Melanie and Mark celebrate their 150th episode this week with a high-energy interview of mutual friend, KF, at Strange Loop. KF gives her perspective on Strange Loop, working remotely, and distributed systems. She compliments Strange Loop for the diversity it has achieved as the conference has grown. She laments the lack of introductory material for distributed systems learners, saying it’s not as complicated as everyone thinks but needs more educational material for beginners! In general, she believes everyone could benefit from some code study, especially if you can find a good mentor. KF also gives us some great tips for working remotely and staying effective and social.

Katherine Fellows

KF is a senior engineer focusing on backend, infrastructure, and data engineering. She has worked remotely for companies at all stages of growth in San Francisco, New York City, Portland, and Philadelphia. Most recently, she’s been a Senior Software Engineer at Turbine Labs, developing tools that leverage a service mesh to make collaboration more effective for engineering teams. KF currently lives with her cat in Portland, OR.

Cool things of the week

• Introducing PyTorch across Google Cloud blog
• Is that a device driver, golf driver, or taxi driver? Building custom translation models with AutoML Translate blog
• A developer onramp to Kubernetes with GKE blog
• Network controls in GCP vs. on-premises: Not so different after all blog

Interview

• Strange Loop site
• Kubernetes site
• Docker site
• SRE site
• GCP Podcast Episode 102: Smart Parking and IoT Core with Brian Granatir podcast

Question of the week

How do I encrypt and decrypt data with Cloud KMS? Symmetric and Asymmetric

Where can you find us next?

Mark will definitely be at Kubecon in December. Mark streams on Twitch streaming.

Melanie will be at CAMLIS.

Get in touch!

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