Fork Around And Find Out
Fork Around and Find Out is your downtime from uptime. Your break from the pager, and a chance to learn from expert’s successes and failures. We cover state-of-the-art, legacy practices for building, running, and maintaining software and systems.
Episodes
Tim Banks will optimize your modem baud rate and kick your ass—respectfully. Then they'll teach you how to be a better person. Their career includes systems, sales, and many other facets of business, but who they are is not defined by what they do for money. Join us on this wonderful conversation about understanding who you are and bringing your whole self. Of course it wouldn't be Fork Around and Find Out without some hot...
Sidero and Oxide Kubecon NA event registration: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/oxidesidero-at-kubecon-north-america-2025-tickets-1538869282449
Duffie has lived through a lot. From multiple startup exits to big company changes. He stays grounded by remembering where he came from and what's important—people. This episode is full of career and life advice from one of the kindest people in the industry.
Links
Unfortunately, we ...
David has worked on a lot of cool tech you know like Kubernetes and Kubeflow, and he's usually a few years ahead of the game. So getting to catch up with him about what he's working on now is probably something you'll want to know about before you have these problems. He has great insights in how to get companies to support open source and how Kubernetes has evolved over time.
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What is it like to ship software in big tech? Sean gives us his experience from multiple companies and what he’s learned. It's probably not what you think. It doesn't matter if you're vibe coding features or bash-ing devops, we all need to remember why we were hired.
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This Episode has a full spread of FAFOFM topics. Ellie has a breadth of knowledge across cloud, on-prem, hardware, and—of course—Kubernetes. We dive into some of the new hardware available as well as the importance of hardware to train the next generation of engineers. A full cycle of interests we think you'll love. 🧡
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Today's history lesson is about the non-markup language platform engineers love to hate, YAML Ain't Markup Language (YAML). Ingy tells us all about how and why it started, how it evolved over time, and what's happening next with YS.
Note: sorry about the audio issues in this episode. We did our best to clean it up.
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It's easy to talk about everything when you've been writing software for half a century. Bhaskar has some amazing insights from his impressive career building software using everything from punch cards to AI. If you like learning about the past to understand the future, this is an episode you don't want to miss.
Links
- YottaDB https://yottadb.com
Angie gives us a crash course on Model Context Protocol (MCP) and how you can get started using it with goose. We also talk about other projects Angie's worked on at Block and what drives her to keep learning new things in tech.
Links
- Angie's website: https://angiejones.tech
- Goose https://github.com/block/goose
- Angie's Modern Day Mashups talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZbXq5qu55U
After 25 years in tech it’s hard not to coast. Adriana has come from writing word docs for the ops team to deploy software, through Devops, and now has a focus on OTel and Kubernetes. How do we get more people from 100 to 400 levels and why is there no content in between? And why we need junior engineers to make our senior engineers better.
Links
- Bluefin wallpapers https://github.com/ublue-os/packages/tree/main/p...
Disaster recovery is more than automation and infrastructure. There's a lot that goes into your services and some of those things can't be defined as code or automated. When was the last time you restored your database from a backup? How do you use least privileged access when your region changes and how do you even know you're having a disaster. Seth has a lot of experience and a ton of good insights in this episode.
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Railway wanted to build a better cloud so they started on Google Cloud and ended up building datacenters. Through the burden of success, they figured out there was a lot of things they had to learn and build themselves if they wanted to offer the best cloud experience they could. Jake tells us how they accomplished the move in 9 months, why the built their own orchestrator, and what they’re working on next.
You can't grow in technology without learning new things. But sometimes those new things are actually old things. We talk with Scott about a wide range of interests about software, video games, 3D printing, and food. If you want to know why junior engineers are important for your teams you need to listen.
Highlights
(0:00) What makes good engineers?
(12:00) Vibe coding
(19:00) Doom scrolling with intention
(24:0...
What exactly is an LLM doing and why do you need to learn so many new terms? Steve Pousty is here to explain that most of those new terms are things you already know. It’s not new technology, it’s new words to describe technologies applied in a new field. We have a wild, ADHD roller coaster looping through embeddings, vectors, RAG, and LLMs. Make sure to keep your hands and arms inside the pod for this one.
Chapters
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How Rachel Ray’s crawler lead to Ada developing a new performance testing framework, hyperscale. This leads to a great conversation about the benefits of rust, modern python package managers, and why MySpace went out of business. The importance of connecting what you’re building to business value and understanding every line of code has a cost.
Show Highlights
(0:00) Intro
(8:00) Rachel Ray crawler
(15:00) Performa...
Is running Kafka on-prem different than running it in the cloud? You’ll find out from Elad Eldor’s years of experience running, tuning, and troubleshooting Kafka in production environments. Elad didn’t set out to learn Kafka, but he kept asking questions and was given the opportunity to dive deep into system performance. He not only knows what all the columns of iostat mean, he knows what his customers want. Make sure to ...
Sam is back with us for a live episode where we discuss important questions such as “is coffee is good?”, “are people on the Internet good writers?”, and “is content creation consistency actually important?” We also share links about turning your hand writing into a font and hacking McDonald’s delivery app. Finally, we wrap up with a new game FAANG GANG.
Chapters
(0:00) Intro
(9:00) Codifying your handwriting
(10:3...
This episode is stacked with information. You could even say “full stacked.” Sam has built and run some large scale systems as a SRE at Google, now building backend services at Budibase, and he spends his free time teaching others how systems work at understandable scale. We dive into what makes Google SRE different from other companies, what it’s like to be a parent, and how Sam got started with building animations for hi...
Bluesky has been on a roller coaster of growth for over a year. From the early days of figuring out a new distributed social protocol—AT protocol—to actually building it and inviting 30 million of their closest friends. Not only has the site gone through tremendous growth, the team has been optimizing, re-architecting, and adding features the entire time.
Jaz is a software engineer focused on the infrastructure at Blues...
Today we find out how building a product at Big Tech can be very different than a startup. Lauren Long has done both. Building parts of Firebase and eventually taking the things she learned to build Ampersand. We discuss what Ampersand is and go into detail about what the back end looks like. We even drop some hot takes about serverless and Kubernetes. We think you’ll love it!
Show Highlights
(0:00) Intro
(1:00) What is A...
Fork it! We’ll do it live! Well, sort of...
In case you missed it last week, we’re running back our FAFO Livestream with Crystal Preston-Watson from this past Friday. Instead of prying into specifics about Crystal’s career, we’re chatting about recent tech news, the dire state of American tech literacy, and WTF WTA stands for!
You can expect shows like these on the last Friday of every month, and we hope to see you t...
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