John and Chris pause to reflect on some of the lessons learned from our hiring series from the perspective of the engineer. How should you invest in the portfolio that is your skillset? What personal habits can you cultivate that make you a more attractive hire? We have a fun, freeform conversation and these questions and more!

References:

• The Passionate Programmer https://www.amazon.com/Passionate-Programmer-Remarkable-Development-Pragmatic-ebook/dp/B00AYQNR5U
• 5am Club https://www.amazon.com/AM-Club-Morning-Elevate-Life/dp/1443456624
• Blinkist https://www.blinkist.com/

Matt Franz (@seclectech) joins POW for our second in a series of shows on hiring. Find out what you can learn by listening to a person that has experience reviewing thousands of resumes and conducting hundreds of interviews. Can we apply DevOps principles to a hiring pipeline? What does Matt mean when he says he looks for candidates who are TCP and not UDP? The answer to that question is well worth the price of admission!

We start our hiring series with cybersecurity executive, ISSA Board Director, and college professor Keyaan Williams. He provides great perspective on what matters most to him when hiring. Is there a skill shortage in cyber security? Keyaan parses that question by rightly considering different segments of the cybersecurity landscape. We also discuss methane gas clouds and chewing with your mouth open. Listen in to hear how he ties them back to hiring!

Aaron Sachs (@asachs01) from Sensu (@sensu) joins the show to talk over Customer Reliability Engineering. We talk about why/how it's different than Site Reliability Engineering. Great discussion not just on technical components but also why soft skills like empathy and humility are so important. 

• GCP Podcast first discussing CRE - https://www.gcppodcast.com/post/episode-72-customer-reliability-engineering-with-luke-stone/
• Interesting blog post from Heptio on the topic - https://blog.heptio.com/from-reactive-technical-support-to-proactive-reliability-engineering-4835be21b375
• Original GCP announcement on CRE - https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/introducing-a-new-era-of-customer-support-google-customer-reliability-engineering
• InfoQ DevOps Trends showing CRE in 'Innovators' column - https://www.infoq.com/articles/devops-cloud-trends-2019

Jeff Koors is back on the show, but this time on the defensive as we review a recent article that calls Agile nonsense! We uproot several Agile tenets including 'giving the customer what they want'.

(No scrum masters were harmed in the making of this podcast.)

References:

• Article discussed: https://link.medium.com/lZjO6ubGpU
• https://www.history.com/shows/the-cars-that-made-america
• Google Design Sprint: https://medium.com/productmanagement101/design-sprints-at-google-85ff62fed5f8

Jeff has a podcast now! Check it out: https://lnkd.in/eMFpxzj

John and Chis make the mistake again of recording on Friday night. As we discuss Michael DeHaan's latest thread on the state of Ops and Open Source we come face to face with the existential crisis in software engineering. As much as we tried we couldn't keep the show from veering off into philosophy and politics. 

Links

• DeHaan's thead - https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1091710068234641408.html
• xkcd comic - https://xkcd.com/2030

Continuous Delivery advocate Dana Finster joins the show for a fun interview on the state of CD in 2019. We also discuss how organizations can improve their build pipelines.  

Check out her presentation on Scaling Continuous Delivery at Walmart: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7achOwp70q8

Tim Gallo (@TimJGallo) joins us to discuss the state Endpoint Security in a cloud world. We cover questions such as is EDR necessary on cloud systems? How can operations engineers prepare their environments?

John and Chris reflect on the state of complexity and software engineering. From the minutia to big-picture philosophy, this is the show you get when you record on a Friday night after a long week!

John and Chris talk about sales in the career of an Operations person; why its important, why we are terrible at it, and what we can do to improve. John also levels-up on his cliches while Chris worries that spewing FUD is actually lying.