how we work. Frank also shows a determination to work through failures and how to build on that, and the best way to make those connections with the human component of our work. Frank offers up a lot of insight on constantly learning, and his perspective is quite worthwhile.

Today’s guest, Robert Reeves, CTO and Co-Founder of Liquibase, has stomped around Corey’s home grounds in Maine. They first crossed paths at “Monktoberfest” and since then have been waiting for a chance to sit down and chat about people, companies, interests, and more! Robert talks about launching into Liquibase and the answers that they are aiming to solve when it comes to automating database schema change. He goes into how Liquibase is helping to dissolve the database bottlenecks, and provides some details on how they’re doing so. Despite getting there as quickly as they can, to the chagrin of one particular baking executive, Liquibase is now on the scene. Tune in for the technical details on what Liquibase is up to!

In the continual effort to highlight folks who inspire us on “Screaming,” especially when that person brings a forceful sense of humor to the question. Thankfully Danielle Baskin, CEO of Dialup, makes her adroit sense of humor quickly known. An excellent example, the first time she and Corey crossed paths was at Oracle OpenWorld where she was dressed as a seer. Yeah, you read that right. Danielle and Corey regale her hilarious gimmicks over the years at various oracle theme conferences. Be they about the cloud, or communing with the ether. Danielle has some great anecdotes that, in short, helped to also highlight some peculiarities of the industry. Alongside her prolific work in tech, Danielle is also a robust artist, whose work straddles realm digital, physical, and other. Check out the conversation!

For the first in-person episode in quite some time, Corey is joined by Sahir Azam, Chief Product Officer at MongoDB. Recording during the madness known as re:Invent, Sahir has graciously taken some time to bring us up to speed on what the folks at MongoDB have been up to, both in their work with AWS and outside of it. With re:Invent in the rearview, Sahir reflects upon MongoDB’s week well spent. Sahir and Corey discuss MongoDB’s history as a “staple of the internet” and how MongoDB is now set in stone as one of the leading cloud database companies. MongoDB has made purpose a central focus for its database build. This purpose is something the company provides to its customer base as a wide array of organizations make the transition to the cloud. Sahir and Corey discuss the nuances of general purpose databases and their potential shortfalls, plus how to craft a more specific database that allows space for innovation.

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”!