Shows
Kubernetes Podcast from GoogleKubernetes at LinkedIn, with Ahmet Alp Balkan and Ronak NathaniAhmet Alp Balkan and Ronak Nathani are software engineers at LinkedIn compute infrastructure team running the Kubernetes platform for LinkedIn and they joined us today to talk about how they run Kubernetes at scale and what they learned along the way. Do you have something cool to share? Some questions? Let us know: - web: kubernetespodcast.com - mail: kubernetespodcast@google.com - twitter: @kubernetespod - bluesky: @kubernetespodcast.com News of the week CubeFS was moved to the CNCF Graduated Maturity Level. 2025-03-2542 min
Software MisadventuresPodcast update and news!Some reflections on running the podcast and Ronak has some eggciting news to share :) Music: Vlad Gluschenko — Forest License: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en2024-10-0813 min
Software MisadventuresUncrating the Oxide Rack | Bryan Cantrill, Steve Tuck (Oxide)Oxide co-founders Bryan and Steve are back on the show to give an impromptu peek at the Oxide server rack and to chat about writing their own manufacturing software, overcoming false summits before shipping the first rack, the #1 reason startups fail and more. Don't miss the full-circle moment on their "meet cute" story from last time, shared at the end of the conversation :) Segments: (00:00:00) The Oxide rack uncrating experience (00:02:40) The office tour (00:04:03) Challenges of shipping and unboxing hardware (00:11:04) Hybrid hardware company? (00:13:38) Custom designing a crate f...2024-09-241h 26
mbanerjeepalmer+listennotes 's Listen LaterLLMs are like your weird, over-confident intern | Simon Willison (Datasette) Podcast: Software Misadventures (LS 29 · TOP 10% what is this?)Episode: LLMs are like your weird, over-confident intern | Simon Willison (Datasette)Pub date: 2024-09-10Get Podcast Transcript →powered by Listen411 - fast audio-to-text and summarizationKnown for co-creating Django and Datasette, as well as his thoughtful writing on LLMs, Simon Willison joins the show to chat about blogging as an accountability mechanism, how to build intuition with LLMs, building a startup with his partner on their honeymoon, and more. Segments: (00:00:00) The weird intern (00:01:50) The...2024-09-161h 55
Software MisadventuresLLMs are like your weird, over-confident intern | Simon Willison (Datasette)Known for co-creating Django and Datasette, as well as his thoughtful writing on LLMs, Simon Willison joins the show to chat about blogging as an accountability mechanism, how to build intuition with LLMs, building a startup with his partner on their honeymoon, and more. Segments: (00:00:00) The weird intern (00:01:50) The early days of LLMs (00:04:59) Blogging as an accountability mechanism (00:09:24) The low-pressure approach to blogging (00:11:47) GitHub issues as a system of records (00:16:15) Temporal documentation and design docs (00:18:19) GitHub issues for team collaboration 2024-09-101h 55
Software MisadventuresFrom "AI mid-life crisis" to the "time of my life" | Steve Yegge (Sourcegraph)A Silicon Valley veteran and known for his writings like "The Death of the Junior Developer", Steve Yegge joins the show to chat about his "AI Midlife Crisis", the unique writing process he employs, and building the future of coding assistants. Segments: (00:00:00) The AI Midlife Crisis (00:04:53) The power of rants (00:09:55) “You gotta be able to make yourself laugh” (00:11:46) Steve's writing process (00:14:10) “I published them… and nothing happened for six months” (00:17:30) Key to perseverance in writing? Get pissed. (00:23:24) Writing in one sitting (00:29:05) The AI Midlife Crisis (00:35:04) Management to IC...2024-08-271h 25
Software MisadventuresEarly Twitter's fail-whale wars | Dmitriy RyaboyA veteran of early Twitter's fail whale wars, Dmitriy joins the show to chat about the time when 70% of the Hadoop cluster got accidentally deleted, the financial reality of writing a book, and how to navigate acquisitions. Segments: (00:00:00) The Infamous Hadoop Outage (00:02:36) War Stories from Twitter's Early Days (00:04:47) The Fail Whale Era (00:06:48) The Hadoop Cluster Shutdown (00:12:20) “First Restore the Service Then Fix the Problem. Not the Other Way Around.” (00:14:10) War Rooms and Organic Decision-Making (00:16:16) The Importance of Communication in Incident Management (00:19:07) That Time When the Data Center Caught Fire2024-08-131h 08
Software MisadventuresDiscovering the power of story-telling in engineering | Adam Gordon Bell (CoRecursive)Known for hosting the CoRecursive podcast, which dives into the stories behind the code, Adam joins the show to chat about discovering that the great engineers he had looked up to are actually great communicators, his framework for building one of the best storytelling engineering podcasts, and the journey getting into DevRel. Chapters: (00:00:00) Highlights (00:04:23) The power of casual conversations (00:07:08) Taking the leap into podcasting (00:10:34) The hardest part of running a podcast (00:14:03) Learning to follow up (00:16:26) Storytelling in podcasting (00:20:36) The evolution of CoRecursive (00:21:19) What makes a good s...2024-08-061h 02
