Software Misadventures - Introducing Software Misadventures Podcast - #0

Episode Date: November 28, 2020

In this episode, Ronak, Austin and Guang share the origin story - who they are, what this podcast is about and why they are doing this.  They've seen first hand how stressful it is when something breaks in production but also found it to be the best opportunity to learn about a system more deeply. They started this podcast to have in-depth conversations with software and devops experts and hear their stories from the trenches about how software breaks in production. In upcoming conversations, they discuss the principles and practical tips to build resilient software as well as advice to grow as technical leaders. Learn more at https://softwaremisadventures.com. Music Credits: Vlad Gluschenko — Forest License: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

Welcome to the Software Misadventures podcast, where we sit down with software and DevOps experts to hear their stories from the trenches about how software breaks in production. We are your hosts, Ronak, Austin, and Guang. We've seen firsthand how stressful it is when something breaks in production, but it't really know what to expect and wish there were more resources on how veteran engineers overcame the daunting task of debugging complex systems. In these conversations, we discussed the principles and practical tips to build resilient software, as well as advice to grow as technical leaders. Hey everyone, I'm Ronak and this is our episode zero. As we are starting out, we wanted to share our origin story, who we are, what this podcast is about, and why we are doing this. To kick us off, a little bit about my background. I started my engineering career in the data infrastructure space at a startup called Insight Data Science. A couple years later, I joined LinkedIn as an SRE

on their compute infrastructure team. Over time, I've realized that deeply understanding the systems I work with has made me a lot more comfortable with production systems and has also made me a better engineer. Like many of us, I've always wanted to learn from others. So I watch conference talks, I read books and various engineering blogs. And I've often wondered if only I could talk to some of the fellow engineers and experts in this domain to get to know them better and get more insights from them. So a few months back, I started thinking about having a podcast as a means to have in-depth conversations about building resilient systems and growing as technical leaders. As I was thinking more about this, I felt that this would be a lot more fun to start with my friends, Austin and Guang. So I reached out to them, and to my pleasant surprise,

they both said yes, and here we are starting a podcast together. Hey all, I'm Austin. First of all, we all know each other through our time at Insight Data Science, where we all started on the data engineering side of things and gravitated towards infrastructure engineering. I think over time, we all became a lot more fascinated with what happened under the hood, so much that we started a computer networking book club sometime in 2016. This let us learn more about this area at our own pace. Ronak and I eventually ended up at LinkedIn as SREs working on much larger infrastructure problems in both the search and compute infrastructure space. We both had our fair share of outages over those years,

so when Ronak reached out, I loved the idea and thought this would be a lot of fun. Hey everyone, this is Guang. So when Ronak reached out, I loved the idea and thought this would be a lot more effective, especially if you're responsible for actually shipping the product. In addition to speaking with technical leaders in infrastructure engineering, we will also have guests who are working on other parts of the stack to come and talk about software misadventures. So we have some very interesting episodes lined up.

First one featuring a wide-ranging conversation with Kelsey Hightower, where we discuss ways in which Kubernetes can break, how to be an effective leader, and much more. This first episode will be released very soon, so stay tuned. You can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and you can learn more about us at softwaremisadventures.com. You can also write to us at hello at softwaremisadventures.com. We would love to hear from you and thank you for listening. Until next time.