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This Select* podcast episode features Kelsey Hightower for a discussion across numerous topics. In this special edition, Kelsey is interviewed by HarperDB's Co-Founder, Stephen Goldberg.

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‍Questions covered include:

• How did it feel to retire from Google this year, what’s next?
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• You have, what some would consider, a non-traditional background when it comes to the software engineering world. How has that shaped your view on the industry? How do you think the industry performs at mentoring/cultivating young engineers, including those from non-CS degree backgrounds?
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• What are your thoughts on where distributed vs. monolithic architecture is going? How is “Edge Computing” impacted by this?
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• There has been a focus in the cloud provider space of bringing on new locations, trying to put infrastructure in hard to reach places. Eventually this will reach a saturation point, where do you think they will invest next?
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• When thinking about building platforms and products, what is your advice on how to make a decision to internalize automation within your product vs. using a framework?
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• What are your opinions on running a stateful application that must have data consistency across its replicas, such as a database, on Kubernetes? It comes with a bunch of problems to solve, like auto scaling, data redundancy and replication. It seems that the community is split on whether or not this is a good idea and how to implement it.
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• What advice would you give yourself 20 years ago?

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Kelsey Hightower is an American software engineer, developer advocate, and speaker known for his work with Kubernetes, open-source software, and cloud computing.

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A few notable quotes from this interview:

• "Not having a CS degree is the traditional background."
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• "Another part of your growth trajectory is your ability to get other people to be as good as you are."
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• "Having 5,000 microservices as a goal is insane."
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• "There is no best practice, there's just practice."
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• "The manual experience doesn't need to be easy, it needs to be good."
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• "Do not think that Kubernetes is a magical bandaid that you rub on a database and it turns into RDS .... If you're a database provider you can do little things that give an operator a chance to pick not just Kubernetes but whatever comes later."
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• "What's really cool is, your database is hyper specific and tuned for a set of use cases."
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• "All the struggles, challenges... imperfections are what makes things interesting."
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• "People are jumping from junior to senior way too fast... there's a lot to learn... if you let it bake, it'll come out of the oven just right."