What becomes very apparent when speaking with Rajashree Mandaogane, a software engineer for Rancher, is that she really enjoys coding and software development. While whether developers find their work “fun” or not is important and how much the fun factor counts for success is a subject of debate, Mandaogane does enjoy the work. She has also emerged as one of the key team members in Rancher’s development of its open source Kubernetes management and container orchestration platform. Evidence of Mandaogane’s passion for the job includes continually turning over different solutions for debugging or new features in her mind, even when she is at the gym or just opting to halfway work while watching a rerun of “Friends” at home.

As part of The New Stack Makers podcast series featuring developers and engineers who share their down-in-the-trenches stories during this renaissance era in computing, Mandaogane also described, among other things, how her love for programming evolved into a passion for first Docker and containers and then Kubernetes while still an undergraduate at North Carolina State University.