Insightful conversations. Less snark.

Regis Wilson is the founding engineer at Release, an environment as a service provider. Regis brings more than 25 years of tech experience to this position, having worked as an infrastructure architect and SRE at TrueCar, Inc. and a cloud systems architect at Live Nation, among several other positions. Oh yeah: He also used to be Corey’s boss. Join Corey and Regis as they talk about what it was like to have Corey as an employee, what Release does and what environments as a service means, how Regis likes working with the people he enjoys working with repeatedly, how the speed of provisioning resources has accelerated over the last decade, what it was like for Regis to switch jobs during a pandemic and why he decided to make the gamble, how at—at one point in his career—Corey’s core competency was getting fired, what Release’s monetization strategy is, how to spin up a Minecraft server for free, and more.

Tim Banks is a Principal Solutions Architect at Equinix Metal, providers of automated and interconnected bare metal solutions. Tim brings more than 20 years of experience to the role, having worked as technical account manager at Mission Cloud (an AWS Premier Consulting Partner), a technical account manager at AWS, a site reliability engineer at Elastic, a DevOps engineer at ObjectRocket, a senior database administrator at TEKsystems, and a LAMP systems architect at Charles Schwab, among other positions. Prior to launching a career in tech, Tim enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps as a musician before being reassigned to avionics. Join Corey and Tim as they talk about why Tim decided to make the leap to Equinix Metal, how you’re more likely to get a bigger raise by switching companies than pursuing the traditional promotion track, why Tim starts interviewing for new jobs on his one-year anniversary of any gig, how many corporations conduct a hazing of sorts during the interview process by asking candidates to perform ridiculous tasks they’d never perform if they got the job, why job titles are important, why Netflix doesn’t stream anything on AWS, why cloud costs are never predictable, and more.

Scott Piper is an AWS security consultant at Summit Route, a company he founded in 2017. He’s also the developer of flaws.cloud and an organizer for the virtual fwd:cloudsec conference. Scott brings 15 years of tech experience to his current position, having worked as director of security at a cybersecurity company, a security engineer at Yelp, and a software engineer at the NSA, among other positions. Join Corey and Scott as they talk about why Scott decided to start an AWS security consultancy, what it was like for Scott to quit his job only to find out the people he thought needed his services wanted him to work for free, how Scott came around to building CloudMapper and CloudTracker, what both of those tools do, why it’s important to define what kind of consultant you are going to be and find your niche, the psychological aspect of running your own business, and more.

Tabitha Sable is a systems security engineer at Datadog who moonlights as a Unix historian. Join Corey and Tabitha as they discuss what it was like to join Datadog right when the pandemic shut everything down, how Tabitha got experience with Unix workstations, what was going on in Murray Hill, New Jersey, in the early 1970s, whether operating systems matter any more or not, what happens when you type www.google.com into your browser and press enter, why job interviews are awful, how Tabitha conducts interviews, the power of referring people for jobs, why you should hire for strengths instead of absence of weakness, and more.

Scott Piper is an AWS security consultant at Summit Route, a company he founded in 2017. Scott Piper is an AWS security consultant at Summit Route, a company he founded in 2017. He’s also the developer of flaws.cloud and an organizer for the virtual fwd:cloudsec conference. Scott brings 15 years of tech experience to his current position, having worked as director of security at a cybersecurity company, a security engineer at Yelp, and a software engineer at the NSA, among other positions. Join Corey and Scott as they talk about how Scott created a game to help teach people AWS security; how Scott likely got a red flag thrown on his account indicating he’s a hassle to deal with; what fwd:cloudsec is, why it was named the way it was, and how it came about; some of the reasons why virtual conferences are better than in-person conferences; why in-person conferences likely aren’t coming back anytime soon; what Scott thinks AWS does well and what he thinks AWS does not do well; what Scott believes the best security boundary on AWS is; and more.

Hal Berenson is the founder of Gaia Platform, a platform that supports software development for autonomous machines. He’s also a board member of Auger AI. Hal brings more than 45 years of tech experience to these positions, having held a number of different positions over the years, including VP of Relational Database Services at AWS, a distinguished engineer and general manager at Microsoft, and the president of True Mountain Group, LLC, among other roles. He also ran a Colorado farm with his wife for five years. Join Corey and Hal as they talk about what Hal’s 45-year career in tech has been like, how new cloud features tend to be not fully baked when they’re initially released, how designing high-end features for enterprise customers hurts smaller shops, some moves Hal thinks stifled the growth of SQL Server, what Microsoft does to make sure it classifies employees and contractors correctly, what it was like being one of the oldest VPs at AWS, how Hal has “retired” three times and why he comes back, why Hal thinks some engineers get “stuck” at companies, and more.

