Josh Kodroff
joshkodroff.bsky.social
Josh Kodroff
@joshkodroff.bsky.social
Customer Success Architect @ Pulumi
I think @jeffatwood.bsky.social (Coding Horror) is a good dude with a good heart. Much respect to a person who did well with honest and hard work and wants others to have the same opportunity.
September 4, 2025 at 7:23 PM
"Zhu told TechCrunch that he credits his early interest in venture capital and startups from ... Discord group chats he joined in 2020, when he was 13, that included people like Sam Altman."

Very normal stuff. I'll bet @bcantrill.bsky.social would have an opinion about this.
17-year-old Eric Zhu's startup was built in a high school bathroom — now it's raised $2.3M and is emerging from stealth | TechCrunch
Aviato is looking to build a private markets database that includes an analytical layer to help investors make decisions.
techcrunch.com
August 26, 2025 at 5:48 PM
Rest in peace, Sly. Truly one of the greatest to ever do it.
June 9, 2025 at 9:21 PM
Reposted by Josh Kodroff
🚀 Just launched: the Platform Engineering Workshop Series by @pulumi.com

Join experts from Pulumi, Docker, GitLab, Temporal, and our team at Honeycomb for a free 6-part workshop series for platform and DevOps engineers.

🗓️ Runs May-July
🔗 buff.ly/BRE4Z3W

#PlatformEngineering #DevOps #PulumiUP
May 5, 2025 at 8:20 PM
My APN blog post on how @pulumi.com ESC tool can help your organization improve its security posture (while making your developers and ops folks happier) is now live!

aws.amazon.com/blogs/apn/ho...
How to strengthen Cloud Security with Pulumi ESC and AWS Secrets Manager | Amazon Web Services
Modern organizations face challenges managing secrets across multiple environments, leading to security risks and operational complexities due to secrets sprawl across various storage locations and sy...
aws.amazon.com
May 1, 2025 at 2:18 PM
I might quibble with this definition somewhat: I think a product *mindset* (customer focus) is absolutely critical, but I don't know that you necessarily need PM or designer specialists for the scale of most of the orgs I've seen. If you're mega-scale, then yes, you do need these specialists.
Platform engineering is about giving internal engineering teams the tools they need to provision, manage, understand, and operate the software they own.

If you're running it for them, you're an ops team.

If you're building tools, sans PM/designers, you're an infra team.
May 1, 2025 at 2:13 PM
Reposted by Josh Kodroff
AGI is coming for all of us. It will write symphonies, direct movies, and author the best novels.

The only thing it won’t be able to do is VC investing, which must be reserved as a task only for the most-special people
April 30, 2025 at 3:14 PM
Reposted by Josh Kodroff
ChatGPT is like the British Museum of the internet.
April 17, 2025 at 1:03 PM
Much like your codebase, if the most common tasks need to span multiple groups (folders in code), especially if you have to do a "rainbow" way up the org chart (directory tree) and then back down, you should consider a reorg that makes those tasks more "ergonomic".
"The corollary to Conway's Law is, you can actually change the architecture of a company just by changing how people talk to each other." 🤔🤯🥂
April 7, 2025 at 4:35 PM
Despite being a software engineer for the first dozen years of my career, I'm clearly more of an SRE bent of mind in this respect.
As SREs, we expect the worst. It's what we do.

You tell me about some cool new thing you're building, I'm already thinking about how it's going to break.

