Podcasts about xmatters

Jon Hyman (CTO & Co-Founder @ Braze) returns to the podcast to share how he balances a mature, public-company roadmap with visionary AI innovation! We deconstruct Braze's quantitative "Product Health" framework - a scoring system used to resolve competing prioritizations and mandate technical remediation. We also discuss shifting engineering leaders to think like GMs, how to realign teams by connecting abstract “vision” to specific releases, goals & outcomes. Plus, Jon's three-tier mental model for AI products, how to identify AI features that actually drive revenue, and reimaging your product for future channels, teams, and skills.   ABOUT JON HYMAN Jon Hyman is the co-founder and chief technology officer of Braze, the customer engagement platform that delivers messaging experiences across push, email, in-app, and more. He leads the charge for building the platform's technical systems and infrastructure as well as overseeing the company's technical operations and engineering team. Prior to Braze, Jon served as lead engineer for the Core Technology group at Bridgewater Associates, the world's largest hedge fund. There, he managed a team that maintained 80+ software assets and was responsible for the security and stability of critical trading systems. Jon met cofounder Bill Magnuson during his time at Bridgewater, and together they won the 2011 TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon. Jon is a recipient of the SmartCEO Executive Management Award in the CIO/CTO Category for New York. Jon holds a B.A. from Harvard University in Computer Science.   This episode is brought to you by xMatters! xMatters automates the entire incident lifecycle with their purpose-built AI powered workflow, giving your team the context they need to stop disruptions before they start and minimize resolution times. Head over to xmatters.com to learn more!   SHOW NOTES: Braze's operating environment & key focus on product health / roadmap (2:58) What's next for Braze: Research-driven innovation in the AI era (6:16) Ensuring customers utilize the full breadth of features (9:42) The "Swarming" strategy: Reducing engineering escalation tax through support collaboration (14:19) Shifting engineering leadership think like GMs: Moving from completion goals to business outcomes like revenue, growth rates & regional differences (17:29) How engineering leaders can increase business IQ by understanding margins and adoption (18:20) Deconstructing misalignment, the abstract nature of product vision, and connect teams to tangible business outcomes, goals, and specific releases (22:02) Management infrastructure: Quarterly product health reporting and trending metrics (23:20) Forming a mental model for company maturity, building a visionary roadmap, and more innovative engineering initiatives (25:34) Frameworks for AI Decision-Making: Identifying AI features that drive revenue vs. those that only improve stickiness (31:55) Reimagining your product based on different personas, new channels, “AI omniboxes”, and teams / skills of the future (35:44) Breaking down team silos, customer engagement as a shared responsibility, and the future of full-stack roles orchestrating outcome-based workflows & automations (41:50) Rapid fire questions (45:10)   LINKS AND RESOURCES Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green: A historical look at how the disease has shaped the world braze.com   This episode wouldn't have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan's also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/ Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

