Lunch with Tech Leaders

Get inspired to submit your first tech talk by listening to public speaking experts Derek DeJonghe, Ell Marquez, Amit Rahti & Tom Kowalski. Hear valuable advice for supporting & mentoring the less confident speakers and conquer your fears of public speaking!

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 podcast discusses the debate between Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) and Functional Programming (FP). Experts explore the benefits of combining both paradigms in a hybrid approach. They delve into the concept of pure functions and immutability in FP, and compare the overhead of copying data in FP with mutating data in game programming. The speakers also discuss side effects and purity in FP, and highlight the importance of message passing and managing state mutation in OOP.

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, the community engages in a discussion about AWS spending, emphasizing the significance of cost control and optimization through strategies like leveraging native tools and making informed instance selections. Experts highlight best practices such as rightsizing instances, implementing automation for resource management, monitoring costs using AWS Cost Explorer, and regularly reviewing reserved instances to maximize savings.Read the accompanying blog post here - http://1707980.hs-sites.com/lunch-with-tech-leaders-the-blog/strategies-for-effective-cost-savings-and-optimization-in-aws

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.

Unlock the secrets to a robust SRE culture as the Great Lakes Tech Leaders delve into the essence of building reliability. This week's hosts Kyle Robertson, Site Reliability Engineer at GitHub, Jordan DeBeer, Customer Engineer at Google, and Tom Kowalski, Software and Data Consultant, discuss how embracing failure, fostering ownership, and treating reliability as a top priority can revolutionize organizations.