On-Call Nightmares Podcast
48 episodes - English - Latest episode: almost 4 years ago - ★★★★ - 11 ratingsBeing on-call in a tech team can lead to some interesting stories. On this podcast we'll talk to a variety of people from the world of technology, discuss their experiences in on-call and find out some nightmares they survived.
Hosted by Jay Gordon - Twitter @jaydestro
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Episodes
On-Call Nightmares: Back in a New York Groove
May 08, 2020 00:00 - 1 minute - 960 KBHey friends, it's been a while. I haven't been on-call, but I have been working on meeting tons of new people for new content for this podcast. I can't do it alone though. Would you like to be on the podcast? Reach out! Twitter: https://twitter.com/OnCallNightmare Email: [email protected] The commitment for your story is under 35 minutes and you'll have a lasting testimony of your experience on-call.
Episode 46 - Year in Review with Corey Quinn of The Duckbill Group
December 23, 2019 00:00 - 36 minutes - 49.9 MBWell 2019 is just about done, that means one more podcast. This time I break format a bit and welcome on Corey Quinn. Corey and I take a look at how he founded the company and how they help people save money on their AWS bills. Then Corey and I take a dive into some of the topics that impacted the cloud in 2019. A fun conversation to end 2019! Corey is the Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group. Corey specializes in helping companies improve their AWS bills by making them smaller...
Episode 45 - Kelsey Hightower - Google
December 19, 2019 00:00 - 34 minutes - 23.4 MBIt's the One Year Anniversary of On-Call Nightmares. When I set out to start this podcast, there were a few people on a list that i just felt I needed to speak to. I finally checked off the first name I had on the list. Episode 45 is a conversation with Google Principal Developer Advocate, Kelsey Hightower. Kelsey Hightower is a Technologist working at Google while learning in public. https://twitter.com/kelseyhightower https://github.com/kelseyhightower/kubernetes-the-hard-way ...
Episode 44 - Silvia Botros - Twilio
November 21, 2019 00:00 - 34 minutes - 31.1 MBThis week I chat with Silvia Botros also known as the @dbsmasher from Twitter. I learn about her experiences on-call for databases, motherhood and an affinity for breaking things. An awesome conversation with an incredible person. Silvia Botros is a Sr Principal Engineer at Twilio. She focuses on ways to break databases but is also talented at finding bugs in all your software. Whether she helped build it or not. When she is not helping Twilio Sendgrid send billions of emails a da...
Episode 43 - Damon Edwards - Rundeck
November 14, 2019 00:00 - 30 minutes - 21.1 MBOne of the best parts of attending DOES 2019 in Las Vegas was meeting so many of the leaders and innovators from the world of DevOps. Damon Edwards's work is extremely well known in the DevOps field and I was lucky enough to discuss his history during this interview. Damon Edwards is a Co-Founder of Rundeck Inc., the makers of Rundeck, the popular open source Operations Management Platform. Damon has spent over 15 years working with both the technology and business ends of IT Opera...
Episode 42 - John Willis - Red Hat
October 31, 2019 00:00 - 36 minutes - 25 MBThe number 42 has a huge meaning for baseball fans. Jackie Robinson wore 42, Mariano Rivera wore 42 and now one of the greatest in DevOps, John Willis wears the On-Call Nightmares podcast episode #42! Learn from John's past, his present and his future at Red Hat. We got together at the 2019 DevOps Enterprise Summit in Las Vegas to chat about all things DevOps and a lil Yankees baseball (not much). By far one of the most important episodes of the podcast yet. John Willis has worked...
Episode 41 - JJ Asghar - IBM
October 24, 2019 18:14 - 41 minutes - 28.7 MBOn-Call Nightmares returns to talk to the man from Texas who represents Big Blue, JJ Asghar. JJ and I discuss his start as a 15-year-old in technology and how on-call has morphed over the years. JJ works at IBM on the IBM cloud as a Developer Advocate. He’s focusing on the IBM Kubernetes Service trying to make companies and users have a successful on boarding to the Cloud Native ecosystem. He lives and grew up in Austin, Texas. He enjoys a good strong stout, hoppy IPA, and some te...
