Sean Hull and the world of databases

Viktor Farcic: To kick things off, tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got involved in DevOps.

Sean Hull: I'm based in New York, and I've been working in technology and alongside start-ups for over a decade. I got my start back when I did database work, scalability, and performance tuning for high-scale websites, such as the Hollywood Reporter and Billboard, sites that got a hundred million unique visitors per month. Back when Amazon started getting bigger, a lot of start-up companies were either migrating to the cloud or natively deploying their applications in the cloud, and so I saw an opportunity there to specialize in automation.

My background really is in Unix and Linux, and so it was a good match for me to shift gears and pivot in that direction, but I still do a lot of database-related work with MySQL, Postgres, and Redshift. These days I also do a lot of Python programming and all the automation stuff like...