We discuss what effective leadership looks like across three organizational archetypes: product-led, business-led, and design-led companies with Sebastiano Armeli (Engineering Leadership @ Meta). Drawing from his leadership journey at places like  Meta, Spotify, Snap, and PayPal, Sebastiano deconstructs the situational leadership frameworks required to thrive in different environments. Plus we discuss how AI is moving managers from implementation to architecture, why the next bottleneck is managing the overhead of high-velocity experimentation, and the future of team topology where AI enables a single leader to oversee high-scale teams of 30–50 people. Whether you are scaling a design-driven startup or navigating a complex business-led enterprise, this conversation provides a framework for aligning your leadership style with your organization's core incentives.   ABOUT SEBASTIANO ARMELI Sebastiano Armeli is an engineering leader currently at Meta. He has previously served as a Director of Engineering at Upwork and held leadership roles at companies such as Pinterest, PayPal, Snap, and Spotify. His work has spanned diverse domains including shopping, crypto, messaging, video creation, and ads. Sebastiano is passionate about building healthy engineering cultures, mentoring the next generation of leaders, and supporting teams through periods of growth and change. He mentors engineering managers and senior engineers, enjoys speaking at conferences, and shares his perspectives on leadership in his Substack, The Healthy Engineering Leader. He also serves on the board of a community-owned grocery store. In all his work, Sebastiano takes a pragmatic, people-first approach to leadership, focusing on clarity, continuous improvement, and long-term impact.   This episode is brought to you by xMatters! xMatters automates the entire incident lifecycle with their purpose-built AI powered workflow, giving your team the context they need to stop disruptions before they start and minimize resolution times. Head over to xmatters.com to learn more!   SHOW NOTES: Deconstructing company archetypes: A framework for product-led organizations (2:03) Strategic leadership practices for succeeding in product-first cultures (7:33) Leveraging data and business metrics to influence product strategy (9:35) Case Study: The story and leadership lessons behind building Spotify's Ad Studio (11:12) Rapid prototyping: Applying a hackathon mindset to product development (13:16) How AI is reshaping product-led orgs: Clearing the feature backlog, scaling experimentation and velocity (16:01) Balancing iteration velocity and product quality with AI (18:12) Sebastiano's observations on effective leadership in business led orgs (19:49) Design-led dynamics: Anticipating the impact of AI on creative-first orgs (23:24) Maintaining engineering excellence within design-driven constraints (25:40) Cultivating high-alignment, valuable design partnerships (27:01) The role of metrics and data in design-focused decision making (28:33) Emerging AI capabilities enhancing leadership leverage (31:16) Scaling management: The potential for 30-50 person teams via AI assistance (33:58) The ethical imperative: Adopting AI responsibility within engineering teams (35:53) Rapid fire questions (37:12)   This episode wouldn't have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan's also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/ Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Live from the Vercel recording studio, Lindsey Simon (VP Engineering @ Vercel) joins us to deconstruct the evolution of management craft and career growth strategies! We dissect the practice of live all-hands demos as a tool for context, accountability and inspiration. Plus, Lindsey's "vote with your wallet" framework for career strategy, how Lindsey's open source project inspired him to apply to Vercel, and why the most effective VPs are building hobby projects to maintain AI competency and empathy for non-technical users.   ABOUT LINDSEY SIMON Lindsey Simon is VP of Engineering at Vercel. Making the Web better has been his lifelong career ambition. Prior to Vercel, Lindsey spent seven years at Google, where he helped launch App Engine as an original core team member, and worked as a tech lead on the Google Translate and Web Performance teams. Lindsey has lived in San Francisco for the past 15 years, and his creative hobbies (beyond coding) include writing music and hunting for wild mushrooms.   This episode is brought to you by xMatters! xMatters automates the entire incident lifecycle with their purpose-built AI powered workflow, giving your team the context they need to stop disruptions before they start and minimize resolution times. Head over to xmatters.com to learn more!   SHOW NOTES: The evolution of Vercel's all hands to demo days: using live show-and-tell to maintain context and inspire the team (2:4p) Accountability for what's real: Why live visual demos help engineering teams with real-time workflow adjustments (4:36) Strategies for creating a successful live visual demo without over-rehearsing (6:20) Lindsey's career inflection point: Navigating the transition from a large ecosystem at Salesforce to a mission-driven startup (10:08) Career advice: Vote with your wallet and go somewhere with pre-existing PMF that feeds your ambition (12:33) The "Janitor" Mindset: Why prioritizing the company's mission over a specific job title can lead to unique opportunities (14:36) How Lindsey's open source hobby project led to a code-first interaction with @ Vercel (19:17) Vercel's "Dig Deep" value: Breaking down the company culture and the importance of technical support for developers (21:26) Standing out in the interview process: Why managers must bring a strong "Point of View" on what a company should do differently (23:51). The Swiss Army Knife Manager: Why today's leaders must also be salespeople, PMs, and customer support engineers (24:46). The death of pure "people management": Re-centering on the IC craft and why managers must maintain AI competency (26:12). Adopting better IC skills: Building hobby projects for non-technical users to maintain empathy for the user experience (28:33) Management principles that remain true today (32:54) Combatting imposter syndrome: Building trust by being vulnerable and learning alongside your team (36:45). Interviewing trends: Assessing how candidates operate with and without AI tools (38:05). The return of "In Real Life" work: Why the Bay Area culture is refocusing on "sweating the details" in person (39:15) Rapid fire questions (41:33)   This episode wouldn't have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan's also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/ Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Career progression is rarely a straight line. More often, it only makes sense in hindsight. Chris Chiu (VP of Engineering, Agentforce @ Salesforce) joins us to deconstruct how to navigate these non-linear career paths! We talk about identifying the mismatch in your current role, building a personal "career thesis," how to engineer a productive exploration phase and leverage your relationships / VC networks to understand the market. Plus, how to apply the "Running Framework" to ensure success in your next role and why technical depth is no longer optional for modern engineering leaders.   ABOUT CHRIS CHIU Chris Chiu is a VP of Engineering at Salesforce, where he helps build Agentforce, a platform for building enterprise AI agents. Prior to Salesforce, Chris was Head of Engineering at Moonhub, building AI recruiting agents. He has experience building and scaling product engineering teams that consistently deliver great products through rapid growth and change. Earlier in his career, he led engineering teams across companies ranging from early-stage startups to late-stage growth companies, including Figma, Flexport, and OpenGov.   This episode is brought to you by xMatters! xMatters automates the entire incident lifecycle with their purpose-built AI powered workflow, giving your team the context they need to stop disruptions before they start and minimize resolution times. Head over to xmatters.com to learn more!   