Explorez tous les épisodes du podcast Fork Around And Find Out
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| Welcome to Fork Around and Find Out! | 10 Dec 2024 | 00:00:57 | |
Fork Around and Find Out is your downtime from uptime. Your break from the pager, and a chance to learn from expert’s successes and failures. We cover state-of-the-art, legacy practices for building, running, and maintaining software and systems. Be sure to follow us on your favorite podcast player, and stay tuned for weekly episodes! Follow the podcast elsewhere online:
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| Remaining Authentic in Retirement with Kelsey Hightower | 03 Jan 2025 | 01:31:45 | |
Retirement is about the journey, not the destination. For Kelsey Hightower, it’s been an epic journey. On our debut episode of the Fork Around and Find Out Podcast (and much to Autumn’s elation), Kelsey joins us to run down his illustrious career that spans a quarter of a century.
Kelsey is not just someone who cares. He’s a genuine human being who’s invested in the future of the industry. We can’t wait for you to check out this conversation, because we know you’ll love it! Show Highlights (0:00) Intro (0:37) Tremolo sponsor read (1:56) Introducing Kelsey Hightower (3:04) Reflecting on how Kelsey's 25-year tech journey shaped what he's been up to recently (9:15) Why you shouldn't be surprised when someone like Google kills off a product (14:46) How Kelsey built up his trust in the tech community through his honesty (16:31) Having the financial privilege to be able to say "no" (22:57) Is the churn and burn nature of the tech industry going to hurt innovation (29:19) Advising NFL stars Larry Fitzgerald and Kelvin Beachum on their tech investments (38:28) Figuring out how to make tech more sustainable by treating it like a relay race (42:36) Autumn’s appreciation for the Kubernetes community (44:16) How you can help sponsor the FAFO Podcast (45:17) Kelsey’s theory around the strong Kubernetes community (47:26) The future of the relationship between corporations and open-source (51:33) Kelsey's adventures in circuitry, doing electrical work on his home, and why that kind of curiosity is vital to learning new skills in tech (59:11) Is tech starting to abandon problem solvers? (1:03:41) Creating solutions for problems that don't exist (1:08:49) The absurd state of the world, social media, and how Kelsey helped lead the tech migration to Bluesky (1:19:40) The power and the positive impact you can have with a large online presence (1:30:29) Where you can find more from Kelsey About Kelsey Hightower Kelsey Hightower has worn every hat possible throughout his career in tech, and enjoys leadership roles focused on making things happen and shipping software. Kelsey is a strong open source advocate focused on building simple tools that make people smile. When he is not slinging Go code, you can catch him giving technical workshops covering everything from programming to system administration. Links Referenced
Sponsor Tremolo: http://fafo.fm/tremolo Sponsor the FAFO Podcast! | |||
| An Oral History of the Kubernetes Revolution with Brian Grant | 10 Jan 2025 | 01:04:18 | |
Kubernetes isn’t just a platform—it’s a revolution. On this episode of Fork Around and Find Out, Justin and Autumn sit down with Kubernetes co-creator Brian Grant to explore the origins of this game-changing technology. From Google’s internal tooling to the cloud-native juggernaut it is today, Brian takes us behind the scenes of Kubernetes’ evolution, including its roots in Borg and the creation of CNCF. Brian also opens up about his fascinating career, from debugging GPUs at PeakStream to improving Google’s threading systems. Along the way, he shares his candid thoughts on Terraform, GitOps, and the future of infrastructure management. We’re talking insider stories, tech critiques, and the cyclical nature of trends like AI—all packed into one unmissable episode. Brian is a visionary who’s shaped the cloud-native ecosystem as we know it. We can’t wait for you to hear his story and insights!