Episode 40 - Ryan Kitchens - Netflix
October 10, 2019 00:00 - 33 minutes - 23.2 MBA big milestone, episode 40! This week I speak with Netflix SRE Ryan Kitchen about birds, DR and movies! Ryan Kitchens has been in a variety of positions in software over the past ten years allowing him to experience the good and the bad, the amazing and the bizarre. As an SRE with a film degree, he currently works at Netflix on the CORE team, focused on ensuring availability. The background of the team spans incident management and analysis, resilience engineering, and human fac...
Episode 39 - Daniel Bentley - tilt.dev
September 25, 2019 17:45 - 33 minutes - 45.4 MBThis week I speak with Dan Bentley of tilt.dev! Dan is a software engineer who's currently fixing microservice development as CEO of Tilt ( https://tilt.dev ). Before that, he was at Google for 11 years and then Twitter, working on tools for devs and tools for non-developers. He's opened for The Who and has checks from Donald Knuth. Transcript: https://aka.ms/AA64hk6 https://tilt.dev https://twitter.com/dbentley
Episode 38 - Gene Kim - IT Revolution
September 12, 2019 00:00 - 35 minutes - 24.6 MBLive from DevOpsDays Portland, I speak with Gene Kim, Author of "The Phoenix Project" and the upcoming book "The Unicorn Project." When I started this podcast, one of my goals was to talk to Gene about his own experiences in IT, thankfully this trip to DevOpsDays in PDX helped that happen. Cameos by Jennifer Davis, Matty Stratton, Jason Yee and Terri Haber! Gene Kim is a multiple award-winning CTO, researcher and author, and has been studying high-performing technology organization...
Episode 37 - Jason Schuster - Stratasan
September 05, 2019 00:00 - 28 minutes - 19.3 MBThe On-Call Nightmares Listener feedback system works! Without your stories I just cannot do this podcast. Thankfully, Jason Schuster reached out to share his experience in a 20 year career in technology. Share in his nightmare on this latest episode! Transcript: https://aka.ms/AA606at Jason's Bio: After graduating with a BFA in theater design in 2000 I landed my first job admiring HPUX servers. I took a low ball salary in exchange for training. While I got the training it took...
Episode 36 - Michael Stahnke - CircleCI
August 29, 2019 00:00 - 30 minutes - 21.1 MBLive from DevOpsDays Chicago! I meet up with Ops Veteran, Michael Stahnke as we discuss his career in technology. From the weird days of AIX systems all the way till his time now at CricleCI, Michael has plenty of great stories. Special cameos by Jason Yee and Joshua Zimmerman (our laugh track). Michael Stahnke is VP of Platform Engineering at CircleCI. Prior to this role, he was at Puppet running engineering for Puppet Enterprise, Puppet Open source, and SRE. He is an author for...
Episode 35 - Mike Grayson - Paychex
August 22, 2019 00:00 - 30 seconds - 18 MBGetting paid is a pretty dang important part of your job. Mike Grayson and the team at Paychex are working to make sure that the databases that handle that are always online. This week I catch up with Mike Grayson who's been a great advocate for the database ops community. Mike is a Senior Database Engineer specializing in DevOps, MongoDB, and Apache Kafka based out of Rochester, New York. He is a MongoDB Master and speaker in the Oracle, SQL Server and MongoDB communities. Transc...
Episode 34 - Xander Grzywinski - Microsoft
August 08, 2019 00:00 - 35 minutes - 24.6 MBX gonna give it to ya! Xander from the Microsoft Azure Kubernetes SRE Team joins me to talk about his history on-call and more! Xander is a Site Reliability Engineer at Microsoft, he currently slings containers on Azure Kubernetes Service. Previous to Microsoft, he did all the things with retail tech at both Starbucks and Target. You are always welcome to send him your favorite cat pictures. @XanderGrzy https://github.com/salaxander Full Transcript: https://aka.ms/AA5r8ja
Episode 33 - Ben Halpern - DEV Community
August 01, 2019 00:00 - 42 minutes - 29.1 MBOn-call can come in different shapes and sizes. Sometimes it's a group of developers who are attacking a problem to keep other developers afloat. That's what Ben Halpern and the team at the DEV Community are up to. Founder of DEV, Canadian, generalist software developer who writes a lot of Ruby. Transcript: https://aka.ms/AA5r8ja https://dev.to/ben https://twitter.com/bendhalpern
Episode 32 - Matty Stratton - PagerDuty
July 25, 2019 00:00 - 50 minutes - 40.1 MBThis week I speak with my friend Matty Stratton as we discuss the hard times and the processes to make them better. Matty Stratton is a DevOps Advocate at PagerDuty, where he helps dev and ops teams advance the practice of their craft and become more operationally mature. He collaborates with PagerDuty customers and industry thought leaders in the broader DevOps community, and back when he drove, his license plate actually said “DevOps”. Matty has over 20 years experience in IT op...
