Critical Point War Stories with Kevin Riggle

Critical Point

Building better software, one incident at a time. Host Kevin Riggle talks with software engineers about that time they broke production. Whether you're an industry professional, or just curious about what makes the modern Internet run and what happens when it breaks, we bring you stories you haven't heard elsewhere. This is the audio version of the podcast. Watch on YouTube: https://youtube.com/@critical-point Produced by Complex Systems Group (https://complexsystems.group). Part of Critical Point (https://criticalpoint.tv).

Episodes

  1. 07/29/2024 · BONUS

    What is the role of a CISO (Chief Information Security Officer)? - Melanie Ensign - Bonus

    Host Kevin Riggle interviews Melanie Ensign, former Global Head of Security, Privacy, & Engineering Communications for Uber, about what the role of a CISO (Chief Information Security Officer) is.  (Hint: It's not being the smartest security person in the room.) Bonus episode from https://warstories.criticalpoint.tv/episodes/the-reporter-called-her-christmas-day-melanie-ensign-bug-bounty-incident-management-programs Video: https://youtu.be/e60YHYHTFUk Melanie's newsletter: https://discernibleinc.com/newsletter-signupMelanie's company: https://discernibleinc.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melanieensign/Twitter: https://twitter.com/imelunyMastodon: https://defcon.social/@Wednesday To subscribe to the video version of the podcast on YouTube, and watch other Critical Point content, check out https://youtube.com/@critical-point  Credits:  Edited by sleepingsage. Intro & outro - "Senpai Funk" by Paul T. Starr. Used with permission. https://soundcloud.com/ptstarr Produced by Complex Systems Group LLC (https://complexsystems.group).

    17 min

  2. 07/15/2024

    He Won George Hotz's Money - Andrey Petrov

    Host Kevin Riggle interviews Andrey Petrov about three different incidents he was involved with: A programming mistake in high school that filled its alumni's email inboxes, a Twitter analytics site he built that got co-opted as part of a phishing scam, and how he won a bug bounty on the Ethereum blockchain rollup prototype developed by superstar hacker George Hotz. Chapters: (00:00) - Intros/titles (05:02) - The Alumni Email Explosion (18:00) - The Twitter Tracker Takeover (33:09) - The George Hotz Ethereum Rollups Bug Bounty Bonanza (57:02) - Socials/outro Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWuqAePsquoNews coverage of the Twitter Tracker Takeover:“New Twitter Scam Won't Show You Your 'Stalkers'” - NBC Newshttps://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna44123467“Beware: Twitter spam viral application on the loose” - Posilanhttps://www.posilan.com/2011/07/20/beware-twitter-spam-viral-application-on-the-loose/“After a lull of a few months, new Twitter Phishing Scam phrases appear” - Just Practisinghttps://www.justpractising.com/social-tools/twitter/after-a-lull-new-twitter-phishing-scam-phrases-appear/  Andrey's Twitter: https://twitter.com/shazowFarcaster: https://warpcast.com/shazow.ethWeb site: https://shazow.net/ To subscribe to the video version of the podcast on YouTube, and watch other Critical Point content, check out https://youtube.com/@critical-point  Credits:  Edited by sleepingsage. Intro & outro - "Senpai Funk" by Paul T. Starr. Used with permission. https://soundcloud.com/ptstarr Produced by Complex Systems Group LLC (https://complexsystems.group).

    59 min

  3. 06/25/2024

    The Reporter Called Her Christmas Day - Melanie Ensign - Bug Bounty & Incident Management

    Kevin Riggle interviews Melanie Ensign (Discernible Inc.), former Global Head of Security, Privacy, & Engineering Communications for Uber, about building good bug bounty programs, incident management processes, and one especially memorable Christmas morning. Melanie's company: https://discernibleinc.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melanieensign/Twitter: https://x.com/imelunyMastodon: https://defcon.social/@Wednesday Credits:  Edited by sleepingsage. Transcript & subtitles by Melody Wisp. Intro & outro - "Senpai Funk" by Paul T. Starr. Used with permission. https://soundcloud.com/ptstarr Produced by Complex Systems Group LLC (https://complexsystems.group).

