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
If you've ever heard code is an expression of free speech you have Cindy Cohn to thank. Her decades of work in courtrooms and at the Electronic Frontier Foundation has been keeping Open Source, open and private communications, private. We got to chat about her new book Privacy's Defender and take a look at the future by hearing stories from the past.
If you're a platform engineer you've had to exit vi at least once. Eve is stuck with it for the rest of her social media life. She's a Sr Platform Engineer and obviously knows a ton about Kubernetes and CI/CD. Enough to make you cry laughing. We got to chat with her about what it's like to be doing s̶y̶s̶a̶d̶m̶i̶n̶ ̶d̶e̶v̶o̶p̶s̶ j̶e̶n̶k̶i̶n̶s̶ d̶e̶p̶l̶o̶y̶m̶e̶n̶t̶ platform engineering work in the age of AI and what people should st...
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"Everyone is a beginner at one point." Even one of the creators of Kubernetes. If you're listening to this podcast then Joe has had an impact on what you do. He's worked on everything from Internet Explorer 6, Google Cloud Platform, and Kubernetes. You can partially blame him for ActiveX and YAML. He's also one of the kindest people who understand the difference between going fast and ...
Sponsor FAFOFM
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Mark is the CTO of Azure and has decades of experience exploring the internals of systems. As a developer and person responsible for running massive AI infrastructure, Mark has a lot of insights and ideas. We talk about the the end of SaaS, training engineers, and a whole lot more on th...
- SoCal Linux Expo - discount "FAFOF" -https://www.socallinuxexpo.org/
- Kubecon EU Amsterdam - https://events.linuxfoundation.org/kubecon-cloudnativecon-europe/
- Linuxfest North West - https://linuxfestnorthwest.org/
- Newsletter - https://sub.fafo.fm/
Dr. Cat Hicks takes a different approach to traditional engineer productivity measurements. Instead of turning engineers into velocity numbers she takes a holistic approach to und...
Cassidy Williams was too funny to be a developer so she was banished to the island of misfit devs called DevRel. Along the way she found a passion for memes and dreams and mechanical keyboards. No Oxford commas required. We start 2026 off strong with a few predictions, a medium amount of jokes, and a lot of AI.
Subscribe to her hilarious newsletter at cassidoo.co
Thank you NoPorts for sponsoring
If the Internet is a big computer, Amazon s3 is the hard drive. So what happens when a single typo breaks the Internet's hard drive? On this episode of Fork Around and Find Out we review the s3 outage from 2017. It wasn't that long ago and yet it seems everyone has forgotten.
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Sidero and Oxide Kubecon NA event registration: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/oxidesidero-at-kubecon-north-america-2025-tickets-1538869282449
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 ...
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.
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Unfortunately, we don...
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. 🧡
Links
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.
Links:
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/pack...
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.
Links
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
(24:00) Making...
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.
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