Podcasts about Apis

The focus is the work.When anyone asks how they can be more productive, I give them the exercise I talk about in this episode. It's extremely simple, but not easy.What are you focused on, right now? If you can answer this question at all times, you will be productive.

About ThomasThomas Hazel is Founder, CTO, and Chief Scientist of ChaosSearch. He is a serial entrepreneur at the forefront of communication, virtualization, and database technology and the inventor of ChaosSearch's patented IP. Thomas has also patented several other technologies in the areas of distributed algorithms, virtualization and database science. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from University of New Hampshire, Hall of Fame Alumni Inductee, and founded both student & professional chapters of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).Links:ChaosSearch: https://www.chaossearch.io TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by my friends at ThinkstCanary. Most companies find out way too late that they've been breached. ThinksCanary changes this and I love how they do it. Deploy canaries and canary tokens in minutes and then forget about them. What's great is the attackers tip their hand by touching them, giving you one alert, when it matters. I use it myself and I only remember this when I get the weekly update with a “we're still here, so you're aware” from them. It's glorious! There is zero admin overhead  to this, there are effectively no false positives unless I do something foolish. Canaries are deployed and loved on all seven continents. You can check out what people are saying at canary.love. And, their Kub config canary token is new and completely free as well. You can do an awful lot without paying them a dime, which is one of the things I love about them. It is useful stuff and not an, “ohh, I wish I had money.” It is speculator! Take a look; that's canary.love because it's genuinely rare to find a security product that people talk about in terms of love. It really is a unique thing to see. Canary.love. Thank you to ThinkstCanary for their support of my ridiculous, ridiculous non-sense.   Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Vultr. Spelled V-U-L-T-R because they're all about helping save money, including on things like, you know, vowels. So, what they do is they are a cloud provider that provides surprisingly high performance cloud compute at a price that—while sure they claim its better than AWS pricing—and when they say that they mean it is less money. Sure, I don't dispute that but what I find interesting is that it's predictable. They tell you in advance on a monthly basis what it's going to going to cost. They have a bunch of advanced networking features. They have nineteen global locations and scale things elastically. Not to be confused with openly, because apparently elastic and open can mean the same thing sometimes. They have had over a million users. Deployments take less that sixty seconds across twelve pre-selected operating systems. Or, if you're one of those nutters like me, you can bring your own ISO and install basically any operating system you want. Starting with pricing as low as $2.50 a month for Vultr cloud compute they have plans for developers and businesses of all sizes, except maybe Amazon, who stubbornly insists on having something to scale all on their own. Try Vultr today for free by visiting: vultr.com/screaming, and you'll receive a $100 in credit. Thats v-u-l-t-r.com slash screaming.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. This promoted episode is brought to us by our friends at ChaosSearch.We've been working with them for a long time; they've sponsored a bunch of our nonsense, and it turns out that we've been talking about them to our clients since long before they were a sponsor because it actually does what it says on the tin. Here to talk to us about that in a few minutes is Thomas Hazel, ChaosSearch's CTO and founder. First, Thomas, nice to talk to you again, and as always, thanks for humoring me.Thomas: [laugh]. Hi, Corey. Always great to talk to you. And I enjoy these conversations that sometimes go up and down, left and right, but I look forward to all the fun we're going to have.Corey: So, my understanding of ChaosSearch is probably a few years old because it turns out, I don't spend a whole lot of time meticulously studying your company's roadmap in the same way that you presumably do. When last we checked in with what the service did-slash-does, you are effectively solving the problem of data movement and querying that data. The idea behind data warehouses is generally something that's shoved onto us by cloud providers where, “Hey, this data is going to be valuable to you someday.” Data science teams are big proponents of this because when you're storing that much data, their salaries look relatively reasonable by comparison. And the ChaosSearch vision was, instead of copying all this data out of an object store and storing it on expensive disks, and replicating it, et cetera, what if we queried it in place in a somewhat intelligent manner?So, you take the data and you store it, in this case, in S3 or equivalent, and then just query it there, rather than having to move it around all over the place, which of course, then incurs data transfer fees, you're storing it multiple times, and it's never in quite the format that you want it. That was the breakthrough revelation, you were Elasticsearch—now OpenSearch—API compatible, which was great. And that was, sort of, a state of the art a year or two ago. Is that generally correct?Thomas: No, you nailed our mission statement. No, you're exactly right. You know, the value of cloud object stores, S3, the elasticity, the durability, all these wonderful things, the problem was you couldn't get any value out of it, and you had to move it out to these siloed solutions, as you indicated. So, you know, our mission was exactly that, transformed customers' cloud storage into an analytical database, a multi-model analytical database, where our first use case was search and log analytics, replacing the ELK stack and also replacing the data pipeline, the schema management, et cetera. We automate the entire step, raw data to insights.Corey: It's funny we're having this conversation today. Earlier, today, I was trying to get rid of a relatively paltry 200 gigs or so of small files on an EFS volume—you know, Amazon's version of NFS; it's like an NFS volume except you're paying Amazon for the privilege—great. And it turns out that it's a whole bunch of operations across a network on a whole bunch of tiny files, so I had to spin up other instances that were not getting backed by spot terminations, and just firing up a whole bunch of threads. So, now the load average on that box is approaching 300, but it's plowing through, getting rid of that data finally.And I'm looking at this saying this is a quarter of a terabyte. Data warehouses are in the petabyte range. Oh, I begin to see aspects of the problem. Even searching that kind of data using traditional tooling starts to break down, which is sort of the revelation that Google had 20-some-odd years ago, and other folks have since solved for, but this is the first time I've had significant data that wasn't just easily searched with a grep. For those of you in the Unix world who understand what that means, condolences. We're having a support group meeting at the bar.Thomas: Yeah. And you know, I always thought, what if you could make cloud object storage like S3 high performance and really transform it into a database? And so that warehouse capability, that's great. We like that. However to manage it, to scale it, to configure it, to get the data into that, was the problem.That was the promise of a data lake, right? This simple in, and then this arbitrary schema on read generic out. The problem next came, it became swampy, it was really hard, and that promise was not delivered. And so what we're trying to do is get all the benefits of the data lake: simple in, so many services naturally stream to cloud storage. Shoot, I would say every one of our customers are putting their data in cloud storage because their data pipeline to their warehousing solution or Elasticsearch may go down and they're worried they'll lose the data.So, what we say is what if you just said activate that data lake and get that ELK use case, get that BI use case without that data movement, as you indicated, without that ETL-ing, without that data pipeline that you're worried is going to fall over. So, that vision has been Chaos. Now, we haven't talked in, you know, a few years, but this idea that we're growing beyond what we are just going after logs, we're going into new use cases, new opportunities, and I'm looking forward to discussing with you.Corey: It's a great answer that—though I have to call out that I am right there with you as far as inappropriately using things as databases. I know that someone is going to come back and say, “Oh, S3 is a database. You're dancing around it. Isn't that what Athena is?” Which is named, of course, after the Greek Goddess of spending money on AWS? And that is a fair question, but to my understanding, there's a schema story behind that does not apply to what you're doing.Thomas: Yeah, and that is so crucial is that we like the relational access. The time-cost complexity to get it into that, as you mentioned, scaled access, I mean, it could take weeks, months to test it, to configure it, to provision it, and imagine if you got it wrong; you got to redo it again. And so our unique service removes all that data pipeline schema management. And because of our innovation because of our service, you do all schema definition, on the fly, virtually, what we call views on your index data, that you can publish an elastic index pattern for that consumption, or a relational table for that consumption. And that's kind of leading the witness into things that we're coming out with this quarter into 2022.Corey: I have to deal with a little bit of, I guess, a shame here because yeah, I'm doing exactly what you just described. I'm using Athena to wind up querying our customers' Cost and Usage Reports, and we spend a couple hundred bucks a month on AWS Glue to wind up massaging those into the way that they expect it to be. And it's great. Ish. We hook it up to Tableau and can make those queries from it, and all right, it's great.It just, burrr goes the money printer, and we somehow get access and insight to a lot of valuable data. But even that is knowing exactly what the format is going to look like. Ish. I mean, Cost and Usage Reports from Amazon are sort of aspirational when it comes to schema sometimes, but here we are. And that's been all well and good.But now the idea of log files, even looking at the base case of sending logs from an application, great. Nginx, or Apache, or [unintelligible 00:07:24], or any of the various web servers out there all tend to use different logging formats just to describe the same exact things, start spreading that across custom in-house applications and getting signal from that is almost impossible. “Oh,” people say, “So, we'll use a structured data format.” Now, you're putting log and structuring requirements on application developers who don't care in the first place, and now you have a mess on your hands.Thomas: And it really is a mess. And that challenge is, it's so problematic. And schemas changing. You know, we have customers and one reasons why they go with us is their log data is changing; they didn't expect it. Well, in your data pipeline, and your Athena database, that breaks. That brings the system down.And so our system uniquely detects that and manages that for you and then you can pick and choose how you want to export in these views dynamically. So, you know, it's really not rocket science, but the problem is, a lot of the technology that we're using is designed for static, fixed thinking. And then to scale it is problematic and time-consuming. So, you know, Glue is a great idea, but it has a lot of sharp [pebbles 00:08:26]. Athena is a great idea but also has a lot of problems.And so that data pipeline, you know, it's not for digitally native, active, new use cases, new workloads coming up hourly, daily. You think about this long-term; so a lot of that data prep pipelining is something we address so uniquely, but really where the customer cares is the value of that data, right? And so if you're spending toils trying to get the data into a database, you're not answering the questions, whether it's for security, for performance, for your business needs. That's the problem. And you know, that agility, that time-to-value is where we're very uniquely coming in because we start where your data is raw and we automate the process all the way through.Corey: So, when I look at the things that I have stuffed into S3, they generally fall into a couple of categories. There are a bunch of logs for things I never asked for nor particularly wanted, but AWS is aggressive about that, first routing through CloudTrail so you can get charged 50-cent per gigabyte ingested. Awesome. And of course, large static assets, images I have done something to enter colloquially now known as shitposts, which is great. Other than logs, what could you possibly be storing in S3 that lends itself to, effectively, the type of analysis that you built around this?Thomas: Well, our first use case was the classic log use cases, app logs, web service logs. I mean, CloudTrail, it's famous; we had customers that gave up on elastic, and definitely gave up on relational where you can do a couple changes and your permutation of attributes for CloudTrail is going to put you to your knees. And people just say, “I give up.” Same thing with Kubernetes logs. And so it's the classic—whether it's CSV, where it's JSON, where it's log types, we auto-discover all that.We also allow you, if you want to override that and change the parsing capabilities through a UI wizard, we do discover what's in your buckets. That term data swamp, and not knowing what's in your bucket, we do a facility that will index that data, actually create a report for you for knowing what's in. Now, if you have text data, if you have log data, if you have BI data, we can bring it all together, but the real pain is at the scale. So classically, app logs, system logs, many devices sending IoT-type streams is where we really come in—Kubernetes—where they're dealing with terabytes of data per day, and managing an ELK cluster at that scale. Particularly on a Black Friday.Shoot, some of our customers like—Klarna is one of them; credit card payment—they're ramping up for Black Friday, and one of the reasons why they chose us is our ability to scale when maybe you're doing a terabyte or two a day and then it goes up to twenty, twenty-five. How do you test that scale? How do you manage that scale? And so for us, the data streams are, traditionally with our customers, the well-known log types, at least in the log use cases. And the challenge is scaling it, is getting access to it, and that's where we come in.Corey: I will say the last time you were on the show a couple of years ago, you were talking about the initial logging use case and you were speaking, in many cases aspirationally, about where things were going. What a difference a couple years is made. Instead of talking about what hypothetical customers might want, or what—might be able to do, you're just able to name-drop them off the top of your head, you have scaled to approximately ten times the number of employees you had back then. You've—Thomas: Yep. Yep.Corey: —raised, I think, a total of—what, 50 million?—since then.Thomas: Uh, 60 now. Yeah.Corey: Oh, 60? Fantastic.Thomas: Yeah, yeah.Corey: Congrats. And of course, how do you do it? By sponsoring Last Week in AWS, as everyone should. I'm taking clear credit for that every time someone announces around, that's the game. But no, there is validity to it because telling fun stories and sponsoring exciting things like this only carry you so far. At some point, customers have to say, yeah, this is solving a pain that I have; I'm willing to pay you money to solve it.And you've clearly gotten to a point where you are addressing the needs of those customers at a pretty fascinating clip. It's bittersweet from my perspective because it seems like the majority of your customers have not come from my nonsense anymore. They're finding you through word of mouth, they're finding through more traditional—read as boring—ad campaigns, et cetera, et cetera. But you've built a brand that extends beyond just me. I'm no longer viewed as the de facto ombudsperson for any issue someone might have with ChaosSearch on Twitters. It's kind of, “Aww, the company grew up. What happened there?”Thomas: No, [laugh] listen, this you were great. We reached out to you to tell our story, and I got to be honest. A lot of people came by, said, “I heard something on Corey Quinn's podcasts,” or et cetera. And it came a long way now. Now, we have, you know, companies like Equifax, multi-cloud—Amazon and Google.They love the data lake philosophy, the centralized, where use cases are now available within days, not weeks and months. Whether it's logs and BI. Correlating across all those data streams, it's huge. We mentioned Klarna, [APM Performance 00:13:19], and, you know, we have Armor for SIEM, and Blackboard for [Observers 00:13:24].So, it's funny—yeah, it's funny, when I first was talking to you, I was like, “What if? What if we had this customer, that customer?” And we were building the capabilities, but now that we have it, now that we have customers, yeah, I guess, maybe we've grown up a little bit. But hey, listen to you're always near and dear to our heart because we remember, you know, when you stop[ed by our booth at re:Invent several times. And we're coming to re:Invent this year, and I believe you are as well.Corey: Oh, yeah. But people listening to this, it's if they're listening the day it's released, this will be during re:Invent. So, by all means, come by the ChaosSearch booth, and see what they have to say. For once they have people who aren't me who are going to be telling stories about these things. And it's fun. Like, I joke, it's nothing but positive here.It's interesting from where I sit seeing the parallels here. For example, we have both had—how we say—adult supervision come in. You have a CEO, Ed, who came over from IBM Storage. I have Mike Julian, whose first love language is of course spreadsheets. And it's great, on some level, realizing that, wow, this company has eclipsed my ability to manage these things myself and put my hands-on everything. And eventually, you have to start letting go. It's a weird growth stage, and it's a heck of a transition. But—Thomas: No, I love it. You know, I mean, I think when we were talking, we were maybe 15 employees. Now, we're pushing 100. We brought on Ed Walsh, who's an amazing CEO. It's funny, I told him about this idea, I invented this technology roughly eight years ago, and he's like, “I love it. Let's do it.” And I wasn't ready to do it.So, you know, five, six years ago, I started the company always knowing that, you know, I'd give him a call once we got the plane up in the air. And it's been great to have him here because the next level up, right, of execution and growth and business development and sales and marketing. So, you're exactly right. I mean, we were a young pup several years ago, when we were talking to you and, you know, we're a little bit older, a little bit wiser. But no, it's great to have Ed here. And just the leadership in general; we've grown immensely.Corey: Now, we are recording this in advance of re:Invent, so there's always the question of, “Wow, are we going to look really silly based upon what is being announced when this airs?” Because it's very hard to predict some things that AWS does. And let's be clear, I always stay away from predictions, just because first, I have a bit of a knack for being right. But also, when I'm right, people will think, “Oh, Corey must have known about that and is leaking,” whereas if I get it wrong, I just look like a fool. There's no win for me if I start doing the predictive dance on stuff like that.But I have to level with you, I have been somewhat surprised that, at least as of this recording, AWS has not moved more in your direction because storing data in S3 is kind of their whole thing, and querying that data through something that isn't Athena has been a bit of a reach for them that they're slowly starting to wrap their heads around. But their UltraWarm nonsense—which is just, okay, great naming there—what is the point of continually having a model where oh, yeah, we're going to just age it out, the stuff that isn't actively being used into S3, rather than coming up with a way to query it there. Because you've done exactly that, and please don't take this as anything other than a statement of fact, they have better access to what S3 is doing than you do. You're forced to deal with this thing entirely from a public API standpoint, which is fine. They can theoretically change the behavior of aspects of S3 to unlock these use cases if they chose to do so. And they haven't. Why is it that you're the only folks that are doing this?Thomas: No, it's a great question, and I'll give them props for continuing to push the data lake [unintelligible 00:17:09] to the cloud providers' S3 because it was really where I saw the world. Lakes, I believe in. I love them. They love them. However, they promote the move the data out to get access, and it seems so counterintuitive on why wouldn't you leave it in and put these services, make them more intelligent? So, it's funny, I've trademark ‘Smart Object Storage,' I actually trademarked—I think you [laugh] were a part of this—‘UltraHot,' right? Because why would you want UltraWarm when you can have UltraHot?And the reason, I feel, is that if you're using Parquet for Athena [unintelligible 00:17:40] store, or Lucene for Elasticsearch, these two index technologies were not designed for cloud storage, for real-time streaming off of cloud storage. So, the trick is, you have to build UltraWarm, get it off of what they consider cold S3 into a more warmer memory or SSD type access. What we did, what the invention I created was, that first read is hot. That first read is fast.Snowflake is a good example. They give you a ten terabyte demo example, and if you have a big instance and you do that first query, maybe several orders or groups, it could take an hour to warm up. The second query is fast. Well, what if the first query is in seconds as well? And that's where we really spent the last five, six years building out the tech and the vision behind this because I like to say you go to a doctor and say, “Hey, Doc, every single time I move my arm, it hurts.” And the doctor says, “Well, don't move your arm.”It's things like that, to your point, it's like, why wouldn't they? I would argue, one, you have to believe it's possible—we're proving that it is—and two, you have to have the technology to do it. Not just the index, but the architecture. So, I believe they will go this direction. You know, little birdies always say that all these companies understand this need.Shoot, Snowflake is trying to be lake-y; Databricks is trying to really bring this warehouse lake concept. But you still do all the pipelining; you still have to do all the data management the way that you don't want to do. It's not a lake. And so my argument is that it's innovation on