    57 min

  4. 06/07/2024

    The Future Is (Literally!) Bright - How Infrastructure Works, by Deb Chachra - Climate, Energy, & the Future

    Kevin Riggle interviews Deb Chachra, professor of engineering at Olin College and author of HOW INFRASTRUCTURE WORKS about climate change, the housing crisis, the green/sustainable energy transition, and how we can build a better world for ourselves and everyone around us. BUY DEB'S BOOK! https://criticalpoint.tv/infrastructure Deb's Twitter: https://twitter.com/debchaBluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/debcha.bsky.socialMastodon: https://saturation.social/@debchaWeb site: http://debcha.org Big Dig podcast from WGBH Boston: https://www.wgbh.org/podcasts/the-big-dig Chapters: Credits:  Edited by sleepingsage. Transcript & subtitles by Melody Wisp. Intro & outro - "Senpai Funk" by Paul T. Starr. Used with permission. https://soundcloud.com/ptstarr Produced by Complex Systems Group LLC (https://complexsystems.group).

    1h 16m

  5. 03/21/2024 · BONUS

    Was Akamai the Velvet Underground of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)? - Abhijit Mehta - Bonus

    Kevin Riggle interviews Abhijit Mehta about Akamai and its role in the history and development of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE).  Bonus episode outtake from https://warstories.criticalpoint.tv/episodes/he-broke-turkish-twitter-abhijit-mehta Abhijit's Twitter: https://twitter.com/AbhijitCMehtaAbhijit's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mehtaabhijit/ To watch the video version of the podcast on YouTube, check out the channel page at https://youtube.com/@critical-point Credits: Transcript/captions by Melody Wisp (https://melodywisp.carrd.co/#commissions). Emoji artwork is provided by Emojitwo (https://emojitwo.github.io/), originally released as Emojione 2.2 (https://www.emojione.com/) by Ranks.com (http://www.ranks.com/) with contributions from the Emojitwo community and is licensed under CC-BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode). Intro & outro - "Senpai Funk" by Paul T. Starr. Used with permission.https://soundcloud.com/ptstarr Critical Point logo and wordmark designed by Timothy James Lopez.https://www.behance.net/lopeztimes Critical Point logo and wordmark copyright ⓒ 2020 Complex Systems Group, LLC.  All Rights Reserved. Produced by Complex Systems Group LLC (https://complexsystems.group).

    13 min

  6. 02/22/2024

    He Broke Turkish Twitter - Abhijit Mehta

    Kevin Riggle interviews Abhijit Mehta, who tells how one tiny dot made almost made a massive difference to Twitter's Turkish ad revenue. Abhijit's Twitter: https://twitter.com/AbhijitCMehtaAbhijit's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mehtaabhijit/ Chapters: (00:00) - Intro (01:25) - How did you find yourself in a place where you could break production? (08:53) - Akamai & the 'aha' moments of product development (15:30) - Google & the Google culture (17:35) - Twitter & what's the difference between brand ads and direct-response ads? (23:58) - How Twitter made its money (27:58) - Re-architecting the fundamental ad platform at Twitter (32:35) - "We had to be really careful!" (34:48) - "There's something really weird happening in Turkey" (37:49) - The meaning of scale (41:02) - "Well we'd thought of all the horses, so we started looking for zebras" (43:48) - "So here's what happened" (49:30) - "So this will work fine almost everywhere" (53:51) - How do you roll things like this out safely? (59:56) - "In general I'm an optimist, there's exciting things to come" (01:03:52) - Thanks & CTAs Credits:Emoji artwork is provided by Emojitwo (https://emojitwo.github.io/), originally released as Emojione 2.2 (https://www.emojione.com/) by Ranks.com (http://www.ranks.com/) with contributions from the Emojitwo community and is licensed under CC-BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode). Intro & outro - "Senpai Funk" by Paul T. Starr. Used with permission.https://soundcloud.com/ptstarr Critical Point logo and wordmark designed by Timothy James Lopez.https://www.behance.net/lopeztimes Critical Point logo and wordmark copyright ⓒ 2020 Complex Systems Group, LLC.  All Rights Reserved. Produced by Complex Systems Group LLC (https://complexsystems.group).

