Out to Lunch with Tech Leaders: Recent Episodes
RightBrain Networks
Listen on your lunch break to some of the best tech leaders in the Great Lakes region discuss anything and everything DevOps and tech related.
In this engaging episode of Lunch with Tech Leaders, host Travis Walker introduces a new interview format with guest Steven Ritchie, a seasoned tech professional and principal engineering software delivery coach. Steven takes us through his extensive background in software engineering and project management, sharing valuable insights and personal anecdotes. Throughout the episode, listeners will learn about effective strategies for software delivery, coaching, and enhancing team productivity. This episode is a must-listen for tech enthusiasts looking to refine their skills in leadership and project execution.
While the technical aspects of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) often take center stage, the human element is just as crucial. In this episode, we delve into the organizational and cultural nuances of adopting IaC. How do you train teams that are new to this paradigm? What challenges might they face during the onboarding process? And most importantly, how can companies create a culture that not only embraces but thrives on infrastructure automation?
Explore the roots of Agile, its evolution, and its profound impact on the software development industry. Travel back in time with experts Adam Oberhausen, Lance Carlson, and Tom Kowalski to understand the evolution of software development from the 1930s and 40s to the pivotal moment in 2001 when the Agile Manifesto was born.
In this continuation of his Serverless series, Jason Brown teams up with experts Preston Frazier and Tom Kowalski to unravel the deeper layers of analysis and visualization in AWS serverless logging. Dive in as they cover CloudWatch logs, shed light on potential pitfalls tied to CloudFormation stacks, and discuss how they approach Personal Identifiable Information (PII) in healthcare. Plus, tune in for insights on the latest AWS policy shifts around Lambda invocations and tools like Glue and Athena in shaping structured log analysis.
In this episode, Lance Carlson leads the dive into the transformative role of AI in programming joined by experts Henrik Kniberg and Adam Oberhausen. They discuss how tools like GitHub Copilot and ChatGPT can shape code readability, the importance of context, and the emergence of "prompt engineering.” Listen in as they cover the potential of AI to contribute to open-source, the need for understanding the "why" behind functions, the dangers of blindly following AI advice, and the exciting prospect of making programming more inclusive for non-programmers.
In this episode host Adam Oberhausen continues his series on Estimates & Productivity with tech experts Tom Kowalski & Nicole Anderson. What is "developer viscosity" - and is it really just about coding speed? How do distractions, in any setting, impact our work? And with paired programming showing potential, what hurdles still stand in the way? Join in as we explore these questions and more, emphasizing the need for continuous learning in the rapidly evolving tech space.
On Episode 58 of "Lunch with Tech Leaders," host Derek DeJonghe dives deep into the world of senior engineering with tech experts Tom Kowalski and Vagish Vela. Together, they unravel what it truly means to be a "senior" engineer, examining the blurred lines between job titles, skills, and capabilities. What is the impact of company culture on career progression and should titles be based on tenure or true qualifications? Tune in to hear their thoughts!
In this week’s episode host Adam Oberhausen challenges us to rethink our approach to estimating engineering projects. Joined by experts Tom Kowalski and Nicole Anderson, they unpack burning questions like why do backward engineering estimates often fail? And how do we set realistic expectations when it comes to creating estimates for yourself and your team? Nicole offers insights from her experience in product management, emphasizing transparency and constant stakeholder communication. Dive into this discussion and learn about the art, science, and guesswork behind project estimation.
In this episode, Jason Brown dives into the topic of event-driven serverless architecture with a panel of technology experts including Tom Kowalski, Preston Frazier, & David Meiser. The conversation kicks off with a brief overview of what event-driven architecture is and how it contrasts with traditional systems. They emphasize the asynchronous nature of event-driven models and highlight the efficiency of handling data and actions based on specific events. The discussion also touches on how Amazon's services like s3 integrate seamlessly into this architectural style. The conversation then delves deep into the healthcare sector, explaining how it naturally aligns with event-driven architecture. By the end, listeners gain insights into how this architecture optimizes data handling in healthcare and the potential for other industries.
In this episode, we delve into the innovative "Shape Up" methodology, a brainchild of Ryan Singer from the renowned software firm 37 signals, now known as Basecamp. We explore the genesis of Shape Up, its departure from traditional Agile and Scrum practices, and how it addresses many of Agile's pitfalls.
Jamie Begin, Founder & CEO of RightBrain Networks, discusses how AI can handle specific tasks, making them more efficient and accessible, but also raises concerns about the potential overreliance on AI tools among early-career professionals. Charles Fry, Founder & CEO of CODE Éxitos, and Gerry Miller, Founder & CEO of Cloudticity, share their insights on the evolving role of engineers and the need to focus on more innovative and valuable aspects of their work.
