Whitney Lee

@whitneylee.com

2660 Followers 198 Following

Doin' it and doin' it and doin' it well https://whitneylee.com/

A lightboard covered in dense handwritten-style text in white and yellow, organized into labeled sections including "Before Network Service Mesh...", "A Network Service is", "Network Service Mesh is", "Use Cases for Network Service Mesh (NSM)", "Network Service Registry", and "Application Service Meshes." Black background with multiple columns of technical notes about K8s networking, Network Service Mesh concepts, and comparisons between application service meshes and NSM.
Whitney Lee on the left, smiling, with long dark hair and a black top. Ed Warnicke on the right, a man with long hair wearing a dark patterned shirt. Between them is a lightboard with large yellow text reading "What Is Network Service Mesh?" and "Workload Connectivity at Layer 3." The Thunder logo appears in the upper left. "With Ed Warnicke" is written in the lower right. Blue lightning bolt decorations appear in the upper corners.
A lightboard titled "BUILDING AN MCP SERVER." A flowchart shows Datadog Backend to Datadog-hosted MCP Server via HTTP to Agent (labeled "WILDCARD") to User to "SUCCESS = HAPPY USER." Below: "TAMING THE AGENT (+ LLM) = Correctness + Efficiency." Three sections: left "Context Efficiency" (data format: JSON crossed out, replaced by YAML nested / CSV flat / TOON; agent control over context: let agents write SQL queries; good tool descriptions: smart yet succinct), center "no tool sprawl" (default core toolset: logs, metrics, traces; opt-in specialized toolset: synthetics), right "guide the agent" (specialized search docs tool with RAG; good error messages: Actionable; good server-level instructions: ex "use search docs RAG tool"). Chalk-style text on a dark lightboard.
Reilly Wood, a man with dark hair, glasses, and a short beard, smiles on the left side. Whitney, a woman with bright red hair, waves enthusiastically on the right. Between them is a lightboard reading "BUILDING THE DATADOG MCP SERVER" in large yellow and white pixel-style letters. "Datadog Illuminated" appears in neon-style lettering in the upper left corner. "with REILLY WOOD" is written at the bottom left.
A lightboard covered in neon handwritten notes on a dark background. The board is divided into sections with RBAC problems, a center architecture diagram showing PARALUS connecting to Kubernetes clusters, and PARALUS MAIN POINTS. Text and arrows are written in neon marker throughout.
Two people flank a lightboard. On the left, Saim Safdar, a man with short dark hair wearing a white collared shirt, looks toward the camera with a calm expression. On the right, Whitney, a woman with long brown hair wearing a patterned top, laughs and points at the board. The board displays "WHAT IS Paralus? KUBERNETES ACCESS CONTROL MADE SIMPLE" in large yellow letters with handwritten lightboard notes visible behind. The Thunder show logo appears in the top left corner. Text at the bottom left reads "With SAIM SAFDAR." The background is white with decorative colorful shapes.
A dark lightboard covered in handwritten colored notes about Confidential Containers. Multiple sections visible including "Confidential Computing Trust Model," "Components of a Confidential VM," and in large letters: "WHOMEVER OWNS THE KERNEL SEES ALL." Diagrams show pod-in-VM architecture and attestation flows.
Whitney Lee on the left, laughing, wearing a dark jacket with bangs. Tobin Feldman-Fitzthum on the right, shown in a black-and-white photo. Large yellow text reads Confidential Containers and white text below reads Hardware Protection for Kubernetes Workloads, with the name Tobin Feldman-Fitzthum at the bottom in yellow. A lightboard covered in handwritten technical notes fills the background. The 🌩️Thunder show logo appears in the top-left corner.
Software Defined Interviews podcast cover art. Whitney Lee (dark hair with bangs, laughing and clapping, black top) is in the upper left, and Coté (bearded man in a blue plaid shirt, smiling) is in the upper right, both flanking the show's cloud logo. The show name "Software Defined Interviews" appears in large black and white block letters with a red script "Interviews" overlay. Below, Emily Long (long brown hair, brown leather jacket, smiling) appears with an arrow and the text "with guest Emily Long."
A color-corrected lightboard covered in a handwritten workflow diagram showing the 13-step LLM-powered migration process. Sections include "Gather + Plan," "DO THE THING! Execute the Plan," a Verification Process loop, "Code review by GPT5," "Address discrepancies," and the final steps through "HUMAN REVIEW" to "MERGED & DEPLOYED!!! HUZZAH!!!" The board also shows "Room for Improvement" and "What's Good" columns on the right.
Whitney Lee (left, smiling broadly, curly red hair) and Nick Isaacs (right, wearing headphones) flank a lightboard covered in a handwritten workflow diagram. Large neon-style text reads "Using AI to Dismantle Our Monolith." The Datadog Illuminated logo appears in the top left corner, and Nick's name is displayed in the bottom right. The background is a dark brick wall with colorful neon light accents.
