app03 Sun, 18 Oct 2026 13:04:43 +0000 Fireside (https://fireside.fm) Software Defined Interviews - Episodes Tagged with “Conferences” https://www.softwaredefinedinterviews.com/tags/conferences Sun, 20 Sep 2026 11:15:00 +0200 Deep discussions about technology, enterprise IT, and the like en-us episodic Deep discussions about technology, enterprise IT, and the like Software Defined Talk Deep discussions about technology, enterprise IT, and the like yes Software Defined Talk softwaredefinedinterviews@cote.wtf Episode 127: The KubeCon Drone Demo, CFP Reviewing at Scale, and the Agentic AI Foundation, with Lin Sun https://www.softwaredefinedinterviews.com/127 5b388ca4-cfe8-4e49-ae42-ea022b5b1a82 Sun, 20 Sep 2026 11:15:00 +0200 Software Defined Talk 127 The KubeCon Drone Demo, CFP Reviewing at Scale, and the Agentic AI Foundation, with Lin Sun full Software Defined Talk Lin Sun flew a drone over 13,000 people in a KubeCon keynote so an AI model on her laptop could score how engaged they were. It broke twice on stage, and she's thinking of doing it again. Why that still worked, what a KubeCon program co-chair actually does with three thousand submissions, how they spot AI-written CFPs, and whether working on open source makes you less strategic to the company paying your salary. 1:04:34 yes <p>Lin Sun is Head of Open Source at Solo.io, a recent KubeCon + CloudNativeCon program co-chair, and an emeritus member of the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee. Whitney and Coté start with the keynote she gave in Amsterdam, where she flew a drone over 13,000 people so an AI model on her laptop could score how engaged the audience was - it broke twice on stage, and Whitney, who was in the room, remembers nothing else from that day. Lin’s account of why it worked anyway is a checklist: a wow factor, something the audience does every day so they can relate to it, real engagement, and a planted surprise. From there they get into the part of co-chairing nobody sees, where three thousand submissions become about two hundred talks, how the AI-written ones get spotted, and why the CNCF cannot simply run a detector over the pile. The rest is open source as a job - twenty years of it, Istio at IBM through to Solo, and a straight answer to the question her own reports keep asking her, which is whether working on open source makes you less strategic to the company paying you.</p> <p>You can watch t<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyTXHkGfClI" rel="nofollow noopener">he video version of this episode as well</a>, if you prefer that kind of thing.</p> <p>Mentions:</p> <ul> <li> <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/lin-sun-a9b7a81/" rel="nofollow noopener">Lin Sun on LinkedIn</a>, where she says she is most active.</li> <li> <a href="https://solo.io/" rel="nofollow noopener">Solo.io</a> - the book “AI Agents on Kubernetes” is a free download from the homepage, and is being refreshed for Salt Lake City.</li> <li> <a href="https://aaif.io/" rel="nofollow noopener">The Agentic AI Foundation</a> and its five projects: Model Context Protocol, goose, AGENTS.md, agentgateway, and the agent-to-agent protocol.</li> <li> <a href="https://github.com/agent-substrate/substrate" rel="nofollow noopener">Agent Substrate</a>, the Google project that rethinks how agents get scheduled.</li> </ul> <p>Special Guest: Lin Sun.<br> Header photo <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/143247548@N03/55169871701/in/album-72177720332674037" rel="nofollow noopener">from the CNCF</a>.</p><p>Special Guest: Lin Sun.</p> Lin Sun, Solo.io, KubeCon, CloudNativeCon, CNCF, Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Technical Oversight Committee, TOC, program co-chair, conference program committee, call for papers, CFP review, AI slop, keynote, live demo, drone demo, KubeCon Amsterdam, KubeCon Salt Lake City, KubeCon Barcelona, Istio, service mesh, IBM, open source strategy, open source business model, Red Hat, maintainers, kagent, agentgateway, kgateway, Agentic AI Foundation, AAIF, Model Context Protocol, MCP, Goose, AGENTS.md, agent-to-agent protocol, A2A, Agent Substrate, AI agents, inference, inference gateway, model serving, Kubernetes, GPUs, CoreWeave, Qwen, AI Agents on Kubernetes, public speaking, slides, conference talks, sandbox, incubation, graduation Lin Sun is Head of Open Source at Solo.io, a recent KubeCon + CloudNativeCon program co-chair, and an emeritus member of the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee. Whitney and Coté start with the keynote she gave in Amsterdam, where she flew a drone over 13,000 people so an AI model on her laptop could score how engaged the audience was - it broke twice on stage, and Whitney, who was in the room, remembers nothing else from that day. Lin’s account of why it worked anyway is a checklist: a wow factor, something the audience does every day so they can relate to it, real engagement, and a planted surprise. From there they get into the part of co-chairing nobody sees, where three thousand submissions become about two hundred talks, how the AI-written ones get spotted, and why the CNCF cannot simply run a detector over the pile. The rest is open source as a job - twenty years of it, Istio at IBM through to Solo, and a straight answer to the question her own reports keep asking her, which is whether working on open source makes you less strategic to the company paying you.

