This week I chat with Silvia Botros also known as the @dbsmasher from Twitter. I learn about her experiences on-call for databases, motherhood and an affinity for breaking things. An awesome conversation with an incredible person.
Silvia Botros is a Sr Principal Engineer at Twilio. She focuses on ways to break databases but is also talented at finding bugs in all your software. Whether she helped build it or not. When she is not helping Twilio Sendgrid send billions of emails a day, she is busy training her little replicas on also breaking computers and trolling her friends on Twitter.
https://twitter.com/dbsmasher
https://twillio.com
https://blog.dbsmasher.com
One of the best parts of attending DOES 2019 in Las Vegas was meeting so many of the leaders and innovators from the world of DevOps. Damon Edwards's work is extremely well known in the DevOps field and I was lucky enough to discuss his history during this interview.
Damon Edwards is a Co-Founder of Rundeck Inc., the makers of Rundeck, the popular open source Operations Management Platform. Damon has spent over 15 years working with both the technology and business ends of IT Operations and is noted for being a leader in porting Lean and cutting-edge DevOps techniques to large-scale enterprise organizations. Damon is a frequent conference speaker and writer who focuses on DevOps, SRE, and Operations improvement topics. Damon is active in the international DevOps community, a co-host of the DevOps Cafe podcast, and a content chair for Gene Kim’s DevOps Enterprise Summit.
The number 42 has a huge meaning for baseball fans. Jackie Robinson wore 42, Mariano Rivera wore 42 and now one of the greatest in DevOps, John Willis wears the On-Call Nightmares podcast episode #42! Learn from John's past, his present and his future at Red Hat. We got together at the 2019 DevOps Enterprise Summit in Las Vegas to chat about all things DevOps and a lil Yankees baseball (not much). By far one of the most important episodes of the podcast yet.
John Willis has worked in the IT management industry for more than 35 years. Currently he is part of Red Hat's Global Transformation Office which will be focused on accelerating our customers digital visions while bringing holistic change across their technological AND social systems.
He was formerly Director of Ecosystem Development at Docker. Prior to Docker, Willis was the VP of Solutions for Socketplane (sold to Docker) and Enstratius (sold to Dell). Prior to to Socketplane and Enstratius, Willis was the VP of Training and Services at Opscode, where he formalized the training, evangelism, and professional services functions at the firm. Willis also founded Gulf Breeze Software, an award-winning IBM business partner, which specializes in deploying Tivoli technology for the enterprise. Willis has authored six IBM Redbooks on enterprise systems management and was the founder and chief architect at Chain Bridge Systems.
https://twitter.com/botchagalupe
Beyond the Phoenix Project - Audiobook https://itrevolution.com/book/beyond-phoenix-project-audiobook/
Maslach Burnout Inventory - https://www.mindgarden.com/117-maslach-burnout-inventory
On-Call Nightmares returns to talk to the man from Texas who represents Big Blue, JJ Asghar. JJ and I discuss his start as a 15-year-old in technology and how on-call has morphed over the years.
JJ works at IBM on the IBM cloud as a Developer Advocate. He’s focusing on the IBM Kubernetes Service trying to make companies and users have a successful on boarding to the Cloud Native ecosystem.
He lives and grew up in Austin, Texas. He enjoys a good strong stout, hoppy IPA, and some team building Artemis, madding Dwarf Fortress, Rimworld, or Factorio. He’s a member of the Church of Emacs, though jumps into Vim on remote machines. He usually chooses Ubuntu over CentOS, but secretly wants FreeBSD everywhere. He’s always trying to become a better Ruby developer, but experiments with Go, Python, and only when he has to, Node. A father and husband, if he’s not trying to automate his job away he’s always trying to convince his daughters to “be button makers not button pushers.
http://www.github.com/jjasghar
https://twitter.com/jjasghar
https://www.deliveryconf.com
A big milestone, episode 40! This week I speak with Netflix SRE Ryan Kitchen about birds, DR and movies!