Software MisadventuresBehind designing Kubernetes' APIs | Brian Grant (Google)As the original architect and API design lead of Kubernetes, Brian joins the show to chat about why "APIs are forever", the keys to evangelizing impactful projects, and being an Uber Tech at Google, and more. Segments: (00:03:01) Internship with Mark Ewing (00:07:10) “Mark and Brian's Excellent Environment” manual (00:11:58) Poker on VT100 terminals (00:14:46) Grad school and research (00:17:23) The value of studying computer science (00:21:07) Intuition and learning (00:24:06) Reflecting on career patterns (00:26:37) Hypergrowth and learning at Transmeta (00:28:37) Debugging at the atomic level 2024-07-302h 10
Software MisadventuresDitching the rules to build a team that lasts | Bryan Cantrill, Steve Tuck (Oxide)From building a new kind of server to building a new kind of company, co-founders Bryan and Steve join the show to chat about their "meet cute" and the origin story of Oxide, their unconventional recruiting process, transparent and uniform salaries, and their solution to the "N+1 shithead problem". Segments: (00:03:03) Bryan and Steve's "meet cute" (00:05:56) "the sun does not shine on me" (00:12:19) the dagger that went into sun (00:21:23) culture of exonerating yourself vs solving customer problems (00:23:25) the shared "error in judgment" of joining joyent (00:27:54) the origin story of joyent (00:29:44) reporting...2024-07-232h 06
Software MisadventuresGrokking Synthetic Biology | Dmitriy Ryaboy (Twitter, Ginkgo Bioworks)From building a data platform and Parquet at Twitter to using AI to make biology easier to engineer at Ginkgo Bioworks, Dmitriy joins the show to chat about the early days of big data, the conversation that made him jump into SynBio, LLMs for proteins and more. Segments: (00:03:18) Data engineering roots (00:05:40) Early influences at Lawrence Berkeley Lab (00:09:46) Value of a "gentleman's education in computer science" (00:14:34) The end of junior software engineers (00:20:10) Deciding to go back to school (00:21:36) Early experiments with distributed systems (00:23:33) The early days of big data (00:29:16) "The thing w...2024-07-161h 08
Software MisadventuresGrowing and selling an indie business | Michael Lynch (TinyPilot)Having quit Google in 2018 to bootstrap indie software businesses, Michael is known for writing very transparently about the ups and downs of his journey. After recently selling his hardware business TinyPilot for $600K, Michael returns to the show to chat about the misconceptions about running an indie business, the hardest part of selling a company, and why “hardware is definitely out” for his next move 😂 Segments: (00:04:22) The complexity of selling a hardware business (00:08:49) Why "hardware is definitely out" for Michael's next venture (00:11:57) The evolution of TinyPilot (00:16:29) Inherent risks of a hardware business (00:20:53) The mos...2024-07-091h 40
Software MisadventuresBreaking distributed systems for fun and profit | Kyle Kingsbury (Jepsen)Well-known for his insightful and meticulous write-ups on testing distributed systems, Kyle (aka Aphyr) joins the show to chat about the origins of Jepsen, how he built a business around testing distributed systems, his writing process, favorite databases, and more. Segments: (00:03:29) From Physics to Software Engineering (00:07:47) The origins of Jepsen (00:09:41) Turning Jepsen into a full-time venture (00:13:14) Jepsen's testing philosophy (00:16:30) The consulting journey (00:19:16) Structuring a consultancy (00:22:32) Setting boundaries (00:24:32) Pricing misadventures (00:29:17) Pros and cons of being an independent consultant2024-07-021h 23
Software MisadventuresThe 3 traps of open source funding models | Wes McKinney (pandas, Voltron Data, Posit)From creating one of the Python’s most influential libraries to co-founding Voltron Data, Wes joins the show to chat about why the book cover of the pandas book doesn’t feature a panda, open source pitfalls to avoid, the pros and cons of hiring engineers at a non-profit, and more. Segments: (00:02:50) Guang’s complaint about the pandas book cover (00:04:38) Quarto and Open Access Publishing (00:12:00) Convincing Wall Street to Open Source (00:15:31) Publishing the first python package over Christmas (00:18:01) Doubling Down on Building pandas (00:23:23) Personal...2024-06-251h 08
Software MisadventuresImpact Driven Development | Matt Klein (Envoy, bitdrift)From creating Envoy to co-founding bitdrift to reimagine mobile observability, Matt joins the show to chat about being told to simply “write some proxy in Python” in the early days of building Envoy, early influences from building “shrink wrap” software at Microsoft, the process of spinning bitdrift out of Lyft, and much more. Segments: (00:03:10) Being a plumber on LinkedIn (00:05:00) Early influences from building “shrink wrap” software at Microsoft (00:10:44) Getting diverse work experiences (00:16:36) Setting high standards for the team (00:20:42) Lessons from failure of the first startup (00:22:02) Building a s...2024-06-181h 19
