With the first episode of their new podcast, Fork Around and Find Out, hosts Autumn Nash and Justin Garrison come out of the gate strong with an hour-and-a-half interview featuring Kelsey Hightower.
Hightower is a well-respected technologist and thinker in the cloud-native space. He is a philosopher. Who other than a philosopher would deliberately have a repository without any code?
Listen to the first episode of Fork Around and Find Out:
Fork Around and Find Out: Remaining Authentic in Retirement with Kelsey Hightower
Nash and Garrison do a great job of giving Hightower space to speak and share his thoughtful reflections. He sees the higher abstractions and the commonalities between technical mindsets in different fields. This approach is vital to professional growth in the tech industry. All too often, engineers look down on people in roles further from the code instead of understanding that the honing of skills in those roles is just as valuable and significant.
Hightower talks about how his eyes were opened to this fact while advising NFL stars Larry Fitzgerald and Kevin Beachum on investing in tech. He realized how professional football players and other technical people at the top of their game share a mindset and a deep notion for systems.
This systems-based thinking extends beyond the day-to-day of work in tech. This episode examines how it applies in the open source ecosystem, the role of authenticity when money is on the line, and putting people into positions to succeed as a leader.
Developing this mindset takes years. You build up your relationships, taste, and knowledge in layers. What’s so exciting about this growth is that you never know where it might lead you. It has led Hightower everywhere from keynotes at KubeCon to running electrical wiring for bidets. This hits at why he is always such a joy to learn from. He takes on whatever challenges are ahead of him and sees how they all tie together. Nash and Garrison do a fantastic job of probing this perspective and the result is a great episode that is worth saving and revisiting.
I have followed the hosts of Fork Around and Find Out from their most recent podcast, Ship It!, which they revived early last year. With its parent podcast network, The Changelog, sunsetting its programming outside of its core show, the pair is striking it out on their own. I am so excited to see what is in store for them.