Insightful conversations. Less snark.

Prashanth Chandrasekar is the CEO of Stack Overflow who’s tasked with driving the company’s overall strategic direction and results. Prior to this role, Prashanth worked for Rackspace for seven years, rising to Senior VP & GM of the company’s cloud and infrastructure business. He’s also worked for Barclays Investment Bank, Zephyr Management LP, and Capgemini. Prashanth is a member of the board of trustees for the World Affairs Council of San Francisco and holds a B.S. in computer engineering from the University of Maine, a master’s in engineering and engineering management from Cornell, and a MBA from Harvard Business School. Join Corey and Prashanth as they discuss Prashanth’s tenure at Rackspace and how the company redefined itself in the competitive cloud era, how Stack Overflow has an incredible foundation of support that most companies dream of, how the company has helped developers around the world build the cloud, what Stack Overflow is focused on in 2020 and beyond, how the company is trying to make newcomers feel more welcome, how diversity and inclusion is a top priority for Stack Overflow and initiatives they’re working on in that arena, how Stack Overflow is a bona fide SaaS business, and more.

Bryan Liles is a senior staff engineer at VMware who leads the developer experience group, which focuses on improving Kubernetes productivity. Previously, Bryan worked as an engineer at Heptio, served as the director of Capital One’s cloud engineering team, worked as a cloud engineer at DigitalOcean, and was the CTO at Thunderbolt Labs, among other positions. Join Corey and Bryan as the explore what it’s like to be on the VMware engineering team, why Bryan spends a lot of his time conducting research, what Corey think the future of Kubernetes looks like and why Bryan agrees, why Twitter’s DM feature leaves much to be desired, what VMware is focusing on over the coming months and years, what Corey’s recipe for the best jokes looks like, how Bryan is focused on being “forever positive” and his advice for other people on taking control of their futures, how Bryan got fired from his first two jobs and what he learned from those experiences, and more.

Jill Rouleau is a senior software engineer at Red Hat Ansible who maintains AWS and other cloud modules. Prior to working on Ansible, they worked as an OpenStack engineer on TripleO, an OpenStack deployment project. Over the years, Jill also worked as a cloud reliability engineer at Canonical Ltd.; was the owner of Bespoke Software Solutions, a consultancy specializing in open source, cloud, and emerging technologies; and served as an operations engineer for Limelight Networks. Join Corey and Jill as they discuss what it’s like to be on the Ansible engineering team, what Jill thinks about various programming languages, including Python, YAML, and XML, how familiarity with languages can help accelerate open source adoption and contributions, what Jill does to encourage first-time open source contributors to stick around, how answering the what can I do to help? question can be tricky, what Ansible is doing to increase contributions in the future, Jill’s advice on what you can do to start a career in tech, why diversity in experience and backgrounds is critical for tech companies, and more.

Jeffery Smith is the director of production operations at Centro. Over the course of his 20-year career, Jeffery has held a number of technology roles. Prior to joining Centro, he worked at Grubhub as a site reliability engineer manager, a senior systems engineer, and a system admin. Before that, Jeffery also worked for Wolters Kluwer as a website support analyst and for Instant Technology as a Windows/Solaris administrator, among other positions. Join Corey and Jeffery as the discuss the inspiration behind Jeff’s book, Operational Anti-Patterns with DevOps Solutions, why Jeff believes that change management is one of the biggest anti-patterns that can be found across a lot of organizations, how automation can help optimize change management initiatives, why Corey thinks consultants are incapable of changing company cultures despite what many of them might say, why it’s impossible to learn from the fabled “perfect story,” why no one in an audience should ever leave a conference talk feeling crappy, what Jeff’s book-writing experience was like, and more.

Yulan Lin is a former developer advocate for Google’s Data Studio, a position she held for the two-plus years, and has since gone on to become a software engineer for Google Chrome. Prior to joining Google, Yulan worked as a software engineer for Valador Inc. at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. She also served as a registration analyst for the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship and was a self-employed musician for a bit, working as an accompanist, voice coach, and assistant choir conductor. Join Corey and Yulan as they discuss how Yulan went from studying chemistry and researching bioinformatics to becoming a developer advocate at Google and a self-described data nerd, how organizations tend to be good at collecting data but not always at making sense of it, why the definition of “big data” changes from one use case to the next, what Google’s Data Studio is and how it supports data visualization, what Yulan does in her developer advocacy role, how data visualizations change depending on the audience, some of the most egregious examples of misusing data visualizations, and more.

Hiro Nishimura is the founder of AWS Newbies, a company that helps newcomers to AWS learn the ropes. She’s also the CEO of 24 Villages, an edtech consulting company, and a technical course instructor at LinkedIn. Prior to these roles, Hiro worked as a system admin and a technical services engineer at Intersection Co., an IT support analyst at Citrin Cooperman, and an IT help desk engineer at CAC American Corporation. Join Corey and Hiro as they discuss the origin story of AWS Newbies, how it’s hard for any newcomer to get up to speed on AWS quickly, how starting a blog led Hiro to an opportunity to work with LinkedIn, why jargon and acronyms aren’t really that helpful for communicating with most people, how making content more accessible increases audience-wide engagement, why Corey thinks that explaining something to a novice can help you learn more than talking to an expert about the same topic, what made Hiro decide to go out on her own instead of joining a cloud education company, using Twitter to get business, how Hiro is overcoming health issues as an entrepreneur, and more.

