Screaming in the Cloud Corey Quinn

Prashanth Chandrasekar is the CEO of Stack Overflow who’s tasked with driving the company’s overall strategic direction and results. Prior to this role, Prashanth worked for Rackspace for seven years, rising to Senior VP & GM of the company’s cloud and infrastructure business. He’s also worked for Barclays Investment Bank, Zephyr Management LP, and Capgemini. Prashanth is a member of the board of trustees for the World Affairs Council of San Francisco and holds a B.S. in computer engineering from the University of Maine, a master’s in engineering and engineering management from Cornell, and a MBA from Harvard Business School.

Join Corey and Prashanth as they discuss Prashanth’s tenure at Rackspace and how the company redefined itself in the competitive cloud era, how Stack Overflow has an incredible foundation of support that most companies dream of, how the company has helped developers around the world build the cloud, what Stack Overflow is focused on in 2020 and beyond, how the company is trying to make newcomers feel more welcome, how diversity and inclusion is a top priority for Stack Overflow and initiatives they’re working on in that arena, how Stack Overflow is a bona fide SaaS business, and more.

Bryan Liles is a senior staff engineer at VMware who leads the developer experience group, which focuses on improving Kubernetes productivity. Previously, Bryan worked as an engineer at Heptio, served as the director of Capital One’s cloud engineering team, worked as a cloud engineer at DigitalOcean, and was the CTO at Thunderbolt Labs, among other positions.

Join Corey and Bryan as the explore what it’s like to be on the VMware engineering team, why Bryan spends a lot of his time conducting research, what Corey think the future of Kubernetes looks like and why Bryan agrees, why Twitter’s DM feature leaves much to be desired, what VMware is focusing on over the coming months and years, what Corey’s recipe for the best jokes looks like, how Bryan is focused on being “forever positive” and his advice for other people on taking control of their futures, how Bryan got fired from his first two jobs and what he learned from those experiences, and more.

Jill Rouleau is a senior software engineer at Red Hat Ansible who maintains AWS and other cloud modules. Prior to working on Ansible, they worked as an OpenStack engineer on TripleO, an OpenStack deployment project. Over the years, Jill also worked as a cloud reliability engineer at Canonical Ltd.; was the owner of Bespoke Software Solutions, a consultancy specializing in open source, cloud, and emerging technologies; and served as an operations engineer for Limelight Networks.

Join Corey and Jill as they discuss what it’s like to be on the Ansible engineering team, what Jill thinks about various programming languages, including Python, YAML, and XML, how familiarity with languages can help accelerate open source adoption and contributions, what Jill does to encourage first-time open source contributors to stick around, how answering the what can I do to help? question can be tricky, what Ansible is doing to increase contributions in the future, Jill’s advice on what you can do to start a career in tech, why diversity in experience and backgrounds is critical for tech companies, and more.

Jeffery Smith is the director of production operations at Centro. Over the course of his 20-year career, Jeffery has held a number of technology roles. Prior to joining Centro, he worked at Grubhub as a site reliability engineer manager, a senior systems engineer, and a system admin. Before that, Jeffery also worked for Wolters Kluwer as a website support analyst and for Instant Technology as a Windows/Solaris administrator, among other positions.

Join Corey and Jeffery as the discuss the inspiration behind Jeff’s book, Operational Anti-Patterns with DevOps Solutions, why Jeff believes that change management is one of the biggest anti-patterns that can be found across a lot of organizations, how automation can help optimize change management initiatives, why Corey thinks consultants are incapable of changing company cultures despite what many of them might say, why it’s impossible to learn from the fabled “perfect story,” why no one in an audience should ever leave a conference talk feeling crappy, what Jeff’s book-writing experience was like, and more.

Yulan Lin is a former developer advocate for Google’s Data Studio, a position she held for the two-plus years, and has since gone on to become a software engineer for Google Chrome. Prior to joining Google, Yulan worked as a software engineer for Valador Inc. at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. She also served as a registration analyst for the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship and was a self-employed musician for a bit, working as an accompanist, voice coach, and assistant choir conductor.

Join Corey and Yulan as they discuss how Yulan went from studying chemistry and researching bioinformatics to becoming a developer advocate at Google and a self-described data nerd, how organizations tend to be good at collecting data but not always at making sense of it, why the definition of “big data” changes from one use case to the next, what Google’s Data Studio is and how it supports data visualization, what Yulan does in her developer advocacy role, how data visualizations change depending on the audience, some of the most egregious examples of misusing data visualizations, and more.

Hiro Nishimura is the founder of AWS Newbies, a company that helps newcomers to AWS learn the ropes. She’s also the CEO of 24 Villages, an edtech consulting company, and a technical course instructor at LinkedIn. Prior to these roles, Hiro worked as a system admin and a technical services engineer at Intersection Co., an IT support analyst at Citrin Cooperman, and an IT help desk engineer at CAC American Corporation.

Join Corey and Hiro as they discuss the origin story of AWS Newbies, how it’s hard for any newcomer to get up to speed on AWS quickly, how starting a blog led Hiro to an opportunity to work with LinkedIn, why jargon and acronyms aren’t really that helpful for communicating with most people, how making content more accessible increases audience-wide engagement, why Corey thinks that explaining something to a novice can help you learn more than talking to an expert about the same topic, what made Hiro decide to go out on her own instead of joining a cloud education company, using Twitter to get business, how Hiro is overcoming health issues as an entrepreneur, and more.