Ronak Nathani, Guang Yang
55 episodes listed below
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A show about not just the technologies, but the people and stories behind them. In every episode, Ronak and Guang sit down with engineers, founders, and investors to chat about their paths, lessons they've learned and of course, the misadventures along the way.
A vanished route table makes your healthy-looking Kubernetes setup a very convincing liar.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A kernel slowdown becomes a practical lesson in curiosity, I/O wait, and diagnostic tools for understanding a live system.
Software Misadventures turns kernel debugging into a clear investigation, not an insider ritual. Ryan traces a latency increase that showed up after applications moved to a newer kernel, using I/O wait to reason toward the kernel and talking through tools such as sysrq and atop.
A candid look at why uptime becomes a company-wide decision when releases keep breaking the site.
Keeping a site up comes through as an organizational argument before it becomes an operations tactic. David Henke makes the case for why the old fence between engineering and operations breaks down on the internet, where slow handoffs cannot address issues quickly enough and…
A slow HTTP request leads into TCP timing, debugging fundamentals, and the value of understanding systems before leaning on tools.
Software Misadventures works best when a slow HTTP request becomes a doorway into the system behavior underneath. Julia follows a debugging path from a Go program that looked healthy, through garbage collection as an early suspect, and into a TCP exchange shaped by Nagle's…
Kelsey Hightower makes Kubernetes networking feel less like platform magic and more like Linux worth tracing.
Kubernetes gets its abstraction honestly here, then loses just enough of it to become easier to reason about. Kelsey Hightower follows a failure down through Linux networking and the infrastructure under the cluster, where Kubernetes and the host can both appear healthy while a…
Steve Yegge reflects on AI, engineering identity, and the pull of hands-on coding.
Software Misadventures is strongest when it stays close to Steve Yegge's collision with AI and professional identity. He describes an "AI mid-life crisis," rooted in the realization that abilities once tied to his self-worth, including memorizing and producing long material, no…
A practical look at prompting, context, and testing as habits for AI-assisted engineering.
AI's advantage with SQL is only one piece of the episode's larger point: useful AI-assisted engineering still depends on judgment, memory, and business context.
Specialists walking through software's tradeoffs, one system at a time.
Founders and engineers on AI coding agents like Claude Code, and supply chain security.
The engineering decisions behind code, agents, and control.
Python tools, practical trade-offs, and the occasional programming joke.
Matt Stratton interviews DevOps practitioners on security, platform engineering, and trusting AI-written code.
This episode explores the differences between the hard power of management (hiring, promotions, money) and the soft power of senior individual contributors (knowledge, context, foresight) through a conversation with data scientist Josh Wills.
Matt Klein discusses the challenges of building Envoy during its early growth phase at Lyft, emphasizing impact-driven development and the importance of communication with company leadership.
Nathan Marz discusses his journey into flying and how it relates to his work in software engineering, particularly with Rama, while sharing personal anecdotes about learning to pilot.
This episode continues a conversation with Kelsey Hightower about his retirement from Google at 42, covering financial planning, startup advising, compensation decisions, and career reflections.
Bruno Connelly, VP of engineering at LinkedIn, discusses his leadership philosophy prioritizing company and team over self, and shares his career journey from self-taught coder to leading the global SRE organization.
This episode features an unboxing and demonstration of the Oxide rack with hosts discussing its engineering features, followed by an introduction to the Software Misadventures podcast.
Bryan Cantrill shares his emotional experience receiving Oxide's first term sheet and discusses the challenges of building complex hardware-software systems while offering advice for tackling difficult engineering problems.
This episode features an interview with Pete Warden about launching his company Useful Sensors and the AI in a Box project, which runs large language models on small hardware for local AI applications.
This episode explores how effective communication and storytelling are crucial for engineers, featuring Adam Gordon Bell discussing his realization that technical excellence alone isn't enough without the ability to share knowledge.
Bryan Cantrill discusses Oxide's transparent compensation and values-based culture, emphasizing trust in engineering and reflecting on chaotic experiences like CEO searches at Joyent.
Kyle Kingsbury discusses his favorite databases across different categories and explains the experimental testing philosophy behind Jepsen, drawing parallels to his background in physics and psychology.
This episode features an interview with Kelsey Hightower discussing his experiences with learning in public, including blogging, speaking at meetups and conferences, and writing his book 'Kubernetes Up and Running', along with advice for others wanting to start sharing their knowledge publicly.
The host provides an update on the podcast's journey, including its start in December 2020, a break in 2022, revival in 2023, and recent transition to weekly releases, while acknowledging team efforts and production challenges.
This episode features an interview with David Henke about his engineering experiences at LinkedIn, Yahoo, and Silicon Graphics, focusing on stories and lessons from his career.
Melissa Runfeldt discusses her career journey in data science, focusing on the irony of automating her own job and the evolving role of data scientists as translators between humans and machines.
This episode features Todd Underwood discussing his decade of experience running ML systems at Google, focusing on the challenges of ML in production, the role of SRE, and insights from outage reports.
This episode features an interview with LinkedIn principal engineer Felix Givi discussing the benefits of open-sourcing their derived data platform Venice and the engineering philosophy behind it.
Brian Grant discusses the challenges of designing permanent APIs and shares insights on successfully proposing and implementing impactful projects like Kubernetes at Google.
This episode features an interview with Daniel Spoonhower (Spoons), co-founder of Lightstep, discussing his experiences building systems at Google scale, the challenges of starting Lightstep, and the importance of customer-focused product development.