SHOW NOTES: How Chris navigated the transition from Figma to Moonhub (3:47) Energy alignment: identifying the mismatch between your role and your drives (6:27) Sidesteps aren't inefficiencies: Why it's okay to not have a specific and/or linear career plan (8:26) Building a career “thesis” by balancing passions with industry shifts (11:18) The exploration phase: Strategies for a productive four-month “sabbatical” (14:07) Leveraging your network and venture capital relationships to understand the market (16:45) The utility of “status”: When the “logo” matters & when it's overrated (19:18) The "Running" Framework: Why you shouldn't increase career "speed" and "distance" simultaneously (21:33) How Chris applied these ideas to his move from Figma to Moonhub (24:33) Avoiding "career injury": Why stretching too thin hinders your flow state (27:07) Developing technical depth and leadership in the AI space (29:15) Learning through imitation: Finding and emulating leaders five years ahead of you (31:20) Chris's observations on the evolution of technical leadership (34:14) The shift from “peacetime” to “wartime” (37:58) The "Leaky Abstraction" litmus test: Why leaders must stay in the technical details (39:40) Now: Chris' transition to Agentforce and the future of AI at Salesforce (41:38) Rapid fire questions: Growth mindsets and holding identity loosely (43:59)   LINKS AND RESOURCES: 99% Invisible: The design and architecture podcast Sulman has followed for over a decade. The Invisible Cow Tunnels of Chicago: A specific episode of 99% Invisible mentioned by Patrick.   This episode wouldn't have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan's also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/ Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In this episode, recorded live at the OpenAI studio, Sulman Choudhry (Head of ChatGPT @ OpenAI) pulls back the curtain on how they structure engineering teams! We talk about shifting from silos to fluid mission-driven teams, vertical vs. horizontal teams, maximizing cross-functional collaboration between research, engineering, product and design. Plus we cover “directly responsible individuals” for high accountability, managers as systems designers, scaling decision-making to prevent leadership from becoming bottlenecks, frameworks for mentoring junior engineers, why “problem framing” is the most critical skill, and how managers can stay close to problems and maintain technical intuition.   ABOUT SULMAN CHOUDHRY Sulman leads ChatGPT Engineering at OpenAI, driving the development and scaling of one of the world's most impactful AI products. He pushes the boundaries of innovation by turning cutting‑edge research into practical, accessible tools that transform how people interact with technology. Previously at Meta, Sulman founded and scaled Instagram Reels, IGTV, and Instagram Labs, and helped lead the early development of Instagram Stories. He also brought MetaAI to Instagram and Messenger, integrating generative AI into experiences used by billions. Earlier in his career, Sulman was on the founding team that built and launched UberEATS from the ground up, helping turn it into a global food delivery platform. With a track record of marrying technical vision, product strategy, and large‑scale execution, Sulman focuses on building products that meaningfully change how people live, work, and connect.   This episode is brought to you by xMatters! xMatters automates the entire incident lifecycle with their purpose-built AI powered workflow, giving your team the context they need to stop disruptions before they start and minimize resolution times. Head over to xmatters.com to learn more!   SHOW NOTES: The Shift to AI-Native Engineering: How AI is collapsing the "Inner Loop" and reshaping engineering team composition (2:48) Mission-Driven Teams: Moving from traditional functional silos to integrated, problem-centric units (4:45) Vertical vs. Horizontal Team Architecture: How OpenAI structures specialized horizontal teams (ex. Infrastructure, RTC/Voice) with product verticals (7:04) Fluid org charts & blurring functional roles: AI-Native teams require proactive mission alignment and coordination over rigid structure (8:48) The Lifecycle of Problem-Oriented Teams: What happens when a "strike team" solves the problem (10:02) Maximizing cross functional collaboration between engineering, research, product and design (11:52) The DRI Framework: Implementing the "Directly Responsible Individual" model for high-velocity accountability (13:32) Thriving in the "Chaos Factory": Addressing bottlenecks in highly dynamic, high-volume environments (16:02) Prioritization & "Letting 1,000 Flowers Bloom": How OpenAI decides which AI bets to double down on (19:13) Scaling Decision-Making: Preventing leadership from becoming the bottleneck as volume increases (21:19) Knowing when to call it quits on a bet and reallocate talent for maximum impact (23:29) The Manager as "Systems Designer": Shifting the EM role from people logistics to technical orchestration (24:49) The Barbell Talent Strategy: Optimizing for innovation by pairing "super seniors" with "super juniors" (28:10) Mentorship in the AI Age: How to coaching junior engineers when the "cost of code" is approaching zero (30:19) Technical Intuition for Leaders: Sulman's frameworks for staying "close to the metal" as a manager (33:17) Cultivating Judgment: Why "Problem Framing" is the most critical skill for the modern engineer (37:01) Rapid fire questions (38:59)   LINKS AND RESOURCES: 99% Invisible](https://99percentinvisible.org/): The design and architecture podcast Sulman has followed for over a decade. The Invisible Cow Tunnels of Chicago](https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/cow-tunnels/): A specific episode of 99% Invisible mentioned by Patrick.   This episode wouldn't have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan's also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/ Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Maxwell, a solution architect at xMatters, took a winding road to get to where he is. After a computer engineering education, he held jobs as field support engineer, product manager, SRE, and finally his current role as a solutions architect, where he serves as something of an SRE for SREs, helping them solve incident management problems with the help of xMatters. When he moved to the SRE role, Maxwell wanted to get back to doing technical work. It was a lateral move within his company, which was migrating an on-prem solution into the cloud. It's a journey that plenty of companies are making now: breaking an application into microservices, running processes in containers, and using Kubernetes to orchestrate the whole thing. Non-production environments would go down and waste SRE time, making it harder to address problems in the production pipeline. At the heart of their issues was the incident response process. They had several bottlenecks that prevented them from delivering value to their customers quickly. Incidents would send emails to the relevant engineers, sometimes 20 on a single email, which made it easy for any one engineer to ignore the problem—someone else has got this. They had a bad silo problem, where escalating to the right person across groups became an issue of its own. And of course, most of this was manual. Their MTTR—mean time to resolve—was lagging. Maxwell moved over to xMatters because they managed to solve these problems through clever automation. Their product automates the scheduling and notification process so that the right person knows about the incident as soon as possible. At the core of this process was a different MTTR—mean time to respond. Once an engineer started working to resolve a problem, it was all down to runbooks and skill. But the lag between the initial incident and that start was the real slowdown. It's not just the response from the first SRE on call. It's the other escalations down the line—to data engineers, for example—that can eat away time. They've worked hard to make  escalation configuration easy. It not only handles who's responsible for specific services and metrics, but who's in the escalation chain from there. When the incident hits, the notifications go out through a series of configured channels; maybe it tries a chat program first, then email, then SMS. The on-call process is often a source of dread, but automating the escalation process can take some of the sting out of it. Check out the episode to learn more. 

