About BrandonBrandon West was raised in part by video games and BBSes and has been working on web applications since 1999. He entered the world of Developer Relations in 2011 as an evangelist for a small startup called SendGrid and has since held leadership roles at companies like AWS. At Datadog, Brandon is focused on helping developers improve the performance and developer experience of the things they build. He lives in Seattle where enjoys paddle-boarding, fishing, and playing music.Links Referenced:
Datadog: https://www.datadoghq.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/bwest

TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by Honeycomb. When production is running slow, it’s hard to know where problems originate. Is it your application code, users, or the underlying systems? I’ve got five bucks on DNS, personally. Why scroll through endless dashboards while dealing with alert floods, going from tool to tool to tool that you employ, guessing at which puzzle pieces matter? Context switching and tool sprawl are slowly killing both your team and your business. You should care more about one of those than the other; which one is up to you. Drop the separate pillars and enter a world of getting one unified understanding of the one thing driving your business: production. With Honeycomb, you guess less and know more. Try it for free at honeycomb.io/screaminginthecloud. Observability: it’s more than just hipster monitoring.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Fortinet. Fortinet’s partnership with AWS is a better-together combination that ensures your workloads on AWS are protected by best-in-class security solutions powered by comprehensive threat intelligence and more than 20 years of cybersecurity experience. Integrations with key AWS services simplify security management, ensure full visibility across environments, and provide broad protection across your workloads and applications. Visit them at AWS re:Inforce to see the latest trends in cybersecurity on July 25-26 at the Boston Convention Center. Just go over to the Fortinet booth and tell them Corey Quinn sent you and watch for the flinch. My thanks again to my friends at Fortinet.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I’m Corey Quinn. My guest today is someone I’ve been trying to get on the show for years, but I’m very bad at, you know, following up and sending the messages and all the rest because we all struggle with our internal demons. My guest instead struggles with external demons. He is the team lead for developer experience and tools advocacy at what I can only assume is a Tinder for Pets style company, Date-A-Dog. Brendon West, thank you for joining me today.Brandon: Hey, Corey, thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here. Finally, like you said, it’s been a couple of years. But glad that it’s happening. And yeah, I’m on the DevRel team at Datadog.Corey: Yes, I’m getting a note here in the headset of breaking news coming in. Yes, you’re not apparently a dog dating company, you are a monitoring slash observability slash whatever the cool kids are calling it today telemetry outputer dingus nonsense. Anyone who has ever been to a community or corporate event has no doubt been tackled by one of the badge scanners that you folks have orbiting your booth, but what is it that you folks do?Brandon: Well, the observability, the monitoring, the distributed tracing, all that stuff that you mentioned. And then a lot of other interesting things that are happening. Security is a big focus—InfoSec—so we’re adding some products around that, automated security monitoring, very cool. And