Wow, I can't believe what started as a COVID summer initiative at CTO.ai has turned into a full-blown YouTube show and podcast.

We create The Ops Show as COVID ramped up in North America as a means to highlight incredible technical leaders, CTOs and developers, and share their stories, tips, tricks, and tools with the world.

Now we've done 32 episodes! Plus, over 60,000 views and listens on our channels.

We've had technical startup founders who have sold their companies to Atlassian and LinkedIn. We've had CTOs and VPEs overseeing the future of DevOps, data, and the developer experience.

We've even had live juggling 🤹‍♀️ (and we expect more musical performances in 2021, cough cough).

So to recap the year and the wonderful variety of code journeys we've heard, here is the complete list of episodes, topics, and guests we've had on #TheOpsShow.


Episode 1 - DevOps for WFH
The Ops Show kicked off at the peak of the work from home era with this episode around DevOps and the rise of remote developer tools with Tristan Pollock and Kyle Campbell.

Episode 2 - SlackOps
Kyle and Tristan tackle Slack and the remote-work phenomenon taking over the tech industry. With the rise in popularity and demand for automating workflows, Slack finds itself in the center.

Episode 3 - Developer Upskilling w/ Don Burks
Episode three introduces the series's first-ever guest: Don Burks, Technical Lead at Sphere (now at AWS). A veteran of the tech industry, Don shares his take on learning and honing skills as a developer.

Episode 4 - Tech Ethics w/ Nima Boscarino
Tristan and Kyle meet with Nima Boscarino, software developer and tech ethicist to talk about where the industry is headed and the societal impacts of those developments.

Episode 5 - Technical Leadership w/ Jillian Evin
Jillian Evin, Engineering Lead at Thinkific, shares some wisdom on leading a tech-focused team from company culture to communication.

Episode 6 - Diversity & Neurodiversity w/ Wesley Faulkner
Episode six tackled the topics of diversity and neurodiversity in the tech industry. Guest Wesley Faulkner, developer advocate, talks about why it's crucial to build products and experiences with equity.

Episode 7 - Emotional Intelligence & Tech Debt w/ Mason Blake
In this episode, Mason, Eng Leadership @ LinkedIn and Founder of UpCounsel, talks about the significance of emotional intelligence in the context of tech business and management.

Episode 8 - Data Bias w/ Arvinder Singh
CTO/Co-Founder of UrbanLogiq Arvinder Singh shares insights into the unconscious bias of algorithms, the consequences this could potentially have, and the need for more representation and diversity in teams.

Episode 9 - Digital by Default with/ Alistair Shepherd-Cross
Episode eight delves into the shift to remote and digital by default period. Alistair Sheperd-Cross, Founder of Team-It, goes into this shift and how the tech industry is adapting.

Episode 10 - Dev to Scaling Startup CEO w/ Karthik Sridharan
This episode, we chat with Karthik, co-founder and CEO of Kinnek, as he shares his personal journey from developer to starting a tech company in New York City.

Episode 11 - Learning Loops of Software Development w/ Sadie Freeman
In this episode, Sadie of Dapper Labs provides valuable insight into the rewarding challenge of taking on software development as a path.

Episode 12 - Building Product w/ Eric Muller
Director of Technology at Presence Eric Muller discusses how keeping things simple and valuing your team's time can get the job done.

Episode 13 - Remote Developer Communities w/ Ilya Brotzky
Ilya, CEO of VanHack, dives deep into why he believes in a remote-first culture (before it was cool) and how to build up strong developer communities in the period of COVID.

Episode 14 - Engineering Team Values w/ Prosper Nwankpa
Prosper (then President and CTO of Avanoo) shares his wisdom on how reinforcing the values and caring about the people working with you is crucial to a strong team.

You may find a more in-depth breakdown of Prosper's values and philosophies in this blog post.

Episode 15 - DevOps Workflows Simplified w/ Chuka Ofili
EP15 features Chuka Ofili, Google Developer Expert, Certified Cloud Architect, and Gigster Full Stack Engineer, as he brings on everything from DevOps workflows, SlackOps, to all the tools in between.

Chuka also gave us 13 Ways to Simplify Your DevOps on the CTO.ai blog.

Episode 16 - Value Stream Mapping for Development w/ Steve Pereira
VSM or Value Stream Mapping has become an important part of optimized technical teams, especially between Dev and Ops. Steve just so happens to be the Marie Kondo of automation.