(0:00) Intro (0:31) Tremolo Security sponsor read (2:42) Brian’s background (6:20) What it’s like working on something great but it not being the right time (9:17) How Brian’s work from the 2000s is still important today (11:16) Why Brian said ‘yes’ to Google after previously turning them down (12:59) The history of the FDIV bug (16:49) What Brian was doing when his old company was bought by Google (20:51) How Brian’s education helped him get started down this path (23:47) Brian’s jump from Borg to Kubernetes (32:27) The effect Kubernetes has had on the landscape of infrastructure and applications (35:48) Tremolo Security sponsor read (36:47) Times Brian has been frustrated at how people use Kubernetes (41:05) The patterns Brian notices thanks to his years in the tech industry (48:04) What Brian expects to see next as manual actions to make providers work to make a comeback (54:58) Reflecting on Brian’s serendipitous journey through the tech world (1:02:18) Where you can find more from Brian About Brian Grant Brian Grant is the CTO and co-founder of ConfigHub, pioneering a new approach to provisioning, deploying, and operating cloud applications and infrastructure. As the original lead architect of Kubernetes, Brian created its declarative configuration model (KRM) and tools like kubectl apply and kustomize. With over 30 years in high-performance and distributed computing, he’s held pivotal roles, including tech lead for Google’s Borg platform and founder of the Omega R&D project. A Kubernetes Steering Committee and CNCF Technical Oversight Committee member, Brian also boasts 15+ patents and a Ph.D. in Computer Science, shaping the future of cloud and computing innovation. Links Referenced
Sponsor Tremolo: http://fafo.fm/tremolo Sponsor the FAFO Podcast! | |||
| Predicting Bluesky’s Scale with Jaz | 14 Feb 2025 | 01:05:57 | |
Bluesky has been on a roller coaster of growth for over a year. From the early days of figuring out a new distributed social protocol—AT protocol—to actually building it and inviting 30 million of their closest friends. Not only has the site gone through tremendous growth, the team has been optimizing, re-architecting, and adding features the entire time. Jaz is a software engineer focused on the infrastructure at Bluesky, and they share how they achieved exponential growth without exponential costs. We cover some of the key components of the protocol and how that affects the architecture. There’s some amazing advice from the trenches we know you’ll enjoy. Show Highlights About Jaz Jaz is a software engineer who learned from on-the-job experience. They have a background with hardware which makes them better with software. If they’re not drinking Monster they’re building a single purpose database, or maybe they’re doing both. Jaz went from building with AT protocol to building AT protocol in a matter of months. They also have an impressive collection of plushies and power tools. Sponsor the FAFO Podcast! | |||
| Making Smart Infrastructure Decisions with Lauren Long | 07 Feb 2025 | 00:45:28 | |
Today we find out how building a product at Big Tech can be very different than a startup. Lauren Long has done both. Building parts of Firebase and eventually taking the things she learned to build Ampersand. We discuss what Ampersand is and go into detail about what the back end looks like. We even drop some hot takes about serverless and Kubernetes. We think you’ll love it!
(0:00) Intro (1:00) What is Ampersand? (3:00) What is the backend? (4:00) What is Lauren’s background (6:00) How are people using it? (10:00) How is Temporal used? (14:00) How to keep APIs in check (21:00) What did you learn? (24:00) What has broken? (26:00) Why use Kubernetes? (32:00) What have customers done? (38:00) What’s next? About Lauren Long Lauren Long is the CTO and co-founder of Ampersand, an API integration and workflow engine for enterprises to integrate their data with hundreds of applications. Lauren co-founded Ampersand after working at Google on their serverless products and saw a need for a different kind of integration for customers. She’s a developer with a great intuition on how to build reliable and scalable systems. Sponsor the FAFO Podcast! | |||
| FAFO Live with Crystal Preston-Watson | 31 Jan 2025 | 00:53:37 | |
Fork it! We’ll do it live! Well, sort of... In case you missed it last week, we’re running back our FAFO Livestream with Crystal Preston-Watson from this past Friday. Instead of prying into specifics about Crystal’s career, we’re chatting about recent tech news, the dire state of American tech literacy, and WTF WTA stands for! You can expect shows like these on the last Friday of every month, and we hope to see you there! Show Highlights (0:00) Intro (0:36) Tremolo sponsor read (1:56) Welcome to FAFO Live! (3:07) Is the AI Bubble bursting (8:17) The vibes at the TikTok security party (19:01) True Crime and Tech Literacy 101 (31:12) Tremolo sponsor read (34:01) Crystal plays WTA- What’s the Acronym? (50:06) What you can expect from more FAFO Live Shows (51:39) Where you can get some FAFO swag and find more from the show
Crystal is an accessibility engineer and analyst. She believes accessibility is a civic and human right, and she is passionate about building accessible and inclusive applications for everyone. Links Referenced
