Insightful conversations. Less snark.

Katrina Bakas is a senior technical product manager at Amazon Web Services, who’s working on CloudFront. Prior to this role, she focused on observability as a senior product manager at Pivotal Software (and VMware upon acquisition) and worked as a product manager at Firepoint Solutions and a senior digital producer at Transamerica, among other positions. Join Corey and Katrina as they talk about what exactly it is a senior technical product manager does and how that role changes from company to company and even within the same company, how CloudFront is designed to focus on the things it does really well without additional bells and whistles, how it’s easy to complain about the things we don’t have instead of the things we do have, how Katrina focuses on developing new features that will help the most users instead of optimizing for niche use cases, some of the most interesting use cases Katrina has seen in the CDN space, and more.

Randall Hunt is a developer advocate at Facebook AI. Prior to this position, he worked as a solutions architect, software engineer, developer advocate, a developer evangelist at AWS, a software engineer at SpaceX, and a developer evangelist and software engineer at MongoDB, among other positions. Join Corey and Randall as they discuss the differences between TensorFlow and PyTorch, the breadth of contributors to the PyTorch project, what it’s like to listen to a conference talk by Randall, how Randall got started live coding on stage, why Randall believes audience participation is the key component of a successful talk, using machine learning to optimize the office coffee shop, how well-executed machine learning is invisible, how Randall will always be a huge AWS fan even though he no longer works there, the energy at re:Invent, and more.

Eric Brandwine is a VP and distinguished engineer at AWS, where he focuses on the cloud and security and has worked for more than 13 years. Prior to joining Amazon, Eric worked as a principal engineer and senior engineer at MITRE for 10 years and a network security engineer at UUNet. He earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Cornell University, with a concentration on engineering physics and research in operating systems. Join Corey and Eric as they talk about why Eric is kind of the Darth Vader of AWS, how meeting coworkers for the first time during security events isn’t the best way to win friends and influence people, how security is job zero at AWS and what that means, why businesses shouldn’t be terrified of making a single misstep but why they should take every security event very seriously, the importance of earning customer trust every day, the two things Eric thinks makes security difficult, how cyberattacks are like playing a blind game of chess against and unknown adversary, why Eric’s favorite word in AWS security is “escalate,” and more.

Dennis Gada is Senior Vice President and Head of Financial Services, North America for Infosys, an IT consultancy headquartered in India. Dennis joined Infosys as a senior client partner in 2005. Prior to that, he worked as a manager at Accenture for more than four years. Join Corey and Dennis as they talk about what Dennis does in his capacity of head of financial services, the digital transformation of a digital transformation consultancy, how Infosys has been around since the dot-com bubble and is pivoting to digital services, how Infosys partnered with Old National Bank, a regional bank based in Iowa, why some organizations take longer to complete digital transformation initiatives than others, how COVID-19 accelerated digital transformation by 10 years, how banks that had strong tech stacks were able to capitalize on the PPP, how the pandemic highlighted the need for end-to-end digital transformation, what financial services companies are getting right about digital transformation, and more.

Jessica Schalz is a workflow engineer at Transposit, a company that build interactive runbooks for DevOps and SREs to turn alerts into action. Prior to this position, Jessica worked as a security engineer at Remitly, a product security engineer at Target, and a DevOps intern at Jamf. Jessica also worked as a teaching assistant at Girls Who Code and an undergrad research assistant at the University of Minnesota. Join Corey and Jessica as they talk about what exactly a workflow engineer is, how Jess is an “aggressive advocate” for accessibility and neurodiversity, why Jess believes ADHD is a superpower in many ways, why Jess prefers agile development over waterfall development, how ADHD is a spectrum and people with the condition never really experience it the same way, what it was like working in infosec and why Jess decided to return to their engineering roots, the power of collaboration and how it lets teams see things differently, the important role empathy plays in collaboration, and more.

Jesse Trucks is the Minister of Magic at Splunk, where he consults on security and compliance program designs and develops Splunk architectures for security use cases, among other things. He brings more than 20 years of experience in tech to this role, having previously worked as director of security and compliance at Peak Hosting, a staff member at freenode, a cybersecurity engineer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and a systems engineer at D.E. Shaw Research, among several other positions. Jesse also was the director of the League of Professional System Administrators, ran his own consultancy for 14 years, and served in the U.S. Navy. Join Corey and Jesse as they talk about what exactly Jesse does at Splunk, what it was like to provision supercomputers at D.E. Shaw Research Group, why it’s important to build security into your products from the outset instead of treating it as an afterthought, the upcoming Meanwhile in Security podcast from The Duckbill Group, its genesis, and why Jesse will be hosting it, the difference between DevSecOps and SecDevOps and the competition to cram as many words into a portmanteau as possible, how Corey weighs sponsorship opportunities for his podcasts, how you can’t regain trust after it’s lost, why you need better security in the cloud than on-prem, and more.