Episode 31 - Jason Yee - Datadog
July 18, 2019 00:00 - 34 minutes - 23.6 MBDatadog Dash was this week which meant I was lucky enough to catch up with my friend, Jason Yee. We discuss his time in tech, measuring everything and a lot more! Jason is a technical evangelist at Datadog, where he works to inspire developers and ops engineers with the power of metrics and monitoring. Previously, he was the community manager for DevOps & Performance at O'Reilly Media and a software engineer at MongoDB. He's currently exploring the world while living as a nomad and...
Episode 30 - Tim Yocum - InfluxDB
July 11, 2019 00:00 - 41 minutes - 28.8 MBEpisode 30 is a waterfall of information you'll soak up and learn a ton from. Things get a bit wet and wild for Tim in this episode of On-Call Nightmares! A great discussion about a long history in tech, the things you just can't plan for and more. Tim is an engineering manager at InfluxData with over 20 years of experience. His technical interests include high-performance, scalable, fault-tolerant cloud infrastructure, interconnected hybrid architecture, containerization (c14n?) ...
Episode 29 - Molly Struve - Kenna Security
July 03, 2019 00:00 - 33 minutes - 23.3 MBThis week's conversation is with Molly Struve of Kenna Security! We discuss her path to tech, how her team worked to fix their on-call rotation and more! Molly Struve is the Lead Site Reliability Engineer at Kenna Security. She joined Kenna in 2015 and has had the opportunity to work on some of the most challenging aspects of Kenna’s code base. This includes scaling Elasticsearch, sharding MySQL databases, and creating an infrastructure that can grow as fast as Kenna's business. Wh...
Episode 28 - Jason Hand - Microsoft
June 27, 2019 20:08 - 44 minutes - 30.7 MBThis week my homie supreme, Jason Hand joins me on On-Call Nightmares. We talk monitoring, SRE and getting in the van. Jason has spent the last 5 years connecting with technologists around the world on ideas related to balancing system and service reliability with the speed and agility required in today's digital world. Previously at VictorOps, Jason authored four books on the subjects of Site Reliability Engineering, Post-Incident Reviews, and ChatOps and was named "DevOps Evange...
Episode 27 - Joseph Marhee - Packet
June 13, 2019 00:00 - 40 minutes - 27.6 MBThis week, I bring a friend from a past job to share his insights on observability and other aspects of a weird life in technology. This is one of my favorite chats because Joe is one of my favorite people in tech. "Customer-concerned Operations and Systems workers turned Cloud Native lab-rat at Packet, previously of DigitalOcean, IBM, Recurly, Platform9 Systems. Approach to Production engineering relies on an iterative combination of programmatically-led audits, collaborative rem...
Episode 26 - Jacquelyne Grindrod - MedStack
June 06, 2019 00:00 - 29 minutes - 20.1 MBThis week I speak with Jacquie of MedStack! We get insights into how her career started including a nightmare where she's thrown right into the fire. Jacquie has worked in FinTech, media, and is currently in eHealth working at MedStack, a digital app platform for the healthcare industry. She's passionate about solving problems with a holistic approach, and bridging the gaps in communication and systems. Building something meaningful is important to her – from making healthcare acces...
Episode 25 - Quintessence Anx - Logz.io
May 30, 2019 00:00 - 29 minutes - 20.5 MBLive from DevOpsDays Toronto, I meet up with my fellow DevRel road warrior, Quintessence Anx of Logz.io. Quintessence bring years of experience and compassion to her role. Quintessence is a champion for mindfulness around accessibility and diversity. In her own words... I’ve worked in the IT community for over 10 years, including as a database administrator and a DevOps / Cloud / Infrastructure engineer. I was a core contributor to Stark & Wayne’s SHIELD project, which adds backu...
