Podcast appearances and mentions of Alex Rasmussen

I 2009 blev jeg holdkammerater med Alex Rasmussen på Saxo Bank – Mr. Par nr. 7 og verdensmesteren fra cykelbanen. Senere, i 2011, kørte vi sammen på HTC – High Road, hvor vi blandt andet var med til at sikre tre etapesejre i Giro d'Italia – to til Cavendish og det indledende holdløb.   I dag gæster Alex Bak Lane til en snak om karrieren, vores år i feltet på Saxo Bank og HTC, hans enorme talent, hvad han laver i dag – og hans egen version af, hvorfor det ikke blev til en længere karriere i det professionelle felt.   Vært: Lars Bak   Bak Lane er en del af Forhjulslir   Klippet af Anders Mielke   Artwork: Kim Sivert

25 millioner norske kroner. Så mange penge skal de tredobbelte Champions League-vindere Vipers Kristiansand skrabe sammen inden weekenden - ellers går de konkurs. Hvordan kan det være nået så vidt, og hvad skal der ske med alle verdensstjernerne på holdkortet? (1.55) I Ballerup jagter de danske cykelryttere medaljer til VM i banecykling. Vi gennemgår de danske medaljemuligheder slavisk og har gode nyheder! (15.40) Fra kedelig til intens. Det er i store træk den ændring, det engelske herrelandshold i fodbold skal vænne sig til, efter de nu har fået ny landstræner. Tyske Thomas Tuchel er det kontroversielle valg. Vi analyserer, hvorvidt han er den rigtige mand for den trofæhungrende nation. (26.05) Vært: Emil Schiønning Medvært: Morten Hausborg Gæster: Mathias Jacobsen, Alex Rasmussen & Arnela Muminovic

Den danske bordtennisdarling Anders Lind har taget verden med storm. Både på og uden for banen. Han er netop vendt hjem efter en tur til Kina, hvor han pludselig er blevet en stor stjerne. (02:30) Herrelandsholdet i fodbold er taget fra Spanien til Schweiz, hvor EM's kvartfinalister venter. Sidste gang endte det i drama og tumult. Vi spørger DR Sportens fodboldkommentator Andreas Kraul, om vi skal forvente mere ondt blod i tirsdagens opgør? (17:35) Siden 2008 har Danmark været medaljetagere på 4000 meter holdforfølgelse til samtlige OL. Men i Paris kiksede det totalt for holdet med en kilometer tilbage i bronzefinalen. Kan de rejse sig fra skuffelsen, når VM i banecykling i denne uge køres på hjemmebane? (27:05) Vært: Emil Schiønning Medvært: Morten Hausborg Gæster: Anders Lind, Andreas Kraul & Alex Rasmussen

I was chatting with my friend Alex the other day and felt like we had to continue this conversation on the podcast to share with you guys! If you are single, newly dating or seeing some "flags" (red or green) - you're going to want to tune into this one!

Alex Rasmussen er på besøg til en snak om de spanske endagsløb, et spændende EM i banecykling og droner.

Host Jeremy C. Park talks with Alex Rasmussen, CEO of Neon Canvas and Signature Advertising, who shares tips and discusses how to drive revenue and ROI for your business with branding, design, digital marketing, and community engagement.During the interview, he talks about the importance of understanding your audience and making them the hero of the story, the power of sharing your knowledge and expertise to build a relationship and then make a call to action, and then how and when to covert a lead into a new client. He also highlights his full-service digital marketing agency based in Memphis, Tennessee, Neon Canvas, along with their sister company, Signature Advertising. He talks about what it means for Neon Canvas to be named one of Inc 5000 fastest growing companies and how they continue to grow their foothold in Orthodontic and medical marketing, especially through the power of community connections and with Memphis-based medical universities, like the University of Tennessee Health Science Center. Alex wraps up talking about why supporting the community is so important and why he is excited for the future of Memphis and the Mid-South.Visit www.neoncanvas.com or www.signature901.com to learn more.

