Insightful conversations. Less snark.

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.

Ana Visneski is the senior director of communications and community at H2O.ai, which focuses on open source AI and machine learning solutions. Prior to this position, she worked at AWS for more than four years, serving as the principal of AWS disaster response, head of launch blog and podcast operations, and senior digital marketing manager there. She also served in the Coast Guard for nine years. Join Corey and Ana as they talk about democratizing AI and making it as transparent and accessible as water, why Ana believes AI has a lot of potential but also a lot of challenges, what it was like to be the founder of the Coast Guard’s social media program, how Ana ended up working with AWS, what it’s like to work during an Andy Jassy keynote, how half of Corey’s job is introducing people who work at AWS to each other, the hidden value veterans bring to tech, how Ana played guard dog for Jeff Barr, how the size of the Coast Guard makes everyone who serves a jack of all trades, and more.

Dr. Sarah Kaiser is a quantum technologist with a PhD in physics and, more specifically, quantum information. She’s also a technical staff member and quantum community lead at Unitary Fund. Over the years, Sarah has worked as a research engineer at Pensar Development, a postdoctoral researcher at Macquarie University, a fellow at the University of Waterloo, and a junior kernel developer at Wolfram Research, among other positions. She’s also the author of kids books, including Neural Networks for Babies, and has a book for grown-ups due in April 2021: Learn Quantum Computing with Python and Q#: A Hands-on Approach. Join Corey and Sarah for a discussion about the ins and outs of quantum computing and how the field is still budding. They talk about the ethics of quantum computing, the similarities between the hype behind machine learning and quantum computing, when Sarah believes quantum computing will become a technical inevitability, why Sarah wouldn’t know what to do with a quantum computer today, how quantum computing is truly an interdisciplinary field and the various kinds of people you’d need to build a quantum computer, the prerequisites Sarah believes are required to get into the field of quantum computing, and more.

Caroline Carter is an account executive at The Duckbill Group, having joined the team in July 2019. Prior to this position, she was an enterprise account executive at CB Insights, a senior account executive at Square, a client operations associate at BlackRock, and an account manager at Savoir Faire Paris, among other positions. She also worked as an English-speaking teaching assistant in Paris for a year. Join Corey and Caroline as they talk about what it was like for Caroline to learn Ruby on Rails in France, how Corey and Caroline met and how their relationship has evolved over the years, how there’s a whole society of people who hate their jobs yet stick with them for years and why Caroline never wanted to be part of it, why Caroline believes you should take job interviews regularly—even if you love your current job, why Corey thinks a successful mentorship depends more on the protege than the mentor, how everyone is doing sales even if they don’t realize it, the difference between working in enterprise sales and working for a startup, and more.

Regis Wilson is the founding engineer at Release, an environment as a service provider. Regis brings more than 25 years of tech experience to this position, having worked as an infrastructure architect and SRE at TrueCar, Inc. and a cloud systems architect at Live Nation, among several other positions. Oh yeah: He also used to be Corey’s boss. Join Corey and Regis as they talk about what it was like to have Corey as an employee, what Release does and what environments as a service means, how Regis likes working with the people he enjoys working with repeatedly, how the speed of provisioning resources has accelerated over the last decade, what it was like for Regis to switch jobs during a pandemic and why he decided to make the gamble, how at—at one point in his career—Corey’s core competency was getting fired, what Release’s monetization strategy is, how to spin up a Minecraft server for free, and more.

Tim Banks is a Principal Solutions Architect at Equinix Metal, providers of automated and interconnected bare metal solutions. Tim brings more than 20 years of experience to the role, having worked as technical account manager at Mission Cloud (an AWS Premier Consulting Partner), a technical account manager at AWS, a site reliability engineer at Elastic, a DevOps engineer at ObjectRocket, a senior database administrator at TEKsystems, and a LAMP systems architect at Charles Schwab, among other positions. Prior to launching a career in tech, Tim enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps as a musician before being reassigned to avionics. Join Corey and Tim as they talk about why Tim decided to make the leap to Equinix Metal, how you’re more likely to get a bigger raise by switching companies than pursuing the traditional promotion track, why Tim starts interviewing for new jobs on his one-year anniversary of any gig, how many corporations conduct a hazing of sorts during the interview process by asking candidates to perform ridiculous tasks they’d never perform if they got the job, why job titles are important, why Netflix doesn’t stream anything on AWS, why cloud costs are never predictable, and more.

Scott Piper is an AWS security consultant at Summit Route, a company he founded in 2017. He’s also the developer of flaws.cloud and an organizer for the virtual fwd:cloudsec conference. Scott brings 15 years of tech experience to his current position, having worked as director of security at a cybersecurity company, a security engineer at Yelp, and a software engineer at the NSA, among other positions. Join Corey and Scott as they talk about why Scott decided to start an AWS security consultancy, what it was like for Scott to quit his job only to find out the people he thought needed his services wanted him to work for free, how Scott came around to building CloudMapper and CloudTracker, what both of those tools do, why it’s important to define what kind of consultant you are going to be and find your niche, the psychological aspect of running your own business, and more.