Software MisadventuresBuild the scary stuff | Bryan Cantrill (Oxide)From being a distinguished engineer at Sun Microsystems to co-founding Oxide Computer Company to build a new kind of server, Bryan joins the show to chat about being told that he’s on a suicide mission when starting Oxide, the moment he felt “I’m actually living HBO Silicon Valley”, and lessons from Sun. And much more. Chapters: (00:02:24) The Origin of Bryan's Nom-de-Guerre: "Colonel of Data Corruption" (00:04:02) What Debugging Performance Issues at Twitter in the Early Days Revealed About Silicon Valley (00:13:37) Value of Formal Education and the Experience That Everyone Should Have (0...2024-06-112h 19
Software MisadventuresLessons from the early days building Kafka and Confluent | Jay KrepsFrom writing the first lines of Kafka over a Christmas break as a LinkedIn engineer to running a public company as the CEO of Confluent, Jay joins the show to chat about how he and his co-founders convinced investors to take a chance on their vision, what many engineers get wrong about communication, and why engineers can make great CEOs - even when coding is not in the job description. And much more. Segments: (00:01:16) The Shaved Head Bet (00:04:07) Fundraising (00:12:16) The Role of Technical Background in VCs (00:15:48) The power of believing in the...2024-06-041h 16
Software MisadventuresBuilding 2 Iconic OSSs Back-to-Back | Maxime Beauchemin (Airflow, Preset)If you’ve worked on data problems, you probably have heard of Airflow and Superset, two powerful tools that have cemented their place in the data ecosystem. Building successful open-source software is no easy feat, and even fewer engineers have done this back to back. In part 2 of the conversation, we talk about Max’s journey in open source. Segments: (00:03:27) “Project-Community Fit” in Open Source (00:08:31) Fostering Relationships in Open Source (00:10:58) Dealing with Trolls (00:13:40) Attributes of Good Open Source Contributors (00:20:01) How to Get Started with Contributing (00:27:58) Origin Stories of Airflow and Superset (0...2024-05-2158 min
Software MisadventuresBecome a LLM-ready Engineer | Maxime Beauchemin (Airflow, Preset)If you’ve worked on data problems, you probably have heard of Airflow and Superset, two powerful tools that have cemented their place in the data ecosystem. Building successful open-source software is no easy feat, and even fewer engineers have done this back to back. In Part 1 of this conversation, we chat about how to adapt to the LLM-age as engineers. Segments: (00:01:59) The Rise and Fall of the Data Engineer (00:11:13) The Importance of Executive Skill in the Era of AI (00:13:53) Developing the first reflex to use AI (00:17:47) What are LLMs goo...2024-05-1441 min
Software MisadventuresLife as a Distinguished Engineer | Joakim Recht (Uber)Out of thousands of engineers at Uber, there’s only a handful of Distinguished Engineers and Joakim was one of them. In this conversation we chat about Why software engineering is a lot like a sausage factory. Considerations for leaving big tech for a startup. “How to beat the promo commitee”. How can one effectively shape engineering culture? “Mentoring two people on the same team is a waste”. Much More. Subscribe now Segments: [0:01:52] The “reverse sausage” architecture [0:07:36] How to get people on...2024-04-301h 15
Software MisadventuresLearning in public | Kelsey HightowerWe’re super excited to have Kelsey back on the show! Our last conversation was around his incredible career journey - from working at McDonald’s after school to starting his own computer store, to hacking on python infrastructure with the core developers, to meeting Satya Nadella for an interview. In part two of this conversation, we dive deep into Kelsey’s experiences learning in public and writing “Kubernetes: Up and Running”: The biggest barrier to getting started with learning in public and a step-by-step guide to overcome it Cautionary tale of the “JavaScript s...2024-04-1657 min
Software MisadventuresEngineer's guide to startup advising | Kelsey HightowerWe’re super excited to have Kelsey back on the show! Our last conversation was around his incredible career journey - from working at McDonald’s after school to starting his own computer store, to hacking on python infrastructure with the core developers, to meeting Satya Nadella for an interview. In part one of this conversation, we dive deep into Kelsey’s experiences and expertise as a startup advisor: How to break into advising when you don’t have a lot of connections How to influence without authority Passive vs. active advising...2024-04-0249 min
