dot tech Podcast by Form3: Recent Episodes
Kevin Holditch
Our new .tech series invites guests inside and outside of Form3, discussing developing trends in the development community and shedding light on Form3's own engineering practices.
There are three main options available to run containers on GCP: cloud functions, cloud run and GKE (Kubernetes). Which is the right fit for your workload and what factors should you consider upon making the decision? JB Jean-Baptiste Leroy a customer engineer from GCP and expert on running containers on GCP takes us through the container landscape on GCP. JB informs us on how powerful the three technologies are and how you can mix and match them according to your needs.
Micro service architectures are exploding in popularity, but a tough problem that is often overlooked is to ensure all of the services that depend on each other still work together after a change is made. One solution is to deploy them all to a test environment and run end to end tests which results in very slow feedback cycle and keeps the testing far away from the engineer.Enter Pact, which solves this problem by enabling you to test dependencies between services as part of your local testing. Pact acts as a super charged mock server, enabling you to test your software functions consumes an API in the way the provider expects. Pact also gives you the ability to test that the provider of the pact (server in this case) is actually serving the API in the way that is it contracted. This end to end testing enables your microservices to change with confidence that everything will work together and it brings the feedback cycle very close to the engineer.In this episode Yousaf Nabi from Smart Bear talks us through how pact solves all of these problems and how you can also use it to solve other dependencies between software such as events when you have an event driven architecture.
A common requirement for a modern technology company is to have a DR strategy and to prove that their DR strategy works. Often this is executed using a manual set of tests run annually. This approach has many pitfalls, the biggest of which being that your tests become out of date the minute a change is made to the system.In this episode our host Kevin Holditch interviewed Viktor Peacock Head: SRE and Mike Tonks: Staff SRE on how Form3 have approached DR testing with their multi-cloud platform. Listen to the episode to find out from Viktor and Mike how Form3 have automated their DR tests, so they can run them nightly, to catch bad changes before they make it to production.
Tech leadership is often something that people find themselves in because they have excelled as an individual contributor, when people first make the leap it is often very hard for them to adjust to the different work patterns and how to manage a team.Sean Hawkridge from Makers, runs leadership programs that teach people how to be great tech leaders. In this episode Sean takes me through the common problems that people face when stepping into tech leadership, how people need to think about changing their mindset as they make the transition and if a good leader can be trained?
Spacelift is a platform that adds workflows on top of infrastructure as code tooling. One of its USPs is that it is agnostic to the underlying infrastructure as code tool, so it can be used with Terraform, CloudFormation, Pulomi, to name but a few.This concept becomes super powerful in that you can combine stacks written for different infrastructure as code tools into dependency workflows, for example the output of a cloud formation stack could feed into a stack written in Terraform.Jean-Marc Fontaine, head of solutions & support at Spacelift, takes us through some of the possibilities that Spacelift enables and the different angle of attack they have in terms of solving infrastructure as code pipelines.
Bert Sinnema, expert in defensive security engineering leads us through the hacking landscape today. He answers why hacking groups are starting to target smaller companies and tells us what smaller companies can do to fight back.Bert takes us behind the curtain, in the arms race between the two sides of the hacking war. In a world where the weapons used by both sides are constantly getting stronger, what can we do to stay safe?
Head of mobile from NewDay, Tris Bates, joined Kevin Holditch to give us the grand tour of the world of mobile development, there is a lot more to think about than initially meets the eye.What is the best way to develop an application for both iOS and Android? Can you use a single code base or is the only option to rewrite the whole application for both platforms? How do you test for all of the device combinations? What about users who use accessibility settings such 2x font? Tris expertly guides us through how the industry is approaching these challenges.We round up the show on how you go about keeping your application up to date. Is it possible just to push code out and live update your app or do you have to push all releases through the official app stores. Tris shares his vast industry experience on all of these topics and many more.
When using infrastructure as code tools such as terraform engineers typically run into issues such as execution times, difficulty managing environment promotion and detecting drift when their code base reaches a certain size.Terramate is a tool that is designed to work with your infrastructure as code tool such as Terraform, to work with you and solve those problems. It also comes with a cloud based observability platform that gives you a lens into what is happening across all of your infrastructure as code environments, even if you are using GitHub runners or Jenkins for execution.Soren takes us through how you can get started with terramate, what benefits it brings and how it can help you solve some of your infrastructure as code issues.
