Tailored Tech Talk

In this episode, Ben & Chris bring on their first guest - Mike Storey. Mike has worked in the software industry for over 40 years. The guys discuss Mike’s career experience and insights, discuss runbooks in a Q&A back and forth as well as discuss Mike’s passion - the thing he spends most of his time on these days – the Agile Learning Institute. To learn more about the Agile Learning Institute visit https://agile-learning.institute/ or email Mike at mike@agile-learning.institute.   Intro and Outro music is “Chip’s Folly” by LAZY SALON and is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

In this episode, Ben & Chris bring you a “war story from the field”. DevOps engineering is always one deployment or upgrade away from a crisis, and today’s story is one of a Kubernetes cluster gone sideways. They go over how they came up with a strategy to upgrade a cluster that was set to expire all certificates in a couple of days, the final solution and then some lessons learned along the way.   Intro and Outro music is “Chip’s Folly” by LAZY SALON and is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

In this episode, Ben & Chris talk through their lessons learned as software developers, DevOps engineers and engineering leadership over 20+ years of building software. These lessons are things we've learned the hard way and ones we've come to live by at Surton. DRY but not too DRY Least complexity principle Code readability matters In human time – code is read more than executed Don’t drink the zealot’s Koolaid Don’t solve problems that don’t exist Analysis Paralysis Intro and Outro music is “Chip’s Folly” by LAZY SALON and is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

In this episode, Ben & Chris talk in depth about building your very own “DevOps Control Center” in one of their favorite platforms, Retool. They discuss automating runbooks via custom internal applications quickly to maximize their return on investment.   Intro and Outro music is “Chip’s Folly” by LAZY SALON and is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

In this episode, Ben & Chris discuss disaster recovery and building a disaster recovery plan you can be proud of. They go over multiple DR strategies, pros and cons of each of them as well as specific AWS services you can use to satisfy your company's recovery requirements. The AWS Disaster Recovery whitepaper with the scale image we discussed in the podcast. Building Runbooks and DR plans are as important as building documentation on any service or product, just like we discussed in last week's episode - Ep. 7 - Documenting your way to a Vacation Rundeck by PagerDuty   Intro and Outro music is “Chip’s Folly” by LAZY SALON and is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

In this episode, Ben & Chris discuss a vacation season requirement – documentation. Whether you’re building a product, supporting a client or just needing someone else to run payroll, documenting for your coworkers is imperative for business continuity and the key to a great time away from the computer.   Intro and Outro music is “Chip’s Folly” by LAZY SALON and is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

In this episode, Ben & Chris talk about converting paper into data using a tool called Amazon Textract. Textract enables you to automatically extract text, handwriting and data from scanned documents. We discuss a customer business problem we solved replacing an old OCR scanner with cheaper scanners uploading documents to Textract and saving the customer a lot of money and time in the process.   Intro and Outro music is “Chip’s Folly” by LAZY SALON and is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

In this episode, Ben & Chris talk about deploying and scaling web applications using Amazon ECS. They focus on approaches they take when using ECS and container orchestration.   Highlights: Overview of Docker Containers Overview of Amazon ECS & Container Orchestration In-depth discussion of Fargate Spot & Spot instances for cost control Standing up a Web Service and auto scaling the service Scheduling Jobs in ECS Reasons to use Amazon ECS tasks over Lambda functions   Intro and Outro music is “Chip’s Folly” by LAZY SALON and is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

In this episode, Ben & Chris deep dive into No Code & Low Code platforms – the promise of these tools, where they struggle to deliver and the ones we still love and use daily.   Platforms we mention on this week’s episode:   Zapier Webflow Middlelink (Alphi) Make Retool Airtable Typeform Outsetta Power Automate Glide Intro and Outro music is “Chip’s Folly” by LAZY SALON and is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

In this episode, Ben & Chris delve into the essential role of technology and automation in modern businesses. They share their approach to consultation, pain point analysis, and creating a custom technological roadmap to guide businesses towards effective automation. Emphasizing a return on investment (ROI) driven mindset, they also discuss the significance of planning and incremental improvement in successful automation strategies. Intro and Outro music is “Chip’s Folly” by LAZY SALON and is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Ben and Chris talk about building Data Warehouses and Lakes with ETL (or ELT!) Pipelines, Visualizations, and more.   Intro and Outro music is “Chip’s Folly” by LAZY SALON and is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Ben and Chris introduce the podcast, themselves and talk about building a custom printing solution for a customer with some other topics (Ferngully, really?) coming up along the way.   Intro and Outro music is “Chip’s Folly” by LAZY SALON and is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0