Spoons (Daniel Spoonhower) - On building Lightstep, being customer focused, developing systems at Google scale and much more - #12

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1. 

   S1 · E17 · 14 Jan 2022 · 1 hr 47 min

   Michael Lynch - On quitting google for indie hacking, bootstrapping to $450K+ ARR in public, writing personal retrospectives and more - #17

   Michael Lynch is the founder of TinyPilot . After doing software engineering at Microsoft and Google for 7 years, Michael decided in 2018 to quit and start working for himself by building small software businesses. From years of negative profit to now building a $450K+ ARR hardware business, Michael joins the show to chat about what made him quit his cushy job at Google, how he builds in public with monthly retrospectives, what he has learned over the 3 years indie hacking and much more.

2. 

   E17 · 12 Nov 2021 · 1 hr 24 min

   Cory Watson - Leading observability teams at Twitter & Stripe, how to succeed in a new org, effective ways to advocate for your team and more - #16

   Cory is currently a Solutions Engineer at Jeli.io and very well known in the community for his work on Observability. His career in observability began at Twitter where he managed the observability team and then he joined Stripe, where he created and led the observability team, this time around as a Principal Engineer. We talk to him about how he got his start in customer support and the role it played in the later part of his career. We discuss his time at Twitter where there was a power outage in the data center on the day he joined and how once he had to stay up all night dealing with…

3. 

   S1 · E16 · 12 Oct 2021 · 1 hr 14 min

   Ashwin Kumar - On learning new things by breaking them down, the secret to winning >$100k from hackathons, the art of storytelling, and much more - #15

   Ashwin is a Startup Partnership Lead at Stripe. From web development to co-founding a YC startup, to deep learning, Ashwin has a knack for picking up new skills extremely quickly. In this episode, we chat about the methods he employed to successfully make these transitions, learnings/tips from winning 30+ hackathons in a row, and what engineers can gain from better story-telling.

4. 

   E15 · 12 Sep 2021 · 1 hr 6 min

   Bruno Connelly - Building and leading the global SRE org at LinkedIn - #14

   Bruno Connelly is a VP of Engineering at LinkedIn. He leads the Site Engineering org responsible for LinkedIn's production infrastructure. He joins the show to talk about his journey in tech - from teaching himself how to code at a young age, building, maintaining and reverse engineering software as a teenager, building ISPs in the early part of his career (there are some fun stories that involve sleeping in the data center) to leading the SRE org at LinkedIn over the last decade. He talks about the early days at LinkedIn that involved a lot of firefighting to keep the site up, how the team…

5. 

   S1 · E14 · 14 Aug 2021 · 1 hr 24 min

   Lorin Hochstein - On how Netflix learns from incidents, software as socio-technical systems, writing persuasively and more - #13

   With 5+ years of experience building resilient systems at the Netflix scale, Lorin joins the show to chat about his favorite incident story, the path that led him to doing chaos engineering (and later away from it), and advocating for a dedicated analyst to talk to people after an incident. Throughout the conversation, Lorin shares his philosophy and tips on how to learn from incidents, what engineers can gain from writing better, and why some metrics may not be as useful as you think.

6. 

   S1 · E12 · 11 Jun 2021 · 1 hr 13 min

   Emmanuel Ameisen - On production ML at Stripe scale, leading 100+ ML projects, iterating fast, and much more - #11

   Having led 100+ ML projects at Insight and built ML systems at Stripe scale, Emmanuel joins the show to chat about how to build useful ML products and what happens next when the model is in production. Throughout the conversation, Manu shares stories and advice on topics like the common mistakes people make when starting a new ML project, what's similar and different about the lifecycle of ML systems compared to traditional software, and writing a technical book.

7. 

   E11 · 7 May 2021 · 1 hr 8 min

   Todd Underwood - On lessons from running ML systems at Google for a decade, what it takes to be a ML SRE, challenges with generalized ML platforms and much more - #10

   Todd is a Sr Director of Engineering at Google where he leads Site Reliability Engineering teams for Machine Learning. Having recently presented on how ML breaks in production , by examining more than a decade of outage postmortems at Google, Todd joins the show to chat about why many ways that ML systems break in production have nothing to do with ML, what's different about engineering reliable systems for ML, vs traditional software (and the many ways that they are similar), what he looks for when hiring ML SREs, and more.

8. 

   E10 · 23 Apr 2021 · 1 hr 13 min

   Evan Estola - On recommendation systems going bad, hiring ML engineers, giving constructive feedback, filter bubbles and much more - #9

   Evan Estola ( https://twitter.com/estola ) is a Director of Engineering at Flatiron Health where he's leading software engineering teams focused on building Machine Learning products. Throughout this episode, Evan shares various stories when recommendation systems didn't work as expected, like this one time when members saw mathematically worst recommendations for meetups near them. He also shares why Schenectady, NY pops up on some lists of most popular cities and the story behind the Wall Street Journal article titled 'Orbitz steers Mac users to pricier hotels'. We also discuss skills Evan…

9. 

   E9 · 9 Apr 2021 · 1 hr 2 min

   Uma Chingunde - On managing migrations, growing engineering teams and much more - #8

   Uma is a VP of Engineering at Render. In this episode, she shared with us her insights on how to successfully manage infrastructure migrations. We discussed the importance of communicating the "why" behind a migration, identifying success metrics, creating a culture where migrations are identified as highly impactful projects and much more. Uma also shared stories where parts of a migration didn't go as planned, how the team fixed the issue and the kind of engineers she thinks would make good tech leads for these projects. We had a great time speaking with Uma! Our major focus in this…

10. 

    E8 · 20 Mar 2021 · 1 hr 7 min

    Charity Majors - On database outages, journey as a co-founder, thriving under pressure and growing as an engineer - #7

    Charity Majors (https://twitter.com/mipsytipsy) is the co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb.io. Before this she worked at Facebook, Parse and Linden Lab on infrastructure and developer tools, and always seemed to wind up running the databases. She is the co-author of Database Reliability Engineering book and also has an amazing blog at charity.wtf. We love the content in her blogs and have learned a lot from them. We had a lot of fun speaking with Charity in this lively conversation! We learned about her journey from being an engineer to co-founding Honeycomb, what it was like being on-call when…