Composed thumbnail graphic for Software Defined Interviews. Upper left: Whitney Lee laughing and clapping, dark hair, wearing a black top. Upper right: Coté, bearded, in a plaid shirt. Center: the Software Defined Interviews logo — a stylized cloud above bold black and red text reading "Software Defined Interviews." Lower right: Josh Berkus, with long gray hair pulled back, glasses, and his hand thoughtfully on his chin. An arrow and the text "with guest Josh Berkus" point to his photo. The left and right borders show a tiled pattern of the SDI branding with clouds, lightning bolts, and geometric shapes.
A filled lightboard covered in handwritten text and diagrams about Athenz. Visible sections include the shift from TCP to TLS to mTLS, domain and subdomain structure for multi-tenancy, the X.509 certificate issuance process, a prominent note about using short-lived certificates instead of revocation lists, the ROLE-ACTION-RESOURCE authorization model, and a section on future features including cert-manager integration.
Henry Avetisyan (in grayscale) on the left and Whitney Lee on the right, both smiling, with a filled lightboard behind them showing handwritten notes and diagrams. Large yellow text in the center reads "Athenz" with "Giving Services an Identity" below it. The 🌩️Thunder logo appears in the top left. Text at the bottom reads "with Henry Avetisyan."
YouTube thumbnail for SDI episode 120. Heidi Waterhouse appears as a guest alongside the Software Defined Interviews branding. The episode title "Progressive Delivery, with Heidi Waterhouse" is displayed prominently.
Completed lightboard from the episode with six sections covering: Kubernetes resource definition (schema stored in etcd, nothing running), CRD definition with two types (vendor/product and company-specific), custom resource definition, side-by-side ConfigMap and Pod examples showing how controllers create running infrastructure, controller definition (reconciliation loop), operator definition (CRD plus controller plus dependencies), and admission controller (validation and mutation before etcd storage). Yellow, pink, and white text on a dark background.
Whitney Lee and Abby Bangser standing at a lightboard covered with colorful handwritten text about Kubernetes custom resources, CRDs, controllers, operators, and admission controllers. The 🌩️Thunder show branding is visible.
Completed lightboard from the OpenFGA episode of Thunder, with handwritten notes in multiple colors on a dark background. Sections include: Before OpenFGA, What is OpenFGA, OpenFGA is Relationship-Based Not Just RBAC with User/Relation/Object diagram, Some OpenFGA Use Cases, OpenFGA vs ABAC, Authorization Model, The Future, and Benefits of OpenFGA Process.
A completed lightboard with handwritten diagrams and text in multiple colors. Sections cover eBPF basics, what Cilium is, a numbered step-by-step diagram showing how Cilium assigns pod identity and attaches eBPF programs to pod namespaces, and Cilium as a service mesh with use cases for encryption, load balancing, L7 network policy, and observability. Text and arrows in blue, green, yellow, and white cover the entire board.
The Thunder show logo appears in the top left. In the center, bold yellow text reads "Cilium Explained" over a dark chalkboard covered in handwritten notes about eBPF and Kubernetes networking. Below, yellow text reads "EBPF-POWERED KUBERNETES NETWORKING." On the left, a woman with long dark hair with reddish highlights smiles broadly, wearing a black denim jacket, pointing both index fingers toward the center text. On the right, a circular headshot of a bearded man with a white-gray beard wearing a black wide-brim hat. Bottom right text reads "With DUFFIE COOLEY" in yellow.
Three people appear in the thumbnail against the Software Defined Interviews logo. On the left, a woman with long reddish-brown hair laughs and claps her hands, wearing a red top. Upper right, a bearded man with short dark hair wears a plaid shirt. At the bottom center, a man with short gray hair and glasses smiles, wearing a blue floral shirt. An arrow and the text "with guest Nathan Harvey" point to him. The center displays the show logo in bold black and red lettering: "Software Defined Interviews." The sides feature a tiled doodle-style background with clouds, lightning bolts, and checkered patterns.
Finished lightboard from the Making GenAI Observable with OpenTelemetry episode. The board shows sections on what OTel is (standard, software, specification), three angles for using OTel with GenAI, GenAI semantic conventions for chat conversations, and how OTel supports building GenAI features by pairing user feedback with performance data alongside system metrics.
Thunder episode thumbnail featuring Whitney Lee and Austin Parker. Large stylized text reads 'Making GenAI Observable with OpenTelemetry' with 'with Austin Parker' below. Whitney appears on the right smiling and pointing upward, wearing a plaid shirt. Austin appears on the left wearing a black hat and glasses with a full beard. A lightboard with GenAI observability diagrams is visible in the background. The Thunder logo appears in the top left corner.
Software Defined Interviews podcast cover with hosts Whitney Lee (top left, laughing and clapping, wearing a black outfit, long brown hair) and Michael Coté (top right, smiling, bearded, in a dark plaid shirt) above the show logo with a stylized cloud graphic. Guest Lian Li appears in the bottom right corner, smiling and wearing a blue blazer with teal drop earrings. An arrow points to text reading 'with guest Lian Li.'
I love my brother so very much ♥