Tailored Tech Talk
A weekly look into the world of DevOps and tailored software solutions hosted by Ben Hayden and Chris Reynolds.
Episodes
In this week's episode, Ben and Chris discuss the Surton founder story. They've been building Surton for two and a half years and have learned a ton of lessons. They discuss their both unique perspectives as first and second-time founders and share their wisdom gained throughout the process.
Intro and Outro music is https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Lazy_Salon/Invisible_Like_Peace/07_Chips_Folly by LAZY SALON and is l...
In this week's episode, Ben and Chris discuss the role of deadlines in engineering. Often feared and often missed, but deadlines play a crucial role in business and delivering value to customers. They talk about how to marry the needs of the engineering team to the needs of the executive team in a business and strategies for both sides.
Intro and Outro music is https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Lazy_Salon/Invisible_Like_Peace/...
In this week's episode, Ben and Chris share their opinions and experience building with full serverless technologies in AWS. They talk through the pros, cons and learnings from using the latest in-vogue tech stack.
Intro and Outro music is https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Lazy_Salon/Invisible_Like_Peace/07_Chips_Folly by LAZY SALON and is licensed under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
In this week's episode, Ben and Chris discuss the rewrite. Typically, as a software solution finds business success, technical debt stacks up over time and eventually the concept of "We just need to start over" comes up as a dream, and potentially in some companies a reality. The problem is that it often turns into a nightmare.
Things You Should Never Do, Part I - Joel on Software - https://www.joelonsoftware.com...
In this week's episode, Ben and Chris discuss internal company documentation at Surton and how they have found success building a company wiki using Microsoft's Loop. They also discuss other popular tools in this space such as Notion and Confluence.
Intro and Outro music is “Chip’s Folly” by LAZY SALON and is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
In this episode, Ben and Chris discuss how they helped a client "lift and shift" 40 servers from a data center into Microsoft's Azure. They discuss how they accomplished this in a tight time window, opportunities for the client to upgrade the application slowly over time after the migration was completed and how to approach hard problems.
Intro and Outro music is “Chip’s
Folly” by LAZY SALON and is licensed under ...
In this episode, Ben & Chris bring on their first guest - Mike Storey. Mike has worked in the software industry for over 40 years. The guys discuss Mike’s career experience and insights, discuss runbooks in a Q&A back and forth as well as discuss Mike’s passion - the thing he spends most of his time on these days – the Agile Learning Institute. To learn more about the Agile Learning Institute visit https://agile-learning.in...
In this episode, Ben & Chris bring you a “war story from the field”. DevOps engineering is always one deployment or upgrade away from a crisis, and today’s story is one of a Kubernetes cluster gone sideways. They go over how they came up with a strategy to upgrade a cluster that was set to expire all certificates in a couple of days, the final solution and then some lessons learned along the way.
Intro and Outro music is “Chi...
In this episode, Ben & Chris talk through their lessons learned as software developers, DevOps engineers and engineering leadership over 20+ years of building software. These lessons are things we've learned the hard way and ones we've come to live by at Surton.
- DRY but not too DRY
- Least complexity principle
- Code readability matters
- In human time – code is read more than executed
- Don’t drink the zealot...
In this episode, Ben & Chris talk in depth about building your very own “DevOps Control Center” in one of their favorite platforms, Retool. They discuss automating runbooks via custom internal applications quickly to maximize their return on investment.
Intro and Outro music is “Chip’s Folly” by LAZY SALON and is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
In this episode, Ben & Chris discuss disaster recovery and building a disaster recovery plan you can be proud of. They go over multiple DR strategies, pros and cons of each of them as well as specific AWS services you can use to satisfy your company's recovery requirements.
- The AWS Disaster Recovery whitepaper with the scale image we discussed in the podcast.
- Building Runbooks and DR plans are as important as bu...
In this episode, Ben & Chris discuss a vacation season requirement – documentation. Whether you’re building a product, supporting a client or just needing someone else to run payroll, documenting for your coworkers is imperative for business continuity and the key to a great time away from the computer.
Intro and Outro music is “Chip’s Folly” by LAZY SALON and is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
In this episode, Ben & Chris talk about converting paper into data using a tool called Amazon Textract. Textract enables you to automatically extract text, handwriting and data from scanned documents. We discuss a customer business problem we solved replacing an old OCR scanner with cheaper scanners uploading documents to Textract and saving the customer a lot of money and time in the process.
Intro and Outro music is “Chip’s...
In this episode, Ben & Chris talk about deploying and scaling web applications using Amazon ECS. They focus on approaches they take when using ECS and container orchestration.
Highlights:
- Overview of Docker Containers
- Overview of Amazon ECS & Container Orchestration
- In-depth discussion of Fargate Spot & Spot instances for cost control
- Standing up a Web Service and auto scaling the service
- Scheduling ...
In this episode, Ben & Chris deep dive into No Code & Low Code platforms – the promise of these tools, where they struggle to deliver and the ones we still love and use daily.
Platforms we mention on this week’s episode:
- Zapier
- Webflow
- Middlelink (Alphi)
- Make
- Retool
- Airtable
- Typeform
- Outsetta
- Power Automate
- Glide
Intro and Outro music is “Chip’s Folly” by LAZY SALON and is licensed unde...
In this episode, Ben & Chris delve into the essential role of technology and automation in modern businesses. They share their approach to consultation, pain point analysis, and creating a custom technological roadmap to guide businesses towards effective automation. Emphasizing a return on investment (ROI) driven mindset, they also discuss the significance of planning and incremental improvement in successful automation strate...
Ben and Chris talk about building Data Warehouses and Lakes with ETL (or ELT!) Pipelines, Visualizations, and more.
Intro and Outro music is “Chip’s Folly” by LAZY SALON and is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Ben and Chris introduce the podcast, themselves and talk about building a custom printing solution for a customer with some other topics (Ferngully, really?) coming up along the way.
Intro and Outro music is “Chip’s Folly” by LAZY SALON and is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
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