About AlexAlex holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from UC San Diego, and has spent over a decade building high-performance, robust data management and processing systems. As an early member of a couple fast-growing startups, he's had the opportunity to wear a lot of different hats, serving at various times as an individual contributor, tech lead, manager, and executive. He also had a brief stint as a Cloud Economist with the Duckbill Group, helping AWS customers save money on their AWS bills. He's currently a freelance data engineering consultant, helping his clients build, manage, and maintain their data infrastructure. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.Links Referenced: Company website: https://bitsondisk.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/alexras LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexras/ 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: I come bearing ill tidings. Developers are responsible for more than ever these days. Not just the code that they write, but also the containers and the cloud infrastructure that their apps run on. Because serverless means it's still somebody's problem. And a big part of that responsibility is app security from code to cloud. And that's where our friend Snyk comes in. Snyk is a frictionless security platform that meets developers where they are - Finding and fixing vulnerabilities right from the CLI, IDEs, Repos, and Pipelines. Snyk integrates seamlessly with AWS offerings like code pipeline, EKS, ECR, and more! As well as things you're actually likely to be using. Deploy on AWS, secure with Snyk. Learn more at Snyk.co/scream That's S-N-Y-K.co/screamCorey: DoorDash had a problem. As their cloud-native environment scaled and developers delivered new features, their monitoring system kept breaking down. In an organization where data is used to make better decisions about technology and about the business, losing observability means the entire company loses their competitive edge. With Chronosphere, DoorDash is no longer losing visibility into their applications suite. The key? Chronosphere is an open-source compatible, scalable, and reliable observability solution that gives the observability lead at DoorDash business, confidence, and peace of mind. Read the full success story at snark.cloud/chronosphere. That's snark.cloud slash C-H-R-O-N-O-S-P-H-E-R-E.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. I am joined this week by a returning guest, who… well, it's a little bit complicated and more than a little bittersweet. Alex Rasmussen was a principal cloud economist here at The Duckbill Group until he committed an unforgivable sin. That's right. He gave his notice. Alex, thank you for joining me here, and what have you been up to, traitor?Alex: [laugh]. Thank you for having me back, Corey.Corey: Of course.Alex: At time of recording, I am restarting my freelance data engineering business, which was dormant for the sadly brief time that I worked with you all at The Duckbill Group. And yeah, so that's really what I've been up to for the last few days. [laugh].Corey: I want to be very clear that I am being completely facetious when I say this. When someone is considering, “Well, am I doing what I really want to be doing?” And if the answer is no, too many days in a row, yeah, you should find something that aligns more with what you want to do. And anyone who's like, “Oh, you're leaving? Traitor, how could you do that?” Yeah, those people are trash. You don't want to work with trash.I feel I should clarify that this is entirely in jest and I could not be happier that you are finding things that are more aligned with aspects of what you want to be doing. I am serious when I say that, as a company, we are poorer for your loss. You have been transformative here across a number of different axes that we will be going into over the course of this episode.Alex: Well, thank you very much, I really appreciate that. And I came to a point where I realized, you know, the old saying, “You don't know what you got till it's gone?” I realized, after about six months of working with Duckbill Group that I missed building stuff, I missed building data systems, I missed being a full-time data person. And I'm really excited to get back to that work, even though I'll definitely miss working with everybody on the team. So yeah.Corey: There are a couple of things that I found really notable about your time working with us. One of them was that even when you wound up applying to work here, you were radically different than—well, let's be direct here—than me. We are almost polar opposites in a whole bunch of ways. I have an eighth-grade education; you have a PhD in computer science and engineering from UCSD. And you are super-deep into the world of data, start to finish, whereas I have spent my entire career on things that are stateless because I am accident prone, and when you accidentally have a problem with the database, you might not have a company anymore, but we can all laugh as we reprovision the web server fleet.We just went in very different directions as far as what we found interesting throughout our career, more or less. And we were not quite sure how it was going to manifest in the context of cloud economics. And I can say now that we have concluded the experiment, that from my perspective, it went phenomenally well. Because the exact areas that I am weak at are where you excel. And, on some level, I would say that you're not necessarily as weak in your weak areas as I am in mine, but we want to reinforce it and complementing each other rather than, “Well, we now have a roomful of four people who are all going to yell at you about the exact same thing.” We all went in different directions, which I thought was really neat.Alex: I did too. And honestly, I learned a tremendous, tremendous amount in my time at Duckbill Group. I think the window into just how complex and just how vast the ecosystem of services within AWS is, and kind of how they all ping off of each other in these very complicated ways was really fascinating, fascinating stuff. But also just an insight into just what it takes to get stuff done when you're talking with—you know, so most of my clientele to date have been small to medium-sized businesses, you know, small as two people; as big as a few hundred people. But I wasn't working with Fortune 1000 companies like Duckbill Group regularly does, and an insight into just, number one, what it takes to get things done inside of those organizations, but also what it takes to get things done with AWS when you're talking about, you know, for instance, contracts that are tens, or hundreds of millions of dollars in total contract value. And just what that involves was just completely eye-opening for me.Corey: From my perspective, what I found—I guess, in hindsight, it should have been more predictable than it was—but you talk about having a background and an abiding passion for the world of data, and I'm sitting here thinking, that's great. We have all this data in the form of the Cost and Usage Reports and the bills, and I forgot the old saw that yeah, if it fits in RAM, it's not a big data problem. And yeah, in most cases, what we have tends to fit in RAM. I guess you don't tend to find things interesting until Microsoft Excel gives up and calls uncle.Alex: I don't necessarily know that that's true. I think that there are plenty of problems to be had in the it fits in RAM space, precisely because so much of it fits in RAM. And I think that, you know, particularly now that, you know—I think there's it's a very different world that we live in from the world that we lived in ten years ago, where ten years ago—Corey: And right now I'm talking to you on a computer with 128 gigs of RAM, and it—Alex: Well, yeah.Corey: —that starts to look kind of big data-y.Alex: Well, not only that, but I think on the kind of big data side, right? When you had to provision your own Hadoop cluster, and after six months of weeping tears of blood, you managed to get it going, right, at the end of that process, you went, “Okay, I've got this big, expensive thing and I need this group of specialists to maintain it all. Now, what the hell do I do?” Right? In the intervening decade, largely due to the just crushing dominance of the public clouds, that problem—I wouldn't call that problem solved, but for all practical purposes, at all reasonable scales, there's a solution that you can just plug in a credit card and buy.And so, now the problem, I think, becomes much more high level, right, than it used to be. Used to be talking about how well you know, how do I make this MapReduce job as efficient as it possibly can be made? Nobody really cares about that anymore. You've got a query planner; it executes a query; it'll probably do better than you can. Now, I think the big challenges are starting to be more in the area of, again, “How do I know what I have? How do I know who's touched it recently? How do I fix it when it breaks? How do I even organize an organization that can work effectively with data at petabyte scale and say anything meaningful about it?”And so, you know, I think that the landscape is shifting. One of the reasons why I love this field so much is that the landscape is shifting very rapidly and as soon as we think, “Ah yes. We have solved all of the problems.” Then immediately, there are a hundred new problems to solve.Corey: For me, what I found, I guess, one of the most eye-opening things about having you here is your actual computer science background. Historically, we have biased for folks who have come up from the ops side of the world. And that lends itself to a certain understanding. And, yes, I've worked with developers before; believe it or not, I do understand how folks tend to think in that space. I have not a complete naive fool when it comes to these things.But what I wasn't prepared for was the nature of our internal, relatively casual conversations about a bunch of different things, where we'll be on a Zoom chat or something, and you will just very casually start sharing your screen, fire up a Jupyter Notebook and start writing code as you're talking to explain what it is you're talking about and watching it render in real time. And I'm sitting here going, “Huh, I can't figure out whether we should, like, wind up giving him a raise or try to burn him as a witch.” I could really see it going either way. Because it was magic and transformative from my perspective.Alex: Well, thank you. I mean, I think that part of what I am very grateful for is that I've had an opportunity to spend a considerable period of time in kind of both the academic and industrial spaces. I got a PhD, basically kept going to school until somebody told me that I had to stop, and then spent a lot of time at startups and had to do a lot of different kinds of work just to keep the wheels attached to the bus. And so, you know, when I arrived at Duckbill Group, I kind of looked around and said, “Okay, cool. There's all the stuff that's already here. That's awesome. What can I do to make that better?” And taking my lens so to speak, and applying it to those problems, and trying to figure out, like, “Okay, well as a cloud economist, what do I need to do right now that sucks? And how do I make it not suck?”Corey: It probably involves a Managed NAT Gateway.Alex: Whoa, God. And honestly, like, I spent a lot of time developing a bunch of different tools that were really just there in the service of that. Like, take my job, make it easier. And I'm really glad that you liked what you saw there.Corey: It was interesting watching how we wound up working together on things. Like, there's a blog post that I believe is out by the time this winds up getting published—but if not, congratulations on listening to this, you get a sneak preview—where I was looking at the intelligent tiering changes in pricing, where any object below 128 kilobytes does not have a monitoring charge attached to it, and above it, it does. And it occurred to me on a baseline gut level that, well wait a minute, it feels like there is some object sizes, where regardless of how long it lives in storage and transition to something cheaper, it will never quite offset that fee. So, instead of having intelligent tiering for everything, that there's some cut-off point below which you should not enable intelligent tiering because it will always cost you more than it can possibly save you.And I mentioned that to you and I had to do a lot of articulating with my hands because it's all gut feelings stuff and this stuff is complicated at the best of times. And your response was, “Huh.” Then it felt like ten minutes later you came back with a multi-page blog post written—again—in a Python notebook that has a dynamic interactive graph that shows the breakeven and cut-off points, a deep dive math showing exactly where in certain scenarios it is. And I believe the final takeaway was somewhere between 148 to 161 kilobytes, somewhere in that range is where you want to draw the cut-off. And I'm just looking at this and marveling, on some level.Alex: Oh, thanks. To be fair, it took a little bit more than ten minutes. I think it was something where it kind of went through a couple of stages where at first I was like, “Well, I bet I could model that.” And then I'm like, “Well, wait a minute. There's actually, like—if you can kind of put the compute side of this all the way to the side and just remove all API calls, it's a closed form thing. Like, you can just—this is math. I can just describe this with math.”And cue the, like, Beautiful Mind montage where I'm, like, going onto the whiteboard and writing a bunch of stuff down trying to remember the point intercept form of a line from my high school algebra days. And at the end, we had that blog post. And the reason why I kind of dove into that headfirst was just this, I have this fascination for understanding how all this stuff fits together, right? I think so often, what you see is a bunch of little point things, and somebody says, “You should use this at this point, for this reason.” And there's not a lot in the way of synthesis, relatively speaking, right?Like, nobody's telling you what the kind of underlying thing is that makes it so that this thing is better in these circumstances than this other thing is. And without that, it's a bunch of, kind of, anecdotes and a bunch of kind of finger-in-the-air guesses. And there's a part of that, that just makes me sad, fundamentally, I guess, that humans built all of this stuff; we should know how all of it fits together. And—Corey: You would think, wouldn't you?Alex: Well, but the thing is, it's so enormously complicated and it's been developed over such an enormously long period of time, that—or at least, you know, relatively speaking—it's really, really hard to kind of get that and extract it out. But I think when you do, it's very satisfying when you can actually say like, “Oh no, no, we've actually done—we've done the analysis here. Like, this is exactly what you ought to be doing.” And being able to give that clear answer and backing it up with something substantial is, I think, really valuable from the customer's point of view, right, because they don't have to rely on us kind of just doing the finger-in-the-air guess. But also, like, it's valuable overall. It extends the kind of domain where you don't have to think about whether or not you've got the right answer there. Or at least you don't have to think about it as much.Corey: My philosophy has always been that when I have those hunches, they're useful, and it's an indication that there's something to look into here. Where I think it goes completely off the rails is when people, like, “Well, I have a hunch and I have this belief, and I'm not going to evaluate whether or not that belief is still one that is reasonable to hold, or there has been perhaps some new information that it would behoove me to figure out. Nope, I've just decided that I know—I have a hunch now and that's enough and I've done learning.” That is where people get into trouble.And I see aspects of it all the time when talking to clients, for example. People who believe things about their bill that at one point were absolutely true, but now no longer are. And that's one of those things that, to be clear, I see myself doing this. This is not something—Alex: Oh, everybody does, yeah.Corey: —I'm blaming other people for it all. Every once in a while I have to go on a deep dive into our own AWS bill just to reacquaint myself with an understanding of what's going on over there.Alex: Right.Corey: And I will say that one thing that I was firmly convinced was going to happen during your tenure here was that you're a data person; hiring someone like you is the absolute most expensive thing you can ever do with respect to your AWS bill because hey, you're into the data space. During your tenure here, you cut the bill in half. And that surprises me significantly. I want to further be clear that did not get replaced by, “Oh, yeah. How do you cut your AWS bill by so much?” “We moved everything to Snowflake.” No, we did not wind up—Alex: [laugh].Corey: Just moving the data somewhere else. It's like, at some level, “Great. How do I cut the AWS bill by a hundred percent? We migrate it to GCP.” Technically correct; not what the customer is asking for.Alex: Right? Exactly, exactly. I think part of that, too—and this is something that happens in the data part of the space more than anywhere else—it's easy to succumb to shiny object syndrome, right? “Oh, we need a cloud data warehouse because cloud data warehouse, you know? Snowflake, most expensive IPO in the history of time. We got to get on that train.”And, you know, I think one of the things that I know you and I talked about was, you know, where should all this data that we're amassing go? And what should we be optimizing for? And I think one of the things that, you know, the kind of conclusions that we came to there was, well, we're doing some stuff here, that's kind of designed to accelerate queries that don't really need to be accelerated all that much, right? The difference between a query taking 500 milliseconds and 15 seconds, from our point of view, doesn't really matter all that much, right? And that realization alone, kind of collapsed a lot of technical complexity, and that, I will say we at Duckbill Group still espouse, right, is that cloud cost is an architectural problem, it's not a right-sizing your instances problem. And once we kind of got past that architectural problem, then the cost just sort of cratered. And honestly, that was a great feeling, to see the estimate in the billing console go down 47% from last month, and it's like, “Ah, still got it.” [laugh].Corey: It's neat to watch that happen, first off—Alex: For sure.Corey: But it also happened as well, with increasing amounts of utility. There was a new AWS billing page that came out, and I'm sure it meets someone's needs somewhere, somehow, but the things that I always wanted to look at when I want someone to pull up their last month's bill is great, hit the print button—on the old page—and it spits out an exploded pdf of every type of usage across their entire AWS estate. And I can skim through that thing and figure out what the hell's going on at a high level. And this new thing did not let me do that. And that's a concern, not just for the consulting story because with our clients, we have better access than printing a PDF and reading it by hand, but even talking to randos on the internet who were freaking out about an AWS bill, they shouldn't have to trust me enough to give me access into their account. They should be able to get a PDF and send it to me.Well, I was talking with you about this, and again, in what felt like ten minutes, you wound up with a command line tool, run it on an exported CSV of a monthly bill and it spits it out as an HTML page that automatically collapses in and allocates things based upon different groups and service type and usage. And congratulations, you spent ten minutes to create a better billing experience than AWS did. Which feels like it was probably, in fairness to AWS, about seven-and-a-half minutes more time than they spent on it.Alex: Well, I mean, I think that comes back to what we were saying about, you know, not all the interesting problems in data are in data that doesn't fit in RAM, right? I think, in this case, that came from two places. I looked at those PDFs for a number of clients, and there were a few things that just made my brain hurt. And you and Mike and the rest of the folks at Duckbill could stare at the PDF, like, reading the matrix because you've seen so many of them before and go, ah, yes, “Bill spikes here, here, here.” I'm looking at this and it's just a giant grid of numbers.And what I wanted was I wanted to be able to say, like, don't show me the services in alphabetical order; show me the service is organized in descending order by spend. And within that, don't show me the operations in alphabetical order; show me the operations in decreasing order by spend. And while you're at it, group them into a usage type group so that I know what usage type group is the biggest hitter, right? The second reason, frankly, was I had just learned that DuckDB was a thing that existed, and—Corey: Based on the name alone, I was interested.Alex: Oh, it was an incredible stroke of luck that it was named that. And I went, “This thing lets me run SQL queries against CSV files. I bet I can write something really fast that does this without having to bash my head against the syntactic wall that is Pandas.” And at the end of the day, we had something that I was pretty pleased with. But it's one of those examples of, like, again, just orienting the problem toward, “Well, this is awful.”Because I remember when we first heard about the new billing experience, you kind of had pinged me and went, “We might need something to fix this because this is a problem.” And I went, “Oh, yeah, I can build that.” Which is kind of how a lot of what I've done over the last 15 years has been. It's like, “Oh. Yeah, I bet I could build that.” So, that's kind of how that went.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friend EnterpriseDB. EnterpriseDB has been powering enterprise applications with PostgreSQL for 15 years. And now EnterpriseDB has you covered wherever you deploy PostgreSQL on-premises, private cloud, and they just announced a fully-managed service on AWS and Azure called BigAnimal, all one word. Don't leave managing your database to your cloud vendor because they're too busy launching another half-dozen managed databases to focus on any one of them that they didn't build themselves. Instead, work with the experts over at EnterpriseDB. They can save you time and money, they can even help you migrate legacy applications—including Oracle—to the cloud. To learn more, try BigAnimal for free. Go to biganimal.com/snark, and tell them Corey sent you.Corey: The problem that I keep seeing with all this stuff is I think of it in terms of having to work with the tools I'm given. And yeah, I can spin up infrastructure super easily, but the idea of, I'm going to build something that manipulates data and recombines it in a bunch of different ways, that's not something that I have a lot of experience with, so it's not my instinctive, “Oh, I bet there's an easier way to spit this thing out.” And you think in that mode. You effectively wind up automatically just doing those things, almost casually. Which does make a fair bit of sense, when you understand the context behind it, but for those of us who don't live in that space, it's magic.Alex: I've worked in infrastructure in one form or another my entire career, data infrastructure mostly. And one of the things—I heard this from someone and I can't remember who it was, but they said, “When infrastructure works, it's invisible.” When you walk in the room and flip the light switch, the lights come on. And the fact that the lights come on is a minor miracle. I mean, the electrical grid is one of the most sophisticated, globally-distributed engineering systems ever devised, but we don't think about it that way, right?And the flip side of that, unfortunately, is that people really pay attention to infrastructure most when it breaks. But they are two edges of the same proverbial sword. It's like, I know, when I've done a good job, if the thing got built and it stayed built and it silently runs in the background and people forget it exists. That's how I know that I've done a good job. And that's what I aim to do really, everywhere, including with Duckbill Group, and I'm hoping that the stuff that I built hasn't caught on fire quite yet.Corey: The smoke is just the arising of the piles of money it wound up spinning up.Alex: [laugh].Corey: It's like, “Oh yeah, turns out that maybe we shouldn't have built a database out of pure Managed NAT Gateways. Yeah, who knew?”Alex: Right, right. Maybe I shouldn't have filled my S3 bucket with pure unobtainium. That was a bad idea.Corey: One other thing that we do here that I admit I don't talk about very often because people get the wrong idea, but we do analyst projects for vendors from time to time. And the reason I don't say that is, when people hear about analysts, they think about something radically different, and I do not self-identify as an analyst. It's, “Oh, I'm not an analyst.” “Really? Because we have analyst budget.” “Oh, you said analyst. I thought you said something completely different. Yes, insert coin to continue.”And that was fine, but unlike the vast majority of analysts out there, we don't form our opinions based upon talking to clients and doing deeper dive explorations as our primary focus. We're a team of engineers. All right, you have a product. Let's instrument something with it, or use your product for something and we'll see how it goes along the way. And that is something that's hard for folks to contextualize.What was really fun was bringing you into a few of those engagements just because it was interesting; at the start of those calls. “It was all great, Corey is here and—oh, someone else's here. Is this a security problem?” “It's no, no, Alex is with me.” And you start off those calls doing what everyone should do on those calls is, “How can we help?” And then we shut up and listen. Step one, be a good consultant.And then you ask some probing questions and it goes a little bit deeper and a little bit deeper, and by the end of that call, it's like, “Wow, Alex is amazing. I don't know what that Corey clown is doing here, but yeah, having Alex was amazing.” And every single time, it was phenomenal to watch as you, more or less, got right to the heart of their generally data-oriented problems. It was really fun to be able to think about what customers are trying to achieve through the lens that you see the world through.Alex: Well, that's very flattering, first of all. Thank you. I had a lot of fun on those engagements, honestly because it's really interesting to talk to folks who are building these systems that are targeting mass audiences of very deep-pocketed organizations, right? Because a lot of those organizations, the companies doing the building are themselves massive. And they can talk to their customers, but it's not quite the same as it would be if you or I were talking to the customers because, you know, you don't want to tell someone that their baby is ugly.And note, now, to be fair, we under no circumstances were telling people that their baby was ugly, but I think that the thing that is really fun for me is to kind of be able to wear the academic database nerd hat and the practitioner hat simultaneously, and say, like, “I see why you think this thing is really impressive because of this whiz-bang, technical thing that it does, but I don't know that your customers actually care about that. But what they do care about is this other thing that you've done as an ancillary side effect that actually turns out is a much more compelling thing for someone who has to deal with this stuff every day. So like, you should probably be focusing attention on that.” And the thing that I think was really gratifying was when you know that you're meeting someone on their level and you're giving them honest feedback and you're not just telling them, you know, “The Gartner Magic Quadrant says that in order to move up and to the right, you must do the following five features.” But instead saying, like, “I've built these things before, I've deployed them before, I've managed them before. Here's what sucks that you're solving.” And seeing the kind of gears turn in their head is a very gratifying thing for me.Corey: My favorite part of consulting—and I consider analyst style engagements to be a form of consulting as well—is watching someone get it, watching that light go on, and they suddenly see the answer to a problem that's been vexing them I love that.Alex: Absolutely. I mean, especially when you can tell that this is a thing that has been keeping them up at night and you can say, “Okay. I see your problem. I think I understand it. I think I might know how to help you solve it. Let's go solve it together. I think I have a way out.”And you know, that relief, the sense of like, “Oh, thank God somebody knows what they're doing and can help me with this, and I don't have to think about this anymore.” That's the most gratifying part of the job, in my opinion.Corey: For me, it has always been twofold. One, you've got people figuring out how to solve their problem and you've made their situation better for it. But selfishly, the thing I like the most personally has been the thrill you get from solving a puzzle that you've been toying with and finally it clicks. That is the endorphin hit that keeps me going.Alex: Absolutely.Corey: And I didn't expect when I started this place is that every client engagement is different enough that it isn't boring. It's not the same thing 15 times. Which it would be if it were, “Hi, thanks for having us. You haven't bought some RIs. You should buy some RIs. And I'm off.” It… yeah, software can do that. That's not interesting.Alex: Right. Right. But I think that's the other thing about both cloud economics and data engineering, they kind of both fit into that same mold. You know, what is it? “All happy families are alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” I'm butchering Chekhov, I'm sure. But like—if it's even Chekhov.But the general kind of shape of it is this: everybody's infrastructure is different. Everybody's organization is different. Everybody's optimizing for a different point in the space. And being able to come in and say, “I know that you could just buy a thing that tells you to buy some RIs, but it's not going to know who you are; it's not going to know what your business is; it's not going to know what your challenges are; it's not going to know what your roadmap is. Tell me all those things and then I'll tell you what you shouldn't pay attention to and what you should.”And that's incredibly, incredibly valuable. It's why, you know, it's why they pay us. And that's something that you can never really automate away. I mean, you hear this in data all the time, right? “Oh, well, once all the infrastructure is managed, then we won't need data infrastructure people anymore.”Well, it turns out all the infrastructure is managed now, and we need them more than we ever did. And it's not because this managed stuff is harder to run; it's that the capabilities have increased to the point that they're getting used more. And the more that they're getting used, the more complicated that use becomes, and the more you need somebody who can think at the level of what does the business need, but also, what the heck is this thing doing when I hit the run key? You know? And that I think, is something, particularly in AWS where I mean, my God, the amount and variety and complexity of stuff that can be deployed in service of an organization's use case is—it can't be contained in a single brain.And being able to make sense of that, being able to untangle that and figure out, as you say, the kind of the aha moment, the, “Oh, we can take all of this and just reduce it down to nothing,” is hugely, hugely gratifying and valuable to the customer, I'd like to think.Corey: I think you're right. And again, having been doing this in varying capacities for over five years—almost six now; my God—the one thing has been constant throughout all of that is, our number one source for new business has always been word of mouth. And there have been things that obviously contribute to that, and there are other vectors we have as well, but by and large, when someone winds up asking a colleague or a friend or an acquaintance about the problem of their AWS bill, and the response almost universally, is, “Yeah, you should go talk to The Duckbill Group,” that says something that validates that we aren't going too far wrong with what we're approaching. Now that you're back on the freelance data side, I'm looking forward to continuing to work with you, if through no other means and being your customer, just because you solve very interesting and occasionally very specific problems that we periodically see. There's no reason that we can't bring specialists in—and we do from time to time—to look at very specific aspects of a customer problem or a customer constraint, or, in your case for example, a customer data set, which, “Hmm, I have some thoughts on here, but just optimizing what storage class that three petabytes of data lives within seems like it's maybe step two, after figuring what the heck is in it.” Baseline stuff. You know, the place that you live in that I hand-wave over because I'm scared of the complexity.Alex: I am very much looking forward to continuing to work with you on this. There's a whole bunch of really, really exciting opportunities there. And in terms of word of mouth, right, same here. Most of my inbound clientele came to me through word of mouth, especially in the first couple years. And I feel like that's how you know that you're doing it right.If someone hires you, that's one thing, and if someone refers you, to their friends, that's validation that they feel comfortable enough with you and with the work that you can do that they're not going to—you know, they're not going to pass their friends off to someone who's a chump, right? And that makes me feel good. Every time I go, “Oh, I heard from such and such that you're good at this. You want to help me with this?” Like, “Yes, absolutely.”Corey: I've really appreciated the opportunity to work with you and I'm super glad I got the chance to get to know you, including as a person, not just as the person who knows the data, but there's a human being there, too, believe it or not.Alex: Weird. [laugh].Corey: And that's the important part. If people want to learn more about what you're up to, how you think about these things, potentially have you looked at a gnarly data problem they've got, where's the best place to find you now?Alex: So, my business is called Bits on Disk. The website is bitsondisk.com. I do write occasionally there. I'm also on Twitter at @alexras. That's Alex-R-A-S, and I'm on LinkedIn as well. So, if your lovely listeners would like to reach me through any of those means, please don't hesitate to reach out. I would love to talk to them more about the challenges that they're facing in data and how I might be able to help them solve them.Corey: Wonderful. And we will of course, put links to that in the show notes. Thank you again for taking the time to speak with me, spending as much time working here as you did, and honestly, for a lot of the things that you've taught me along the way.Alex: My absolute pleasure. Thank you very much for having me.Corey: Alex Rasmussen, data engineering consultant at Bits on Disk. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn. This is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an angry comment that is so large it no longer fits in RAM.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

