Insightful conversations. Less snark.

This week Corey is joined by Nipun Agarwal, Vice President of MySQL HeatWave at Oracle, who stands as a rare entity in the tech world! Nipun has spent 27 years at Oracle, his first job out of school, and along the way has landed at the top of his field. He is the maestro of all things databases and the 170 patents proves it! Nipun and Corey discuss what it was like to stay at one company for so long, and how Nipun can serve as a role model for how to do so. Nipun discusses the varied opportunities he has pursued working across various teams at Oracle. He also discusses the role that Heatwave will play for MySQL, and how it is outpacing the competitors. Tune in for all the details!

This week Corey is joined by Adam Zimman, a self proclaimed “public servant” of the tech world, to talk about often unspoken about aspects of the industry—at least on the technolgoy side of the house. Adam is here to discuss leadership, product marketing, and go to market strategies. Adam’s role as a strategic advisor has carried him from large scale organizations to the small, and it has helped him shape a stark awareness of the role of people within a company. Adam goes into how his background has shaped his perspectives on leadership and management. He also offers the importance of providing the right professional mold for someone to provide challenges to management structures within an organization. Adam also discusses how the ability to challenge managers can be valuable and helpful. Adam teases out the differences between leadership and management, and how the former should reinforce the success of others. Tune in for Adam’s valuable insight!

This week Corey is joined by Karthik Ranganathan, CTO and Co-Founder of Yugabyte, to talk about databases of which YugabyteDB is one of the best. Karthik started at Facebook building distributed databases and now has moved onto building even more! Why? Well Karthik gives us the details. Check out the conversation! Karthik informs us about the database gap that Yugabyte is now working towards solving. This includes building out an open source relational database that can perform in three important ways: high availability, the ability to scale, and geographic distribution. Karthik gives us the details on how Yugabyte is working towards mastering all three.

This week Corey is joined by Laurie Barth, Senior Software Engineer at Netflix, though most of us know Laurie by her Twitter handle: @laurieontech. While Laurie and Corey have bounced around each other in the digital sphere, now they’re finally sitting down to a conversation! Corey and Laurie talk Twitters tip jar, super follows, and Laurie’s cheeky debut of The Art of the Subtle Subtweet. Laurie offers her perspectives on how growing an audience on Twitter shifts the way people interact with you, how tweets shouldn’t always be taking seriously, and navigating that space with success. Tune in for Laurie’s tweeting tidbits!

Ev Kontsevoy, Co-Founder and CEO of Teleport, is back a year later to give us an update on what Teleport has been up to! Last time they talked the security growing pains of the pandemic were still a little manic, Ev is here to dial us in on what exactly has changed. Teleport is working hard to stay at the forefront of the “scaling stress” of cloud computing over the past year. Ev goes into details about how Teleport has handled security and the massive shift to the cloud, and the four components of what access actually means and teases out their differences. Ev also goes into how Teleport works with authentication and identity and the innovation they bring to that space. Ev, and by extension Teleport, have a lot to offer. Check out his conversation with Corey for all the details!

Katie Sylor-Miller is a frontend architect at Etsy, a company she joined in November 2015. Prior to this position, Katie worked as a senior front end developer at Constant Contact, a technical lead at EF Education, a front end web developer at Miller Systems, and a program coordinator providing research administrative services at Harvard University. She’s also the co-author of the Design Systems Handbook and the creator of Oh Shit, Git!?! Join Corey and Katie as they explore the wonderful world of Git and talk about how humans are confused by Git, how Katie’s website went viral overnight and what the experience was like, learning Git to give a talk on Git after said talk had already been accepted, how to teach yourself Git, how to teach others Git after having taught yourself Git, how people think that nothing is fixable with Git and why that’s wrong, how engineers write less and less code the higher and higher they climb at organizations, and more.

This week Corey is joined by Eric Dynowski, Managing Partner and Chief Solutions Officer at Deft. Eric began in engineering, then moved over to consulting and helping customers through the trails of AWS. Eric goes into what “technological needs” that Deft provides to its customers. The transition from cloud to data center or vice versa is at the forefront of this conversation! Eric goes into the deeper details on the origins of Deft and what they offer, navigating Corey’s bias of using multicloud, and becoming “trusted advisors” when it comes to AWS. Eric offers his perspective on the importance of building a solid reputation with partners and customers alike, and building on conversations. Tune in for the details!

Francessca Vasquez is the Vice President of Technology at Amazon Web Services, a job she started in March 2021 after a four-year stint as head of solutions architecture and customer solutions management at AWS. Prior to these positions, Francessca worked as a group vice president at Oracle, led the Americas enterprise architects and solution specialists at Salesforce, and was a partner for CSC’s global consulting and public sector division, among other positions. She also worked for the Department of Defense for two years. Join Corey and Francessca as they talk about empowering customers with tools that enable them to build cultures of innovation, how AWS is focused on meeting customers where they are, how different organizations have different starting points for moving to the cloud, how AWS helped Nationwide migrate to the cloud, how the pandemic has made digital a permanent fixture for all organizations, how some workers have taken a break during the pandemic, what AWS is doing to make technology more accessible, how many AWS employees start as customers, and more.

Angie Jones, Senior Director/Developer Relations at Applitools, joins Corey this week to have a good laugh as they discuss testing. Angie talks Corey through his own testing frustrations and makes the case for the importance of it within organizations. Angie takes the helm at teaching testing, and her work pays off! Angie discusses the whims of testing along with her contagious laughter. Angie talks about the “test automation pyramid” and breaks down its various layers. Angie and Corey also pontificate on the mythology of testing elves, and Angie’s accomplishment of becoming the first black woman to become Java Champion. Angie shares her passion of teaching coding and the places she does so in order to make tech more attractive for women and minorities. Tune in for the rest!

This week Duckbill Group’s very own Director of “Snarketing”, Natalie Williams, joins Corey for a conversation on what exacly marketing is—versus Corey’s so called “ridiculous nonsense.” Natalie’s recent hire at the DBG goes to show that marketing is much more than shitposting and witticisms, thankfully she is now on the team to show us how. Natalie offers her perspectives on how to make marketing feel more authentic to an audience and how to push the narrative around marketing into a more human space. She discusses coming on board with DBG and how working with them has helped her to foster the above. Natalie gives insightful advice on how you don’t need to obsess over tracking people across the internet to market your product to them, tune in for the “must know!”

As an industry we stand on the precipice of change! There is a lot going on in the cloud these days and Forrest Brazeal, Head of Content at Google Cloud, joins Corey again to talk about what's coming with his new career change! At the beginning of his transition to Google, Forrest goes into detail on what he is most excited to bring to the story telling of another cloud provider and how he is working to give back to the cloud community. Forrest discusses his time at A Cloud Guru and how it helped him in his new transition, his time as an AWS Severless Hero, and the technical excellence he brings to his vast ranging and prolific content. Forrest is also a successful author of a newsletter and multiple books, to include a children's book about the cloud! Needless to say, Forrest is an incredibly varied personality in the cloud community, tune in for a chance to get to know him better!

How has Ant Stanely, Co-Founder of Senzo, not been on Screaming in the Cloud before? Time to remedy that. Ant sits down with Corey to do so. He offers up his history which has lead to his time as “Serverless Hero” to landing on the line that “severless sucks.” Lend us your ears to see how that transition happened! Ant goes into detail on JeffConf (not the of the Bezos nomen), and working with severs and what to put where and why. Ant and Corey talk over the plague of AWS services where Ant offers his perspective how to trim the fat and keep things simple to make long terms objectives more attainable. They discuss the importance of training, the role of certifications for better and worse, and more. Tune in for his take!