This episode explores Kelsey Hightower's experiences and frameworks for engineers advising startups, including practical advice on balancing advisory work with day jobs.
Chris Pruett shares his decision to leave LinkedIn to co-found Jam, discussing values-based decision making and receiving supportive advice from his former CEO.
This episode features an interview with Julie Amundson, a senior software engineer at Google, discussing her experience with career breaks, job searching during hiring freezes, and positioning herself in the market after being affected by layoffs.
This episode explores the parallels between synthetic biology and software development, discussing how robots enable high-throughput experimentation in biology despite the high cost of mistakes compared to software.
This episode features an interview with Erica Lockheimer, former VP of engineering at LinkedIn, discussing practical strategies for building diverse engineering teams and empowering women in tech through mentorship and advocacy.
Michael Lynch discusses the challenges and rewards of building and selling a hardware business like TinyPilot compared to software ventures or corporate employment.
This episode features an interview with Dave O'Connor about practical mentorship strategies for engineers, drawing from his experience at Google, Twilio, and Elastic.
Wes McKinney discusses the emotional and financial challenges of open source software development, focusing on funding traps like the startup model.
Jay Kreps discusses early lessons from building Kafka and Confluent, including a humorous anecdote about shaving an investor's head to celebrate a company milestone.
Maxime Beauchemin discusses the importance of code orientation for open source contributors and offers advice on starting with projects that address personal needs.
This episode features an interview with DJ Patil, the first US chief data scientist, discussing his high school suspension, career lessons, and insights on AI.
The hosts discuss the reasons behind starting their podcast, focusing on learning from successful people and improving their questioning skills, while sharing updates and plans for 2022.
Michael Lynch shares his journey of quitting Google to bootstrap a software business to over $450K ARR, discussing niche market strategies and personal retrospectives.
Simon Willison discusses his mental model of LLMs as 'weird, over-confident interns' who can generate code but require careful prompting and correction.
This episode features an interview with Arnab Deka and Ilya Bezdelev, who left their roles at AWS and Google to bootstrap their startup Metacast, discussing their personal and practical reasons for the career transition.
A former Twitter engineer shares a story about a major data loss incident and discusses the process of technical due diligence in acquisitions from his experience at Ginkgo.
This episode features an interview with Netflix senior software engineer Loren Hochstein discussing how Netflix learns from incidents, Chaos Engineering, writing persuasively, and software as socio-technical systems.
This episode features Emmanuel Ameisen discussing production machine learning at Stripe scale, leading over 100 ML projects, and practical insights on data quality and iteration.
This episode features an interview with Kelsey Hightower discussing his career journey and recent retirement as a Distinguished Engineer from Google at age 42.
This episode features an interview with Evan Estola discussing challenges in machine learning systems, including recommendation failures, hiring practices, and technical leadership insights.
This episode features an interview with Uma Chingunde, VP of Engineering at Render, discussing strategies for managing large-scale infrastructure migrations and growing healthy engineering teams.
This episode features an interview with Kailash Nadh, CTO of Zerodha, discussing how absurdist philosophy influenced building India's largest stockbroker's tech team without external funding.
On Software Misadventures, Ronak and Guan interview Maxime Beauchemin about how data engineers can become “LLM-ready” as AI generates SQL and automates more technical work.
Ashwin Kumar describes moving from investment banking into coding through Codecademy and a nine-week bootcamp, then progressing through a YC-funded startup, machine learning at Mythic, and startup partnerships at Stripe.
Software Misadventures hosts Ronak and Gwan interview Mitchell Hashimoto about the path from Neopets game bots and a cease-and-desist letter to Vagrant, Terraform, Consul, and HashiCorp.
Software Misadventures hosts Ronak and Guan interview Steve Yegge of Sourcegraph about public rants, writing, and the effect of LLMs on engineering work.
Software Misadventures examines distinguished engineering through Jens Nielsen's account of building Uber deployment platforms and later founding BeyondWork, with the episode identifying scope as the defining difference at the top of the individual-contributor ladder.
Corey Watson tells Software Misadventures how a mid-1990s dial-up support call shaped his rule that “being mad at somebody is not going to make it any better.” He recounts joining Twitter during a physical data-center power outage, later taking down its observability read side with a dashboard named using three emoji, and managing an observability team.
This episode features Charity Majors, co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb.io, discussing her journey from engineer to founder, including early on-call experiences and handling production incidents.
This episode features Tammy Bryant Butow, a principal SRE at Gremlin, discussing chaos engineering, reliability culture, and her experiences with major outages and disaster recovery tests.
This episode features Oliver Leaver-Smith, a DevOps engineer, discussing how a monitoring change caused a major outage and the importance of resiliency.
Software Misadventures hosts Ronek and Guang interview LinkedIn staff SRE and tech lead Ryan Underwood about debugging a Linux kernel performance regression during a move from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 to CentOS.
David Henke, LinkedIn's former SVP of engineering and operations, explains how he made "site up" and security priorities after finding LinkedIn's site down every day.
Software Misadventures hosts Ronak, Austin, and Guang interview Julia Evans about two production bugs involving Kubernetes scheduling and TCP performance.
Software Misadventures hosts Ronak, Austin Bellamy, and Guang interview Google principal developer advocate Kelsey Hightower about Kubernetes failures, technical leadership, and storytelling.