RedMonk senior analyst Kate Holterhoff took the MonkCast on the road to devopsdays Atlanta 2025. In episode 2 of this 2-part series, Kate interviews Rachel-Lee Nabors, Nathen Harvey, Pratik Parikh & Kimasia Ayers about their devopsdays talks and the roast of John Willis. Other subjects covered include how AI is changing the way developers build; the impact of generative AI on the software development lifecycle, including some of the latest research from DORA; IDPs, DevOps, and Kubernetes; and what’s often missing when we talk about “user-centered design” in tech.
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Transcript
Rachel-Lee Nabors
Kate Holterhoff
Welcome to this episode of the MonkCast. My name is Kate Holterhoff, Senior Analyst at RedMonk. And with me today, I have Rachel-Lee Nabors. They’re here to speak with me about their role as a web futurist and bit about their So Rachel, thank you so much for joining me on the MonkCast
Rachel-Lee Nabors
Thank you so much for having me, Kate. So how have you been enjoying devopsdays Atlanta so far?
Kate Holterhoff
Well, this is my first one, so I feel like I’m learning a lot. yeah, lot of the superstars of DevOps are here right now, And yeah, I have been, I guess, not surprised how much AI has come into every conversation. It’s been a good introduction to the culture, I guess. And I love the venue. It’s a beautiful building.
Rachel-Lee Nabors
I know. It’s beautiful to be here in historical Georgia. I am overwhelmed with the Southern elegance that surrounds us.
Kate Holterhoff
Yeah, I think that’s a good way of framing this. I was speaking to somewhat about what style this room is. So we’re recording this in the library. And it’s at the Academy of Medicine where apparently there’s some very famous chandeliers here, but it’s a Greek revival style. So there’s lots of nice detailing on the walls and old heavy furniture like the one we decided to set up in front of.
Rachel-Lee Nabors
You mean it’s not Georgian?
Kate Holterhoff
It could be Georgian. I wouldn’t know the difference, but yeah, embarrassingly enough. talk to me about your talk? What is it that you’re going to be sharing with us?
Rachel-Lee Nabors
Actually, my talk here is called AI Cram Session. And it’s, I put it together because when I would come to conferences, everyone was talking about AI. But I kind of got the impression that people weren’t really sure what they were talking about. Like, what’s a RAG system? ⁓ What’s a vector database? What is the difference between an LLM and GPT, and is GPT a trademark that only refers to chat GPT? A lot of times people would say AI. What they really meant was a chat interface for an LLM running a GPT architecture. And that’s not, that is a very tiny subset of AI. So in my talk, I drag people all the way from perceptrons, the very first computer that could learn, all the way through what deep learning is and how RAG actually works.
So it’s a good crash course and I’m hoping that it will help us all make better decisions. It’s interesting to me that we have, like being an engineer does not mean you are literate in artificial intelligence terminology, which is a whole other field of engineering. It would be like asking your plumber to know anything about electricity. That’s a whole nother job class. But suddenly all the plumbers need to worry about electricity. So I made the whole talk just trying to uplevel us all a little bit in our vocabulary and understanding of this field, which is going to impact every piece of our lives.
Kate Holterhoff
That’s fantastic. It really sounds necessary to me based on the conversations that I have at a lot of these conferences as well. And frankly, I think we’re all scrambling to try to catch up with what the latest and greatest in AI is. For instance, Angie Jones gave a talk yesterday about MCP.
Rachel-Lee Nabors
Yeah, which was very good.
Kate Holterhoff
Yeah, and I feel like hers was a sort of crash course, although she framed it around the idea of a mashup, which I did appreciate.
Rachel-Lee Nabors
I loved Angie’s talk, but generally I love whenever Angie has something to share. But I think she did an amazing job of explaining what MCPs are. I just wrap them up by saying MCPs are just APIs with little wrappers on them so that LLMs know what to do with them.
Kate Holterhoff
That’s good. Succinct. I keep seeing the USB-C analogy for MCPs. ⁓ Do you don’t like that one?
Rachel-Lee Nabors
No, I think that one’s really good for the layman. Okay. I feel like for people who have actually built back-end services who are like, why do I need to build an MCP server? It’s like, that’s a standard for LLMs. It’s for them. They don’t quite know what to do with your API endpoints. They get confused. They need a little human touch. That’s what the MCP server’s for.
Kate Holterhoff
I like that. And I like how you…characterize the LLM’s in a very anthropomorphic way because I think we’re all compelled to do that. It’s like very hard to get away from and frankly is embedded in the nomenclature. So that’s useful.
Rachel-Lee Nabors
They are, I mean, they’re literally language models. They’re supposed to understand us. ⁓ But I think we do mistake like the model of the language for intelligence. I always remember how when I was a kid, people would say parrots aren’t really intelligent. They just repeat words. And I think, of course, we all know parrots are intelligent. But in the same way that a parrot might use English language to roughly communicate with us, but not knowing what it’s saying, the LLM has no real knowledge of what it’s saying, has no internal, like at least a parrot has self-direction, goals, et cetera. LLMs do not possess that. That’s a whole other side of artificial intelligence study. LLMs just a voice box.
Kate Holterhoff
Wow. Do you have any tools that you particularly enjoy using right now that help you to better understand the field?
Rachel-Lee Nabors
So tools that I like to use to understand the field. Honestly, a couple of things. I always say you should be using an agent right now. No matter who you are, what you’re doing, you should have an agent. I know that OpenAI is touting ChatGPT as a personal agent, as is Anthropic with Claude. But if I’m honest, I don’t quite feel like they are. There’s now currently a conversation about what’s agentic and what’s an agent. Agents are supposed to be little autonomous, ⁓ well, agents that go out and do work and you don’t have to interfere with them. Whereas I feel like Claude or ChatGPT is an assistant. One of the personal agents I really like that’s come out is Goose and it’s actually from the company that Angie Jones works for. And I find it has a really nice user experience. It’s really easy to add little MCP tools and there are MCP tool directories out there. So you can be like, I want a tool that will let my agent search the web and you can go find like the DuckDuckGo MCP server, or maybe you want to like collect all your WhatsApp conversations. What’s up, MCP sir? So it’s sort of like adding little extensions to your personal assistant so it can do more things. I think this is a really good place for most people to get started. That goes beyond just, you know, asking GPT for responses. And this way you can figure out a little bit more about what the capabilities are for the autonomy aspect of AI that we’re exploring right now.
