ShipTalk: AI, DevOps & Software Delivery

In this episode of ShipTalk, we are joined by Chris Riley who is a Senior Developer Advocate at Splunk. Chris's background spans years of professional services and being an advocate. Chris is part of the Observability Panel at {unscripted} 2021 and gives us a background in O11Y, aka Observability. 

With any new technology, there is an internal need to advocate for change. Chris also talks about tips and tricks for those bringing in new technology how to advocate for change and to leave their mark on organizations.   

In this episode of ShipTalk, we are joined by James Bohrman who is the founder of Cloudspeakers. James had an interesting path to technology. James started his career
as an emergency dispatch technician for a security monitoring firm. From receiving calls about literal house fires to putting out metaphoric fires in production as a Site Reliability Engineer.   

Making the initial jump from a dispatcher to a DevOps Engineer then to an SRE, James created a blog detailing what he has learned along the way. The art of storytelling for James was a conduit for building his brand and getting into technology. James a neurodiverse individual chats about how perceived weakness can be used as a strength in the technology world.   

In this episode of ShipTalk, we are joined by Donovon Carter who is a DevOps Engineer at Dexcom, a medical device company. Dexcom is one of the firms leading the charge against diabetes with CGM, constant glucose monitoring technology. 

Donovon graduated from university with a political science degree, which comes in handy with all of the negotiations that a DevOps organization and engineer have to go through. Supporting the pipeline of innovation and regulatory requirements can be tricky.  Donovon walks through how to balance innovation and regulation. 

With any forward-thinking organization, wanting new technology is a constant.  Donovon also helps balance how you should think about keeping your skills sharp with and without adopting new technology. 

In this episode of ShipTalk, we are joined by Jim Shilts who is the founder and organizer of North American DevOps Group or NADOG and is a developer advocate at the cloud-native firm Shipa. 

Jim has been working on solving engineering efficiency problems for over 20 years working at firms such as Build Forge and Electric Cloud, pre-dating the inception of Hudson/Jenkins. As Jim walks through his experience and how complexity and bottlenecks have shifted around in the decades gone by and whats in store for the future. 

In this episode of ShipTalk, we are joined by Bart Farrell who leads the Data on Kubernetes Community. Bart certainly has not had a traditional path to technology with stops in theology and talent management. Bart has made two leaps, one into tech and one into a more bleeding edge/crypto part of technology, running stateful workloads on Kubernetes. 

Not being afraid of change and finding confidence in courage in incremental success is key. As an engineer, you might be looking at working with any new technology or a new paradigm/process. You don't have to give a talk in front of 50,000 people to start learning or even be an expert. Part of the human element is that a community can help you complete your story. Imposter syndrome plagues many in the engineering community, learn that you are not an imposter and more in this episode. 

In this episode of ShipTalk, we are joined by Tracy Miranda who is the Executive Director of the Continuous Delivery Foundation which is part of the Linux Foundation. Tracy has been leading open source communities prior to her time at the CDF at Cloudbees and has spent time on the governing board of the Eclipse Foundation. 

Tracy chats through her experience creating thriving open source communities and practices from inception to maturity. Open source projects especially at their inception run like a start-up. Learn in this episode how to build a sustainable, robust, and inclusive community and more from Tracy. 

In this episode of ShipTalk, we talk to Chris Jowett who is a DevOps Architect at ABC Fitness. Chris has significant system engineering experience and has worked on several operations teams in various organizations.  DevOps is the operational focus on development scaling e.g engineering efficiency. 

There is no one path for a DevOps engineer, learn from Chris as the evolution in operations teams occur how this translates to DevOps. For example number of services supported vs infrastructure support. Chris talks about modern approaches such as not ever patching a system. This and more on this episode! 

In this episode of ShipTalk, we are joined by Tracy Ragan who is the CEO of DeployHub. Tracy is no stranger to open source communities spending time with the Eclipse Foundation and Continuous Delivery Foundation [part of the Linux Foundation].  A software and open source community is more than just a place to get free software, the community aspect is crucial. Especially during the COVID pandemic, the human element is key to furthering the software engineering craft.  Tracy talks about her career and community journey and why it is important to find your tribe.  At a bonus at the end, a joint perplexity around the rise of YAML.

In this episode of ShipTalk, we are joined by Bob Chen who is a Director of DevOps at ADP.  Bob has been practicing and now leading DevOps organizations since the inception of the term DevOps.  Bob talks about the art and tact required to scale your team, technology, and to further the craft. The tips and advice can be used across any set of new technology paradigms. 

In this episode of ShipTalk, we have a great conversation with David Sudia who is a Senior DevOps Engineer at GoSpotCheck. Prior to being a DevOps Engineer, David was an educator then software engineer for a large eCommerce site.  Balancing long and short-term goals, sometimes moving a mountain takes time and sometimes incremental confidence can happen in a sprint. Learn from David in his vast experience how to move the DevOps needle in your organization forward.