Why Ship It Weekly exists
Brian started Ship It Weekly because most tech news does a decent job saying what happened, but not always why it matters to the people who actually have to run the systems afterward. A new cloud feature, a GitHub outage, a security advisory, an AI tooling release, a supply chain incident, a Kubernetes change, or a weird platform failure can all sound interesting in a headline. For the people on-call, managing infra, supporting developers, watching costs, and trying not to break production on a Friday, the real question is usually simpler: What does this mean for my team? That is the lens Brian brings to every episode.
Brian has spent years working in real production environments across cloud, infrastructure, automation, and reliability. Day-to-day work has covered Terraform and Terragrunt, AWS, Kubernetes, EKS, Kafka, CI/CD, GitHub, incident response, infrastructure guardrails, cost management, platform patterns, and the messy operational details that rarely show up in clean conference demos. Brian has worked as both a hands-on engineer and a technical mentor, helping teams make better decisions around infrastructure design, reliability, security, and delivery.
Ship It Weekly is built for the engineers, SREs, platform teams, DevOps folks, cloud engineers, technical leaders, and curious practitioners who want more than a headline recap. The show filters the noise down to the stories that matter for infrastructure, reliability, security, cost, engineering workflows, and production operations. Some weeks that means a major outage. Some weeks it means digging into GitHub Actions, AI agents, Terraform, Kubernetes, AWS, supply chain risk, or why a "small" tooling change can become a very big production problem.
Brian's style is practical, opinionated, and grounded in the reality of doing the work—not trying to sound like an analyst reading market notes. The focus is tradeoffs, failure modes, operational risk, team impact, and the "okay, what should we actually do with this?" part that often gets skipped.
That usually means asking questions like: Does this change how we build pipelines? Does this affect our blast radius? Should we be tightening permissions? Is this a real platform shift, or just vendor noise? What would I want my team to know before this becomes our incident?
Outside Ship It Weekly, Brian creates DevOps and cloud engineering content through Teller's Tech, with a focus on practical education instead of lab-only demos. The goal is to help engineers connect concepts to the kind of decisions they actually face in production: how to structure Terraform, how to think about reliability, how to avoid fragile automation, how to use AI without outsourcing judgment, and how to build systems that teams can safely operate over time.
At its core, Brian's work is about making infrastructure and operations conversations more useful. Less hype. Less vague "best practices." More context, more judgment, and more respect for the people carrying the pager.
Track record: production systems, leadership, and communication
Production infrastructure
Brian has co-led large-scale AWS → GCP migrations and owned Kafka platform engineering through vendor transitions (Confluent Cloud → MSK → Confluent Cloud with private networking), including Schema Registry and MirrorMaker2 / Replicator during cutover windows. He has supported public-company readiness from an infrastructure and platform angle, run SOC2 evidence programs across multiple audit cycles, and helped prepare teams for SOX expectations. Earlier in his career he operated AWS at depth and contributed heavily to PCI and SOC2 programs in HIPAA-certified environments, and he has led disaster recovery work with explicit RTO/RPO targets. As CTO of a digital-signage company, he led a zero-downtime migration to the cloud.
Leadership under pressure
Brian has operated as CTO and engineering manager, leading technical programs where clarity and accountability matter as much as architecture. Earlier leadership experience included running high-volume restaurant operations with teams up to ~60. Different domain, same lessons in shift orchestration, standards under stress, and customer-visible incidents when something breaks in front of the customer.
Early technical roots
Brian's first paid work in tech came during high school at fred.net (later xecu.net), a Frederick-area dial-up ISP doing front-line support, Unix administration, colo, and customer website hosting. In high school he also managed Unix mail servers and was president of the web club. He has been doing production-minded tech work since before DevOps was a job title.
Broadcast and communication
Brian came up through radio: a college show on XTSR at Towson University with a dormmate; intern to associate morning show producer at a major Washington, DC station (then Z104 / WWVZ–WWZZ); hosted evening (7–11pm) and Sunday mornings on Key 103.1 in Frederick, Maryland; and spent years as a mobile DJ for schools, weddings, and events. Live timing, reading a room, and staying composed when things break on air. Photos and audio from that era are below in On air & behind the mic.
Outside work
Brian coaches youth football. Married, four kids. Fundamentals, repetition, and calm communication carry the same whether you are on a sideline, in a war room, or at the dinner table.
On air & behind the mic
Before infrastructure leadership and podcast hosting, Brian came up through college radio, major-market production in Washington, DC, and Frederick’s Key 103.1 — plus years as a mobile DJ. The photos and audio clips below are archive samples from that era (roughly 15–20 years ago). For how he sounds today on DevOps and platform topics, listen to Ship It Weekly.
Audio samples
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XTSR promo
Junior year at Towson University — college show on XTSR with a dormmate.
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Quiznos commercial
Key 103.1, Frederick, Maryland — on-air commercial voice work.
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Carroll Manor Fire Company commercial
Key 103.1, Frederick, Maryland — on-air commercial voice work.
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Pentagon area report (September 13, 2001)
Z104 (Washington, DC) — news intern coverage after 9/11, including a bomb-threat situation on 9/13/2001.
What I cover on Ship It Weekly
- DevOps
- Site Reliability Engineering
- Platform Engineering
- AI in Operations
- Cloud Engineering
- CI/CD
- Observability
- Incident Response
- Kubernetes
- Infrastructure as Code
- Production Engineering
Available for talks & engagements
Brian also speaks at conferences, internal engineering all-hands, leadership offsites, and on podcasts — same operator-focused lens, in person.