Kate Holterhoff
Yeah, that’s really helpful. I haven’t tried Goose, but it seems like it is. a good developer experience for trying to toy around with a lot of these new tools.
Rachel-Lee Nabors
I found that a lot of the things that I have just roughly put together, even using Zapier to make calls to different LLMs, ⁓ I dump all of these. I ⁓ use an AI-driven parser called AGQL to go to different websites and just daily get search results from those pages, dump them into a spreadsheet, and then I have a call in ⁓ Zapier that takes the spreadsheet, dumps it into Claude, and Claude goes there and picks out the things that are relevant to the agentic web and then Zapier sends me an email with what Claude responds with. And in this way, I’ve got my own personal newsletter every morning, and I can keep on top of trends.
Kate Holterhoff
This is so smart. my god. Okay, well, I’m learning, and yeah, I think it just like comes down to workflows too, right? The way that we used to do things is just, it can be optimized, it can be improved. Okay, well, you’ve given me a lot to chew on. I also want to talk about the conference theme, which is really focused on, roasting John Willis. ⁓ So that’s been interesting. I have never been to a roast-based conference before. Do you want to speak to that at all? What has been your experience of the roasting aspect?
Rachel-Lee Nabors
You know, it’s hard for me because prior to ⁓ speaking at All Things Open AI in Durham, I did not know John Willis. I did not know who he was.
Kate Holterhoff
Gotcha.
Rachel-Lee Nabors
And so I’m woefully ill prepared to roast him. yeah. I think it goes to show just how vast the industry is that one side can have completely different set of heroes than the other. Yeah. Although I did hear he like he wrote this book about AI, I should probably read.
Kate Holterhoff
He’s written so many books. mean, that is like, the man is a writing machine. It’s, it’s incredible. So yes, it sounds like there’s more to put on your reading list. One more thing.
Rachel-Lee Nabors
I know. I, I find that reading is very difficult. That’s another thing though, that LLMs are good for people use them for generation. I don’t think they’re so good at generating, but they’re really good at taking a lot of information and making it into less information. ⁓ Condensing.
Kate Holterhoff
The summarizing aspect is what really appeals to me. I have a bad habit of not liking to write conclusions. ⁓ It’s, you know, I said what I said and I just want to move on. And so I get very frustrated and there’s like, it is the one thing it could do every time I just drop in some text, it summarizes it and I go about my day. I like, that was always a bottleneck for me. Like I would put off finishing a project because I didn’t want to write a conclusion.
Rachel-Lee Nabors
I hear that. It’s always awkward, you know, it’s like saying goodbye at the end of the night. It’s sort of like, I was here and now I’m going. ⁓ But people, especially American readers, really appreciate a summary.
Kate Holterhoff
They absolutely do. Yeah. little tangential, but I just found a review of my first book that I didn’t know was out there. and just found it by chance because I was Googling something else. And it was from this scholar that I really like and At the end of an academic review, the last paragraph is the one you worry about as an author, because that’s where they say, well, here’s what didn’t go so well. And in it, he said, this really could have used a conclusion, ⁓ an epilogue. I said, well, shit.
Rachel-Lee Nabors
⁓ my gosh. So which book was that?
Kate Holterhoff
It’s on illustration studies, so 19th century illustrations.
Rachel-Lee Nabors
Wow. You have an incredible winding road into tech as well. Have you published any tech books that we should know about?
Kate Holterhoff
No, I have not written any tech books. I’m thinking about it, but I almost feel like the book process, especially the one I’m familiar with in academia, is not well fitted to tech because it’s so slow. And especially with AI, I mean, we’re talking, yeah, I when did MCP come out? Like, it’s only been out since the wintertime. are you kidding me? Why would anybody try to publish a book except for John Willis, apparently? He’s the man.
Rachel-Lee Nabors
I’ve actually been considering writing a book ⁓ about AI that expands, just to kind of introduce it to the every man. Because I feel a lot ⁓ of company heads are coming to their engineering department being like, explore AI, go forth and find, just go do things with it. And the word on the street, at least, You know, I just spoke at data council. I’ve been to a couple of conferences and I’ve talked with these teams. I’ve also worked with the, with clients in the Bay that make products that engineers would use to make workflows and streamline things. And for many people who have been given this mandate, it turns out that they use AI to sort of rapidly prototype things that they could do programmatically without AI, you know, with if, they had a team to build the API. And you know, they had the resources to build the workflow and the CI system, et cetera. But they just got the mandate to do it with different tools. My suspicion is like when those mandates dry up or when leadership is like, all right, show me what you got. A lot of these will be shifted over to more programmatic approaches that are cheaper to run. The real question is, what are the things that people are building that can only be done with AI? Agents.
Kate Holterhoff
Yeah. These are unanswered questions.
Rachel-Lee Nabors
We’re going to find out real soon.
Kate Holterhoff
find out. Okay. All right. These are unanswered questions in my mind. These are answerable questions. Soon to be answered. Okay. Well, I think we are about out of time. So what is a good way for folks to keep up with your thoughts on the future of AI?
Rachel-Lee Nabors
Well, One of the easiest ways is to check out my website at dressedforspace.com There’s a link to my agentic web newsletter there, which you can sign up for. You can also get on the waiting list for a little something I’m building. But if you’d just like to connect with me on the socials, you can find me @nearestnabors That’s N-A-B-O-R-S dot com. And pretty much every one of my different profiles is there. I talk quite a bit in them, so. I hope you enjoy hearing my crazy thoughts about what’s going to happen to the web as we continue to explore it with our new agentic tool.
