Software Defined Interviews

Whitney Lee's career path has been all over the place, from artist, wedding photographer, waiter, and now world-renowned devrel in the cloud native world.

This episode kicks off the reboot of this podcast, Software Defined Interviews. Whitney and I (Coté) have been planning to start a podcast for a year or so now, and it's great to start. We'll be putting out interviews every two weeks with people from our community. I hope you enjoy it, and tell us what you think! Guest suggestions are, of course, welcome.

Relevant Material:

You can check out the unedited, video version of this interview as well.

At the end, you hear an AI generated version of two hosts discussing Whitney Lee. It's from Google NotebookML.

Here's the AI generated summary:

In this inaugural episode of our new podcast, Coté sits down with Whitney Lee to discuss her diverse career path, including her experiences as a waiter, musician, wedding photographer, and now a tech professional in developer advocacy and Kubernetes. They delve into Whitney’s thoughts on the corporate world’s culture of busyness and the bizarre aspects she’s encountered transitioning from hospitality to tech. Whitney shares her approach to efficiently managing interruptions, setting boundaries, and the concept of context-switching in work environments.

They also talk about the importance of continually learning and adapting, Whitney’s strategy for tackling new technical concepts, and how she integrates her curiosity into creating educational content. The conversation includes anecdotes from Whitney’s time as a wedding photographer, her initial steps into the tech world, and the significant differences in social dynamics between these fields.

Finally, Whitney offers insights about DevRel (Developer Relations), explaining common misconceptions and the real motivations behind effective advocacy. She also touches on her learning habits, the balance of work and creativity, and the importance of rest and mental space for idea generation.

Key Topics:

We discuss compensation, particularly how people in the IT department ("developers," etc.) are so disconnected from the actual business that compensating them based on business performance is near impossible. Not good if you're an IT person and like money.

There's other types of comp. then money, obviously, and those are fine too. In particular, we discuss participation in open source and more recognition. But, still: money is the best.

People in large organizations avoid improving for improving's sake. They're very rarely proactive in transforming. Instead, it seems that management in most large organizations only act, and change, when they fear competition and failure. "Everyone" knows this is a bad strategy, and yet "everyone" does it. Perhaps we should embrace that behavior, or at least be empathetic, and figure out how to work with it.

We discuss this problem and things to do in this episode.

Also, we find out why Coté always has bad breath.

Mood board:

We discuss outsourcing IT.

Journey Through the Business Bottleneck, part 1.

Join Rick and I as we try to find this elusive thing called "The Business." We lay out a theory we've been talking about: while IT has been improving or, at least, can improve, the business side of the house isn't showing up to do anything with CLOUD and AGILE and THE DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION.

Why's this the case? Do toothpaste people have this problem? Outsourcing - that's a treat! And so forth.

Hopefully next episode we'll discuss tactics to get people outside of IT interested.

Subscribe at https://misaligned.business

And, check out Coté's work in progress book on this topic: https://cote.io/bottleneck/

Large organization are desperate to become “tech companies.” They drool at these tech companies ability to grow and change quickly. Despite mastering agile over the past 20 years, IT as a whole is too slow and unreliable. “It’s the culture,” everyone says. Changing culture for a team of 10 people is easy - changing a department of 20,000 developers is another challenge entirely.

Based on case studies and interviews over the past five years, this talk describes how large organizations are getting over that challenge. First, the talk covers moving from a project to a product mindset and the associated practices. Second, it covers how DevOps and cloud platforms enable that product mindset. Third, it goes over how leadership and management change to support this new approach. Finally, the talk catalogs tactics, patterns, and organizational structures that large organizations are using to improve how they do software which leads to improving their business.

This talk is based on my book Monolithic Transformation (O’Reilly, Feb 2019).

You can download the slides if you like, and they pop-up as chapter art if your podcast app supports that.

Chris Aniszczyk is the CTO of the CNCF. We discuss how he got into open source, what it's like to work at Twitter and how he helped start the CNCF. Plus, Chris gives us an overview of the different kinds of CNCF projects and offers advice on how to get started with Kubernetes.

Special Guest: Chris Aniszczyk.

Matt and Brandon interview Adam Jacob the co-founder of Chef. We discuss Adam's career, what led him to start Chef and Chef's recent decision to open source 100% of its Software. Plus, Adam give us some tips on Dungeons & Dragons and transitioning from being a founder to an executive.

Follow Adam at @adamhjk

Check out the Software Defined Talk Podcast for the latest news in Enterprise Tech.

Special Guest: Adam Jacob.

Jeff Meyerson is the host of Software Engineering Daily. We talk about his career and what led him to start a daily tech podcast for software engineers. We also talk about current trends in cloud computing and Jeff recounts his career as professional poker player.

Special Guest: Jeff Meyerson.

Version control has changed a lot over the past 15 years: we’ve moved from a centralized to a distributed model at the basic level. But the practices people follow have changed and grown as new methodologies like DevOps and continuous delivery have relied on version control for operational stability and reliability. In this interview, Coté talks with Plastic SCM’s Pablo Santos to get the low-down and some tips on doing version control better. We also discuss Plastic SCM and how their approach to semantic merging and mergebot-driven automation addresses version control toil.

This episode is sponsored by Plastic SCM, that is, it’s a paid interview.

Special Guest: Pablo Santos.

Sponsored By:

• Plastic SCM: Plastic SCM is a version control to help teams focus on delivering work, one task at a time. Signup today for a 30-day free trial and get a sassy T-Shirt.