Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

It’s our favorite Reality Bites tradition: the end-of-year panel! Tom and Tim bring the whole crew together—Megan, Ariana, Sean, and Dina—for a joyful, honest, and insight-packed reflection on 2025. From global travel and AI breakthroughs to personal milestones, hard-won lessons, and the music that carried us through the year, the team shares what defined a transformative moment for DEX, for Nexthink, and for each of us. Expect candid takes on AI balance, ambition, slop, mediation, vibe-coding, human connection—and a full round of “song of the year” picks from the whole panel. A warm, funny, heartfelt wrap to a huge year.

In this episode of Masters of Data, we're breaking down AWS re:Invent 2025 through David's eyes (and probably a few cups of conference coffee). We dive into the massive crowds, killer customer conversations, and product demos that actually worked—because we're all about building real tech, not smoke-and-mirrors clickbait. David geeks out over Mobot, our AI tool that's making workflows smoother (not just another chatbot in disguise), and how attendees couldn't get enough of the live demos. We also throw some shade at the AI-washing epidemic and dig into why practical AI applications in security and observability actually matter.

Michael Drogalis, founder of ShadowTraffic and former Confluent stream-processing lead, joins Hugh Evans to tackle one of the hardest problems in Kafka: generating realistic synthetic test data. From his work on Kafka Streams, ksqlDB, and the Onyx platform, Michael shares practical insights for engineering teams struggling with testing and demo data at scale.

Without reliability tests, you’re left in the dark about how your system will react to failures. It leaves you open to outages and prevents vital conversations that will help improve your reliability.