Kate Holterhoff
Fantastic. All right. Thank you.
Nathen Harvey
Kate HolterhoffHello and welcome to this MonkCast on the road. I am here with Nathen Harvey, DORA lead to talk to me at devopsdays Atlanta 2025. Excited to have a number of amazing guests. Nathen being one of them. So welcome to the MonkCast.
Nathen Harvey
Thanks so much, Kate. I’m excited to be here.
Kate Holterhoff
All right. So what’s your experience been like so far
Nathen Harvey
This devopsdays has been really great. The talks, of course, have been really fun. But I love the open spaces the best. That’s where we get the participants of the conference all get to propose topics. We have just open conversations about the things that matter most to the people that are here right now.
Kate Holterhoff
Yeah, this is my first DevOps day. So I’m learning so much about the process. yes, Chris Corriere said that I absolutely cannot miss the open spaces and I was able to even suggest one when you talked a little bit about open source licensing. So yeah, I’m a big fan too. I’m a convert. I feel like this should be more universal.
Nathen Harvey
think it does take doing to get that conversion happening. When when Chris described them to you, you probably felt like the same way I felt the first time I went to a conference with open spaces. This will never work. This will never work. And it sounds like something I don’t want to do. But it’s like they turn out to be really amazing.
Kate Holterhoff
I’ve been deeply impressed. And I, yeah, I mean, I like the idea of the interactive part too, because I think by the afternoon of most conferences, you’re lagging a little bit. I mean, I’m like sipping coffee trying to, keep up the energy. But it makes it easy because you’re the one that like gets to be up there talking about what interests you.
Nathen Harvey
Absolutely. And this community has always been about learning and doing that in a community way, like learning together. And so ⁓ I also love just the little things about open spaces, the chairs are set up in a circle. It’s not a presentation, it’s a conversation and that really matters.
Kate Holterhoff
Yeah, yeah, that’s so true. ⁓ Yeah, I know there’s there’s such an attention to detail here. And I mean, I can’t say enough nice things about this building. my gosh, the building is beautiful. Beautiful. Yeah, this is great. And you’re sort of an expert on devopsdays at this point, you’ve been to many.
Nathen Harvey
I’ve been I’ve been to many. Yes, I’ve been
Kate Holterhoff
Care to enumerate a few of the ones you’ve attended?
Nathen Harvey
Well, I’ll say that I’ve I regularly go to devopsdays Amsterdam. I helped found and start both devopsdays DC and devopsdays Baltimore. So I’m a pretty regular at both of those devopsdays DC, I think it’s having its 10th event this year in 2025. That’s later in September.
Kate Holterhoff
Oh my goodness. Yeah. Well, I’m glad I brought the experts on the show to help educate me. There you go. What this is all about. Okay. That’s phenomenal. Okay. Well, let’s talk a little bit about what you’re talking about here.
Nathen Harvey
Yeah. So I lead up the DORA research program. Google Cloud. And DORA, as you may know, is a research that’s how to into how to teams get better at delivering and operating software. And so my talk, I’m going to lead folks through a little bit of an exercise where we can help them evaluate how’s their software delivery performance going right now. But understanding how you are doing something today is less important than what are going to do tomorrow? Right? So I’m going to try to give them ⁓ some space and some time to think about what might you improve when you go back to the office after this conference is over. And then of course, DORA as a research program has been looking pretty deeply into artificial intelligence lately because as you know, AI is on everyone’s mind. And so we’ve really looked at ⁓ how is AI impacting the developer workflow, how is it impacting software delivery performance and so forth. And so my talk includes some of our findings there.
Kate Holterhoff
Phenomenal. Can you share any of those?
Nathen Harvey
Absolutely. First and foremost, we recently released a brand new report that’s from DORA, the impact of generative AI in software development. And what we see is that AI is actually ⁓ first, it’s being prioritized by organizations everywhere. It’s also starting to be relied on by many practitioners. And to me, this is a really interesting thing. You’ve got sort of this top-down mandate, thou shalt use AI, and this grassroots movement. Hey, we love using AI. And it’s this sort of like, meeting in the middle or driving from the top and the bottom that I think is more evidence that AI is real and it’s here to stay. And so it is important that we all start adopting more and more of it.
Kate Holterhoff
Right. Yeah. And I don’t think there’s going to be any ripping it from, anyone’s hands at this point. I mean, it’s here, it’s
Nathen Harvey
It’s funny in an open space yesterday, one of the engineers that was here was talking about how they’ve been using AI for a long time and on their team, they decided that they were going to try and experiment. for the next two sprints or iterations or whatever, some amount of time, no AI is to be used. And they wanted to just really understand how does that impact both their productivity, but also how did the developers on those teams feel about having this tool taken away from them? Right.
Kate Holterhoff
Yeah. man, how did they feel?
Nathen Harvey
I think they’re ready to get the AI back. think they’re ready.
Kate Holterhoff
They’re ready. No, I can understand that. what is really helped me with is summarizing activities like, yes, just like doing abstracts and things where, I’ve got a bunch of texts already written, and then I need to go back and try to condense it. To me, that’s grunt work. That’s my bottleneck. I don’t enjoy that.
