🎙️ Episode 26: Don’t Stop Believin’ – Mick Miller’s Journey from Circus Tent to Cloud Engineering
What does a life in the circus have to do with building enterprise cloud systems and leading high-performing engineering teams? A lot more than you’d think. In this unforgettable episode, we sit down with Mick Miller, Senior Product Manager at KeyBank, whose journey into tech started with typewriters, trampolines, and a relentless drive to adapt and lead.
Mick brings a rare mix of passion, grit, humility, and wisdom, sharing lessons from the frontlines of both life and technology. From the early days of mainframes to pioneering modern DevOps culture, Mick’s reflections on leadership, burnout, agile evolution, team dynamics, and the power of truly being human will inspire technologists at every level.
⚠️ Warning: You may leave this episode with renewed hope and a desire to play Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” at full volume.
🔑 Key Takeaways:
On Leadership: “The number one thing is making sure people can have their best ideas.”
On Burnout: “You can’t have great software without great ideas. And you can’t have great ideas if you’re constantly interrupted.”
On Inspiration: Real leadership means being in the trenches - not just managing, but coding, listening, and protecting your team from unnecessary noise.
On Transformation: Mick’s journey from circus rigging to modern cloud engineering is a case study in resilience, curiosity, and reinvention.
On Constraints & Creativity: “Constraints aren’t limits - they’re focal points for innovation.”
🙏 Thanks to our sponsors for supporting community-led conversations that matter:
🙌 Rackspace Technology – We advise, design, build, and manage solutions across multicloud, applications, data, and security.
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🙌 Sigma Computing – Business intelligence built for the cloud. Live, collaborative analytics for data-driven teams.