Maxwell, a solution architect at xMatters, took a winding road to get to where he is. After a computer engineering education, he held jobs as field support engineer, product manager, SRE, and finally his current role as a solutions architect, where he serves as something of an SRE for SREs, helping them solve incident management problems with the help of xMatters. When he moved to the SRE role, Maxwell wanted to get back to doing technical work. It was a lateral move within his company, which was migrating an on-prem solution into the cloud. It's a journey that plenty of companies are making now: breaking an application into microservices, running processes in containers, and using Kubernetes to orchestrate the whole thing. Non-production environments would go down and waste SRE time, making it harder to address problems in the production pipeline. At the heart of their issues was the incident response process. They had several bottlenecks that prevented them from delivering value to their customers quickly. Incidents would send emails to the relevant engineers, sometimes 20 on a single email, which made it easy for any one engineer to ignore the problem—someone else has got this. They had a bad silo problem, where escalating to the right person across groups became an issue of its own. And of course, most of this was manual. Their MTTR—mean time to resolve—was lagging. Maxwell moved over to xMatters because they managed to solve these problems through clever automation. Their product automates the scheduling and notification process so that the right person knows about the incident as soon as possible. At the core of this process was a different MTTR—mean time to respond. Once an engineer started working to resolve a problem, it was all down to runbooks and skill. But the lag between the initial incident and that start was the real slowdown. It's not just the response from the first SRE on call. It's the other escalations down the line—to data engineers, for example—that can eat away time. They've worked hard to make  escalation configuration easy. It not only handles who's responsible for specific services and metrics, but who's in the escalation chain from there. When the incident hits, the notifications go out through a series of configured channels; maybe it tries a chat program first, then email, then SMS. The on-call process is often a source of dread, but automating the escalation process can take some of the sting out of it. Check out the episode to learn more. 

