Kelsey Hightower: From Sleeping in His Car to Distinguished Engineer, Google

Today’s guest is Kelsey Hightower, a distinguished engineer and developer advocate at Google and speaker known for his work with Kubernetes, open source software and cloud computing.

As a curious and motivated self-learner, Kelsey dropped out of College and taught himself the skills required to start his career as an independent contractor for BellSouth – a telecoms company in Atlanta helping the community to get online. From there, Kelsey set up his own business – an electronics store before becoming involved in the open source world, working at New Relic, CoreOS, Puppet Labs, and most recently at Google.

A self-taught developer, Kelsey’s work on Kubernetes and at Google, from which he just retired, is well-known* so I wanted to focus our conversation on his life - how he got into tech, his love of learning, what drives him, what it means to be hopeful and the one piece of advice he would offer a younger Kelsey.

I know I am not meant to have favourites – these conversations are like children - but I have to say this is up there with one of my most loved conversations. I learned so much from Kelsey and I think you will too.

Enjoy!

Kelsey on Twitter

Danielle Twitter / Instagram / Newsletter

Photo of Kelsey is part of the Faces of Open Source Project by Peter Adams

*If you want to learn more about Kelsey's work history, give this episode  from Ardan Labs a listen.