Episode description

“What I come to realize is that technology doesn’t move that fast. The fundamentals are roughly the same. It’s the fact that we don’t necessarily teach fundamentals. When you start to focus on the fundamentals, then you don’t mentally get attached to one particular implementation."

Kelsey Hightower is one of the leading figures in open source, cloud computing, and Kubernetes. I’m extremely excited to have him with me sharing a lot of his insights around many things in tech. We started the conversation with what he has been doing recently—his involvement in serverless technologies and security landscape. Kelsey then shared his interesting career journey of how he got from working at fast food in high school to where he is at Google today. He also shared his advice on how one should learn and develop knowledge in the current fast changing technology landscape, and how he shifted his learning mindset to overcome impostor syndrome. Kelsey also discussed various latest updates on cloud, serverless technologies, and Kubernetes. He also shared how he has developed his fundamental understanding of certain technologies by learning them “the hard way” and publicly. We also covered his latest observation and views on microservices vs monolith. Last but not least, we close off the session with Kelsey’s Tech Lead Wisdom on his take around personal growth, learning, and his preferred way of leading by inspiring others.

Listen out for:

• What Kelsey is up to - [00:06:39]
• Kelsey’s career journey - [00:10:15]
• Succeeding in tech from under-represented groups - [00:13:21]
• Understanding technology fundamentals - [00:16:45]
• Impostor syndrome - [00:21:19]
• On cloud latest and cloud native - [00:27:51]
• Twelve-Factor application - [00:34:00]
• Serverless latest - [00:36:14]
• Monolith vs microservices - [00:42:44]
• Learning things The Hard Way - [00:54:20]
• Kubernetes-ify everything - [01:02:15]
• Kubernetes resources - [01:08:54]
• Kelsey’s 3 Tech Lead Wisdom - [01:12:13]

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Kelsey Hightower’s Bio
Kelsey Hightower has worn every hat possible throughout his career in tech, but most enjoys leadership roles focused on making things happen and shipping software. Kelsey is a strong open source advocate focused on building simple tools that make people smile. When he is not slinging Go code, you can catch him giving technical workshops covering everything from programming and system administration to his favorite Linux distro of the month.

Follow Kelsey:

• Twitter – https://twitter.com/kelseyhightower
• Github - https://github.com/kelseyhightower

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For more info about the episode (including quotes and transcript), visit techleadjournal.dev/episodes/18.