This week's episode is brought to you by Oracle NetSuite (sign up for a personalized product tour at www.netsuite.com/scale) and Indeed (get a $75 credit for your job post at indeed.com/podcast). Abbas is the VP of Customers Success and Value Engineering at Segment (now a Twilio company) where he's building a cross-functional global value engineering team. Prior to Segment, Abbas had a 10 year stint at xMatters as CTO where he led the technology team. Abbas embodies the pay it forward mentality by mentoring his time and giving back to the community through his involvement at PlatoHQ (the largest engineering and product mentorship community), as well as EverWise (now a torch company). Connect with Abbas Haider Ali: https://www.linkedin.com/in/abbashaiderali/ Connect with Poya Osgouei: https://www.linkedin.com/in/poyaosgouei/ Connect with Robby Allen: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robbyallen/ --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/uncharted1/support

CEO of xMatters, Troy McAlpin, joins this episode to discuss xMatters’ transition onto GCP, what uniquely differentiates them from other competitors, and how GCP enables them in such a way that no other Cloud Provider can. McAlpin also touches on his customer experience philosophy and how earning and exceeding customer satisfaction, day in and day out, should be the top priority for any SaaS company. Host: Tony SafoianGuest: Troy McAlpin Connect on Twitter: https://twitter.com/cloudnclear https://twitter.com/SADA https://twitter.com/Safoian https://twitter.com/tmcalpinxm Connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/sada/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/safoian/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/troy-mcalpin-2a936b6/   To learn more, visit SADA.com.

