Where we discuss interviewing - good versus bad questions, cultural issues, and how to avoid common pitfalls, bias and other things that are problematic.
Hosted by Breandan Dezendorf,
Breandan Dezendorf has 20 years of operations experience,
a degree in Journalism and has managed monitoring and alerting
systems for every company he's ever worked for.
Ken Mink,
Ken Mink has spent 30 years as a Unix Administrator and Developer.
He started out on AIX and HP-UX in the early '90s. Ken finally
started using Linux in 1994 while working at Gateway. Since then
he's bounced between doing development, administration, later
HPC administration, and now DevOps. While Ken has recently spent
time handling very large HPC and database clusters, he really
enjoys small SBCs. Ken is also a long time user of MythTV.
Jack Neely,
Jack Neely has been in operations for close to 20 years and
finds solutions through code. Experience in configuration
management, time series based metrics, and automating platform
deployments for large companies.
and Jarod Watkins.
Jarod Watkins has over 12 years experience in operations at small
companies and startups. Automation and infrastructure as code are
his specialty.
Practical Operations is a pragmatic podcast about the difference between running your IT organization the "Right Way" and the Practical Way. Your hosts talk about the theory of small to web scale operations and DevOps and then discuss how to get the most out of these tools in practice.
Your hosts Breandan Dezendorf, Ken Mink, Jack Neely, and Jarod Watkins have over 70 years of IT experience. Practical experience in small companies and research groups of only a handful of people to large multinational technology companies, cloud providers, and major universities. We practice operations.
Episode 119 - Conducting Interviews
July 26, 2021
Episode 118 - Imposter Syndrome
July 12, 2021
Where we discuss imposter syndrome and how it changes work dynamics for the worse.
Episode 117 - Human Input and Output
June 4, 2021
Where we discuss human input and output. Who are we kidding? We talked about mechanical keyboards, with very mild diversions into trackballs, trackpads and monitors. This is a notes-heavy episode, please look at the shownotes!
Episode 116 - How The Fundamental Constants of The Universe Hate Us And Want Us To Fail
May 21, 2021
Where we discuss one of the fundamental physical constants that is always trying to bring us down - the speed of light - and how latency for round trip times impacts programming, systems design, and organizational behavior.
Episode 115 - Your Employer Isn't Your Family
May 7, 2021
Where we discuss the seperation of work and personal life, and why such a seperation is both crucial and hard to do.
Episode 114 - Terraforming Existing Clouds
April 23, 2021
Where we discuss getting control of an existing, organically built cloud environment, and how to structure said control. Monolitic terraform? Hundreds of terraform projects? CloudFormations? Control Tower?
Episode 113 - Licensing
April 9, 2021
Where we discuss licensing and how it intersects with everything we do - from Elastic adopting Mongo’s SSPL to the mess that was made public with Wireguard, PFSense and BSD. Licenses are important, folks, choose them well and with purpose, ideally with a laywer in the room.
Episode 112 - Large Scale Networking With Brian Miller
March 27, 2021
Where we talk with Brian Miller about running large scale networks for a major university and his adventures in Internet2, IPv6 and wireless all come up.
Episode 111 - Host Your Own Code
March 12, 2021
Where we discuss the risks you take using package managers and code you do not host yourself.
Episode 110 - Planning For Failure, or a Failure To Plan
February 26, 2021
Where we discuss the failure of the Texas energy grid and how it relates to a failure to plan ahead. We look at active/active, n+1 and other cases where redundancy sneaks away from you.