Software Defined Interviews

Ben Savage is CEO and founder of Veritas Automata, a consultancy doing AI, blockchain and IoT, and CTO at Apex, where one of his teams built the Little Caesars Pizza Portal. He explains why those pickup cubbies mostly don't need heat (people just feel better when they're warm), what a logistics check call is, and why a routing algorithm is really a search algorithm. Whitney and Coté ask how a consultancy keeps its bench busy, and when code is too safety-critical to let AI write it: a robot can't "-ish" a command. Also: model routers, decision models, and turning SEC filings into corporate theme songs. You can watch the video version of this episode as well, if you prefer that kind of thing. Mentions: Veritas Automata Apex Order Pickup, the food pickup lockers. Ben on LinkedIn Truth in Automation: The Deep Dive, the Veritas Automata podcast. The Domino's Pizza Tracker Theory of Everything, from Planet Money. Business!, Louie Zong's album of corporate music. Special Guest: Ben Savage.Special Guest: Ben Savage.

Rick Clark is Global Head of Cloud Advisory at UST, and co-founded OpenStack. His argument is that enterprise architecture is nearly extinct, killed off by fifteen years of shifting every decision left, and that this is how one insurance company he worked with ended up running over 50 secrets managers in production. Whitney and Coté push on whether platform engineering was meant to solve exactly that, and on what a modern enterprise architect would do instead - write the rules the platform enforces. The back half is agents: why nobody is ready to run them in production, and the difference between a rule an agent cannot break and one it must not break. You can watch the video version of this episode as well, if you prefer that kind of thing. Mentions: Rick on LinkedIn, which is where he sends people. The Construct, his newsletter on agentic workloads in production. From tokenmaxxing to tokenomics: you're still doing it wrong, his first op-ed for The Stack. Special Guest: Rick Clark.Special Guest: Rick Clark.

Viktor Farcic is a developer advocate at Upbound, runs the DevOps & AI Toolkit YouTube channel, and was last on the show back in episode 89. Whitney and Coté start with the animated bedtime stories he has started making - tech history told as fairy tales with a nightmare at the end - which he began after catching sight of himself in a mirror and deciding people should not have to watch that. From there it is what his working day looks like now, with 20 to 50 agents running at once, a coder and a tester and a reviewer who are not allowed to do each other's jobs and argue until they agree, and a private YouTube channel where the agents post recorded tests for him to review on his phone in the morning. The last stretch is money: why he thinks AI is cheap next to what a person costs, why he expects a bloodbath as industries fail to adapt, and a walk through Docker, Chef, Puppet, Ansible and HashiCorp on whether an open source company can ever turn a profit on its own. Check it out in YouTube, if you prefer that kind of thing. Mentions: DevOps & AI Toolkit on YouTube, where the bedtime stories live. devopstoolkit.live - the blog and video archive. devopstoolkit.ai - the product. Viktor on GitHub. DevOps Paradox, his other podcast. Episode 89, his first time on the show. Special Guest: Viktor Farcic. Show notes written by AI with a human's lazy-look.Special Guest: Viktor Farcic.

Lin Sun is Head of Open Source at Solo.io, a recent KubeCon + CloudNativeCon program co-chair, and an emeritus member of the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee. Whitney and Coté start with the keynote she gave in Amsterdam, where she flew a drone over 13,000 people so an AI model on her laptop could score how engaged the audience was - it broke twice on stage, and Whitney, who was in the room, remembers nothing else from that day. Lin’s account of why it worked anyway is a checklist: a wow factor, something the audience does every day so they can relate to it, real engagement, and a planted surprise. From there they get into the part of co-chairing nobody sees, where three thousand submissions become about two hundred talks, how the AI-written ones get spotted, and why the CNCF cannot simply run a detector over the pile. The rest is open source as a job - twenty years of it, Istio at IBM through to Solo, and a straight answer to the question her own reports keep asking her, which is whether working on open source makes you less strategic to the company paying you. You can watch the video version of this episode as well, if you prefer that kind of thing. Mentions: Lin Sun on LinkedIn, where she says she is most active. Solo.io - the book “AI Agents on Kubernetes” is a free download from the homepage, and is being refreshed for Salt Lake City. The Agentic AI Foundation and its five projects: Model Context Protocol, goose, AGENTS.md, agentgateway, and the agent-to-agent protocol. Agent Substrate, the Google project that rethinks how agents get scheduled. Special Guest: Lin Sun. Header photo from the CNCF.Special Guest: Lin Sun.