Currently writing
Confidently Wrong — a practical book for DevOps, SRE, platform, and infrastructure engineers on using AI safely across Terraform, Kubernetes, CI/CD, agentic workflows, and operational decisions. Same operator lens you hear on the show, in long form.
Building in the labs
Teller's Tech Labs is where I build practical tools and training systems for DevOps, SRE, platform engineering, and AI-era operational judgment. Flagship: Code Duck, an AI-driven incident simulator that helps engineers practice production judgment without breaking production. Currently in early access.
Also runs
lmgt.org and lmgt.com — long-running “let me get that for you” pages that send a steady trickle of search traffic back to Ship It Weekly and this bio. Built once, maintained occasionally, useful indefinitely.
Recent episodes
Kiro CLI Approval Bypass, Amazon Braket Pickle Risk, AWS Org Logging, KEDA Upgrades, and Automation’s Hidden Boundaries
This episode of Ship It Weekly explores automation's hidden boundaries, focusing on Kiro CLI's CVE-2026-9255 approval bypass and Amazon Braket's Python pickle risk.
GitHub Supply Chain Attacks, Railway’s GCP Outage, Discord’s Voice Failure, AWS Retry Changes, and Trusted Tool Risk
This episode of Ship It Weekly discusses the growing risks of trusted tools in production, highlighted by a GitHub supply chain attack involving a compromised VS Code extension.
Ship It Conversations: Jake Warner on Cycle.io, Bare Metal’s Comeback, and Why Private Cloud Is Getting Interesting Again
In this episode, Jake Warner of Cycle.io discusses the resurgence of bare metal and private cloud, emphasizing their benefits in cost, performance, and compliance.
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Practitioner conversations
Where Brian shows up in practitioner threads: recent Reddit replies from /u/tellerstech across the engineering subreddits. Comments only — episode posts and self-promotion threads are filtered out.
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Re: DevOps feels endless — what should I focus on after Git, Docker, and Linux?
Roadmaps are cool, just dont treat them like homework or you’ll lose your mind lol
View thread on Reddit →
If you know Git, Docker and Linux, I’d prob pick AWS next, then Terraform, then some basic CI/CD.
Then just build some dumb little app and ship it. Break it, fix it, add logs, redeploy it, etc.
Also AI is super useful now too, but use it like a tutor.
Kubernetes can wait a bit imo. It makes way more sense once the other stuff clicks.
Most of us learned by breaking stuff and googling in a panic a... -
Re: Quick poll: would you expense a $19/month incident diagnosis tool yourself?
For my own learning or homelab stuff? yeah maybe.
View thread on Reddit →
For work incidents? probably not. If it’s actually useful during an incident, the company should pay for it and approve whatever access it needs.
$19/mo isn’t really the issue. It’s more that now I’m personally paying for a tool that might touch prod logs/alerts/context, and if everyone starts relying on it during a P0, we kinda made it part of the process by accident.
I’d test it or expense it, but I prob wouldn’t ju... -
Re: Any experience with Mission from CDW?
Had some limited experience with Missio a few years ago while we were on an EDP.
View thread on Reddit →
Their billing portal was okay-ish. Maybe a little better than AWS billing at the time, but that’s not saying much. It felt delayed and kinda clunky. And now AWS has CUDOS / Cloud Intelligence Dashboards anyway, so I wouldn’t personally treat the portal as a huge selling point.
The bigger issue was support. At the time, we couldn’t just open AWS cases directly like normal Enterprise Support. W... -
Re: New Kubernetes conference talks & podcast episodes (May 13–20, 2026)
Great list, thank you for taking the time to compile it!
View thread on Reddit → -
Re: What exactly do you do as an SRE?
I’d say SRE is basically owning reliability end to end.
View thread on Reddit →
Not just “is the server up?” but “is the app actually working for users?”
So yeah, it can be infra, k8s, deploys, observability, incidents, capacity, performance, slow queries, bad retry logic, memory leaks, etc.
DevOps usually leans more infra / CI/CD / cloud / automation. SRE is more focused on keeping the actual product reliable, even if that means digging past the infra layer.
But titles are messy. At a good or... -
Re: Focus more on Cloud Engineering or dive further into DevOps?
Honestly I think the titles are kind of useless at this point.
View thread on Reddit →
Cloud Engineer, DevOps, Platform, SRE, Infra Engineer… it all depends on the company. One place’s Cloud Engineer is basically Terraform tickets and IAM cleanup. Another place’s Platform Engineer is doing real architecture around Kubernetes, CI/CD, golden paths, developer experience, observability, etc.
I wouldn’t assume cloud = architecture and platform = AI babysitting. That’s really more about the compan... -
Re: Lack of Devops jobs
Are you just looking in NYC, or only searching for DevOps roles?
View thread on Reddit →
I still see jobs out there, but I think people get stuck focusing too much on titles. I wouldn’t even limit yourself to the obvious stuff like platform engineer or SRE since everyone already mentioned those.
I’d search more based on the actual work. Stuff around infrastructure, cloud, delivery, operations, automation, reliability, internal tooling, production, CI/CD, Kubernetes, Terraform, and things like that... -
Re: Does Anyone Else Working in DevOps Services Feel Destroyed by DSA Interviews?
I get why companies test some coding ability, but I’ve always found DevOps/SRE interviews way more useful when they focus on real scenarios.
View thread on Reddit →
Talk me through Kubernetes troubleshooting. How would you do a blue/green DB migration with minimal downtime? How would you design CI/CD for multiple environments? How would you handle WAF rules, API traffic, observability, rollback strategy, secrets, IAM, or an actual incident?
I’ve interviewed at a decent amount of places, including...