Insightful conversations. Less snark.

This week Craig McLuckie, VP-Modern Applications Platform Business Unit at VMware, sits down with Corey to discuss his beginning with Google Compute Engine in the early days of the cloud, and his time at the forefront of Kubernetes and Docker. He discusses VMWare, and what exactly modern applications hope to achieve there, and what the next steps look like. Craig has always been at the forefront of innovation, especially in regard to the cloud. His storied history speaks to this and it stands at the center of Craig’s contributions to the field. Craig and Corey’s conversation covers a wide range that embodies Craig’s own trajectory, tune in for the whole story!

This week Corey is joined by Clint Sharp, CEO and co-founder of a company called Cribl. Clint breaks down what exactly Cribl is and the innovations they are bringing to security and observability. Cribl also has a lot to offer when it comes to optimizing and saving money--to the point of dropping vowels! Clint gives us a lot on Cribl’s offerings, tune in to see what they are! From security and observability, to making esoteric security products more accessible for an entire organization Clint offers a lot of insight. He and Corey discuss getting everybody on board with security, how Cribl LogStream navigates this space, the rising waters of “observability lakes”, and more! Tune in for the rest!

This week Corey is joined by Rich Burroughs, a Senior Developer Advocate at Loft Labs. Rich stays busy with improving workloads for folks using Kubernetes. Rich is a great resource for all things Kubernetes, he even hosts his own podcast (link in the description below) where he interviews people in the community. Rich tells us what's going on at Loft Labs and how they’re helping the folks who keep “banging their shins” on Kubernetes. Rich and Corey discuss learning to work well with ADHD, which he has launched into the Twitter-verse for the sake of advocacy. Rich offers his perspective on how to do so, and to do it well. Rich talks about working at large companies, versus small and the various responsibility of working with the latter. Tune in this week for Rich’s take!

Will Gregorian, Head of Security and Technical Operations at Rhino, sits down with Corey—despite the fact they’ve crossed paths in the past! Will’s background working for startups has informed his current work in security. By spending his time in smaller companies its helped Will to craft his perspectives in a valuable way, check in for how! Will and Corey talk about their own history, Will’s capacity to bring security to the early stages of start up, and how to find the failures to avoid in the future. Will ponders on the militarism in the language around security and how to revolutionize the conversation going forward, and what lessons can be learned from working security for healthcare. At the forefront is where Will tries so stay and he gives us the reasons why.

This week Corey is joined by Cliff Moon, an Agile Consultant, who has a history steeped in engineering that lead him to consultancy work—to include working on HBO’s Silicon Valley. Now as an Agile Consultant, Cliff’s discusses what his work brings to the table and how he handles Scrum within organizations. Cliff gives us the details on Agile, the Agile Manifesto, and its resulting “Agilist,” if you will. Cliff talks about how to do Agile the right way, working with the entirety of engineering departments, and the why ship-ability of products is a constant trial. Cliff also talks about the potential negative impacts of the engineer path as it stands, and how it might be changed. Tune in for the positive changes that can be made and the rest!

This week Corey is joined by John Allspaw, Founder/Principal at Adaptive Capacity Labs. John was foundational in the DevOps movement, but he’s continued to bring much more to the table. He’s written multiple books, and seems to always be at the forefront. Which is why he is now at Adaptive Capacity Labs. John tells us what exactly Adaptive Capacity Labs does and how it works and how he convinced some heros to get behind it. John brings a much needed insight into how to get multiple people in an organization on the same level when it comes to dealing with incidents. Engineers and non. John points out the issues surrounding public vs. private write ups and the roadblocks they may prop up. Adaptive Capacity Labs is working towards bringing those roadblocks down, tune in for how!

