This episode features Kelsey Hightower for a discussion across numerous topics. In this special edition, Kelsey is interviewed by HarperDB's Co-Founder, Stephen Goldberg. Questions covered include:

• How did it feel to retire from Google this year, what’s next?
• You have, what some would consider, a non-traditional background when it comes to the software engineering world. How has that shaped your view on the industry? How do you think the industry performs at mentoring/cultivating young engineers, including those from non-CS degree backgrounds?
• What are your thoughts on where distributed vs. monolithic architecture is going? How is “Edge Computing” impacted by this?
• There has been a focus in the cloud provider space of bringing on new locations, trying to put infrastructure in hard to reach places. Eventually this will reach a saturation point, where do you think they will invest next?
• When thinking about building platforms and products, what is your advice on how to make a decision to internalize automation within your product vs. using a framework?
• What are your opinions on running a stateful application that must have data consistency across its replicas, such as a database, on Kubernetes? It comes with a bunch of problems to solve, like auto scaling, data redundancy and replication. It seems that the community is split on whether or not this is a good idea and how to implement it.
• What advice would you give yourself 20 years ago?

Kelsey Hightower is an American software engineer, developer advocate, and speaker known for his work with Kubernetes, open-source software, and cloud computing.