Armed with a Ph.D. from UC San Diego, our guest started off with internships at Google and Microsoft before gaining valuable experience as a VP and a highly sought-after consultant for startups and SMBs. Now he's one of the world's foremost experts on wrangling vast data sets and maximizing efficiency. Today Alex is focusing his expertise into keeping AWS bills under control. Don't miss our engaging conversation with Alex Rasmussen, Principal Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group. Hear the Answers to these Questions: What it's like to work on large-scale data processing? How can we leverage new solutions to old problems? How to manage data costs through AWS cloud architecture? … and more on machine learning, AI, and what the future holds  More information about Alex and today's topics: LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexras/ Company Website: https://www.duckbillgroup.com/  Additional Resources Read: Optimize Your AWS Data Lake with Data Enrichment and Smart Pipelines Watch: Make Your Data Lake Deliver - AWSInsider Evaluate: AWS vs GCP: Top Cloud Services Logs to Watch and Why To make sure you never miss an episode of Data Legends: Stories from the IT Trenches, follow on Google, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, our website, or anywhere you get podcasts.

Gruppettoen har inviteret den fire-dobbelte verdensmester, Alex Rasmussen, ind til en special om den netop overståede weekend med GP Herning og Fyen Rundt - to løb som Alex vandt i løbet af sin karriere.   Der bliver fortalt en masse anekdoter samt diskuteret hvad potentiale egentlig er? Gruppettoen - sammen med Alex - vender tendensen i cykelmiljøet og blandt medierne om at gøre ryttere, der ikke fuldender sit fysiske potentiale, til dovne. Det er en ironisk påstand, når mange mediepersonligheder ikke har en forståelse for, hvad det vil sige at være World Tour-rytter i dag, mener Gruppettoen.   Medvirkende: Mathias Norsgaard Jørgensen, Rasmus Byriel Iversen og Alex Rasmussen  

Host Jeremy C. Park talks with Alex Rasmussen, CEO and Co-Founder of Neon Canvas, who highlights his full-service digital marketing agency based in Memphis, Tennessee, along with their sister company, Signature Advertising. During the interview, Alex talks about the "why" behind Neon Canvas and their focus on driving ROI and results for their clients, then discusses some of the things companies need to focus on with their website, digital marketing and storytelling. He talks about the need for the customer to be the "hero" of the story, understanding and focusing on your real customers, and how personal brands and community engagement are critical to success with your professional brand, as well.Visit www.neoncanvas.com or www.signature901.com to learn more.

