Software Defined Interviews

Episode 126: DevOpsDays, Technical Storytelling, and Loading the Dishwasher, with Jason Yee

September 2nd, 2026  |  1 hr 5 mins

community, conferences, devops, devopsdays, devrel, sponsorship, storytelling

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.

Episode 125: Running D&D with AI, Determinism First, and Workflow ROI, with Michael Rishi Forrester

August 20th, 2026  |  1 hr 13 mins

agents, ai, determinism, devops, dnd, enterprise it, roi, tabletop

Michael Rishi Forrester built his son a homebrew tabletop campaign with AI in the loop - 20 hours of work instead of 60 to 100 - and found out the hard way that the model had quietly started doing the dice math itself. That turns into an argument about why individuals get so much value out of AI while organizations get so little, and why the ROI is at the workflow level or nowhere.

Episode 124: The Chief Therapy Officer, Job Titles as Culture Change, and AI as Spreadsheets, with Bryan Ross

August 5th, 2026  |  1 hr 9 mins

ai, bryan ross, developer productivity, devops, enterprise it, field cto, gitlab, metrics, org culture, platform engineering

Episode 123: Deming, DevOps History, AI Risk, and Critical Thinking, with John Willis

June 6th, 2026  |  1 hr 9 mins

ai, critical thinking, deming, devops, history of computing, john willis, lean, software delivery, systems thinking, venture capital

Episode 30: Patrick Debois on using serverless for a year and half, defining DevOps vs. SRE vs. design, and meatware over tools

May 26th, 2017  |  13 mins 50 secs

devops, dodaustin, serverless

At DevOpsDays Austin, 2017, Barton George and I talk with Patrick Debois.

Episode 25: John Willis on DevOps, inclusion, burn-out, and biz dev

May 11th, 2017  |  13 mins 9 secs

burgers, devops, dodaustin, john willis

Barton George and I talk with John Willis at DevOpsDays Austin 2017.

Episode 19: Computers are easy. Humans are Hard. With Bridget Kromhout

January 27th, 2017  |  31 mins 12 secs

bridget kromhout, culture, devops, meatware, process

We discuss all the human and process changes needed to do good things with computers.