On-Call Nightmares Podcast

You get opportunities in tech to work with some of the best people in the world. I got that opportunity when I joined Microsoft, that's where I met the Exchange Goddess!

We discuss family, work and how it all comes together when you're on-call.

We also discuss the Microsoft Create Startups Event Phoummala will be taking part in, https://www.createstartups.io/

You can register now, for free!

Sr Cloud Advocate @ Microsoft, with a background focus on messaging and collaboration, virtualization, and storage. She is a VMware vExpert and co-hosts The Current Status Podcast. In her spare time she blogs for 24x7ITConnection, Exchangegoddess.com. Some her technical articles can also be found on Petri IT Knowledgebase, WeBreakTech.com, and The Register. Considered as one of the Top 50+ Tech Influencers and Thought Leaders You Should Follow , Phoummala aka Exchange Goddess can be followed as @exchangegoddess on Twitter.

Get your playbook and have the stats ready, we're talking with Andy Fleener of SportsEngine this week.

Andy is a Humanist, Systems Thinker, New View Safety Nerd, Sr. Platform Operations Manager at SportsEngine, DevOps Days MSP Co-Organizer.

Twitter: @andyfleener

Ever wonder what it was like to do dial-up support hosting in Hawaii? Well this is the damn episode you've waited for your whole life.

After 16 years working as a systems/network administrator in the Bay Area, Eric relocated to Portland in 2012 to further develop his passion for awesome configuration management tools. As Puppet's product manager, he worked on extending and improving it for modern infrastructure; his current project is Lyra, a cloud-native workflow engine. Outside of work he enjoys riding road bikes on the dirt and performing electronic music with Portland's techno collective Volt Divers.

https://www.facebook.com/VoltDivers/

https://puppet.com/

Twitter: @ahpook

The Conscientious Developer

There are great ways to think of how to attack the on-call situation even if you aren't in an on-call rotation. By being a conscientious developer and taking that extra interest in your software after deployment you're adding incredible valuable. Your co-workers may also really end up appreciating your time a little bit more as well.

Some people are born to on call, and some people have on call thrust up on them. Andrew Clay Shafer stole good ideas from wherever he could and started calling them all devops. Andrew tries to solve more problems than he causes but often fails. If devops ever caused you any problems, Andrew feels bad. If devops ever helped you with anything, he also apologizes.

Twitter: littleidea

Welcome back to OCN! I this time I chat with CEO of Raygun, JD Trask. One of the cool parts of this podcast is meeting people from all over the world who have had some experience on-call, JD does his thing in New Zealand!

John-Daniel is the CEO and co-founder of Raygun.com, an application monitoring company that helps teams identify hidden performance bottlenecks and software bugs. With over 25 years of experience in software development, JD is a programmer at heart with unique insights into scaling software businesses and software team leadership, and he has a deep understanding of building healthy software that gives great customer experiences. He is known to enjoy a glass of whiskey now and then.

https://raygun.com/

https://twitter.com/traskjd

Welcome back to another podcast about downtime! Once again we meet with another technologist who's building a new product and getting it out to the world. This time we meet Damian of Auth0 who's been working with his team to ensure identity services.

Damian is an Software Engineer that loves to solve hard problems of any type, especially those related to making software and teams scale. He is a Director of Engineering at Auth0 helping make identity simple for developers. Before Auth0, Damian spent many years working for and at Microsoft on Azure, Media and patterns & practices related initiatives. He spends his spare time with family, friends, exercising and catching up on all things NBA.

Twitter: @dschenkelman

auth0.com

Content Warning: This episode does contain some graphic description of the work done by an EMT - if you find this troubling you may want to check out another episode!

On this episode, I speak with the CTO and founder of VividCortex on his life down on the farm and as an EMT. Baron gives us some insight into how that prepared him for his time on-call in different roles to ensure databases are fast and reliable.

Baron is the CTO and founder of VividCortex, the best way to see what your production database servers are doing. Baron has written a lot of open source software, and several books including High Performance MySQL. He’s focused his career on learning and teaching about scalability, performance, and observability of systems generally (including the view that teams are systems and culture influences their performance), and databases specifically.

Twitter: @xaprb

Website: xaprb.com

On this edition, Sam shares with me some scary moments from his time at DigitalOcean. Sam tells the tale of a database table that was dropped.

https://blog.digitalocean.com/update-on-the-april-5th-2017-outage/

Sam Phippen is a Developer Advocate at Google, and previously an Engineering Manager at DigitalOcean. He's seen his fair share of deep, complex, incidents. He has strong opinions about incident management, postmortem culture, and on call practises. He's sad that he can't hug every cat.

Twitter: @samphippen

samphippen.com

In this episode, Jay and J. Paul Reed discuss the need for on-call practices and incident response in the world of software release engineering. Paul shares some great stories, including how the World Series can depend on a single line of code.

J. Paul Reed has over twenty years experience in the trenches as a build/release engineer, working with such companies as VMware, Mozilla, Postbox, Symantec, and Salesforce.

In 2012, he founded Release Engineering Approaches, a consultancy incorporating a host of tools and techniques to help organizations "Simply Ship. Every time." He's worked across a number of industries, from financial services to cloud-based infrastructure to health care, with teams ranging from 2 to 2,500 on everything from tooling, operational analysis and improvement, cultural transformation, and business value optimization.

He speaks internationally on release engineering, DevOps, operational complexity, and human factors and holds a Masters of Science candidate in Human Factors & Systems Safety at Lund University.

Infrastructure Week, Episode 2!

Charity and Jay sit down for a discussion on her career and a deep dive into a database incident. You'll get some interesting thoughts on how monitoring has changed in operations.

Charity is cofounder and CEO of Honeycomb.io, a startup aimed at debugging complex systems. (“It’s like strace for systems!”) Previously, Charity ran infrastructure at Parse and was an engineering manager at Facebook. She also worked with the RocksDB team to build and deploy the world’s first Mongo + Rocks in production. She likes single malt scotch.

https://honeycomb.io

https://twitter.com/mipsytipsy