Nathen Harvey
That’s it’s really interesting that you talked first about bottlenecks and like, where is your constraint? Because that’s really what the DORA framework is all about helping teams identify their constraints so they can make improvements there. But also I love that you talk about summarizing information with AI because one of the findings that we had from the report was that as you increase your AI adoption, your documentation quality tends to improve. And that’s quality, not quantity. And we have four years of research into how documentation quality impacts teams and their software delivery performance and a bunch of other things. And so not surprisingly, documentation quality is really, really important, but also not surprisingly, yeah. not a lot of engineers really like wake up in the morning and say, can’t wait to go and write some documentation. And so there’s this really interesting thing about how AI is impacting that. It is certainly the case that AI can help you with sort of that blank page syndrome, right? I don’t even know where to start. AI can help you start writing that documentation, can help you keep your code documented and so forth. But as you mentioned, AI is also really good at summarizing information. And so there’s this really interesting question that we have as researchers. If we’re improving the quality, is AI helping us improve the quality by actually improving the quality of the documentation, or is it improving the utility that I’m able to get out of the existing documentation by summarizing it and condensing it and so forth? And so is the underlying documentation quality actually improving, or is our ability to get value from that the thing that’s improving as we’re using AI? And our data can’t tell us, but I believe the answer is yes. It’s both of these things that are happening sort of at the same time that is really driving up the quality that you’re getting and recognizing from documentation.
Kate Holterhoff
Yeah, I’m interested in how AI is helping folks in the operations sector as well and IT. Because I think when we talk, a lot of us think about like AI code assistants. Yes. And that’s the writing component. But how is the DORA report, What does it tell us about operations?
Nathen Harvey
Yeah, it’s really interesting. So first we are seeing, you know, obviously documentation quality improving and a bunch of other things that are developer centric improving. But when we look at software delivery performance, the story changes a little bit. Software delivery performance is actually falling off a bit as you’re using more AI. And that impacts specifically the quality of changes. So that definitely hits operations folks. As we’re using more AI, maybe shipping more AI generated code, maybe the quality of that code isn’t up to snuff and it’s causing incidents or outages in production. That becomes a real problem. Maybe creating more work for our operations teams and incident response and so forth.
Kate Holterhoff
Yeah. That’s interesting.
Nathen Harvey
So there’s lots more to learn in the report, of course, than we have time to cover here as well.
Kate Holterhoff
Yeah, for sure. And I’d be really impressed if you’d memorized the entire thing. Right, yes. What was the exact percentage? Nathen, help me out here. OK, so, know, PSA for everyone to check out the actual report.
Nathen Harvey
Yeah, download the report for sure.
Okay, and then of course, at this particular devopsdays, we are roasting John Willis.
Nathen Harvey
Yes.
Kate Holterhoff
So what has your been to your experience around the John Love?
Nathen Harvey
The John Love, yeah. I think it’s always fascinating to me as we bring together a community, know, half of the people that are here in the room today, it’s their first time at a devopsdays. Right. And we’re roasting someone that for many of us has been part of our DevOps journey from the very beginning, John Willis. And for some people in the room, They have no idea who John Willis is. And so I think it’s always an awkward thing when we celebrate those that were early in the movement and try to welcome newcomers into the movement at the same time, because there’s this disconnect. like, so in my roasting of John, I tried to introduce folks to, know, why. Why do we know and love John so much? And it really is because he’s been around really since the beginning of this DevOps movement and he’s impacted so many different careers, my own career and the career trajectory of so many people in this community. I think the work that he does ⁓ is underlying a bunch of things and you may not even recognize that he’s had impact on your career. I like to say that, you know, his work and this is kind of a nod to my… My roast of him, his work is both important and mysterious. Yeah, and I won’t say more so you can watch the recording and get a little bit more detail into the roast of him.
Kate Holterhoff
A little bit of a mystery. All right. Well, so more PSAs, know, follow ups. Yeah, there’s homework with this podcast.
Nathen Harvey
There’s always homework.
Kate Holterhoff
There’s always homework. Okay. Well, yeah, that has that certainly seems to be the case here where if enthusiasm and a sense of belonging is important for, making sure that the DevOps community thrives, then, what is the best way to do that? How are we going to walk that razor’s edge? I don’t know, I feel like it’s been done in a way that my, you know, I am a relative newcomer to the space that I felt welcomed. And I feel like I’m in on the jokes. I don’t feel excluded. So I would say that it’s been done with eclat.
Nathen Harvey
Well, that’s great. And the other thing that’s beautiful about this conference, right, we’re roasting John and he’s here and he’s a very personable person and anyone here can go up and talk to him and hear more of his stories, but also just, you know, share their own story with John. is a, he’s always learning and loves to hear everyone’s stories and experience as well. That’s so much.
Kate Holterhoff
Okay. All right. Yes, I have spent so much time with him, I didn’t anticipate him to be so approachable, owing to the grandness of his, presence in this entire movement. yeah, it’s funny, he’s responded to some of my posts on LinkedIn. ⁓ I feel like, but his avatar is very abstract. So I wasn’t entirely sure what he would look like. Not to mention the fact that all the publicity material for devopsdays has replaced him with Deming. So that has also led to a bit of a confusion. So maybe that’s part of the in-joke, because you have to actually know what John looks like to find him and talk to him. But once you figure it out, it’s all good.
Nathen Harvey
Very true. true.
Kate Holterhoff
All right. So the roast is being done well. It’s not mean-spirited. this.
Nathen Harvey
Yes.
Kate Holterhoff
Okay. there anything else that you would want to tell us about the DORA report?
Nathen Harvey
Yeah, I think, you know, DORA, as we mentioned, publishes a report. But the thing that’s more important to me than the research and the report itself is the teams that are putting it into action. And you know, it really takes a community to do that. And so the thing that I’m most proud about around DORA is that we’ve built a DORA community. And it is thousands of practitioners and leaders and researchers worldwide coming together regularly to learn and learn more about the research and how folks are putting it into practice. So we’re really learning together and you can get there at dora.community.
Kate Holterhoff
Fantastic. All right. And for folks who’d like to follow more of your musings on DORA and other devopsdays that you’re involved with, what’s your best social channels.
Nathen Harvey
For sure. I’m on both LinkedIn and Bluesky and in both places you can find me with my name. It’s Nathen Harvey, but I will warn you my father misspelled my first name. So it’s N-A-T-H-E-N-H-A-R-V-E-Y.