why. Now, they have money; they have time, but, you know, we have a big head start.Corey: I remembered last year at re:Invent they released a, shall we say, significant change to S3 that it enabled read after write consistency, which is awesome, for again, those of us in the business of misusing things as databases. But for some folks, the majority of folks I would say, it was a, “I don't know what that means and therefore I don't care.” And that's fine. I have no issue with that. There are other folks, some of my customers for example, who are suddenly, “Wait a minute. This means I can sunset this entire janky sidecar metadata system that is designed to make sure that we are consistent in our use of S3 because it now does it automatically under the hood?” And that's awesome. Does that change mean anything for ChaosSearch?Thomas: It doesn't because of our architecture. We're append-only, write-once scenario, so a lot of update-in-place viewpoints. My viewpoint is that if you're seeing S3 as the database and you need that type of consistency, it make sense of why you'd want it, but because of our distributive fabric, our stateless architecture, our append-only nature, it really doesn't affect us.Now, I talked to the S3 team, I said, “Please if you're coming up with this feature, it better not be slower.” I want S3 to be fast, right? And they said, “No, no. It won't affect performance.” I'm like, “Okay. Let's keep that up.”And so to us, any type of S3 capability, we'll take advantage of it if benefits us, whether it's consistency as you indicated, performance, functionality. But we really keep the constructs of S3 access to really limited features: list, put, get. [roll-on 00:20:49] policies to give us read-only access to your data, and a location to write our indices into your account, and then are distributed fabric, our service, acts as those indices and query them or searches them to resolve whatever analytics you need. So, we made it pretty simple, and that is allowed us to make it high performance.Corey: I'll take it a step further because you want to talk about changes since the last time we spoke, it used to be that this was on top of S3, you can store your data anywhere you want, as long as it's S3 in the customer's account. Now, you're also supporting one-click integration with Google Cloud's object storage, which, great. That does mean though, that you're not dependent upon provider-specific implementations of things like a consistency model for how you've built things. It really does use the lowest common denominator—to my understanding—of object stores. Is that something that you're seeing broad adoption of, or is this one of those areas where, well, you have one customer on a different provider, but almost everything lives on the primary? I'm curious what you're seeing for adoption models across multiple providers?Thomas: It's a great question. We built an architecture purposely to be cloud-agnostic. I mean, we use compute in a containerized way, we use object storage in a very simple construct—put, get, list—and we went over to Google because that made sense, right? We have customers on both sides. I would say Amazon is the gorilla, but Google's trying to get there and growing.We had a big customer, Equifax, that's on both Amazon and Google, but we offer the same service. To be frank, it looks like the exact same product. And it should, right? Whether it's Amazon Cloud, or Google Cloud, multi-select and I want to choose either one and get the other one. I would say that different business types are using each one, but our bulk of the business isn't Amazon, but we just this summer released our SaaS offerings, so it's growing.And you know, it's funny, you never know where it comes from. So, we have one customer—actually DigitalRiver—as one of our customers on Amazon for logs, but we're growing in working together to do a BI on GCP or on Google. And so it's kind of funny; they have two departments on two different clouds with two different use cases. And so do they want unification? I'm not sure, but they definitely have their BI on Google and their operations in Amazon. It's interesting.Corey: You know its important to me that people learn how to use the cloud effectively. Thats why I'm so glad that Cloud Academy is sponsoring my ridiculous non-sense. They're a great way to build in demand tech skills the way that, well personally, I learn best which I learn by doing not by reading. They have live cloud labs that you can run in real environments that aren't going to blow up your own bill—I can't stress how important that is. Visit cloudacademy.com/corey. Thats C-O-R-E-Y, don't drop the “E.” Use Corey as a promo-code as well. You're going to get a bunch of discounts on it with a lifetime deal—the price will not go up. It is limited time, they assured me this is not one of those things that is going to wind up being a rug pull scenario, oh no no. Talk to them, tell me what you think. Visit: cloudacademy.com/corey,  C-O-R-E-Y and tell them that I sent you!Corey: I know that I'm going to get letters for this. So, let me just call it out right now. Because I've been a big advocate of pick a provider—I care not which one—and go all-in on it. And I'm sitting here congratulating you on extending to another provider, and people are going to say, “Ah, you're being inconsistent.”No. I'm suggesting that you as a provider have to meet your customers where they are because if someone is sitting in GCP and your entire approach is, “Step one, migrate those four petabytes of data right on over here to AWS,” they're going to call you that jackhole that you would be by making that suggestion and go immediately for option B, which is literally anything that is not ChaosSearch, just based upon that core misunderstanding of their business constraints. That is the way to think about these things. For a vendor position that you are in as an ISV—Independent Software Vendor for those not up on the lingo of this ridiculous industry—you have to meet customers where they are. And it's the right move.Thomas: Well, you just said it. Imagine moving terabytes and petabytes of data.Corey: It sounds terrific if I'm a salesperson for one of these companies working on commission, but for the rest of us, it sounds awful.Thomas: We really are a data fabric across clouds, within clouds. We're going to go where the data is and we're going to provide access to where that data lives. Our whole philosophy is the no-movement movement, right? Don't move your data. Leave it where it is and provide access at scale.And so you may have services in Google that naturally stream to GCS; let's do it there. Imagine moving that amount of data over to Amazon to analyze it, and vice versa. 2020, we're going to be in Azure. They're a totally different type of business, users, and personas, but you're getting asked, “Can you support Azure?” And the answer is, “Yes,” and, “We will in 2022.”So, to us, if you have cloud storage, if you have compute, and it's a big enough business opportunity in the market, we're there. We're going there. When we first started, we were talking to MinIO—remember that open-source, object storage platform?—We've run on our laptops, we run—this [unintelligible 00:25:04] Dr. Seuss thing—“We run over here; we run over there; we run everywhere.”But the honest truth is, you're going to go with the big cloud providers where the business opportunity is, and offer the same solution because the same solution is valued everywhere: simple in; value out; cost-effective; long retention; flexibility. That sounds so basic, but you mentioned this all the time with our Rube Goldberg, Amazon diagrams we see time and time again. It's like, if you looked at that and you were from an alien planet, you'd be like, “These people don't know what they're doing. Why is it so complicated?” And the simple answer is, I don't know why people think it's complicated.To your point about Amazon, why won't they do it? I don't know, but if they did, things would be different. And being honest, I think people are catching on. We do talk to Amazon and others. They see the need, but they also have to build it; they have to invent technology to address it. And using Parquet and Lucene are not the answer.Corey: Yeah, it's too much of a demand on the producers of that data rather than the consumer. And yeah, I would love to be able to go upstream to application developers and demand they do things in certain ways. It turns out as a consultant, you have zero authority to do that. As a DevOps team member, you have limited ability to influence it, but it turns out that being the ‘department of no' quickly turns into being the ‘department of unemployment insurance' because no one wants to work with you. And collaboration—contrary to what people wish to believe—is a key part of working in a modern workplace.Thomas: Absolutely. And it's funny, the demands of IT are getting harder; the actual getting the employees to build out the solutions are getting harder. And so a lot of that time is in the pipeline, is the prep, is the schema, the sharding, and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. My viewpoint is that should be automated away. More and more databases are being autotune, right?This whole knobs and this and that, to me, Glue is a means to an end. I mean, let's get rid of it. Why can't Athena know what to do? Why can't object storage be Athena and vice versa? I mean, to me, it seems like all this moving through all these services, the classic Amazon viewpoint, even their diagrams of having this centralized repository of S3, move it all out to your services, get results, put it back in, then take it back out again, move it around, it just doesn't make much sense. And so to us, I love S3, love the service. I think it's brilliant—Amazon's first service, right?—but from there get a little smarter. That's where ChaosSearch comes in.Corey: I would argue that S3 is in fact, a modern miracle. And one of those companies saying, “Oh, we have an object store; it's S3 compatible.” It's like, “Yeah. We have S3 at home.” Look at S3 at home, and it's just basically a series of failing Raspberry Pis.But you have this whole ecosystem of things that have built up and sprung up around S3. It is wildly understated just how scalable and massive it is. There was an academic paper recently that won an award on how they use automated reasoning to validate what is going on in the S3 environment, and they talked about hundreds of petabytes in some cases. And folks are saying, ah, S3 is hundreds of petabytes. Yeah, I have clients storing hundreds of petabytes.There are larger companies out there. Steve Schmidt, Amazon's CISO, was recently at a Splunk keynote where he mentioned that in security info alone, AWS itself generates 500 petabytes a day that then gets reduced down to a bunch of stuff, and some of it gets loaded into Splunk. I think. I couldn't really hear the second half of that sentence because of the sound of all of the Splunk salespeople in that room becoming excited so quickly you could hear it.Thomas: [laugh]. I love it. If I could be so bold, those S3 team, they're gods. They are amazing. They created such an amazing service, and when I started playing with S3 now, I guess, 2006 or 7, I mean, we were using for a repository, URL access to get images, I was doing a virtualization [unintelligible 00:29:05] at the time—Corey: Oh, the first time I played with it, “This seems ridiculous and kind of dumb. Why would anyone use this?” Yeah, yeah. It turns out I'm really bad at predicting the future. Another reason I don't do the prediction thing.Thomas: Yeah. And when I started this company officially, five, six years ago, I was thinking about S3 and I was thinking about HDFS not being a good answer. And I said, “I think S3 will actually achieve the goals and performance we need.” It's a distributed file system. You can run parallel puts and parallel gets. And the performance that I was seeing when the data was a certain way, certain size, “Wait, you can get high performance.”And you know, when I first turned on the engine, now four or five years ago, I was like, “Wow. This is going to work. We're off to the races.” And now obviously, we're more than just an idea when we first talked to you. We're a service.We deliver benefits to our customers both in logs. And shoot, this quarter alone we're coming out with new features not just in the logs, which I'll talk about second, but in a direct SQL access. But you know, one thing that you hear time and time again, we talked about it—JSON, CloudTrail, and Kubernetes; this is a real nightmare, and so one thing that we've come out with this quarter is the ability to virtually flatten. Now, you heard time and time again, where, “Okay. I'm going to pick and choose my data because my database can't handle whether it's elastic, or say, relational.” And all of a sudden, “Shoot, I don't have that. I got to reindex that.”And so what we've done is we've created a index technology that we're always planning to come out with that indexes the JSON raw blob, but in the data refinery have, post-index you can select how to unflatten it. Why is that important? Because all that tooling, whether it's elastic or SQL, is now available. You don't have to change anything. Why is Snowflake and BigQuery has these proprietary JSON APIs that none of these tools know how to use to get access to the data?Or you pick and choose. And so when you have a CloudTrail, and you need to know what's going on, if you picked wrong, you're in trouble. So, this new feature we're calling ‘Virtual Flattening'—or I don't know what we're—we have to work with the marketing team on it. And we're also bringing—this is where I get kind of excited where the elastic world, the ELK world, we're bringing correlations into Elasticsearch. And like, how do you do that? They don't have the APIs?Well, our data refinery, again, has the ability to correlate index patterns into one view. A view is an index pattern, so all those same constructs that you had in Kibana, or Grafana, or Elastic API still work. And so, no more denormalizing, no more trying to hodgepodge query over here, query over there. You're actually going to have correlations in Elastic, natively. And we're excited about that.And one more push on the future, Q4 into 2022; we have been given early access to S3 SQL access. And, you know, as I mentioned, correlations in Elastic, but we're going full in on publishing our [TPCH 00:31:56] report, we're excited about publishing those numbers, as well as not just giving early access, but going GA in the first of the year, next year.Corey: I look forward to it. This is also, I guess, it's impossible to have a conversation with you, even now, where you're not still forward-looking about what comes next. Which is natural; that is how we get excited about the things that we're building. But so much less of what you're doing now in our conversations have focused around what's coming, as opposed to the neat stuff you're already doing. I had to double-check when we were talking just now about oh, yeah, is that Google cloud object store support still something that is roadmapped, or is that out in the real world?No, it's very much here in the real world, available today. You can use it. Go click the button, have fun. It's neat to see at least some evidence that not all roadmaps are wishes and pixie dust. The things that you were talking to me about years ago are established parts of ChaosSearch now. It hasn't been just, sort of, frozen in amber for years, or months, or these giant periods of time. Because, again, there's—yeah, don't sell me vaporware; I know how this works. The things you have promised have come to fruition. It's nice to see that.Thomas: No, I appreciate it. We talked a little while ago, now a few years ago, and it was a bit of aspirational, right? We had a lot to do, we had more to do. But now when we have big customers using our product, solving their problems, whether it's security, performance, operation, again—at scale, right? The real pain is, sure you have a small ELK cluster or small Athena use case, but when you're dealing with terabytes to petabytes, trillions of rows, right—billions—when you were dealing trillions, billions are now small. Millions don't even exist, right?And you're graduating from computer science in college and you say the word, “Trillion,” they're like, “Nah. No one does that.” And like you were saying, people do petabytes and exabytes. That's the world we're living in, and that's something that we really went hard at because these are challenging data problems and this is where we feel we uniquely sit. And again, we don't have to break the bank while doing it.Corey: Oh, yeah. Or at least as of this recording, there's a meme going around, again, from an old internal Google Video, of, “I just want to serve five terabytes of traffic,” and it's an internal Google discussion of, “I don't know how to count that low.” And, yeah.Thomas: [laugh].Corey: But there's also value in being able to address things at much larger volume. I would love to see better responsiveness options around things like Deep Archive because the idea of being able to query that—even if you can wait a day or two—becomes really interesting just from the perspective of, at that point, current cost for one petabyte of data in Glacier Deep Archive is 1000 bucks a month. That is ‘why would I ever delete data again?' Pricing.Thomas: Yeah. You said it. And what's interesting about our technology is unlike, let's say Lucene, when you index it, it could be 3, 4, or 5x the raw size, our representation is smaller than gzip. So, it is a full representation, so why don't you store it efficiently long-term in S3? Oh, by the way, with the Glacier; we support Glacier too.And so, I mean, it's amazing the cost of data with cloud storage is dramatic, and if you can make it hot and activated, that's the real promise of a data lake. And, you know, it's funny, we use our own service to run our SaaS—we log our own data, we monitor, we alert, have dashboards—and I can't tell you how cheap our service is to ourselves, right? Because it's so cost-effective for long-tail, not just, oh, a few weeks; we store a whole year's worth of our operational data so we can go back in time to debug something or figure something out. And a lot of that's savings. Actually, huge savings is cloud storage with a distributed elastic compute fabric that is serverless. These are things that seem so obvious now, but if you have SSDs, and you're moving things around, you know, a team of IT professionals trying to manage it, it's not cheap.Corey: Oh, yeah, that's the story. It's like, “Step one, start paying for using things in cloud.” “Okay, great. When do I stop paying?” “That's the neat part. You don't.” And it continues to grow and build.And again, this is the thing I learned running a business that focuses on this, the people working on this, in almost every case, are more expensive than the infrastructure they're working on. And that's fine. I'd rather pay people than technologies. And it does help reaffirm, on some level, that—people don't like this reminder—but you have to generate more value than you cost. So, when you're sitting there spending all your time trying to avoid saving money on, “Oh, I've listened to ChaosSearch talk about what they do a few times. I can probably build my own and roll it at home.”It's, I've seen the kind of work that you folks have put into this—again, you have something like 100 employees now; it is not just you building this—my belief has always been that if you can buy something that gets you 90, 95% of where you are, great. Buy it, and then yell at whoever selling it to you for the rest of it, and that'll get you a lot further than, “We're going to do this ourselves from first principles.” Which is great for a weekend project for just something that you have a passion for, but in production mistakes show. I've always been a big proponent of buying wherever you can. It's cheaper, which sounds weird, but it's true.Thomas: And we do the same thing. We have single-sign-on support; we didn't build that ourselves, we use a service now. Auth0 is one of our providers now that owns that [crosstalk 00:37:12]—Corey: Oh, you didn't roll your own authentication layer? Why ever not? Next, you're going to tell me that you didn't roll your own payment gateway when you wound up charging people on your website to sign up?Thomas: You got it. And so, I mean, do what you do well. Focus on what you do well. If you're repeating what everyone seems to do over and over again, time, costs, complexity, and… service, it makes sense. You know, I'm not trying to build storage; I'm using storage. I'm using a great, wonderful service, cloud object storage.Use whats works, whats works well, and do what you do well. And what we do well is make cloud object storage analytical and fast. So, call us up and we'll take away that 2 a.m. call you have when your cluster falls down, or you have a new workload that you are going to go to the—I don't know, the beach house, and now the weekend shot, right? Spin it up, stream it in. We'll take over.Corey: Yeah. So, if you're listening to this and you happen to be at re:Invent, which is sort of an open question: why would you be at re:Invent while listening to a podcast? And then I remember how long the shuttle lines are likely to be, and yeah. So, if you're at re:Invent, make it on down to the show floor, visit the ChaosSearch booth, tell them I sent you, watch for the wince, that's always worth doing. Thomas, if people have better decision-making capability than the two of us do, where can they find you if they're not in Las Vegas this week?Thomas: So, you find us online chaossearch.io. We have so much material, videos, use cases, testimonials. You can reach out to us, get a free trial. We have a self-service experience where connect to your S3 bucket and you're up and running within five minutes.So, definitely chaossearch.io. Reach out if you want a hand-held, white-glove experience POV. If you have those type of needs, we can do that with you as well. But we booth on re:Invent and I don't know the booth number, but I'm sure either we've assigned it or we'll find it out.Corey: Don't worry. This year, it is a low enough attendance rate that I'm projecting that you will not be as hard to find in recent years. For example, there's only one expo hall this year. What a concept. If only it hadn't taken a deadly pandemic to get us here.Thomas: Yeah. But you know, we'll have the ability to demonstrate Chaos at the booth, and really, within a few minutes, you'll say, “Wow. How come I never heard of doing it this way?” Because it just makes so much sense on why you do it this way versus the merry-go-round of data movement, and transformation, and schema management, let alone all the sharding that I know is a nightmare, more often than not.Corey: And we'll, of course, put links to that in the [show notes 00:39:40]. Thomas, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. As always, it's appreciated.Thomas: Corey, thank you. Let's do this again.Corey: We absolutely will. Thomas Hazel, CTO and Founder of ChaosSearch. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast episode, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this episode, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an angry comment because I have dared to besmirch the honor of your homebrewed object store, running on top of some trusty and reliable Raspberries Pie.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.

