The Full Stack Journey is coming to an end. After five years and more than 80 episodes of deeply technical conversations about technologies, tools, and career journeys, this is the final episode of the series. In this show, with guest Drew Conry-Murray, I reflect on my time hosting the podcast, the challenges and pleasures of putting together a show, lessons and insights from all the conversations I’ve had, thoughts on the state of IT and technology, and what comes next. Many thanks to you,...

All the way back in episode 41—published in April 2020—we discussed Talos Linux, a “fit-for-purpose OS” designed for running Kubernetes. Three years later, Andrew Rynhard joins Scott for another journey into the world of Talos Linux. Andrew answers a bunch of questions about Talos Linux and Sidero Labs, the company behind the Talos open source project. Some of the things Andrew and Scott touch on include: * What’s happened in the last three years? * What is the real driving force behind...

Episode 81 of the Full Stack Journey podcast features Darren Shepherd, one of the creators of Rancher and now a co-founder of Acorn Labs, the company behind the Acorn open source project. Darren (@ibuildthecloud on Twitter) shares a ton of useful information on Acorn, including: * Where Acorn fits into the overall landscape of infrastructure and application development tooling * Why Kubernetes is useful but not necessarily the “final end state” for many organizations * How Acorn helps...

Episode 80 features Rishab Kumar, developer advocate at Twilio. He and Scott Lowe discuss his career journey. Specifically, Rishab focuses on three key things he learned that helped enable important career transitions for him. Specifically, Rishab and Scott discusses how learning these things affected Rishab’s career: * A cloud provider (AWS, in Rishab’s case) * Infrastructure as code (IaC) and the importance of faster releases * Writing, public speaking, and video creation For each...

This Full Stack Journey podcast episode features host Scott Lowe and guest Frank Wiles of REVSYS discussing GitOps and Flux. They explain how GitOps involves making changes to infrastructure by committing code to a Git repository, which is then automatically implemented. They also discuss their preferences for programming languages and operating systems, with Python and Linux being their top choices. The speakers delve into the role of Flux in the GitOps process, explaining how it automates...

On today’s Full Stack Journey podcast we examine pyATS, a Python testing framework typically used for network testing. Our guest to explain all things pyATS is John Capobianco. John is a Developer Advocate for Cisco Training Bootcamps and a proponent of Python and automation. We discuss: * How pyATS relates to Python * The GENIE component of pyATS * The concept of a testbed * Common uses for pyATS * Whether pyATS is for production networks or labs and training * How pyATS interacts...

On today’s Full Stack Journey podcast, Scott Lowe talks with Alexandria Leary who left a career as a financial advisor to break into cybersecurity. Alexandria and Scott discuss the reasons why she changed careers, and provide some information and resources useful for others who are seeking to find a career in cybersecurity. Find Alexandria on LinkedIn and see her Medium blog. Scott and Alexandria discuss: * The role professional networking played in making her career transition and in...

We all use certificates and certificate authorities every day, so in episode 76 Scott takes a deep dive on Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) with Linda Ikechuwku of Smallstep Labs. Linda covers everything you need to know about PKI: * What is PKI? * What are the major elements of a PKI? * What are certificates, and how can you (or should you) use them? * DIY your PKI, or no? * Active revocation or passive revocation? Show Notes: @_MsLinda – Linda Ikechuwku on Twitter Everything you...

You’ve probably heard terms such as authentication, authorization, OAuth2, OIDC, WebAuthn, but maybe you don’t have a good idea of exactly what they are or when they’re used. Authentication is a key technology that underpins large portions of the online world, and so it’s worth exploring in a bit more detail. In this episode of the Full Stack Journey podcast, Scott talks with Dan Moore of FusionAuth about all things authentication. We discuss * What is authentication? * What kinds or...

On today’s Full Stack Podcast, Scott is joined by Krithika Chandramouli, a software engineer at Meta, to discuss how the lessons she learned while preparing to run her first-ever half-marathon also apply to careers and career decisions. The podcast is loosely structured around this Medium post by Krithika. Some of the lessons we discuss include: * Just get started * Your progress may be non-linear * The 3 C’s (Consistency, Commitment, and Continuity) Scott and Krithika also dive into...

Today’s Full Stack Journey podcast welcomes Kat Morgan, a software engineer at Microsoft. She joins Scott to discuss finding and following passion projects—which for Kat include KubeVirt and UOR Framework. Scott and Kat have a very technical and yet entertaining conversation about how pursuing passion projects can inform, shape, and create career opportunities over the long term. Kat also has the distinction of having what is, arguably, the best online username/handle; find her as usrbinkat...

On today’s Full Stack Journey podcast we climb the ivory tower to get a glimpse of academic life in the field of networking and computer science with guest Dave Levin. Dr. Levin is Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Maryland. His research focuses on networking and security, including measurement, cryptography, artificial intelligence, and economics. On today’s show we talk with Dr. Levin about his background and how he got into computing, research projects he’s...

