In this episode, we chat with Cisco’s head of developer content, community, and events, Michael Chenetz. We discuss everything from KubeCon to kindness and Legos! Michael delves into some of the main themes he heard from creators at KubeCon, and we discuss methods for increasing adoption of new concepts in your organization. We have a conversation about attending live conferences, COVID protocol, and COVID shaming, and then we talk about how Legos can be used in talks to demonstrate concepts.

It’s time to shoot for the stars with Dan Isla, VP of Product at itopia, to talk about everything from astronomical importance of reliability to time zones on Mars. Dan’s trajectory has been a propulsion of jobs bordering on the science fiction, with a history at NASA, modernizing cloud computing for them, and loads more. Dan discusses the finite room for risk and failure in space travel with an anecdote from his work on Curiosity.

You might be familiar with GameDays at this point. From watching our Introduction to GameDay webinar, viewing our Demo video, and reading our tutorial, you’ve probably learned that GameDays were created with the goal of increasing reliability by purposely creating major failures on a regular basis. Better yet, perhaps your own team has run a GameDay and learned something new about their services’ behavior during failure scenarios.

Natalie Conklin, tamer of chaos and Head of Engineering here at Gremlin, joins us to talk about embracing change, working alongside each other, and building more reliable systems. Natalie has a talk coming up at DevOpsDays Boise which she has titled “Embracing Change Fearlessly.” Her talk is oriented around enabling teams to take calculated risks and having the guts to take those risks. Natalie spent time working in India, which helped solidify her “fearlessly” philosophy.