You can watch the video version of this episode as well, if you prefer that kind of thing.

Mentions:

  • Lin Sun on LinkedIn, where she says she is most active.
  • Solo.io - the book “AI Agents on Kubernetes” is a free download from the homepage, and is being refreshed for Salt Lake City.
  • The Agentic AI Foundation and its five projects: Model Context Protocol, goose, AGENTS.md, agentgateway, and the agent-to-agent protocol.
  • Agent Substrate, the Google project that rethinks how agents get scheduled.

Special Guest: Lin Sun.
Header photo from the CNCF.

Special Guest: Lin Sun.

]]> Lin Sun is Head of Open Source at Solo.io, a recent KubeCon + CloudNativeCon program co-chair, and an emeritus member of the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee. Whitney and Coté start with the keynote she gave in Amsterdam, where she flew a drone over 13,000 people so an AI model on her laptop could score how engaged the audience was - it broke twice on stage, and Whitney, who was in the room, remembers nothing else from that day. Lin’s account of why it worked anyway is a checklist: a wow factor, something the audience does every day so they can relate to it, real engagement, and a planted surprise. From there they get into the part of co-chairing nobody sees, where three thousand submissions become about two hundred talks, how the AI-written ones get spotted, and why the CNCF cannot simply run a detector over the pile. The rest is open source as a job - twenty years of it, Istio at IBM through to Solo, and a straight answer to the question her own reports keep asking her, which is whether working on open source makes you less strategic to the company paying you.

You can watch the video version of this episode as well, if you prefer that kind of thing.

Mentions:

  • Lin Sun on LinkedIn, where she says she is most active.
  • Solo.io - the book “AI Agents on Kubernetes” is a free download from the homepage, and is being refreshed for Salt Lake City.
  • The Agentic AI Foundation and its five projects: Model Context Protocol, goose, AGENTS.md, agentgateway, and the agent-to-agent protocol.
  • Agent Substrate, the Google project that rethinks how agents get scheduled.

Special Guest: Lin Sun.
Header photo from the CNCF.

Special Guest: Lin Sun.

