This week, I bring a friend from a past job to share his insights on observability and other aspects of a weird life in technology. This is one of my favorite chats because Joe is one of my favorite people in tech.

"Customer-concerned Operations and Systems workers turned Cloud Native lab-rat at Packet, previously of DigitalOcean, IBM, Recurly, Platform9 Systems.

Approach to Production engineering relies on an iterative combination of programmatically-led audits, collaborative remediation, and mental health check-ins to ensure the observability scheme is serving the organization and its workers, and not leaving burnt out engineers at the on-call rotation's mercy. "

https://twitter.com/jmarhee
https://github.com/jmarhee
https://www.packet.com/

This week I speak with Jacquie of MedStack! We get insights into how her career started including a nightmare where she's thrown right into the fire.

Jacquie has worked in FinTech, media, and is currently in eHealth working at MedStack, a digital app platform for the healthcare industry. She's passionate about solving problems with a holistic approach, and bridging the gaps in communication and systems. Building something meaningful is important to her – from making healthcare accessible to creating a networking app for women in tech (winning team at ElleHacks 2018). She recently became one of Canada's Top 30 Under 30 Developers and was a speaker at DevOpsDays TO 2019! Toronto's tech community is getting stronger and Jacquie looks forward to continuing to collaborate with, and empower, those around her.

https://twitter.com/devopsjacquie
https://medstack.co/

Live from DevOpsDays Toronto, I meet up with my fellow DevRel road warrior, Quintessence Anx of Logz.io. Quintessence bring years of experience and compassion to her role. Quintessence is a champion for mindfulness around accessibility and diversity.

In her own words...

I’ve worked in the IT community for over 10 years, including as a database administrator and a DevOps / Cloud / Infrastructure engineer. I was a core contributor to Stark & Wayne’s SHIELD project, which adds backup functionality to Cloud Foundry, as well as a technical reviewer for Learning Go Programming published by Packt Publishing. Currently I am the US Developer Advocate for Logz.io, driving DevOps community engagement. Outside of work I am a chapter leader of Girl Develop It’s Buffalo chapter to help women in the Buffalo community launch careers in development.

https://twitter.com/QuintessenceAnx
https://twitter.com/inctechbuffalo

Live from ChefConf 2019, I talk with Nathen Harvey about outages, lunch and a life spent in technology.

This was one of my favorite podcast interviews because Nathen is one of my major influences and mentors in what we do in Developer Advocacy and Relations in technology. He's taught me so much over the years and has done his best to check in with me during the tough moments, like another member of the on-call team might do during a rough incident.

Nathen Harvey, Cloud Developer Advocate at Google, helps the community understand and apply DevOps and SRE practices in the cloud. Nathen is a co-host of the Food Fight Show, a podcast about Chef and DevOps, and is part of the DevOps Days conferences global organizing committee.

Nathen is part of the Google DevRel team and can be found at the following links:

https://twitter.com/nathenharvey
https://linkedin.com/in/nathen

This week we speak with Gremlin's Community Manager, Rich Burroughs, on his time on-call. We discuss power outages, active-active datacenters and other perspectives from a long career in technology.

Rich Burroughs is a Community Manager at Gremlin where he’s focused on growing and strengthening the Chaos Engineering community. He previously worked at Puppet as an SRE and in other operational roles over the years. Rich spent about twenty years of his career in oncall rotations, and is driven by his empathy for operators and engineers who manage production systems. His first PC ran Windows 95, but he set it up to dual boot Linux.

https://twitter.com/richburroughs
https://gremlin.com

Bonus! ME!!!

I spoke at Microsoft's community event "bits of //build" about overcoming failure. This is a culture talk I have been working on that really focuses on my personal road through failure and recovery. Thanks to all who sat in the room and took part.

https://twitter.com/jaydestro

This week I get a chance to speak to someone who just wants to save you some money on your cloud bills. Mike shares some great stories and gives insight to what he and Corey Quinn are working on at the Duckbill Group.

Mike is the CEO of The Duckbill Group, a consultancy helping companies fix the horrifying AWS bill by both lowering the size of it and helping them understand where the money is going. Mike also hosts the Real World DevOps Podcast, is the author of O’Reilly’s Practical Monitoring, and editor/analyst at Monitoring Weekly. He was previously an SRE/DevOps Engineer/system administrator for companies such as Taos Consulting, Peak Hosting, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and many more. Mike is originally from Knoxville, TN (Go Vols!) and currently resides in Portland, OR.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/mike_julian

https://www.duckbillgroup.com
https://monitoring.love
https://www.realworlddevops.com

Who wakes up the people who get woken up for on-call? The folks at PagerDuty are responsible for providing pager notifications to teams across the globe. In this interview I talk with Arup Chakrabarti who's dedicated to get you your alerts.

Arup has been working in the space of software operations since 2007. He started out at as an Operations Engineer at Amazon, helping to reduce customer defects with multiple teams for the Amazon Marketplace. Since then, he has managed and built operations teams at Amazon and Netflix to help improve availability and reliability. He currently works at PagerDuty, where he is part of the Infrastructure Engineering group.

twitter: https://twitter.com/arupchak
https://pagerduty.com

LET'S GET WEIRD. LET'S GET WEIRD. LET'S GET WEIRD.

This week we talk with Nick Maludy of Encore Technologies on some "weird on-prem" he managed when working as a Defense Contractor. Nick brings unique insight into having to manage critical systems from 10,000 feet above the ground.

After graduating Nick Maludy worked for ~5 years at a Department of Defense contractor called SilverBlock Systems. Here they developed an "integration platform" for performing sensor research for next-gen Navy aircrafts. Nick would routinely be traveling and flying in the aircraft for testing purposes. Several times a year the team were deployed to execute missions with our platform on the aircraft. Nick would fly on the plane and debug, troubleshoot, and implement new features on the fly.

Since leaving SilverBlock Nick has worked at Encore Technologies as the Manager of the DevOps Team and recently was promoted to Director of Engineering.

Twitter: @NickMaludy
Github = https://github.com/nmaludy
Encore's tech blog = https://encoretechnologies.github.io/

You know that little box on the lower bottom of the window you see that asks you if you need help on websites? Well Shayon is part of the team that keeps that online for businesses across the planet. We chat a bit about his time on-call and other topics.

Shayon is a System Engineer at Intercom. He is part of the internal infrastructure team that is responsible for Intercom's Availability, Performance, and Scalability. Outside of regular system/infra work, he has played other roles at Intercom, as an engineer on marketing team to doing product development as a Product Engineer. He takes a deep interest into operations and incident management, and attributes operations playing a major role in career growth.

Twitter: @shayonj