There's a reason ops engineers rarely start companies. 🙈 Being a founder requires a suspension of disbelief...faith in the new & untested.
March 31, 2025 at 3:27 PM
Jeff Atwood is a good dude. I learned SO MUCH from StackOverflow, and his recent activism to fight wealth inequality and charity to support the public good is so obviously heartfelt. He starts speaking around 25 min: www.youtube.com/watch?app=de...
Rebuilding The American Dream : A Path Forward
YouTube video by The Cooper Union
www.youtube.com
March 28, 2025 at 7:18 PM
Reposted by Josh Kodroff
Kafka is for closers
March 28, 2025 at 6:25 PM
It's so great all these generous people giving away MacBook Air's on various Meetup Groups. Really restores my faith in humanity.
March 26, 2025 at 11:55 PM
I've done this and would gladly recommend. The quality is far less questionable than its donor thinks.
Oh hey, it's been a long time since I've posted this... I'm available for career advice, nights and weekends (PST).

calendly.com/charitym/adv...

This is mostly useful for staff+ ICs and people on the management track (or pendulum).

Please read the fine print 🥰
Advice of questionable quality - Charity Majors
If you are at a crossroads in your career, or want to talk through a hard problem with management or organizational, sociotechnical change, I am here for you. I will try to help. I can at least listen...
calendly.com
March 24, 2025 at 6:12 PM
Generative AI is most useful for 2 things for me:

1. Summarizing content (when precision is not of paramount importance)
2. Creating refined content for public consumption from detailed notes that include clear goals/structure of output
March 21, 2025 at 10:06 PM
YES. This is what you want in your company culture, or really any important relationships between people.
Psychological safety != psychological comfort.

Real psychological safety means being able to trust that when you are fucking up, SOMEONE WILL TELL YOU.

Someone will challenge you. Sooner rather than later. While you have time to figure it out and turn it around.

bsky.app/profile/p-y....
p-y.wtf P-Y @p-y.wtf · Mar 14
We did our tech lead unconference at Square TODAY and one of the topics was "are we too nice / how psychological safety cannot exist when folks avoid conflicts".

Are you a spy?!
March 21, 2025 at 3:57 PM
Is it fair to say that being a successful manager requires a certain capability for egolessness? I'm thinking in particular about the coaching aspect of management.
March 21, 2025 at 3:53 PM
Is there some fantastic tool out there that lets OSS companies link GH issues to paid customers? Has to be a common problem.
March 13, 2025 at 7:35 PM
lol
Fired employee, Davis Lu, has claimed he’s not guilty of writing a “IsDLEnabledinAD” function that checked if Davis Lu was still in the company’s Active Directory and if not deleted a bunch of files and sabotaged his former employer’s network.

A crazy coincidence if true.
Developer convicted for “kill switch” code activated upon his termination
Software developer plans to appeal after admitting to planting malicious code.
arstechnica.com
March 12, 2025 at 3:03 AM
I am in that tiny segment of people who need an AWS Organizations Factory, not just an Account Factory.
March 6, 2025 at 7:51 PM
I have an extreme bias toward eliminating toil, attempting to improve the things around me, etc. Mostly it's been good for my career, but the other edge of the sword is that sometimes I can't compartmentalize and put on blinders for my own good.
March 5, 2025 at 11:53 PM
If you are not fully aware of the downsides of using Kubernetes and accept them as necessary due to your organization's scale, then you do not need Kubernetes and should instead use a managed container service.
February 28, 2025 at 4:07 PM
Is documenting stuff an act that reduces toil in your mind? Maybe a pre-requisite? Curious what people think in the field, whether you're an SRE or even in technical pre/post-sales.
February 27, 2025 at 7:26 PM
It is difficult for me to conceive of the lack of empathy it takes to devote one's energies to creating a project like this. Agreeing to fund something like this is a close second: www.404media.co/optifyeai-yc...
Y Combinator Supports AI Startup Dehumanizing Factory Workers
Optifye.ai's pitch includes a video where a "boss" yells at a "worker" by calling him a number, and sarcastically saying he's having a bad month.
www.404media.co
February 25, 2025 at 4:57 PM
The more I read, the more I am convinced that the platform engineering community has a lot of room to improve explaining:

1. What actual components comprise a platform (when speaking about the practice)
2. What the value of platform engineering is (when speaking about an implementation)
February 18, 2025 at 9:45 AM