About AlexAlex holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from UC San Diego, and has spent over a decade building high-performance, robust data management and processing systems. As an early member of a couple fast-growing startups, he's had the opportunity to wear a lot of different hats, serving at various times as an individual contributor, tech lead, manager, and executive. Prior to joining the Duckbill Group, Alex spent a few years as a freelance data engineering consultant, helping his clients build, manage and maintain their data infrastructure. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.Links: Twitter: https://twitter.com/alexras/ Personal page: https://alexras.info Old Consulting website with blog: https://bitsondisk.com 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: The company 0x4447 builds products to increase standardization and security in AWS organizations. They do this with automated pipelines that use well-structured projects to create secure, easy-to-maintain and fail-tolerant solutions, one of which is their VPN product built on top of the popular OpenVPN project which has no license restrictions; you are only limited by the network card in the instance. 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That's min.io/download, and be sure to tell them that I sent you. Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. I'm the chief cloud economist at The Duckbill Group, which people are generally aware of. Today, I'm joined by our most recent principal cloud economist, Alex Rasmussen. Alex, thank you for joining me today, it is a pleasure to talk to you, as if we aren't talking to each other constantly, now that you work here.Alex: Thanks, Corey. It's great being here.Corey: So, I followed a more, I'd say traditional path for a cloud economist, but given that I basically had to invent the job myself, the more common path because imagine that you start building a role from scratch and the people you wind up looking for initially look a lot like you. And that is grumpy sysadmin, historically, turned into something, kind of begrudgingly, that looks like an SRE, which I still maintain are the same thing, but it is imperative people not email me about that. Yes, I know, you work at Google. But instead, what I found during my tenure as a sysadmin, is that I was working with certain things an awful lot, like web servers, and other things almost never, like databases and data warehouses. Because if you screw up a web server, we all have a good laugh, the site's down for a couple of minutes, life goes on, you have a shame trophy on your desk if that's your corporate culture, things continue.Mess up the data severely enough, and you don't have a company anymore. So, I was always told to keep my aura away from the expensive spendy things that power a company. You are sort of the first of a cloud economist subtype that doesn't resemble that. Before you worked here, you were effectively an independent consultant working on data engineering. Before that, you had a couple of jobs, but you had gotten a PhD in computer science, which means, first, you are probably one of the people in this world most qualified to pass some crappy job interview of solving a sorting algorithm on a whiteboard, but how did you get here from where you were?Alex: Great question. So, I like to joke that I kind of went to school until somebody told me that I had to stop. And I took that and went and started—or didn't start, but I was an early engineer at a startup and then was an executive at another early-stage one, and did a little bit of everything. And went freelance, did that for a couple of years, and worked with all kinds of different companies—vast majority of those being startups—helping them with data infrastructure problems. I've done a little bit of everything throughout my career.I've been, you know, IC, manager, manager, manager, IT guy, everything in between. I think on the data side of things, it just sort of happened, to be honest with you, it kind of started with the stuff that I did for my dissertation and parlayed that into a job back when the big data wave was starting to kind of truly crest. And I've been working on data infrastructure, basically my entire career. So, it wasn't necessarily something that was intentional. I've just been kind of taking the opportunity that makes the most sense for me it kind of every juncture. And my career path has been a little bit strange, both by academic and industrial standards. But I like where I'm at and I gained something really valuable from each of those experiences. So.Corey: It's been an interesting area of I won't say weakness here, but it's definitely been a bit of a challenge when we look at an AWS environment and even talking about a typical AWS customer without thinking of any of them in particular, I can already tell you a few things are likely to be true. For example, the number one most expensive line item in their bill is going to be EC2, and compute is the thing that powers it. Now, maybe that is they're running a bunch of instances the old-fashioned way. Maybe they're running Kubernetes but that's how it shows up. There's a lot of things that could be, and we look at what rounds that out.Now, the next item down should almost certainly not be data transfer and if so we should have a conversation, but data in one form or another is very often going to be number two. And that can mean a bunch of different things, historically. It could mean, “Oh, you have a whole bunch of stuff in S3. Let's talk about access patterns. Let's talk about lifecycle policies. Let's talk about making sure the really important stuff is backed up somewhere. Maybe you want to spend more on that particular aspect of it.”If it's on EBS volumes, that's interesting and definitely worth looking into and trying to understand the context of what's going on. Periodically we'll see a whole bunch of additional charges that speak to some of that EC2 charge in the form of EMR, AWS's Elastic MapReduce, which charges a per-hour instance charge, but also charges you for the instances that are running under the hood and under the EC2 line item. So, there's a lot of data lifecycle stuff, there's a lot of data ecosystem stories, that historically we've consulted out with experts in that particular space. And that's great, but we were starting to have to drag those people in on more and more engagements as we saw them. And we realized that was really something we had to build out as a core competency for ourselves.And we started out not intending to hire for someone with that specialty, but the more we talked to you, the more it became clear that this was a very real and very growing need that we and our customers have. How closely it is what you're doing now as far as AWS bill analysis and data pattern deep-dive align with what you were doing as a freelance consultant in the space?Alex: A lot more than you might expect. You know, I think that increasingly, what you're seeing now is that a company's core differentiator is its data, right, how much of it they have, what they do with it. And so, you know, to your point, I think when you look at any company's cloud spend, it's going to be pretty heavy on the data side in terms of, like, where have you put it? What are you doing to process it? Where is it going once it's been processed? And then how is that—Corey: And data transfer is a very important first word in that two-word sequence.Alex: Oh, sure is. And so I think that, like, in a lot of ways, the way that a customer's cloud architecture looks and the way that their bill looks kind of as a consequence of that is kind of a reification in a way of the way that the data flows from one place to another and what's done with it at each step along the way. I think what complicates this is that companies that have been around for a little while have lived through this kind of very amorphous, kind of, polyglot way that we're approaching data. You know, back when I was first getting started in the big data days, it was MapReduce, MapReduce, MapReduce, right? And we quickly [crosstalk 00:07:29]—Corey: Oh, yes. The MapReduce white paper out of Google, a beautiful April Fool's Day prank that the folks at Yahoo fell for hook, line, and sinker. They wrote Hadoop, and now we're all stuck with that pattern. Great gag, they really should have clarified they were kidding. Here we are.Alex: Exactly. So—Corey: I mostly kid.Alex: No, for sure. But I think especially when it comes to data, we tend to over-index on what the large companies do and then quickly realize that we've made a mistake and correct backwards, right? So, there was this big push toward MapReduce for everything until people realize that it was just a pain in the neck to operate and to build. And so then we moved into Spark, so kind of up-leveled a little bit. And then there was this kind of explosion of NoSQL and NewSQL databases that hit the market.And MongoDB inexplicably won that war and now we're kind of in this world where everything is cloud data warehouse, right? And now we're trying to wrestle with, like, is it actually a good idea to put everything in one warehouse and have SQL be the lingua franca on top of it? But it's all changing so rapidly. And when you come into a customer that's been around for 10 or 15 years, and has, you know, been in the cloud for a substantial—Corey: Yeah, one of those ancient customers. That is—Alex: I know, right?Corey: —basically old enough to almost get a driver's license? Oh, yeah.Alex: Right. It's one of those things where it's like, “Ah, yes, in startup years, you're, like, a hundred years old,” right? But still, you know, I think you see this, kind of—I wouldn't call it a graveyard of failed experiments, right, but it's a collection of, like, “Well, we tried this, and it kind of worked and we're keeping it around because the cost of moving this stuff around—the kind of data gravity, so to speak—is high enough that we're not going to bother transitioning it over.” But then you get into this situation where you have to bend over backwards to integrate anything with anything else. And we're still kind of in the early days of fixing that.Corey: And the AWS bill pattern that we see all the time across the board of those experiments were not successful and do not need to exist, but there's no context into that. The person that set them up left five years ago, the jobs are still running on time. What's happening with them? Well, we could stop them and see who screams, but very often, that's not the right answer either.Alex: And I think there's also something to note there, too, which is like, getting rid of data is very scary, right? I mean, if you resize a Kubernetes cluster from 15 nodes to 10, nobody's going to look at you sideways. But if you go, “Hey, we're just going to drop these tables.” The immediate reaction that you get, particularly from your data science team more often than not is, “Oh, God, what if we need that?” And so the conversation never really happens, and that causes this kind of snowball of data debt that persists in some cases for many, many years.Corey: Yeah, in some cases, what I found has been successful on those big unknown questions is don't delete the data, but restrict access to it for a few weeks and see what happens. Look into it a bit and make sure that it's not like, “Oh, cool. We just did for a month, and now we don't need that data. Let's get rid of it.” And then another month goes by it's like, “So, time to report quarterly earnings. Where's the data?”Oh, dear, that's not going to go well, for anyone. And understanding what's happening, the idea of cloning a petabyte of data so you can run an experiment on it. And okay, turns out the experiment wasn't needed. Do we still need to keep all of that?Alex: Yeah.Corey: The underlying platform advancements have been helpful toward this as well, a petabyte of data now in Glacier Deep Archive cost the princely sum of a thousand bucks a month, which is pretty close to the idea of why would I ever delete data ever again? I can get it back within a day if I need it, so let's just put it there instead.Alex: Right. You know, funny story. When I was in graduate school, we were dealing with, you know, 100 terabyte datasets on the regular that we had to generate every time because we only had 200 terabytes of raw storage. [laugh]. And this was before cloud was yet mature enough that we could get the kind of performance numbers that we wanted off of it.And we would end up having to delete the input data to make room for the output data. [laugh]. And thankfully, we don't need to do that anymore. But there are a lot of, kind of, anti-patterns that arise from that too, right? If data is easy to keep around forever, it stays around forever.And if it's easy to, let's say, run a SQL command against your Snowflake instance that scans 20 terabytes of data, you're just going to do it, and the exposure of that to you is so minimal that you can end up causing a whole bunch of problems for yourself by the fact that you don't have to deal with stuff at that low-level of abstraction anymore.Corey: It's always fun watching how this stuff manifests—because I'm dipping a toe into it from time to time—the easy, naive answer that we could give every customer but we don't is, “Huh. So, you have a whole bunch of EMR stuff? Well, you know, if you migrate that into something else, you'll save a whole bunch of money on that.” With no regard for the 500 jobs that run against that EMR cluster on a consistent basis that form is a key part of business process. “Yeah, if you could just do the entire flow of how data is operated with throughout your entire business that would be swell because you can save tens of thousands of dollars a month on that.” Yeah, how about we don't suggest things that are just absolute buffoonery.Alex: Well, and it's like, you know, you hit on a good point. Like, one of my least favorite words in the English language is the word ‘just.' And you know, I spent a few years as a freelance data consultant, and you know, a lot of what I would hear sometimes from customers is, “Well, why don't we ‘just' deprecate X?”Corey: “Why don't we just—” “I'm going to stop you there because there is no ‘just.'”Alex: Exactly.Corey: There's always context that we cannot have as outsiders.Alex: Precisely. Precisely. And digging into that really is—it's the fun part of the job, but it's also the hard part of the job.Corey: Before we created The Duckbill Group, which was really when I took Mike Julian on as business partner and CEO and formed the entity, I had something in common with you; I was freelancing for a couple of years beforehand. Now, I know why I wound up deciding, all right, we're going to turn this into a company, but what was it that I guess made you decide to, you know, freelancing is all well and good, but it's time to get something that looks a lot more like a quote-unquote, “Traditional job.”Alex: So, I think, on one level, I went freelance because I wasn't exactly sure what I wanted to do next. And I knew what I was good at. I knew what I had a lot of experience at, and I thought, “Well, I can just go out and kind of find a bunch of people that are willing to hire me to do what I'm good at doing, and then maybe eventually I'll find one of them that I like enough that I'll go and work for them. Or maybe I'll come up with some kind of a business model that I can repeat enough times that I don't have to worry that I wake up tomorrow and all of my clients are gone and then I have to go live in a van down by the river.”And I think when I heard about the opening at The Duckbill Group, I had been thinking for a little while about well, this has been going fine for a long time, but effectively what I've been doing is I've been you know, a staff-level data engineer for hire. And do I want to do something more than that, you know? Do I want to do something more comp—perhaps more sophisticated or more complex than that? And I rapidly came to the conclusion that in order to do that, I would have to have sales and marketing, and I would have to, you know, spend a lot of my time bringing in business. And that's just not something that I have really any experience in or I'm any good at.And, you know, I also recognize that, you know, I'm a relatively small fish in a relatively large pond, and if I wanted to get the kind of like, large scale people, the like the big, you know, Fortune 1000 company kind of customers, they may not pay attention to somebody like me. And so I think that ultimately, what I saw with The Duckbill Group was, number one, a group of people that were strongly aligned to the way that I wanted to keep doing this sort of work, right? Cultural alignment was really strong, good people, but also, you know, you folks have a thing that you figured out, and that puts you 10 to 15 steps ahead of where I was. And I was kind of staring down the barrel that, I'm like, am I going to have to take six months not doing client work so that I can figure out how to make this business sustain? And, you know, I think that ultimately, like, I just looked at it, and I said, this just makes sense to me, like, as a next step. And so here we all are.Corey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Oracle Cloud. Counting the pennies, but still dreaming of deploying apps instead of “Hello, World” demos? Allow me to introduce you to Oracle's Always Free tier. It provides over 20 free services and infrastructure, networking, databases, observability, management, and security. And—let me be clear here—it's actually free. There's no surprise billing until you intentionally and proactively upgrade your account. This means you can provision a virtual machine instance or spin up an autonomous database that manages itself, all while gaining the networking, load balancing, and storage resources that somehow never quite make it into most free tiers needed to support the application that you want to build. With Always Free, you can do things like run small-scale applications or do proof-of-concept testing without spending a dime. You know that I always like to put asterisks next to the word free? This is actually free, no asterisk. Start now. Visit snark.cloud/oci-free that's snark.cloud/oci-free.Corey: It's always fun seeing how people perceive what we've done from the outside. Like, “Oh, yeah, you just stumbled right onto the thing that works, and you've just been going, like, gangbusters ever since.” Then you come aboard, it's like, “Here, look at this pile of things that didn't pan out over here.” And it's, you get to see how the sausage is made in a way that we talk about from time to time externally, but surprisingly, most of our marketing efforts aren't really focused on, “And here's this other time we screwed up as well.” And we're honest about it, but it's not sort of the thing that we promote as the core message of what we do and who we are.A question I like to ask people during job interviews, and I definitely asked you this, and I'll ask you now, which is going to probably throw some folks for a loop because who talks to their current employees like this? But