This week Nader Dabit, who works in developer relations at Edge & Node, joins Corey to chat. What is Edge & Node? Nader breaks it down for us. He also discusses his career and unconventional background that lead up to joining Edge & Node, and how he is always looking for the next challenge. That striving has informed his entire trajectory, and also lends an edge of excitement to Nader’s next steps. Nader talks about the decentralized financial issues in countries like Lebanon or Venezuela, dabblings in the dark arts of Front End Web, and how his blogging inspried him to become more community focused. Nader talks Java Script, paths into tech, the joys and benefit of teaching others and more! Tune in for Nader’s unique and energized take.

This week Serena Tiede, an SRE at Optum, joins Corey to talk about the world of SREs. Serena discusses their mix of traditional and non-traditional background and making the jump from electrical engineering to tech. Serena tells us about their beginnings at Optum and the different, and welcome, challenges of moving from system to system as an SRE. They talk about what Serena carrys forward from their background, starting in security and moving over to becoming an SRE and learning Docker. Corey and Serena also discuss the interminable nature of the cloud and the vast differences between when we’re footing the AWS bill—and when its the company’s problem! It turns out Serena learned some tricks on keeping costs down by tuning in to the various “Last Week in AWS” podcasts. You can do the same!

Amy Negrette is a cloud economist at The Duckbill Group. Prior to joining our team, Amy worked as a cloud architect at Trek10, Inc., a cloud software engineer lead at Cloudreach, a software developer at ASRC Research and Technology Solutions, and a software engineer at Yahoo, among other positions. She’s also an organizer of Write/Speak/Code, an organization committed to helping Under Represented Genders sharpen their technical speaking and writing capabilities. Join Corey and Amy as they discuss the pros and cons of remote work, what Duckbill’s organizational structure is like, remote work during the pandemic vs. remote work during the before times, why it’s nice to be able to work whenever you want to work instead of during fixed hours, why the future of travel in the tech industry should change, how Corey and Amy met, what makes cloud economics come natural to Amy, a tool that helps recreate physical events online more effectively than Zoom, and more.

Jesse DeRose is a cloud economist at The Duckbill Group, where he wears many hats: consultant, team liaison, technical lead, and project manager. Jesse brings more than 10 years of tech experience to Duckbill, having previously worked as a platform engineer at Omada Health, a DevOps engineer at Capital One, a DevOps engineer at AnyPerk, and a DevOps engineer at Taos, among other positions. Join Corey and Jesse as they talk about how many organizations expect tech workers to be able to write code in every language right off the bat, the importance of being able to speak to both sides of the table (i.e., the business side and the engineering side), how the Duckbill Group also thinks about organizational dynamics when suggesting how a client can save money in AWS, what Jesse thinks is one of the biggest challenges the Duckbill Group faces when working with clients, how Jesse helps both sides understand that both sides are important, and more.

James Governor is the co-founder of RedMonk, the developer-focused analyst firm. He’s also the managing director of Shoreditch Works, a coworking business that doubles as an event space. Previously, James worked as a deputy editor for InformationWeek UK. He lives in London. Join Corey and James as they discuss how RedMonk is different from traditional analyst firms, how Corey and James met and how James credentialed Corey as a bona fide industry analyst on Twitter, how anyone can be an analyst in theory, the mindset required to give advice as an analyst, what attracted James to becoming an analyst in the first place, why RedMonk focuses on the qualitative instead of the quantitative, why James believe the two biggest defining forces in culture are outrage and confirmation bias, and more.

Sean Kilgore is a senior principal engineer/architect at Twilio. Sean brings more than two decades worth of tech experience to this role. Previously, he worked as a principal engineer II/operations architect at SendGrid (which was acquired by Twilio), an operations engineer at Beachhead Studio, and an associate system administrator at Blizzard Entertainment, among other positions. Join Corey and Sean as they talk about becoming a manager and underestimating the emotional outlay that's needed to manage humans effectively, the difference between engineers and architects and what it's like to influence without authority, what the transition was like after Twilio purchased SendGrid, what it's like to have 11 job titles in eight years at one company, how staying at the same company for too long often results in underpaid employees but how Twilio has shattered that mold, how you can tell a lot about a company by the way they buy their people, and more.