Real World DevOps

When I heard about a company doing observability on robots in the physical world, I was hooked--I had to know more! Thankfully, my guest this week, was all-too-happy to talk about what he and his team at Formant.io are doing, how it works, and the challenges they run into. Some stuff you can look forward to in this episode: the robot just got stuck in a puddle--how does it know? What considerations do you make for the safety of humans around the robot, so they don’t get up getting whacked by it? And, of course, a whole lot more.

A mentor is one of those things that everyone wants but no one seems to know how to get. My guest this episode is Aaron Sachs, who cares quite a bit about mentorship in the tech world and has quite a lot of advice on finding a mentor, being a good mentee (and mentor!), plus thoughts on what mentorship is and isn’t.

One of the most interesting conversations I’ve had was the day I learned about Andrew Rodgers using Graphite to monitor a million-dollar furnace in a manufacturing plant. Since then, he’s gone on to start a company that uses the same observability tooling you know and love (Influx, Kafka, Cassanda, Grafana, etc) to solve observability challenges in the physical world, such as tracking energy consumption in the hundreds of government buildings in Washington, D.C. If you’re at all interested in unique uses of software tooling, this episode is a fun one.

Many people view the relationships they have with their vendors, whether SaaS or service companies, somewhere along a line between disdain and indifference. But it doesn’t need to be that way. In fact, vendors can be a crucial component of your team and help make your company’s vision a reality--provided you know how to work with your vendors. My guest this week is an expert on this very thing, and he’s joined me to talk through it all.

Building communities is harder than it sounds, but they’re really nothing new. Humans have been forming communities since we’ve existed, so it’s only natural that technical communities are a thing, but they certainly have their unique challenges. How do you grow a technical community? How do you keep everyone happy and resolve arguments peacefully? How do you keep a community from stagnating? If you’re an organization trying to start a community around your product, how do you measure results? Mary Thengvall and I chat about her experiences with technical community growth and management on this week’s episode.

My guest this week is Kelly Shortridge, VP of Product Strategy at Capsule8, and we’re talking about infosec. We get into some interesting discussion: threat modeling, foundational security defense, why you’re totally screwed if a nation-state is after you (tip: they’re probably not), and why chaos engineering and ephemeral infrastructure is actually great for security. Also, we totally crap on security vendor FUD for a bit and how to choose security tools that actually work.

Monitoring and observability is something near-and-dear to my own heart, so this week’s episode is exciting: Christine Yen, Cofounder & CEO of Honeycomb, joins me to talk about observability, why dashboards aren’t as helpful as you think, and the value of being able to ask questions of your own application and infrastructure when you’re troubleshooting.

Probably the most common question I received when I told people I was writing a book about monitoring was, “Have you read James Turnbull’s book?” I’m putting that to rest with a delightful conversation with James Turnbull on a variety of topics, including which of his own books is his favorite, some not-so-subtle digs at Kubernetes, and why James thinks DevOps is dead.

We’re happy to have VM (Vicky) Brasseur join us to talk about open source and dispel a few myths. We talk about what it means to properly license your code -- it’s not difficult -- and what it means for businesses that use open source code in their projects. Of course, we’ll dive deep into some tips on building a community around your open source project and talk about some ways to help continue to sustain open source projects and culture.

Ryn Daniels joins me in this episode to talk about building resilient cultures, particularly in Engineering teams. Ryn’s knowledge comes to us through two different incidents they experienced at two different companies, how the response differed at each, and what both teach us about building safe, learning environments and a resilient culture.