Insightful conversations. Less snark.

Kylie Robison is a student at California State University, Sacramento where she studies business management information systems and expects to graduate in May 2021. She’s also a technology reporter at The State Hornet, the school’s newspaper. When she’s not studying textbooks or chasing down the next story, Kylie works in IT services at Covered California, the Golden State’s health insurance marketplace. Join Corey and Kylie as they talk about how computer science classes at universities have evolved over the last 20 years, how those in the legal profession might be most likely to cuss out people on the IT help desk, why Kylie is particularly interested in the intersection of infosec and empathy, why she doesn’t have any plants in her house at the moment, how infosec in general can seem like a toxic community, what it’s like to be a college student with 6,000 Twitter followers, what Kylie’s planning to do after school, and more.

Alex Hidalgo is a principal site reliability engineer at Nobl9, makers of a robust service level objective (SLO) platform for SREs. Prior to this role, Alex worked as a senior site reliability engineer at Squarespace and a senior site reliability engineer at Google. He’s also the author of the O’Reilly book Implementing Service Level Objectives, which was released in September 2020. In 2001, Alex restored a 1964.5 Mustang for money. Join Corey and Alex as they discuss the pros and cons of writing a book, what exactly a service-level objective is, the difference between a service-level objective and a service-level agreement, how implementing SLOs is all about finding the perfect balance of failure your users are willing to tolerate, how reliability for an SRE is defined by SLOs, what the moment was like when Alex realized he was going to write a book, how it’s difficult to bring up the fact that you’ve written a book in conversation, and more.

Danyel Fisher is a principal design researcher at Honeycomb.io, makers of observability tooling for engineering and DevOps teams. Prior to joining Honeycomb in May 2018, Danyel worked as a senior researcher at Microsoft for nearly 14 years, with a focus on data visualization. He holds a masters in computer science from UC Berkeley and a PhD in information and computer science from UC Irvine. Join Corey and Danyel as they talk about the different kinds of research, what the biggest misunderstanding about Danyel’s job is, how figuring out the root cause of an outage is like a murder mystery, how nobody really knows what digital transformation means, how it’s easy to find issues when you start an observability project but how starting such a project is the hardest part, what Honeycomb means by testing in production and why they encourage teams to do that, the difference between conducting research for a juggernaut like Microsoft and an agile startup like Honeycomb, and more.

Chris Porter is the director of solutions engineering at StackRox, makers of the industry’s first Kubernetes-native container security platform. Previously, Chris worked as the director of field sales engineers at Bracket Computing, a technical solutions architect and senior manager of systems engineering at Cisco, and a software engineer at VA Software, iBeam Broadcasting, and Silicon Graphics, among other positions. He is also an author and a certified AWS solutions architect and security specialist. Join Corey and Chris as they talk about bringing security to Kubernetes while touching upon how nobody really manages application security—they just pretend to; why security needs to think the same way as microservices; how a lot of people end up using the container model incorrectly by thinking they’re the same as VMs; what billing and security have in common; why security needs to be baked into the foundation vs. treated as an afterthought; why you should aim for incremental security improvements; what Chris thinks the business value of Kubernetes is; why Chris doesn’t think moving applications to containers automatically makes them more secure, and more.

Jordan and Richard are the brains behind Simpsons Against DevOps (@SimpsonsOps), a Twitter account that posts hilarious and snarky Simpsons memes catered to the world of DevOps and cloud. Join Corey, Jordan, and Richard as they talk about the benefits of pseudo-anonymity, the genesis of @SimpsonsOps, what Jordan and Richard’s approach to memeing looks like, the difference between interacting with people and interacting with a meme account, how the deep Simpsons catalog makes memeing easier, why you should avoid engaging with comments from toxic people, why you should apologize for mistakes, how there’s a site called Frinkiac that makes it easy to create Simpsons memes, and more.

Matt Stratton is a transformation specialist at Red Hat, where he helps public sector organizations succeed in their digital transformation initiatives. Previously, he worked as a DevOps advocate at PagerDuty, a customer architect at Chef Software, a managing consultant at 10th Magnitude, and an engineer lead at JPMorgan Chase, among other positions. He’s also the host of the Arrested DevOps podcast and the global co-chair of DevOpsDays. Join Corey and Matt as they talk about Matt’s decision to brand himself as Matt then Matty and now Matt again, how COVID-19 has changed DevRel and conferences in general, what it was like to run DevOpsDays Chicago online this year, why folks can’t just decide to move in-person events to the virtual world and expect great results, why a webinar with a Slack channel isn’t a virtual event, how virtual events are harder for sponsors, why Corey is happy he hasn’t gone to Las Vegas this year, how DevRel done right is a super effective sales strategy, how podcasts are the new medium for conversations with people who otherwise wouldn’t speak to you, the pros and cons of live talks and pre-recorded talks at virtual events, and more.

