The New Stack Podcast

The tech industry is broken. We deify overworking, and think burnout comes with bragging rights. But how do we break this exhausting cycle? In this episode of The New Stack Makers, we talk with LaunchDarkly's Manager of Developer Marketing Dawn Parzych about how to identify burnout in others and in yourself, how to treat it, and how to build a psychologically safe working environment that allows folks to say no.With a masters in psychology and a DevRel role that certainly straddles people and tech, Parzych's work often sits on the people side of what they're building."I love the idea ofthe socio-technical systems that we're building,like tech, doesn't exist in a bubble. People are building the technology. They're very interrelated and you can't just focus on the tech, the people are the hardest part of tech. And we spend more time talking about how tech's the hard piece,where it's reallythe people and the interrelation betweenthe people and the machines," she said.

No longer considered an ephemeral concept as it originally was, data management has become a huge issue and challenge, especially for managing stateless data in Kubernetes environments. Cloud Native Data Management Day at the recently held KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2021 event in May and the state of data management were the subject of discussion in this edition of The New Stack Makers podcast, hosted by Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack. The guests were Michael Cade, senior global technologist, Veeam Software and Nigel Poulton, owner of nigelpoulton.com, which offers Kubernetes and Docker training and other services. Both Cade and Poulton were also involved in the organization of Cloud Native Data Management Day.

Today’s developer seems to be working with more tools than ever. Building a Node.js-based JavaScript application could require over a dozen tools at times to get code out into production. It's easy to get sucked down a rabbit hole and not stay focused. Debugging an application once in production can also be a challenge: You want as much context at your fingertips as needed while maintaining a reasonable signal-to-noise ratio.Dan O’Brien, a software engineer for feature management platform provider LaunchDarkly, has a personal interest in how to keep from being distracted/staying in the flow when working on a new feature or any piece of code.In this very latest episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, we ask O'Brien about the complexities he sees in today’s developer workflow, as well as some tips he has to stay “in the zone” when writing code. We’ll also discuss the tools that LaunchDarkly has that can help expedite application development. TNS founder and Publisher Alex Williams, along with TNS Managing Editor Joab Jackson, hosted this podcast.

No matter how much we prepare, deployments don’t always go as planned. In this edition of The New Stack Makers podcast, hosted by Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, Isabelle Miller, software engineer, LaunchDarkly, describes how DevOps teams can build processes to help remove unwanted surprises during release cycles —  and why they do not need to be stressful.One of the main things Miller said she has discovered since joining LaunchDarkly at the beginning of 2020 is the importance of having procedures in place for when things do go wrong, “because things are going to go wrong,” she said.“You need to be able to manage that problem as quickly as possible, and minimize any harm before things get out of control when that happens,” said Miller. “So, one of the great things about working at LaunchDarkly is that I get to use our products. And one of the wonderful things about LaunchDarkly’s feature flags is that you can just turn things off.”

How Adidas manages for scale gives a sense for how a sportswear company is also in part similar to a software house just in terms of measuring how much code they run.In this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, speaks with Adidas’ Iñaki Alzorriz, senior director platform engineering, and Rastko Vukasinovic, director solution architecture, on how Adidas  scales DevOps and resiliency on Kubernetes. They also discuss how Adidas views managing at scale in three ways: technically, culturally and strategically.

Debate continues in the industry about what observability is, and more specifically, what it should offer DevOps, especially those working in operations who are often responsible for detecting those “unknown unknowns.” In this The New Stack Makers podcast hosted by Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, Bartek Plotka, a principal engineer at Red Hat, a SIG observability tech Lead for Thanos and a Prometheus maintainer; and Richard Hartmann, community director at Grafana, a Prometheus maintainer, OpenMetrics founder and a CNCF SIG observability chair member, discuss how observability should be easier to use and how it can be cost effective.

At this year’s KubeCon EU 2021, some things were the same — it was still virtual which meant it attracted a huge turnout of a more broadly international audience — and some things were different — like that almost everyone’s bought into Kubernetes and cloud native architecture, it’s now just how they use it. Another KubeCon tradition, The New Stack hosted a live pancake breakfast to reflect on the maturity of Kubernetes particularly around data persistence and storage.Our Publisher Alex Williams hosted this year’s very early discussion (at least for him) with Itzik Reich, VP of technologists, and Nivas Iyer, senior principal product manager, both at Dell Technologies, along with pancakes regular Cheryl Hung, VP of ecosystem at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

The adoption of GitOps, improvements to APIs and the increasing reach of virtual machine language WebAssembly (Wasm) are influencing the developer experience, and ultimately, how DevOps teams reach their application-deployment and -management goals. These were among the more talked-about themes at Cloud Native Computing Foundation KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EUPutting it all into context, Alex Williams, founder and publisher, and Joab Jackson, managing editor, of The New Stack, are the hosts of this The New Stack Makers podcast. The featured guests are Bryan Liles, principal engineer, VMware and Cheryl Hung, vice president of ecosystem, CNCF.

A major part of improving developer velocity is about getting the most out of an observability platform. While that is a commonly held assumption, this best practice is also a far-reaching goal for many DevOps teams.Hosted by Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, this The New Stack Makers — podcast recorded during a virtual pancake breakfast — features a discussion on improving observability for developers. The featured guests were Zain Asgar, general manager, Pixie and New Relic open source and CEO and co-founder of Pixie Labs, Roopak Venkatakrishnan, engineering manager, Bolt (an e-commerce retailer tool), Ihor Dvoretskyi, developer advocate, Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and Christine Wang, senior solutions engineer, Grafana Labs.

As GitOps moves beyond improving how code repositories are managed for continuous integration/continuous integration (CI/CD), the security component of GitOps has become more of a pressing issue as the use of Git, and GitOps, becomes more widely adopted. The open source community should also play a critical role in improving GitOps.Hosted by Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, this recording features Om Moolchandani, co-founder and CISO/CTO, for Accurics, Cindy Blake, senior security evangelist, GitLab, Frank Kim, fellow, SANS Institute; Sanjeev Sharma, head of platform engineering, Truist Financial and Katie Gamanji, ecosystem advocate, Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).