Kate Holterhoff
All right. Well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
Nathen Harvey
All right. Thanks so much for having me.
Pratik Parikh
Kate Holterhoff
welcome to this RedMonk conversation with me. I have Pratik Parikh who is joining me at devopsdays Atlanta 2025, And I’m excited to talk to him about DevOps. So Pratik, thank you so much for joining me.
Pratik Parikh
Thank you.
Kate Holterhoff
So Pratik is presenting at the conference. So talk to me about your talk. What are you presenting?
Pratik Parikh
So yeah. I’ll be presenting about internal development platform, what it is all about, how to implement one in your organization, and how to actually get the maximum benefits out of it.
Kate Holterhoff
Okay. Can you share some of that wisdom with us here? Give us a little teaser.
Pratik Parikh
Yeah. So basically, IDP or internal development platform is ⁓ all about developers. It is developer focused and it should be created in such a way that all your DevOps tools or DevOps processes are all abstracted away behind an ICPI and a UI or a UI. And the developers, instead of the DevOps people, answering to all the developer requests, things like, can you run a branch? Can you run a test and test my code? Or can you update production with my code? So things like these, although they are important, are really, you don’t really, it’s very like low ROI work. And… All those things should be done by the IDP and all you have to do is maintain the IDP as a DevOps team or a DevOps person, you should maintain the IDP and that’s what platform engineering is all about.
Kate Holterhoff
Fantastic. Okay. And I feel like there is a lot of controversy on the P of IDPs. Are you more of a fan of calling it a portal or a platform?
Pratik Parikh
I mean, it doesn’t matter what you call it. Call it a service, call it an API, call it a UI. It can be scripts as well,
Kate Holterhoff
Okay. right. Fair enough. ⁓ And what would you say the relationship between ⁓ these IDPs and platform engineering is? Is it like a core to the functioning of these particular teams? Or is it something that maybe vendors are just telling us that we need to have, but you could maybe use APIs instead?
Pratik Parikh
Yeah. So… you have the IDP, right? And platform engineering, would say at least for me, is all about the IDP. It’s ⁓ all relates to IDP. So you have to maintain the IDP for example, right? And that’s the whole crux of platform engineering.
Kate Holterhoff
And so what does your job look like? What do you do for a living?
Pratik Parikh
So I’m a DevOps engineer at Simbian and day to day I’m mostly dealing with Kubernetes with the cloud, multiple clouds and creating applications, IDPs, as I mentioned before and a little bit of coding, a little bit of development and collaborating with other developers on how to get their deployments working and ⁓ automating the tests and automating other things as well. So like creating something like a release thing where they click a button and the software is released. So things like that.
Kate Holterhoff
And can you talk to me about what your tooling looks like? So are you using like backstage as an IDP? Are you using something that you, did you roll your own? Did you build it yourselves?
Pratik Parikh
Yeah. So believe it or not, I haven’t used backstage and whatever IDP like that I have, it’s all built on my own.
Kate Holterhoff
Great.
Pratik Parikh
And initially it started off with like a small script, but gradually as the requirements increased and the workload increased and the developers increased, gradually I built it in such a way that it’s like, go to this website or an application and you have like different buttons there for doing different things and that’s it.
Kate Holterhoff
So yeah. What advice would you give for folks who are interested in building their own IDP?
Pratik Parikh
I would say instead of focusing on building the IDP, build, start with small scripts, maybe slowly make it into like a collection of scripts, maybe a CLI tool, maybe a RSTP and then later on expand as the need arises into a nice API and then like a fully fledged application where you have like links to documentations and readymade templates and presets, preset configurations, things like that for developers to use.
Kate Holterhoff
Wow. Okay. Very good advice. All right, so one of the subjects that I often grapple with is the relationship between Kubernetes and platform engineering. So what is the relationship of, platform engineering, SRE, work and and ⁓ yeah DevOps in general and What’s happening with containerization?
Pratik Parikh
So I think Kubernetes has has been like a revolution where anything you want to build a build on and It’s like Kubernetes like the de facto standard now for containers especially and even if you don’t want to run containers you My first thought always is right. Okay, let me do it on Kubernetes. That’s like my first thought whether it’s like a big application, sometimes even like a small application where now you can run like Kubernetes on even like Raspberry Pi’s, right? So, I mean, that has been a revolution and it’s kind of like the center to at least for DevOps, not like platform engineering, but yeah, I mean, I love Kubernetes.
Kate Holterhoff
You love Kubernetes. Okay. Do you hope to attend a KubeCon at some point?
Pratik Parikh
Yeah, I actually attended KubeCon India. It happened for the first time. It was also my first KubeCon.
Kate Holterhoff
Love that.
Pratik Parikh
And I’m planning to attend others as well.
Kate Holterhoff
Wonderful. You know what’s fun is that we’re actually having a KubeCon here in Atlanta in the fall. So Pratik, tell me about your experience here at devopsdays. Is this your first one?
Pratik Parikh
Yes, this is my first one.
Kate Holterhoff
Amazing. And where are you coming in from?
Pratik Parikh
I’m coming from Mumbai, India. Mumbai.
Kate Holterhoff
Okay. This is my first devopsdays as well. I am local to Atlanta, so it’s a little more convenient for me than coming from Mumbai. But I have been very impressed. What’s your perception of this type of conference? It’s a little different than typical tech conferences.
Pratik Parikh
Right. So the one of the best things that I think about devopsdays is the open spaces where instead of just one person speaking and others listening or maybe a little bit of interaction, you get all the people get to speak, get to learn from each other, get to collaborate. And the best thing about it, it’s a small focus group. So there’s a lot more attention and a lot more collaboration than typical like talks.
Kate Holterhoff
Yeah, for sure. I have also been enjoying the open spaces. I like that they are a little more collaborative. I enjoy the fact that we’re able to dictate what the topics are going to be. And I think it’s also a nice way of talking back to a subject and not just being a passive listener. okay. ⁓ And let’s also talk about the theme of this particular devopsdays, which is, roasting John Willis. Were you familiar with John Willis before the conference?
