Jeff Andrews (performing as J Alan Andrews) and I met in college 36 years ago. He has been one of my closest friends ever since. Long before I met him, and throughout all the years that I have known him, Jeff has been making music, even as he has nurtured his family and built a career in technology.

Jeff's music career includes 10 years as a full-time professional musician out of Athens, GA in a touring band called The Fountains. He has written hundreds of songs, is a multi-instrumentalist, and much of what he creates he also records and produces himself.

I especially wanted Jeff on The Change Resilient because of something he decided to do this year. In 2026, Jeff committed himself to releasing one new song every single week.

Jeff is doing something many of us strive to do. Each week he looks fear in the eye and pushes the button, submitting his art into the world. Some of the music he is releasing this year has been held for 10 to 20 years. In our conversation we discuss his creative and production process, how he deals with fear and self-criticism, and how he finds the resilience and grit to keep releasing music, week after week.

Episode #7 gets deep into building, transforming, and growing software-centric businesses. Dan Van Tran is the CTO of Collectors, a technology company that helps people authenticate, grade, vault, and sell collectibles.

Dan is a technology executive, engineering leader, and CTO advisor who has spent his career building and evolving complex software organizations and production systems.

At Collectors, Dan has led engineering through a period of significant growth and modernization, balancing the realities of legacy technology with the need to move quickly, improve reliability, and build for the future. He also advises CTOs and technology leaders on architecture, organizational design, engineering effectiveness, and navigating large-scale change.

I’ve had the good fortune to work with Dan twice as a customer and I’ve always appreciated his combination of deep technical judgment, pragmatism, curiosity, and willingness to get into the deep details of how software systems—and the teams behind them—actually work.

This is an episode packed full of pragmatic wisdom for the realities of building and operating software systems here in late 2026. Yet, even if you're not a technologist, you'll enjoy Dan's stories of his family's migration from Vietnam, his approach to leadership, and how he finds resilience in the face of AI-fueled change.

For episode six, we riff through a multi-dimensional, deeply human conversation with my friend and former colleague Jason Baer. Jason is the CEO of SYPartners, a transformation consultancy that has spent more than 30 years helping leaders and organizations navigate moments of consequential change.

Jason joined SYP in 2013 and became CEO in 2026 after serving as Managing Partner, Chief Client Officer, and President. He has advised senior leaders at organizations including AARP, NBCUniversal, Alphabet, Coach, Verizon, and Paramount.

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In our broad and fluid conversation we discuss purpose, organizational resilience, leadership, the pace of change, some of the books and ideas that have shaped Jason—and what he’s learning now that he’s sitting in the CEO chair himself.

Episode Five features the amazing, thoughtful, fun, and precise, Courtney Nash. Courtney is the co-founder and CEO of The VOID, where she researches system safety, resilience, and failure in complex sociotechnical systems. She’s also vice president of the board of the Resilience in Software Foundation. A former cognitive neuroscientist, Courtney has spent much of her career exploring how people learn, make decisions, and respond when complex systems behave in unexpected ways. Over the past two decades, she’s held roles at organizations including Verica, Fastly, O’Reilly, Microsoft, and Amazon. Today Courtney is one of the more influential voices in resilience engineering and modern incident analysis.

For episode four, I sit down for a mind-expanding conversation with futurist and author, Byron Reese.

Byron is a longtime serial entrepreneur who holds numerous technical patents and has started a half dozen companies over the past thirty years. He is currently CEO of a startup called PhotoOp AI. Byron is also the author of several bestselling science books, including We are Agora. His AI book, The Fourth Age, sold 500K copies in 14 languages.

He and his wife have resided in an old Victorian home in Georgetown, Texas for a quarter of a century where they homeschooled their four children.

Our conversation covers building technology companies, using AI in our personal lives, the joys of beekeeping, the possibilities that human structures like cities operate as superorganisms, and much, much more.

For episode three, we take a deep journey of open source software history, currents, and projections with Chris Aniszczyk. Chris is an open source technologist with a passion for building a better world through open collaboration. He's currently a CTO at the Linux Foundation focused on infrastructure and developer experience while running the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Furthermore, he's a Partner at Capital Factory where he focuses on mentoring, advising and investing in open source and infrastructure focused startups. He has a strong passion for supporting open source focused founders and entrepreneurship. For disclosure, Chris is an investor Autoptic.

Brett Hurt is a serial software entrepreneur who has built seven successful companies. He founded Coremetrics which was acquired by IBM, co-founded and led Bazaarvoice through its IPO, and most recently co-founded and led data.world, which was acquired by ServiceNow in 2025. Brett is also an investor, a Henry Crown Fellow, and the author of The Entrepreneur’s Essentials.

His newest chapter is Love Conquers Fear—a USA Today best selling book, podcast, and broader mission exploring what happens as AI and other key technologies accelerate, with the goal of helping humanity make it to the Age of Abundance for All.

Show transcript, referenced links, and more are on the Autoptic website.

For episode one, we interview one of the world's leading thinkers on software resilience, resilience engineering, and human factors. John Allspaw is a founder of the Resilience in Software Foundation and a principal at Adaptive Capacity Labs. He previously served as CTO of Etsy, where his work helped shape many of the practices that became central to the DevOps movement.

John’s landmark 2009 talk with Paul Hammond, 10+ Deploys Per Day: Dev and Ops Cooperation, helped change how the industry thinks about the relationship between development and operations. John is also the author of The Art of Capacity Planning and Web Operations, and holds a master’s degree in Human Factors and Systems Safety from Lund University.

More recently, John’s work has focused deeply on resilience engineering, adaptive capacity, expertise, and how people actually make complex software systems work in the face of surprise and uncertainty.