Our expert hosts, Benjamin Ensor and Deepa Anikhindi, are joined by some great guests to talk about the most notable fintech, financial services and banking news from the past week. This week's guests include: Polly Jean Harrison, Features Editor, The Fintech Times David Cunningham, Chief Commercial Officer, Lextego With soundclips from: Viktor Nebehaj, CMO, Freetrade Mark Mullen, CEO, Atom Bank Jamie Campbell, Co-Founder, Fronted We cover the following stories from the fintech and financial services space: Freetrade raises crowdfunding at £650m valuation (soundclip from Viktor Nebehaj, CMO, Freetrade) - 3:15 Payhawk raises €99 million to expand payments and expenses solution - 14:25 Irish banks commit €5 million to payment app joint venture Synch - 23:25 Atom Bank moves to a four-day week (soundclip from Mark Mullen, CEO, Atom Bank) - 35:20 Mode Global shares sink after Ocado, Boots and Homebase deny involvement in bitcoin scheme (soundclip from Jamie Campbell, Co-Founder, Fronted) - 45:40 India's Paytm Tumbles Another 13% After First-Day IPO Flop - 46:40 Fronted launches ‘Lifetime Deposit' lending product with the help of fresh £20m funding (soundclip from Jamie Campbell, Co-Founder, Fronted) - 48:25 Nike teams up with Roblox to create a virtual world called Nikeland - 51.20 This episode is sponsored by Primer. Primer is the world's first automation platform for payments. With Primer, merchants and developers have all the underlying infrastructure and "lego blocks" they need to build the best buying experiences for their customers. Learn more and book a demo at primer.io (https://primer.io/?utmsource=11fs&utmmedium=referral&utmcampaign=fintechinsider_) This episode is sponsored by SAS. SAS help their customers make banking simple, safe and rewarding for everyone. They support banks in their goal to treat every customer as an individual. Combining data from across the bank with external information and real-time context delivers unique insight and a deep understanding of customer needs. By applying this insight at the right time via the right channel, SAS help make every customer engagement with the bank a relevant, valuable, and seamless experience. SAS enables banks to embed real-time intelligence in every interaction, helping them make smarter, faster decisions that transform customer experience. To find out more, visit. https://www.sas.com Fintech Insider by 11:FS is a podcast dedicated to all things fintech, banking, technology and financial services. Hosted by a rotation of 11:FS experts including David Brear, Simon Taylor and Jason Bates, who are joined by a range of brilliant guests. We cover the latest global news, bring you interviews from industry experts or take a deep dive into subject matters such as APIs, AI or digital banking. If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe and please leave a review Follow us on Twitter: www.twitter.com/fintechinsiders where you can ask the hosts questions, alternatively email podcasts@11fs.com! Special Guests: Dave Cunningham, Deepa Anikhindi, Jamie Campbell, Mark Mullen, Polly Jean Harrison, and Viktor Nebehaj.