Lead platform SRE, Viktor Peacock takes us through what is SRE Engineering and why is it important to have an SRE function? Viktor then goes on to explain how you can use SLOs and error budgets to build your alerts and decide what a team should work on.
In this engaging episode of the Form3.tech Engineering Podcast, we explore the essentials of serverless computing with AWS Serverless Ambassador Bojan Zivic. Our guest sheds light on the types of workloads best suited for serverless environments and dispels common myths, especially concerning long-running tasks. The conversation also dives into the comparison between serverless and Kubernetes, discussing their respective efficiencies in cloud computing.A key focus is the security aspect of serverless computing, where our expert outlines the unique challenges and best practices. We also touch upon the practical use of serverless in Kubernetes environments, with a special emphasis on KNative applications. Additionally, the discussion references a relevant AWS article that highlights how Prime Video leverages EC2 and ECS for cost and efficiency gains. This episode is a must-listen for anyone interested in understanding the basics and nuances of serverless technology in a concise, easy-to-understand format.
Screenloop have built a set of products that leverage modern AI to give an indepth analysis of interviews. In this episode we dive under the covers into what advances in AI have made this possible and what technology Screenloop use out of the box vs what they chose to build themselves. The team at Screenloop go through the architecture of their platform and how the principle of keeping the architecture as simple as possible has lead them to their design.
Our .tech series invites guests inside and outside of Form3, discussing current trends in the engineering world alongside shedding light into some of the engineering practices here at Form3.
Get in touch with us via this short form if you'd like to be a podcast guest.
Patrycja Wegrzynowicz is Lead SRE Engineer at Form3. She works on reliability and performance of UK payments. She has a wealth of experience, having been a professional software engineer for over 20 years. Her main area of expertise lies in Java, C++, security and performance tuning. Patrycja will be speaking about securing Kubernetes at Code Europe, European Women in Tech, KCD Munich, GopherCon UK, JavaZone, Porto Tech Hub, JAX London and DevOpsCon.
Artur Kondas is Lead Engineer at Form3. He has a music background and is a self taught engineer, specialising in the Go programming language. Artur will be speaking about scaling & securing microservices at DevBcn, GopherCon UK and ContainerDays.
Marcin Niemiec is Cloud Security Engineer at Form3. He is part of the defensive team, keep our team and our platform safe and to the highest security standards. Marcin will be speaking about how to mitigate SSRF vulnerabilities in Go at BSides Ljubljana and BSides Athens.
Our .tech series invites guests inside and outside of Form3, discussing current trends in the engineering world alongside shedding light into some of the engineering practices here at Form3.
Get in touch with us via this short form if you'd like to be a podcast guest.
Byron Ruth is Director of Developer Relations at Synadia, who are the maintainers of NATS.io. Byron is a long time NATS user and has a background in health tech. He has extensive experience developing data pipelines, integrating data, ETL and building applications. As he got more and more involved with the NATS community, the opportunity to join the team and advocate for the technology he really believed in was a no-brainer.
Here are some further resources from Byron where you can learn more about NATS:
- NATS by Example
- NATS newsletter
- Synadia screencast
- Synadia Developer Education questionnaire
Our .tech series invites guests inside and outside of Form3, discussing current trends in the engineering world alongside shedding light into some of the engineering practices here at Form3.
Get in touch with us via this short form if you'd like to be a podcast guest.
Michael Kerrisk is a Linux expert and runs a Linux System Programming course, which is a very popular course for Form3 engineers. He started working with UNIX, the predecessor of Linux, and has used this knowledge in his Linux courses. Linux was roughly a re-implementation of the UNIX kernel that had been writted more than 20 years before at Bell Laboratories. His primary area of focus is not the kernel internals, but the kernel interface that it presents to the world, which is the same as classical UNIX. Michael has always had a passion for teaching, having spent years as a university teacher, before starting his corporate career. He joined the Training department of a previous employer and started delivering the system programming course for them. This was the ideal job for him, as it brought together the two things he was passionate about: UNIX and teaching. He is also the author of "The Linux Programming Interface", which is a a detailed guide and reference for Linux and UNIX system programming.