Kat Cosgrove is a developer advocate at JFrog, makers of a robust platform designed to accelerate DevOps workflows. She’s also a legit cyborg, with an NFC chip implanted in her hand. Kat brings 15 years of experience to JFrog, having previously worked as a software engineer and lead teaching assistant at Code Fellows (where she also studied advanced software development in Python), a technical support coordinator at Online Holdings, LLC, and a business development professional at Remote Backup Systems, Inc., among other roles. She’s also the co-host of fsckdpod, a left tech podcast. Join Corey and Kat as they discuss what it’s like to have an NFC chip implanted in your hand and how Kat uses hers, what it was like to get the chip installed, how Kat weaseled her way into tech from a gig at a video rental store, how working as a bartender at a strip club has helped Kat’s developer advocacy, how Kat is the same on Twitter and in real life and how she’s different, what it’s like to gain 7,000 twitter followers in 36 hours and the tweet that did it for Kat, why both Corey and Kat are keen on the liberal use of the Twitter block button, and more.

Paul Osman is a lead instrumentation engineer at Honeycomb.io, an observability platform that helps engineers get a deeper understanding of their production environments. He brings more than 20 years of tech experience to the role, having worked as a senior engineering manager at Under Armour, a platform engineer manager at PagerDuty, director of platform engineering at 500px, a developer evangelist at SoundCloud, and a web development lead at Mozilla, among other positions. Join Corey and Paul as they discuss what exactly it is that a lead instrumentation engineer does, how Paul initially didn’t like serverless at first and why he does now, why Paul believes in using the least amount of technology when possible, why Corey thinks that setting your database to your local timezone is a terrible idea, how there is no such thing as best practices that work for everyone, Paul’s favorite programming languages, what Paul thinks the right tech stack is, how Paul approaches computing languages he’s not well-versed in, and more.

Brandon Shaw is a senior program manager in security operations at Discovery, Inc., an entertainment company that owns several premium cable brands, including Discovery Channel, HGTV, Food Network, and TLC. Previously, he worked as an applications manager at CRISP and a senior software applications engineer at CompuGroup Medical, among other positions. Brandon has a slew of certifications, including CISSP, CISM, CDPSE, CCSK, PMP, ITIL, and three from AWS. Join Corey and Brandon as they talk about their 26-year friendship and how their lives have diverged and converged over that time, what Corey was like as a kid, what it was like growing up in Maine and why Corey and Brandon are happy they left The Pine Tree State, how Stephen King’s writing is similar to living in Maine, what exactly it is that Brandon does at Discovery, how information security is always moving faster than we think, the journey that Brandon took to end up at Discovery, the CISSP and what you have to do to achieve it, and more.

Kylie Robison is a student at California State University, Sacramento where she studies business management information systems and expects to graduate in May 2021. She’s also a technology reporter at The State Hornet, the school’s newspaper. When she’s not studying textbooks or chasing down the next story, Kylie works in IT services at Covered California, the Golden State’s health insurance marketplace. Join Corey and Kylie as they talk about how computer science classes at universities have evolved over the last 20 years, how those in the legal profession might be most likely to cuss out people on the IT help desk, why Kylie is particularly interested in the intersection of infosec and empathy, why she doesn’t have any plants in her house at the moment, how infosec in general can seem like a toxic community, what it’s like to be a college student with 6,000 Twitter followers, what Kylie’s planning to do after school, and more.

Alex Hidalgo is a principal site reliability engineer at Nobl9, makers of a robust service level objective (SLO) platform for SREs. Prior to this role, Alex worked as a senior site reliability engineer at Squarespace and a senior site reliability engineer at Google. He’s also the author of the O’Reilly book Implementing Service Level Objectives, which was released in September 2020. In 2001, Alex restored a 1964.5 Mustang for money. Join Corey and Alex as they discuss the pros and cons of writing a book, what exactly a service-level objective is, the difference between a service-level objective and a service-level agreement, how implementing SLOs is all about finding the perfect balance of failure your users are willing to tolerate, how reliability for an SRE is defined by SLOs, what the moment was like when Alex realized he was going to write a book, how it’s difficult to bring up the fact that you’ve written a book in conversation, and more.

Danyel Fisher is a principal design researcher at Honeycomb.io, makers of observability tooling for engineering and DevOps teams. Prior to joining Honeycomb in May 2018, Danyel worked as a senior researcher at Microsoft for nearly 14 years, with a focus on data visualization. He holds a masters in computer science from UC Berkeley and a PhD in information and computer science from UC Irvine. Join Corey and Danyel as they talk about the different kinds of research, what the biggest misunderstanding about Danyel’s job is, how figuring out the root cause of an outage is like a murder mystery, how nobody really knows what digital transformation means, how it’s easy to find issues when you start an observability project but how starting such a project is the hardest part, what Honeycomb means by testing in production and why they encourage teams to do that, the difference between conducting research for a juggernaut like Microsoft and an agile startup like Honeycomb, and more.