Could the API revolution and the digital transformation be exposing everyone to security risks? An API is the connective tissue that binds together cloud-native architecture and enables us to enjoy digital services. While these are fundamental for the way we work and live, they're exposing organizations to a new domain of security risk. Peter Klimek, Director of Technology, Office of the CTO at Imperva joins me on the Tech Talks Daily Podcast in a conversation about the benefits, and pitfalls, of APIs. Imperva is a cybersecurity leader with a mission to protect data and all paths to it. They protect the data of over 6,000 global customers from cyberattacks through all stages of their digital transformation. Their products are informed by the Imperva Research Lab, an international threat intelligence community that feeds the latest security and compliance expertise into our solutions.

Our expert host, Simon Taylor, is joined by some great guests to talk about all things sustainabilty in the financial services sector – in association with Mastercard. There's never been a better or more timely way to go green, and financial services is uniquely placed to have real impact in this space. Following COP26, Simon and the panel look at where we are now, the challenges and opportunities, as well as the role of fintech in driving big changes. This week's guests include: Scott Abrahams, SVP Business Development and Fintech, Mastercard Lee Brown, Operations Manager, Helpful Will Smith, Co-Founder, Tred All of this and much more on today's episode! This episode is sponsored by Temenos. Temenos is the world leader in banking software, serving over 3,000 financial institutions. SCALE 2021 is Temenos' dedicated, virtual developer event, including: insights from industry leaders on current technology trends and how they impact banking; customer presentations; product demonstrations and road-map sessions and opportunities to speak with Temenos experts. Whether you're a developer, consultant or business user, discover the latest technology opportunities and how this can help you deliver bigger, better, faster. Register to attend here. (https://tem.mn/3jYLZlm) This episode is sponsored by Primer. Primer is the world's first automation platform for payments. With Primer, merchants and developers have all the underlying infrastructure and "lego blocks" they need to build the best buying experiences for their customers. Learn more and book a demo at primer.io (https://primer.io/?utmsource=11fs&utmmedium=referral&utmcampaign=fintechinsider_) This episode is sponsored by SAS. SAS help their customers make banking simple, safe and rewarding for everyone. They support banks in their goal to treat every customer as an individual. Combining data from across the bank with external information and real-time context delivers unique insight and a deep understanding of customer needs. By applying this insight at the right time via the right channel, SAS help make every customer engagement with the bank a relevant, valuable, and seamless experience. SAS enables banks to embed real-time intelligence in every interaction, helping them make smarter, faster decisions that transform customer experience. To find out more, visit. https://www.sas.com Fintech Insider by 11:FS is a podcast dedicated to all things fintech, banking, technology and financial services. Hosted by a rotation of 11:FS experts including David Brear, Simon Taylor, Jason Bates and Sarah Kocianski and joined by a range of brilliant guests, we cover the latest global news, bring you interviews from industry experts or take a deep dive into subject matters such as APIs, AI or digital banking. If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe and please leave a review Follow us on Twitter: www.twitter.com/fintechinsiders where you can ask the hosts questions, alternatively email podcasts@11fs.com! Special Guests: Lee Brown, Scott Abrahams, and Will Smith.

My guest today is Starkerz, DAO member of 3Speak, a censorship-resistant video platform built on top of the Hive Network. Launched on March 20th, 2020, Hive is a decentralized information-sharing network with an accompanying blockchain-based financial ledger built on the Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) protocol. Myriad dapps, APIs, and front-ends contribute to general and straightforward accessibility of data, transactions, and records so that this existing diversity and utility ensure that the ecosystem is welcoming to content creators, consumers, investors, and builders. Hive is developed to store vast amounts of content and to make it available for time-based monetization. Examples of use include social media with monetized rewards for content producers, interactive games, identity management, polling systems, and micro-loans. By combining the lightning-fast processing times and fee-less transactions, Hive is positioned to become one of the leading blockchain technologies used by people around the world. Hive's support for high transaction volumes, combined with its fast 3-second block times and fee-less transactions, make it an ideal platform for building highly interactive applications that would bog down on most blockchain networks. Hive was founded by a diverse group of community members, developers, and investors who believed in the common goal of decentralization. There is no set team and no company behind it. All protocol changes are proposed, developed, prepared for, and implemented through a transparent and collaborative team-working environment. They are entirely open source from initiation to their final release. 3Speak is a place where content creators directly own their onsite assets and their communities. Using blockchain technology, the ownership of these assets and communities is intrinsic to the creator and the user, not 3 Speak. By using the platform, users get rewarded in Hive tokens and can receive donations in our proprietary Speak token. In our conversation, we discuss Hive, consensus models, the path to decentralization, web3 and community, and much more. We begin our conversation by discussing the differences between Web2 and Web3. Starkerz does an excellent job at explaining the pitfalls and problems creators face when building their audience on Web2 platform. Our conversation flows to how Web3 protects individuals from censorship and removes the gatekeepers from the decision-making process. We discuss Hive's unique history and Starkerz shares an amazing story of the first blockchain war. Our conversation transitions to the importance of community and the community around a blockchain are layer0. Starkerz demonstrates the importance of community by discussing the accomplishments of Hive and their consensus model. Our conversation transitions to discussing the differences and tradeoffs between the various consensus models. Our conversation transitions and we discuss how Web3 will enable a new paradigm. Starkerz describes this new paradigm that is enabled by decentralization, market forces, and community-led. Please enjoy my conversation with Starkerz. -- Public: Start investing with as little as $1 and get a free slice of stock up to $50 when you join Public.com today. Visit public.com/UNTOLDSTORIES to download the app and sign up. Ledn: Ledn provides financial products to help you unlock the power of digital assets. With a secure and easy-to-use platform, it's the simplest way to earn interest, borrow, and trade your BTC and USDC. For maximum accountability, Ledn offers Proof of Reserves attestations to give you peace of mind while you make the most of your Bitcoin. Untold Stories listeners can receive $50 in free BTC when you create a new loan. More info at https://untoldstories.link/LEDN -- This podcast is powered by Blockworks. For exclusive content and events that provide insights into the crypto and blockchain space, visit them at https://blockworks.co

Time for a bonus episode! Our expert host, David Brear, is joined by Jeremy Balkin, Global Head of Innovation & Corporate Development, Payments at J.P. Morgan, to take a deep dive into their new report: Payments are Eating the World. Join us for an in depth discussion about Jeremy's career, the report, and all things payments. All of this and much more on today's episode! Fintech Insider by 11:FS is a podcast dedicated to all things fintech, banking, technology and financial services. Hosted by a rotation of 11:FS experts including David Brear, Simon Taylor and Jason Bates, who are joined by a range of brilliant guests. We cover the latest global news, bring you interviews from industry experts or take a deep dive into subject matters such as APIs, AI or digital banking. If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe and please leave a review Follow us on Twitter: www.twitter.com/fintechinsiders where you can ask the hosts questions, alternatively email podcasts@11fs.com! Special Guest: Jeremy Balkin.

Microsoft is building a Planetary Computer. The Planetary Computer combines a multi-petabyte catalog of global environmental data with intuitive APIs, a flexible scientific environment that allows users to answer global questions about that data, and applications that put those answers in the hands of conservation stakeholders. https://planetarycomputer.microsoft.com/   For a podcast episode about Google Earth Engine just have a look back through the podcast archive of click this link https://mapscaping.com/blogs/the-mapscaping-podcast/introducing-google-earth-engine     Remember to Subscribe :)  and Share this podcast with a friend! Learn more at https://mapscaping.com Happy to connect with you on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielodonohue/ Or Twitter https://twitter.com/MapScaping    

Most things are compositions of other things. Most problems are multi-factorial. Most opportunities have more than one selling point.Sometimes, it helps to realign your thinking to composition, using tools like matrices to make better decisions.

In this episode, Saurabh Sahni and Taylor Singletary of Slack share their experiences and best practices for designing APIs and building developer communities.

Our expert hosts, Simon Taylor and Benjamin Ensor, are joined by some great guests to talk about the most notable fintech, financial services and banking news from the past week. This week's guests include: Emily Nicolle, Fintech Correspondent, Financial News Clare McKeeve, CEO, Talenthouse With soundclips from: Philip Belamant, CEO & Founder, Zilch Omar Kassim, CEO & Founder, Nomod We cover the following stories from the fintech and financial services space: Amazon to stop accepting Visa credit cards in UK - 4:10 Zilch becomes Europe's fastest ever unicorn with $2bn valuation (soundclip from Philip Belamant, CEO & Founder, Zilch) - 15:45 Talenthouse, Vodeno, and Aion Bank partner to bring embedded banking services to creatives across Europe - 28:12 Nomod raises $3.4M seed to allow merchants to accept payments without hardware (soundclip from Omar Kassim, CEO & Founder, Nomod) - 37:07 Starling snaps up £1BN mortgage book as it seeks to float next year - 45:25 N26 pulls back from the US - 46:54 CMA pushes ‘variable recurring payment' deadline back by six months - 49:02 Miramax Sues Quentin Tarantino Over ‘Pulp Fiction' NFTs - 51:12 This episode is sponsored by Temenos. Temenos is the world leader in banking software, serving over 3,000 financial institutions. SCALE 2021 is Temenos' dedicated, virtual developer event, including: insights from industry leaders on current technology trends and how they impact banking; customer presentations; product demonstrations and road-map sessions and opportunities to speak with Temenos experts. Whether you're a developer, consultant or business user, discover the latest technology opportunities and how this can help you deliver bigger, better, faster. Register to attend here. (https://tem.mn/3jYLZlm) This episode is sponsored by Primer. Primer is the world's first automation platform for payments. With Primer, merchants and developers have all the underlying infrastructure and "lego blocks" they need to build the best buying experiences for their customers. Learn more and book a demo at primer.io (https://primer.io/?utmsource=11fs&utmmedium=referral&utmcampaign=fintechinsider_) Fintech Insider by 11:FS is a podcast dedicated to all things fintech, banking, technology and financial services. Hosted by a rotation of 11:FS experts including David Brear, Simon Taylor and Jason Bates, who are joined by a range of brilliant guests. We cover the latest global news, bring you interviews from industry experts or take a deep dive into subject matters such as APIs, AI or digital banking. If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe and please leave a review Follow us on Twitter: www.twitter.com/fintechinsiders where you can ask the hosts questions, alternatively email podcasts@11fs.com! Special Guests: Clare McKeeve and Emily Nicolle.

Our expert host, Bejnamin Ensor, is joined by some great guests to talk about all things Indian fintech. Fintech is one of the fastest-growing technology segments in India, bringing innovation in digital identity, credit scoring, loans, payments, and stock trading. So what does the market look like, what technologies are paving the way, and what opportunities does the ecosystem offer Fintech founders? This week's guests include: Gurjodhpal Singh, India CEO, Tide Aditi Sholapurkar, Co-founder, SALT All of this and much more on today's episode! This episode is sponsored by Temenos. Temenos is the world leader in banking software, serving over 3,000 financial institutions. SCALE 2021 is Temenos' dedicated, virtual developer event, including: insights from industry leaders on current technology trends and how they impact banking; customer presentations; product demonstrations and road-map sessions and opportunities to speak with Temenos experts. Whether you're a developer, consultant or business user, discover the latest technology opportunities and how this can help you deliver bigger, better, faster. Register to attend here. (https://tem.mn/3jYLZlm) This episode is sponsored by Primer. Primer is the world's first automation platform for payments. With Primer, merchants and developers have all the underlying infrastructure and "lego blocks" they need to build the best buying experiences for their customers. Learn more and book a demo at primer.io (https://primer.io/?utmsource=11fs&utmmedium=referral&utmcampaign=fintechinsider_) Fintech Insider by 11:FS is a podcast dedicated to all things fintech, banking, technology and financial services. Hosted by a rotation of 11:FS experts including David Brear, Simon Taylor, Jason Bates and Sarah Kocianski and joined by a range of brilliant guests, we cover the latest global news, bring you interviews from industry experts or take a deep dive into subject matters such as APIs, AI or digital banking. If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe and please leave a review Follow us on Twitter: www.twitter.com/fintechinsiders where you can ask the hosts questions, alternatively email podcasts@11fs.com! Special Guests: Aditi Sholapurkar and Gurjodhpal Singh.