Episode 24 - Nathen Harvey - Google
May 23, 2019 00:00 - 38 minutes - 26.1 MBLive from ChefConf 2019, I talk with Nathen Harvey about outages, lunch and a life spent in technology. This was one of my favorite podcast interviews because Nathen is one of my major influences and mentors in what we do in Developer Advocacy and Relations in technology. He's taught me so much over the years and has done his best to check in with me during the tough moments, like another member of the on-call team might do during a rough incident. Nathen Harvey, Cloud Developer...
Episode 23 - Rich Burroughs - Gremlin
May 16, 2019 00:00 - 36 minutes - 25.1 MBThis week we speak with Gremlin's Community Manager, Rich Burroughs, on his time on-call. We discuss power outages, active-active datacenters and other perspectives from a long career in technology. Rich Burroughs is a Community Manager at Gremlin where he’s focused on growing and strengthening the Chaos Engineering community. He previously worked at Puppet as an SRE and in other operational roles over the years. Rich spent about twenty years of his career in oncall rotations, and ...
Bonus Episode - Jay Gordon - "bits of //build, Overcoming Failure"
May 09, 2019 00:00 - 23 minutes - 16.1 MBBonus! ME!!! I spoke at Microsoft's community event "bits of //build" about overcoming failure. This is a culture talk I have been working on that really focuses on my personal road through failure and recovery. Thanks to all who sat in the room and took part. https://twitter.com/jaydestro
Episode 22 - Mike Julian - The Duckbill Group
May 09, 2019 00:00 - 40 minutes - 27.6 MBThis week I get a chance to speak to someone who just wants to save you some money on your cloud bills. Mike shares some great stories and gives insight to what he and Corey Quinn are working on at the Duckbill Group. Mike is the CEO of The Duckbill Group, a consultancy helping companies fix the horrifying AWS bill by both lowering the size of it and helping them understand where the money is going. Mike also hosts the Real World DevOps Podcast, is the author of O’Reilly’s Practica...
Episode 21 - Arup Chakrabarti - PagerDuty
April 25, 2019 00:00 - 38 minutes - 26.7 MBWho wakes up the people who get woken up for on-call? The folks at PagerDuty are responsible for providing pager notifications to teams across the globe. In this interview I talk with Arup Chakrabarti who's dedicated to get you your alerts. Arup has been working in the space of software operations since 2007. He started out at as an Operations Engineer at Amazon, helping to reduce customer defects with multiple teams for the Amazon Marketplace. Since then, he has managed and built...
Episode 20 - Nick Maludy - Encore Technologies
April 18, 2019 00:00 - 38 minutes - 26.1 MBLET'S GET WEIRD. LET'S GET WEIRD. LET'S GET WEIRD. This week we talk with Nick Maludy of Encore Technologies on some "weird on-prem" he managed when working as a Defense Contractor. Nick brings unique insight into having to manage critical systems from 10,000 feet above the ground. After graduating Nick Maludy worked for ~5 years at a Department of Defense contractor called SilverBlock Systems. Here they developed an "integration platform" for performing sensor research for next...
Episode 19 - Shayon Mukherjee - Intercom
April 11, 2019 00:00 - 32 minutes - 22 MBYou know that little box on the lower bottom of the window you see that asks you if you need help on websites? Well Shayon is part of the team that keeps that online for businesses across the planet. We chat a bit about his time on-call and other topics. Shayon is a System Engineer at Intercom. He is part of the internal infrastructure team that is responsible for Intercom's Availability, Performance, and Scalability. Outside of regular system/infra work, he has played other roles...
Episode 18 - Phoummala Schmitt - Microsoft
April 04, 2019 00:00 - 39 minutes - 27 MBYou get opportunities in tech to work with some of the best people in the world. I got that opportunity when I joined Microsoft, that's where I met the Exchange Goddess! We discuss family, work and how it all comes together when you're on-call. We also discuss the Microsoft Create Startups Event Phoummala will be taking part in, https://www.createstartups.io/ You can register now, for free! Sr Cloud Advocate @ Microsoft, with a background focus on messaging and collaboration, vi...
