Insightful conversations. Less snark.

Stephanie Stimac is a program manager and design technologist at Microsoft, where she focuses on Microsoft Edge Developer Experiences and The Web We Want initiative. She brings more than 10 years of design experience to the role, having served as an experience and production designer at WE Communications, a graphic designer at Lina Zeineddine, and a graphic and UI designer at Point Inside, among other positions. She’s also lead UX designer for the open source tool webhint. Join Corey and Stephanie as they discuss the evolution of Microsoft Edge and how it’s different from Internet Explorer, how websites should render on all browsers in 2020, what Stephanie focuses on in her role as a program manager at Microsoft, how Stephanie’s career evolved from a graphic designer to front-end web designer, why it’s impossible to learn everything about the web and you should just focus on your niche instead, The Web We Want initiative and Stephanie’s role in it, how Stephanie prepared for her first public speaking opportunity, and more.

Mark Nunnikhoven is the Vice President of Cloud Research at Trend Micro, a cybersecurity firm. He’s also an AWS Community Hero. Mark brings more than 20 years of IT experience to his current role. Over the years, he’s served as a network security specialist, a principal engineer, and a senior research scientist, among other positions. Join Corey and Mark as they talk about the ever-evolving nature of cybersecurity, what it was like for Mark to work for the Canadian government on nation state-level security stuff for a decade, what’s nice about working on the research side of things vs. the product side, why Mark is focused on cloud cybersecurity today, why the two worst words in the AWS IAM console are “full access,” the struggle of “nerd me” vs. “I’ve-seen-some-things me,” what it’s like to be a “volunteer” for a trillion-dollar company, why Mark participates in the AWS Community Heroes program, how difficult it is to name a company, service, or program, and more.

Adithya Reddy is a software developer at Branch Insurance, a serverless insurance startup that sells bundled home and auto insurance products. In this role, he does it all—web, mobile, and backend architecture. After being hired as the company’s first frontend developer, Adithya expanded across the stack. Adithya graduated from Visvesvaraya Technological University with a bachelor of engineering degree in computer science in 2018. Join Corey and Adithya as they discuss what it’s like to build a startup that operates in a heavily regulated industry on serverless architecture, Adithya’s experience as being hired as the first developer at Branch Insurance, how serverless helps remove all sorts of tasks from the average developer’s plate and reduces the barrier of entry, how going serverless locks you into the AWS ecosystem at least for the near term and why that’s not necessarily a bad thing, why the Branch Insurance team uses CloudFormation instead of Terraform, and more.

For the last three years, Christina Warren has worked as a Senior Cloud Advocate at Microsoft. Before joining Microsoft, Christina published bylines all over the place, working as a senior writer at Gizmodo and a senior tech correspondent at Mashable. She’s also appeared as a commentator practically everywhere, including ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, CNBC, Fox News, and Fox Business. In her spare time, she co-hosts the Overtired and Rocket: Accelerated Geek Conversation podcasts. Join Corey and Christina as they discuss how a senior cloud advocate does more than say “I’m for the cloud,” the success of Microsoft’s virtual Build event and what it was like to pull it off, how Christina hopes that the current pandemic will improve the perception of virtual conferences moving forward, why Corey thinks the opportunity costs of attending conferences might hurt attendance whenever in-person events start back up, how giving a talk in front of an audience and giving a talk in from of a camera are different skill sets, the different things you need to consider for successful recorded vs. in-person talks, Christina’s tips for using a teleprompter, how everyone has been forced to become an AV experts overnight, and more.

Charles Fitzgerald is a Seattle-based angel investor with more than three decades of experience in tech who’s the managing director at Platformonomics, a consultancy that helps early-stage tech startups succeed. Prior to this position, Charles worked as a platform consiglieri at VMware and a VP of product management at Mozy. He also did a 19-year stint at Microsoft, where he ended up as general manager of platform strategy, and has served on the board of several tech startups, including buuteeq, Shippable, and Rec Room. Join Corey and Charles as they discuss what Charles worked on during his 19 years at Microsoft, including 16-bit Windows, 32-bit Windows, OLE, ActiveX, and .NET; what Charles invests in these days; how the big cloud players are so big that you’d struggle to catch them if someone gave you $100 billion; the three arguments IBM people made to Charles after he predicted they wouldn’t have a successful cloud transition in 2013; why Charles expects there to be more niche cloud offerings in the future; why no one will challenge the hyperscale cloud providers; how the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the deglobalization trend; and more.

Bill Staples is the Chief Product Officer at New Relic who’s responsible for driving the company’s platform strategy and leading its product management, engineering, and design functions. Bill has more than 20 years of experience in technology, coming to New Relic after a three-year stint as Adobe’s Vice President of Experience Cloud and a 17-year stint at a little company called Microsoft, where he ended up as a Corporate Vice President of the Azure Application Platform. Join Corey and Bill as they discuss the New Relic One platform that’s designed to make it easier for companies to adopt observability; what the difference between monitoring and observability is; New Relic’s free tier, which Bill says is 10x more generous than any other vendor; why Bill believes New Relic lives its values more than the other company’s he’s worked at; Corey’s complicated relationship with usage-based pricing models; why Bill thinks observability should be part of the basic engineering process; and more.