About Micheal BenedictMicheal Benedict leads Engineering Productivity at Pinterest. He and his team focus on developer experience, building tools and platforms for over a thousand engineers to effectively code, build, deploy and operate workloads on the cloud. Mr. Benedict has also built Infrastructure and Cloud Governance programs at Pinterest and previously, at Twitter -- focussed on managing cloud vendor relationships, infrastructure budget management, cloud migration, capacity forecasting and planning and cloud cost attribution (chargeback). Links: Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/micheal LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michealb/ 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: You know how git works right?Announcer: Sorta, kinda, not really Please ask someone else!Corey: Thats all of us. Git is how we build things, and Netlify is one of the best way I've found to build those things quickly for the web. Netlify's git based workflows mean you don't have to play slap and tickle with integrating arcane non-sense and web hooks, which are themselves about as well understood as git. Give them a try and see what folks ranging from my fake Twitter for pets startup, to global fortune 2000 companies are raving about. If you end up talking to them, because you don't have to, they get why self service is important—but if you do, be sure to tell them that I sent you and watch all of the blood drain from their faces instantly. You can find them in the AWS marketplace or at www.netlify.com. N-E-T-L-I-F-Y.comCorey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Vultr. Spelled V-U-L-T-R because they're all about helping save money, including on things like, you know, vowels. So, what they do is they are a cloud provider that provides surprisingly high performance cloud compute at a price that—while sure they claim its better than AWS pricing—and when they say that they mean it is less money. Sure, I don't dispute that but what I find interesting is that it's predictable. They tell you in advance on a monthly basis what it's going to going to cost. They have a bunch of advanced networking features. They have nineteen global locations and scale things elastically. Not to be confused with openly, because apparently elastic and open can mean the same thing sometimes. They have had over a million users. Deployments take less that sixty seconds across twelve pre-selected operating systems. Or, if you're one of those nutters like me, you can bring your own ISO and install basically any operating system you want. Starting with pricing as low as $2.50 a month for Vultr cloud compute they have plans for developers and businesses of all sizes, except maybe Amazon, who stubbornly insists on having something to scale all on their own. Try Vultr today for free by visiting: vultr.com/screaming, and you'll receive a $100 in credit. Thats v-u-l-t-r.com slash screaming.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. Sometimes when I have conversations with guests here, we run long. Really long. And then we wind up deciding it was such a good conversation, and there's still so much more to say that we schedule a follow-up, and that's what happened today. Please welcome back Micheal Benedict, who is, as of the last time we spoke and presumably still now, the head of engineering productivity at Pinterest. Micheal, how are you?Micheal: I'm doing great, and thanks for that introduction, Corey. Thankfully, yes, I am still the head of engineering productivity; I'm really glad to speak more about it today.Corey: The last time that we spoke, we went up one side and down the other of large-scale environments running on AWS and billing aspects thereof, et cetera, et cetera. I want to stay away from that this time and instead focus on the rest of engineering productivity, which is always an interesting and possibly loaded term. So, what is productivity engineering? It sounds almost like it's an internal dev tools team, or is it something more?Micheal: Well, thanks for asking because I get this question asked a lot of times. So, for one, our primary job is to enable every developer, at least at our company, to do their best work. And we want to do this by providing them a fast, safe, and a reliable path to take any idea into production without ever worrying about the infrastructure. As you clearly know, learning anything about how AWS works—or any public cloud provider works—is a ton of investment, and we do want our product engineers, our mobile engineers, and all the other folks to be focused on delivering amazing experiences to our Pinners. So, we could be doing some of the hard work in providing those abstractions for them in such way, and taking away the pain of managing infrastructure.Corey: The challenge, of course, that I've seen is that a lot of companies take the approach of, “Ah. We're going to make AWS available to all of our engineers in it's raw, unfiltered form.” And that lasts until the first bill shows up. And then it's, “Okay. We're going to start building some guardrails around that.” Which makes a lot of sense. There then tends to be a move towards internal platforms that effectively wrap cloud services.And for a while now, I've been generally down on the concept and publicly so in the general sense. That said, what I say that applies as a best practice or something that most people should consider does tend to fall apart when we talk about specific use cases. You folks are an extremely large environment; how do you view it? First off, do you do internal platforms like that? And secondly, would you recommend that other companies do the same thing?Micheal: I think that's such a great question because every company evolves with its own pace of development. And I wouldn't say Pinterest by itself had a developer productivity or an engineering productivity organization from the get-go. I think this happens when you start realizing that your core engineers who are working on product are now spending a certain fraction of time—which starts ballooning pretty fast—in managing the underlying systems and the infrastructure. And at that point in time, it's probably a good question to ask, how can I reduce the friction in those people's lives such that they could be focused more on the product. And, kind of, centralize or provide some sort of common abstractions through a central team which can take away all that pain.So, that is generally a good guiding principle to think about when your engineers are spending at least 30% of their time on operating the systems rather than building capabilities, that's probably a good time to revisit and see whether a central team would make sense to take away some of that. And just simple examples, right? This includes upgrading OS on your EC2 machines, or just trying to make sure you're patching all the right versions on your next big Kubernetes cluster you're running for serving x number of users. The moment you start seeing that, you want to start thinking about, if there is a central team who could take away that pain, what are the things they could be investing on to help up-level every other engineer within your organization. And I think that's one of the best ways to be thinking about it.And it was also a guiding principle for us within Pinterest to view what investments we could make in these central teams which can up-level each and every different type of engineer in the company as well. And just an example on that could be your mobile engineer would have very different expectations from your backend engineer who was working on certain aspects of code in your product. And it is truly important to understand where you want to centralize capabilities, which both these types of engineers could use, or you want to divest and have unique capabilities where it's going to make them productive. There's no one-size-fits-all solution for this, but I'm happy to talk about what we have at Pinterest, which has been reasonably working well. But I do think there's a lot more improvements we could be doing.Corey: Yeah, but let's also be clear that, as you've mentioned, you are heavily biased towards EC2 instances for a lot of what you do. If we look at the AWS console and we see hundreds of different services now, and it's easy to sit here and say, “Oh, internal platforms are terrible because all of those services are going to be enhanced in various ways and you're never going to be able to keep up with feature parity.” Yeah, but if you can wrap something like EC2 in an internal platform wrapper, that begins to be a different story because sure, someone's going to go and try something new with a different AWS service, they're going to need direct access. But the EC2 product across the board generally does not evolve in leaps and bounds with transformative changes overnight. Let's also not forget that at a company with the scale that Pinterest operates at, “Hey, AWS just dusted off a new feature and docs are still rolling out, and it's not in CloudFormation yet, but we're going to roll it out to production,” probably seems like the wrong direction to go in, I would assume.Micheal: And yes, I think that brings one of the key guardrails, I think, which these groups provide. So, when we start thinking about what teams, centralized teams like engineering productivity, developer tools, developer platforms actually do is they help with a couple of things. The top three are: they can help pave a path for the most common use cases. Like to your point, provisioning EC2 does take a set of steps, all the time. If you're going to have a thousand people doing that every time they're building a new service or trying to expand capacity playing with their launch templates, those are things you can start streamlining and making it simple by some wrapper because you want to address those 80% use cases which are usually common, and you can have a wrapper or could just automate that. And that's one of the key things: can you provide a paved path for those use cases?The second thing is, can you do that by having the right guardrails in place? How often have you heard the story that, “I just clicked a button and that now spun up, like, a thousand-plus instances.” And now you have to juggle between trying to stop them or do something about it.Corey: Back in 2013, you folks were still focusing on this fair bit. I remember because Jeremy Carroll, who I believe was your first SRE there once upon a time, wound up doing a whole series of talks around how Pinterest approached doing an AMI Factory. And back in those days, the challenges were, “Okay. We have the baseline AMI, and that's great, but we also want to do deployments of things and we don't really want to do a new deploy of an entire fleet of EC2 instances for a single line of config change, so how do we wind up weighing off of when you bake a new AMI versus when you just change something that has—in what is deployed to them?” And it was really a complicated problem back then.I'm not convinced it's not still a complicated problem, but the answers are a lot more cohesive. And making sure that every team—when you're talking about a company as large as Pinterest with that many teams—is doing things in the same way, seems like it's critically important otherwise you wind up with a whole bunch of unique-looking instances that each have to be managed by hand as opposed to something that can be reasoned around collectively.Micheal: Yep. And that last part you mentioned is extremely crucial as well because like I said, our audience or our customers are just not the engineers; we do work with our product managers and business partners as well because at times, we have to tie or change our architecture based on certain cost optimizations which would make sense, like you just articulated. We don't want to have all the instance types. It does not add much value to a developer unless they're explicitly seeking a high-memory instance or a [GP-based instance in a 00:10:25] certain way. So, we can then work with our business partners to make sure that we're committing to only a certain type of instances, and how we can abstract our tools to only give you that. For example, our deployment system, Teletraan which is an open-source system, actually condenses down all these instance types to a couple of categories like high-compute, high-memory—and you've probably seen that in many of the new cloud providers as well—so people don't have to learn or know the underlying instance type.When we moved from c3 to c5, it was just called as a high-compute system, so the next time someone provisioned a new service or deployed it using our system, they would just select high-compute as the de facto instance type and we would just automatically provision a C5 for them. So, that just reduces the extra complexity or the cognitive overhead individuals would have to go through in learning each instance type, what is the base AMI that comes on it, what are the different configurations that need to go in terms of setting up your AZ-scaling properties. We give them a good reasonable set of defaults to get started with, and then they can then work on optimizing or making changes to it.Corey: Ignoring entirely your mispronunciation of AMI, which is, of course, three syllables—and that is a petty hill upon which I will die—it occurs to me the more I work with AWS in various ways, the easier it gets. And I used to think in some respects, it was because the platform was so—it was improving so dramatically around me. But no, in many cases, it's because the first time you write some CloudFormation by hand, it's a nightmare and you keep smacking into weird issues. But the second or third time, it's super easy because you just copy the thing you've already built and change the relevant bits around. And that was the learning curve that I went through playing around with a lot of these things.When you start looking at this from a large-scale environment where it's not just about upskilling the people that you have to understand how these things integrate in AWS land, but also the consistent onboarding of engineers at a fairly progressive clip is, great, you effectively have to start doing trainings on all these things, and there's a lot of knobs and dials that can blow up and hurt people. At some point, building the guardrails or building the environment in which you are getting all the stuff abstracted away from where the application engineers have to think about this at all, it eventually reaches a tipping point where it starts to feel like it's no longer optional if you want to continue growing as a company because you don't have the luxury of spending six months of onboarding before you let someone touch the thing they were hired to build.Micheal: And you will see that many companies very often have very similar programming practices like you just described. Even I learned that the same way: you have a base template, you just copy-paste it and start from there on. And no one goes through the bootstrapping process manually anymore; you want to—I think we call it cargo-culting, but in general, just get something to bootstrap and start from there. But one of the things we learned in sort of the hard way is that can also lead to, kind of, you pushing, you know, not great practices because people don't know what is a blessed version of a good template or what actually would make sense. So, some of those things, we have been working on.And this is where centralized teams like engineering productivity are really helpful is we provide you with the blessed or the canonical way to do certain things. Case in point example is a CI/CD pipeline or delivery of software services. We have invested enough in experimenting on what works with some of the more nuanced use cases at Pinterest, in helping generate, sort of, a canonical version which would cover 80% of the use cases. Someone could just go and try to build a service and they could just use the same canonical pipeline without learning much or making changes to it. This also reduces that cargo-culting nature which I called, rather than copying it from unknown sources and trying to like—again, it may cause havoc to our systems, so we can avoid a lot of that because of these practices.Corey: So, let's step a little bit beyond AWS—I know I hate doing it, too—but I'm going to assume that your remit is broader than, oh, AWS whisperer-slash-Wrangler. So, tell me a little bit more about what it is that your day-to-day looks like if there is anything that could be said not to focus purely around AWS whispering.Micheal: So, one of the challenges—and I want to talk about this a bit more—is our environments have become extremely complex over time. And it's the nature of, like, rising entropy. Like, we've just noticed that there's two things: we have a diverse set of customer base, and these include everyone trying to do different workloads or work service types. What that essentially translates into is that we realized that our solution may not fit all of them. For example, what works for a machine-learning engineer in terms of iterating on building a model and delivering a model is not the same as someone working on a long-running service and trying to deploy that. The same would apply for someone trying to operate a Kafka system.And that has made, I think, definitely our job a bit challenging in trying to assess where do you actually draw the line on the abstraction? What is the right layer of abstraction across your local development experience, across when you move over to staging your code in a PR model and getting feedback and subsequently actually releasing it to production? Because this changes dramatically based on what is the workload type you're working on. And we feel like that has been one of the biggest challenges where I know I spent my day-to-day and my team does too, in trying to help provide some of the right solutions for these individuals. There's—very often we'll also get asked from individuals trying to do a very nuanced thing.Of late, we have been talking about thinking about how you operate functions, like provide Functions as a Service within the company? It just put us in a difficult spot at times because we have to ask the hard question, “Is this required?” I know the industry is doing it; it's definitely there. I personally believe, yes, it could be a future, but is that absolutely important? Is that going to benefit Pinterest in any formal way if we invest on some core abstractions?And those are difficult conversations to have because we have exciting engineers coming in trying to do amazing things; it puts us in a hard spot, as well, as to sometimes saying graciously, no. I know many companies deal with it when they have these centralized teams, but I think it's part of that job. Like when you say it's day-to-day, I would say I'm probably saying no a couple of times in that day.Corey: Let's pretend for the sake of argument that I am, tomorrow morning, starting another company—Twitter for Pets—and over the next ten years, it grows to be larger than Pinterest in terms of infrastructure, probably not revenue because it turns out pets are not the lucrative source of ad revenue that I was hoping it would be but, you know, directionally the same thing. It seems to me that building out this sort of function with this sort of approach to things is dramatically early as far as optimizations go when it's just me puttering around on something. I'm always cognizant of the wrong people taking the wrong message when we're talking about things that happen like this at scale. When does having an engineering productivity group begin to make sense?Micheal: I mentioned this earlier; like, yeah, there is definitely not a right answer, but we can start small. For example, this group actually started more as a delivery team. You know, when we started, we realized that we had different ways of deploying services or software at Pinterest, so we first gathered together to figure out, okay, what are the different ways and can we start simplifying that part? And that's where it started expanding. Okay, we are doing button-based deployments right now we have thousand-plus microservices, and we are seeing more incidents than we wanted to because anything where there's a human involved means there's a potential gap for error. I myself was involved in a SEV 0 incident, and I will be honest; we ended up deploying a Hello World application in one of our production fleet. Not the thing I wanted to be associated with my name, but, you know—Corey: And you were suddenly saying hello to the world, in fact—Micheal: [laugh].Corey: —and oops-a-doozy.Micheal: Yeah. So—and that really prompted us to rethink how we need to enable guardrails to do safe production rollouts. And that's how those conversations start ballooning out.Corey: And the healthy correct way. We've all broken production in various ways, and it's—you correctly are identifying, I believe, the direction you're heading in where this is a process problem and a tooling problem; it is not that you are secretly crap and should never have been allowed near anything in production. I mean, that's my excuse for me, but in your case, this is a common thing where it's, if someone can unintentionally cause issues like that, there needs to be better processes and procedures as the organization matures.Micheal: Yep. And that's kind of like always the route or the starting point for these discussions. And it starts growing from there on because, okay, you've helped improve the deploy process but now we're seeing insane amount of slowness, say on the build processes, or even post-deploy, there's, like, issues on how we monitor and look into data.And that I think forces these conversations, okay, where do we have these bespoke tools available? What are people doing today? And you have to ask those hard questions, like what can we actually remove from here? The goal is not to introduce yet another new system. Many a times, to be honest bash just gets the job done. [laugh].Personally, I'm okay with that as long as it's consistent and people, you know, are able to contribute to it and you have good practices in validating it, if it works, we should go for it rather than introducing yet another YAML [laugh] and some of that other aspects of doing that work. And that's what we encourage as well. That's how I think a lot of this starts connecting together in terms of, okay, now this is becoming a productivity group; they're focused on certain challenges where investing probably one person here may up-level a few other engineers who don't have to do that on a day-to-day basis. And I think that's one of the key items for, especially, folks who are running mid-sized companies to realize and start investing in these type of teams to really up-level, sort of, the rest of the engineering.Corey: You've been doing this for a fair while. If you were to go back and start over again on day one—which is always a terrifying question, on some level—what would you have done differently about building out this function as Pinterest continued to scale out?Micheal: Well, first, I must acknowledge that this was just not me, and there's, like, ton of people involved in helping make this happen.Corey: No, that's fair. We'll blame them for the missteps; that is—Micheal: [laugh].Corey: —just fine with me. I kid. I kid.Micheal: I think, definitely the nuances. If I look back, all the decisions that were made then at that point in time, there was a decision made to move to Phabricator, which was back then a great open-source code management system where with the current information at that point in time. And I'm not—I think it's very hard to always look back and say, “Oh, we could have chosen x at one point in time.” And I think in reality, that's how engineering organizations always evolve, that you have to make do with the information you have right now to make a decision that works for you over a couple of years.And I'll give you a small example of this. There was a time when Pinterest was actually on GitHub Enterprise—this was like circa 2013, I would say—and it really served as well for, like, five-plus years. Only then at certain point, we realized that it's hard to hire PHP engineers to support a tool like that, and we had to rethink what is the ROI and the investments we've made here? Can we ever map up or match back to one of the offerings in the industry today? And that's when you make decisions that, okay, at this point in time, it's clear that business continuity talks, you know, and it's hard to operate a system, which is, at this moment not supported, and then you make a call about making a shift or moving.And I think that's the key item. I don't think there's anything dramatically I would have changed since the start. Perhaps definitely investing a bit more individuals into the group and going from there. But that said, I'm really, sort of, at least proud of the fact that usually these teams are extremely lean and small, and they always have an outsized impact, especially when they're working with other engineers, other [opinionated 00:22:13] engineers for what it's worth.