Our .tech series invites guests inside and outside of Form3, discussing current trends in the engineering world alongside shedding light into some of the engineering practices here at Form3.
Get in touch with us via this short form if you'd like to be a podcast guest.
Moritz Johner is a Senior Software Engineer at Form3. He has roughly 10 years experience in the tech industry. He comes from a non-conventional background, having studied Media Technology in University. He has worked in a variety of industries, including web agencies, startups and consulting. He is also a Linux Foundation trainer for Kubernetes. He joined Form3 a year ago and works on providing cloud agnostic Kubernetes experience for product teams.
Moritz's journey into open-source began in 2018 when he was working in consulting and had to build a Kubernetes platform that would work across AWS accounts. Most projects did not support assuming a role in another AWS account, so Moritz contributed this functionality to the various OSS projects he was using. Eventually, Moritz provided this same feature to kubernetes-external-secrets which was the de-facto secrets synching solution at the time. He then gradually became more involved in this project and helped take on the work of merging multiple secrets solutions together.
Lucas Severo Alves is a Software Engineer at RedHat, focusing on open-source. He has a background in DevOps, SRE and system administration. His introduction to open-source was also on the kubernetes-external-secrets project that Moritz was working on. He was excited to focus on a single solution for managing secrets across platforms, which is something that he was focused on as part of his role.
Our .tech series invites guests inside and outside of Form3, discussing current trends in the engineering world alongside shedding light into some of the engineering practices here at Form3.
Get in touch with us via this short form if you'd like to be a podcast guest.
Kaspar Von Grünberg is the CEO and founder of Humanitec. Kaspar is passionate for platform engineering and been building platforms at multiple companies. In 2019, he started building the commercial and open-source products for Internal Developer Platforms, including growing communities at platformengineering.org and PlatformCon. His mission is to consolidate tooling and education for modern internal developer platforms.
Our .tech series invites guests inside and outside of Form3, discussing current trends in the engineering world alongside shedding light into some of the engineering practices here at Form3.
Alexandra Forsberg is a Talent Acquisition Lead at Form3. Alexandra co-leads Form3's Engineering hiring across the UK, Europe, Argentina and Canada. She is currently leading a team of experienced Talent partners. Alexandra joined the business in 2018 and has had the privilege of growing Form3's Product, Engineering and Security departments. She has a background in agency recruitment, but is passionate about talent acquisition. She has shared her top interviewing tips in her article "How to Land Your Dream Remote Software Engineer Job".
Alexandra recommends a few remote job boards to use in your search for a new role, which you can easily find using Google. The top boards she recommends are:
- We Work Remotely
- Wellfound (formerly AngelList)
- Remotive
- Otta
You can also check Slack channels related to the languages you're interested in. For example, if you're interested in Go opportunities you can check the Gophers Slack.
Dragan Stepanović is a Senior Principal Engineer at Talabat. Dragan has experience working at different sizes of companies, from small to large corporates. He became interested in Extreme Programming (XP) early on in his career. Then, he started diving into architecture, Domain Driven Design (DDD) and LEAN as tools to enable engineers to maximise their throughput for their stakeholders.
Renato Rodrigues de Araujo is a Senior Software Engineer at Form3. Renato is part of the Tooling Team, which is responsible for making the lives of engineers easier by maintaining internal tools.
Our .tech series invites guests inside and outside of Form3, discussing current trends in the engineering world alongside shedding light into some of the engineering practices here at Form3.
Get in touch with us via this short form if you'd like to be a podcast guest.
Kevin Holditch is Head of Platform Engineering at Form3. Kevin leads and looks after the Platform Engineering teams, who have been working on the Form3 multi-cloud platform.
Our .tech series invites guests inside and outside of Form3, discussing current trends in the engineering world alongside shedding light into some of the engineering practices here at Form3.
Get in touch with us via this short form if you'd like to be a podcast guest.