Sponsor Tremolo: http://fafo.fm/tremolo
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| Making Tech More Accessible with Crystal Preston-Watson | 25 Jan 2025 | 01:03:08 | |
If technology serves everybody, then everyone deserves access to a seat at the table. No one better embodies this sentiment than Crystal Preston-Watson. She’s a Senior Digital Accessibility Analyst with Salesforce, and she brings an unrivaled passion for making tech available for anyone to use. On this episode of FAFO, we’re unpacking why her mission is so vital, and the previous career that made Crystal realize the disabled community needs a voice to advocate for them. Crystal goes into why it’s okay to turn personal struggles into triumphs for others, ARIA as a vital resource, and the issues with pushing GenAI tools onto accessibility tools. You’ll also get to hear why Autumn loves Crystal’s presence on the internet, but especially Crystal’s blog (which is a great read if you love serious topics sprinkled with a good laugh). Show Highlights (0:00) Intro (0:29) Tremolo sponsor read (1:51) Introducing Crystal through the power of numeronym (5:43) Crystal's journey to accessibility and software (10:01) How Crystal’s background in tech led her directly to tech (15:30) Using additional tools to help solve problems (18:31) The power of lifting other people up through your own personal struggles (21:53) The importance of the right to repair and accessibility in the disability community (27:58) Rapid evolutions in accessibility, vulnerability, and security (33:57) Tremolo sponsor read (34:55) Changes Crystal has seen in accessibility (39:04) Why ARIA is important to accessibility (43:17) Can open source provide a voice for accessibility advocates? (45:52) Audio accessibility tools and their many functions (48:22) Who's better for accessibility: Apple or Android? (51:42) GenAI's impact (or lack thereof) on accessibility (57:33) Why Autumn loves Crystal's social media presence (59:50) Where you can find more from Crystal (1:01:04) Crystal's advice for making security more accessible About Crystal Preston-Watson Crystal is an accessibility engineer and analyst. She believes accessibility is a civic and human right, and she is passionate about building accessible and inclusive applications for everyone. Links Referenced
Sponsor Tremolo: http://fafo.fm/tremolo Sponsor the FAFO Podcast! | |||
| Making the World a More Secure Place with Yasmin Abdi | 17 Jan 2025 | 00:48:31 | |
Data and security breaches are a dime a dozen nowadays, and despite their frequency, they’re still just as dangerous. That’s where Yasmin Abdi, the CEO of noHack, comes in. Despite her relatively short career, she’s already worked for some of the giants of the tech industry like Google and Snapchat. Along with Justin and Autumn, Yasmin breaks down real-world security challenges and solutions, a firsthand view into managing role-based access, phishing simulations for employee training, and the delicate balance between security and usability.
(0:00) Intro (0:32) Tremolo sponsor read (2:04) How Yasmin built noHack (3:15) Breaking down Yasmin's impressive resume (4:17) What sparked Yasmin's interest in security? (7:54) Yasmin's biggest challenge since starting noHack (11:05) How Zero Trust has evolved over the past decade (12:34) Balancing usability and security (15:43) The problems with role-based access and how Yasmin's work addresses it (19:31) Phishing schemes and AI's role in the future of security (23:14) Tremolo sponsor read (24:13) Yasmin's efforts to educate organizations on the dangers of phishing and poor security (29:31) "Security theater" and the lack of serious education (34:20) How to get people to take security seriously (39:37) Yasmin's opinions on third-party scanning vendors (43:17) How Yasmin would have handled the CrowdStrike attack (46:52) Where you can find more from Yasmin About Yasmin Abdi Yasmin Abdi is the CEO and Founder of noHack, a cybersecurity company focused on delivering high-impact solutions for public and private (startups, & SMB) clients. Yasmin’s expertise spans enterprise security, secure software development, vulnerability and risk management, threat detection and intelligence, security assurance and education, and privacy best practices. Yasmin has also shared her knowledge at major industry platforms (featured on Forbes, Cisco, Voice of America) and has established herself as a leading voice in the cybersecurity space.
Links Referenced
Sponsor Tremolo: http://fafo.fm/tremolo Sponsor the FAFO Podcast! | |||
| Training The future with Mark Russinovich | 20 Mar 2026 | 01:05:23 | |
Sponsor FAFOFM Mark is the CTO of Azure and has decades of experience exploring the internals of systems. As a developer and person responsible for running massive AI infrastructure, Mark has a lot of insights and ideas. We talk about the the end of SaaS, training engineers, and a whole lot more on this episode. | |||
| Developing Measurements with Cat Hicks | 25 Feb 2026 | 01:17:54 | |
Dr. Cat Hicks takes a different approach to traditional engineer productivity measurements. Instead of turning engineers into velocity numbers she takes a holistic approach to understanding why a person or team might be over or under performing. This episode talks about lots of factors and gives you some ideas to understand what's actually going on.
