Advertise on podcast: Break Things on Purpose

Today Jason chats with Mauricio Galdieri, a staff engineer at Pismo. Mauricio describes his journey to becoming a developer, and then talks about his role at Pismo. Jason and Mauricio talk about reliability and the reluctance of financial institutions to adopt new tech, and Mauricio delves into some of the work he’s done with Chaos Engineering. The conversation concludes with a discussion about maximizing success and new technologies Mauricio’s team has been utilizing at Pismo.

Today Jason chats with Aaron Clark, Director of Developer Advocacy at the Royal Bank of Canada. Aaron shares what it was like starting out as a developer at RBC and working in early cloud development, and then transitioning to his role as a developer advocate. Jason and Aaron talk about the value applying open source principles within organizations, or “innersource.” Their time ends with a discussion on continuing education and how to keep learning.

Today we chat with Cisco’s head of developer content, community, and events, Michael Chenetz. We discuss everything from KubeCon to kindness and Legos!

We’re joined by Dan Isla, VP of Product at itopia, to talk about everything from astronomical importance of reliability to time zones on Mars.

Natalie Conklin, tamer of chaos and Head of Engineering here at Gremlin, joins us to talk about embracing change, working alongside each other, and building more reliable systems. Natalie has a talk coming up at DevOpsDays Boise which she has titled “Embracing Change Fearlessly.” Her talk is oriented around enabling teams to take calculated risks and having the guts to take those risks. Natalie spent time working in India, which helped solidify her “fearlessly” philosophy. She provides examples of taking chances and how teams can orient around them together, the cultural changes that need to happen in chaos engineering, how to communicate across whole teams, dealing with “adolescent” engineers and more!

For this episode we’re continuing to “Build Things on Purpose” with JJ Tang, co-founder of Rootly, who joins us to talk about incident response, the tool he’s built, and his many lessons learned from incidents. Rootly is aiming to automate some of the more tedious work around incidents, and keeping that consistency. JJ chats about why he and his co-founder built Rootly, and the problems they’re trying to fix and eliminate when it comes to reliability. JJ reflects on what sets Rootly apart, how they handle chaos engineering, and more!

For this episode of “Build Things on Purpose” we are joined by Elizabeth Lawler, founder of AppLand, the creators of AppMap. Elizabeth is here to chat about the challenges of building modern, complex software and the tool that she has built that serves as a “Google maps for code” for developers. AppMap is designed to show in a more visually driven way to help clarify, in real time, writing code. Elizabeth breaks down AppMap, why she choose to build it, the way it helps whole teams understand an application, navigating the open-source space, and more ways to build!

Dad jokes lead the way in this episode as we interview Chris Martello, manager of application performance at Cengage. Chris is a wearer of many testing hats, but his passion is chaos and breaking things on purpose. Chaos was a natural fit for Chris with his background as a middle school science teacher, so when he made the jump to tech chaos engineering was a natural fit. Now at Cengage Chris is steeped in higher education, the result is a lot of seasonal fluxes that serve as great testing grounds for peak trafficking events. Tune in to hear the fruitful results of following the academic schedule!

Time for a cross over! Today Page it to the Limit host Mandi Walls, DevOps Advocate at PagerDuty joins Julie for a special two parter. They are interviewing Kolton Andrus, co-founder of Gremlin and Alex Solomon, co-founder of PagerDuty. Both of whom have known each other for a good while. Each of them share the origins of their respective companies, both of which began in their respective work at larger organizations. Kolton and Alex reflect on how they identified the space where they could build their respective companies and the shift from larger entities to start ups. Each of them offer up some excellent insight!

Being new in tech can be intimidating! Thankfully, folks like Carissa Morrow are shining examples of how to come into tech from the ground up. Carissa began with a career shift and just started coding, went through the Boise Codeworks bootcamp, and made the jump to tech. Carissa talks about the resilience it took in her early days, and how those experiences reinforced her attitude on continually learning. Carissa levels a focus on keeping things fresh to avoid the “organizational death spiral” that only a new set of eyes can bring to the table. Check out the conversation for more!

Reliability and serverless are at the forefront of today’s conversation. For this episode Gunnar Grosch, Senior Developer Advocate at AWS, is here to talk about Chaos Engineering, AWS Serverless, and the work that AWS is doing when it comes to reliability. Gunnar traces his history from AWS user to AWS Serverless Hero, to his current position where they are shaping “serverless as reliability.” Gunnar talks about his applications of Chaos Engineering to test how their different services work together, and he waxes on the outcomes.

For this round Julie and Jason are joined by Gremlin’s own Sam Rossoff, who works over here as a Principal Software Engineer. But his accolades extend well beyond Gremlin, Sam is also a grand Pokémon Champion. Sam, Julie and Jason geek out about Nintendo and Saturo Iwata’s legacy. Sam divulges some AWS in China anecdotes and some well earned lessons from his time working in that realm. Sam ponders on his time at Snapchat as well. The three carry on a wide ranging conversation, check out the episode for all the details!