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. 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Visit https://snark.cloud/oci-free that's https://snark.cloud/oci-free.Corey: Most folks show up intending to do good today, and you make the best decision at the time with the context and constraints that you have, but my question I think is less around, “Well, what were the biggest mistakes you made?” But more to do with the idea of, based upon what you've learned and as you have shown—as you've shined light on these dark areas, as you have been exploring it, has anything jumped out at you that is, “Oh, yeah. Now, that I know—if I had known then what I know now, I would definitely have made this other decision.” Ideally, something that applies a little more globally than specific within Pinterest, just because the whole idea, aspirationally, is that people might learn something from our conversation. At least I will, if nothing else.Micheal: No, I think that's a great question. And I think the three things that jump to me, top of mind. I think technology is means to an end unless it gives you a competitive edge. And it's really hard to figure out at what point in time what technology and why we adopted it, it's going to make the biggest difference. Humans always tend to have a bias towards aligning towards where we want to go. So, that's the first one in my mind.The second one is, and we spoke about this last time, embrace your cloud provider as much as possible. You'd want to avoid taking on operational burden which is not going to add value to the business. If there is something you see your operating which can be offloaded—because your provider can, trust me, do a way better job than you or your team of few can ever do—embrace that as soon as possible. It's better that way because then it frees up your time to focus on the most important thing, which I've realized over time is—I really think teams like ours are actually—we're probably the most value as a glue to all the different experiences a software engineer would go through as part of their SDLC lifecycle.If we can simplify someone's life by giving them a clear view as to where their commit or the work is in this grand scheme of rolling out and giving them the right amount of data to take action when something goes wrong, trust me, they will love you for what you're doing because you're saving them ton of time. Many times, we don't realize that when we publish 11 different ways for you to go and check to just get your basic validation of work done. We tend to so much focus on the technological aspect of what the tool does, rather than the experience of it, and I've realized, if you can bridge the experience, especially for teams like ours, people really don't even need to know whether you're running Kubernetes or any of those solutions behind the scenes. And I think that's one of the biggest takeaways I have.Corey: I want to double down on something you said about the fact that you are not going to be able to run these services as effectively as your provider can. And relatively recently—in fact, since the first time we spoke—AWS has released a investment report in Virginia. And from 2011 through 2020, they have invested in building AWS data centers there, $35 billion. I promise almost no company that employs people listening to this that are not themselves a cloud provider is going to make that kind of investment in running these things themselves.Now, do cloud providers have sharp edges? Yes, absolutely. That is what my entire career is about, unfortunately. But you're not going to do a better job of running things more sustainably, more reliably, et cetera, et cetera. But there are other problems with this—and that's what I want to start exploring here—where in the olden days, when I ran things in data centers and they went down a lot more as a result, sometimes when there were outages, I would have the CEO of the company just standing there nervous worrying over my shoulder as I frantically typed to fix things.Spoiler: my typing accuracy did not improve by having someone looming over me. Now, when there's an outage that your cloud provider takes, in many cases the thing that you are doing to fix it is reloading the status page and waiting for an update because it is completely out of your hands. Is that something that you've had to encounter? Because you can push buttons and turn dials when things are broken and you control it, but in an AWS—or other cloud provider—outage, all you can really do is wait unless you have a DR plan that is large-scale and effective enough that you won't feel foolish or have wasted a huge amount of time and energy migrating off and then—because then it gets repaired in ten minutes. How do you approach that, from your perspective? I guess, the expectation management piece?Micheal: It's definitely I know something which keeps a lot of folks within infrastructure up at night because, like you just said, at times we can feel extremely powerless when we obviously don't have direct control—or visibility at times, as well—on what's happening. One of the things we have realized over time as part of running on our cloud provider for over a decade now, it forces us to rethink a bit on our priority workflows, what we want our Pinners to always have access to, what they need to see, what is not important or critical. Because it puts into perspective, even for the infrastructure teams, is to what is the most important thing we should always have it available and running, what is okay to be in a degraded state, until what time, right? So, it actually forces us to define SLOs and availability criteria within the team where we can broadcast that to the larger audience including the executives. So, none of this comes as a surprise at that point.I mean, it's not the answer, probably, you're looking for because is there's nothing we can do except set expectations clearly on what we can do and how when you think about the business when these things do happen. So, I know people may have I have a different view on this; I'm definitely curious to hear as well, but I know at Pinterest at least we have converged on our priority workflows. When something goes out, how do we jump in to provide a degraded experience? We have very clear run books to do that, and especially when it's a SEV 0, we do have clear processes in place on how often we need to update our entire company on where things are. And especially this is where your partnership with the cloud provider is going to be a big, big boon because you really want to know or have visibility, at the minimum some predictability on when things can get resolved, and how you want to work with them on some creative solutions. This is outside the DR strategy, obviously; you should still be focused on a DR strategy, but these are just simple things we've learned over time on how to just make it predictable for individuals within the company, so not everyone is freaking out.Corey: Yeah, from my perspective, I think the big things that I found that have worked, in my experience—mostly by getting them wrong the first time—is explain that someone else running the infrastructure when they take an outage; there's not much we can do. And no, it's not the sort of thing where picking up the phone and screaming at someone is going to help us, is the sort of thing that is best to communicate to executive stakeholders when things are running well, not in the middle of that incident.Then when things break, it's one of those, “Great, you're an exec. You know what your job is? Literally anything other than standing in the middle of the engineering floor, making everyone freak out even more. We'll have a discussion later about what the contributing factors were when you demand that we fire someone because of an outage. Then we're going to have a long and hard talk about what kind of culture you're trying to build here again?” But there are no perfect answers here.It's easy to sit here in the silver light of day with things working correctly and say, “Oh, yeah. This is how outages should be handled.” But then when it goes down, we're all basically an inch away at best from running around with our hair on fire, screaming, “Fix it, fix it, fix it, fix it, now.” And I am empathetic to that. There's a reason but I fix AWS bills for a living, and one of those big reasons is that it's a strictly business-hours problem and I don't have to run production infrastructure that faces anything that people care about, which is kind of amazing and freeing for someone who spent too many years on call.Micheal: Absolutely. And one of the things is that this is not only with the cloud provider, I think in today's nature of how our businesses are set up, there's probably tons of other APIs you are using or you're working with you may not be aware of. And we ended up finding that the hard way as well. There were a certain set of APIs or services we were using in the critical path which we were not aware of. When these outages happen, that's when you find that out.So, you're not only beholden to your provider at that point in time; you have to have those SLO expectations set with your other SaaS providers as well, other folks you're working with. Because I don't think that's going to change; it's probably only going to get complicated with all the different types of tools you're using. And then that's a trade-off you need to really think about. An example here is just like—you know, like I said, we moved in the past from GitHub to Phabricator—I didn't close the loop on that because we're moving back to GitHub right now [laugh] and that's one of the key projects I'm working with. Yeah, it's circle of life.But the thing is, we did a very strong evaluation here because we felt like, “Okay, there's a probability that GitHub can go down and that means people will be not productive for that couple of hours. What do we do then?” And we had to put a plan together to how we can mitigate that part and really build that confidence with the engineering teams, internally. And it's not the best solution out there; the other solution was just run our own, but how is that going to make any other difference because we do have libraries being pulled out of GitHub and so many other aspects of our systems which are unknowingly dependent on it anyways. So, you have to still mitigate those issues at some point in your entire SDLC process.So, that was just one example I shared, but it's not always on the cloud provider; I think there are just many aspects of—at least today how businesses are run, you're dependent; you have critical dependencies, probably, on some SaaS provider you haven't really vetted or evaluated. You will find out when they go down.Corey: So, I don't think I've told this story before, but before I started this place, I was doing a fair bit of consulting work for other companies. And I was doing a project at Pinterest years ago. And this was one of the best things I've ever experienced at a company site, let alone a client site, where I was there early in the morning, eight o'clock or so, so you know, engineers love to show up at the crack of 11:30. But so I was working a little early; it was great. And suddenly my SSH session that I was using to remote into something or other hung.And it's tap up, tap enter a couple of times, tap it a couple more. It was hung hard. “What's the—” and then someone gently taps me on the shoulder. So, I take the headphones off. It was someone from corporate IT was coming around saying, “Hey, there's a slight problem with our corporate firewall that we're fixing. Here's a MiFi device just for you that you can tether to get back online and get worked on until the firewall gets back.”And it was incredible, just the level of just being on top of things, and the focus on keeping the people who were building things and doing expensive engineering work that was awesome—and also me—productive during that time frame was just something I hadn't really seen before. It really made me think about the value of where do you remove bottlenecks from people getting their jobs done? It was—it remains one of the most impressive things I've seen.Micheal: That is great. And as you were telling me that I did look up our [laugh] internal system to see whether a user called Corey Quinn existed, and I should confirm this with you. I do see entries over here, a couple of commits, but this was 2015. Was that the time you were around, or is this before that even?Corey: That would have been around then, yes. I didn't start this place until late 2016.Micheal: I do see your commits, like, from 2015, and I—Corey: And they're probably terrible, I have no doubt. There's a reason I don't read code for a living anymore.Micheal: Okay, I do see a lot of GIFs—and I hope it's pronounced as GIF—okay, this is cool. We should definitely have a chat about this separately, Corey?Corey: Oh, yeah. “Would you explain this code?” “Absolutely not. I wrote it. Of course, I have no idea what it does. That's the rule. That's the way code always works.”Micheal: Oh, you are an honorary Pinterest engineer at this point, and you have—yes—contributed to our API service and a couple of Puppet profiles I see over here.Corey: Oh, yes—Micheal: [Amazing 00:36:11]. [laugh].Corey: You don't wind up thinking that's a risk factor that should be disclosed. I kid. I kid. It's, I made a joke about this when VMware acquired SaltStack and I did some analytics and found that 60 some odd lines of code I had written, way back when that were still in the current version of what was being shipped. And they thought, “Wait, is this actually a risk?”And no, I am making a joke. The joke is, is my code is bad. Fortunately, there are smart people around me who review these things. This is why code review is so important. But there was a lot to admire when I was there doing various things at Pinterest. It was a fun environment to work in, the level of professionalism was phenomenal, and I was just a big fan of a lot of the automation stuff.Phabricator was great. I love working with it, and, “Great, I'm going to use this to the next place I go.” And I did and then it was—I looked at what it took to get it up and running, and oh, yeah, I can see why GitHub is so popular these days. But it was neat. It was interesting seeing that type of environment up close.Micheal: That is great to hear. You know, this is what I enjoy, like, hearing some of these war stories. I am surprised; you seem to have committed way more than I've ever done in my [laugh] duration here at Pinterest. I do managing for a living, but then again—Corey, the good news is your code is still running on production. And we—Corey: Oh dear.Micheal: —haven't—[laugh]. We haven't removed or made any changes to it, so that's pretty amazing. And thank you for all your contributions.Corey: Oh, please, you don't have to thank me. I was paid, it was fine. That's the value of—Micheal: [laugh].Corey: —[work 00:37:38] for hire. It's kind of amazing. And the best part about consultants is, is when we're done with a project, we get the hell out everyone's happy about it.More happy when it's me that's leaving because of obvious personality-related reasons. But it was just an interesting company from start to finish. I remember one other time, I wound up opening a ticket about having a slight challenge with a flickering on my then Apple-branded display that everyone was using before they discontinued those. And I expected there to be, “Oh, okay. You're a consultant. Great. How did we not put you in the closet with a printer next to that thing, breathing the toner?” Like most consulting clients tend to do, and sure enough, three minutes later, I'm getting that tap on the shoulder again; they have a whole replacement monitor. “Can you go grab a cup of coffee? We'll run the cable for it. It'll just be about five minutes.” I started to feel actively bad about requesting things because I did a lot of consulting work for a lot of different companies, and not to be unkind, but treating consultants and contractors super well is not something that a lot of companies optimize for. I can't necessarily blame them for that. It just really stood out.Micheal: Yep, I do hope we are keeping up with that right now because I know our team definitely has a lot of consultants working with us as well. And it's always amazing to see; we do want to treat them as FTs. It doesn't even matter at that point because we're all individuals and we're trying to work towards common goals. Like you just said, I think I personally have learned a few items as well from some of these folks. Which is again, I think speaks to how we want to work and create a culture of, like, we're all engineers; we want to be solving problems together, and as you were doing it, we want to do it in such a way that it's still fun, and we're not having the restrictions of titles or roles and other pieces. But I think I digressed. It was really fun to see your commits though, I do want to track this at some point before we move completely over to GitHub, at least keep this as a record, for what it's worth.Corey: Yeah basically look at this graffiti in the codebase of, “A shit-poster was here,” and here I am. And that tends to be, on some level, the mark we live on the universe. What's always terrifying is looking at things I did 15 years ago in my first Linux admin job. Can I still ping the thing that I built there? Yes, I can. And how is that even possible? That should not have outlived me; honestly, it should never have seen the light of day in production, but here we are. And you never know how long that temporary kluge you put together is going to last.Micheal: You know, one of the things I was recalling, I was talking to someone in my team about this topic as well. We always talk about 10x engineers. I don't know what your thoughts are on that, but the fact that you just mentioned you built something; it still pings. And there's a bunch of things, in my mind, when you are writing code or you're working on some projects, the fact that it can outlast you and live on, I think that's a big, big contribution. And secondly, if your code can actually help up-level, like, ten other people, I think you've really made the mark of 10x engineer at that point.Corey: Yeah, the idea of the superhuman engineer is always been a strange and dangerous one. If for nothing else, from where I sit, excellence is inherently situational. Like we just talked about someone at Pinterest: is potentially going to be able to have that kind of impact specifically because—to my worldview—that there's enough process and things around there that empower them to succeed. Then if you were to take that engineer and drop them into a five-person startup where none of those things exist, they might very well flounder. It's why I'm always a little suspicious of this is a startup founded by engineers from Google or Facebook, or wherever it is.It's, yeah, and what aspects of that culture do you think are one-to-one matches with the small scrappy startup in the garage? Right, I predicting some challenges here. Excellence is always situational. An amazing employee at one company can get fired at a second one for lack of performance, and that does not mean that there's anything wrong with them and it does not mean that they are a fraud. It means that what they needed to be successful was present in one of those shops, but not the other.Micheal: This is so true. And I really appreciate you bringing this up because whenever we discuss any form of performance management, that is a—in my view personally—I think that's an incorrect term to be using. It is really at that point in time, either you have outlived the environment you are in, or the environment is going in a different direction where I think your current skill set probably could be best used in the environment where it's going to work. And I know it's very fuzzy at that point, but like you said, yes, excellence really means you don't want to tie it to the number of commits you have pushed out, or any specific aspect of your deliverables or how you work.Corey: There are no easy answers to any of these things, and it's always situational. It's why I think people are sometimes surprised when I will make comments about the general case of how things should be, then I talk to a specific environment where they do the exact opposite, and I don't yell at them for it. It's there—in a general sense, I have some guidance, but they are usually reasons things are the way they are, and I'm interested in hearing them out. Everything's situational, the worst consultant in the world is the one that shows up, has no idea what's going on, and then asked, “What moron set this up?” Invariably, two said, quote-unquote, “Moron.” And the engagement doesn't go super well from there. It's, “Okay, why is this the way that it is? What constraints shaped it? What was the context behind the problem you were trying to solve?” And, “Well, why didn't you use this AWS service?” “Because it didn't exist for another three years when we were building that thing,” is a—Micheal: Yes.Corey: —common answer.Micheal: Yes, you should definitely appreciate that of all the decisions that have been made in past. People tend to always forget why they were made. You're absolutely right; what worked back then will probably not work now, or vice versa, and it's always situational. So, I think I can go on about this for hours, but I think you hit that to the point, Corey.Corey: Yeah, I do my best. I want to thank you for taking another block of time out of your day to wind up talking with me about various aspects of what it takes to effectively achieve better levels of engineering productivity at large companies, with many teams, working on shared codebases. If people want to learn more about what you're up to, where can they find you?Micheal: I'm definitely on Twitter. So, please note that I'm spelled M-I-C-H-E-A-L on Twitter. So, you can definitely read on to my tweets there. But otherwise, you can always reach out to me on LinkedIn, too.Corey: Fantastic and we will, of course, include a link to that in the [show notes 00:44:02]. Thanks once again for your time. I appreciate it.Micheal: Thanks a lot, Corey.Corey: Micheal Benedict, head of engineering productivity at Pinterest. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn 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 a comment telling me that you work at Pinterest, have looked at the codebase, and would very much like a refund and an apology.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.