Jordan Van Dyk is a Senior Software Developer on the Tooling Team at Form3. Two of the major projects he's working on are k8s-promoter and a variety of GitHub actions tooling. Based in Canada, Jordan has been at Form3 since November 2021.
Our .tech series invites guests inside and outside of Form3, discussing current trends in the engineering world alongside shedding light into some of the engineering practices here at Form3.
Get in touch with us via this short form if you'd like to be a podcast guest.
Natan Yellin is the CEO of Robusta Dev. He has a background as an engineer and has been tackling the challenges of the business world in his role as CEO.
Make sure explore these excellent resources to learn more from Natan:
- Common Kubernetes Mistakes - CPU and Memory Requests
- The Robusta YouTube channel
- Stop using CPU limits on Kubernetes
- Kubernetes is the POSIX of the cloud
Our .tech series invites guests inside and outside of Form3, discussing current trends in the engineering world alongside shedding light into some of the engineering practices here at Form3.
Get in touch with us via this short form if you'd like to be a podcast guest.
Evelina Vrabie is an Engineering Manager at Hopin. She is an engineering leader with over 15 years of experience, with a strong entrepreneurial, management and technical background. In her, Master's degree she explored the use of artificial intelligence in work therapy for high performance environments. Her work culminated in co-founding Touco Labs, a FinTech with the purpose of helping personal finance.
Evelina's blog is called Jumpstart and she often publishes for CTO Craft as well. Follow these resources to connect with her.
Our .tech series invites guests inside and outside of Form3, discussing current trends in the engineering world alongside shedding light into some of the engineering practices here at Form3.
Get in touch with us via this short form if you'd like to be a podcast guest.
Interested in joining Form3? Check out our careers site.
Leah Cohen is Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at School of SOS. She has a background as an entrepreneur, developer and is now in charge of building the platform and leading the technical team at School of SOS.
Our .tech series invites guests inside and outside of Form3, discussing current trends in the engineering world alongside shedding light into some of the engineering practices here at Form3.
Get in touch with us via this short form if you'd like to be a podcast guest.
Interested in joining Form3? Check out our careers site.
Arnaud Lauret is currently working on the Postman Open Technology team. The team educates engineers and organisations to take advantage of APIs. Arnaud shares his knowledge on his blog apihandyman.io and has also written the book "The Design of Web APIs".
Our .tech series invites guests inside and outside of Form3, discussing current trends in the engineering world alongside shedding light into some of the engineering practices here at Form3.
Get in touch with us via this short form if you'd like to be a podcast guest.
Interested in joining Form3? Check out our careers site.
Our .tech series invites guests inside and outside of Form3, discussing current trends in the engineering world alongside shedding light into some of the engineering practices here at Form3.
Get in touch with us via this short form if you'd like to be a podcast guest.
Interested in joining Form3? Check out our careers site.
Our .tech series invites guests inside and outside of Form3, discussing current trends in the engineering world alongside shedding light into some of the engineering practices here at Form3.
Get in touch with us via this short form if you'd like to be a podcast guest.
Interested in joining Form3? Check out our careers site.
Our .tech series invites guests inside and outside of Form3, discussing current trends in the engineering world alongside shedding light into some of the engineering practices here at Form3.
Get in touch with us via this short form if you'd like to be a podcast guest.
Interested in joining Form3? Check out our careers site.
Our .tech series invites guests inside and outside of Form3, discussing current trends in the engineering world alongside shedding light into some of the engineering practices here at Form3.
Get in touch with us via this short form if you'd like to be a podcast guest.
Interested in joining Form3? Check out our careers site.
Our .tech series invites guests inside and outside of Form3, discussing current trends in the engineering world alongside shedding light into some of the engineering practices here at Form3.
Get in touch with us via this short form if you'd like to be a podcast guest.
Interested in joining Form3? Check out our careers site.
Our .tech series invites guests inside and outside of Form3, discussing current trends in the engineering world alongside shedding light into some of the engineering practices here at Form3.
Interested in joining Form3? Check out our careers site.
Our .tech series invites guests inside and outside of Form3, discussing current trends in the engineering world alongside shedding light into some of the engineering practices here at Form3.
