Michael Rishi Forrester does AI workforce transformation at Accenture LearnVantage, after three years at KodeKloud and about thirty years in IT before that. Whitney and Coté talk with him about running tabletop role-playing games with AI. He built his 19-year-old son a homebrew campaign on top of Lancer, the sci-fi mech game, in about 20 hours instead of the 60 to 100 it would have taken him before - and got a website, a virtual tabletop and some Discord bots out of it. What breaks is the interesting part: there was a night when every shot did one damage, because the model had quietly stopped using the dice harness and started doing the math itself.

From there it turns into an argument about where AI actually pays off at work. Michael’s position is that the ROI is at the workflow level and there is no organizational ROI to go find, that read-only work over more information than a person can hold is where it currently earns its keep, and that everything he has had success with is a bound system with a finite rule set. Whitney names the through-line: what can be deterministic should be deterministic, and if you need an LLM, scope it tightly and have it write the deterministic thing.

It ends on mantis shrimp.

You can watch the video version of this episode as well, if you prefer that kind of thing.

Mentions:

• Michael Rishi Forrester’s home page on the World Wide Web.
• Antiphon: The Game, the homebrew Lancer campaign - the whole story, the missions, the board, and the sea-creature capital ships.
• Michael on LinkedIn, where he posts most often.
• Lancer, the sci-fi mech game Antiphon is built on top of.

Special Guest: Michael Rishi Forrester.

Bryan Ross is a Field CTO at GitLab, a role he describes as straddling sales, customer success, and solution architecture - or, as one of his customers renamed it, chief therapy officer, which he has since turned into a Substack. Whitney and Coté talk with him about what the job actually looks like: getting catapulted into an account by the sales team, asking a lot of questions, and finding out about four minutes in that the tech problem is a human one. He makes the case that changing job titles - sysadmin, DevOps engineer, platform engineer, now context engineer - is mostly an organization trying to change its culture without knowing how, and that the real difference is mindset: keeping a box alive versus serving one team versus building a product. There’s a long stretch on metrics, including Goodhart’s law, why every metric needs a balancing one, and why he cared more about how many VMs were being decommissioned than how many were being provisioned. Also: whether anyone actually needs to ship faster (Coté’s pharmacy doesn’t), the UK Postal Service discovering that a friendly postman beat a modernized delivery fleet on customer satisfaction, and why copying Google is usually the wrong move. On AI, Bryan’s argument is that it will end up like spreadsheets - a few experts building the macros, everyone else using and lightly tinkering with what they made - and that which model you use should be a finance and data governance decision, not a developer one. Plus the hazard of a nicely formatted report: the pastel-shading trick for spreadsheets nobody will check, and why an AI scoring something 6 out of 10 gets the same unearned benefit of the doubt.

Also, ordering pizza in Amsterdam.

You can watch the video version of this episode as well, if you prefer that kind of thing.

Mentions:

• Bryan Ross’s home page on the World Wide Web, which links to everything else.
• Chief Therapy Officer, Bryan’s Substack.
• Bryan on LinkedIn.
• Coté's list of "laws," anecdotes, and common shit people say. See also Hacker Laws.

Special Guest: Bryan Ross.

W. Edwards Deming was a physicist, statistician, and quality theorist who taught post-war Japanese manufacturers what eventually became the Toyota Production System - and, decades later, DevOps. John Willis, one of the founders of the DevOps movement and the author of a book on Deming, walks Whitney and Coté through that lineage: Deming's system of profound knowledge (theory of knowledge, variation, psychology, and systems thinking), how it landed at Toyota, and how it threads through Lean software development into modern delivery practice. From there, the conversation turns to what the industry is getting wrong about AI: bragging about K-LOC and token counts instead of value, treating probabilistic systems with old deterministic notions of risk, and forgetting the social-technical lessons we already paid for. Along the way: VC moats and the buy-versus-build conversation inside large organizations, David Foster Wallace's "This is Water" and the ladder of inference, Jevons Paradox and whether AI gets us a three-day work week or a six-day one, and what CS students should be learning besides how to code. Also a brief detour into why John would want fifteen minutes with Bill Clinton.

You can watch the video version of this episode as well, if you prefer that kind of thing.

Mentions:

• John on LinkedIn - the entry point to his author portal and writing.
• John's book on Deming, Deming's Journey to Profound Knowledge.
• John's book on AI, Rebels of Reason.
• The DevOps Handbook, which John co-authored with Gene Kim, Jez Humble, and Patrick Debois.
• Donella Meadows, Thinking in Systems.
• Steven Spear, The High-Velocity Edge.
• Mary and Tom Poppendieck, Lean Software Development.
• David Foster Wallace, "This is Water" commencement speech.
• The 1980 NBC documentary If Japan Can, Why Can't We?.

Whitney and Coté talk with Emily Long, CEO and co-founder of Edera, about building a hardened container runtime that secures infrastructure foundations instead of chasing detect-and-respond alerts. Emily describes how Edera lets teams swap in a new container runtime without re-platforming or adopting yet another zero-trust migration, and why the "zero days as the new hotness" landscape makes that kind of structural change worth doing.

