Kubernetes and retiring at the top with Kelsey Hightower

The Pragmatic Engineer · Jun 3, 2026 · 2h 51m

Brought to You By:

• Antithesis – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages.

• Buildkite – CI software built to absorb whatever your coding agents throw at the build queue

• Sentry – application monitoring software considered “not bad” by millions of developers

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Kelsey Hightower went from a self-taught technician installing DSL modems to becoming one of Google’s elite Distinguished Engineers, whom the CEO of Microsoft personally tried to recruit. Hightower’s career achievements are rooted in hard work and self-directed…