Meet the team: Bryan Boreham (Director of Engineering)
Next up in our "meet the team" series is Bryan Boreham, Director of Software Engineering, helicopter pilot and theatre enthusiast! Bryan is a maintainer on the CNI project, and also works on Weave Cortex, a scalable multi-tenant back-end for Prometheus. You can find him at KubeCon where he’ll be delivering a few talks over the week, or you can find him at the Weaveworks booth (S-C09).
This week, we’re continuing with our “Meet the team” blog series to introduce you to our superstar team here at Weaveworks.
Next up is Bryan Boreham, Director of Software Engineering, helicopter pilot and theatre enthusiast! Bryan is a maintainer on the CNI project, and also works on Weave Cortex, a scalable multi-tenant back-end for Prometheus. You can find him at KubeCon where he’ll be delivering a few talks over the week, or you can find him at the Weaveworks booth (S-C09).
Five Questions for Bryan Boreham
What does a typical day look like for you and what are you currently working on?
Most days begin with looking to see if there are any outstanding user queries - I work in London so quite often pick something up that was asked late in California time or during the Asian timezone.
Then I'll pick up whatever project I'm working on - lately I have been improving the performance of Cortex, our time-series database. I also have to finish the slides for my talks at CloudNativeCon!
Each day is somehow different - I might have to interview an engineering candidate, or meet a customer, or troubleshoot someone's Kubernetes install.
Towards the end of the London day our San Francisco colleagues come online, and there's a narrow window to exchange thoughts before it's time to go home.
Any words of advice for others trying to learn about containers and Kubernetes?
There is no magic: a container is just a process, wrapped up in some cool Linux technology called "namespaces".
What’s your top 3 Talks/Books?
I tend to read Hacker News more than any book these days - it keeps me up to date on what people are talking about, and a few commentators are extraordinarily well-informed. If you press me for books I'd go for "Site Reliability Engineering" and "The Datacenter as a Computer" which give detailed insight into how Google operates; the rest of us are really trying to catch up to that position.
Lastly I still have a soft spot for "The Mythical Man-Month" - although some details have dated, it remains a heartfelt and profound piece of work.
What do you wish other people knew about Weaveworks?
We have engineering teams in Berlin and San Francisco as well as London.
Any favourite cool new technologies you’ve been looking at lately?
Jaeger distributed tracing - I love delving into the details of what happened inside a program.
Wrapping up…
If you are planning on attending Kubecon EU this year please visit the Weaveworks booth. You can also check out a few of Bryan’s talks that he’ll be presenting:
- 1st May: Lightning Talk: What I wish I’d known about Fluentd with Kubernetes
- 2nd May: How we used Jaeger and Prometheus to deliver lightning-fast user queries
In addition to those talks, Bryan will also be co-leading “An Introduction to the CNI Maintainers” on the 3rd of May.
For more information about Bryan Boreham, find him on Github and Twitter.