You probably want to check out Cat's upcoming book The Psychology of Software Teams or her recent whitepaper No Silver Bullets: Why Understanding Software Cycle Time is Messy, Not Magic. | |||
| Writing bugs with K.S. Bhaskar | 23 May 2025 | 00:59:08 | |
It's easy to talk about everything when you've been writing software for half a century. Bhaskar has some amazing insights from his impressive career building software using everything from punch cards to AI. If you like learning about the past to understand the future, this is an episode you don't want to miss. Links
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| MCPing in the Open with Angie Jones | 25 Apr 2025 | 00:58:05 | |
Angie gives us a crash course on Model Context Protocol (MCP) and how you can get started using it with goose. We also talk about other projects Angie's worked on at Block and what drives her to keep learning new things in tech. Links
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| Motivated to Learn with Adriana Villela | 18 Apr 2025 | 01:14:19 | |
After 25 years in tech it’s hard not to coast. Adriana has come from writing word docs for the ops team to deploy software, through Devops, and now has a focus on OTel and Kubernetes. How do we get more people from 100 to 400 levels and why is there no content in between? And why we need junior engineers to make our senior engineers better. Links
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| Recovering from Disaster with Seth Eliot | 11 Apr 2025 | 01:02:13 | |
Disaster recovery is more than automation and infrastructure. There's a lot that goes into your services and some of those things can't be defined as code or automated. When was the last time you restored your database from a backup? How do you use least privileged access when your region changes and how do you even know you're having a disaster. Seth has a lot of experience and a ton of good insights in this episode. Links
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| Building a Datacenter with Jake Cooper | 04 Apr 2025 | 01:03:41 | |
Railway wanted to build a better cloud so they started on Google Cloud and ended up building datacenters. Through the burden of success, they figured out there was a lot of things they had to learn and build themselves if they wanted to offer the best cloud experience they could. Jake tells us how they accomplished the move in 9 months, why the built their own orchestrator, and what they’re working on next. Check out Railway at https://railway.com/ and their blog at https://blog.railway.com. Specifically read the post discussed in this episode. https://blog.railway.com/p/data-center-build-part-one | |||
| Staying Curious with Scott Hanselman | 28 Mar 2025 | 00:42:16 | |
You can't grow in technology without learning new things. But sometimes those new things are actually old things. We talk with Scott about a wide range of interests about software, video games, 3D printing, and food. If you want to know why junior engineers are important for your teams you need to listen.
(0:00) What makes good engineers?
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| Vectorizing Your Databases with Steve Pousty | 21 Mar 2025 | 01:14:10 | |
What exactly is an LLM doing and why do you need to learn so many new terms? Steve Pousty is here to explain that most of those new terms are things you already know. It’s not new technology, it’s new words to describe technologies applied in a new field. We have a wild, ADHD roller coaster looping through embeddings, vectors, RAG, and LLMs. Make sure to keep your hands and arms inside the pod for this one.
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| Testing Your Performance with Ada Lundhe | 14 Mar 2025 | 01:13:22 | |
How Rachel Ray’s crawler lead to Ada developing a new performance testing framework, hyperscale. This leads to a great conversation about the benefits of rust, modern python package managers, and why MySpace went out of business. The importance of connecting what you’re building to business value and understanding every line of code has a cost.
(0:00) Intro Links Referenced
Sponsor FAFO at https://fafo.fm/sponsor | |||
| Getting to Know Kafka with Elad Eldor | 07 Mar 2025 | 00:56:36 | |
Is running Kafka on-prem different than running it in the cloud? You’ll find out from Elad Eldor’s years of experience running, tuning, and troubleshooting Kafka in production environments. Elad didn’t set out to learn Kafka, but he kept asking questions and was given the opportunity to dive deep into system performance. He not only knows what all the columns of iostat mean, he knows what his customers want. Make sure to subscribe to this topic on all your consumers.
(0:00) Intro Links Referenced
https://www.softwaredefinedtalk.com Sponsor FAFO at https://fafo.fm/sponsor | |||
| FAFO Live with Sam Rose | 28 Feb 2025 | 00:51:56 | |
Sam is back with us for a live episode where we discuss important questions such as “is coffee is good?”, “are people on the Internet good writers?”, and “is content creation consistency actually important?” We also share links about turning your hand writing into a font and hacking McDonald’s delivery app. Finally, we wrap up with a new game FAANG GANG.