Shelby Spees is a developer advocate at Honeycomb.io. She brings five years of software development experience to the position, having worked as a DevOps engineer at true[X], a site reliability engineer at Grindr, and a software engineer at The Aerospace Corporation. Join Corey and Shelby as they talk about the pros and cons of remote work, why it’s so important to let employees work in whatever way they can be most effective, how everyone thrives in different environments, the downsides of being a superuser on Twitter, how Shelby keeps track of epic Twitter threads, why Corey thinks it’s harder to speak remotely than in a live setting, the pros and cons of the hallway track at conferences, the aspects of virtual events Shelby prefers, and more.

Alfonso Cabrera is the Director of Platform Engineering at Red Ventures, where he helps manage and optimize the company’s extensive AWS footprint. Previously, he worked as a solutions architect at Amazon Web Services, a DevOps engineer at startups in the Charlotte area, and a systems administrator at NTT America, among other positions. For the last five years, he’s also organized DevOpsDays Charlotte. Join Corey and Alfonso as they explore Alfonso’s journey with Red Ventures, what exactly it is that Red Ventures does, the crazy writing culture at AWS and why Alfonso believes it’s better than the PowerPoint approach, the merits of principles-based decision-making, how AWS approaches solutions architecture, what it’s like to have your writing reviewed at AWS, the difference between optimizing for prestige and optimizing for happiness in your career, what it’s like to work on the Red Ventures campus, how cloud-native and serverless guide Red Ventures’ approach today, the importance of not blocking engineers’ workflows, and more.

Richard Seroter is the director of outbound product management at Google Cloud. He brings more than 20 years of experience to the role, having worked as a senior director of technical marketing and developer relations at VMware, vice president of product marketing at Pivotal, Inc., and vice president of product at CenturyLink most recently. He also worked at Amgen, Microsoft, and Accenture. Join Corey and Richard as they talk about what a director of outbound product management does, how it’s hard to find people who are broad and deep across anything in cloud, how many oranges can fit in the state of Utah, how Richard ended up at Google, how Google Cloud has evolved in recent years, why Richard believes the era of Google as an ivory tower is over, how Richard views multi-cloud and why he believes most orgs are multi-cloud, the difference between the kind of relationships companies have with Google and the relationships they have with AWS, and more.

Peter Cooper has more than two decades of experience at the intersection of technology and media. He’s the founder of Cooper Press, a tech publishing outfit for software development professionals that’s the driving force behind JavaScript Weekly, Ruby Inside, Ruby Weekly, DB Weekly, and more. In a previous life, he was a conference chair for O’Reilly Media, a consultant for a web hosting startup and a web engineer and systems administrator. Join Corey and Peter as they talk about what it’s like to grow a newsletter from scratch into something that has tens of thousands of subscribers, how it’s only a matter of time before newsletter subscribership starts to plateau, how Peter balances sponsorship opportunities on his newsletter by giving both the big guys and the small guys a shot, how publishing has always been in Peter’s blood, how The Duckbill Group uses media to essentially make their customer acquisition costs a negative number, Peter’s tips on launching a newsletter, and more.

Divanny Lamas is the CEO at Transposit, a platform that enables DevOps teams to build interactive runbooks. She’s also the managing director at Sutter Hill Ventures, a VC fund that’s funded tech startups since 1962. Prior to these roles, Divanny worked at Splunk for seven years, ending up as head of new product introduction there. She also worked as VP Products and Marketing at Context Relevant and an Associate at Google. Divanny is an alumnus of Harvard and has a degree in government and computer science. Join Corey and Divanny as they discuss the journey that led Divanny to her two current roles, what Sutter Hill Ventures thinks VCs should actually do, how Transposit thinks about data in different categories and what those categories are, how messaging data has been traditionally underleveraged, how Transposit and PagerDuty have different goals, how automation can improve the incident response process, what tasks humans are good at and what tasks humans are bad at, how it’s not feasible for any engineer to be an expert in everything, how DevOps is essentially agile in a sexier label, the rise of the platform team, and more.

Brooke Mitchell is an associate DevOps engineer at Mitel, a telecommunications company that sells VoIP technology. She’s also a certified Amazon Web Services Solutions Architect Associate. Before joining Mitel, Brooke worked as an analyst at T-Mobile, which was her role when this episode was recorded. Join Corey and Brooke as they talk about how Brooke got into the world of cloud through Forrest Brazeal’s cloud resume challenge, what that experience was like, the difference between the “anyone who asks for help is a moron” mindset and more inclusive and welcoming communities, the important role networking plays in advancing your career, the qualities to look for in a mentor, the Lambda learning cliff, how Stack Overflow disabling copy and paste functionality would be the end of the world, and more.