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Platform Engineering Podcast

Platform Engineering Podcast

Written by: Cory O'Daniel CEO of Massdriver
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About this listen

 The Platform Engineering Podcast is a show about the real work of building and running internal platforms — hosted by Cory O’Daniel, longtime infrastructure and software engineer, and CEO/cofounder of Massdriver. Each episode features candid conversations with the engineers, leads, and builders shaping platform engineering today. Topics range from org structure and team ownership to infrastructure design, developer experience, and the tradeoffs behind every “it depends.” Cory brings two decades of experience building platforms — and now spends his time thinking about how teams scale infrastructure without creating bottlenecks or burning out ops. This podcast isn’t about trends. It’s about how platform engineering actually works inside real companies. Whether you're deep into Terraform/OpenTofu modules, building golden paths, or just trying to keep your platform from becoming a dumpster fire — you’ll probably find something useful here.Copyright 2025 | All Rights Reserved | Massdriver, Inc. Careers Economics Personal Success Politics & Government
Episodes
  • Green CI and Merge Queue Mastery with Trunk’s Eli Schleifer

    Green CI and Merge Queue Mastery with Trunk’s Eli Schleifer
    Apr 15 2026

    When a flaky test can stall a merge queue, “just rerun CI” stops scaling fast.

    Cory talks with Trunk co-founder and CEO Eli Schleifer about the outer loop problems that show up as teams ship more code - especially with AI-assisted development increasing PR volume. They break down what a merge queue is, why logical merge conflicts happen even when individual PRs are green, and how predictive testing helps protect main without forcing constant retesting.

    Eli also explains how Trunk approaches flaky tests: collecting JUnit results, using quarantines so known flakes don’t block delivery, and fingerprinting failures to tell the difference between “this always times out” and “this was just broken by a recent change.” The conversation closes on how review and quality practices may shift as code generation accelerates - and what still needs strong guardrails like tests, security checks, and reliable CI signals.

    Guest: Eli Schleifer, co-founder and CEO of Trunk

    Eli Schleifer leads Trunk’s technical vision and product strategy, focused on closing the gap between AI-speed code generation and human-speed delivery by removing the bottlenecks that slow modern engineering teams. Trunk’s platform eliminates flaky tests, resolves merge queue constraints, and redesigns CI systems to enable high-throughput, continuous delivery.

    Prior to founding Trunk, Eli was CTO at Directr, which was acquired by Google, and has served in engineering leadership roles at YouTube, Uber, and Microsoft.

    Eli Schleifer, X

    Trunk, website

    Trunk, Slack

    Trunk, Github

    Trunk, X

    Links to interesting things from this episode:

    • Balsamiq
    • “Code First Engineering” by Eli Schleifer
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    50 mins
  • AI-Native Ops: Making AI Safe for Production with William Collins

    AI-Native Ops: Making AI Safe for Production with William Collins
    Apr 1 2026
    What happens when your “coworker” can generate code and changes faster than your team can review them, and production still has to stay up?William Collins breaks down what AI-Native Ops looks like when you take reliability seriously: where reasoning should stop, where deterministic automation should begin, and how guardrails like compliance checks, version pinning, and controlled workflows keep AI from turning into outage fuel. Cory and William also dig into why context windows and tool sprawl matter in real systems, how protocols like MCP and agent-to-agent communication are shaping day-to-day automation, and why regulated environments can’t adopt new tech with hype-driven shortcuts.If you’re a platform engineer trying to balance speed with safety, this conversation offers a practical way to use AI for the work that drags teams down, without giving up operational discipline.Guest: William Collins, Director of Technical Evangelism at Itential, AWS community builder, and the co-host of the Cloud Gambit podcastWilliam Collins is a strategic thinker and catalyst for innovation. Over his career, he has helped enterprises build large-scale networks, driven modernization through cloud adoption, and excels at optimizing complex environments through good design practices and automation. Today, William works as Director of Technical Evangelism for Itential, where he focuses on evangelizing the Itential Platform, fostering strong relationships with customers to fully realize their goals, engaging with community, and advocating for the successful future of network, security, and automation infrastructure.As a content creator, William hosts The Cloud Gambit Podcast with Eyvonne Sharp, a show that unravels the state of cloud computing, markets, strategy, and emerging trends with industry experts. He is also a LinkedIn Learning Instructor (Automation, Cloud, and Network Engineering Content), AWS Community Builder (Network & Content Delivery), and is a group organizer for the USNUA - Kentucky User Group (KYNUG).Prior to Itential, William worked as a Principal Cloud Architect and Director of Technical Evangelism for Alkira where he helped grow the company from lean beginnings to being ranked 25th Fastest-Growing Company in North America and 6th in the Bay Area on the 2024 Deloitte Technology Fast 500. He also held various senior technical roles across the enterprise space in Financial Services and Healthcare, most recently at Humana as Director of Cloud Architecture. Outside of tech, his time is spent with family, woodworking, ice hockey, and guitar.Opinions expressed are solely his own and do not express the views or opinions of his employer.William Collins, BlogWilliam Collins, YouTubeWilliam Collins, X William Collins, Instagram William Collins, TikTokWilliam Collins, GitHubItential“The Cloud Gambit” podcastLinks to interesting things from this episode:Ghostty“Harness design for long-running application development” by Anthropic
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    1 hr and 3 mins
  • Infrastructure as Code's Hidden Problem with Pavlo Baron

    Infrastructure as Code's Hidden Problem with Pavlo Baron
    Mar 18 2026
    Terraform drift, state wrangling, and a growing “tools for tools” stack are still daily work for many platform teams - despite a decade of DevOps talk and cloud maturity. Why does ops automation so often feel like it needs babysitting?Pavlo Baron breaks down where Infrastructure as Code tends to break down in real organizations: manual drift management, low-level state complexity, and a lack of practical abstractions that let developers self-serve without inheriting the entire ops burden.The conversation digs into what a more use-case-driven approach could look like - where teams can choose when to enforce desired state, when to accept emergency changes, and how to build “guardrails” that reduce mistakes without slowing delivery.Pavlo also explains why type safety and constrained interfaces matter (especially as AI starts generating more code and infrastructure changes), and why the future of platform engineering depends less on slogans and more on systems that reduce toil.Guest: Pavlo Baron, Co-Founder and CEO of Platform Engineering LabsPavlo Baron is Co-Founder and CEO of Platform Engineering Labs, who are crafting tools to remove the toil from the operations work, with a current focus on infrastructure. He is a veteran in the space, having served in all kinds of roles throughout his career that spans more than 35 years. Previously, he was co-founder, CTO, and major inventor at an observability startup, Instana, that was acquired by IBM in 2020. Pavlo is a frequent conference speaker and author of several books.Pavlo Baron, Xhttps://pavlobaron.medium.com/https://github.com/platform-engineering-labshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/platform-engineering-labshttps://x.com/plateng_labshttps://bsky.app/profile/platform.engineeringhttps://mastodon.social/@plateng_labshttps://www.youtube.com/@plateng-labsLinks to interesting things from this episode:The Pkl Primerformaeformae quick start"10+ Deploys Per Day: Dev and Ops Cooperation at Flickr"“Where everyone is responsible, no one is really responsible.” Albert BanduraJPL “Visions of the Future”“Fallout: New Vegas”
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    58 mins
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