what's next for you? When it comes time for you to leave the Duckbill Group, what do you want to do after this job?Alex: That's a great question. So, I mean, as we've mentioned before, you know, my career trajectory has been very weird and circuitous. And, you know, I would be lying to you if I said that I had absolute certainty about what the rest of that looks like. I've learned a few things about myself in the course of my career, such as it is. In my kind of warm, gooey center, I build stuff. Like, that is what gives me joy, it is what makes me excited to wake up in the morning.I love looking at big, complicated things, breaking them down into pieces, and figuring out how to make the pieces work in a way that makes sense. And, you know, I've spent a long time in the data ecosystem. I don't know, necessarily, if that's something that I'm going to do forever. I'm not necessarily pigeonholing myself into that part of the space just yet, but as long as I get to kind of wake up in the morning, and say, “I'm going to go and build things and it's not going to actively make the world any worse,” I'm happy with that. And so that's really—you know, might go back to freelancing, might go and join another group, another company, big small, who knows. I'm kind of leaving that up to the winds of destiny, so to speak.Corey: One thing that I have found incredi—sorry. Let me just address that first. Like that—Alex: Sure.Corey: —is the right way to think about it. My belief has always been that you don't necessarily have, like, the ten-year plan, or the five-year plan or whatever it is because that's where you're going to go so much as it gives you direction and forces you to keep moving so you don't wind up sitting in the same place for five years with one year of experience repeated five times. It helps you remember the bigger picture. Because I've always despised this fiction that we see in job interviews where average tenure in our industry is 18 to 36 months, give or take, but somehow during the interviews, we all talk like this is now your forever job, and after 25 years, you'll retire. And yeah, let's be a little more realistic than that.My question is always what is next and how can we align in a way that helps you get to what's coming? That's the purpose behind the question, and that's—the only way to make that not just a drippingly insincere question is to mean it and to continue to focus on it from time to time of, great. What are you learning what's next? Now, at the time of this recording, you've been here, I believe three weeks if I'm not mistaken?Alex: I've—this is week two for me at time of recording.Corey: Excellent. Yes, my grasp of time is sort of hazy at the best of times. I have a—I do a lot of things.Alex: For sure.Corey: But yeah, it has been an eye-opening experience for me, not because, “Oh, wow, we have an employee.” Yeah, we've done that a few times before. But rather because of your background, you are asking different questions than we typically get during onboarding. I had a blog post go out recently—or will be by the time this airs—about a question that you asked about, “Wow, onboarding into our internal account structure for AWS is way more polished than I've ever seen it before. Is that something you built in-house? What is that?”And great. Oh, terrific, I'd forgotten that this is kind of a novel thing. No. What we're using is AWS's SSO offering, which is such a well-built, polished product that I can only assume that it's under NDA because Amazonians don't talk about it ever. But it's great.It has a couple of annoyances, but beyond that, it's something that I'm a big fan of, but I'd forgotten how transformative that is, compared to the usual approach of all right, here's your username, here's a password you're going to have to change, here are your IAM credentials to store on disk forever. It's the ability to look at what we're doing through the eyes of someone who is clearly deep into the technical weeds, but not as exposed to all of the minutiae of the 300-some-odd AWS services is really a refreshing thing for all of us, just because it helps us realize what it's like to see some of this stuff for the first time, as well as gives me content ideas because if it's new to you, I promise you are not the only person who's seeing it that way. And if you don't really understand something well enough to explain it, I would argue you don't really understand the thing, so it forces me to get more awareness around exactly how different facets work. It's been an absolutely fantastic experience so far, from my perspective.Alex: Thank you. Right back at you. I mean, spending so many years working with startups, my kind of level of expected sophistication is, “I'm going to write your password on the back of a napkin. I have fifteen other things to do. Go figure it out.” And so you know, it's always nice to see—particularly players like AWS that are such 800-pound gorillas—going in and trying to uplevel that experience in a way that feels like—because I mean, like, look, AWS could keep us with the, “Here's a CSV with your username and password. Good luck, have fun.” And you know, they would still make—Corey: And they're going to have to because so much automation is built around that—Alex: Oh yeah—Corey: In so many places.Alex: —so much.Corey: It's always net-additive, they never turn anything off, which is increasingly an operational burden.Alex: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. But yeah, it's nice to see them up-level this in a way that feels like they're paying attention to their customers' pain. And that's always nice to see.Corey: So, we met a few years ago—in the before times—at a mixer that we wound up throwing—slash meetup. It was in Southern California for some AWS event or another. You've been aware of who we are and what we do for a while now, so I'm very curious to know—and the joy of having these conversations is that I don't actually know what the answer is going to be, so this may never see the light of day if it goes to weird—Alex: [laugh].Corey: —in the wrong direction, but—no I'm kidding. What has been, I guess, the biggest points of dissonance or surprises based upon your perception of who we are and what we do externally, versus joining and seeing how the sausage is made?Alex: You know, I think the first thing is—um, well, how to put this. I think that a lot of what I was expecting, given how much work you all do and how big—well, ‘you all;' we do—and how big the list of clients is and how it gets bigger every day, I was expecting this to be, like, this very hyper put together, like, every little detail has been figured out kind of engagement where I would have to figure out how you all do this. And coming in and realizing that a lot of it is just having a lot of in-depth knowledge born from experience of a bunch of stuff inside of this ecosystem, and then the rest of it is kind of free jazz, is kind of encouraging. Because as someone that was you know, as a freelancer, right, who do you see, right? You see people who have big public presences or people who are giant firms, right?On the GCP side, SADA Systems is a great example. They're another local company for me here in Los Angeles, and—Corey: Oh, yes. [unintelligible 00:24:48] Miles has been a recurring guest on the show.Alex: Yeah. And he's great. And, like, they have this enormous company that's got, like, all these different specializations and they're basically kind of like the middleman for GCP on a lot of things. And, like, you see that, and then you kind of see the individual people that are like, “Yeah, you know, I'm not really going to tell you that I only have two clients and that if both of them go away, I'm screwed, but, like, I only have two clients, and if both of them go away, I'm screwed.” And so, you know, I think honestly seeing that, like, what you've built so far and what I hope to help you continue to build is, you know, you've got just enough structure around the thing so that it makes sense, and the rest of it, you're kind of admitting that no plan ever survives contact with the client, right, and that everybody's going to be different than that everybody's problems are going to be different.And that you can't just go in and say, “Here's a dashboard, here's a calculator, have fun, give me my money,” right? Because that feels like—in optimization spaces of any kind, be that cloud, or data or whatever, there's this, kind of, push toward, how do I automate myself out of a job, and the realization that you can't for something like this, and that ultimately, like, you're just going to have to go with what you know, is something that I kind of had a suspicion was the case, but this really made it clear to me that, like, oh, this is actually a reasonable way of going about this.Corey: We thought otherwise at one point. We thought that this was something could be easily addressed their software. We launched our DuckTools SaaS platform in beta and two months later, did the—our incredible journey has come to an end, and took it off of a public offering. Because it doesn't lend itself to solving these problems in software in any reasonable way. I am ever more convinced over time that the idea of being able to solve cloud cost optimization with software at VC-scale is a red herring.And yeah, it just isn't going to work because it's one size fits some. Our customers are, by definition, exceptional in many respects, and understanding the context behind why things are the way that they are mean that we can only go so far with process because then it becomes a let's have a conversation and let's be human. Otherwise, we try to overly codify the process, and congratulations, we just now look like really crappy software, but expensive because it's all people doing it. It doesn't work that way. We have tools internally that help smooth over a lot of those edges, but by and large, people who are capable of performing at especially at the principal level for a cloud economics role, inherently are going to find themselves stifled by too much process because they need to have the freedom to dig into the areas that are relevant to the customer.It's why we can't recraft all of our statements of work in ways that tend to shy away from explicitly defined deliverables. Because we deliver an outcome, but it's going to depend entirely, in most cases, up on what we discover along the way. Maybe a full-on report isn't the best way of presenting the data in the way that we see it. Maybe it's a small proof of concept script or something like that. Maybe it's, I don't know, an interpretive dance in front of the company's board.Alex: [laugh]. Right.Corey: I'm open to exploring opportunities. But it comes down to what is right for the customer. There's a reason we only ever charge a fixed fee for these things, and it's because at that point, great, we're giving you the advice that we'd implement ourselves. We have no partnerships with any vendor in the space just to avoid bias or the perception of same. It's important that we are the authoritative source around these things.Honestly, the thing that surprised me the most about all this is how true to that vision we've stayed as we've as we flushed out what works, what doesn't. And we can distantly fail to go out of business every month. I am ecstatic about that. I expected this to wind up cratering into a mountain four months after I went freelance. Not yet.Alex: Well, I mean, I think there's another aspect of this too, right? Because I've spent a lot of my career working inside of venture capital-backed companies. And there's a lot of positive things to be said about having ready access to that kind of cash, but it does something to your business the second you take it. And I've been in a couple of situations where, like, once you actually have that big bucket of money, the incentive is grow, right? Hire more people get more customers, go, go, go, go, go.And sometimes what you'll find is that you'll spend the time and the money on an initiative and it's clearly not working. And you just kind of have to keep doubling down because now you've got customers that are using this thing and now you have to maintain it, and before you know it, you've got this albatross hanging around your neck. And like one of the things that I really respect about the way that Duckbill Group is is handling this by not taking outside cash is, like, it frees you up to make these kinds of bets, and then two months later say, “Well, that didn't work,” and try something else. And you know, that's very difficult to do once you have to go and convince someone with, you know, money flowing out of their ears, that that's the right thing to do.Corey: We have to be intentional about what we're doing. One of the benefits of bringing you aboard is that one, it does improve our capacity for handling more engagements at the same time, but it also improves the quality of the engagements that we are delivering. Instead of basically doing a round-robin assignment policy we can—Alex: Right.Corey: —we consult with each other; we talk about specific areas in which we have specific expertise. You get dragged into a lot of data portions of existing engagements, and the rest of us get pulled into other areas in which you might not be as strong. For example, “What are all of these ridiculous services? I can't make heads or tails have the ridiculous naming side of it.” Surprise, that's not a you problem.It comes down to being able to work collaboratively and let each other shine in a way that doesn't mean we load people up with work. We're very strict about having a 40-hour or less work week, just because we're not rushing for an exit. We want to enjoy our time working, we want to enjoy what we're doing, and then we want to go home and don't think about work until it's time to come back and think about these things. Like, it's a lifestyle company, but that lifestyle doesn't need to be run, run, run, run, run all the time, and it doesn't need to be something that people barely tolerate.Alex: Yeah. And I think that, you know, especially coming from being an army of one in a lot of engagements, it is really refreshing to be able to—see because, you know, I'm fortunate enough, I have friends in the industry that I can go and say like, “I have no idea how to make heads or tails of X.” And you know, I can get help that way, but ultimately, like, the only other outlet that I have here is the customer and they're not bringing me in if they have those answers readily to hand. And so being able to bounce stuff off of other people inside of an organization like this has been really refreshing.Corey: One of the things I've appreciated about your tenure here so far is the questions that you ask are pitched at the perfect level, by which I mean, it is never something you could answer with a three-second visit to Google, but it's also not something that you've spent three days spinning your wheels on trying to understand. You do a bit of digging; it's a little unclear, especially since there are multiple paths to go down, and then you flag it for clarification. And there's really so much to be said for that. Really, when we're looking for markers of seniority in the interview process, it's admitting you don't know something, but then also talking about how you would go about getting the answer. And it's—because no one has all this stuff in their head. I spend a disturbing amount of time looking at search engines and trying to reformulate queries and to get answers that make sense.I don't have the entirety of AWS shoved into my head. Yet. I'm sure there's something at re:Invent that's going to be scary and horrifying that will claim to do it and basically have a poor user interface, but all right. When that comes, we'll reevaluate then because this industry is always changing.Alex: For sure. For sure. And I think it's, it's worth pointing out that, like, one of the things that having done this for a long time gives you is this kind of scaffolding in your head that you can hang things over. We're like, you don't need to have every single AWS service memorized, but if you've got that scaffold in your head going, “Oh, like, this thing sounds like it hangs over this part of the mental scaffold, and I've seen other things that do that, so I wonder if it does this and this and this,” right? And that's a lot of it, honestly.Because especially, like, when I was solely in the data space, there's a new data wareho—or a new, like, data catalog system coming out every other week. You know, there are a thousand different things that claim to do MLOps, right? And whenever, like, someone comes to me and says, “Do you have experience with such and such?” And the answer was usually, “Well if you hum a few bars, I can fake it.” And, you know, that tends to help a great deal.Corey: Yeah. “No, but I'll find out and get back to you,” the right answer. Making it up and being wrong is the best way to get rejected from an environment. That's not just consulting; that's employment, too. If 95% of the time, you give the right answer, but that one time and 20 you're going to just make it up, well, I have to validate the other 19 because I never know when someone's faking it or not. There's that level of earned trust that's important.Alex: Well, yeah. And you're being brought in to be the expert in the room. That doesn't necessarily mean that you are the all-seeing, all-knowing oracle of knowledge but, like, if you say a thing, people are just going to believe you. And so, you know, it's beholden on you—Corey: If not, we have a different problem.Alex: Well, yeah, exactly. Hopefully, right? But yeah, I mean, it's beholden on you to be honest with your customer at a certain point, I think.Corey: I really want to thank you for taking the time out of your day to got with me about this. And I would love to have you back on in a couple of months once you're fully up to speed and spinning at the proper RPMs and see what's happened then. I—Alex: Thank you. I'd—Corey: —really appreciate—Alex: —love to.Corey: —your time where's the best place for people to learn more about you if they haven't heard your name before?Alex: Well, let's see. I am @alexras on Twitter, A-L-E-X-R-A-S. My personal website is alexras.info.I've done some writing on data stuff, including a pretty big collection of blog posts on the data side of the AWS ecosystem that are still on my consulting page, bitsondisk.com. Other than that—I mean, yeah, Twitter is probably the best place to find me, so if you want to talk more about any weird, nerd data stuff, then please feel free to reach out there.Corey: And links to that will, of course, be in the [show notes 00:35:57]. Thanks again for your time. I really appreciate it.Alex: Thank you. It's been a pleasure.Corey: Alex Rasmussen, principal cloud economist here at The Duckbill Group. I am Corey Quinn, cloud economist to the stars, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an angry, insulting comment that you then submit to three other podcast platforms just to make sure you have a backup copy of that particular piece of data.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