Episode 17 - Andy Fleener - SportsEngine
March 28, 2019 00:00 - 41 minutes - 28.7 MBGet your playbook and have the stats ready, we're talking with Andy Fleener of SportsEngine this week. Andy is a Humanist, Systems Thinker, New View Safety Nerd, Sr. Platform Operations Manager at SportsEngine, DevOps Days MSP Co-Organizer. Twitter: @andyfleener
Episode 16 - Eric Sorenson - Puppet
March 20, 2019 00:00 - 30 minutes - 20.6 MBEver wonder what it was like to do dial-up support hosting in Hawaii? Well this is the damn episode you've waited for your whole life. After 16 years working as a systems/network administrator in the Bay Area, Eric relocated to Portland in 2012 to further develop his passion for awesome configuration management tools. As Puppet's product manager, he worked on extending and improving it for modern infrastructure; his current project is Lyra, a cloud-native workflow engine. Outside o...
Episode 15 - Andrew Clay Shafer - Pivotal
March 14, 2019 00:00 - 42 minutes - 29.3 MBThe Conscientious Developer There are great ways to think of how to attack the on-call situation even if you aren't in an on-call rotation. By being a conscientious developer and taking that extra interest in your software after deployment you're adding incredible valuable. Your co-workers may also really end up appreciating your time a little bit more as well. Some people are born to on call, and some people have on call thrust up on them. Andrew Clay Shafer stole good ideas fro...
Episode 14 - JD Trask - Raygun
March 07, 2019 00:00 - 35 minutes - 24.1 MBWelcome back to OCN! I this time I chat with CEO of Raygun, JD Trask. One of the cool parts of this podcast is meeting people from all over the world who have had some experience on-call, JD does his thing in New Zealand! John-Daniel is the CEO and co-founder of Raygun.com, an application monitoring company that helps teams identify hidden performance bottlenecks and software bugs. With over 25 years of experience in software development, JD is a programmer at heart with unique in...
Episode 13 - Damian Schenkelman - Auth0
February 28, 2019 00:00 - 29 minutes - 20 MBWelcome back to another podcast about downtime! Once again we meet with another technologist who's building a new product and getting it out to the world. This time we meet Damian of Auth0 who's been working with his team to ensure identity services. Damian is an Software Engineer that loves to solve hard problems of any type, especially those related to making software and teams scale. He is a Director of Engineering at Auth0 helping make identity simple for developers. Before Au...
Episode 12 - Baron Schwartz - VividCortex
February 21, 2019 00:00 - 40 minutes - 28 MBContent Warning: This episode does contain some graphic description of the work done by an EMT - if you find this troubling you may want to check out another episode! On this episode, I speak with the CTO and founder of VividCortex on his life down on the farm and as an EMT. Baron gives us some insight into how that prepared him for his time on-call in different roles to ensure databases are fast and reliable. Baron is the CTO and founder of VividCortex, the best way to see what ...
Episode 11 - Sam Phippen - Google
February 14, 2019 00:00 - 38 minutes - 26.7 MBOn this edition, Sam shares with me some scary moments from his time at DigitalOcean. Sam tells the tale of a database table that was dropped. https://blog.digitalocean.com/update-on-the-april-5th-2017-outage/ Sam Phippen is a Developer Advocate at Google, and previously an Engineering Manager at DigitalOcean. He's seen his fair share of deep, complex, incidents. He has strong opinions about incident management, postmortem culture, and on call practises. He's sad that he can't hug...
Episode 10 - J. Paul Reed - Everywhere and Nowhere ;-)
February 07, 2019 00:00 - 44 minutes - 30.4 MBIn this episode, Jay and J. Paul Reed discuss the need for on-call practices and incident response in the world of software release engineering. Paul shares some great stories, including how the World Series can depend on a single line of code. J. Paul Reed has over twenty years experience in the trenches as a build/release engineer, working with such companies as VMware, Mozilla, Postbox, Symantec, and Salesforce. In 2012, he founded Release Engineering Approaches, a consultancy in...
