Sidero and Oxide Kubecon NA event registration: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/oxidesidero-at-kubecon-north-america-2025-tickets-1538869282449
Duffie has lived through a lot. From multiple startup exits to big company changes. He stays grounded by remembering where he came from and what's important—people. This episode is full of career and life advice from one of the kindest people in the industry.
Links
Unfortunately, we don't have links for most of the companies Duffie talks about because they've all been acquired. CoreOS, Heptio, and Isovalent are all either gone or part of bigger companies now.
Thankfully the Isovalent products are still going strong. Check them out at isovalent.com
David has worked on a lot of cool tech you know like Kubernetes and Kubeflow, and he's usually a few years ahead of the game. So getting to catch up with him about what he's working on now is probably something you'll want to know about before you have these problems. He has great insights in how to get companies to support open source and how Kubernetes has evolved over time.
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What is it like to ship software in big tech? Sean gives us his experience from multiple companies and what he’s learned. It's probably not what you think. It doesn't matter if you're vibe coding features or bash-ing devops, we all need to remember why we were hired.
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This Episode has a full spread of FAFOFM topics. Ellie has a breadth of knowledge across cloud, on-prem, hardware, and—of course—Kubernetes. We dive into some of the new hardware available as well as the importance of hardware to train the next generation of engineers. A full cycle of interests we think you'll love. 🧡
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Today's history lesson is about the non-markup language platform engineers love to hate, YAML Ain't Markup Language (YAML). Ingy tells us all about how and why it started, how it evolved over time, and what's happening next with YS.
Note: sorry about the audio issues in this episode. We did our best to clean it up.
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It's easy to talk about everything when you've been writing software for half a century. Bhaskar has some amazing insights from his impressive career building software using everything from punch cards to AI. If you like learning about the past to understand the future, this is an episode you don't want to miss.
Angie gives us a crash course on Model Context Protocol (MCP) and how you can get started using it with goose. We also talk about other projects Angie's worked on at Block and what drives her to keep learning new things in tech.
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After 25 years in tech it’s hard not to coast. Adriana has come from writing word docs for the ops team to deploy software, through Devops, and now has a focus on OTel and Kubernetes. How do we get more people from 100 to 400 levels and why is there no content in between? And why we need junior engineers to make our senior engineers better.
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Disaster recovery is more than automation and infrastructure. There's a lot that goes into your services and some of those things can't be defined as code or automated. When was the last time you restored your database from a backup? How do you use least privileged access when your region changes and how do you even know you're having a disaster. Seth has a lot of experience and a ton of good insights in this episode.
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Railway wanted to build a better cloud so they started on Google Cloud and ended up building datacenters. Through the burden of success, they figured out there was a lot of things they had to learn and build themselves if they wanted to offer the best cloud experience they could. Jake tells us how they accomplished the move in 9 months, why the built their own orchestrator, and what they’re working on next.
Check out Railway at https://railway.com/ and their blog at https://blog.railway.com. Specifically read the post discussed in this episode. https://blog.railway.com/p/data-center-build-part-one
You can't grow in technology without learning new things. But sometimes those new things are actually old things. We talk with Scott about a wide range of interests about software, video games, 3D printing, and food. If you want to know why junior engineers are important for your teams you need to listen.
Highlights
(0:00) What makes good engineers?
(12:00) Vibe coding
(19:00) Doom scrolling with intention
(24:00) Making vs buying
(26:00) Praising hard work
(30:00) Loss of empathy
Links
What exactly is an LLM doing and why do you need to learn so many new terms? Steve Pousty is here to explain that most of those new terms are things you already know. It’s not new technology, it’s new words to describe technologies applied in a new field. We have a wild, ADHD roller coaster looping through embeddings, vectors, RAG, and LLMs. Make sure to keep your hands and arms inside the pod for this one.
Chapters
(0:00) Intro
(9:00) Embeddings
(19:00) Graph DB vs Vector DB
(21:00) Vector Algebra
(36:00) Open Source
(41:00) Vector databases
(51:00) What is RAG?
(58:00) What is an LLM doing?