Alex Rasmussen is a Financial Advisor and the Manager of Investment and Retirement Services for the LBL Group in Santa Ana, CA. She is extremely knowledgeable about the world of retirement plans and she is a strong and successful woman in the male-dominated financial services industry.Alex is a straight talker and an expert at taking complex subjects and making them understandable for people from all walks of life.Not only is she dedicated to helping young and minority individuals enter the rewarding world of Financial advising but she also has a prodigious talent that you will find out more about in this fun and lively interview.What you will learn from this episode:Why you, as an Aligned Woman need to become more financially literate and how Alex can make that simple to achieveThe get rich slow program that Amy just loves6 smart questions that anyone interested in a career in finance should ask The amazing cultural initiatives that Alex lends her talents toConnect with Alex Rasmussen:arasmussen@lblgroup.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-rasmussen-aif%C2%AE-cpfa-a201069a/https://www.akomidance.com/

Så er Byriel og Norsgaard tilbage i dit podcast-feed. Hop med på hjul af Gruppettoen i dette nytårsspecial-afsnit, hvor Norsgaard har et par sure opstød, stort drama i kvindefeltet med nye tøj design, en jul med fart på, en juletur med Alex Rasmussen og meget meget mere.  Tak for i år, pas på jer selv i aften og gode tømmermænd i morgen!  Medvirkende: Rasmus Byriel Iversen og Mathias Norsgaard Jørgensen. Produceret af Anders Mielke (Forhjulslir).

Forhjulslir præsenteres i samarbejde med Oddset fra Danske Licens Spil +18.  Danmarksmester, europamester, verdensmester og OL-sølvvinder. I dette portræt skal vi høre historien om et af dansk cykelsports største talenter nogensinde, nemlig Alex Rasmussen.   Hans historie i cykelsporten byder på rigtig mange opture, men også enkelte, store nedture. Han er blevet verdensmester 5 gange, han har vundet 39 danske mesterskaber på bane og landevej, han har fået OL-sølv i holdløb og så har han kørt på nogle af de største cykelhold i nyere tid. Vi har alle sammen hørt om Alex Rasmussen. Vi har hørt om sejrene, de store opture, regnbuestriberne og succesoplevelserne, og så har vi også hørt om de store nedture, Whereabouts-karantænen, et misset OL og en hård tid efter karrierestoppet. For første gang skal vi høre hele historien om Alex Rasmussen, fra start til slut og fra første pedaltråd til første regnbuetrøje.   Hvem er og var cykelrytteren Alex Rasmussen? Hvordan husker han rejsen som cykelrytter på de skrå banebrædder og landeveje? Det og meget mere vil Alex gøre os alle klogere på i dette store portræt over 3 etaper. Hold gennem karrieren: Odense Energi - Fionia Bank (2007) Designa Køkken (2008) Saxo Bank (2009-2010) HTC - Highroad (2011) Garmin - Barracuda (USA)  til 31-07-2012 Garmin - Sharp (USA)  fra 16-03-2013 Riwal Cycling Team (2014) Team Tre For - Blue Water (2015) Team Coloquick (2016) Født: 9. juni 1987 (37 år). Fulde navn: Alex Falke Manneke Rasmussen Vært: Anders Mielke

Forhjulslir præsenteres i samarbejde med Oddset fra Danske Licens Spil +18.  Danmarksmester, europamester, verdensmester og OL-sølvvinder. I dette portræt skal vi høre historien om et af dansk cykelsports største talenter nogensinde, nemlig Alex Rasmussen.   Hans historie i cykelsporten byder på rigtig mange opture, men også enkelte, store nedture. Han er blevet verdensmester 5 gange, han har vundet 39 danske mesterskaber på bane og landevej, han har fået OL-sølv i holdløb og så har han kørt på nogle af de største cykelhold i nyere tid. Vi har alle sammen hørt om Alex Rasmussen. Vi har hørt om sejrene, de store opture, regnbuestriberne og succesoplevelserne, og så har vi også hørt om de store nedture, Whereabouts-karantænen, et misset OL og en hård tid efter karrierestoppet. For første gang skal vi høre hele historien om Alex Rasmussen, fra start til slut og fra første pedaltråd til første regnbuetrøje.   Hvem er og var cykelrytteren Alex Rasmussen? Hvordan husker han rejsen som cykelrytter på de skrå banebrædder og landeveje? Det og meget mere vil Alex gøre os alle klogere på i dette store portræt over 3 etaper. Hold gennem karrieren: Odense Energi - Fionia Bank (2007) Designa Køkken (2008) Saxo Bank (2009-2010) HTC - Highroad (2011) Garmin - Barracuda (USA)  til 31-07-2012 Garmin - Sharp (USA)  fra 16-03-2013 Riwal Cycling Team (2014) Team Tre For - Blue Water (2015) Team Coloquick (2016) Født: 9. juni 1987 (37 år). Fulde navn: Alex Falke Manneke Rasmussen Vært: Anders Mielke

Forhjulslir præsenteres i samarbejde med Oddset fra Danske Licens Spil +18.  Danmarksmester, europamester, verdensmester og OL-sølvvinder. I dette portræt skal vi høre historien om et af dansk cykelsports største talenter nogensinde, nemlig Alex Rasmussen.   Hans historie i cykelsporten byder på rigtig mange opture, men også enkelte, store nedture. Han er blevet verdensmester 5 gange, han har vundet 39 danske mesterskaber på bane og landevej, han har fået OL-sølv i holdløb og så har han kørt på nogle af de største cykelhold i nyere tid. Vi har alle sammen hørt om Alex Rasmussen. Vi har hørt om sejrene, de store opture, regnbuestriberne og succesoplevelserne, og så har vi også hørt om de store nedture, Whereabouts-karantænen, et misset OL og en hård tid efter karrierestoppet. For første gang skal vi høre hele historien om Alex Rasmussen, fra start til slut og fra første pedaltråd til første regnbuetrøje.   Hvem er og var cykelrytteren Alex Rasmussen? Hvordan husker han rejsen som cykelrytter på de skrå banebrædder og landeveje? Det og meget mere vil Alex gøre os alle klogere på i dette store portræt over 3 etaper. Hold gennem karrieren: Odense Energi - Fionia Bank (2007) Designa Køkken (2008) Saxo Bank (2009-2010) HTC - Highroad (2011) Garmin - Barracuda (USA)  til 31-07-2012 Garmin - Sharp (USA)  fra 16-03-2013 Riwal Cycling Team (2014) Team Tre For - Blue Water (2015) Team Coloquick (2016) Født: 9. juni 1987 (37 år). Fulde navn: Alex Falke Manneke Rasmussen Vært: Anders Mielke

I denne episode af Bagerstop pakker vi sydfrugterne og rejser til de mest ikoniske steder at besøge i Europa som cykelturist.Vi kommer til bjerge og brosten. Til steder, hvor man kan mærke historiens vingesus og solens stråler.Gæster: Alex Rasmussen og Allan Johansen. Vært: Martin WeibelSupport the show (https://bagerstop.10er.app/)

To block or not to block - that is the question Clint Harding and Alex Rasmussen will discuss with you in this episode.

We go BIG with Eff Bombs from Dr. Chris Feldman and Dr. Jeff Kozlowski - dozens of clinical efficiency tips from the masters of clinical efficiency. We also discuss the pros and cons of clinical delegation with Drs. Shane Langley and Bryan Lockhart AND pick the best BBQ in Memphis with Alex Rasmussen and a star-studded tasting panel.

Dr. Cole Johnson prepares a mystery basket breakfast while he shares "The Art of Cooking and Communicating." Dr. Kyle Fagala and Alex Rasmussen outline a 12-month digital marketing plan that's sure to work for everyone in their "Marketing Coordinator MasterClass."

Join me as Dr. Cole Johnson and Dr. Nicole Wax drop some major leadership pro tips that you won't want to miss. Alex Rasmussen also interviews Dr. Courtney Schiefelbein and Dr. Chris Feldman on the topic “Be Yourself: A Discussion on Branding, Authenticity, and Culture.” Lastly, you'll hear Pro Tips from consultants Dino Watt and Angie Menendez.

