vBrownBag

Whitney Lee is a well-known figure in cloud computing. She is an international keynote speaker, the host of several successful streaming shows, and a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Ambassador. But here’s the wild part: Whitney wrote her first line of code EVER when she was almost 40 years old, only 6 years ago 🤯 🥳 In this inspiring episode we talk to Whitney about her journey, her lear...

Yufa Li is a Fullstack Software Engineer who has been freelancing for years! In this episode we get into ALL the questions: What was her journey like? What are the ups and downs of freelancing? What works, what doesn't, what you should charge, EVERYTHING! 00:00 - Intro 08:00 - Let's talk about freelancing 12:00 - Freelance Statistics 2025 14:30 - The Pros 21:30 - The Cons 29:00 - How to get starte...

Amanda Ruzza is a DevOps Engineer, world famous Jass Bassist, and a Services Architect at Datadog! in this episode she shares how she ‘migrated’ traditional music studying techniques into learning Cloud and all things tech related! "Study is fun and it’s all about falling in love with the journey 📚🎶🎼 " 00:00 - Intro 19:03 - Study Techniques for Busy Humans 20:21 - Figure out your WHY 24:30 - De...

Mark Tinderholt, Azure architect and author of the book "Mastering Terraform", joins the vBrownBag to talk about his top 5 Azure automation mistakes to avoid. Learn how to approach complex automation tasks and how to solve them, all while maintaining your sanity. 🥳 Chapters: 00:00 Introductions 07:06 Big Mistake #1: Boiling the ocean 17:39 Big Mistake #2: The Cloud Shotgun 23:29 Big Mistake #3: D...

Du'An Lightfoot, AWS Developer Advocate, joins the vBrownBag crew to talk about how he went from frustrated tinkerer to confident builder. He'll demonstrate his actual workflow, and live-code a project using nothing but vibes and Amazon Q Developer. Come see how and why anyone with ideas can now be a developer. Chapters: 00:00 Introductions 02:49 What is vibe coding? 03:42 The importance of our fo...

Robby Stahl, technical account manager at Platform9, joins the vBrownBag crew to vJailbreak, an open source tool that automates VM migration from VMware ESXi to KVM. Chapters: 00:00 Robby & Damian banter 04:49 What is vJailbreak? 10:06 vJailbreak on GitHub 13:45 A demo is attempted, but the demo gods do not approve 22:00 A video of the demo is attempted, but the video gods do not approve 23:40 Rob...

Matthew Bonig, chief cloud architect at Defiance Digital, and co-author of the AWS CDK book, joins the vBrownBag crew to talk about leveraging observability & AI in software development. Chapters: 00:00 Roger, Damian, and Matthew have a bit of a chit-chat 03:27 Introducing Matthew👏 08:14 The importance of observability in software development 10:40 Some real-world examples 34:17 Going beyond AI c...

Aaron Hunter, AWS principal developer advocate, joins the vBrownBag crew to discuss general tips on preparing for certifications, the AWS AI/ML certification catalog, and great tools YOU can use to help pass an AWS AI/ML certification. Chapters: 00:00 Sean, the prodigal son, returns! There is much rejoicing across the lands! 🥳 07:32 Introducing Aaron 👏 08:55 Let's talk about the different ways f...

Kyler Middleton joins Chris and Damian to talk about her free and open-source generative AI solution for the enterprise. The second link below includes a free 30 day subscription to Substack. You have Kyler's express permission to cancel on the last free day. 😊 Also, I (Damian) forgot that we were doing chapters in these show notes. Sorry! Chapters: 00:00 Shenanigans ensue 04:20 Introducing Kyler...

Ashley Lyon joins Shala, Chris, and Damian for an entertaining yet insightful discussion about impostor syndrome, getting past being afraid of The Worst Thing Happening, and more. Resources: https://workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/129099/how-to-know-if-i-am-a-real-developer https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashleylyon1/

Damien Burks is the Founder of the DevSec Blueprint: "a comprehensive, free, and open-source learning guide designed to equip you with the essential skills and knowledge needed to transition into DevSecOps or grow within your DevSecOps career."! In this episode he walks us through the blueprint, his inspiration for creating it, and how to get started! 00:00 - Intro 04:27 - About The DevSec Bluepri...

AWS Community Builder and Software/Platform Engineer Ervin Szilágyi joins us today to talk about his project: creating a BlueSky Bot (for good, not evil 😂). Join us as he walks through the build process, his architectural decision making, and some lessons he learned along the way! 00:00 - Intro 04:02 - About BlueSky 10:05 - How the bot works 29:27 - AI challenges detecting service deprecations 37...