#133: Joyce Lin, the head of developer relations at Postman, joins us to discuss why software produced today should be done in a "API First" manner. We talk about what it means for a product to be "API First" and how that process differs from the what typically happens in the real world. Joyce shares her thoughts on emerging trends in the world of APIs and how Postman's own business is being shaped by them.   Joyce's contact info: Twitter: https://twitter.com/PetuniaGray LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/joyce-lin   Postman: https://www.postman.com/   YouTube channel: https://youtube.com/devopsparadox/   Books and Courses: Catalog, Patterns, And Blueprints https://www.devopstoolkitseries.com/posts/catalog/   Kubernetes Chaos Engineering With Chaos Toolkit And Istio https://www.devopstoolkitseries.com/posts/chaos/   Canary Deployments To Kubernetes Using Istio and Friends https://www.devopstoolkitseries.com/posts/canary/   Review the podcast on Apple Podcasts: https://www.devopsparadox.com/review-podcast/   Slack: https://www.devopsparadox.com/slack/   Connect with us at: https://www.devopsparadox.com/contact/

We’re learning all about Vertex AI this week as Carter Morgan and Jay Jenkins host guest Erwin Huizenga. He helps us understand what is meant by Asia Pacific and how Machine Learning is growing there. APAC’s Machine Learning scene is exciting for its enterprise companies leveraging ML for innovative projects at scale. The ML journey of many of these customers revealed challenges with things like efficiency that Vertex AI was built to solve. The Vertex AI platform boasts tools that help with everything from the beginning stages of data collection to analysis, validation, transformation, model training, evaluation, serving the model, and metadata tracking. Erwin offers detailed examples of this pipeline process and describes how Feature Store helps clients manage their projects. Using Vertex AI not only simplifies the initial development process but streamlines the iteration process as the model is adjusted over time. Pipelines offers automation options that help with this, Erwin explains. ML Operations are also built into Vertex AI to ensure everything is done in compliance with industry standards, even at scale. Using customer recommendations as an example, Erwin walks us through how Vertex AI can employ embedding to enhance customer experiences through ML. By using Vertex AI in combination with other Google offerings like AutoML, companies can effectively build working ML projects without data science experience. We talk about the Vertex AI user interface and the other tools and APIS that are available there. Erwin tells us how Digits Financial uses Vertex AI and Pipeline to bring models to production in days rather than months, and how others can get started with Vertex AI, too. Erwin Huizenga Erwin Huizenga is a Data Scientist at Google specializing in TensorFLow, Python, and ML. Cool things of the week Announcing Spot Pods for GKE Autopilot—save on fault tolerant workloads blog Indosat Ooredoo and Google Launch Strategic Partnership to Accelerate Digitalization Across SMBs and Enterprises in Indonesia site Indosat Ooredoo dan Google Luncurkan Kemitraan Strategis untuk Percepatan Digitalisasi UMKM dan Perusahaan di Indonesia site Interview Vertex AI site Google Cloud in Asia Pacific blog Introduction to Vertex AI docs What Is a Machine Learning Pipeline? site TensorFlow site PyTorch site Vertex AI Feature Store docs AutoML site BigQuery ML site Vertex AI Matching Engine docs ScaNN site Announcing ScaNN: Efficient Vector Similarity Search blog Vertex AI Workbench site Vertex Pipeline Case Study: Digits Financial site Intro to Vertex Pipelines Codelab site Vertex AI: Training and serving a custom model Codelab site Vertex AI Workbench: Build an image classification model with transfer learning and the notebook executor Codelab site APAC Best of Next 2021 site TFX: A TensorFlow-Based Production-Scale Machine Learning Platform site Rules of Machine Learning site Google Cloud Skills Boost: Build and Deploy Machine Learning Solutions on Vertex AI site Monitoring feature attributions: How Google saved one of the largest ML services in trouble blog What’s something cool you’re working on? Jay is working on APAC Best of Next and will be doing a session on sustainability! Carter is working on transitioning the GCP Podcast to a video format!

