Ep03: “Journey into Tech with Kelsey Hightower (Uncut version) 🌠

👨🏽‍🚀 Welcome to Episode 03 of “Tech Beats unplugged”

This time, we have been incredibly honored and fortunate to host one of the most prolific speakers, storyteller, and thought leader of his generation. He was kind enough to bless us with his presence for an exclusive interview filled with priceless wisdom and life hacks💡. 

Beyond his groundbreaking contributions to Kubernetes, Cloud Native and Open-Source software, he’s been one the most influential figures in the tech industry over the past decade.

Today, despite his retirement, he continues to inspire engineers across the world to build smarter, scalable, and highly usable systems🌟.

We’re so excited to share our privileged exchange with the one and only, Kelsey HighTower🧡!

We hope you’ll enjoy it!!!

Topics discussed:

  1. (00:00) Introduction
  2. (02:06) Day 0: Kelsey’s early life up to his tech introduction
    • Fun facts, boyhood in Long Beach
    • Early hustles in Atlanta
    • First gig in Tech (08:20)
  3. (14:40) If we had a dinner with 3 of your best friends and Asked them to describe you, What would we learn 🦸‍♂️ ?
    • The past lives of Kelsey in the show business
    • The impact of minimalism
  4. (25:40) What did it take on a hindsight: Skills, talent, hard work, luck or all of them?
    • The revolution of the Open source mindset
    • Can do attitude, increase the luck surface
    • The most powerful language: “Human language”
  5. (32:30) The CNCF landscape: How did we get there?
    • Limitless options; Is it a good or bad thing
  6. (37:50) Monolith vs Microservices debate: is it still a thing today?
    • Stack Overflow & Prime Video examples
  7. (48:40) Platform engineering vs DevOps! What’s that all about ?
  8. (53:38) At what time serverless stops making sense?
    • Beyond cost and process length.
  9. (57:56) One day Kubernetes will die, what does life after K8 look like?
  10. (01:05:42) What the heck is service mesh/istio and is eBPF is here to replace it?
    • keeping up with side cars vs ambient mesh and cilium.
  11. (01:14:16) Dev consumerism, are we in a disposable Dev language era?
    • I’m a junior dev, should I pick the weekly hype or stick to my guns? (too many frameworks, APIs, runtimes).
  12. (01:23:32) How to distinguish Right Abstraction from the Bloat Abstraction?
  13. (1:27:20) Something called Empathetic engineering?
    • Your experience back at google improving usability.
  14. (1:34:31) Tips for when you’re obsessed with exciting new ideas but fail miserably to convey its potential to the higher ups?
  15. (1:44:30) Startup CTOs conundrum- should we keep it simple (monolith/managed) or go all-in shiny framework?
  16. (1:52:00) The state of the Black Community in Silicon Valley
  17. (2:05:07) Career wisdom for Youngbloods
  18. (2:11:50) Surprise Quiz😀: What Kind of Kelsey are you (Hip Hop version 🎵)

Show Notes

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