Sally O'Malley: background and Red Hat role

Hey yall, Alex here (with a scheduled post)

I’m taking this week off to get married and celebrate life with family, and touch some grass, but wanted to share the awesome chats I had with some great folks at AI Engineer Europe last week.

BTW - Yam and Ryan took over the live show today, if you didn’t happen to catch that, please check out the live on our youtube channel!

Ok, now to the actual content. The best thing about the AI Engineer conferences for me is the people I meet. I often have a chance to bring them to the live show (in fact, the live show we recorded there had the most guests yet on an episode! 4 guests including Swyx, Omar Sanseviero, VB from OpenAI and Peter Gostev)

But often times I also have an offline chat. I find these conversation to be less about the weeks news, and more about the state of AI Engineering, and the guests themselves. Not quite Lex Friedman pod level, but a different vibe from our live shows.

Sunil Pai - Cloudflare (@threepointone)

The first conversation in today’s pod is with Sunil Pai, Principle Engineer at Cloudflare. Long time followers of ThursdAI know that I love Cloudflare, they gave me my first big break when I was building Targum (which still runs on Workers), so I had a great time chatting with Sunil!

This guy has had several lives. React.js core team at Meta (he self-deprecates — "I'm the one nobody talks about, there's a testing API I shipped that pisses people off"). Then did developer tooling and the CLI at Cloudflare the first time. Left to found PartyKit — open-source deployment platform for real-time multiplayer apps and AI agents, built on Cloudflare Durable Objects. Backed by Sequoia. Acquired by Cloudflare in 2024, and he came back as a Principal Systems Engineer (per his bio: "Worked at Cloudflare once, left and created PartyKit, came back wiser"). Also plays guitar (Les Pauls — it's all over his blog). Co-hosts a live show called Dry Run on Cloudflare TV with Craig Dennis.

Our conversation was a very fun one, ranging from Cloudflare agentic offerings, to how engineers should think about writing/reading code in 2026.

I had a great time chatting with Sunil and I hope you enjoy getting to know him!

Sally Ann O'Malley - Redhat

Then I had the pleasure of chatting with Sally, who’s a Principal Engineer at Redhat and contributor to OpenClaw.

Sally has one of the more unusual paths in the speaker lineup. Started as a schoolteacher, did a stint at Trader Joe's, then moved to Westford, MA, discovered Red Hat's HQ across the street, and went back to school for a second bachelor's in software engineering at UMass Lowell. Joined Red Hat in 2015, has been there a decade. Worked across OpenShift teams, integrating Kubernetes and Podman into the platform. Recent projects span Image Based Operating Systems, Podman, OpenTelemetry, and Sigstore. Also an instructor at Boston University's Faculty of Computing and Data Sciences and an organizer for DevConf.US. Won the 2025 Paul Cormier Trailblazer Award at Red Hat. Currently a founding contributor on the llm-d project — distributed, scalable, high-performance AI inferencing built on K8s. Heavily involved in Red Hat's InstructLab collaboration with IBM (the small-model distillation system using IBM Granite + Llama).

Sally and I had a great conversation, two high energy personalities met!

We geeked out about our OpenClaw agents, securing your Clankers, how it is to maintain OpenClaw, and everything in between!

She was so stressed about the recording, but dare I say, this was one of the more natural guests I had on the show!

I hope you enjoyed this format, please let me know if the comments, and I’ll see you next week!

— Alex

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