Interested in joining Form3? - https://www.form3.tech/careers
Our .tech series invites guests inside and outside of Form3, discussing current trends in the engineering world alongside shedding light into some of the engineering practices here at Form3.
Interested in joining Form3? - https://www.form3.tech/careers
Our .tech series invites guests inside and outside of Form3, discussing current trends in the engineering world alongside shedding light into some of the engineering practices here at Form3.
Interested in joining Form3? - https://www.form3.tech/careers
Our .tech series invites guests inside and outside of Form3, discussing current trends in the engineering world alongside shedding light into some of the engineering practices here at Form3.
Interested in joining Form3? - https://www.form3.tech/careers
https://www.cockroachlabs.com/
Our last episode with Daniel Holt: https://techpodcast.form3.tech/episodes/ep-13-tech-cockroachdb-a-cloud-native-global-database
Our .tech series invites guests inside and outside of Form3, discussing current trends in the engineering world alongside shedding light into some of the engineering practices here at Form3.
Interested in joining Form3? - https://www.form3.tech/careers
Interpreter book: https://interpreterbook.com
Thorsten Ball's Github: https://github.com/mrnugget
Our new .tech series invites guests inside and outside of Form3, discussing current trends in the engineering world alongside shedding light into some of the engineering practices here at Form3.
Interested in joining Form3? - https://www.form3.tech/careers
Marcia's Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/FooBar_codes
Our new .tech series invites guests inside and outside of Form3, discussing current trends in the engineering world alongside shedding light into some of the engineering practices here at Form3.
Interested in joining Form3? - https://www.form3.tech/careers
Our new .tech series invites guests inside and outside of Form3, discussing current trends in the engineering world alongside shedding light into some of the engineering practices here at Form3.
Interested in joining Form3? - https://www.form3.tech/careers
Our new .tech series invites guests inside and outside of Form3, discussing current trends in the engineering world alongside shedding light into some of the engineering practices here at Form3.
Interested in joining Form3? - https://www.form3.tech/careers
Our new .tech series invites guests inside and outside of Form3, discussing current trends in the engineering world alongside shedding light into some of the engineering practices here at Form3.
Interested in joining Form3? - https://www.form3.tech/careers
Our new .tech series invites guests inside and outside of Form3, discussing current trends in the engineering world alongside shedding light into some of the engineering practices here at Form3.
Interested in joining Form3? - https://www.form3.tech/careers
Cilium website : https://cilium.io/
Our new .tech series invites guests inside and outside of Form3, discussing current trends in the engineering world alongside shedding light into some of the engineering practices here at Form3.
Interested in joining Form3? - https://www.form3.tech/careers
Hashicorp website -https://www.hashicorp.com/
Kevin's talk at Hashiconf: https://www.youtube.com/20watch?v=oRsDn8iiozs
Our new .tech series invites guests inside and outside of Form3, discussing current trends in the engineering world alongside shedding light into some of the engineering practices here at Form3.
Interested in joining Form3? - https://hubs.li/H0zlrGd0
Cloud Native Computing Foundation website: https://www.cncf.io/
Our new .tech series invites guests inside and outside of Form3, discussing current trends in the engineering world alongside shedding light into some of the engineering practices here at Form3.
Interested in joining Form3? - https://hubs.li/H0zlrGd0
Cockroach website: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/
Our new .tech series invites guests inside and outside of Form3, discussing current trends in the engineering world alongside shedding light into some of the engineering practices here at Form3.
Interested in joining Form3? - https://www.form3.tech/careers
Our new .tech series invites guests inside and outside of Form3, discussing current trends in the engineering world alongside shedding light into some of the engineering practices here at Form3.
Interested in joining Form3? - https://hubs.li/H0zlrGd0
Yan's website: https://theburningmonk.com/
Our new .tech series invites guests inside and outside of Form3, discussing current trends in the engineering world alongside shedding light into some of the engineering practices here at Form3.
Interested in joining Form3? - https://hubs.li/H0zlrGd0
Our new .tech series invites guests inside and outside of Form3, discussing current trends in the engineering world alongside shedding light into some of the engineering practices here at Form3.