Rodrigo Flores has more than 35 years of experience in the tech industry. For the last seven years, he’s served as the managing director of the Accenture Cloud Platform. In this role, he leads a team of 400 people that delivers services to 3,000 clients and oversees $400 million of cloud spend. Previously, he worked as the chief technology officer at Cisco, with a focus on intelligent automation solutions. He’s also the founder of newScale, which was acquired by Cisco. Join Corey and Rodrigo as they discuss what it’s like to deliver cloud services to Fortune 2000 and government customers, why the word “legacy” isn’t always a bad thing, how the skills shortage is one of the biggest prohibitors to cloud adoption, what it’s like to deal with billion-line cloud bills, why we live in a multi-cloud world even though it might not be the best option, how Accenture has expertise in every cloud because they have to, how leveraging the public cloud means you get to enjoy its benefits but also have to manage the associated problems, and more.

Blake Stoddard is a senior site reliability engineer at Basecamp who’s tasked with running and maintaining Ruby on Rails applications running on-premises, in AWS ECS, and in Kubernetes. Previously, he served as the chief executive officer at Coursix, Inc., a company that built software solutions for schools. In 2018, Blake earned a bachelor’s in business management with a concentration in IT from North Carolina State University. Join Corey and Blake as they discuss the recent saga of Basecamp taking on Apple, Basecamp’s email platform HEY and Blake’s role in its development, tracking pixels and why they’re a terrible thing, how HEY solves the tracking pixel problem, how everything Basecamp designs is intended to last until the end of the internet, what Basecamp’s hybrid cloud environment looks like, why organizations shouldn’t simply move to the cloud to transfer CAPEX to OPEX, how Basecamp uses Kubernetes, and more.

Sachin Agarwal is the worldwide product management lead at IBM Aspera. He’s also an organizer at Empower Platform and the founder and CEO of Braid, a project management solution built inside Gmail, Google Calendar, and Slack. Previously, Sachin worked as a principal product manager at LaunchDarkly, vice president of product and operations at Nylas, and director of financials product management and strategy at Oracle, among other positions. Join Corey and Sachin as they discuss what it’s like to work at Aspera, the startup inside the larger IBM behemoth; the lessons learned from the recent IBM Cloud outage; why Sachin tends to leave companies every two years; what the Red Hat acquisition means for IBM and why Sachin believes IBM has done a great job of letting Red Hat be Red Hat; how IBM prides itself on client service and strives to take care of customers on an individual basis; how “legacy” is code for “it makes money;” and more.

Simon Elisha is the Head of Technology and Transformation for the Australia and New Zealand public sector at AWS. He’s also the host of the AWS Podcast and an advisor for Bugwolf, the curated marketplace for bug bounty hunters. Previously, Simon served as the CTO and director of field engineering for Australia and New Zealand at Pivotal, Inc., a principal solution architect at AWS, and a data center enterprise architect for Cisco, among other positions. Join Corey and Simon as they discuss why it’s different to sell services to the public sector versus the private sector, why Simon decided to launch the AWS Podcast, what the most rewarding thing about hosting the podcast is, how increasing concurrent EC2 instances can actually help lower total spend, how tagging is a critical tool in getting a handle on your AWS bill, how the cloud has lowered the barrier of entry to tech considerably, career advice from Simon for those starting out, how the word “resilient” doesn’t have the same definition as it used to, and more.

For the last eight years, Jaana Dogan has been building developer products at Google. Currently, she is a staff engineer and technical advisor working on Spanner, a relational database that’s globally scalable. Previously, Jaana worked as a software architect at Tart, a software engineer at Tikle, and a software engineer at Microsoft. She also founded Rootapi, a company that built rich editing tools for internet publishing companies. Join Corey and Jaana as they talk about Spanner and all things database, why Jaana believes that five nines is extreme for most businesses, the CAP theorem and what it actually means, the difference between Google’s internal Spanner product and the Cloud Spanner product you can buy with someone else’s credit card, how Google designs all of its major releases with scalability in mind, the role Jaana played in the Go community, what Jaana loves about working at Google, Jaana’s career advice, and more.

Jon Myer is a partner solutions architect for cloud management tools at AWS. Prior to joining AWS, Jon worked as a senior cloud solutions architect at NetEnrich AWS, an AWS consultant for DevOps and Solutions at MetroStar Systems, and an AWS course author at Linux Academy. A self-described evangelist for all things AWS, Jon holds a host of AWS certifications and blogs at TheAWSBlogger.com. Join Corey and Jon as they discuss what a partner solutions architect for cloud management tools does at AWS, the company’s top partners for cloud management, what it’s like to be part of the AWS team, what it’s like to work from home during the COVID-19 pandemic and how it compares to working from home during “normal times,” how working from home will become the new normal in the near future, why you can’t measure work-from-home productivity effectively during COVID-19, two new features Jon just realized Chime has and what he hopes to see added to the video meeting tool in the near future, why Jon launched his own AWS-focused blog, what AWS’ response to his blog has been, and more.