Software MisadventuresThe hard power of management and the soft power of senior ICs | Josh WillsAs a self-described “gainfully unemployed data person”, Josh Wills is an angel investor and has worked on and led data teams at Slack, Cloudera, WeaveGrid and Google. We discuss: How to get started with angel investing without a ton of $$ Attributes that define great engineering managers What’s it like transitioning from management back to IC Challenges in Climate Tech from a software perspective And more Segments: [0:01:35] Transitioning from management to individual contributor (IC). [0:10:19] Emotional intelligence and its role in engineering managem...2024-03-191h 18
Software MisadventuresFrom High School Suspension to US Chief Data Scientist | DJ PatilKnown for coining the term “Data Scientist”, DJ is a renowned technologist with a diverse background spanning academia, industry, and government. Having led product teams at companies like RelateIQ and LinkedIn, DJ was appointed by President Obama to be the first U.S. Chief Data Scientist where his efforts led to the establishment of nearly 40 Chief Data Officer roles across the Federal government, new health care programs as well as new criminal justice reforms. We discuss: “Dream in years, plan in months, evaluate in weeks, ship daily” High school misadventures that shaped DJ’s world view...2024-03-051h 05
Software MisadventuresBuilding Diverse Engineering Teams | Erica LockheimerErica is a former VP of Engineering at LinkedIn. Having almost dropped out of college, Erica’s journey in tech is a testament to her perseverance and dedication. In addition to leading engineering teams at LinkedIn, Erica founded WIT (Women In Tech) to empower women within the company as well as the broader tech community. We discuss: How to create incentives for diversity-building work. Building your personal “board of directors”. Balancing mentoring work vs sprint tickets. Structuring a community for long-term success. Much more. Segments: ...2024-02-201h 20
Software MisadventuresStories behind building HashiCorp | Mitchell HashimotoMitchell co-founded HashiCorp in 2012 and created many important infrastructure tools, such as Terraform, Vagrant, Packer, and Consul. In addition to being a prolific engineer, Mitchell grew HashiCorp into a multi-billion-dollar public company. We discuss: How to structure large projects to avoid demotivation or burnout The "A.P.P.L.E" framework for diffusing tense situations and handling trolls How to decide what to work on Mitchell's unconventional transitions from CEO to CTO and then back to an individual contributor (IC) The quality that Mitchell values the most in an...2024-01-301h 17
Software MisadventuresPractical Guide to More Effective Mentorship | Dave O'Connor (Google, Twilio, Elastic)After 17 years building SRE teams at Google and serving as the Site Lead for Engineering in Dublin, Dave joined Elastic as the Sr Director of Engineering and later VP of Engineering at Twilio. Following a recent career break, Dave now divides his time between coaching engineering leaders and consulting to help busy teams be more effective. In the heart of our conversation, Dave shares the frameworks and practical tips he's amassed for making the most of the mentorship experience. Segments: [00:01:45] Growing remote SRE team as the Google Dublin Site Lead [00:19:49] Company C...2024-01-161h 50
Software MisadventuresWar stories from early days of engineering at LinkedIn | David Henke (LinkedIn, Yahoo)At the personal request of Reid Hoffman to emerge from early retirement, David joined LinkedIn in 2009 during a period of rapid growth to help stabilize the chaos, cultivating a much-needed culture of “Site Up and Secure.” Before this, David served as SVP of Engineering and Operations at Yahoo!, overseeing their Search Marketing organization and the Production Operations infrastructure for the entire company. Throughout his career, David has held multiple leadership positions and is recognized as one of the top operations executives. David’s intensity, passion, courage and commitment to work have always been deeply admired by his colleagues and his wi...2024-01-0457 minSoftware MisadventuresAutomating away your job as a Data Scientist | Melissa Runfeldt (Salesforce, CueIn)Before joining CueIn last year as a Founding Data Scientist, Melissa was a Lead Data Scientist at Salesforce working on the Einstein Platform that focused on automating Data Science workflows. In this conversation we dive into Melissa’s unique journey, what to do in the face of increasing job automation and explore the latest developments in practical AI. Segments: [00:02:13] Melissa’s background in computational neuroscience [00:06:08] 7 years at Salesforce vs startup [00:11:31] Joining CueIn [00:19:30] Chatbot observability [00:28:16] Feedback loops [00:33:10] Use LLM to observe.. LLMs? [00:39:06] AI automating jobs...2023-12-121h 01Software MisadventuresOpen sourcing LinkedIn's Derived Data Platform | Felix GV (LinkedIn)What's it like to open source an internal project at a big tech company like LinkedIn? When should a company open source a project and what are the benefits and challenges that come along with it? If you want to open source an internal project, how should you go about advocating for it? Félix is a Principal Staff Engineer at LinkedIn where he works on the data infrastructure team that builds Venice. Venice is a distributed derived data store which LinkedIn open sourced in the fall of 2022. He joins the show to chat about h...2023-11-281h 01Software MisadventuresWhen enough was enough - practical and emotional drivers for leaving big tech to bootstrap Metacast | Arnab Deka & Ilya Bezdelev (AWS, Google)Should engineers and product managers “stay in their lanes”? What big company habits should you keep vs unlearn when transitioning to working at a start-up? Could an ayahuasca retreat give you more clarity on your career goals? Ilya and Arnab join the show to share their journey quitting big tech to bootstrap a podcasting startup. Arnab and Ilya are the co-founders of Metacast. Before starting the company, Arnab was a Principal Engineer at AWS while Ilya was a Sr. Product Manager at Google and Principal PM at Amazon before that. While at Amazon, Arnab and Ilya worked toge...2023-11-071h 17Software MisadventuresPete Warden - On launching "AI in a Box" and building a hardware edge AI company - #24What's "AI in a Box"? Pete Warden joins the show to share a new project he recently launched that encapulates Language Transcription/Translation and Question Answering capabilities into a wallet-sized board running locally without internet, as well as stories and learnings from building his new company, Useful Sensors, after 7 years of leading the tensorflow mobile project at Google. Pete is the CEO of Useful Sensors. After founding his own company Jetpac and selling it to Google in 2014, he became a staff research engineer at Google, where he led the TensorFlow Mobile team. Pete is also the author o...2023-10-2343 minSoftware MisadventuresNathan Marz - On changing the economics of building large-scale software with Rama - #23What does it mean to change the economics of software development? Nathan Marz joins the show to share how they reduced the cost of building Mastodon at Twitter-scale by 100X and the 10 years journey to build Rama, a new programming platform that made this feat possible. Nathan is the founder of Red Planet Labs. Prior to RPL, he led engineering for BackType which was acquired by Twitter in 2011. Nathan created the Apache Storm project and wrote the book Big Data: Principles and best practices of scalable realtime data systems. Outside of working, Nathan is a private pilot...2023-09-221h 32Software MisadventuresKelsey Hightower - On retiring as Distinguished Engineer from Google at 42 (Part 2)Kelsey Hightower was a Distinguished Engineer at Google, where he worked on Google Cloud Platform. In this second part of the conversation, we focus on Kelsey’s retirement - the financial planning that enabled him to retire at 42, how he got started advising startups and his perspectives on compensation, turning down a substantial offer from Microsoft and meeting Satya Nadella in person. And, of course, plans for the future.2023-08-031h 30Software MisadventuresKelsey Hightower - On retiring as Distinguished Engineer from Google at 42 (Part 1)Kelsey Hightower was a Distinguished Engineer at Google, where he worked on Google Cloud Platform. In this first part of the conversation, we delve into pivotal moments in Kelsey’s career journey ranging from buying his first car by working at mcdonald’s after school, to starting his own computer store that turned into a music studio after 6pm, to hacking on python infrastructure with the core developers. Through these stories, we learned a ton about how Kelsey thinks about acquiring new skills - getting paid for it, breaking into the world of open source, navigating corporate politics, building trus...2023-07-241h 05
Software MisadventuresJulie Amundson - Career breaks, job search amidst hiring freezes, positioning yourself and much more - #20 Julie Amundson is a Sr Staff Software Engineer at Google working on Machine Learning Infrastructure. Prior to Google, she was the Director of Machine Learning Infrastructure at Netflix. Julie decided to take a career break last year when she was affected by mass layoffs. In this conversation, we talk to her about what it was like to find a job during hiring freezes, what it was like to position herself in this market, whether the interviewers cared about the career break she took and how the career break changed her perspective towards work and life. 2023-06-2757 min
Metacast: Behind the scenes12. Podcasting Misadventures with Software Misadventures' Ronak Nathani and Guang YangIn this episode we sat down with hosts of the Software Misadventures podcast Ronak Nathani and Guang Yang to chat about podcasting, careers and remote work.