Tech leaders share their experiences, discussing the transition from manual infrastructure management to code-driven provisioning and the benefits it brings, including version control, increased visibility, and collaboration. Discover the role of IaC in enabling DevOps practices, ensuring compliance, and automating testing for reliable system delivery.
Industry experts explore the impact of insecure configurations and share best practices to mitigate security vulnerabilities. The conversation covers implementing the principle of least privilege, securely handling secrets and credentials, leveraging lambda layers for third-party libraries, and maintaining a stable and secure environment through consistent CI/CD practices.
The Great Lakes Tech Leaders community discusses the challenges of achieving observability in serverless architectures compared to traditional ones, the role of logging, monitoring, and distributed tracing, and the limitations and benefits of tools like AWS X-Ray. Listen to gain insights into how to achieve observability in serverless environments and explore the nuances of serverless monitoring.
Explore the benefits of using self-hosted runners on Kubernetes for deployment pipelines, such as private subnet communication, self-scaling, and self-destruction. Experts share their experiences migrating from CodePipeline and AWS CDK to GitHub actions and how it has improved their deployment processes.
This week, Great Lakes Tech Leaders' community experts discuss the open-source application AutoGPT, which uses the ChatGPT large language model to create recursive AI agents capable of autonomously solving goals and completing complex tasks. While it garnered attention and excitement, the tool currently faces limitations in its ability to stay on track and fulfill goals effectively. Listen to learn more about topics such as managing memory in large language models, token limitations, and strategies like embeddings and summarization to address context window constraints.
The Great Lakes Tech Leaders discuss serverless data stores in this episode, exploring their definitions, advantages, and real-world use cases. They highlight the cost-effectiveness, scalability, and flexibility of serverless data stores like DynamoDB and emphasize the importance of considering team expertise and workload patterns when choosing between serverless and traditional relational databases.
This week, we have Sanjay Padhi, Ph.D., former Head of AWS Research, as our guest. Sanjay shares some exciting stuff about using AI in personalized medicine and how it can improve diagnoses by integrating clinical and genomic data. We also discuss the challenges of data privacy, fairness, and ethics in AI.
Join us for the latest episode, where we dive into the fascinating world of AI and game development with Nathan Hanish, Lead Developer at Stardock. In this episode, we explore the incorporation of AI into game design, specifically focusing on the use of AI in creating civilizations in games like Gal Civ. We discuss emerging technologies for 3D and animated 2D, the impact of generative AI on game design, and the potential of AI to accelerate content creation and facilitate collaboration.
This week, we discuss the growing debate surrounding the regulation of AI. Our experts will delve into recent developments, including the proposed AI Bill of Rights from the White House and policy recommendations. We will also explore concerns about the potential dangers of AI and the need for regulatory measures to prevent bias and ensure accountability.
Discover the best serverless computing option for your next project. Find out how Lambda handles event-driven processing and low to moderate compute workloads while Fargate runs containerized workloads at scale, such as web applications, batch processing, and machine learning with specialized hardware or GPU resources. Learn about the unique advantages of each service and which one is ideal for your use case.
Experts from the Great Lakes Tech Leaders community discuss the latest innovations in sustainability and how technology can help reduce carbon emissions, promote renewable energy, and create a more sustainable future for all.
Great Lakes Tech Leaders Adam and Tom dive into the world of AI technologies and how they're currently impacting various business sectors, and process optimizations, especially when it comes to automation.
In this week's episode, the Great Lakes Tech Leaders community explores serverless computing architecture, its evolution over the years, benefits, challenges, and optimization techniques for building and maintaining large-scale serverless applications.
The technology industry's hiring and retention practices have entirely evolved since the introduction of remote work. In this week's episode, industry leaders examine the pros and cons of remote work and discuss their best practices for onboarding remotely, how they maintain company culture without an office, and what they expect for the future of remote work in engineering.
The Great Lakes Tech Leaders take a technical deep-dive into the newly launched AI-powered coding tool, GitHub Co-Pilot. The community discusses the technical capabilities of Co-Pilot, how it works, and the potential impact of this tool on the software engineering industry.
The GLTL community returns this week to discuss the visual workflow service - AWS Step Functions. Listen to learn what Step Functions are, how to know when you should be using them over Lambda, and how they can be used for automation, microservice orchestration, and data/ML pipeline creation.
The Great Lakes Tech Leaders discuss the learning curve of Kubernetes, key features and benefits, and some best practices for working with Kubernetes, including optimizing performance, troubleshooting issues, and ensuring reliability.
In this week's episode, the GLTL community dives into the world of feature flags, and explores how mastering this technique can help take your tech career to the next level and even conquer the world. GLTL's feature flag experts start off with a discussion on the different types of feature flags, why they are so useful, and how they can reduce development time, cost and risk. They explore different methods and strategies for managing feature flags in different types of projects, along with the pros and cons of each. Finally, the community wraps up with tips and tricks for getting the most out of feature flagging, from novice to veteran. Listen as industry leaders take a closer look at how feature flags can help you take your career to the stratosphere!