Jason Yee is a Staff Technical Advocate at Datadog and one of three global co-chairs of DevOpsDays, and both jobs turn out to be mostly about getting other people to talk. Whitney and Coté ask him how the DevOpsDays machine actually works - local teams run the events, a global core team advises, and the co-chairs exist as a final escalation point - and what happens to conference sponsorship now that DevOps is mature rather than hot. His answer is that the sponsors who do well have stopped counting leads and started running workshops, on the grounds that a Lego giveaway gets you a list of people who wanted Lego. They also get into why DevOpsDays has a human streak that other tech subcultures never picked up, with Jason putting most of the "blame" on John Allspaw and safety science; Jason's Ignite talks in Amsterdam, including a DevOps children's book read aloud in his own bad Dutch; whether people drawn to systems are simply a particular kind of person, tested here by asking what everyone does when they open a badly loaded dishwasher; and Jason's actual day job, which is a technical storytelling team he thinks is the only one of its kind - talking Datadog engineers and executives into telling their own stories, then ghostwriting the session description and outline so they have something to react to instead of a blank page. DevOpsDays Portland is back for the first time since 2021, September 8 through 10, with Whitney giving both a workshop and a talk. Jason has no home page and would rather you did not look for him: "go touch grass, get outside, get some fresh air." If you don't like grass, and must Internet, he is on LinkedIn. Mentions: Jason Yee on LinkedIn. DevOpsDays Portland, September 8-10, back for the first time since 2021. Every DevOpsDays, on a map. John Allspaw and Paul Hammond, "10+ Deploys Per Day", the Velocity 2009 talk that comes up. Special Guest: Jason Yee.Special Guest: Jason Yee.

Michael Rishi Forrester does AI workforce transformation at Accenture LearnVantage, after three years at KodeKloud and about thirty years in IT before that. Whitney and Coté talk with him about running tabletop role-playing games with AI. He built his 19-year-old son a homebrew campaign on top of Lancer, the sci-fi mech game, in about 20 hours instead of the 60 to 100 it would have taken him before - and got a website, a virtual tabletop and some Discord bots out of it. What breaks is the interesting part: there was a night when every shot did one damage, because the model had quietly stopped using the dice harness and started doing the math itself. From there it turns into an argument about where AI actually pays off at work. Michael’s position is that the ROI is at the workflow level and there is no organizational ROI to go find, that read-only work over more information than a person can hold is where it currently earns its keep, and that everything he has had success with is a bound system with a finite rule set. Whitney names the through-line: what can be deterministic should be deterministic, and if you need an LLM, scope it tightly and have it write the deterministic thing. It ends on mantis shrimp. You can watch the video version of this episode as well, if you prefer that kind of thing. Mentions: Michael Rishi Forrester’s home page on the World Wide Web. Antiphon: The Game, the homebrew Lancer campaign - the whole story, the missions, the board, and the sea-creature capital ships. Michael on LinkedIn, where he posts most often. Lancer, the sci-fi mech game Antiphon is built on top of. Special Guest: Michael Rishi Forrester.

Bryan Ross is a Field CTO at GitLab, a role he describes as straddling sales, customer success, and solution architecture - or, as one of his customers renamed it, chief therapy officer, which he has since turned into a Substack. Whitney and Coté talk with him about what the job actually looks like: getting catapulted into an account by the sales team, asking a lot of questions, and finding out about four minutes in that the tech problem is a human one. He makes the case that changing job titles - sysadmin, DevOps engineer, platform engineer, now context engineer - is mostly an organization trying to change its culture without knowing how, and that the real difference is mindset: keeping a box alive versus serving one team versus building a product. There’s a long stretch on metrics, including Goodhart’s law, why every metric needs a balancing one, and why he cared more about how many VMs were being decommissioned than how many were being provisioned. Also: whether anyone actually needs to ship faster (Coté’s pharmacy doesn’t), the UK Postal Service discovering that a friendly postman beat a modernized delivery fleet on customer satisfaction, and why copying Google is usually the wrong move. On AI, Bryan’s argument is that it will end up like spreadsheets - a few experts building the macros, everyone else using and lightly tinkering with what they made - and that which model you use should be a finance and data governance decision, not a developer one. Plus the hazard of a nicely formatted report: the pastel-shading trick for spreadsheets nobody will check, and why an AI scoring something 6 out of 10 gets the same unearned benefit of the doubt. Also, ordering pizza in Amsterdam. You can watch the video version of this episode as well, if you prefer that kind of thing. Mentions: Bryan Ross’s home page on the World Wide Web, which links to everything else. Chief Therapy Officer, Bryan’s Substack. Bryan on LinkedIn. Coté's list of "laws," anecdotes, and common shit people say. See also Hacker Laws. Special Guest: Bryan Ross.

