The Stack Overflow Podcast - A collaborative hub for infrastructure as code

On this sponsored episode of the podcast, we talk with Marcin Wyszynski, founder and CEO at Spacelift. Marcin says Spacelift aims to be for infrastructure-as-code what GitHub is to git. It centralizes everything about your IaC system: it runs code, deploys within CI/CD pipelines, tracks the progress of your infrastructure, and gives you insight into who made what changes and why. Today it works with the IaC tools already out there: Terraform, Cloud Formation, and Pulumi, with plans to add support for services like Ansible and Kubernetes in the future. 

Like a lot of programmers, Marcin got into coding through games. Once he ran through the limited number of Commodore 64 games at his local shop in Poland, he learned to program his own. But he never thought of programming as a career, so when it came time to pick a college major, he followed a group of his peers into sociology. Sociology, with its heavy focus on statistics, brought him back to programming. 

He landed his first job at Google reviewing copy for Ads, which lasted until he could automate himself out of it. Google gave him increasingly technical roles until he moved into an SRE position handling tape backups, a job that is mostly very boring until it becomes extremely exciting. After that, it was a stint at Facebook spinning up point-of-presence clusters around the world, then CTO at a startup that didn’t catch on as he’d hoped. 

With this wealth of experience under his belt, he went into consulting. As a consultant, he had his bag of best practices, open-source tools, processes, and scripts that he brought with him, but he also built bespoke pieces of technology for every single one of his clients. One need his clients had in common was a way to manage the code that defined their infrastructure. 

During Marcin’s career, there were many times when he built the thing he needed: games, automation, scripts. When his consulting clients would leave for a new organization, they would reach out to ask if he could provide them with the solution he had built for infrastructure as code. Realizing that he had created something which addressed a pain point common to many companies, he decided to turn this solution into a new company: Spacelift. 

Spacelift aims to take the heavy lifting out of infrastructure-as-code, automate it, and make it auditable. When a change gets made, everyone can see it and comment on it. From the product manager to the junior dev, everyone knows what’s going on, even if an infrastructure change doesn’t fit the original architecture docs. Plus, the SRE team no longer need to go on archeological expeditions to find a database secretly running and costing the company five figures a month. 

To learn more about Spacelift, check out their website at https://spacelift.io/, where you can start a free trial and see it in action. 

Short Wave - Should Big Oil Pick Up The Climate Change Bill?

The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals is deciding whether a Baltimore case against more than a dozen oil and gas companies will be heard in state or federal court. The city argues the companies are liable for the local costs of climate change. It wants the case heard in state court, which is governed by robust consumer protection laws. But industry lawyers are fighting hard to have it and more than 20 other similar lawsuits nationwide tried in federal court, where the oil and gas industry may be more likely to prevail.

NPR climate correspondent Rebecca Hersher, brings an update on the case, which went before the U.S. Supreme court last year. She explains how this pending decision may prove key to determining who pays for climate change.

Listen to the full Short Wave episode from last year about this case here: n.pr/3gcJDOk

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Big Technology Podcast - Digital Publishing’s Next Evolution — With Brian Morrissey

Brian Morrissey writes The Rebooting on Substack and hosts The Rebooting Show, a podcast. He is the former editor-in-chief of Digiday and digital editor of Adweek. He joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss how digital publishing is evolving from an industry reliant on social media for distribution to one that prioritizes focus and dedicated audiences. Stay tuned for the third segment where we discuss Brian's views on Web3, crypto, and how these new technologies may help the industry.


Headlines From The Times - Mexico’s murdered journalists

Mexico trails just Syria and Iraq as the deadliest country in the world to be a journalist. That’s according to data collected from 2000 through 2022 by the Committee to Protect Journalists. And the Mexican government has done little to stop it.

But in the wake of the murder of four reporters so far this year — José Luis Gamboa, Margarito Martínez Esquivel, Lourdes Maldonado López and Roberto Toledo — Mexican journalists are openly criticizing President Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador and government officials like never before.

More reading:

Journalists throughout Mexico say enough to killings and crimes against press

Photojournalist shot to death outside his home in Tijuana

She told Mexico’s president she feared for her life. Then she was killed
 


 

The Daily Detail - The Daily Detail for 2.2.22

Alabama

  • Secretary of state Merill responds to claims about ERIC systems used in AL elections
  • Response to Parent's Choice Act from head of  AL Christian Education Association
  • Jury now deliberates over Roy Moore -Leigh Corfman double defamation lawsuit
  • Singer songwriter Lee Greenwood was in Madison County to "Help a Hero"

National

  • Johns Hopkins releases massive study of on Lockdowns for Covid 19
  • Biden administration creates a sanctions list of Russian oligarchs connected to Putin
  • NY Times sues US State department for emails connected to Hunter Biden
  • Canadian Convoy and vaccine protest  expands to Border town between Canada and US

The Intelligence from The Economist - Action pact: NATO’s Ukraine role

Our correspondent speaks with Jens Stoltenberg, NATO’s secretary-general, who says the alliance’s involvement in de-escalating Russia tensions is a sign of its resurgent relevance. After tortuous votes, Italy’s lawmakers elected a president: the incumbent who did not want the job. No posts have changed, but the political balance surely has. And we meet the nuns racking up followers on TikTok. For full access to print, digital and audio editions of The Economist, subscribe here www.economist.com/intelligenceoffer

Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders - S6 Bonus: Rob Carpenter, Valyant

Rob Carpenter was born and raised in Dillingham, Alaska - and no... he can't see Russia from his back steps. He has been a long term space ship nerd, and confesses that one of the reason he got into entrepreneurship is because he wants to eventually secure a ticket to space. Currently, he lives outside of Boulder, Colorado with his young family, and really enjoys the outdoors, growing his company, and taking good care of his little ones. While his kids are young, he loves to take the kids hiking, swimming at the pool, and going to the zoo and local animal sanctuaries.

Rob started a company, wanting to originally create holographic employees, using a gaming engine - and they even named this employee Holly. What they figured out during that process was that conversational AI hadn't been solved yet, and if they were ever going to make their original idea work, they would have to solve it. So... they got heads down solving it.

This is the creation story of Valyant.

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Honestly with Bari Weiss - The Tiger Mom Won’t Stop Roaring

It’s hard to think of an institution in American life that’s more broken than higher education. As universities have abandoned core liberal principles like free speech, bending to students’ demands for censorship, perhaps the most striking feature of all has been the cowardice and silence of tenured professors.


Yale Law professor Amy Chua is not one of them.


Since Chua wrote her bestselling parenting memoir Battle Hymn of The Tiger Mother in 2011, she has been no stranger to controversy. She wrote a book, The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America, about why certain cultural groups succeed—and was accused of “cultural racism.” She refused to recant her support for Brett Kavanaugh—and was accused of misogyny. The list goes on. 


None of this has stopped her from speaking her mind.


Today, why Amy Chua remains an optimist in the face of unprecedented political tribalism; how her students continue to inspire her even as she’s lost faith in Yale; and why she did, indeed, threaten to burn her daughter’s stuffed animals if she didn’t practice her piano perfectly. 

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