ChatGPT and the future of AI has been a hot topic for the Great Lakes Tech Leaders community. This week, the community's top AI experts discuss the transformer architecture foundation of ChatGPT, the importance of knowing how to interact with AI, and the ethical, legal, and security concerns of using ChatGPT in the tech industry.
This week the Great Lakes Tech Leaders community is here to discuss how you and your team can go from zero to tagging heroes by implementing a tagging schema with consistent values, enforcing tagging policies to ensure compliance, and utilizing automation to maintain consistency and security.
The Great Lakes Tech Leaders product management experts return this week to discuss who and what drives defining a product's goals and how to balance user feedback and quantitative data in order to validate those goals.
Why is the popularity of serverless growing? What does serverless really mean? The GLTL community answers these questions and more as they discuss how serverless technologies as a service changes the software development lifecycle, how it enables the DevOps philosophy, and how to optimize your observability and debugging capabilities while working in serverless.
The Great Lakes Tech Leaders community discusses variations of DevOps team topologies and how each model impacts and reflects an organization's maturity, customer focus, and culture.
This week, the Great Lakes Tech Leaders community turns to its SQA members to ask what their role is, how they got to where they are today, and where they work within their organizational structure.
The Great Lakes Tech Leaders community rounded up product manager members from Google News Apps, DaySmart, and Opendock to discuss how product management came to be, how they would define product management, how they manage getting caught between stakeholders and the end user, and what their day-to-day work looks like.
For episode 20, we are kicking off our SRE series with Great Lakes Tech Leaders Jordan DeBeer, Google, Tom Kowalski, AWS community builder, Kyle Robertson, Github, and Adam Oberhausen, RightBrain Networks, discuss how SREs came to be, what SLIs, SLAs, and SLOs are, and more!
In the cloud consulting realm, we're often asked, "Who should do the platform work?". The Great Lakes Tech Leaders discuss how to answer this question given several contextual factors such as non-negotiable standards, engineering, management, and platform team capabilities. The GLTL community also dives into DevOps implementation and execution.
This week, the Great Lakes Tech Leaders community has an epic CDK vs Terraform showdown as they discuss what's in store for Terraform, the evolution of IaC, and the rollback process.
This week, Great Lakes Tech Leaders Tom Kowalski, Kyle McAuliffe, Adam Oberhausen, and Travis Walker discuss strategies for optimizing hosting spend going beyond the more obvious ways to save money in AWS. The tech leaders touch on reserved instances, spot instances, compute savings plans, Trusted Advisor, cost alarms, and more.
Great Lakes Tech Leaders Jason Brown, Lance Carlson, Derek DeJonghe, Tom Kowalski, and Adam Oberhausen how to think like a software architect while maximizing customer value.
Jason Brown, Kyle McAuliffe, and William Valance lead this week's discussion on security suites. The Great Lakes Tech Leaders touch on building solid core components, AWS Trusted Advisor, control tower organizations, and more.
This week, Great Lakes Tech Leaders Derek DeJonghe, Adam Oberhausen, and Michael Girard lead a community-wide discussion on what characteristics and skills they look for when building the ideal engineering team and how to look out for them in the interview process.
Derek DeJonghe, Tom Kowalski, and Adam Oberhausen lead this week's discussion on consumption and contribution to open-source software. The Great Lakes Tech Leaders cover maintaining small tool repositories, CDK libraries, and how companies invest in maintaining open-source tools.
Great Lakes Tech Leaders Ray Welker, Philip Wortinger, and Morgan Worgess-Carveth discuss different third-party solutions they've used, the pros and cons of various solutions, and how they found the services were best utilized.
Suggested by tech leader Kyle McAuliffe, the Great Lakes Tech Leaders discuss the certifications they've found to be most relevant, and what resources were most helpful while they prepared for exam day.
Great Lakes Tech Leaders Derek DeJonghe, Thomas Knox, and William Vallance discuss the value of CloudWatch dashboards with its single pane view, and how to customize dashboards by configuring JSON documents.
There are a lot of factors to consider when it comes to building the ideal team. Tech leaders Kyle McAuliffe, William Valance, Ray Welker, Tom Kowalski, and Derek DeJonghe discuss how factors such as psychological safety, diversity, communication, and more contribute to overall team productivity and efficiency.
This week tech leaders Jason Brown, Tom Kowalski, and Philip Wortinger continue our centralized logging discussion series with application logs. As monolithic apps are phasing out and multitudes of smaller components across different environments are becoming more favored, centralized application logs are needed. Listen to learn how these Great Lakes tech leaders store their app logs and utilize the data to increase the application's performance.