Episode 17 - Future of Big Data w/ Neej Gore
Neej is the acting President of the Data Cloud Division at Zeta Global, one of the largest data aggregators in the world. He knows data. Listen in and learn what you should look out for in 2021 re: big data.

Episode 18 - Monolith to Microservices w/ Noah Labhart
Noah Labhart, the founder/CTO of Veryable and host of #CodeStory, hits The Ops Show with a bang covering everything from his CTO journey to how he evolved and simplified his development stack over the last few years.

Episode 19 - Event Modeling w/ Adam Dymitruk
Adam Dymitruk, Author of Event Modeling, Original Contributor of #CQRS and #EventSourcing, and founder of Adaptech Group shows us how to map out event modeling for information systems.

Episode 20 - Full Stack Serverless w/ Nader Dabit
Nader Dabit, DevRel at #AWS Cloud and AWS Amplify, Author of #FullStackServerless, top StackOverflow contributor for React, and a tried and true web and mobile developer, consultant, and founder, joins us for EP20.

Episode 21 - Mayuko’s Developer Journey + Dev Content Creator Tools
Our guest was the incredible Mayuko Inoue, an iOS software engineer with 350,000 subscribers on YouTube and experience working with Patreon, Netflix, and Intuit TurboTax and Quickbooks.

Episode 22 - DevOps for Dummies w/ Emily Freeman
Emily Freeman, a software engineer, author of DevOps for Dummies, principal cloud advocate at Microsoft, and a self-proclaimed human router joins us to unveil the true simplicity of developer operations.

Episode 23 - Scaling w/ Serverless w/ Fatih Acet
Fatih Acet is co-founder and CTO of SuperPeer, a platform for video mentorship. Fatih was also the 2nd EVER frontend developer at Gitlab. He tells us all his serverless secrets that helped him scale his engineering team to 17 engineers completely serverless, plus his takeaways from his fond memories of working at Gitlab while it scaled to 60 frontend devs and over one thousand remote-first employees (Fatih was employee #40).

Fatih also shared his tips on doing serverless right at a startup stage.

Episode 24 - Serverless & SMS Chatbots at Twilio w/ Lizzie Siegle
Lizzie Siegle, developer evangelist at Twilio, talks about developer relations, demos Twilio’s SMS chatbot and machine learning phone call functionalities, and shows the Twilio serverless environment.

Episode 25 - Slack for Developers w/ Bear Douglas
Bear Douglas, Director of Developer Relations at Slack, comes on The Ops Show to discuss Slack for developers.

Episode 26 - DevOps Chat w/ Shawn Mayzes
Shawn Mayzes, Founder of DevOps Chat, Lara Chat, and Unleashed Ventures tells us about his code journey, how he built his developer communities to 20,000 members and what he sees as the future of DevOps. Oh, and he also tells how he played hockey at 5,000 feet and won a gold medal.

Episode 27 - Observability Driven Development w/ Charity Majors
Charity Majors, Co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb.io and co-author of Database Reliability Engineering tells all about observability driven development.

Episode 28 - #DevOpsRob, Platform Architect
Rob Barnes (aka #DevOpsRob), Senior Developer Advocate at HashiCorp, covering DevOps and security.

Episode 29 - Platform Scale w/ Daniel Hochman
Daniel Hochman is Platform Engineer at Lyft, and Founder of Clutch OSS.

Episode 30 - Developer Systems Thinking w/ Jessica Kerr
Jessica Kerr (aka @Jessitron) is a DevOps mastermind, Symmathecist, co-host of the Greater Than Code podcast and co-host of Arrested DevOps.

Episode 31 - Fletcher Richman, Co-founder of Halp (Acquired by Atlassian)
Fletcher Richman, CEO and co-founder of Halp (acquired by Atlassian) tells all about his startup journey.

Episode 32 - Data Infra & Heroku w/ DeVaris Brown & Ali Hamidi
CEO DeVaris Brown and CTO Ali Hamidi, the ex-Heroku director of product management and lead engineer, respectively, and co-founders of Meroxa, a #data infrastructure platform, join us for the last episode of 2020.

That's all folks! Hope you can level up your technical chops, leadership skills, and technology game in 2021!

You can find all of The Ops Show content in a few places: