Episode Details

About our guest:

Alex Boten is a senior staff software engineer that has spent the last ten years helping organizations adapt to a cloud-native landscape by mashing keyboards. From building core network infrastructure to mobile client applications and everything in between, Alex has first-hand knowledge of how complex troubleshooting distributed applications is. This led him to the domain of observability and contributing as an approver and maintainer to OpenTelemetry.

Find our guest on:

• All of Alex's socials on dot.cards/codeboten

Find us on:

• All of our social channels are on bento.me/geekingout
• All of Adriana's social channels are on bento.me/adrianamvillela

Show Links:

• Silicon Valley - Tabs vs Spaces
• The Engineer/Manager Pendulum, by Charity Majors (blog)
• The Journey Back to Being an Individual Contributor, by Alex Boten (blog)
• An Elegant Puzzle, by Will Larson (book)
• Ash Patel talks about stepping away from a director role and going into consulting
• Riaan Nolan talks about stepping away from a director role and going into consulting

Transcript:
ADRIANA: Hey, y'all, welcome to Geeking Out, the podcast about all geeky aspects of software delivery, DevOps, Observability, reliability, and everything in between. I'm your host, Adriana Villela, coming to you from Toronto, Canada. Geeking out with me today is Alex Boten. Welcome, Alex.

ALEX: Hello. Thanks for having me.

ADRIANA: Super excited to have you on. Where are you calling from today?

ALEX: Just Vancouver, Canada, on the far west coast. So not too far away, but kind of far away.

ADRIANA: All right, well, before we get started with the meaty bits, I'm going to subject you to my lightning round questions.

ALEX: All right, let's do this.

ADRIANA: All right, first question. Are you a lefty or a righty?

ALEX: I am mostly a righty, although when I play sports, I'm a lefty.

ADRIANA: Cool. Okay, iPhone or Android?

ALEX: I tried Android for a very brief moment, and then when I tried to sync it with my iTunes library like 15 years ago, it didn't work. So I just switched to iPhone and never looked back. I'm kind of stuck in it.

ADRIANA: The iTunes library sync was the deal breaker.

ALEX: Absolutely.

ADRIANA: I feel ya. I, my mom had an Android for a while because my dad bought it for her even though he had an iPhone. And then she would ask me how to do stuff on, on her Android and I'm like, listen, if I'm not looking at your phone, I have no freaking clue what's going on because I don't have an Android.

ALEX: It just made no sense. I...I'm with you. I could never understand it.

ADRIANA: Yeah. Yeah. All right, next question. Mac, Linux or Windows?

ALEX: Mostly...mostly Mac these days. I have contemplated a few times going back to a Linux laptop, although every time I've tried it, I do a quick search on the laptops of choice,