Pratik Parikh
Not so much.
Kate Holterhoff
have you felt like they’ve done it in a way that helps folks who are we’re unfamiliar with John to feel included in the jokes?
Pratik Parikh
Yeah, a little bit now now I would say I know more about John than I knew before
Kate Holterhoff
okay. it is it’s tough to get that sort of humor, right? But I would say some of the roasts have been done very well in a way that even if it was a total stranger to me, I still would think it was pretty funny. mean, the jokes I feel like are, they’re pretty universal. and some of the speakers here are phenomenal. So that also I think helps with the delivery. I’m glad that there’s folks here who can bring that type of energy and playfulness. Yeah, and talk to me about Atlanta. Are you doing any touristy things while you’re in town?
Pratik Parikh
Yeah, so I visited the aquarium and it was amazing.
Kate Holterhoff
I love that.
Pratik Parikh
Especially the dolphin shows and the sea lion shows and they were phenomenal.
Kate Holterhoff
I love that. I’m so glad you got a chance to go to the aquarium. I tell anyone who comes to Atlanta that if you’re going to do one thing while you’re here, it’s got to be the aquarium because it is world class. I’ve never seen such a large aquarium. it blows my mind. And in the middle of Georgia, of all places, I mean, it’s wild. ⁓ But yes, it is absolutely the best aquarium I’ve ever visited in my life.
Pratik Parikh
Yeah, same here.
Kate Holterhoff
Okay, good. Well, I’m glad you’re getting a chance to get out a little bit. But this is a lovely building. I mean, this is very unusual for conference. I’m used to maybe hotels or big conference center. The World Congress Center, for instance, is our local large sort of corporate seeming box where a lot of the trade shows happen. But this is, I think it helps with the intimacy of open spaces and helping folks to feel a little bit more included because it almost feels like a living room. A very nice living room, not my living room, but somebody’s, I’m sure. Well, it has been a pleasure speaking with you Pratik. Can you give us any social so that folks can keep up with your musings on I guess IDPs, DevOps, et cetera.
Pratik Parikh
Yeah, so I’m very active on LinkedIn. So that’s probably the only social media I use like a lot. I’m also on Twitter, but not so much.
Kate Holterhoff
Yeah, not so much. I’m with you. Okay. I very much appreciate you coming on the MonkCast. Thank you so much for stopping by.
Pratik Parikh
Thank you for having me.
Kimasia Ayers
Kate Holterhoff
Welcome to the MonkCast I’m excited to have Kimasia Ayers with me. She is Director of Multimedia Innovation and I’m so excited to be speaking with you here about user-centered design. So talk to me about what you’re doing at devopsdays Atlanta.
Kimasia Ayers
Gotcha. So I’m a speaker. I presented yesterday with an Ignite talk and when I tell you it’s my first Ignite talk and I was like, okay, 15 seconds first slide, we got this. Inclusivity. But so my session was called Designing Beyond the Template, How to Build Digital Ecosystems that Reflect the Complexity of Society. And so I emphasize how sociology influences technology and how technology reinforces us sociologically. I provide a couple frameworks for ⁓ ways to approach not just the actual design, UI, UX, but how to also look into your actual ecosystem when it comes to your brand, when it comes to outreach, community outreach, infrastructure, decision making, who’s making the decisions. And I highlight how inclusivity is not just having a couple people who are like, there are different ethnicities or someone’s in a wheelchair.
We’re cool. It’s actually taking them into the decision making process and getting user feedback and some of the frameworks that I ⁓ am introducing into the tech field are actually my own frameworks that I created. So I created something called the axis of assimilation. And so I don’t like to think of it as, you know, like a seesaw of like, I’m here and then now I’m here. I like to think of it as like a hex color grid where all the colors at the top are going to the shade white and then all the colors at the bottom are going to the shade black.
but it’s looped together to where there’s that weird gray scale in the middle. And essentially, it’s comprised of pseudo-assimilation and meta-assimilation, where pseudo-assimilation, you’re assimilating for the sake of survival, of community camouflage. For example, say you go into a space where you’re the odd one out, but you know for a fact that the odds aren’t in your favor. So I like to use the example of being me, I’m black and queer going into some…
professional spaces, notice that like, hey, just, I necessarily don’t shorten my name to Kim, but I notice that a lot of professionals will just call me Kim like right off the bat, or I have to act differently, or I start to articulate my words. Like even now doing the podcast, like I’m making sure how like that I’m being articulated and I’m enunciating my words when, you know, meta assimilation is when it’s actually part of your identity, but depending on the environment that you’re in, you’re kind of like being flucid.
And so I used the word flucid. It’s actually a word that I made. Shout out to my English majors. It’s a word that I made, which is comprised of fluid and lucid, where I call it flucidity. And essentially you’re in the state of flucidity where it is you, but it’s not the full you. Cause you know, like for example, one identity that you share, that’s not your entire identity. And so this framework highlights cultural hybridity and how.
you aren’t just one single thing. You’re an entire puzzle piece comprised of different pieces that shape your identity and it’s influenced by your thoughts. It’s influenced by your environment and the people around you and your traumas and how all those things come together into its own form of qualitative research. Because quantitative research is cool. Going by numbers is cool, but I tell every brand that I work with, that single number, whether it’s a dollar or it’s just a user signing in.
that’s someone who experienced today differently. They woke up differently, they grew up differently, they have different beliefs, different ideas of what a perfect society looks like, they have different ideas about themselves, and they see themselves differently how you would see them. And so it all kind of goes back into this other theory called the spider web theory that I coined, where essentially, ⁓ so my hyperfixation as a child was spiders.