(1:08:00) Dating advice
Links
• 🦋Steve on Bluesky https://bsky.app/profile/thesteve0.bsky.social
• ▶️ Steve on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@thesteve0
• 📍Voxel 51 https://voxel51.com/
• 🎮 Vector algebra game https://neal.fun/infinite-craft/
• 📘The Alignment Problem https://www.amazon.com/Alignment-Problem-Machine-Learning-Values/dp/0393635821
• 🎥 Mitchells vs The Machines https://www.netflix.com/title/81399614
• 📀 MNIST dataset https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MNIST_database
• 📝 What ChatGPT is not https://blog.techravenconsulting.com/what-chatgpt-is-not/
• 📝 Why I am excited about ChatGPT https://blog.techravenconsulting.com/why-i-am-excited-about-chatgpt/
How Rachel Ray’s crawler lead to Ada developing a new performance testing framework, hyperscale. This leads to a great conversation about the benefits of rust, modern python package managers, and why MySpace went out of business. The importance of connecting what you’re building to business value and understanding every line of code has a cost.
Show Highlights
(0:00) Intro
(8:00) Rachel Ray crawler
(15:00) Performance testing
(20:00) Moving in to tech
(31:00) Hyperscale and uv
(39:00) Does memory safety matter?
(43:00) Datavant
(54:00) Connecting performance to business
(1:02:00) Spicy takes
Links Referenced
Sponsor FAFO at https://fafo.fm/sponsor
Is running Kafka on-prem different than running it in the cloud? You’ll find out from Elad Eldor’s years of experience running, tuning, and troubleshooting Kafka in production environments. Elad didn’t set out to learn Kafka, but he kept asking questions and was given the opportunity to dive deep into system performance. He not only knows what all the columns of iostat mean, he knows what his customers want. Make sure to subscribe to this topic on all your consumers.
Show Highlights
(0:00) Intro
(9:30) Why do people use Kafka
(15:00) Learning cloud vs on-prem
(18:30) Kafka vs Linux troubleshooting
(27:00) scaling clusters
(38:00) How to get started
Links Referenced
Sponsor
https://www.softwaredefinedtalk.com
Sponsor FAFO at https://fafo.fm/sponsor
Sam is back with us for a live episode where we discuss important questions such as “is coffee is good?”, “are people on the Internet good writers?”, and “is content creation consistency actually important?” We also share links about turning your hand writing into a font and hacking McDonald’s delivery app. Finally, we wrap up with a new game FAANG GANG.
Chapters
(0:00) Intro
(9:00) Codifying your handwriting
(10:30) I’m loving it
(27:00) Consistency in content
(39:00) FAANG gang game
Links Shared
Sponsor
VocalCat: https://fafo.fm/vocalcat
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This episode is stacked with information. You could even say “full stacked.” Sam has built and run some large scale systems as a SRE at Google, now building backend services at Budibase, and he spends his free time teaching others how systems work at understandable scale. We dive into what makes Google SRE different from other companies, what it’s like to be a parent, and how Sam got started with building animations for his blog. Don’t forget to visit and check out the easter eggs he’s hidden throughout.
Show Highlights
0:00 - Intro
2:00 - Sam’s background
6:00 - How Google did SRE
15:00 - Importance of docs
19:00 - The problems with Java
26:00 - Budibase
32:00 - Borg vs Kubernetes
39:00 - Building animations
46:00 - Being a better teacher
56:00 - Art in the age of AI
1:00:00 - What’s next
Links Referenced
Sponsor
The sponsor for this week is YOU!
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Bluesky has been on a roller coaster of growth for over a year. From the early days of figuring out a new distributed social protocol—AT protocol—to actually building it and inviting 30 million of their closest friends. Not only has the site gone through tremendous growth, the team has been optimizing, re-architecting, and adding features the entire time.
Jaz is a software engineer focused on the infrastructure at Bluesky, and they share how they achieved exponential growth without exponential costs. We cover some of the key components of the protocol and how that affects the architecture.
There’s some amazing advice from the trenches we know you’ll enjoy.
Show Highlights
(0:00) Intro
(5:00) Jaz’s background
(12:30) Bluesky Infrastructure
(17:00) Predicting the future
(20:00) What is a PDS?
(22:30) Relay and firehose
(26:00) Work queues
(30:00) Scaling physical servers
(37:00) How do you handle incidents?
(41:00) Where’s Kubernetes?
(43:30) How video changes
(45:00) Data locality
(46:30) Hardware decisions
(53:00) What bad decisions?
(57:00) Launching video
(1:00:00) What’s next?
About Jaz
Jaz is a software engineer who learned from on-the-job experience. They have a background with hardware which makes them better with software. If they’re not drinking Monster they’re building a single purpose database, or maybe they’re doing both. Jaz went from building with AT protocol to building AT protocol in a matter of months. They also have an impressive collection of plushies and power tools.