It’s all about data management this week on the podcast as Brian Dorsey and Mark Mirchandani talk to Google Cloud Product Marketing Manager, Amy Krishnamohan. Amy starts the show by explaining that Cloud SQL is a fully managed relational database service that recently added Microsoft SQL Server to its repertoire. We talk about SQL Server’s migration from 2008R2 to a newer version, the process involved, and how it’s effecting customers. Luckily, Cloud SQL for SQL Server is very backwards compatible, making the process easy for Google Cloud customers! Cloud SQL also offers other tools to make using Microsoft SQL Server easier with Google Cloud, including shortcuts to set up the high availability function. Amy talks later in the show about what companies are a good fit for Microsoft SQL Servers on Google Cloud. She explains the steps to set up and tear down, how licensing works, and what the best use cases are for Microsoft SQL Servers on Google Cloud. In the future, Cloud SQL will have a managed AD service available. A multi-cloud strategy is important, according to Amy. It is up to each company to research cloud services and pick the best vendors and products for themselves and their clients. Cloud SQL for SQL Server is a way to bring two great products together for the benefit of consumers. Amy Krishnamohan Amy Krishnamohan is Product Marketing Manager at Google Cloud responsible for databases. She has diverse experience across product marketing, marketing strategy and product management from leading enterprise software companies such as MariaDB, Teradata, SAP, Accenture, Cisco and Intuit. Amy received her Masters in Software Management from Carnegie Mellon University. Cool things of the week Introducing Cloud AI Platform Pipelines blog Finding a problem at the bottom of the Google stack blog Larger local SSD storage available now blog Compute Engine gets machine images blog Google Cloud Next Update site Interview Microsoft SQL Server site Google Cloud SQL site BigQuery site GCE site Question of the week Lift and shift, move and improve, or re-architect: How do we “move and improve”? GCP Podcast Episode 211: Digital Services with xMatters podcast Importing virtual disks docs Create machine image from virtual appliance file (OVA/OVF) docs Tutorial: Getting started with Migrate for Compute Engine docs Whitepaper: Velostrata technology for mass migrations into Google Cloud Platform whitepaper Where can you find us next? We’re working from home for a while! Brian will be looking at getting a kind of weekly “reading group” of people who work with VMs and want to get better. Ping him on Twitter if you’re interested! Mark will be working on more video content and a cool nickname for Brian!

Priyanka Vergadia joins Mark Mirchandani today to talk shop with Travis DePuy about all things digital services. Travis is a product evangelist for xMatters, a company that provides digital services for clients in a way that makes it easy for them to “limit the blast radius” as they build and use their projects. At xMatters, customers can build an incident management workflow for their custom services and integrate the tools of their choice. Travis talks about service degradation and how xMatters helps clients optimize and manage their services to control instances of degradation. With programs like Google Stackdriver, xMatters can set limits and get alerts when thresholds are met, then use that information to fix performance. Later in the show, Travis talks about moving a large enterprise like xMatters to the cloud. Travis DePuy Travis DePuy is a Tinkerer of Things, Master of Hats and Father of Kitties. He is currently Head Product Evangelist at xMatters where he gets to talk to people about how they are doing Incident Management, DevOps notifications and anything else involving humans, processes and tools. Travis balances the stationary computer work with the fluid moving of Chen Taichi and is often found in the sun flowing the forms of the old ways. Cool things of the week Join us for Google Cloud Next ‘20: Digital Connect blog Connecting businesses and educators with advanced Hangouts Meet capabilities blog Interview xMatters site Site Reliability Engineering Book site Stackdriver site Migrating a monolith to GKE - Customer Story (Get Cooking in Cloud) video Question of the week How can I improve reliability/availability with the least amount of work? Codelabs site Migrating a monolithic application to microservices on Google Kubernetes Engine article Migrating a Monolith to Google Kubernetes Engine — An Overview blog Where can you find us next? You can find Priyanka online in her video series Get Cooking in Cloud and her series on Pub/Sub. You can see Mark in recently released Stack Chat videos.

Troy and Tobias work at xMatters providing tools that help devops engineers manage things when they go wrong. Their tools at xMatters provide information that makes is easier to track down problems. Running a service like xMattters also allows them to become experts in how workflows should go to empower people to fix issues. Follow UpCloud on Twitter: @UpCloud Follow Troy on Twitter: @Tmcalpinxm Connect with Tobias on LinkedIn Panelist Nell Shamrell-Harrington Charles Max Wood Guests Troy McAlpin Tobias Dunn-Krahn Sponsors UpCloud Use promo code " devchat" for $25 off CacheFly _______ "The MaxCoders Guide to Finding Your Dream Developer Job" by Charles Max Wood is now available on Amazon. Get Your Copy Today! ______________________________________ Links OODA loop (x)matters Picks Nell Shamrell-Harrington: A Higher Standard Charles Max Wood: Contigo Water Bottles Conference Swag SOCKS!!! Tobias Dunn-Krahn: BigQuery Chat Bots Tobias Dunn-Krahn: Delivering Happiness Best Friends