Like it was it was spiders and so I remember being in elementary school and picking out the same three spider books from kindergarten to fifth grade Just checking out the same three books and when they got a fourth one, I got it and I lost it. So I to pay for it. But essentially just like a spider web. Every spider is different. You know, a funnel web spider’s web is gonna be different from an orb weaver versus a trapdoor spider or a fishing spider or anything like that.
And so with all these different webs, they serve different purposes. And just like spider webs, I’m sure everybody’s walked into a spider web before. You didn’t see it, it’s just like a… And so it highlights how ⁓ everything is intertwined like a spider web. So your love life is influencing your health. Your work is influencing your physical activity. Like every aspect and component of your life is interwoven in together. And I noticed a lot of times when we feel like…
dread or we feel heavy, know, spiders, once they get their bug, they will literally take it off the web and discard it and like make sure the web’s clean, reinforce it. And so I use the analogy of like, you know, when you’re feeling down, what is still on your web? What debris is on your web? Whenever you feel like your life has gone crazy, did someone walk into your web? Did a bird just randomly fly into the web or, know? And so with everything being intertwined,
I feel like the spider web theory also highlights how everything is so invisible until you’re in that one perfect moment and then you see like, wow, everything is intertwined together. I remember a core memory that like kind of jolted like the theory. I was walking on a bridge with a couple of my friends and the bridge like from right here all the way to the edge of like the bookshelf closest to the wall, it was a giant spider web just across water.
And I remember being like, how did that spider even go over there to come back and then just go back and forth and make a web? And I remember one of my friends grabbed the web and was like, watch this. And then he pulled the web up so high and just let go. it was like, boing, boing, boing, boing, boing, boing. And I was like, wow, it’s so strong. And then I’m examining it and I’m like, oh, wow, like only the horizontal lines are sticky. The vertical lines are here for structure. And then I really started to see how.
everything’s so interwoven and just like how, you know, every web has a different purpose, every web has a different pattern, but it’s still a web. It still has the same fundamentals of, you know, assisting with life. It might be assisting with life differently. For example, know, a trapdoor spider actually making a door out of its web versus a crab spider just here in a flower or something, just like, hey, I’m here. I’m making a web cause I’m just…
Kate Holterhoff
Interesting. Oh man, you could have been a biologist.
Kimasia Ayers
Yeah, I thought about being an entomologist when I was younger, but I was like, how would that transfer into the job world?
Kate Holterhoff
I can’t give you any advice on that one. have no idea.
Kimasia Ayers
That’s so real.
Kate Holterhoff
Yeah, but that’s super interesting.
Kimasia Ayers
Thank you.
Kate Holterhoff
I was so excited that you wanted to come on the podcast because you and I both did lightning talks, one after the other, and you were so well prepared. I was really impressed by your presentation and you’re right, the format is just really exacting. the fact that you have to get up there and you can’t really see the slides while you’re presenting them. You have to talk very quickly. It’s very hard to prepare for. ⁓ And I feel like I had some good takeaways for the format. since both you and I experienced the difficulties of this type of presentation, as you’re processing this, can you give ⁓ any advice for folks who might be thinking about doing a lightning talk in the future?
Kimasia Ayers
So what I would say is find a method that works best for you. I know some people who start off and they’re like, oh yeah, I my five minutes down. Me personally, I took an hour presentation and had to make it like 15 seconds per slide. And so what I did, I essentially just did a brain dump of this is what I’m passionate about, this is what I want to talk about. Like da da da da. I already had a couple of slides like essentially fixed. Cause I used this slide when I spoke in St. Louis. So I looked at it and I was like, okay, what are things that I can take out?
So I took some things out and I timed it. I’m like, wow, you’re at 30 minutes. Okay, take some things out, take some things out, take some things out. And then the slides that I kept, how can I make the wording as small as possible or as like the point where if I lose track, can just low key just read the slide. But make it where it’s like almost like caveman speak, if that makes sense. Where it’s like.
Hey, instead of me having this huge definition of like what implicit bias is, I’m like, you don’t know it. Anyways, this is an example, explicit bias, you know it. This is an example. And then also, just having fun. Like I know that sounds so freaking cliche of like, it’s just a speech, like have fun. But I feel like if you’re talking about something you’re passionate about, and this is something I know you can also relate to, because I could just see your face light up in your business, I was like, oh my gosh, okay.
I feel like if you really care about what you’re talking about and then having like maybe bullet points are just like looking at a slide. Cause I was peeking at them slides. Okay. Yeah. I was looking at them slides. I said, okay, this is, ⁓ axis of assimilation. is communicative theory. but you know, it’ll naturally come out and then also having photos or gifs. Yeah. Like that. I wish my gifs were moving because it makes it like level up like 50 times. I’m like, imagine this is moving.
Kate Holterhoff
That’s right. Yeah, none of our gifs worked for the presenter vote. Yeah, that was too bad. Yeah, that’s all really good advice. my takeaway is yeah, I don’t know, I get up there and I’m telling jokes and I certainly lost track of time. And I wish that I didn’t have any slides that actually related to my topic because towards the end I did have like some things that sort of related to parts of the talk that I never got to. So I would do that very differently. ⁓ But I also began with a longer presentation and cut it down ⁓ and I should have cut it down more. I needed to keep cutting. I was… ⁓ over optimistic about how much I could jam into that. I, because I think you’re right at the end of the day, it’s about having fun with those talks, which I think is why having the, so the whole theme of the conference really is that about a very good natured roast of John Willis. And, having fun, is underscoring that and it’s something that’s difficult to do, especially in a kind way. And John is here he knew this was coming. He’s very, very good natured and
demonstrates his importance to the DevOps community. ⁓ But at the same time, I think it shows that this is maybe a group of people that don’t take themselves too seriously. And so when we get up there and are over-prepared, it just doesn’t translate as well, especially for the Ignite talk. So I don’t know. Those are the lessons that I have. But I also, if I could go back and tweak some things, I would be doing that. ⁓ I’m impressed that you were able to look at your slides though, because I hit the ground running. It was like, okay, here we go. And then just saw that it was my end slide. was like, well, guess I’m Wrapping it up, know?
