The Rollback Café

Everyone is building with AI, but who do you talk to when you're stuck?

In this episode of the Rollback Cafe, Animesh Pathak talks with Tanisha Sharma, DevRel at Bolna and founder of Project Humans in the Loop, an AI community that runs events across India and beyond.Tanisha explains why she started the community. Many builders now turn to AI tools instead of other people, and she wanted a place to swap problems, demos and ideas face to face. She also covers:

• Why she left a dream job at Microsoft and ended up in AI DevRel
• What DevRel looks like at an early-stage startup versus a VC-backed company
• The voice AI myth that cheaper models always perform worse, and how configuration, guardrails and context change the result
• Women in tech, and what companies can do to improve onboarding
• Flying planes as a hobby, including the engine failure she faced as a trainee pilot
• The decision she'd roll back, and her advice for women just starting out in tech

In this episode, Tanisha Bansal explains what it takes to build reliable AI agents for enterprise: from LLM evaluation, cloud infrastructure, authentication, and monitoring to human oversight and cost control.

She also shares why a successful demo isn’t production-ready, how AI is changing hackathons and technical interviews, and how community, mentorship, and speaking helped shape her engineering career.

Connect with us:

Tanisha Bansal - https://www.instagram.com/grow.with.tanisha

Animesh Pathak - https://linkedin.com/in/sonichigo

Women in tech are still too often told they have to choose between engineering, community, and leadership - Haimantika proves you can build all three into one powerful career. She also opens up about the “silly” side projects that quietly became career accelerators - including a GitHub Roast app that went viral, a Gen Z translator, and an AI plank coach built to solve her own workout problem. Those experiments weren’t just for fun. They became the fastest way to learn new tools, understand how products really work, and create proof that she could go far beyond tutorials.

You'll discover why DevRel is not a step away from engineering, but often the place where engineering, product sense, content, and community all collide. Haimantika breaks down the three C’s of DevRel - core, content, and community - and explains why the future of the role is even more technical in the age of AI, not less. We also get into the reality of AI-era building: why shipping is easier than ever, but understanding systems, architecture, benchmarking, and production tradeoffs matters more than ever. She shares what companies and communities can do better for women in tech, from making events feel safer and more welcoming to actively bringing more women speakers, engineers, and builders into the room.

Haimantika is a developer advocate at DigitalOcean, formerly in DevRel at Appwrite and a software engineer at Microsoft. She is also the author of an ebook on DevRel for startups and brings a rare mix of technical depth, community perspective, and honest career reflection. Perfect for developers, aspiring DevRel professionals, women in tech, and anyone who wants a sharper view of where engineering is headed next.

In this episode of Rollback Café, Sylvian joins us to explore how AI is reshaping incident response and modern SRE practices.

From faster detection to smarter debugging, we unpack where AI is actually adding value-and where it still falls short in real-world production environments.

We discuss:

• how AI is being used in incident detection and response
• the role of prompting in debugging and investigation workflows
• opportunities and limitations of AI in high-pressure incidents
• how SRE teams can integrate AI without compromising reliability
• the evolving skillset required for engineers in AI-assisted operations

This conversation focuses on practical, experience-driven insights-not hype-around applying AI in reliability engineering.

Who this is for
SREs, DevOps engineers, platform teams, and engineering leaders working on incident management, reliability, and production systems.

Connect with us on LinkedIn:

• Sylvain Kalache: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sylvainkalache/
• Animesh Pathak: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sonichigo/

Subscribe for more conversations on DevOps, platform engineering, and real-world software delivery.

#SRE #IncidentResponse #AIEngineering #DevOps #PlatformEngineering #ReliabilityEngineering #TechPodcast #RollbackCafe

Uncover the hidden truth behind DevOps that nobody talks about. It's not just about tools or scripts, it's about culture, resilience, and scaling your entire system with confidence. If you think DevOps is only about CI/CD pipelines or monitoring metrics, think again. What is the real game-changer?

In this fiery episode, Pratik Parikh, a leading DevOps engineer and community influencer, shares raw stories from his journey—how a single outage during a late-night deployment transformed his perspective forever. He dives deep into why resilience isn’t just a technical metric but a reflection of your team’s culture. You’ll learn why scaling systems is more than just code it's about understanding infrastructure, security, and user experience on a whole new level.

Connect with :

Pratik - https://www.linkedin.com/in/parikh-pratik/

Animesh - https://sonichigo.com

In this episode of Rollback Café, we host Bryan Finster co-author of MinimumCD.org, seasoned Continuous Delivery practitioner, and enterprise transformation leader, for a grounded, experience-driven conversation on what truly matters in modern software delivery.

Moving beyond tools and process theater, Bryan shares practical insights on defining the minimum bar for Continuous Delivery, identifying “SAD DevOps” anti-patterns, and systematically reducing the friction that slows teams down. Drawing from real-world experiences across large-scale and constrained environments, this session focuses on outcomes that improve delivery safety, developer experience, and organizational trust without over-engineering or dogma.

Join the conversation and continue the conversation on LinkedIn:

• Bryan Finster: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bryan-finster/

• Animesh Pathak : https://www.linkedin.com/in/sonichigo/

This episode is ideal for engineering leaders, platform teams, and practitioners looking to reset their delivery practices with clarity, realism, and impact.

☕🎙️ Welcome to The Rollback Café! I’m Animesh, your host, and in this kickoff episode , I share why failed deployments often teach us more than the smooth ones. This podcast is all about rollbacks, lessons from code, and the human side of DevOps and developer life. Pull up a chair and join the conversation.

🌐 Website: https://sonichigo.com
🔗 LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/sonichigo
🐦 Twitter: https://twitter.com/@sonichigo1219