Troy and Tobias work at xMatters providing tools that help devops engineers manage things when they go wrong. Their tools at xMatters provide information that makes is easier to track down problems. Running a service like xMattters also allows them to become experts in how workflows should go to empower people to fix issues. Follow UpCloud on Twitter: @UpCloud Follow Troy on Twitter: @Tmcalpinxm Connect with Tobias on LinkedIn Panelist Nell Shamrell-Harrington Charles Max Wood Guests Troy McAlpin Tobias Dunn-Krahn Sponsors UpCloud Use promo code " devchat" for $25 off CacheFly _______ "The MaxCoders Guide to Finding Your Dream Developer Job" by Charles Max Wood is now available on Amazon. Get Your Copy Today! ______________________________________ Links OODA loop (x)matters Picks Nell Shamrell-Harrington: A Higher Standard Charles Max Wood: Contigo Water Bottles Conference Swag SOCKS!!! Tobias Dunn-Krahn: BigQuery Chat Bots Tobias Dunn-Krahn: Delivering Happiness Best Friends

Travis Depuy of xMatters speaks to Leandro & Brian about how to leverage tools like xMatters to enable proactive alerting and remediation throughout your code life-cycle.

Travis Depuy of xMatters speaks to Leandro & Brian about how to leverage tools like xMatters to enable proactive alerting and remediation throughout your code life-cycle

Travis Depuy of xMatters speaks to Leandro & Brian about how to leverage tools like xMatters to enable proactive alerting and remediation throughout your code life-cycle.

Travis Depuy of xMatters speaks to Leandro & Brian about how to leverage tools like xMatters to enable proactive alerting and remediation throughout your code life-cycle

In this episode, you’ll hear Greg, Conor and Travis Depuy from xMatters discuss closed-loop APIs and how AI can be applied to see the holes in the cognitive blind spots of large enterprises. They look at how we can build durable DevOps teams and overcome variables within the natural process of skill acquisition. https://www.xmatters.com/ https://www.mthree.com/

Introducing chaotic, unpredictable test software into your methodical testing regime is a good idea, right? Yes, it's a branch of testing called Chaos Engineering, or Chaos Testing. Netflix's Chaos Monkey famously introduced many of us to the idea that resilient systems, networks and software become more resilient and less brittle if we use chaotic testing methods to find their weak points before customers do. An innovative engineer at xMatters launched a new open source chaos testing tool named after H.P. Lovecraft's nightmarish character Cthulhu. Cthulhu is designed to test across multiple cloud providers, initially supporting Google Cloud with plans to support Amazon Web Services. It's open source, free to use, looking for more contributors, and is available on GitBub. We are joined on this DevOps Chats by Tobias Dunn-Krahn, CTO, and Gabrielle Gasse, lead engineer on the Cthulhu open source project, both at xMatters.