Ryan Kitchens has been in a variety of positions in software over the past ten years allowing him to experience the good and the bad, the amazing and the bizarre. As an SRE with a film degree, he currently works at Netflix on the CORE team, focused on ensuring availability. The background of the team spans incident management and analysis, resilience engineering, and human factors & systems safety.
This week I speak with Dan Bentley of tilt.dev!
Dan is a software engineer who's currently fixing microservice development as CEO of Tilt ( https://tilt.dev ). Before that, he was at Google for 11 years and then Twitter, working on tools for devs and tools for non-developers. He's opened for The Who and has checks from Donald Knuth.
Transcript: https://aka.ms/AA64hk6
Live from DevOpsDays Portland, I speak with Gene Kim, Author of "The Phoenix Project" and the upcoming book "The Unicorn Project." When I started this podcast, one of my goals was to talk to Gene about his own experiences in IT, thankfully this trip to DevOpsDays in PDX helped that happen. Cameos by Jennifer Davis, Matty Stratton, Jason Yee and Terri Haber!
Gene Kim is a multiple award-winning CTO, researcher and author, and has been studying high-performing technology organizations since 1999. He was founder and CTO of Tripwire for 13 years. He has written five books, including “The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win”, “The DevOps Handbook”, “Accelerate” and the upcoming “The Unicorn Project”. Since 2014, he has been the organizer of the DevOps Enterprise Summit, studying the technology transformations of large, complex organizations.
https://twitter.com/RealGeneKim
Transcript - https://aka.ms/AA6107c
The Unicorn Project - https://itrevolution.com/book/the-unicorn-project/
DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas - https://events.itrevolution.com/us/
The On-Call Nightmares Listener feedback system works! Without your stories I just cannot do this podcast. Thankfully, Jason Schuster reached out to share his experience in a 20 year career in technology. Share in his nightmare on this latest episode!
Transcript: https://aka.ms/AA606at
Jason's Bio:
After graduating with a BFA in theater design in 2000 I landed my first job admiring HPUX servers. I took a low ball salary in exchange for training. While I got the training it took a long while for the scales to even out inheriting an outgoing sysadmins servers when I was less than a year on the job. My true passion for automating all the things came on an off site DR test watching 2 senior admins formatting disks one at a time and building a crazy number of volume groups and luns on them by hand. DR used to be a real interesting space that having so much stuff virtualized has mostly solved. After working on various .gov contracts and then supporting internal systems for 13 years I made the jump to devops at one small startup that folded out from under me but did start me on my way.
I joined Stratasan just after new years and am loving this place. We are big fans of making boring things boring and not adding unneeded tools to our lives. Mostly I have been extending the reach of our terraform while trying to cut down the number of services we use in AWS to just what is needed. I have also been highlighting metrics we are missing to help us making good planning choices.
https://twitter.com/devoprus
iamaunixadmin.com
Live from DevOpsDays Chicago! I meet up with Ops Veteran, Michael Stahnke as we discuss his career in technology. From the weird days of AIX systems all the way till his time now at CricleCI, Michael has plenty of great stories.
Special cameos by Jason Yee and Joshua Zimmerman (our laugh track).
Michael Stahnke is VP of Platform Engineering at CircleCI. Prior to this role, he was at Puppet running engineering for Puppet Enterprise, Puppet Open source, and SRE. He is an author for State of DevOps Report in 2018 and 2019. Michael also helped get the Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) repository off the ground in 2005, is the author of Pro OpenSSH (Apress, 2005), is an organizer of Devopsdays Madison. You can find reach him @stahnma on nearly any service online.
Transcript: https://aka.ms/AA5yha2
Getting paid is a pretty dang important part of your job. Mike Grayson and the team at Paychex are working to make sure that the databases that handle that are always online. This week I catch up with Mike Grayson who's been a great advocate for the database ops community.
Mike is a Senior Database Engineer specializing in DevOps, MongoDB, and Apache Kafka based out of Rochester, New York. He is a MongoDB Master and speaker in the Oracle, SQL Server and MongoDB communities.
Transcript: https://aka.ms/AA5wnuo
https://twitter.com/mikegray831
https://mongomikeblog.wordpress.com/blog/