Hvordan laver man de bedste cykelruter? Det spørgsmål har Bagerstop fået de to tidligere danske mestre, Alex Rasmussen og Allan Johansen til at svare på.   Du får gode råd til software og ruter. Du kan også høre de to tidligere stjerners bud på den ultimative danske World Tour-rute. Nå ja, og det eviggyldige spørgsmål: Skal man skal nappe medvinden hjem eller ud på en cykeltur. Support the show (https://bagerstop.10er.app/)

Alex Rasmussen, CEO at Neon Canvas, A DotCom Magazine Exclusive Interview ABOUT ALEX RASMUSSEN I love driving revenue for businesses! Marketing and sales are my passion and have been all my adult life. I am entering my 18th year as a marketing and sales leader, and my career is as exciting as ever. I sell our services to potential clients, and I also have the unique role of being able to consult and lead a team of marketing pros that help clients with their marketing campaigns. Meet Neon Canvas We take a lot of pride in not only the work we do but how we do the work we do. Our passion for digital marketing comes from a deep respect for your business.We're grateful for the honor our clients give us when they let us tell their story. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

Marketing guru, Alex Rasmussen, joins the podcast to talk about a variety of topics. Alex and Alan talk about how Alex manages to make his clients more visible with excellent marketing strategies, his experience at the Las Vegas shooting in 2017 and some local and federal politics. A very interesting conversation between two life-long Memphians. For video options click the link below! https://youtu.be/4nfGJBXn6Ao For more Ask Alan! The Podcast, click right here! https://cronelawfirmplc.com/resources/ask-alan/ Neon Canvas: https://neoncanvas.com/

Season 3 of The Digital Orthodontist: Live! rolls on with the Neon Canvas Holiday Happy Hour hosted by Dr. Kyle Fagala and Alex Rasmussen with guests Dr. Jonathan Nicozisis, Dr. Courtney Schiefelbein, Dr. Christopher Feldman, and Dr. Patrice Smith. We mix a drink together (the Cocoa Loco Chocolate Martini) and rank our top 5 moments of 2020, including discussion on aligners, digital systems, and virtual meetings. You'll also be the first to learn details about the upcoming TDO: Live! Meeting 2021 AND receive a one-of-a-kind promo code you won't want to miss.

Har du overvejet at bruge en del af vinteren på en hometrainer? Og har du måske overvejet Zwift?Lyt med her, hvor den tidligere toprytter og Zwift-ansatte, Alex Rasmussen, giver gode råd til at komme i gang. Du må også meget gerne lytte med, hvis du allerede har erfaring med den digitale platform.Support the show (https://bagerstop.10er.app/)

Forhjulslir præsenteres i samarbejde med Oddset fra Danske Licens Spil +18. På dagens etape af Forhjulslir zoomer vi ind på VM-ugen i Imola og gennemgår alle de fire løb. Til at starte med gennemgår Alex Rasmussen og Anders Mielke herrenes linjeløb, hvor Julian Alaphilippe (Frankrig) tog sejren og regnbuetrøjen. En fortjent og meget lirens verdensmester. Danskerne gjorde en god figur og leverede en stærk holdindsats. Fuglsang blev nr. 5 og var med i kampen om medaljerne, mens Valgren viste hele cykelverdenen, at han stadig er blandt verdens bedste cykelryttere med en flot 11. plads og flot forarbejde til Fuglen. Vi kommenterer naturligvis også på italienske Filippo Gannas flotte VM-sejr i enkeltstarten hos herrerne fra i fredags.  Derefter sætter vi fokus på kvindernes løb, hvor Emma Norsgaard fortæller om sin VM-uge i Imola: sin flotte 7. plads på VM-enkeltstarten, uheldige Cecilie Uttrup i linjeløbet, vanvittige van der Breggen og meget mere. Emmas næste mål var egentlig DM i enkeltstart på lørdag i Skælskør, men hun må ikke stille til start for arrangørerne. Hør mere om hendes frustration og ærgerelse i interviewet.  Til sidst runder Alex og Mielke også kort Giroen, som venter lørdag, hvor en form for 'nedkørsels-enkeltstart' indleder 1. etape på Sicilien.   Medvirkende: Alex Rasmussen, Emma Norsgaard Jørgensen og Anders Mielke

ForhjulsTour præsenteres i samarbejde med Oddset fra Danske Spil +18. På den sidste udgave af ForhjulsTour analyserer, Alex Rasmussen, massespurten på Champs-Élysées, hvor verdensbedste Mads P. kørte en fantastisk spurt. Der var ikke en finger at sætte på Mads P's spurt. Der var bare en hurtigere mand i finalen, nemlig irske Sam Bennett fra The Wolfpack.  Medvirkende: Alex Rasmussen og Anders Mielke

ForhjulsTour er præsenteret i samarbejde med Oddset fra Danske Licens Spil +18. TADEJ POGACAR VINDER TOUR DE FRANCE 2020! På aftenens udgave af ForhjulsTour analyserer vi den sidste enkeltstart, hvor Pogacar knuste Jumbo-Visma og Roglic' Tour-drømme. Pogacars holdkammerat, Mikkel Bjerg, er også med i aftenens udgave og kommer med sin reaktion på Pogacars mesterværk. Han fremhæver blandt andet Pogacars enkeltstartsposition, som en af faktorene til hans fantastiske præstation. Modsat Roglic, minder Pogacars position på enkeltstartscyklen nemlig meget om positionen på hans normale racercykel, og derfor var det nemmere for ham at finde rytmen efter cykelskiftet, siger Mikkel.   Vi tager også et samlet overblik over det samlede klassement, trøjerne og den mest angrebsivrige rytter. Til sidst kigger vi frem mod Champs-Élysées i morgen, hvor vi krydser fingre for Mads P.  Medvirkende: Mikkel Bjerg, Alex Rasmussen og Anders Mielke Samlet resultat af Tour de France 2020: 1. Tadej Pogacar (SLO) — 84:26:33 2. Primoz Roglic (SLO) — +:59 3. Richie Porte (AUS) — +3:30 4. Mikel Landa (ESP) — +5:58 5. Enric Mas (ESP) — +6:07 6. Miguel Angel Lopez (COL) — +6:47 7. Tom Dumoulin (NED) — +7:48 8. Rigberto Uran (COL) — +8:02 9. Adam Yates (GBR) — +9:25 10. Damiano Caruso (ITA) — +14:03

ForhjulsTour præsenteres i samarbejde med Oddset fra Danske Spil +18. Tour-feltet og Alex Rasmussen holder en velfortjent hviledag, men det stopper ikke ForhjulsTour for at køre videre. På aftenens etape er Mikkel Bjerg (UAE-Team Emirates) med på en telefon fra UAE-bussen i Tirreno. Mikkel var på en 3-ugers lang højdetræningslejr sammen med Tadej Pogacar og resten af UAE-Tourtruppen lige inden tourstarten i Nice. Hør Mikkel fortælle lidt om sit kendskab til Pogacar - hvem er han? Overrasker den store Tour-succes ham? Og hvordan er hans chancer mod Roglic på enkeltstarten? Netop enkeltstarten har Mikkel nærstuderet sammen med Pogacar - det kan du også høre mere om på dagens hviledag-edition af ForhjulsTour.  Medvirkende: Mikkel Bjerg og Anders Mielke

ForhjulsTour præsenteres i samarbejde med Oddset fra Danske Spil +18. 10. etape af Tour de France blev en nervøs og hektisk affære for hele feltet. På trods af styrt og sidevind kom feltet samlet hjem, hvor Sam Bennett (Deceuninck-QuickStep) vandt etapen foran Caleb Ewan (Lotto-Soudal) og Peter Sagan (Bora-Hansgrohe). Ingen klassementsfavoritter tabte tid og Primoz Roglic (Jumbo-Visma) er stadig i den gule trøje.  På aftenens udgave af ForhjulsTour analyserer vi den nervøse 10. etape, hvor sidevind og tekniske veje gjorde at farten var høj hele dagen. Alex Rasmussen kommer også med en skarp analyse af massespurten, hvor Michael Mørkøvs finte på de sidste meter var en genialitet og medvirkende til Bennetts sejr. Verdensbedste Mads P. får også en kæmpe føring for sin fremragende præstation i dag. Han babysitter Richie Porte i sidevinden og kører en 5. plads hjem i massespurten, chapeau! Vi snakker naturligvis også om den skæbnesvanger formiddag med 5 positive coronatest, heriblandt løbsdirektør, Christian Prudhomme.  Medvirkende: Alex Rasmussen og Anders Mielke

Denne etape er sponsoreret af Oddset fra Danske Spil +18. Wout Van Aert (Team Jumbo-Visma) har siden starten af Tour de France dedikeret sig som hjælperytter for kaptajnerne, Roglic og Dumolin, men på dagens halvhårde sprinterafslutning fik Van Aert lov til at køre sin egen chance i finalen. Van Aert greb chancen og vandt massespurten foran Cees Bol (Team Sunweb) og Sam Bennett (Deceuninck - QuickStep). På dagens udgave af ForhjulsTour analyserer vi spurten, hvor Casper Pedersen leverede et verdensklasse lead-out til Cees Bol. Vi kan selvfølgelig ikke undgå at runde vanvittige Van Aert, som i disse dage beviser, at han er verdensbedste cykelrytter pt. Adam Yates er også ny mand i den gule trøje, da Alaphilippe fik en tidsstraf på 20 sekunder, fordi han fik forplejning 17 km. før mål. Alex Rasmussen er glad for, at UCI står ved deres regler, mens Mielke synes, at straffen måske lige er hidsig nok.  Medvirkende: Alex Rasmussen og Anders Mielke

Denne etape er sponsoreret af Oddset fra Danske Spil. Der ventede den første bjergafslutning på 4. etape af Tour de France, hvor rytterne sluttede på Orcières Merlette. Skihopperen fra Jumbo Visma, Primoz Roglic var klart den stærkeste, da en favoritgruppe på ca. 16 mand skulle afgøre det mellem sig. Tadej Pogacar (UAE Emirates blev nr. 2, mens franske Guillaume Martin (Cofidis) blev lidt overraskende nr. 3. Julian Alaphilippe forsvarede den gule trøje og fører stadig med 4 sekunder til Adam Yates.  På dagens udgave af ForhjulsTour sætter vi selvfølgelig fokus på den første bjergafslutning. Hvem var vinderne og taberne ved det første lille bjergslag? Hvad sker der med INEOS? Og så får Mielkes favorit, Higuita, en justering for ikke at være der i dag. Til sidst kigger vi frem mod morgendagens 5. etape, hvor Alex Rasmussen har studeret de sidste 5 km. på Google Maps/View.  Medvirkende: Alex Rasmussen og Anders Mielke

Denne etape er sponsoreret af Oddset fra Danske Spil. 3. etape af Tour de France endte i en forventet massespurt, hvor The Pocket Rocket, Caleb Ewan (Lotto Soudal) kørte en fremragende massespurt og slog Sam Bennet (Deceuninck-Quickstep.   På tredje del af ForhjulsTour sætter vi selvfølgelig fokus på den første traditionelle massespurt i dette års Tour de France. Som tidligere sprinter giver Alex Rasmussen sin analyse af dagens massespurt, hvor den barske modvind kom til at koste for flere af rytterne. Derudover vender vi også Sam Bennetts svej på de sidste meter og den snak byder også på en anekdote fra en af Alex' vilde massespurter, hvor han røg i asfalten. Til sidst kigger vi frem mod morgendagens etape, hvor rytterne for første gang slutter opad. Bliver det en klassementsdag? Åbner Jumbo toget op? Går Yates i angreb efter den gule trøje? Og hvad med Alaphilippe?   Medvirkende: Alex Rasmussen og Anders Mielke

Denne etape er sponsoreret af Oddset fra Danske Spil. Julian Alaphilippe (Deceuninck-QuickStep) levede op til favoritværdigheden på 2. etape af Tour de France og vandt foran 22-årige Marc Hirschi (Team Sunweb) og Adam Yates (Mitchelton Scott). Det betyder også, at Alaphilippe er i den gule trøje -  tilbage la maillot jaune, som han kørte 14 dage i ved sidste års Tour de France.  På 2. etape af ForhjulsTour sætter vi fokus på vanvittige Alaphilippe, unge Hirschi, den gule hær fra Jumbo Visma og bæstet fra Kolding, Kasper Asgreen. Vi diskuterer også om det bliver et deja-vu i Touren, hvor Alaphilippe kommer til at være i den gule trøje i mange dage. Og så var den store taber på 2. etape EF og Daniel Martínez, som mistede 3:38 til de andre klassementsfavoritter. Vi vender kort EF's nedtur, hvorefter vi sætter fokus på morgendagens 3. etape. Alex Rasmussen har studeret afslutningen på Google Street View og kommer med sine forudsigelser for den ventede spurt i morgen. Medvirkende: Alex Rasmussen og Anders Mielke