Kimasia Ayers
Yeah, that’s so real.
Kate Holterhoff
Clap hands. I’m done.
Kimasia Ayers
Yeah, you did a great job.
Kate Holterhoff
Well, thank you.
Kimasia Ayers
I was was like, glued in. I’m like, okay, I’m locked in right now. like, this is really good. Combine in a little content with a little fun.
Kate Holterhoff
Yeah. I aspire to be a speaker like Katie Anderson where she doesn’t have to look at her notes She did a phenomenal job. I was so impressed. Yeah. Some of the speakers here, I mean, you know, they’re like straight from a TED talk. so, I’d like to think on the spectrum of like being able to present at a conference and, getting up on stage and not just sheer panic. I’m somewhere in the middle, but yeah, I mean, she’s very aspirational for me. I don’t know, but I’m sure she practices. know that it’s very, I think very few people can get up on stage and just command it and have all their bullet points top of mind. ⁓ I mean, it takes… really hard work and a of commitment. So, but I mean, I would say that you’re on your way to doing it. ⁓ I was very impressed. So talk to me about your history with conferences. How many do you do? You mentioned St. Louis. So do you present at conferences all the time?
Kimasia Ayers
So actually just started. So I spoke in St. Louis two weeks ago. I’ve kind of been on like a conference tour. So I knew I wanted to… like your motivational speaker, public speaker do something since I was in middle school. And so I found Sessionize and I was like, wow, like I can apply to a bunch of them. Okay, bet. And so essentially I just made a crap ton of sessions and any opportunity that interests me, whether it was accommodated or not, I was like, this is going to be my main vehicle that’s going to build rapport for my consulting company. Cause I noticed, you know, when you’re in consulting and you’re independent contractor,
It’s hard to find clients if you’re not already tapped in. And the network that I’m tapped into, I don’t see them, I’m not gonna say aligning, because that’s definitely not the word. ⁓ I like to utilize the network that I have for some of my other passionate projects and not just my consulting, because I also substitute teach. And so I’ll substitute teach for an entire week just to have money to spend. whenever I’m in Atlanta, I’m like, okay, I don’t have to look at my card. I don’t have to look at my card. Just swipe. It’s okay. Keep checking your finances, though.
But, and so I went to St. Louis and spoke on the same presentation that I did for the Ignite Talk. And then I went to Las Vegas for The Experiential Marketing Summit is the only conference for experiential marketing. And I’m a part of an organization called Experiential in Color, and they sponsored me to go. And I didn’t speak, but the notes that I got from watching the speakers and I really like, like,
I started paying attention to other things, like for example, like with Katie Anderson, her lack of filler words, there was not any ums or hmms or anything, I was just like, wow.
Kate Holterhoff
She’s transcendent. She’s doing it. I feel like we’re in an individual one-on-one conversation right now.
Kimasia Ayers
And so it’s like, I would go look at speakers, just see like what information I can get, network with them. And then I came to DevOps and now I’m here. And then on… I think Sunday I’m going to Copenhagen in Denmark. Yeah, I’m excited. I’m going to talk about the same thing. then essentially I have every, I have a conference every single month except for in June, because in June my podcast Kim’s Corner, Humanizing the Creative Experience, it’s also like I do media coverage. And so we’re going to go cover a festival in North Carolina called the Durag Festival. But it’s like, I’m speaking on like an agile conference.
Agile 2025 in Colorado and then the Gold Writers Conference and then I’m just trying to, Conference, Conference, Conference, Conference as much as possible just to like really build that rapport, not just with my company but like also with myself because when it comes to my research, I noticed that since I don’t have a PhD, some people don’t see me as like super credible even though it’s like writing like 40 page master thesis as an undergrad and just like.
doing crazy assignments where they would be like, hey, the final is the outline. And then I’d be like 13 pages in and I’m like, just the outline? ⁓ OK. Well, I’m done. And ⁓ so essentially, using this to build credibility as I just finished undergrad. And so going into my master’s and then I’m thinking about getting a PhD. I think I’ll wanted more so for the credibility, then also Dr. Ayers sounds pretty cool.
Kate Holterhoff
Sure does.
Kimasia Ayers
I really like that. And so just seeing like wherever the universe and God takes me. And so right now I’m just like, build rapport, build rapport, build rapport, do whatever you can. There’s no reason why you should not be doing something.
Kate Holterhoff
All right. Well, it’s been a pleasure speaking with you, Kimasia. Will you give us some ways that we can follow you in your world journey? Do you have any particular social channels that you prefer? How can folks get in touch with you?
Kimasia Ayers
Gotcha. So I have a couple. So my LinkedIn, if you are in a professional mood, I would say LinkedIn and stay on my LinkedIn. Okay. So my LinkedIn is Kimasia Ayers. That’s Kim and Asia put together like Kim like Kim and then the continent Asia put together Ayres A-Y-E-R-S. I tell all my students it’s like it’s pronounced like the air but plural. Okay.
And then all of my social media, whether it’s YouTube or Instagram, this is usually where you would see me kind of take off my, I don’t want to say professional mask, because I feel like I make it a mission for me to not hyper assimilate into like professional spaces. Okay. where you’ll see a blend of like fun, creativity, sociology, me just goofing off or creative projects or, Hey, I just wrote this article. You’ll see probably things about like my podcast or just avenues of me just.
life dump and then it’s just a bunch of random stuff like my time in Las Vegas or even here like I I’ll take pictures of like whatever catches my eye. So yesterday at the after party at the nacho bar I took a picture was like nacho bar and so you’ll see that if you follow me just like random doodads of my mind.
Kate Holterhoff
All right nacho bar that’s good. ⁓ Okay love it that’s great. Okay well thank you so much for coming on the MonkCast.
Kimasia Ayers
Thank you so much for having me I appreciate this thank you.
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