On-Call Nightmares Podcast

Hey 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: oncallnightmares@gmail.com The commitment for your story is under 35[...]

Well 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[...]

It'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,[...]

This 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[...]

One 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[...]

The 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[...]

On-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[...]

A 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[...]

This 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[...]

Live 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,[...]

The 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[...]

Live 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[...]

Getting 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[...]

X 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[...]

On-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

This 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[...]

Datadog 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,[...]

Episode 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[...]

This 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[...]

This 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[...]

This 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[...]

This 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[...]

Live 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[...]

Live 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[...]

This 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[...]

Bonus! 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

This 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[...]

Who 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[...]

LET'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[...]

You 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[...]

You 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[...]

Get 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

Ever 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[...]

The 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[...]

Welcome 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[...]

Welcome 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[...]

Content 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[...]

On 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[...]

In 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[...]

Infrastructure 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,[...]

Does 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[...]

Jamesha "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,[...]

Ride 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[...]

Fear, 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[...]

There'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[...]

Chris 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[...]

Welcome 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[...]

A quick preview of what's to come!