Full show notes with links: https://newsletter.metacastpodcast.com/p/012-podcasting-misadventures
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Email: hello@metacastpodcast.com
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Subscribe to our newsletter where we announce new episodes, publish key takeaways, and ramble about interesting stuff at https...2023-03-2956 min
Software MisadventuresChris Pruett - On deciding to leave LinkedIn and co-founding Jam, values based decision making and compassionate leadership - #19 Chris Pruett is the CTO and Co-founder of Jam - a new way to share and listen to bite-sized audio. Prior to Jam, Chris spent 9+ years at LinkedIn growing from an engineering manager to VP of Engineering. During his tenure at LinkedIn, he worked on almost all aspects of the app and towards the end, led an org of 500+ engineers working on Feed, Messaging, Identity and Search. In this episode, we discuss how he made the decision to leave his leadership position at LinkedIn and co-found Jam. We also spoke about his time at LinkedIn and how he developed the...2022-06-031h 19
Software MisadventuresSoftware Misadventures Update and Plans for 2022Short episode about reflections on the past year and plans for 2022.2022-03-2508 min
Software MisadventuresKailash Nadh - On being an absurdist and building the tech team at Zerodha, India's largest stock broker - #18 Kailash is the CTO at Zerodha, the largest stock broker in India. In this conversation, we speak with him about absurdism - a philosophy that guides his personal and professional worldview. We discuss how he built Zerodha’s tech team, their team culture and how the team operates so efficiently while being so lean. We also discuss why Zerodha self-hosts all of their tech stack, what they look for when hiring engineers and how their systems scaled when the user base grew from 2 to 8 million in 18 months. 2022-02-251h 38
Software MisadventuresMichael Lynch - On quitting google for indie hacking, bootstrapping to $450K+ ARR in public, writing personal retrospectives and more - #17Michael Lynch is the founder of TinyPilot. After doing software engineering at Microsoft and Google for 7 years, Michael decided in 2018 to quit and start working for himself by building small software businesses. From years of negative profit to now building a $450K+ ARR hardware business, Michael joins the show to chat about what made him quit his cushy job at Google, how he builds in public with monthly retrospectives, what he has learned over the 3 years indie hacking and much more.2022-01-141h 46
Software MisadventuresCory Watson - Leading observability teams at Twitter & Stripe, how to succeed in a new org, effective ways to advocate for your team and more - #16 Cory is currently a Solutions Engineer at Jeli.io and very well known in the community for his work on Observability. His career in observability began at Twitter where he managed the observability team and then he joined Stripe, where he created and led the observability team, this time around as a Principal Engineer. We talk to him about how he got his start in customer support and the role it played in the later part of his career. We discuss his time at Twitter where there was a power outage in the data center on the day he joined...2021-11-121h 24
Software MisadventuresAshwin Kumar - On learning new things by breaking them down, the secret to winning >$100k from hackathons, the art of storytelling, and much more - #15Ashwin is a Startup Partnership Lead at Stripe. From web development to co-founding a YC startup, to deep learning, Ashwin has a knack for picking up new skills extremely quickly. In this episode, we chat about the methods he employed to successfully make these transitions, learnings/tips from winning 30+ hackathons in a row, and what engineers can gain from better story-telling.2021-10-121h 14
Software MisadventuresBruno Connelly - Building and leading the global SRE org at LinkedIn - #14 Bruno Connelly is a VP of Engineering at LinkedIn. He leads the Site Engineering org responsible for LinkedIn's production infrastructure. He joins the show to talk about his journey in tech - from teaching himself how to code at a young age, building, maintaining and reverse engineering software as a teenager, building ISPs in the early part of his career (there are some fun stories that involve sleeping in the data center) to leading the SRE org at LinkedIn over the last decade. He talks about the early days at LinkedIn that involved a lot of firefighting to keep the...2021-09-121h 06
