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Platform Engineering PodcastAuthor: Cory O'Daniel, CEO of Massdriver
The Platform Engineering Podcast is a show about the real work of building and running internal platforms hosted by Cory ODaniel, 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 isnt about trends. Its 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 youll probably find something useful here. Language: en Genres: Business, Careers, News, Tech News Contact email: Get it Feed URL: Get it iTunes ID: Get it |
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Observability in the AI Era with New Relic's Nic Benders
Episode 43
Wednesday, 18 February, 2026
What happens when nobody wrote the code running in your production environment? As AI-generated software becomes standard practice, platform engineers face a new challenge: operating systems without experts to consult.Nic Benders, Chief Technical Strategist at New Relic, has spent 15 years watching observability evolve from basic server monitoring to understanding complex distributed systems. Now he's tackling the next frontier: how to maintain and operate software when there's no human author to ask why something was built a certain way.The conversation covers the shift from instrumentation being the hard problem to understanding being the bottleneck. Nic explains why inventory matters more than you think, how to approach AI-generated code as a black box that needs testing and telemetry, and why "garbage in, safety out" should be your new mantra.You'll learn practical strategies for instrumenting modern systems with OpenTelemetry, why your observability hierarchy needs to start with knowing what's actually running, and how to build platforms that make safe deployment easier than risky shortcuts. Nic also shares his perspective on technical drift versus technical debt and what changes when your best troubleshooting tool - institutional knowledge - no longer exists.Whether you're drowning in observability data or just starting to instrument your systems, this conversation offers concrete approaches for building understanding into your platform engineering practice.Guest: Nic Benders, Chief Technical Strategist at New RelicNic Benders is New Relic's Chief Technical Strategist. Part of the Engineering team since the early days of the company, Nic has been involved with everything from Agents to ZooKeeper and all the pieces and products in between. As New Relic's Chief Technical Strategist, he now looks after the long-term technical strategy behind the product and the experience of all the engineering teams who build it. Before New Relic, he worked in the mobile space, managing back-end messaging and commerce systems powering some of the largest carriers in the world.New Relic, websiteNew Relic, BlogLinks to interesting things from this episode:OpenClaw (aka Moltbot, aka Clawdbot)Moltbook
