Fork Around And Find Out

Flying through The Atmosphere with Dan Abermov

Come find Justin in-person and get FAFOFM stickers! Tailscale Up - San Francisco, CA - August 26 Devopsdays - Portland, OR - September 8-10. Get 20% off tickets with FAFOFM Edgecase - Gooiland Hilversum, NL - September 24 Taloscon - Amsterdam, NL - October 15-16 KCD UK - Edinburgh - October 19 Kubecon NA - Salt Lake City, UT - November 9-12 Have an opening? HIRE AUTUMN!!! The AT protocol has a fundamental different design than other social networks. There are no siloed instances and every user is associated with their own domain. As Dan likes to put it, a Personal Data Server (PDS) is more like a filesystem for your personal activity. Apps that read those files can read one type of file or many types. User identity lives outside of any one app and we go deep into it on this episode. Show notes: Anisota - A different approach to browsing social media FAFOFM Guests starter pack Dan’s blog (00:00) - Introduction and guest setup (01:15) - Dan’s background with Blue Sky (06:14) - What at protocol is built on (12:52) - Why at protocol matters (17:26) - At protocol vs. ActivityPub (22:31) - Identity, portability, and lock-in (30:37) - Public data, scraping, and AI (41:41) - Moderation, forks, and the future of AT protocol

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Laughing Through The Pain with David Crawshaw

Some of you might know David as a co-founder of Tailscale. In this episode we're talking about a new kind of cloud he's building at exe.dev. The SSH-only interface is a breath of fresh air compared to the monstrocity that the AWS console has become. We dive deep into why the cloud needs a reset and how integrating AI can be more than just a chat bot. David Crawshaw on Bluesky exe.dev exe.dev Discond community You can find FAFOFM on your favorite, non-nazi infested social media platforms Bluesky Follow episode guests with this Starter Pack Instagram Mastodon LinkedIn YouTube

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Suing The Government with Cindy Cohn

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. Privacy's Defender book Cindy's SCaLE keynote

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Taking Down Prod with Eve

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 stop doing. Eve's Instagram Eve's TikTok Chapters 00:00 Introduction 02:37 Eve's Journey into Tech 05:22 CI/CD and Kubernetes 08:08 Psychological Safety in Tech 11:01 The Importance of Documentation 13:28 GitOps vs. DevOps 16:09 Platform Engineering and Developer Experience 19:01 Best Practices in CI/CD 22:09 The Role of AI in Development 24:39 Advice for New Engineers 27:19 Closing Thoughts

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Laying the Foundation with Joe Beda

Fork Around and Get Email Sponsor FAFOFM "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 going far. Don't forgot to check out the FAFOFM store.

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Training The Future with Mark Russinovich

Sponsor FAFOFM Don't FAFO with cloud disaster recovery. Do it right with Arpio. Have a podcast you need help with? Reach out to HumblePod. 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 this episode. Zero Day Redefining the Software Engineering Profession for AI Mark's SCaLE 23x Keynote

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Developing Measurements with Cat Hicks

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 understanding why a person or team might be over or under performing. This episode talks about lots of factors and gives you some ideas to understand what's actually going on. You probably want to check out Cat's upcoming book The Psychology of Software Teams or her recent whitepaper No Silver Bullets: Why Understanding Software Cycle Time is Messy, Not Magic.

Embracing the Journey with Cassidy Williams

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

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Objecting to storage

Thank you NoPorts for sponsoring https://fafo.fm/noports 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. Please leave a review Apple Podcasts Spotify Podcast addict Pocketcasts Amazon Music Send us an email to let us know what you thought of this episode Email your feedback The music was provided by Dave Eddy Sponsor FAFOFM at https://fafo.fm/sponsor Individual donations are appreciated at https://ko-fi.com/fafofm

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Looking Forward with Tim Banks

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 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 takes on AI and the future of tech. Links Tim's Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/elchefe.me tim-banks.ghost.io Ship It! Episode https://changelog.com/shipit/116

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Staying Calm with Duffie Cooley

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 don't have links for most of the companies Duffie talks about because they've all been acquired. CoreOS, Heptio, and Isovalent are all either gone or part of bigger companies now. CoreOS -> Red Hat -> IBM Heptio -> VMware -> Broadcom Isovalent -> Cisco Thankfully the Isovalent products are still going strong. Check them out at isovalent.com

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Colocating Data with David Aronchick

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. Links David on Bluesky Expanso An oral history of Kubernetes ConfigHub PetSet GitHub issue

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Building Trust with Sean Goedecke

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. Links: https://www.seangoedecke.com/how-to-ship/

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Cooling Infrastructure with Ellie Ford

https://fafo.fm/store 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 https://ellie.fm https://bsky.app/profile/ellie.fm https://devzero.io https://www.cloudlab.us/ https://github.com/clastix/kamaji https://www.softwaredefinedtalk.com/

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Creating YAML with Ingy döt Net

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: https://helmys.org/ https://yamlscript.org/ https://exercism.org/ https://yamlscript.org/ingydotnet/

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Writing bugs with K.S. Bhaskar

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

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MCPing in the Open with Angie Jones

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

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Motivated to Learn with Adriana Villela

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/packages/bluefin/wallpapers Justin’s talk with balloons and a spreadsheet https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0mWGaBawR8 Adriana on Bluesky https://bsky.app/profile/adrianamvillela.bsky.social

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Recovering from Disaster with Seth Eliot

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 Seth’s Linktree https://linktr.ee/setheliot arpio https://arpio.io/services/ EKS Auto example repo https://community.aws/content/2sV2SNSoVeq23OvlyHN2eS6lJfa/amazon-eks-auto-mode-enabled-build-your-super-powered-cluster Disaster recovery white paper https://docs.aws.amazon.com/whitepapers/latest/disaster-recovery-workloads-on-aws/disaster-recovery-workloads-on-aws.html Disaster recovery blog series https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/tag/disaster-recovery-series/ Ship it! with Pete Naylor https://changelog.com/shipit/127 Engineering Resilient Systems on AWS by Jennifer Moran https://www.amazon.com/Engineering-Resilient-Systems-AWS-Resilience/dp/1098162420 Four Things Everyone Should Know About Resilience https://community.aws/content/2duX45O6vKOE7cmmXQ9Nj3tO3bL/should-know-resilience

Building a Datacenter with Jake Cooper

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. Check out Railway at https://railway.com/ and their blog at https://blog.railway.com. Specifically read the post discussed in this episode. https://blog.railway.com/p/data-center-build-part-one