David Henke - On building a culture of "Site Up" at LinkedIn and Yahoo! - #3
Release Date: 01/23/2021
Software Misadventures
Short episode about reflections on the past year and plans for 2022.
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is the CTO at , the largest stock broker in India. In this conversation, we speak with him about absurdism - a philosophy that guides his personal and professional worldview. We discuss how he built Zerodha’s tech team, their team culture and how the team operates so efficiently while being so lean. We also discuss why Zerodha self-hosts all of their tech stack, what they look for when hiring engineers and how their systems scaled when the user base grew from 2 to 8 million in 18 months.
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Michael Lynch is the founder of TinyPilot. After doing software engineering at Microsoft and Google for 7 years, Michael decided in 2018 to quit and start working for himself by building small software businesses. From years of negative profit to now building a $450K+ ARR hardware business, Michael joins the show to chat about what made him quit his cushy job at Google, how he builds in public with monthly retrospectives, what he has learned over the 3 years indie hacking and much more.
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Cory is currently a Solutions Engineer at Jeli.io. Prior to this, he led observability teams at Twitter & Stripe. We talk to him about how he got his start in customer support and the role it played in the later part of his career. We discuss his time at Twitter where there was a power outage in the data center on the day he joined. We also discuss how he created & led the observability team at Stripe, how one can succeed in a new org & what are some effective ways to advocate for your team.
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Ashwin is a Startup Partnership Lead at Stripe. From web development to co-founding a YC startup, to deep learning, Ashwin has a knack for picking up new skills extremely quickly. In this episode, we chat about the methods he employed to successfully make these transitions, learnings/tips from winning 30+ hackathons in a row, and what engineers can gain from better story-telling.
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Bruno Connelly is a VP of Engineering at LinkedIn. In this episode, we talk about his journey in tech - from teaching himself how to code to leading the SRE org at LinkedIn. We also discuss the early days at LinkedIn, building technical stability, growing the org globally and his leadership style.
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With 5+ years of experience building resilient systems at the Netflix scale, Lorin joins the show to chat about his favorite incident story, the path that led him to doing chaos engineering (and later away from it), and advocating for a dedicated analyst to talk to people after an incident. Throughout the conversation, Lorin shares his philosophy and tips on how to learn from incidents, what engineers can gain from writing better, and why some metrics may not be as useful as you think.
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Spoons is the Co-founder and Chief Architect of Lightstep. He joins the show to talk about building systems at Google scale and various aspects that make Google a weird place than other companies. We talked about Spoons's journey of leaving Google and deciding to join Lightstep as a co-founder. We dig into the challenges during the early days of Lightstep and discuss the importance of speaking to customers to build the right product.
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Having led 100+ ML projects at Insight and built ML systems at Stripe scale, Emmanuel joins the show to chat about how to build useful ML products and what happens next when the model is in production. Throughout the conversation, Manu shares stories and advice on topics like the common mistakes people make when starting a new ML project, what’s similar and different about the lifecycle of ML systems compared to traditional software, and writing a technical book.
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Todd is a Sr Director of Engineering at Google where he leads Site Reliability Engineering teams for Machine Learning. Having recently presented on how ML breaks in production at Google, Todd joins the show to chat about why many ways that ML systems break in production have nothing to do with ML, what’s different about engineering reliable systems for ML, vs traditional software (and the many ways that they are similar), what he looks for when hiring ML SREs, and more.
info_outlineDavid is LinkedIn’s former SVP of Engineering and Operations. He came out of retirement to join LinkedIn in 2009 during a time of rapid growth. After 4 years at LinkedIn, he retired in 2013. Throughout his career, David has been in multiple leadership positions and has been recognized as one of the best Operations Executives.
This was an extremely fascinating conversation. David shares insightful stories from early days at LinkedIn and what it took to develop the culture of “Site Up and Secure”. He shares one of the most severe outages he has experienced in his career - this one was at Yahoo!, which he calls the 10g massacre. We talk about David’s 3 retirements throughout his career, his advice on developing operational excellence and lessons on being an effective leader. Throughout this conversation you’ll also hear various nuggets of wisdom from David, better known as Henkeisms. Please enjoy this highly entertaining and deeply insightful conversation with David Henke.
Website link: https://softwaremisadventures.com/henke