Whitney Lee

Sun, 16 Aug 2026 08:27:14 -0500

“In Kubernetes, ‘pod’ refers to both a configuration stored in etcd AND the actual running container.”

In this episode of 🌩️Thunder, Abby Bangser (Principal Engineer at Syntasso) and I untangle CRDs, custom resources, controllers, and operators. These terms can get used interchangeably, but they mean very different things.

A CRD is a schema. A custom resource is data in etcd. A controller is what does the work.

Watch and learn! youtu.be/xlBMpLNaP…

Thu, 13 Aug 2026 09:21:27 -0500

This is the finished lightboard from the 🌩️Thunder episode on Keycloak. Ever wonder why it’s so easy to plug an app into Keycloak? This board explains the OpenID Connect flow, step by step.

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

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 08:45:14 -0500

“Observability is solved.”

In this episode of 🌩️Thunder, Duffie Cooley, Field CTO at Isovalent and CNCF TOC member, explains why Cilium does far more than a traditional CNI.

Cilium attaches an eBPF program to every pod’s network namespace at creation time. That single hook is how it delivers networking, security, and observability at native kernel speed.

Have a look-see! youtu.be/slJP_CS5X…

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 07:00:00 -0500

Datadog Illuminated: How to Evaluate AI Code against Your Company’s Standards, with Ville Hellman

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 07:00:00 -0500

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

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 07:00:00 -0500

Datadog Illuminated: How Datadog Detects Malicious Code at Scale, with Christoph Hamsen

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 10:22:47 -0500

Lin Sun, co-creator of kagent, joined me at the lightboard to walk through how it works.

kagent is a framework to help you make AI agents and run them in Kubernetes declaratively, with YAML.

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

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 09:26:37 -0500

“AI’s role in software development is primarily that of an amplifier.”

In this episode of Software Defined Interviews, Nathen Harvey, who leads the DORA research program at Google Cloud, explains what 15 years of research data reveals about AI’s impact on software delivery.

AI amplifies what’s already there, good or bad.

Give it a listen! www.softwaredefinedinterviews.com/118

Sat, 01 Aug 2026 10:37:11 -0500

During my sunrise hike today, I spotted six sneaky Underwing Moths on a single tree.

Can you find them all? ♫

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 10:07:47 -0500

On 🌩️Thunder, Kubescape maintainer Ben Hirschberg shows how the tool catches misconfigurations, then watches runtime behavior with eBPF & turns that into a least-privileged NetworkPolicy proposal.

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

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 10:07:16 -0500

Your GenAI feature returned a 200. The model did indeed return text to the user. But was the answer any good?

In this 🌩️ Thunder episode, Austin Parker (Director of Open Source at Honeycomb) explains why traditional observability falls short for GenAI. With deterministic software, success is binary: it worked or it didn’t. With GenAI, a successful HTTP response tells you nothing about whether users are actually happy.

Austin covers how OpenTelemetry’s semantic conventions let you combine user feedback (thumbs up, thumbs down) with performance data (token counts, model, cost) in the same telemetry. He also talks about “architectural blindness” in coding agents and how feeding trace data back into your agent helps it understand your system’s execution paths.

Watch now → youtu.be/RNaa_48LW…

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 07:00:00 -0500

Datadog Illuminated: How to Evaluate AI Code against Your Company’s Standards, with Ville Hellman

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 09:27:22 -0500

“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

Fri, 24 Jul 2026 16:57:56 -0500

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…

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 16:59:15 -0500

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

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 16:57:02 -0500

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…

Sat, 18 Jul 2026 16:42:22 -0500

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

Wed, 15 Jul 2026 09:45:36 -0500

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

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 07:00:00 -0500

Datadog Illuminated: How Datadog Detects Malicious Code at Scale, with Christoph Hamsen

Thu, 09 Jul 2026 17:15:15 -0500

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…

Mon, 06 Jul 2026 11:17:36 -0500

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…

Thu, 02 Jul 2026 08:35:03 -0500

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…

Wed, 01 Jul 2026 18:20:08 -0500

Being interviewed at AI Engineer World’s Fair

Wed, 01 Jul 2026 07:00:00 -0500

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

Sat, 27 Jun 2026 08:33:48 -0500

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…