Denne etape er sponsoreret af Oddset fra Danske Spil. På dagens etape sætter vi fokus på DM i linjeløb, som køres på søndag i Middelfart. 12 danske World Tour-ryttere står på startlisten, men spørgsmålet er om Pro Tour-holdene, UNO-X og Riwal kan true den forsvarende danmarksmester Michael Mørkøv og verdensmester Mads P? Og hvad med continentalrytterne og DCU-holdene, kan de true World Tour-rytterne og måske køre en medalje hjem? Det er nogle af de spørgsmål som Casper Folsach og Alex Rasmussen vil tage os igennem.  Derudover snakker vi også om Jakob Fuglsangs flotte sejr i lørdags i Lombardiet Rundt, samt det dramatiske Dauphiné.  Medvirkende: Alex Rasmussen, Casper Folsach og Anders Mielke

På dagens etape sætter vi fokus på verdens smukkeste cykelløb. Det cykelløb som vi alle sammen kommer til at savne i maj måned, nemlig Giro d'Italia. Per Bausager og Alex Rasmussen har samlet kørt 6 Giro's og de har begge to været med til at vinde løbet samlet med deres kaptajn, Per i 1981 med Giovanni Battaglin og Alex i 2012 med Ryder Hesjedal. Dagens etape er spækket med anekdoter og røverhistorier fra Pers og Alex' oplevelser med Giroen. Lige fra Pers første Giro-start i 1977, hvor han som 20-årig neoprof var betaget af superstjernerne; Roger de Vlaeminck, Francesco Moser og Freddy Maertens, og videre til 2012, da Giroen startede i Herning, som Alex kalder sin største oplevelse som professionel cykelrytter på landevejen. Der er garanteret højt humør og gode grin på dagens etape, men også enkelte seriøse øjeblikke. Giroen er godt nok smuk og fantastisk, men den har også knust drømme og kostet liv. Medvirkende: Per Bausager, Alex Rasmussen og Anders Mielke

I'M Alex Rasmussen, CEO of Neon Canvas and Signature Advertising, I am also a real estate investor... I am a business man and this is BizSchool, your digital classroom that will take you behind the scenes and gives you insights from the inside. This will be unlike any thing you have ever listened to. I a going to give away the secrets that other people say I am crazy to tell. But I am the man of the people and I won't be stopped.  There are dozens of majors you can get from a university in the Business School but none of them are going to teach you anything about the real world of running a business. I got one of those business degrees hanging on my wall but the most important thing I got of business school was not the knowledge as it was the relationships. It take a serious commitment to get a degree in anything and if you want to be a great business person, you need to place learning at the forefront of all you do.  You don't get out of school and know everything that youre going to need to know to succeed in business.  So I created BizSchool to give you insights and information that I have learned during my 20 year career.  We will dive deep into marketing, sales where I made my mark but also into every aspect of running a business. Planning, Management, Finance, Skill building, Technology, HR, Culture, Health and Safety, Employee motivation.  I will bring on experts and leaders that I have built relationships with through the years that have helped me in my businesses and can also help you in yours. We will leave no stone unturned and we look forward to this journey together.  From Neon Canvas and Signature Advertising, this is BizSchool w/ Alex Rasmussen. Subscribe now on Apple Podcast or your favorite listening app and please...share it with your friends. 

Der er ikke mange positive historier og nyheder for tiden under coronakrisen. I Danmark må man stadig gerne cykle på landevejene, men det er ikke tilfældet for de sydeuropæiske lande; Italien, Spanien og Frankrig, hvor der er strengt udgangsforbud. Det har derfor tvunget mange af de professionelle cykelryttere ind i stuen og op på hometraineren og ud på de virtuelle landeveje i e-cykling-verdenen. E-cykling er altså i disse mørke tider blevet en lysende hjælp for mange af de proffer, som er indespærrede hjemme i stuerne. Netop e-cykling bliver vores hovedfokus på dagens etape, hvor vi hovedsageligt vil fokusere på den mest populære platform, nemlig Zwift. Til at gøre os alle klogere på e-cykling og Zwift har Anders Mielke fået besøg på viften af tidl. World Tour-rytter og ambassadør for Zwift i Skandinavien, Alex Rasmussen, samt Klaus Møller, som til daglig kører i A-klassen på Zwift for Danish Bike Riders og kommenterer og streamer en masse Zwiftløb. Vi gennemgår en række interessante emner som blandt andet; community-fællesskabet på Zwift, danskernes niveau internationalt, frygten for snyd på Zwift, OL i Zwift 2028 og meget mere andet lir om e-cykling.   Medvirkende: Alex Rasmussen, Klaus Møller og Anders Mielke

I've been getting a ton of questions about virtual visits and consults and seeing a lot of misinformation floating around, so I decided to do a live Zoom meeting to discuss. My partner at Neon Canvas Alex joined me to answer these questions and to discuss Virtual Visits and Consults, adjusting social media during COVID-19, whether you should decrease your AdSpend at this time, and updates on the TDO: Live! Meeting 2020. It's a great episode and I hope you are able to watch!

Denne etape er også fra Alex Rasmussens, Casper Folsachs og Anders Mielkes kommentering fra De Nordiske Mesterskaber på Odense Cyklebanen den 6. oktober. Der gik dog meget podcast og samtale over det, hvor vi blandt andet snakkede om Casper Folsachs ufrivillige karrierestop, som har stået på de sidste par måneder.  Alex giver Folsach et par råd om at undgå i det sorte hul, som han slev  og mange andre cykelryttere endte i, når de stoppede karrieren. Derudover, så sætter vi også meget fokus på banecykling generelt. Hvordan ser det danske landshold ud? Hvad kommer den nye ændring af World Cup kalenderen til at betyde? 6-dagesløb? Landshold kontra firmahold og meget mere andet godt cykelsnak. Undervejs knytter vi en kommentar til de De Nordiske Mesterskaber i parløb, som køres mens vi snakker. Det meste af denne etape gik faktisk hen og blev en meget interessant snak om det vi alle elsker - cykelsporten.   Medvirkende: Alex Rasmussen, Casper Folsach og Anders Mielke  

På denne etape får du hele kommentering af Mathias Norsgaards timerekordforsøg i Odense Cyklebane søndag den 6. oktober. Anders Mielke havde fornøjelsen af at kommentere rekordforsøget sammen med Alex Rasmussen, tidligere professionel cykelrytter og mange årig banerytter og med Casper Folsach, som har været fast mand på banelandsholdet de sidste 10 år og er trofast hjælperytter på Forhjulslir. Her får du hele kommenteringen og til sidst får du et interview med en træt, men stolt Mathias Norsgaard.   Mathias kørte 52,061 km. og du kan se og høre hele livestreamet på dette link: https://www.facebook.com/OdenseCyklebane/videos/677903955953107/UzpfSTEyNTQxNTAyMjgwNzIzMjM6MTQ0MDg2MzU3NjA2NzY1Mw/?notif_id=1570369152802652¬if_t=page_post_reaction Medvirkende: Alex Rasmussen, Casper Folsach og Anders Mielke

**Udsendelsen er sponsoreret af Partnership'' Her er vores helt nye format i Mediano Lab, hvor vi kigger på fodboldens kommercielle udvikling. Vi kalder det 'Mediano Marketing' og i første episode har vi besøg af to af de tungeste aktører i den verden: FC Københavns direktør for partnerskaber, Alex Rasmussen, og marketings- og kommunikationsdirektør i Arbejdernes Landsbank, Peter Froulund. Hør blandt andet om: - De bedste cases med klubber og virksomheder - Arbejdernes Landsbanks forhold til Brøndby - Hvorvidt AL Bank kunne blive partner i FC København - Landsholdets udvikling - En god case om en bilforhandler i Svendborg - Og en masse andet. Vært: Peter Brüchmann Hvis du vil vide mere om Partnership, så tjek https://www.partnership.dk/

Vi har samlet fire af de tunge drenge fra sponsoraternes business class til et panel om, hvordan man skaber værdi i sportens verden. Det er: - Alex Rasmussen, salgsdirektør og chef for partnerskaberne i FC København - Anton Kragh Lauritzen, senior manager, experience marketing hos Velux - Peter Froulund, kommunikations- og marketingsdirektør hos Arbejdernes Landsbank - Thomas Badura, ejer og direktør hos Sponsorpeople, der forbinder de store sportsbegivenheder med virksomhederne. Hør blandt andet om: - Hvad skal klubberne gøre for at få fat i de store sponsorer? - Hvorfor er et sponsorat i FCK dyrere end andre steder - handler det kun om mesterskaber? - Hvorfor er Velux gået ind i håndbold? - Hvad er det, AGF er særligt dygtige til? - Hvilken fejl har Randers FC begået for nylig? - Og hvad er det bedste råd, som dette panel kan give til klubber, forbund og virksomheder? Vært: Peter Brüchmann

Brian Holm og ‘Radio Godefroot' har besøg af tidligere cykelrytter, Alex Rasmussen. Med to verdensmesterskaber i scratch i 2005 og 2010, DM i landevej 2007, VM i parløb med Michael Mørkøv i 2009 og utallige andre udmærkelser, har der aldrig nogensinde været tvivl om hans store talent. Men efter udelukkelsen i 2011, hvor han ikke redegjorde for sine whereabouts, blev karrieren aldrig helt det samme igen, da han kom tilbage efter 18 måneders karantæne.I ‘Radio Godefroot' fortæller Alex Rasmussen om at have stor kærlighed til og fuldt fokus på banecyklingen i starten af karrieren. Han skulle lære at elske landevejen, hvilket han blandt andet gjorde, da han slog Peter Sagan på stregen i Philadelphia i 2011. Han og Brian Holm taler også om karantænen, der ændrede karrierens forløb, og så har Alex Rasmussen oplevet det sorte hul efter karrierestoppet og bearbejdet den depression, der fulgte med.Denne episode af ‘Radio Godefroot' er tilegnet Andreas Byskov Sarbo.

Alex gæster det store studie til en lang snak om mange gode emner. Det sorte hul, Giroen, Dm, Touren og sidst men ikke mindst sikkerhed på landevejen.

Alex Rasmussen, Marcel Kittel, Moreno Moser og Peter Kennaugh er nogle af de cykelrytter som har haft problemer på det psykiske plan og derfor har vi taget en snak med Phil om presset i sport og hvor meget det mentale spiller ind i denne meget spændende podcast.

Alex Rasmussen gæster studiet til en snak om Zwift/Esport og vintertræning. Har du aldrig prøvet zwift og ville hører hvordan man starter op og hvad det går ud på, så skynd dig at lytte med her.

F.C. Københavns sponsordirektør Alex Rasmussen fortæller om de mange indtryk han fik med fra Leader's Week i London i uge 41. Ca. 3.000 deltagere fra klubber, organisationer og brands i hele verden var samlet til konference på Stamford Bridge for at tale og høre om cases og tendenser inden for bl.a. sports-marketing, sponsorater, aktivering, content, digital udvikling m.m.

Mens Plesner hygger sig i London, hygger Stefan og Elming sig med besøg i Studie 14 af Alex Rasmussen. De snakker Valgren, de tre første etaper i PostNord Danmark Rundt og kigger frem mod afslutningen af det danske etapeløb.

Ex-professionelle Alex Rasmussen gæster studiet hos Plesner og Elming, mens Lars Bak og Michael Mørkøv fortæller om deres forventninger til årets første Grand Tour i denne Veloropa Podcast Giro-special. Ruten, rytterne, favoritterne, åbnings-enkeltstarten, managerhold, quiz og meget mere.

F.C. København: Farvel til kold canvas og goddag til social selling. Vi har interviewet F.C. Københavns salgsdirektør Alex Rasmussen og taler om, hvorfor at fodboldklubben har taget en strategisk beslutning om at sige farvel til kold canvas og goddag til social selling i forhold til deres daglige salgs- og markedsføringsindsatser. Alex deler ud af hans holdninger til kold canvas og social selling, og F.C. Københavns erfaringer med denne salgsmetodik.