The conversation also covers her jump from COO to CEO - the ambiguity of the COO title, what actually changes when you're the one absorbing every decision - and what it's like raising a deep-tech Series A as an all-woman founding team, including the downside-vs.-upside question pattern VCs fall into and the now-classic "I just Googled Kubernetes and I know more than you do" pitch moment.

They open with a long detour on to-do lists, Claude Code, and whether AI tooling just keeps expanding the list of things you feel obligated to do.

You can watch the video version of this episode as well, if you prefer that kind of thing.

• Edera.
• Emily Long on LinkedIn.
• Rachel Chalmers, an Edera investor, was on the show a few episodes back.

Special Guest: Emily Long.

Whitney and Coté discuss with Josh Berkus (Red Hat, Kubernetes contributor) how liberal and fine arts degrees (philosophy, photography, sculpture, pottery) apply to tech careers. Berkus details how early hardware experience influenced his database performance work, noting hardware's renewed relevance with AI and multi-arch computing. The conversation covers Sun Microsystems’ 1990s internet role, internal politics, and its MySQL/Postgres strategy. They examine open source's shift from end-user to vendor-driven models, foundations' roles, and contributor incentives. Berkus describes Kubernetes release processes, contributor-experience programs, and its resilience to low-quality AI contributions.

You can also watch the video recording of this episode if you prefer that kind of thing.

Josh's home page on the World Wide Web.
And, check out Josh's pottery store, Fuzzy Chef.

Special Guest: Josh Berkus.

Whitney and Coté talk with Heidi Waterhouse, co-author of the book Progressive Delivery.

You can watch the video of the recording as well, if you're into that kind of thing.

Heidi on the World Wide Web:
LinkedIn.
Her Website.
The book, Progressive Delivery.

Special Guest: Hedi Waterhouse.

Spotting talent, getting innovation adoption and driving use, open source, AI, and developing taste - those are the major topics Coté and Andrew discussed this week at the live reading. Also, a framework for creating the perfect burger. This was recorded at cfgmgmtcamp 2026, in Ghent, Belgium. Thanks to the staff for making it happen!

You can watch the video recording of this episode as well, if you're into that kind of thing.

If you missed cfgmgmtcamp this year, keep an eye on cfgmgmtcamp for next year - it's a great conference to start the year with.

Check out Andrew in LinkedIn.

Special Guest: Andrew Clay Shafer.

Coté and Whitney talk with Nathen Harvey, who leads the DORA research program at Google Cloud. They talk about what 15 years of DevOps and delivery data actually says about AI. The answer feels something like "it makes you even better at what you're already good at." High-performing teams get better, while struggling teams just move faster into bottlenecks. They talk about AI-assisted software development, why throughput is rising while stability drops, how culture still beats tools, and why “user-centric” work remains stubbornly hard despite being obvious.

You can watch the video version of this episoode in YouTube, if you prefer that kind of thing.

Check out Nathen in LinkedIn.

Special Guest: Nathen Harvey.

In this episode, Whitney and Coté talk with Lian, a "cloud-native human" with a 15-year career in tech. Lian discusses her transition from tech to performance art, her experiences in amateur musical theater, stand-up comedy, and improv theater. She talks about platform engineering, the importance of community building in tech, and balancing professional life with personal projects. They also cover her unique improv workshops for engineers at conferences and the popular KubeCon karaoke parties she organizes.

If you prefer video, you can watch that.

Mentions:

• Lian's home page on the World Wide Web.
• Lian's LinkedIn.
• One of Lian's talks discussed: "Many Cooks, One Platform: Balancing Ownership and Contribution for the Perfect Broth," Lian Li, KubeCon EU 2025.
• Kuberoke.
• Lian's workshops.
• Also, Coté on a magazine cover.

Special Guest: Lian Li.

The Octopus Organization is a great collection of organization anti-patterns. This week, one of the co-authors, Jana Werner talks with Whitney and Coté about those patterns and her own experiences. They go over topics like reading habits, the role of business books, decision making, ownership, curiosity in organizations. practical steps to avoid common corporate anti-patterns, the importance of clear communication and leadership principles, and rubber pigs.

You can also watch the video version of this episode if you prefer that kind of thing.

Check out the book, The Octopus Organization.

Also, an HBR overview article on the book.

And find Jana Werner in LinkedIn.

She's also talked with Coté a couple of other times, back in 2020 and then in 2024.

Special Guest: Jana Werner.

Whitney and Coté chat with Jason Hand. They discuss the challenges and rewards of organizing conferences, the impact of the pandemic on in-person events, and the nuances of developer relations.

Jason shares his experiences with AI Tools Lab, vibe coding, and personal projects such as developing his own tools to replace commercial SaaS products. They also talk about devrel differences at large vs. mid-sized companies, and how to maintaining personal energy and sanity in high-demand roles.

Check out just about everything Jason Hand related at his home page on the World Wide Web.

If you prefer video, check out the video of this episode.

Special Guest: Jason Hand.