]]> Episode 126: DevOpsDays, Technical Storytelling, and Loading the Dishwasher, with Jason Yee https://www.softwaredefinedinterviews.com/126 8443b81d-88ac-4957-9971-75f56c7dab2a Wed, 02 Sep 2026 17:00:00 +0200 Software Defined Talk 126 DevOpsDays, Technical Storytelling, and Loading the Dishwasher, with Jason Yee full Software Defined Talk Jason Yee has two jobs that turn out to be the same job - Staff Technical Advocate at Datadog, and one of three global co-chairs of DevOpsDays - and both are about getting other people to talk. How the DevOpsDays machine actually runs, what sponsorship looks like now that DevOps is mature rather than hot, and why the sponsors doing well have stopped counting leads and started running workshops. 1:05:03 yes <p>Jason Yee is a Staff Technical Advocate at Datadog and one of three global co-chairs of DevOpsDays, and both jobs turn out to be mostly about getting other people to talk. Whitney and Coté ask him how the DevOpsDays machine actually works - local teams run the events, a global core team advises, and the co-chairs exist as a final escalation point - and what happens to conference sponsorship now that DevOps is mature rather than hot. His answer is that the sponsors who do well have stopped counting leads and started running workshops, on the grounds that a Lego giveaway gets you a list of people who wanted Lego.</p> <p>They also get into why DevOpsDays has a human streak that other tech subcultures never picked up, with Jason putting most of the "blame" on John Allspaw and safety science; Jason's Ignite talks in Amsterdam, including a DevOps children's book read aloud in his own bad Dutch; whether people drawn to systems are simply a particular kind of person, tested here by asking what everyone does when they open a badly loaded dishwasher; and Jason's actual day job, which is a technical storytelling team he thinks is the only one of its kind - talking Datadog engineers and executives into telling their own stories, then ghostwriting the session description and outline so they have something to react to instead of a blank page.</p> <p><a href="https://devopsdays.org/events/2026-portland-or/welcome/" rel="nofollow noopener">DevOpsDays Portland</a> is back for the first time since 2021, September 8 through 10, with Whitney giving both a workshop and a talk.</p> <p>Jason has no home page and would rather you did not look for him: "go touch grass, get outside, get some fresh air." If you don't like grass, and must Internet, he is on LinkedIn.</p> <p>Mentions:</p> <ul> <li><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/gitbisect/" rel="nofollow noopener">Jason Yee on LinkedIn</a>.</li> <li><a href="https://devopsdays.org/events/2026-portland-or/" rel="nofollow noopener">DevOpsDays Portland</a>, September 8-10, back for the first time since 2021.</li> <li><a href="https://devopsdays.org/events" rel="nofollow noopener">Every DevOpsDays, on a map</a>.</li> <li><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdOe18KhtT4" rel="nofollow noopener">John Allspaw and Paul Hammond, "10+ Deploys Per Day"</a>, the Velocity 2009 talk that comes up.</li> </ul> <p>Special Guest: Jason Yee.</p><p>Special Guest: Jason Yee.</p> Jason Yee, Datadog, DevOpsDays, DevOpsDays Portland, DevOpsDays Amsterdam, global co-chair, conference organizing, conference sponsorship, sponsorship KPIs, lead generation, workshops, Ignite talks, open spaces, unconference, technical storytelling, developer advocacy, developer relations, ghostwriting, blank page problem, call for papers, speaker coaching, executive communications, product marketing, John Allspaw, blameless postmortem, safety science, resilience engineering, University of Lund, 10 deploys a day, Velocity, systems thinking, Thinking in Systems, DevOps, platform engineering, Portland, Portlandia, community conferences, volunteer organizing, code of conduct, introverts, dishwasher loading Jason Yee is a Staff Technical Advocate at Datadog and one of three global co-chairs of DevOpsDays, and both jobs turn out to be mostly about getting other people to talk. Whitney and Coté ask him how the DevOpsDays machine actually works - local teams run the events, a global core team advises, and the co-chairs exist as a final escalation point - and what happens to conference sponsorship now that DevOps is mature rather than hot. His answer is that the sponsors who do well have stopped counting leads and started running workshops, on the grounds that a Lego giveaway gets you a list of people who wanted Lego.

They also get into why DevOpsDays has a human streak that other tech subcultures never picked up, with Jason putting most of the "blame" on John Allspaw and safety science; Jason's Ignite talks in Amsterdam, including a DevOps children's book read aloud in his own bad Dutch; whether people drawn to systems are simply a particular kind of person, tested here by asking what everyone does when they open a badly loaded dishwasher; and Jason's actual day job, which is a technical storytelling team he thinks is the only one of its kind - talking Datadog engineers and executives into telling their own stories, then ghostwriting the session description and outline so they have something to react to instead of a blank page.

DevOpsDays Portland is back for the first time since 2021, September 8 through 10, with Whitney giving both a workshop and a talk.

Jason has no home page and would rather you did not look for him: "go touch grass, get outside, get some fresh air." If you don't like grass, and must Internet, he is on LinkedIn.

Mentions:

Special Guest: Jason Yee.

Special Guest: Jason Yee.

]]> Jason Yee is a Staff Technical Advocate at Datadog and one of three global co-chairs of DevOpsDays, and both jobs turn out to be mostly about getting other people to talk. Whitney and Coté ask him how the DevOpsDays machine actually works - local teams run the events, a global core team advises, and the co-chairs exist as a final escalation point - and what happens to conference sponsorship now that DevOps is mature rather than hot. His answer is that the sponsors who do well have stopped counting leads and started running workshops, on the grounds that a Lego giveaway gets you a list of people who wanted Lego.

They also get into why DevOpsDays has a human streak that other tech subcultures never picked up, with Jason putting most of the "blame" on John Allspaw and safety science; Jason's Ignite talks in Amsterdam, including a DevOps children's book read aloud in his own bad Dutch; whether people drawn to systems are simply a particular kind of person, tested here by asking what everyone does when they open a badly loaded dishwasher; and Jason's actual day job, which is a technical storytelling team he thinks is the only one of its kind - talking Datadog engineers and executives into telling their own stories, then ghostwriting the session description and outline so they have something to react to instead of a blank page.

DevOpsDays Portland is back for the first time since 2021, September 8 through 10, with Whitney giving both a workshop and a talk.

Jason has no home page and would rather you did not look for him: "go touch grass, get outside, get some fresh air." If you don't like grass, and must Internet, he is on LinkedIn.

Mentions:

Special Guest: Jason Yee.

Special Guest: Jason Yee.

]]>