Software MisadventuresLorin Hochstein - On how Netflix learns from incidents, software as socio-technical systems, writing persuasively and more - #13With 5+ years of experience building resilient systems at the Netflix scale, Lorin joins the show to chat about his favorite incident story, the path that led him to doing chaos engineering (and later away from it), and advocating for a dedicated analyst to talk to people after an incident. Throughout the conversation, Lorin shares his philosophy and tips on how to learn from incidents, what engineers can gain from writing better, and why some metrics may not be as useful as you think.2021-08-141h 24
Software MisadventuresSpoons (Daniel Spoonhower) - On building Lightstep, being customer focused, developing systems at Google scale and much more - #12 Spoons is the Co-founder and Chief Architect of Lightstep. He joins the show to talk about building systems at Google scale and various aspects that make Google a weird place than other companies. We talked about Spoons's journey of leaving Google and deciding to join Lightstep as a co-founder. We dig into the challenges during the early days of Lightstep and discuss the importance of speaking to customers to build the right product. We talk about what it's like to start a family and run a startup and how one can be intentional about building a company’s culture. As al...2021-07-091h 14
Software MisadventuresEmmanuel Ameisen - On production ML at Stripe scale, leading 100+ ML projects, iterating fast, and much more - #11Having led 100+ ML projects at Insight and built ML systems at Stripe scale, Emmanuel joins the show to chat about how to build useful ML products and what happens next when the model is in production. Throughout the conversation, Manu shares stories and advice on topics like the common mistakes people make when starting a new ML project, what’s similar and different about the lifecycle of ML systems compared to traditional software, and writing a technical book.2021-06-111h 12
Software MisadventuresTodd Underwood - On learnings from running ML systems at Google for a decade, what it takes to be a ML SRE, challenges with generalized ML platforms and much more - #10Todd is a Sr Director of Engineering at Google where he leads Site Reliability Engineering teams for Machine Learning. Having recently presented on how ML breaks in production, by examining more than a decade of outage postmortems at Google, Todd joins the show to chat about why many ways that ML systems break in production have nothing to do with ML, what’s different about engineering reliable systems for ML, vs traditional software (and the many ways that they are similar), what he looks for when hiring ML SREs, and more.2021-05-071h 07Software MisadventuresEvan Estola - On recommendation systems going bad, hiring ML engineers, giving constructive feedback, filter bubbles and much more - #9Evan Estola (https://twitter.com/estola) is a Director of Engineering at Flatiron Health where he's leading software engineering teams focused on building Machine Learning products. Throughout this episode, Evan shares various stories when recommendation systems didn’t work as expected, like this one time when members saw mathematically worst recommendations for meetups near them. He also shares why Schenectady, NY pops up on some lists of most popular cities and the story behind the Wall Street Journal article titled 'Orbitz steers Mac users to pricier hotels'. We also discuss skills Evan looks for when hiring ML engineers, how to...2021-04-231h 12
Software MisadventuresUma Chingunde - On managing migrations, growing engineering teams and much more - #8Uma is a VP of Engineering at Render. In this episode, she shared with us her insights on how to successfully manage infrastructure migrations. We discussed the importance of communicating the "why" behind a migration, identifying success metrics, creating a culture where migrations are identified as highly impactful projects and much more. Uma also shared stories where parts of a migration didn’t go as planned, how the team fixed the issue and the kind of engineers she thinks would make good tech leads for these projects. We had a great time speaking with Uma! Our major fo...2021-04-091h 01
Software MisadventuresCharity Majors - On database outages, journey as a co-founder, thriving under pressure and growing as an engineer - #7 Charity Majors (https://twitter.com/mipsytipsy) is the co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb.io. Before this she worked at Facebook, Parse and Linden Lab on infrastructure and developer tools, and always seemed to wind up running the databases. She is the co-author of Database Reliability Engineering book and also has an amazing blog at charity.wtf. We love the content in her blogs and have learned a lot from them. We had a lot of fun speaking with Charity in this lively conversation! We learned about her journey from being an engineer to co-founding Honeycomb, what it was like...2021-03-201h 06
