Insightful conversations. Less snark.

Alex DeBrie is the founder of DeBrie, LLC, a cloud-native training and AWS consulting company with a focus on DynamoDB and serverless technologies. He’s also the author of The DynamoDB Book, a 450-page tome that offers tips, strategies, and more about data modeling in DynamoDB. Prior to starting his own company, Alex was an engineer at Serverless Inc. and Hudl. Before that, he worked as an associate attorney for a law firm in Nebraska after earning his J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law. Join Corey and Alex as they discuss what got Alex so interested in DynamoDB in the first place, why Alex isn’t worried about AWS pricing, why you should view your cloud provider as a partner instead of an enemy, the many hats Alex wore at Serverless, Inc., why Dynamo is the database of choice for serverless applications, why auto-scaling doesn’t work quite as well with DynamoDB as it does for EC2, the most egregious uses of DynamoDB Alex has encountered to date, how Alex made the leap from law school to engineering and tech, the time Alex was the number two Django contributor on Stack Overflow over a six-month period even though he’d never done any real production, and more.

Stephen O’Grady is a cofounder of RedMonk, the open source industry analyst firm, and he works as a principal analyst there. Prior to joining RedMonk in November 2002, Stephen held several different analyst and consultant positions at companies like Illuminata, Blue Hammock, DiaLogos, and Keane, Inc. He’s also the author of two books: The New Kingmakers and The Software Paradox. Join Corey and Stephen as they talk about what RedMonk is and how it’s different from other analyst firms, why Stephen decided to write books that were about half as long as other similar books, how the prominence of the developer within the organization has shifted over the last few years, why having a lot of software solutions at your fingertips is both a good and a bad thing, what Stephen’s next book might look like, what it’s like to make predictions that go against what the big firms are saying, why listening is one of the most important skills in business, and more.

Sid Rao is the GM of Amazon Chime, AWS’ communications platform for voice and video calls. Prior to joining AWS, Sid worked at CTI Group, serving as the company’s CTO for a decade before joining its board of directors. Over the years, Sid’s worn many other hats, including working as a consultant for DaVinci Capital and a program manager at Microsoft. He was also the founder and vice president of R&D at I/O Medical Systems, makers of a device that could acquire multiple physiological indicators using a tablet device. Join Corey and Sid as they discuss the newly announced Amazon Chime and Slack and partnership and what it means for virtual meetings, where the optimal place to host a video meeting between a user in New York City and a user in Taiwan is, how chat becomes exceptionally difficult when you’re trying to scale to hundreds of thousands of users, how the Amazon Chime team responds to user feedback, how Amazon’s own usage of Chime doubled in recent months and Chime scaled without a hitch, why the Chime team focused on and perfected the app’s plumbing first and how it’s now shifting its attention to polishing the porcelain, why the Chime interface displays a region label, what Sid thinks the number one misunderstanding about Chime is, and more.

Jeff Sandquist is the corporate vice president of developer relations at Microsoft, a place he’s called home for more than 20 years of his career. Other positions he’s held there include senior director of developer product management, senior director of developer relations, and general manager of the cloud and enterprise group. In 2013, Jeff left Microsoft for an 18-month stint at Twitter, where he was the company’s global director of developer and platform relations. Join Corey and Jeff as they discuss what Jeff does at the helm of Microsoft’s developer relations group, how Microsoft defines “developer relations,” the critical role docs play in developer success, how Microsoft was able to seamlessly transition Build into a fully remote event during the COVID-19 pandemic, how successful documentation is more of a lifestyle than an initiative, how Microsoft writes docs before they write code, the one thing that makes Microsoft tick, and more.

Colin Percival is the founder of Tarsnap, a secure online backup service. He’s also an AWS community hero. For the last 16 years, Colin has contributed to the FreeBSD project, and he led efforts to bring FreeBSD to EC2. An alumnus of Simon Fraser University, Colin has a D.Phil. in computer science from the University of Oxford. Join Corey and Colin as they discuss what FreeBSD is, why Colin started using it in the first place, how Colin is responsible for getting FreeBSD working on EC2 in the early days, how FreeBSD’s generous open source license raises other issues, what’s changed about communicating with AWS over the last several years, how Colin’s company Tarsnap makes online backups for the “truly paranoid,” how Colin turned down a job offer from Google to start his own company, what Colin’s AWS architecture looks like, why Colin doesn’t care if Tarsnap never becomes a publicly traded company, and more.

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.