Matthew Casperson: Platform Engineering - Episode 269

Matthew has loved technology since his first Commodore 64, and that passion remains to this day. His days have me integrating enterprise platforms with Octopus, writing guides and books for platforms like Kubernetes, blogging, and training my colleagues, testing bleeding edge open source projects, and contributing to various blogs.

Matthew is a 5-star published author and has created solutions that Red Hat felt were worthy of being submitted for a patent. CEOs endorse his development skills.

Although he calls himself a developer, Matthew is quite comfortable administering a Linux server, managing a MySQL database, deploying infrastructure with Ansible, reconfiguring a firewall, or just doing what needs to be done to get the job finished.

To ensure that he is learning the industry's best practices, Matthew pushes himself to gain certification in technologies that he relies on, with Oracle proudly telling him "You are among the elite 1% of certified Java professionals who have gone on to achieve the Java Enterprise Architect certification."

Topics of Discussion:

[3:36] Mike talks about some high points in his varied career.

[6:33] What is platform engineering?

[8:22] Most jobs fall into the category of DevOps.

[10:58] The platform team is looking inward and trying to scale up the team members as opposed to scaling up the technology.

[13:08] Has Matt seen any of the job boards coming out with how we need to hire a platform engineering director or platform engineering analyst?

[15:08] What does Matt's typical work day and work week look like?

[17:02] Guiding customers into creating useful solutions in their own teams.

[18:17] Have we figured out the difference between platform engineering and DevOps?

[20:05] "Needless creativity."

[23:56] The importance of consistent feedback and improvement.

[25:58] Developers have a $0 budget, but an unlimited time budget.