This is a guest conversation episode of Ship It Weekly, separate from the weekly news recaps.
In this Ship It Conversations episode, I talk with Rob Koch about what accessible cloud native actually looks like, why sign language is still one of the hardest problems in AI, and why the fastest way to make your tooling accessible is to hire deaf engineers.
Rob is a senior principal at Slalom, an AWS Hero, and co-chair of the CNCF Deaf and Hard of Hearing Working Group. Rob is Deaf, and his ASL interpreter, Amelia Fruehsamer, voices his answers. Special thanks to Amelia for interpreting the conversation.
We start with an analogy Rob comes back to all episode: cloud native is the toolbox, and platform engineering is the workbench. Then we get into what's overhyped about AI, the guardrails it still needs, and what auditable AI observability looks like.
A big part of the conversation is accessibility in practice. Rob explains how captions pushed for deaf attendees ended up helping neurodivergent folks too, and what conferences get wrong: accessibility planned at the very end instead of the start, and the real cost of interpreters versus captions.
Then we get technical. Rob walks through using Kubernetes and Kubeflow to train models that recognize sign language, and why it's so hard: regional signs, lighting, skin tone and backgrounds, and a camera that can't tell which way a hand is facing. His joke: we don't have AGI until AI understands sign language.
The big takeaway: start with people, not a checklist. Hire deaf and hard of hearing engineers, ask them how they want to work, and your tools get more accessible because they're in the room.
Highlights
• Cloud native as the toolbox, platform engineering as the workbench
• What's overhyped about AI, and the guardrails it still needs
• What accessible cloud native means in practice
• Captions that help far more people than you planned for
• What conferences get wrong about accessibility, and what it costs
• Kubernetes and Kubeflow for sign language recognition
• Gesture-based computing and why speech-to-text had a 30-year head start
• Where to start: hire deaf engineers
Links
Rob Koch on LinkedIn: https://tsn.io/4qmFo
Rob Koch on GitHub: https://tsn.io/Mbxrs
Amelia Fruehsamer (Rob's ASL interpreter) on LinkedIn: https://tsn.io/UJB88
CNCF Deaf and Hard of Hearing Working Group: https://tsn.io/tB1lS
CNCF conference accessibility best practices: https://tsn.io/BZvpv
CNCF Merge Forward: https://tsn.io/QPVNQ
Kubeflow: https://tsn.io/4OVKf
More episodes and show notes: https://tsn.io/NqkdP
On Call Brief: https://tsn.io/Gpz2d
LMGT Awards: https://tsn.io/lAERA