    1h 6m

  7. 02/08/2024

    She Missed the Overnight Push! - Julia Lunetta

    Kevin Riggle interviews Julia Lunetta, who tells us how an ostensibly minor change caused her employer, a financial institution (Upromise Investments), to miss its overnight reconciliation with its banks. Credits: Emoji artwork is provided by Emojitwo (https://emojitwo.github.io/), originally released as Emojione 2.2 (https://www.emojione.com/) by Ranks.com (http://www.ranks.com/) with contributions from the Emojitwo community and is licensed under CC-BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode). Intro & outro - "Senpai Funk" by Paul T. Starr. Used with permission.https://soundcloud.com/ptstarr Critical Point logo and wordmark designed by Timothy James Lopez.https://www.behance.net/lopeztimes Critical Point logo and wordmark copyright ⓒ 2020 Complex Systems Group, LLC.  All Rights Reserved. Produced by Complex Systems Group LLC (https://complexsystems.group).

    52 min

  8. 09/26/2023

    She Made Dropbox Give the Internet Free Watermelon? - Kate Rudolph

    Kevin Riggle interviews Kate Rudolph, who tells how a rolled back commit on her intern project resulted in Dropbox, her employer, offering free watermelon to the entire Internet. Credits: Emoji artwork is provided by Emojitwo (https://emojitwo.github.io/), originally released as Emojione 2.2 (https://www.emojione.com/) by Ranks.com (http://www.ranks.com/) with contributions from the Emojitwo community and is licensed under CC-BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode). Intro & outro - "Senpai Funk" by Paul T. Starr. Used with permission.https://soundcloud.com/ptstarr Critical Point logo and wordmark designed by Timothy James Lopez.https://www.behance.net/lopeztimes Critical Point logo and wordmark copyright ⓒ 2020 Complex Systems Group, LLC.  All Rights Reserved.

    55 min

  9. 09/21/2023

    He Locked Players Out On Launch Day - Zachery Johnson

    Kevin Riggle interviews Zachery Johnson, who tells how an innocent command doomed the database servers and locked players out of Diablo II: Resurrected on Day 2 of launch. Blizzard's blog post on the incident: https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/d2r/t/diablo-ii-resurrected-outages-an-explanation-how-we%E2%80%99ve-been-working-on-it-and-how-we%E2%80%99re-moving-forward/28164 Credits: Intro & outro - "Senpai Funk" by Paul T. Starr. Used with permission.https://soundcloud.com/ptstarr Critical Point logo and wordmark designed by Timothy James Lopez.https://www.behance.net/lopeztimes Critical Point logo and wordmark copyright ⓒ 2020 Complex Systems Group, LLC.  All Rights Reserved.

    1h 25m

  10. 08/09/2023

    Twelve Lines of Code Took Down the Whole Company - Patrick O'Doherty

    Kevin Riggle interviews Patrick O'Doherty, who tells how a seemingly-simple configuration change one Friday morning led to a massive outage. Patrick's web site: https://patrickod.computer Credits: Intro & outro - "Senpai Funk" by Paul T. Starr. Used with permission.https://soundcloud.com/ptstarr Critical Point logo and wordmark designed by Timothy James Lopez.https://www.behance.net/lopeztimes Critical Point logo and wordmark copyright ⓒ 2020 Complex Systems Group, LLC.  All Rights Reserved.

    1h 1m

  11. 08/03/2023

    He Broke (part of) The Internet - Willie Williams

    Kevin Riggle interviews Willie Williams, who tells the story of the time he accidentally took down a major site while an intern at Akamai. Willie's Twitter: https://twitter.com/bigwilliestyle Credits: Intro & outro - "Senpai Funk" by Paul T. Starr. Used with permission.https://soundcloud.com/ptstarr Critical Point logo and wordmark designed by Timothy James Lopez.https://www.behance.net/lopeztimes Critical Point logo and wordmark copyright ⓒ 2020 Complex Systems Group, LLC.  All Rights Reserved.

    47 min
  • 11 Episodes

About

Building better software, one incident at a time. Host Kevin Riggle talks with software engineers about that time they broke production. Whether you're an industry professional, or just curious about what makes the modern Internet run and what happens when it breaks, we bring you stories you haven't heard elsewhere. This is the audio version of the podcast. Watch on YouTube: https://youtube.com/@critical-point Produced by Complex Systems Group (https://complexsystems.group). Part of Critical Point (https://criticalpoint.tv).

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