Known as xssfox online, Michael is a developer from Australia who recently released Big Buck AWS, a tool that exploits code vulnerabilities to enable users to host up to 75 gigs of data in AWS for free. Join Corey and Michael as they discuss why Michael is a “code terrorist,” how to get 75 gigs of free storage in AWS with a tool called Big Buck AWS, how AWS might potentially shut this loophole down or why they might end up deciding to let it roll, what inspired Michael to even tinker with this idea in the first place, how Michael looks at each new AWS service and tries to push their limit, why Michael hopes nobody is actually using Big Buck AWS in production, ideas for other tools like this, and more.

Sandy Carter is VP of Partners and Programs at Amazon Web Services. In her spare time, she also serves as an adjunct professor at Carnegie Mellon University Silicon Valley, an advisory board member for the IoT Community, a strategic advisor for SmartVizX and Betagig, and Chairman of the Board for Girls in Tech, Inc. Prior to wearing this many hats at once, Sandy served as a General Manager and CMO at IBM, Chief Sales Officer & Evangelist at Lotus Software, and CEO at Silicon Blitz. Join Corey and Sandy as they discuss the journey that led Sandy from running AWS’ Windows operations to becoming VP of Public Sector Partners and Programs, how AWS’ customer-centricity drives the company forward, the day Michael Jordan and Stacey King combined to score 70 points, the secret sauce that leads to AWS products being adopted rapidly, how satisfying it is to help large companies migrate from legacy infrastructure to the “new world” of the cloud, why Sandy loves mentoring women in tech, the importance of diversity and inclusion and what it really means, and more.

Ben Sigelman is the CEO and co-founder of LightStep, makers of tools that deliver observability at scale for modern applications. Prior to that, he served as a mentor and advisor for Code for America and an advisor for Librato, Inc. He also worked at Google as a senior staff software engineer for more than nine years where he co-created Dapper. Join Corey and Ben as they discuss the journey that led Ben to co-founding LightStep, including what it was like to be “born” at Google and help build Dapper, what Ben believes the point of distributed tracing is, why Ben is not a fan of Facebook, what it was like building a social network for depressed introverts, why building enterprise software is more validating that building a social network, what it’s like being involved with the OpenTelemetry project, and more.

Farrah Campbell is the Ecosystems Director at Stackery, a software company that builds tools that support and accelerate the development and delivery of serverless applications. She also serves as the speaker liaison and runs business development for TechfestNW, a conference that brings business leaders, innovators, and entrepreneurs together to talk all things tech. Previously, Farrah worked in customer and people ops at Reflect Technologies and as director of operations at Chirpify. Join Corey and Farrah as they discuss career advice Farrah got from Kara Swisher, what an AWS Serverless Hero is and what it’s like to be one, what Corey’s done to earn the AWS Villain moniker, Farrah’s experience as a single mom raising two kids and the mindset that comes with it, what evangelizing for a new technology really means, how serverless is a mindset, an innovation strategy, and a paradigm shift, how to use Route 53 as a database, and more.

Tobi Knaup is the co-founder and CTO of D2iQ, an enterprise-grade cloud platform provider that helps customers build cloud-native applications. In his spare time, he doubles as continuity advisor at Y Combinator. Previously, Tobi worked as a tech lead at Airbnb, signing on as the fourth engineer and helping scale the company’s product to millions of users around the world. He also co-founded Knaup Multimedia, a company that built websites for small- and medium-sized businesses, when he was 15. Join Corey and Tobi as they discuss why Mesosphere rebranded as D2iQ and what that new name means; why the Kubernetes community deserves the credit for the widespread adoption of the container orchestration platform; how D2iQ helps customers build end-to-end data pipelines with tools like Kafka, Cassandra, and Spark; how D2iQ solves one industrial IoT use case with a mini edge cloud; how many people assume Kubernetes is all they need, why that’s a mistake, and what other tools they end up having to use; why Tobi thinks that multi-cloud is the future; what it was like for Tobi to grow up in Germany and hear about Silicon Valley; joining Airbnb as the company’s fourth engineer; and more.

Gene Kim is an author who writes about topics like DevOps and the digital age. His works include The Phoenix Project, The Unicorn Project, and The DevOps Handbook. Prior to picking up a pen, Gene served as CTO and founder of Tripwire, was the founder and director of research at IT Process Institute, and worked as an independent director of the Energy Sector Security Consortium in Portland, Oregon. He’s also the founder of the DevOps Enterprise Summit. Join Corey and Gene as they discuss what it was like to revisit the Parts Unlimited world for The Unicorn Project, where Corey stands on the should I stick around or should I leave the company spectrum, the Five Ideals, how Corey helped Gene zero in on his core audience for The Unicorn Project, what Gene admires about the DevOps Enterprise Summit community, the tremendous impact that Gene believes the DevOps community will have on the future, and more.