Podcast: Break Things on Purpose | Mandi Walls, DevOps Advocate at PagerDuty

Take a trip down memory lane with Mandi Walls, to chat about the many changes over the years in chaos engineering and other ares of tech. We’ve also got the new addition to Gremlin’s Developer Advocacy, Julie Gunderson who has joined Jason to chat with their mutual friend. Mandi talks about her previous work alongside Julie, but also the variegated nature of her background in operations and systems administration. From the days of Moviefone, AOL disks, and #hacktheplanet to more recent innovations in chaos engineering and making empathy a central ethos, Mandi has plenty of fun and valuable insights.

Podcast: Break Things on Purpose | 2021 Year In Review

December 28, 2021

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12 min read

For this episode your hosts, Jason Yee and Julie Gunderson, are sitting down for a year in review! With the new year just around the corner, lets take a glance back at a year of chaos...engineering that is. The rest of the chaos we will leave out of the conversation. Julie and Jason talk about their favorite outages of the year. From Fastly to texts from Julie’s mom, we’ve definitely got a heck of a year to consider!

Podcast: Break Things on Purpose | Carissa Morrow: Learning to be Resilient

February 22, 2022

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19 min read

Being new in tech an be intimidating! Thankfully, folks like Carissa Morrow are shining examples of how to come into tech from the ground up. Carissa began with a career shift and just started coding, went through the Boise Codeworks bootcamp, and made the jump to tech. Carissa talks about the resilience it took in her early days, and how those experiences reinforced her attitude on continually learning. Carissa levels a focus on keeping things fresh to avoid the “organizational death spiral” that only a new set of eyes can bring to the table. Check out the conversation for more!

Podcast: Break Things on Purpose | Sam Rossoff: Data Centers Inside Data Centers

January 25, 2022

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28 min read

Break Things on Purpose is a podcast for all-things Chaos Engineering. Check out our latest episode below.

Podcast: Break Things on Purpose | Alex Solomon & Kolton Andrus: Break it to the Limit

March 8, 2022

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18 min read

Time for a cross over! Today Page it to the Limit host Mandi Walls, DevOps Advocate at PagerDuty joins Julie for a special episode. In this two part episode, Julie and Mandi interview Kolton Andrus, co-founder of Gremlin and Alex Solomon, co-founder of PagerDuty. Each of them share the origins of their respective companies, how they build amazing cultures, and some of the fun anecdotes along the way. Kolton and Alex reflect on how they identified the space where they could build their respective companies and the shift from larger entities to start ups. Each of them offer up some excellent insight! Part 2: Break it 2 the Limit will premier on the Page it to the Limit podcast March 15, 2022.

Podcast: Break Things on Purpose | Chris Martello: Day of Darkness

March 22, 2022

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19 min read

Dad jokes lead the way in this episode as we interview Chris Martello, manager of application performance at Cengage. Chris is a wearer of many testing hats, but his passion is chaos and breaking things on purpose. Chaos was a natural fit for Chris with his background as a middle school science teacher, so when he made the jump to tech chaos engineering was a natural fit. Now at Cengage Chris is steeped in higher education, the result is a lot of seasonal fluxes that serve as great testing grounds for peak trafficking events. Tune in to hear the fruitful results of following the academic schedule!

Podcast: Break Things on Purpose | Natalie Conklin: Learning to Embrace Change

May 3, 2022

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22 min read

Natalie Conklin, tamer of chaos and Head of Engineering here at Gremlin, joins us to talk about embracing change, working alongside each other, and building more reliable systems. Natalie has a talk coming up at DevOpsDays Boise which she has titled “Embracing Change Fearlessly.” Her talk is oriented around enabling teams to take calculated risks and having the guts to take those risks. Natalie spent time working in India, which helped solidify her “fearlessly” philosophy. She provides examples of taking chances and how teams can orient around them together, the cultural changes that need to happen in chaos engineering, how to communicate across whole teams, dealing with “adolescent” engineers and more!

Julie Gunderson

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