Interested in joining Form3? - https://hubs.li/H0zlrGd0
Flutter : https://flutter.dev/
Dart : https://dart.dev/
Majid's website: https://majidhajian.com/
Our new .tech series invites guests inside and outside of Form3, discussing current trends in the engineering world alongside shedding light into some of the engineering practices here at Form3.
Interested in joining Form3? - https://hubs.li/H0zlrGd0
Topics covered in this show include:
-What is infrastructure as code and how Terraform fits in to the landscape
-Contrasting Terraform and AWS Cloud Formation
-Using Terraform as glue across public clouds
-Terraform Modules
-Terraform registry ( https://registry.terraform.io/ )
-Controlling cost in a cloud infrastructure
-Ensuring Compatibility
Anton's youtube (weekly terraform uploads) : https://www.youtube.com/user/cyberbob37
Anton's Serverless terraform project: https://serverless.tf/
Our new .tech series invites guests inside and outside of Form3, discussing current trends in the engineering world alongside shedding light into some of the engineering practices here at Form3.
Interested in joining Form3? - https://hubs.li/H0zlrGd0
About GraphQL - https://graphql.org/
Topics discussed in this episode include:
-Transitioning to Go from PHP
-Differences of Go as a language
-Simplicity
-Bart's approach to testing
-Docker containerisation
-Klio (Crossover between a CLI framework and a package manager)
-Bart's blog
- Topics discussed in this episode include:
-What was the idea behind NATS & where it came from
-The technical choice to use Go & broker based system design
-Simplicity as a feature
-Security
-Liftbridge
-Running a popular open source project as a company
-Jetstream & what the future holds for NATS
About NATS: https://nats.io/about/
Our new .tech series invites guests inside and outside of Form3, discussing current trends in the engineering world alongside shedding light into some of the engineering practices here at Form3.
Interested in joining Form3? - https://hubs.li/H0zlrGd0
Our new .tech series invites guests inside and outside of Form3, discussing current trends in the engineering world alongside shedding light into some of the engineering practices here at Form3.
Topics/questions covered in this episode:
- How did Will start Linkerd?
- Linkerd and the intrinsic value of a service mesh
- The benefits of changes at a platform level with Linkerd
- Form3's transition to Kubernetes
- Becoming cloud agnostic
- What to think about when choosing which service mesh to use
- Rust, Garbage collection and Tail latency.
- Containerization
- Linkerd 2 and mutual TLS.
- Multi region with Linkerd
- Telemetry and Monitoring on Linkerd
Interested in joining Form3? - https://hubs.li/H0zlrGd0
Our new .tech series invites guests inside and outside of Form3, discussing what's going on in the engineering community an shedding light about how engineering works at Form3.
Topics/questions covered in this episode:
- How did Ash get into Go?
- Was it difficult?
- How easy was it to pick up?
- Benthos's use case in the beginning
- Developing an open source project alongside work
- C++ vs Go and the issue of Memory Leaks in C++
- Using Benthos for projections and transformations
- How Ash deals with Pull Requests and the community driven nature of Benthos
- Open Source contribution to Benthos
- Go adoption
- Benthos Graphic style
Interested in joining Form3? - https://hubs.li/H0zlrGd0
Episode NotesIn this episode, we invited Johan Brandhorst from Buf & our very own Andy Kuszyk to dive into the wonderful world of Go, with a new host for our tech-focused series, Kevin Holditch.
Our new .tech series invites guests inside and outside of Form3, discussing what's going on in the engineering community, sheds light about how engineering works at Form3 and gives engineers advice.
Topics/questions covered in this episode:
- How did our guests get into Go?
- Was it difficult?
- How easy was it to pick up?
- What are the limitations of Go?
- Go vs Java
- What are the pros and cons?
- How does Go work for Form3?
- Ruby on Rails vs Go - What are the advantages and disadvantages?
- Go vs Python
- What's great with Python?
- How does it scale compared to Go?
- Tangible examples where Go should be used and why
- What are the tools that can add value in Go?
- The input you can have as an individual contributor on the Go community
- How does error management work in Go?
- What's coming next in Go and what would you like to see added to the language?
- What's the best way to way learn Go?
Interested in joining Form3? - https://hubs.li/H0zlrGd0