Our interview for this week is up, it’s with Josh Berkus:
Whitney and Coté discuss with Josh Berkus (Red Hat, Kubernetes contributor) how liberal and fine arts degrees (philosophy, photography, sculpture, pottery) apply to tech careers. Berkus details how early hardware experience influenced his database performance work, noting hardware’s renewed relevance with AI and multi-arch computing. The conversation covers Sun Microsystems’ 1990s internet role, internal politics, and its MySQL/Postgres strategy.
Posts in "podcasts"
Podcasts I do or are involved in, mostly.
You Can Feel It Coming - Software Defined Talk
This week, we discuss personal AI hype cycles, bottoms-up adoption, and “The Modern Stack” simplifying cloud. Plus, thoughts on new cars and the dogs that ride in them.
See the traditional podcast listing for links and more.
Progressive Delivery, with Heidi Waterhouse - Software Defined Interviews
See the traditional podcast version for more and Heidi links.
Go cheap on innovation. Otherwise you just buy PowerPoints. Jana Werner on using tight timelines and small teams to force real progress.
AI, open source, talent, and more, live at cfgmgmtcamp 2026, with Andrew Clay Shafer
Spotting talent, getting innovation adoption and driving use, open source, AI, and developing taste - those are the major topics Andrew and I discussed this week at a live recording. Also, a framework for creating the perfect burger.
This week’s Software Defined Talk: This week, we discuss the end of Cloud 1.0, AI agents fixing old apps, and Chainguard vs. Docker images. Plus, the mystery of Dutch broth is finally solved.
I recommend the traditional podcast format.
This week’s Software Defined Interviews: we talk with Nathen Harvey, who leads the DORA research program at Google Cloud. They talk about what 15 years of DevOps and delivery data actually says about AI. The answer feels something like “it makes you even better at what you’re already good at.” High-performing teams get better, while struggling teams just move faster into bottlenecks. The talk about AI-assisted software development, why throughput is rising while stability drops, how culture still beats tools, and why “user-centric” work remains stubbornly hard despite being obvious.
There’s also the traditional podcast version.
After the Dream - Software Defined Talk #555
This week’s Software Defined Talk podcast: This week, we discuss Gemini powering Siri, AWS’s biggest competitor, and AWS strategy choices. Plus, when should your next meeting actually start?
Watch the video (above), or if you prefer traditional podcasts, subscribe to it.
This week’s Software Defined Interviews episode is with Lian Li:
In this episode, Whitney and Coté talk with Lian, a “cloud-native human” with a 15-year career in tech. Lian discusses her transition from tech to performance art, her experiences in amateur musical theater, stand-up comedy, and improv theater. She talks about platform engineering, the importance of community building in tech, and balancing professional life with personal projects. They also cover her unique improv workshops for engineers at conferences and the popular KubeCon karaoke parties she organizes.
Listen and subscribe, or watch the video (above) if you’re into that kind of thing.
The Alpha and The Omega, Software Defined Talk #554: This week, Brandon and I discuss AI’s impact on Stack Overflow, Docker’s Hardened Images, and Nvidia buying Groq. Plus, thoughts on playing your own game and having fun. If you don’t like the traditional podcast format, check out the unedited recording.