Episode 9 - Charity Majors - Honeycomb.io
January 31, 2019 00:00 - 22 minutes - 15.2 MBInfrastructure Week, Episode 2! Charity and Jay sit down for a discussion on her career and a deep dive into a database incident. You'll get some interesting thoughts on how monitoring has changed in operations. Charity is cofounder and CEO of Honeycomb.io, a startup aimed at debugging complex systems. (“It’s like strace for systems!”) Previously, Charity ran infrastructure at Parse and was an engineering manager at Facebook. She also worked with the RocksDB team to build and dep...
Episode 8 - Melissa Palmer - Veeam
January 28, 2019 00:00 - 32 minutes - 22.7 MBDoes this VM bring me joy? Melissa is Product Strategy Technologist at Veeam and an information technology infrastructure enthusiast, with a focus on virtualization, security, and emerging technologies. Melissa is a VMware Certified Design Expert (VCDX #236), and has held roles such as VMware Engineer, Systems Engineer, Solutions Architect, and Technical Marketing Engineer prior to joining Veeam. You can find Melissa on twitter @vMiss33 or at her blog https://vMiss.net.
Episode 7 - Jamesha "Jam" Fisher - Splice
January 24, 2019 00:00 - 36 minutes - 25 MBJamesha "Jam" Fisher is an infrastructure engineer at Splice. Jamesha has worked in the tech industry for over 15(!) years, with a special interest in security. Graduating with a degree in information assurance and security engineering, they lent their experience to operations and systems engineering at companies like Google and GitHub. In their spare time, Jamesha queers it up, along with being a maker of things musical or delicious and objects that use binary numbers.
Episode 6 - Adam Jacob - Board Member at Chef Software
January 17, 2019 00:00 - 40 minutes - 27.7 MBRide The On-Call Lightning with Adam Jacob Adam Jacob is a Board Member, CTO and founder of Chef. Adam joins us this week to discuss his world as an on-call engineer. Find out what happens when they call in the "Mr. Wolf" of Oracle on a private jet to get the database back online. Learn about Adam's passion for Open Source while we interject our mutual interest in heavy metal.
Episode - 5 - Kolton Andrus - Gremlin Inc
January 10, 2019 00:00 - 37 minutes - 25.9 MBFear, Chaos and Pain Common subjects in the Christopher Nolan Batman films, especially when the Joker appears. How do we avoid the moments of fear, chaos and pain in real time? By preparing for it. Today we talk with Gremlin Inc founder and CEO Kolton Andrus. Kolton is co-founder and CEO of Gremlin. Previously, he was a Chaos Engineer at Netflix improving streaming reliability and operating the Edge services. He designed and built F.I.T., Netflix's failure injection service. Pri...
Episode 4 - Tanya Janca - Microsoft
January 03, 2019 00:00 - 31 minutes - 21.9 MBThere's on-call in nearly every aspect of the tech industry, in this episode we will focus on Security. Tanya Janca is a senior cloud advocate for Microsoft, specializing in application and cloud security; evangelizing software security and advocating for developers and operations folks alike through public speaking, her open source project OWASP DevSlop, and various forms of teaching via workshops, blogs and community events. As an ethical hacker, OWASP Project and Chapter Leader, ...
Episode 3 - Chris Short - Red Hat
December 27, 2018 00:00 - 37 minutes - 25.7 MBChris Short has been a proponent of open source solutions throughout his over two decades in various IT disciplines including systems, security, networks, and DevOps engineering and advocacy across the public and private sectors. He currently works on the Ansible team at Red Hat. Chris is a partially disabled US Air Force veteran living with his wife and son in Greater Metro Detroit. Chris writes about DevOps and other topics at chrisshort.net. He also runs the DevOps, Cloud Native, ...
On-Call Nightmares Podcast - Episode 2 - Dan Maher - Datadog
December 20, 2018 00:00 - 37 minutes - 25.9 MBWelcome to the first full-length episode of The On-Call Nightmares Podcast. Dan is a veteran of the original dotcom bubble and has since worked in a variety of environments from start-ups to global corporations, including a stints as a founder, university lecturer, and a day labourer. Today, Dan is a member of the Devopsdays Global team, and a Developer Advocate at Datadog. Twitter: @phrawzty
On-Call Nightmares Episode 1 - Preview
December 19, 2018 00:00 - 2 minutes - 1.49 MBA quick preview of what's to come!