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Today we find out how building a product at Big Tech can be very different than a startup. Lauren Long has done both. Building parts of Firebase and eventually taking the things she learned to build Ampersand. We discuss what Ampersand is and go into detail about what the back end looks like. We even drop some hot takes about serverless and Kubernetes. We think you’ll love it!
Show Highlights
(0:00) Intro
(1:00) What is Ampersand?
(3:00) What is the backend?
(4:00) What is Lauren’s background
(6:00) How are people using it?
(10:00) How is Temporal used?
(14:00) How to keep APIs in check
(21:00) What did you learn?
(24:00) What has broken?
(26:00) Why use Kubernetes?
(32:00) What have customers done?
(38:00) What’s next?
About Lauren Long
Lauren Long is the CTO and co-founder of Ampersand, an API integration and workflow engine for enterprises to integrate their data with hundreds of applications. Lauren co-founded Ampersand after working at Google on their serverless products and saw a need for a different kind of integration for customers. She’s a developer with a great intuition on how to build reliable and scalable systems.
Sponsor the FAFO Podcast!
Fork it! We’ll do it live! Well, sort of...
In case you missed it last week, we’re running back our FAFO Livestream with Crystal Preston-Watson from this past Friday. Instead of prying into specifics about Crystal’s career, we’re chatting about recent tech news, the dire state of American tech literacy, and WTF WTA stands for!
You can expect shows like these on the last Friday of every month, and we hope to see you there!
Show Highlights
(0:00) Intro
(0:36) Tremolo sponsor read
(1:56) Welcome to FAFO Live!
(3:07) Is the AI Bubble bursting
(8:17) The vibes at the TikTok security party
(19:01) True Crime and Tech Literacy 101
(31:12) Tremolo sponsor read
(34:01) Crystal plays WTA- What’s the Acronym?
(50:06) What you can expect from more FAFO Live Shows
(51:39) Where you can get some FAFO swag and find more from the show
About Crystal Preston-Watson
Crystal is an accessibility engineer and analyst. She believes accessibility is a civic and human right, and she is passionate about building accessible and inclusive applications for everyone.
Links Referenced
Sponsor
Tremolo: http://fafo.fm/tremolo
Sponsor the FAFO Podcast!
If technology serves everybody, then everyone deserves access to a seat at the table. No one better embodies this sentiment than Crystal Preston-Watson. She’s a Senior Digital Accessibility Analyst with Salesforce, and she brings an unrivaled passion for making tech available for anyone to use.
On this episode of FAFO, we’re unpacking why her mission is so vital, and the previous career that made Crystal realize the disabled community needs a voice to advocate for them. Crystal goes into why it’s okay to turn personal struggles into triumphs for others, ARIA as a vital resource, and the issues with pushing GenAI tools onto accessibility tools.
You’ll also get to hear why Autumn loves Crystal’s presence on the internet, but especially Crystal’s blog (which is a great read if you love serious topics sprinkled with a good laugh).
Show Highlights
(0:00) Intro
(0:29) Tremolo sponsor read
(1:51) Introducing Crystal through the power of numeronym
(5:43) Crystal's journey to accessibility and software
(10:01) How Crystal’s background in tech led her directly to tech
(15:30) Using additional tools to help solve problems
(18:31) The power of lifting other people up through your own personal struggles
(21:53) The importance of the right to repair and accessibility in the disability community
(27:58) Rapid evolutions in accessibility, vulnerability, and security
(33:57) Tremolo sponsor read
(34:55) Changes Crystal has seen in accessibility
(39:04) Why ARIA is important to accessibility
(43:17) Can open source provide a voice for accessibility advocates?
(45:52) Audio accessibility tools and their many functions
(48:22) Who's better for accessibility: Apple or Android?
(51:42) GenAI's impact (or lack thereof) on accessibility
(57:33) Why Autumn loves Crystal's social media presence
(59:50) Where you can find more from Crystal
(1:01:04) Crystal's advice for making security more accessible
About Crystal Preston-Watson
Crystal is an accessibility engineer and analyst. She believes accessibility is a civic and human right, and she is passionate about building accessible and inclusive applications for everyone.
Links Referenced
Sponsor
Tremolo: http://fafo.fm/tremolo
Sponsor the FAFO Podcast!