W. Edwards Deming was a physicist, statistician, and quality theorist who taught post-war Japanese manufacturers what eventually became the Toyota Production System - and, decades later, DevOps. John Willis, one of the founders of the DevOps movement and the author of a book on Deming, walks Whitney and Coté through that lineage: Deming's system of profound knowledge (theory of knowledge, variation, psychology, and systems thinking), how it landed at Toyota, and how it threads through Lean software development into modern delivery practice. From there, the conversation turns to what the industry is getting wrong about AI: bragging about K-LOC and token counts instead of value, treating probabilistic systems with old deterministic notions of risk, and forgetting the social-technical lessons we already paid for. Along the way: VC moats and the buy-versus-build conversation inside large organizations, David Foster Wallace's "This is Water" and the ladder of inference, Jevons Paradox and whether AI gets us a three-day work week or a six-day one, and what CS students should be learning besides how to code. Also a brief detour into why John would want fifteen minutes with Bill Clinton. You can watch the video version of this episode as well, if you prefer that kind of thing. Mentions: John on LinkedIn - the entry point to his author portal and writing. John's book on Deming, Deming's Journey to Profound Knowledge. John's book on AI, Rebels of Reason. The DevOps Handbook, which John co-authored with Gene Kim, Jez Humble, and Patrick Debois. Donella Meadows, Thinking in Systems. Steven Spear, The High-Velocity Edge. Mary and Tom Poppendieck, Lean Software Development. David Foster Wallace, "This is Water" commencement speech. The 1980 NBC documentary If Japan Can, Why Can't We?.

Whitney and Coté talk with Emily Long, CEO and co-founder of Edera, about building a hardened container runtime that secures infrastructure foundations instead of chasing detect-and-respond alerts. Emily describes how Edera lets teams swap in a new container runtime without re-platforming or adopting yet another zero-trust migration, and why the "zero days as the new hotness" landscape makes that kind of structural change worth doing. The conversation also covers her jump from COO to CEO - the ambiguity of the COO title, what actually changes when you're the one absorbing every decision - and what it's like raising a deep-tech Series A as an all-woman founding team, including the downside-vs.-upside question pattern VCs fall into and the now-classic "I just Googled Kubernetes and I know more than you do" pitch moment. They open with a long detour on to-do lists, Claude Code, and whether AI tooling just keeps expanding the list of things you feel obligated to do. You can watch the video version of this episode as well, if you prefer that kind of thing. Edera. Emily Long on LinkedIn. Rachel Chalmers, an Edera investor, was on the show a few episodes back. Special Guest: Emily Long.

Whitney and Coté discuss with Josh Berkus (Red Hat, Kubernetes contributor) how liberal and fine arts degrees (philosophy, photography, sculpture, pottery) apply to tech careers. Berkus details how early hardware experience influenced his database performance work, noting hardware's renewed relevance with AI and multi-arch computing. The conversation covers Sun Microsystems’ 1990s internet role, internal politics, and its MySQL/Postgres strategy. They examine open source's shift from end-user to vendor-driven models, foundations' roles, and contributor incentives. Berkus describes Kubernetes release processes, contributor-experience programs, and its resilience to low-quality AI contributions. You can also watch the video recording of this episode if you prefer that kind of thing. Josh's home page on the World Wide Web. And, check out Josh's pottery store, Fuzzy Chef.Special Guest: Josh Berkus.