Every year AWS Hero Peter Sankauskas creates the AWS Survey. In it we can see trends for the various services: what's hot, what's not 🤣 Join us for the 2025 AWS Survey where we review findings from years past and make some predictions about what we'll see in 2025! P.S. Do the survey!!! https://answersforaws.com/survey/ 00:00 - Intro 03:05 - What is the AWS Survey? 26:33 - Let's do the survey! How...

Welcome to the New Year and the first episode of the year: We are excited to be talking with Developer Advocate Jessican Deen about GitHub Actions and how you can use them to automate your workflows! 00:00 - Intro 05:49 - What are we going to talk about? 08:23 - Reusable Workflows 14:21 - Job Summaries 18:45 - Matrix Jobs 34:58 - Artifact Attestations 41:47 - OIDC 50:47 - Additional Resources How...

Andrew Brown joins Shala, Chris, and Damian for a re:Invent re:cap of their favorite announcements, tips on how to attend re:Invent, and more. Resources: https://genai.cloudprojectbootcamp.com/ https://www.exampro.co/ https://x.com/andrewbrown https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-wc-brown/

What better way to learn about Machine Learning than with an AWS Machine Learning Hero??? Join us as we talk with Cyril Bandolo about the best ways to learn about this exciting new field! 00:00 - Intro 08:20 - What is serverless? 16:00 - What is Machine Learning? 18:38 - ML vs GenAI vs DL 31:35 - Path #1! 33:34 - Path #2! 38:06 - Path #3! Resources: Twitter: @BandoloCyril Bluesky: @cyrilbandolo Yo...

AWS Hero Linda Mohamed joins the vBrownBag to show us how she uses Amazon Q to scale community engagement (also a sneak peek for her AWS ReInvent 2024 session!) 00:00 Intros and chit-chat 09:05 Linda is a juggler, and Damian is fascinated by juggling math 🤣 12:30 Building an AI application with Amazon Q, and the learning curve of building an AI app 16:30 Introducing the AWS Community Helper app 1...

Jeramiah Dooley joins the vBrownBag to discuss his experience at and insights from GitHub Universe 2024, and explores the transition from individual contributor to people manager. Great career tips inside! 00:53 Introducing Jeramiah Dooley 07:11 Experiencing GitHub Universe 2024 22:06 Interesting announcements @ GitHub Universe 2024 39:30 Jeramiah's journey from IC to manager 43:00 The hardest mom...

Aaron Miller joins the vBrownBag to discuss the human side of DevOps, HumanOps, a recap of an AWS event in London, and his experience in the AWS New Voices program. 02:56 Introducing Aaron Miller 11:42 Aaron's quest to understand DevOps 13:00 What DevOps is all about 23:12 People, tools, and processes 36:10 What is HumanOps? 37:30 The five HumanOps principles 38:25 Recap of AWS London re:Inforce r...

AWS Hero, CTO, & long time friend of the show Calvin stops in to help make developers lives easier! 🥰 In this episode he walks us through scaf a project he's created to build kubernetes based environments to enable django devs to (1) get up and running quickly (2) provide a similar environment across local, dev, and prod and much much more. 00:00 - Intro 04:15 - Six Feet Up??? 07:55 - Why we star...

Damien Burks joins the vBrownBag to demo a solution he architected & uses Terraform & GenAI to accelerate his content creation 01:10 Call to action! Who's hiring? Let us know and we'll promote 🚀 04:50 Introducing Damien Burks 08:05 Level set: What is Terraform and what's it used for? 11:55 Problem statement & Damien's solution, the Personal Blogging Assistant 26:00 Let's dive into the code! 🏊 32...

JJ Asghar shares his thoughts on IBM TechXchange & InstructLab with Chris Williams Resources: https://x.com/jjasghar

Keith Townsend (Futurum Group & The CTO Advisor) shares his thoughts on IBM TechXchange with Chris Williams Resources: https://x.com/CTOAdvisor

Microsoft technologist Kevin Evans explores the general trend of technology maturation, certifications for aspiring cloud solutions architects, his thoughts on near-future changes for existing cloud solution architects, and more. 00:00 Welcome and a detour into homelabs 05:33 Kevin's role at Microsoft and technology maturation 10:48 Damian's wife sets off the smoke alarms 🤣(sorry!) 14:10 What's n...

AWS Hero Vivek Raja goes beyond the GenAI hype and explores AWS AI/ML offerings, AI ethics, and more. 04:05 Introducing Vivek 👋 11:54 Exploring the technology hype cycle 20:50 Considering computer vision, as an example of the hype cycle 25:06 Where is Gen AI in the hype cycle? 29:50 AWS & GenAI 32:29 Rediscovering AWS AI/ML services 🔍 55:44 AWS Sagemaker Studio demo 72:20 Navigating risks & ethi...