“I quit my job in tech because I just couldn’t do it anymore.”

In this episode of Software Defined Interviews, Whitney and Coté talk with Lian Li, Cloud Native Expert at Vorwerk Group. Lian Li spent 16 years in tech, quit to pursue stand-up comedy and improv theater, and came back with a completely different take on what makes teams work.

We cover her transition from platform engineering to stand-up comedy, musical theater, and improv theater, how performance art changed the way she thinks about tech teams and conference talks, her improv workshops for engineers at conferences, and the KubeCon karaoke parties she organizes.

www.softwaredefinedinterviews.com/117

Software Defined Interviews podcast cover with hosts Whitney Lee (top left, laughing and clapping, wearing a black outfit, long brown hair) and Michael Coté (top right, smiling, bearded, in a dark plaid shirt) above the show logo with a stylized cloud graphic. Guest Lian Li appears in the bottom right corner, smiling and wearing a blue blazer with teal drop earrings. An arrow points to text reading 'with guest Lian Li.'

Here’s the final board from the Datadog Illuminated episode with AJ Stuyvenberg, who explains how his team rewrote Datadog’s serverless agent in Rust, and the benefits of doing so!

Read the full board notes here: gist.github.com/wiggitywh…

A lightboard titled "WHY WE REWROTE OUR SERVERLESS AGENT." Three sections: left "The Problem Space" notes that AWS Lambda freezes the CPU between requests and runs code in tiny, isolated sandboxes, while the Datadog Agent was built to be long-running with a 55mb binary and 400ms+ startup, shown with a before/after timeline where startup drops from 400ms to 50ms and the agent continuously flushes data to Datadog during I/O waits. Middle "Why Rewrite?" lists making the agent lighter, eliminating upstream bugs, and switching to Rust for no garbage collection, small binaries, fast startup, and memory safety, with a playful "Suspense" note about more reasons to come. Right "Challenges" notes the team had no Rust knowledge, next to a "Results" box showing startup time improving from 400ms to 50ms, binary size shrinking from 55mb to 7mb, memory reduced by 50%, a 2x reduction in tail latency, and a safe rollout shipping Rust and Go binaries together with failover to the old Go version. Chalk-style text on a dark lightboard.

The client doesn’t know or care where the Network Service is running. Read the full board notes here: gist.github.com/wiggitywh…

A lightboard covered in dense handwritten-style text in white and yellow, organized into labeled sections including "Before Network Service Mesh...", "A Network Service is", "Network Service Mesh is", "Use Cases for Network Service Mesh (NSM)", "Network Service Registry", and "Application Service Meshes." Black background with multiple columns of technical notes about K8s networking, Network Service Mesh concepts, and comparisons between application service meshes and NSM.

My Datadog Illuminated episode with Reilly Wood, whose team built the Datadog MCP server from scratch, distilled to a single lightboard. Read the full board notes here: gist.github.com/wiggitywh…

A lightboard titled "BUILDING AN MCP SERVER." A flowchart shows Datadog Backend to Datadog-hosted MCP Server via HTTP to Agent (labeled "WILDCARD") to User to "SUCCESS = HAPPY USER." Below: "TAMING THE AGENT (+ LLM) = Correctness + Efficiency." Three sections: left "Context Efficiency" (data format: JSON crossed out, replaced by YAML nested / CSV flat / TOON; agent control over context: let agents write SQL queries; good tool descriptions: smart yet succinct), center "no tool sprawl" (default core toolset: logs, metrics, traces; opt-in specialized toolset: synthetics), right "guide the agent" (specialized search docs tool with RAG; good error messages: Actionable; good server-level instructions: ex "use search docs RAG tool"). Chalk-style text on a dark lightboard.

If a dev leaves, it is a one-click experience to remove permissions. Read the full board notes here: gist.github.com/wiggitywh…

A lightboard covered in neon handwritten notes on a dark background. The board is divided into sections with RBAC problems, a center architecture diagram showing PARALUS connecting to Kubernetes clusters, and PARALUS MAIN POINTS. Text and arrows are written in neon marker throughout.

WHOMEVER OWNS THE KERNEL SEES ALL. Read the full board notes here: gist.github.com/wiggitywh…

A dark lightboard covered in handwritten colored notes about Confidential Containers. Multiple sections visible including "Confidential Computing Trust Model," "Components of a Confidential VM," and in large letters: "WHOMEVER OWNS THE KERNEL SEES ALL." Diagrams show pod-in-VM architecture and attestation flows.