This week we explain everything you need to know about monitoring and compliance. Plus, we review this history of the monolith and how it led to microservices. Forget AWS vs. Azure, it’s WholeFoods vs. H-E-B that’s what will divide families! H-E-B buys Favor. (https://www.americaninno.com/austin/inno-news/texas-grocery-giant-h-e-b-is-acquiring-favors-on-demand-delivery-business/) Amazon extends 5% back Prime credit card benefits to Whole Foods purchases (https://www.geekwire.com/2018/amazon-extends-5-back-prime-credit-card-benefits-whole-foods-purchases/) Hard-hustle & shameless self-promotion Brandon interviews JJ on this weeks Software Defined Interviews (http://www.softwaredefinedinterviews.com/63). (http://www.softwaredefinedinterviews.com/63) Make sure to subscribe Email us at stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com for free stickers. This episode brought to you by: Datadog! This episode is sponsored by Datadog, a monitoring platform for cloud-scale infrastructure and applications. Built by engineers, for engineers, Datadog provides visibility into more than 200 technologies, including AWS, Chef, and Docker, with built-in metric dashboards and automated alerts. With end-to-end request tracing, Datadog provides visibility into your applications and their underlying infrastructure—all in one place. Sign up for a free trial (https://www.datadoghq.com/lpgs/?utm_source=Advertisement&utm_medium=Advertisement&utm_campaign=SoftwareDefinedTalk-Tshirt-Native). Datadog also offers Forecast Alerts (https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/forecasts-datadog/), which makes it easy to get notified of potential problems before they cause outages. Read more at: https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/forecasts-datadog/ Compliance, Monitoring, Mesh & Design, Oh my! Chef Software bids to automate compliance with new InSpec 2.0 release (https://siliconangle.com/blog/2018/02/20/chef-software-bids-automate-compliance-new-inspec-2-0-release/) Networking ruins everything! History of Service Mesh. (https://thenewstack.io/history-service-mesh/) The RED Method: A New Approach to Monitoring Microservices (https://thenewstack.io/monitoring-microservices-red-method/) A print button? Mmkay. Let's explore WHY you need me to add that (https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/02/20/design_in_the_age_of_devops/) xMatters snares $40 million Series D led by Goldman Sachs Private Capital Investing (https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/20/xmatters-snares-40-million-series-d-led-by-goldman-sachs-private-capital-investing/) The Road To 400G Ethernet Is Paved With Bechtolsheim’s Intentions (https://www.nextplatform.com/2018/02/21/road-400g-ethernet-paved-bechtolsheims-intentions/) Conferences, et. al. May 15th to 18th, 2018 - Coté talking EA at Continuous Lifecycle London (https://continuouslifecycle.london/sessions/the-death-of-enterprise-architecture-defeating-the-devops-microservices-and-cloud-native-assassins/). DevOpsDays Jakarta (http://devopsdays.org/events/2018-jakarta/) - April 26-27 Matt will be there Derek Mazzone (https://kexp.org/djs/darek-mazzone/) from KEXP ChefConf 2018 (https://chefconf.chef.io/) - May 22-25 in Chicago SxSW (https://www.sxsw.com/) — Brandon in Austin giving out stickers SDT news & hype Check out Software Defined Interviews (http://www.softwaredefinedinterviews.com/), our new podcast. Pretty self-descriptive, plus the #exegesis podcast we’ve been doing, all in one, for free. Keep up with the weekly newsletter (https://us1.campaign-archive.com/home/?u=ce6149b4008d62a08093a4fa6&id=5877922e21). Join us in Slack (http://www.softwaredefinedtalk.com/slack). Buy some t-shirts (https://fsgprints.myshopify.com/collections/software-defined-talk)! DISCOUNT CODE: SDTFSG (20% off) Send your name and address to stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com (mailto:stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com) and we will send you a sticker. Recommendations Matt: Oceanic (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00E84GOZY/) by Greg Egan Brandon: (https://www.netflix.com/title/80176878)How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars: The Snapchat Story (https://www.audible.com/pd/Science-Technology/How-to-Turn-Down-a-Billion-Dollars-Audiobook/B079DTHLCJ) related Snap stock plummets after Kylie Jenner declares Snapchat dead (https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/22/17040332/snap-stock-price-kylie-jenner-tweet-snapchat-1-billion-market-loss) Cover Art Credit (https://www.flickr.com/photos/polycart/6899465702/)

Abbas Haider Ali, CTO of xMatters, joins Nice Work! to talk with Lacey about how the challengers to solving incidents at scale. It takes a team of people to solve incidents. Do you know who the right people are or do you just require everyone to join the call? Queue the endless conference call joining meme. Lacey also talks to Abbas about his work mentoring women in tech through the mentor matching service, Everwise.

Many of my guests on the show are Tech leaders that appear on my radar that not only resonate but also inspire or intrigue me. Abbas Haider is the CTO of xMatters, and after seeing a video talking about how internal collaboration is crucial to digital transformation I wanted to find out more. xMatters aim to boost IT Operations, DevOps and Major Incident Management processes with intelligent communications. "Turn Insights into Action During Business Disruptions From IT major incidents to manufacturing line slowdowns, virtually every business process generates insights that need to reach the people required to take action" As most of you listening know by now, I love my tech, but it's how it brings people together and increases collaboration that really excites me. When I also heard him speak my IT language about the major incident and change management along with how automated chatbots can help in the communication process, I had to get him to on the show. Guest Info www.xmatters.com @xMatters_inc