Software MisadventuresTammy Bryant Butow - On failure injection, chaos engineering, extreme sports and being curious - #6Tammy Bryant Butow is a Principal SRE at Gremlin where she works on Chaos Engineering. In this episode, we discuss how her curiosity led her to the world of infrastructure engineering, an outage from her early days where a core switch took down half the datacenter, her experience running a disaster recovery test and how it taught her about the importance of injecting failures into a system to make it more resilient. We also touch on advanced failure injection techniques, how chaos engineering is evolving and how extreme sports help Tammy keep calm under pressure. Lastly, Tammy has some...2021-03-071h 03
Software MisadventuresOliver Leaver-Smith - On how "just a monitoring change" took down the entire site and resilience engineering - #5 Oliver Leaver-Smith, better known as Ols, is a Senior Devops Engineer at Sky Betting and Gaming. In this episode, we discuss how a seemingly simple monitoring change ended up taking down the entire site. We also talk about chaos and resilience engineering. We discuss how the team at Sky Betting and Gaming conducts fire drills (chaos engineering exercises) where they not only test the resiliency of their software systems but also their people systems. We walk through a recent example of a fire drill, how they have evolved over the past few years and the lessons learned in the process. 2021-02-191h 01
Software MisadventuresRyan Underwood - On debugging the Linux kernel - #4Ryan Underwood is a Staff SRE and tech lead on the Helix and Zookeeper SRE team at LinkedIn. Prior to LinkedIn, he was an SRE at Machine Zone and Google. Apart from his regular responsibilities, Ryan’s interest and expertise include debugging production kernel, I/O and containerization issues. His opinion about not treating software as a black box and his persistent approach to debugging complex problems are truly inspiring. On several occasions, Ryan’s colleagues have leaned on him to solve an esoteric problem that everyone thought was insurmountable. Our main focus today is one s...2021-02-061h 02
Software MisadventuresDavid Henke - On building a culture of "Site Up" at LinkedIn and Yahoo! - #3David is LinkedIn’s former SVP of Engineering and Operations. He came out of retirement to join LinkedIn in 2009 during a time of rapid growth. After 4 years at LinkedIn, he retired in 2013. Throughout his career, David has been in multiple leadership positions and has been recognized as one of the best Operations Executives. This was an extremely fascinating conversation. David shares insightful stories from early days at LinkedIn and what it took to develop the culture of “Site Up and Secure”. He shares one of the most severe outages he has experienced in his career - this one was...2021-01-2358 min
Software MisadventuresJulia Evans - On kubernetes scheduler bugs, TCP performance regressions and debugging tips - #2In this episode, we speak with Julia Evans. Julia runs a programming zines business, called Wizard Zines (https://wizardzines.com/), where she creates comics about various programming concepts. She has been creating zines, when she was still a software engineer at Stripe. Her zines are extremely approachable and highly educational. In addition to creating zines, Julia is a prolific blogger and has around 500 posts on her blog at jvns.ca. Her blogs are another great source to learn about fundamental programming concepts. We had a lot of fun speaking with Julia for this episode. We discuss two b...2021-01-0646 minSoftware MisadventuresKelsey Hightower - On ways kubernetes can break, being an effective leader and much more - #1In this episode, we speak with Kelsey Hightower who is currently a Principal Developer Advocate at Google and one of the most influential individuals in the Kubernetes community. He is also an author and a keynote speaker, with a knack for demystifying complex topics, doing live demos and enabling others to succeed. In this insightful conversation, we cover wide ranging topics from his role at Google to the art of storytelling. We get into some very interesting details of how Kubernetes can break in production and practices that work for Kelsey in being an effective leader. Links: https://twitter.com/ke...2020-12-041h 01
Software MisadventuresIntroducing Software Misadventures Podcast - #0In this episode, Ronak, Austin and Guang share the origin story - who they are, what this podcast is about and why they are doing this. They've seen first hand how stressful it is when something breaks in production but also found it to be the best opportunity to learn about a system more deeply. They started this podcast to have in-depth conversations with software and devops experts and hear their stories from the trenches about how software breaks in production. In upcoming conversations, they discuss the principles and practical tips to build resilient software as...2020-11-2804 min