The New Stack Podcast

In this episode of The New Stack Makers, TC Currie is joined with industry veteran Larry Peterson, now CTO of the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) and Professor Emeritus at Princeton University.  Listeners might recognize his name as co-author of the seminal book Computer Networks: A Systems Approach, which is now open sourced, or as the Director of the PlanetLab Consortium.

TC caught up with Dr. Peterson at the recent Service Mesh Days in San Francisco where he was interested in learning how service meshes might be able to help solve the telco industry’s problems as they move, in a slow-as-molasses sort of way, toward microservices architecture.

The PlanetLab consortium combined with the ONF and network engineers are represented on the board by the CTOs of AT&T, Deutsche Telekom, and Comcast. Google is also on the board because it’s not just telco, but all network operators. All the ONF partners and their supply chains are are all interested re-organizing around a dis-aggregated solution, as they move to a more cloud-like architecture, said Peterson.

When we talk about accessibility on the Web, we often talk about can someone who is visually or dextrously impaired, but that's not the only bit of it. While meeting these legal accessibility requirements is important, we can't forget that the Web has systematically left groups of people behind, including the elderly, LGBTQ+, women, people still unconnected, and more — basically those that aren't the cis white men most commonly building and running the tech industry. In short, the most vulnerable people are kept from the potential of the Web.

This is what we talked about and more when The New Stack Makers podcast spoke to BBC Software Engineer Olu Niyi-Awosusi leading up to her talk at this year's Afrotech Fest.

First, the day job. Niyi-Awosusi's work at BBC — which aims to be the most accessible news website in the world — comes with two roles. She builds article webpages using React, and she is an accessibility champion. The latter is a voluntary but official role, probably unique to the BBC, tasked with keeping accessibility at the front of colleagues' minds.

Atticus Finch, the wise country father and country lawyer literary character, in Harper Lee’s classic “To Kill a Mockingbird”, communicated one of the more timeless and poignant descriptions of what empathy means. Understanding another person’s point of view or plight, especially when it is removed from yours, requires one to “climb in his skin and walk around in it,” he says.

Flash forward to today in this renaissance era in open stack development. While the act of understanding the “other” is critical in any context, empathy in the software development world is also especially important in a number of often surprisingly ways. Denise Yu, a senior software engineer at Pivotal, recently described in her The New Stack post “Why Empathy in Open Source Matters More Than You Think” just how broadly taking into account the wants and needs of others counts when dealing with colleagues, end-use software customers and people in general.

Yu writes “Even without the financial motivations, empathy is something that we as product builders should care about because it is the right thing to do.” In a podcast hosted by The New Stack’s Joab Jackson, managing editor, at Cloud Foundry Summit North America last week in Philadelphia, Yu was able to continue her discussion on empathy and why it is so important in the software development sector. Jai Schniepp, product owner for cloud and Security at Liberty Mutual Insurance, also offered more details based on in-house practices and processes on why thinking of the other is critical.

Those working in the developer and DevOps space have invariably heard of DevSecOps and, at the very least, know how it plays a critical role in the software delivery pipeline.

But every organization is different and the tools and mechanisms for software delivery very accordingly. And once you throw into the mix the hundreds of different CI/CD tools available today, as well as the challenges associated with more-modern platforms, such as container and microservices deployments, the challenges of security and DevSecOps become that much more dauting — and in many cases, confusing.

“A lot of people don’t really know what [DevSecOps] entails. Not so much that they don’t understand the concept — they get DevOps and they know how to implement it — but I think folks are still a little skittish about DevSecOps and how to implement it,” Sonya Koptyev, director of product marketing and evangelism for Twistlock, said.

InfluxData is a sponsor of The New Stack.

When Gianluca Arbezzano, now a site reliability engineer (SRE) for InfluxData, first approached Chris Churilo, director of product marketing, over two years ago, what an SRE was and did was a largely nebulous concept for him.”I was looking at myself more as a DevOps person, but I was never a systems administration,” Arbezzano said. “I always wrote code and automated [applications and deployments].”

Initially, when Arbezzano reached out to InfluxData, “he said he was a fan of InfluxDB and we just hit it off and I said ‘we’ve got to do something together,’ Churilo said. Arbezzano then grew into the role from there and has since been instrumental in helping InfluxData in a number of ways, including helping to automate InfluxCloud processes and making sure customer deployments remain on track.