On this episode of the Full Stack Journey, host Scott Lowe is trying something new! Scott does a semi-regular blog series known as Technology Short Takes, and over the years he’s gotten lots of requests for audio and/or video versions. So, here in episode 71, we are happy to present the first-ever Technology Short Take – Audio Edition! In this episode, Scott takes three career-focused articles, shares a brief summary of the article, and then discusses the article in a little bit of depth....

On today’s Full Stack Journey podcast we welcome guest Eric Chou (@ericchou on Twitter; here’s his LinkedIn profile), an author, educator, and network engineer who shares the story of his career journey. From traditional network engineering to the birth of “cloud” at Amazon and now working to share his knowledge via blog posts, videos, books, and classes, Eric has some great career lessons to share with listeners. We discuss * How a “classic” network engineer end up working in cloud at...

The Full Stack Journey podcast is talking about network automation, this time with Matt Oswalt (@mierdin on Twitter) and Christian Adell (@chadell0 on Twitter). Both Matt and Christian are deeply involved in network automation, and are also co-authors with yours truly (Scott, the host) on the second edition of O’Reilly’s Network Programmability and Automation book, available now in early release. Scott grills Matt and Christian about topics such as: * The current state of network...

Today’s Full Stack Journey podcast is all about Pixie, an “open source observability tool for Kubernetes applications.” Pixie takes advantage of eBPF to capture telemetry data. Joining Scott to provide a beginner-level overview of Pixie is Fabian Ngala (@FabianNgala on Twitter). In this show, Scott and Fabian discuss: * What is Pixie, exactly? * Why would someone consider using Pixie? * What technologies does Pixie leverage? * How is Pixie different from other observability tools such...

You’ve probably heard of GitOps. But what is it, exactly? It seems like a new “-Ops” word is popping up every week! Joining Scott for episode 67 of the Full Stack Journey podcast is Christian Hernandez (@christianh814 on Twitter and on GitHub) of Codefresh, who takes some time to explain GitOps, what it is, and how listeners might get started using it. Some of the things Scott and Christian discuss include: * What GitOps is, and what GitOps isn’t * The relationship between GitOps,...

On today’s Full Stack Journey podcast, Drew Conry-Murray and Du’An Lightfoot discuss essential skills for IT professionals in 2022. They include learning to code, learning Linux, and sharing your journey. This topic was inspired by a Tweet thread Du’An recently posted. We also talk about the role of content creation such as blogging and videos to enhance your own learning and advance your career. Du’An is a Sr. Cloud Networking Developer Advocate at AWS Cloud. You may know Du’An from his...

Today’s Full Stack Journey asks: Are there tools, techniques, or practices common to software development that other IT disciplines should consider adopting? Can these tools and practices help other IT disciplines improve automation, operations, and daily tasks? Guests Adeel Ahmad (@devops_adeel on Twitter) and Kurt Seifried (@kurtseifried on Twitter) join host Scott Lowe to discuss this question. Topics include: * The top two or three things they recommend for other IT disciplines *...

Maybe you’ve heard of chaos engineering, and you’re curious about what it is. This episode will help you understand! Joining Scott for the Full Stack Journey is Cwen (Chengwen) Yin of Pingcap (@cwenyin on Twitter), who is a co-founder of the Chaos Mesh project (now part of CNCF, found on Twitter as @chaos_mesh). Cwen was/is also involved in the TiDB and TiKV projects. TiKV is a CNCF Graduated project. Scott and Cwen talk about a number of different aspects of chaos engineering: * What is...

Hearing about some of the lessons others have learned during their career journeys can be helpful; in fact, that’s something we’ve done quite a bit here on the Full Stack Journey podcast! We continue exploring career stories with Tracy Holmes. She shares lessons she’s learned on an IT voyage that includes engineering, data centers, and developer advocacy. You can find her just about anywhere with the moniker “tracypholmes”, like Twitter or GitHub. Tracy and Scott touch on topics...

The Full Stack Journey is back for 2022, and kicking off the year Scott (@scott_lowe on Twitter) takes a look at some recommendations for learning new technologies based on his own career experiences and the technology transitions he’s lived through. These include: * The transition from virtualization to networking * Shifting from networking to containers and container orchestration * Adding developer tools and workflows to his skill set * Focusing on cloud connectivity via service...

eBPF has taken the Linux networking world by storm. But what is it, exactly? And how it is related to the open-source Cilium project? Duffie Cooley (@mauilion on Twitter and GitHub and pretty much everywhere else), Field CTO at Isovalent, joins Scott to discuss eBPF and Cilium. If you’re into Linux, networking, or Kubernetes—or any combination of these three areas—this episode is for you! Scott and Duffie talk about things like: * What is eBPF, and why is it seeing increased attention? *...

Today on the Full Stack Journey podcast, Scott welcomes Hong Wang (@wanghong230 on Twitter) of Akuity. Hong is co-founder and CEO of Akuity, and is a maintainer of the open-source Argo project. Argo is a collection of tools to help ops team use Kubernetes. Scott and Hong talk about Argo and its various sub-projects including: * What projects are part of Argo? * Use cases for the various Argo projects * How the different projects complement each other * Technologies listeners should be...