(0:00) Intro Links Shared
Sponsor VocalCat: https://fafo.fm/vocalcat Sponsor the FAFO Podcast! | |||
| Embracing the Journey with Cassidy Williams | 27 Jan 2026 | 01:00:32 | |
Cassidy Williams was too funny to be a developer so she was banished to the island of misfit devs called DevRel. Along the way she found a passion for memes and dreams and mechanical keyboards. No Oxford commas required. We start 2026 off strong with a few predictions, a medium amount of jokes, and a lot of AI. Subscribe to her hilarious newsletter at cassidoo.co | |||
| Animating the Stack with Sam Rose | 21 Feb 2025 | 01:14:00 | |
This episode is stacked with information. You could even say “full stacked.” Sam has built and run some large scale systems as a SRE at Google, now building backend services at Budibase, and he spends his free time teaching others how systems work at understandable scale. We dive into what makes Google SRE different from other companies, what it’s like to be a parent, and how Sam got started with building animations for his blog. Don’t forget to visit and check out the easter eggs he’s hidden throughout.
0:00 - Intro Links Referenced
The sponsor for this week is YOU! Please share and rate this episode! | |||
| Objecting to storage | 15 Dec 2025 | 00:34:31 | |
Thank you NoPorts for sponsoring If the Internet is a big computer, Amazon s3 is the hard drive. So what happens when a single typo breaks the Internet's hard drive? On this episode of Fork Around and Find Out we review the s3 outage from 2017. It wasn't that long ago and yet it seems everyone has forgotten. Please leave a review Send us an email to let us know what you thought of this episode The music was provided by Dave Eddy Sponsor FAFOFM at https://fafo.fm/sponsor Individual donations are appreciated at https://ko-fi.com/fafofm | |||
| Looking Forward with Tim Banks | 05 Nov 2025 | 01:14:18 | |
Sidero and Oxide Kubecon NA event registration: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/oxidesidero-at-kubecon-north-america-2025-tickets-1538869282449 Tim Banks will optimize your modem baud rate and kick your ass—respectfully. Then they'll teach you how to be a better person. Their career includes systems, sales, and many other facets of business, but who they are is not defined by what they do for money. Join us on this wonderful conversation about understanding who you are and bringing your whole self. Of course it wouldn't be Fork Around and Find Out without some hot takes on AI and the future of tech. Links
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| Staying Calm with Duffie Cooley | 09 Oct 2025 | 01:03:35 | |
Sidero and Oxide Kubecon NA event registration: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/oxidesidero-at-kubecon-north-america-2025-tickets-1538869282449 Duffie has lived through a lot. From multiple startup exits to big company changes. He stays grounded by remembering where he came from and what's important—people. This episode is full of career and life advice from one of the kindest people in the industry. Links Unfortunately, we don't have links for most of the companies Duffie talks about because they've all been acquired. CoreOS, Heptio, and Isovalent are all either gone or part of bigger companies now.
Thankfully the Isovalent products are still going strong. Check them out at isovalent.com | |||
| Colocating Data with David Aronchick | 17 Sep 2025 | 01:22:29 | |
David has worked on a lot of cool tech you know like Kubernetes and Kubeflow, and he's usually a few years ahead of the game. So getting to catch up with him about what he's working on now is probably something you'll want to know about before you have these problems. He has great insights in how to get companies to support open source and how Kubernetes has evolved over time. Links | |||
| Building Trust with Sean Goedecke | 16 Aug 2025 | 01:04:17 | |
What is it like to ship software in big tech? Sean gives us his experience from multiple companies and what he’s learned. It's probably not what you think. It doesn't matter if you're vibe coding features or bash-ing devops, we all need to remember why we were hired. Links: | |||
| Cooling Infrastructure with Ellie Ford | 16 Jul 2025 | 01:09:03 | |
This Episode has a full spread of FAFOFM topics. Ellie has a breadth of knowledge across cloud, on-prem, hardware, and—of course—Kubernetes. We dive into some of the new hardware available as well as the importance of hardware to train the next generation of engineers. A full cycle of interests we think you'll love. 🧡 Links
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| Creating YAML with Ingy döt Net | 18 Jun 2025 | 01:04:48 | |
Today's history lesson is about the non-markup language platform engineers love to hate, YAML Ain't Markup Language (YAML). Ingy tells us all about how and why it started, how it evolved over time, and what's happening next with YS.
Note: sorry about the audio issues in this episode. We did our best to clean it up.
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