In this latest episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, Arbezzano and Churilo discussed what is like to be an SRE today and how it all fits together in InfluxData’s quest to help customers improve observability and analytics and automation with its time series platform.

Pivotal’s Corey Innis’ job function, on paper at least, falls under the traditional category of software developer or engineer. Indeed, their “official” business title is staff software engineer at Pivotal. But instead, Innis says they have claimed another job title that is more reflective of what they actually do. Innis’ true title, they say, is “software craftsperson.”

“At really healthy software and information technology organizations, the work is really much more like that of a craftsman than it is as an engineer,” Innis said. “I’m also really interested in diversity in the workplace, including gender diversity, so I claimed ‘person’ instead of 'craftsman,' as in 'craftsperson.' So, that’s where that’s coming from.”

In this latest episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, Innis described how software development and culture have evolved over the course of his career that began in the pre-dot.com bust days of the 1990s. Over the past two decades, coding and software engineering have also certainly evolved into a new culture and mindset — much of which DevOps and agile development have fostered — that, at the end of the day, reflect a more craftsperson collective mindset.

Dieu Cao, director of product management at Pivotal Software, and the chair for the Cloud Foundry project management committee (PMC), says she was “at the right place at the right time” when her involvement with Cloud Foundry began.

She had been directly involved with Pivotal before it became a company when Greenplum had contracted with Pivotal Labs. “I like to say that project went so well, that we decided to buy Pivotal Labs,” Cao said.

After Pivotal became a separate company in 2013, Cao went on maternity leave in 2014. When she returned, Cao said her projects had changed. “I was looking for something to do,” Cao said. “Cloud Foundry was one of the projects that came into the Pivotal initiative. I’ve also been very product-oriented and I was in the right place at the right time.

Initially, she became the project manager for the runtime team — which has now exploded from one to about 20 teams. After serving as the Runtime PMC Lead in the Cloud Foundry, she recently became the Cloud Foundry PMC chair.

The Cloud Foundry Foundation has certainly changed during the past five years. Its evolution and exciting developments were the topic of a podcast hosted by The New Stack’s Joab Jackson, managing editor, at Cloud Foundry Summit North America last week in Philadelphia,

On this episode of The New Stack Makers, TC Currie is joined by Ramin Keene, CEO & Founder, Fuzzbox a brand new company that makes it safe to experiment in production.  She caught up with him at the LaunchDarkly Trajectory convention in Oakland, California where he ended his talk with the question “If it were completely safe to experiment in production, why wouldn’t you?”

Keene said he’s had to make a shift that is common across the industry where he used to be able to know his company’s entire stack and knew exactly what to do to fix it.  But with the growth and addition of complexity, he’s now about three levels removed from what the engineers are doing.

On this episode of The New Stack Makers, TC Currie is joined by Lee Byron, the developer of GraphQL at Facebook and now manager of the web engineering team at the investment app Robinhood.  He also is a founder of the GraphQL Foundation, a neutral place for the GraphQL community to support the expansion of GraphQL and surrounding ecosystems, whose launch last November was covered by The New Stack. 

Facebook’s mission when Byron joined in 2008 was to “map the social graph.” After that was complete, they moved on to new missions and GraphQL was developed in 2012 in response to the need to move Facebook onto mobile devices.  Facebook was originally designed on client-server architecture, and they clearly needed a native mobile data platform.

By 2015, the React open source community gained traction and held their first conference.  The expanding use in the open source community, said Byron, led to the necessity to rebuild GraphQL from the ground up.

APIs have certainly evolved beyond the first application programming interfaces (APIs) of the late 1960s to become the focal point of software development today.

But during the past three to four years, APIs have also evolved to become fully integrated with DevOps and front- and back-end development. Among the benefits APIs offer, well-developed APIs serve integral role allowing organizations to realize their business goals more efficiently and rapidly.And APIs continue to evolve, of course. Beerinder Rodey, senior product manager at TIBCO Software who works with the company’s Mashery API management product, discussed APIs’ recent developments with The New Stack’s Joab Jackson, managing editor, at the Cloud Foundry Summit North America in Philadelphia.

Four or five years ago, for example, API management was more focused on distribution, Rodey said. Then, developers often would say “‘I’ve got APIs and I just need to be able to get them out to my consumers. I want to maybe put them in some packages and make sure they’re discoverable and get some docks in front of them,’” Beerinder said. “[It was] mostly a distribution layer.”