Here’s everything we covered on the lightboard when Nick Isaacs walked me through how Datadog’s LLM-powered monolith migration agent works. Fun!

Read the full board notes here: gist.github.com/wiggitywh…

A color-corrected lightboard covered in a handwritten workflow diagram showing the 13-step LLM-powered migration process. Sections include "Gather + Plan," "DO THE THING! Execute the Plan," a Verification Process loop, "Code review by GPT5," "Address discrepancies," and the final steps through "HUMAN REVIEW" to "MERGED & DEPLOYED!!! HUZZAH!!!" The board also shows "Room for Improvement" and "What's Good" columns on the right.

Here is the finished lightboard from my 🌩️Thunder episode with Henry Avetisyan on Athenz. Athenz automates workload identity for services, containers, and AI agents alike. Read the full board notes here: gist.github.com/wiggitywh…

A filled lightboard covered in handwritten text and diagrams about Athenz. Visible sections include the shift from TCP to TLS to mTLS, domain and subdomain structure for multi-tenancy, the X.509 certificate issuance process, a prominent note about using short-lived certificates instead of revocation lists, the ROLE-ACTION-RESOURCE authorization model, and a section on future features including cert-manager integration.

This lightboard from my 🌩️Thunder episode with Abby Bangser captures what trips up so many Kubernetes users: a CRD is a schema, a custom resource is data in etcd, and nothing is running until a controller gets involved.

gist.github.com/wiggitywh…

Completed lightboard from the episode with six sections covering: Kubernetes resource definition (schema stored in etcd, nothing running), CRD definition with two types (vendor/product and company-specific), custom resource definition, side-by-side ConfigMap and Pod examples showing how controllers create running infrastructure, controller definition (reconciliation loop), operator definition (CRD plus controller plus dependencies), and admission controller (validation and mutation before etcd storage). Yellow, pink, and white text on a dark background.

Being interviewed at AI Engineer World’s Fair

Datadog DASH 2026: Engineering with AI in the Stack (Women in Tech Panel)

Other authorization techniques gather data at check time. OpenFGA stores relationships as they happen, so the answer is already there. No computation needed.

Lightboard notes from the OpenFGA ep of 🌩️Thunder with Raghd Hamzeh: gist.github.com/wiggitywh…

Completed lightboard from the OpenFGA episode of Thunder, with handwritten notes in multiple colors on a dark background. Sections include: Before OpenFGA, What is OpenFGA, OpenFGA is Relationship-Based Not Just RBAC with User/Relation/Object diagram, Some OpenFGA Use Cases, OpenFGA vs ABAC, Authorization Model, The Future, and Benefits of OpenFGA Process.

KCD Texas: Livin' In the Future: Your Platform’s Next Interface Is an AI Agent

This lightboard from the Cilium episode of 🌩️Thunder with Duffie Cooley walks through how Cilium works, step by step.

Read the full board notes here: gist.github.com/wiggitywh…

A completed lightboard with handwritten diagrams and text in multiple colors. Sections cover eBPF basics, what Cilium is, a numbered step-by-step diagram showing how Cilium assigns pod identity and attaches eBPF programs to pod namespaces, and Cilium as a service mesh with use cases for encryption, load balancing, L7 network policy, and observability. Text and arrows in blue, green, yellow, and white cover the entire board.

Datadog Security Labs: Kubernetes project issues warning on Ingress NGINX retirement

[Keynote] Cloud Native Days Romania: Ozzie & Nova: A Kubernetes Security Play

🌩️ Thunder: Build and Run AI Agents on Kubernetes with Kagent

Software Defined Interviews: Deming, DevOps History, AI Risk, and Critical Thinking, with John Willis

Datadog Illuminated: Evaluating the Datadog MCP Server, with Scott Yak

Here’s the finished board from my 🌩️ Thunder episode with Austin Parker.

GenAI success = happy user, not just a successful HTTP response.

Read the full board notes here: gist.github.com/wiggitywh…

Finished lightboard from the Making GenAI Observable with OpenTelemetry episode. The board shows sections on what OTel is (standard, software, specification), three angles for using OTel with GenAI, GenAI semantic conventions for chat conversations, and how OTel supports building GenAI features by pairing user feedback with performance data alongside system metrics.