Kevin Kuchta is the lead product engineer for DuckTools at The Duckbill Group, a company that you may or may not be familiar with. Prior to winding up in this spectacular position, Kevin worked as a software engineer at Brex, Joyable, Threadflip, and Expensify. He also worked as a web developer at the Rochester Institute of Technology and an applications software developer at GE Energy. Join Corey and Kevin as they talk about DuckTools and why Duckbill decided to sunset the suite of tools, what the genesis of the product was like, how a Slack message led to Kevin joining Duckbill, why Kevin created a URL shortener with Lambda and why you shouldn’t try that at home, how tricky it is to find the right price point for a SaaS tool, why it’s so important for product developers to talk to customers early and often, why startups become scatterbrained when they focus on too much at once, why the key job of any CEO is to fire yourself repeatedly, the curse of being a full-stack developer, what’s in store for Kevin’s future, and more.

Jonan Scheffler is the Director of Developer Relations at New Relic, where he’s a boomerang employee, having previously worked there as a Ruby Agent Engineer. Prior to his current position, Jonan worked as a developer advocate at Timescale, a developer advocate and senior software engineer at Heroku, and a software developer at LivingSocial. Back in the day, he worked at the front desk for a major hotelier—which has influenced approach to his current role. Join Corey and Jonan as they explore how New Relic has changed over the years, transforming from a subscription model to a usage-based model; how the cloud has evolved since New Relic became a company and how that’s impacted the business; what Jonan wants to see when he logs into an observability platform; the kinds of tweets you get when you work in DevRel and how smiley faces can make them better; how Twitch is now being used as a collaborative live coding platform and what that means for devs; how interactive media affects attention spans; the two most common places to spot DevRel folks pre-pandemic; and more.

Tom Uebel is the co-founder and CEO of Command E, a search engine that works across your cloud and your computer, all accessible via one shortcut that launched in 2018. Prior to this position, Tom worked as a software engineer at First Round Capital and a software engineer at UniversityNow, Inc. Tom is an alumnus of Miami University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in finance and entrepreneurship. Join Corey and Tom as they talk about why Command E is the fastest way to find files on your desktop and across your cloud environment, how Command E’s approach to security makes it easy for Tom to sleep at night, how Command E is free to use right now and how the company plans to monetize the service moving forward, the genesis of Command E and how Tom saw some of the smartest people in the world tearing their hair out trying to find information and moving between systems, how Command E is designed to be very intuitive and simple but there’s a lot of sophisticated engineering under the hood, what the future holds for Command E, and more.

Sarah Novotny is a free and open source software strategist at Azure, working out of the office of the CTO. She’s also on the Linux Foundation’s board of directors. Previously, Sarah served as the head of open source strategy for GCP, the program manager of the Kubernetes community at Google, head of developer relations at NGINX, and program chair of the O’Reilly Open Source Convention, among other positions. Join Corey and Sarah as they discuss how and why Microsoft’s stance on open source has changed over the last 20 years, how companies can win in open source and what they need to do to make that happen, how Microsoft is involved in the Linux Foundation and how that would be almost unthinkable 20 years ago, how the cloud is not a zero-sum game, the pros and cons of turning the cloud into a utility, the importance of empowering customers versus telling them what to buy, and more.

James Urquhart is the global field CTO at VMware. He brings more than 25 years of tech experience to this position, having worked as the global field CTO at Pivotal Software, the general manager of learning services at AWS, SVP of performance analytics at SOASTA, and director of product, cloud management at Dell, among other positions. Join Corey and James as they talk about Tanzu and how it is not a vertically integrated T-shirt brand; what James predicts the world will look like in five or 10 years; James’ new book, Flow Architectures: The Future of Streaming and Event-Driven Integration, and the role streaming data will play in the future; how data runs through our economy like water runs downhill through a sand dune; the important role one’s attention span plays in writing a book; what it was like for James to write the book and why he did it; how nobody really predicted how hard it would be for Google and Microsoft to catch up to AWS in the cloud space; and more.

Nora Jones is the founder and CEO at Jeli, makers of an incident analysis platform that leverages data to recommend productive solutions to the problems at hand. Before this role, she was Head of Chaos Engineering and Human Factors at Slack, a senior software engineer at Netflix, and a team lead/senior software engineer at Jet.com, among other positions. She also had a four-month stint working on restricted research for the U.S. Navy and literally wrote the book onChaos Engineering. Join Corey and Nora as they talk about just what the heck it is that Jeli does, how incidents can help organization learn more about themselves, what it was like to work at Jet when it was scaling rapidly, how if everything is an incident than nothing is an incident, why businesses need to define exactly what an incident means to them, what the purpose of chaos engineering is, the unintended positive consequences of chaos engineering, why Nora thinks the word ‘post-mortem’ should be removed from the incident response lexicon, what’s surprised Nora as her role has evolved over her career, and more.