On this week's show Patrick Gray and Adam Boileau discuss the week's security news, including: Watering hole attacks are getting much better How Israel's government used NSO to strengthen its diplomatic ties Randori sat on some PAN 0day. This is fine. Facebook outs state-backed ops FBi has unfortunate incident with its mail boxes Much, much more This week's sponsor interview is with HD Moore. He's the founder of Rumble, the network asset discovery scanner, and he's joining us to talk about some new tricks he's added to the product, like integrations with cloud service APIs and external discovery products like Censys. Links to everything that we discussed are below and you can follow Patrick or Adam on Twitter if that's your thing. Show notes British news website was hacked to control readers' computers, report says Strategic web compromises in the Middle East with a pinch of Candiru | WeLiveSecurity Analyzing a watering hole campaign using macOS exploits Israel, spyware and corruption: NSO ties to Netanyahu, Bennett and other politicians - Israel News - Haaretz.com Pakistani hackers operated a fake app store to target former Afghan officials - The Record by Recorded Future Exclusive: A Cyber Mercenary Is Hacking The Google And Telegram Accounts Of Presidential Candidates, Journalists And Doctors New Moses Staff group targets Israeli organizations in destructive attacks - The Record by Recorded Future Kevin Beaumont on Twitter: "Pay attention to this one when it's out. I haven't seen it, but it's possible to use BitLocker to remotely (re)encrypt every endpoint in AD in a way that only the attacker can decrypt… and it bypasses sec solutions. So I imagine it's that." / Twitter Hacker sends spam to 100,000 from FBI email address Booking.com was reportedly hacked by a US intel agency but never told customers | Ars Technica ‘Ghostwriter' Looks Like a Purely Russian Op—Except It's Not | WIRED Emotet botnet returns after law enforcement mass-uninstall operation - The Record by Recorded Future Canadian health systems recovering from breach that forced thousands of appointment cancellations Dustin Volz on Twitter: "@riskybusiness @DAlperovitch I think folks outside government can also underestimate how much agencies rehearse talking points and in testimony like this and try to be always on the same page—unless they don't want to be. And that adds to the sense of “conflict” or “disagreement” for some of us." / Twitter CERT-PL employees rally around politically-dismissed chief - The Record by Recorded Future US detains crypto-exchange exec for helping Ryuk ransomware gang launder profits - The Record by Recorded Future Researchers wait 12 months to report vulnerability with 9.8 out of 10 severity rating | Ars Technica DDR4 memory protections are broken wide open by new Rowhammer technique | Ars Technica New secret-spilling hole in Intel CPUs sends company patching (again) | Ars Technica GoCD bug chain provides second springboard for supply chain attacks | The Daily Swig ‘Add yourself as super admin' – Researcher details easy-to-exploit bug that exposed GSuite accounts to full takeover | The Daily Swig Adult cam site StripChat exposes the data of millions of users and cam models - The Record by Recorded Future Hundreds of WordPress sites defaced in fake ransomware attacks - The Record by Recorded Future

Robert Delwood, a former NASA engineer, sheds light on how technical writers can pivot to API writing. It is a special skill set and mindset. Listen to this exclusive episode to find out how you can acquire this skill and make it in this high-in-demand career. Per the website programmableweb.com, approximately 2000s APIs are added each year. For each API, roughly 2-3 writers are needed. Given this exponential rise in APIs, there is obviously a growing demand for API writers. But, writers are in short supply, while the pay scale is high. If you want to make it in this niche area, you must have the right attitude. What is it?Some key things we touch upon:What is the 30-minute limit test?What are the three strategies to learn API documentation?What are the four easy ways to start building an API portfolio?Also, if you are a hiring manager looking for API writers, this interview provides great tips on how you can find and fill this role with the right talent.Resources:The Programmable WebSearch for articles authored by Robert Delwood on medium.comFind projects on Upwork Guest BioRobert Delwood is a programmer, writer, and programming writer in Chicago's legal community. He strives to produce innovative API documentation. He's been an active writer for more than 20 years, 13 of those with API documentation. He's also been a titled developer, once even writing NASA software that made sure the space station astronauts had clean underwear each day. If the astronauts themselves don't appreciate it, the other crew members did.

Our expert hosts, Gwera Kiwana and Ewan Silver, are joined by some great guests to talk about the most notable fintech, financial services and banking news from the past week. This week's guests include: Siddharth Venkataramakrishnan, Capital Markets Correspondent, Financial Times David Jarvis, Founder & CEO, Griffin With soundclips from: Karl Turnball, Head of Banking Services, Starling Keith Grose, Head of International, Plaid Darren Westlake, CEO, Crowdcube We cover the following stories from the fintech and financial services space: Standard Chartered taps Starling BaaS platform for green savings product (soundclip from Karl Turnball, Head of Banking Services, Starling) - 3:47 Paytm raises $1.1 billion from anchor investors in India's blockbuster IPO - 15:35 Crowdcube expands across Europe as EU crowdfunding takes flight (soundclip from Darren Westlake, CEO of Crowdcube) - 27:35 Plaid report: Fintech adoption helps break money taboo (soundclip from Keith Grose, Head of International at Plaid) - 36:28 Robinhood says millions of customers' names and emails addresses taken in data breach - 44:30 New neobank Monument readies for launch after regulator lifts restrictions - 47:30 Square makes its Cash App available for teen use - 48:40 Microsoft's Own Metaverse Is Coming, and It Will Have PowerPoint - 49:50 This episode is sponsored by Temenos. Temenos is the world leader in banking software, serving over 3,000 financial institutions. SCALE 2021 is Temenos' dedicated, virtual developer event, including: insights from industry leaders on current technology trends and how they impact banking; customer presentations; product demonstrations and road-map sessions and opportunities to speak with Temenos experts. Whether you're a developer, consultant or business user, discover the latest technology opportunities and how this can help you deliver bigger, better, faster. Register to attend here. (https://tem.mn/3jYLZlm) This episode is sponsored by Primer. Primer is the world's first automation platform for payments. With Primer, merchants and developers have all the underlying infrastructure and "lego blocks" they need to build the best buying experiences for their customers. Learn more and book a demo at primer.io (https://primer.io/?utmsource=11fs&utmmedium=referral&utmcampaign=fintechinsider_) Fintech Insider by 11:FS is a podcast dedicated to all things fintech, banking, technology and financial services. Hosted by a rotation of 11:FS experts including David Brear, Simon Taylor, Jason Bates and Sarah Kocianski and joined by a range of brilliant guests, we cover the latest global news, bring you interviews from industry experts or take a deep dive into subject matters such as APIs, AI or digital banking. If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe and please leave a review Follow us on Twitter: www.twitter.com/fintechinsiders where you can ask the hosts questions, alternatively email podcasts@11fs.com! Special Guests: David Jarvis, Ewan Silver, and Siddharth Venkataramakrishnan.

  Nick is a Senior Engineering Manager for Developer Platform and Engineering Experience at Checkout.com. He is a Microsoft MVP for developer technologies and a YouTube content creator, creating educational content on C# and .NET for developers of all skill levels.   Links https://twitter.com/nickchapsas https://www.linkedin.com/in/nick-chapsas/ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrkPsvLGln62OMZRO6K-llg   Resources https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRJFNGIsJEo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuFQtyRmS0E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKN0084p7WQ   https://devblogs.microsoft.com/aspnet/asp-net-core-updates-in-net-6-preview-4/#introducing-minimal-apis https://www.hanselman.com/blog/exploring-a-minimal-web-api-with-aspnet-core-6 https://dotnetthoughts.net/minimal-api-in-aspnet-core-mvc6/ https://github.com/CarterCommunity/Carter https://github.com/ardalis/CleanArchitecture https://github.com/jasontaylordev/CleanArchitecture "Tempting Time" by Animals As Leaders used with permissions - All Rights Reserved × Subscribe now! Never miss a post, subscribe to The 6 Figure Developer Podcast! Are you interested in being a guest on The 6 Figure Developer Podcast? Click here to check availability!  

In this Hasty Treat, Scott and Wes talk about Next.js 12 and all of its hot new goodness and updates! Sanity - Sponsor Sanity.io is a real-time headless CMS with a fully customizable Content Studio built in React. Get a Sanity powered site up and running in minutes at sanity.io/create. Get an awesome supercharged free developer plan on sanity.io/syntax. LogRocket - Sponsor LogRocket lets you replay what users do on your site, helping you reproduce bugs and fix issues faster. It's an exception tracker, a session re-player and a performance monitor. Get 14 days free at logrocket.com/syntax. Show Notes 04:00 - Rust Compiler: ~3x faster Fast Refresh and ~5x faster builds 06:25 - Middleware (beta): Enabling full flexibility in Next.js with code over configuration 08:16 - React 18 Support: Native Next.js APIs are now supported, as well as suspense 09:56 -  AVIF Support: Opt-in for 20% smaller images 11:58 - Bot-aware ISR Fallback: Optimized SEO for web crawlers 13:10 - Native ES Modules Support: Aligning with the standardized module system 14:39 - URL Imports (alpha): Import packages from any URL, no installs required Links https://twitter.com/mattgperry Introducing Middleware Tweet us your tasty treats! Scott's Instagram LevelUpTutorials Instagram Wes' Instagram Wes' Twitter Wes' Facebook Scott's Twitter Make sure to include @SyntaxFM in your tweets

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team wishes for time-traveling data. Also, GCP announces Data Lakehouse, Azure hosts Ignite 2021, and Microsoft is out for the metaverse.  A big thanks to this week's sponsors: Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. JumpCloud, which offers a complete platform for identity, access, and device management — no matter where your users and devices are located.  This week's highlights

Justin Yoo joins Scott Hanselman to demonstrate an extension he developed for adding OpenAPI capabilities to Azure Functions apps. See how easy it is to get HTTP-triggered .NET functions with OpenAPI support and deploy an Azure Functions app with Azure API Management from Visual Studio.═══════════════Watch the episode to the end and then submit your answers to our five-question quiz about the info Scott and Justin covered. Eligible participants who answer all five questions correctly will be entered into a Sweepstakes with a chance to be one of ten lucky winners to win a box of Microsoft swag! The Azure Friday Quiz Sweepstakes ends on Dec 10, 2021.Take the quiz! Terms and conditions Privacy statement═══════════════[0:00:00]– Intro[0:03:15]– Create[0:09:20]– Publish[0:12:56]– Consume[0:22:48]– Wrap-upCreate serverless APIs in Visual Studio using Azure Functions and API Management integration (preview)Azure Functions OpenAPI ExtensionCreate a free account (Azure)

Justin Yoo joins Scott Hanselman to demonstrate an extension he developed for adding OpenAPI capabilities to Azure Functions apps. See how easy it is to get HTTP-triggered .NET functions with OpenAPI support and deploy an Azure Functions app with Azure API Management from Visual Studio.═══════════════Watch the episode to the end and then submit your answers to our five-question quiz about the info Scott and Justin covered. Eligible participants who answer all five questions correctly will be entered into a Sweepstakes with a chance to be one of ten lucky winners to win a box of Microsoft swag! The Azure Friday Quiz Sweepstakes ends on Dec 10, 2021.Take the quiz! Terms and conditions Privacy statement═══════════════[0:00:00]– Intro[0:03:15]– Create[0:09:20]– Publish[0:12:56]– Consume[0:22:48]– Wrap-upCreate serverless APIs in Visual Studio using Azure Functions and API Management integration (preview)Azure Functions OpenAPI ExtensionCreate a free account (Azure)

Our expert host, David M. Brear, is joined by some great guests to talk about all things football and fintech. Both industries have seen monumental rises in the last decade, so it's no surprise that financial technology and football are becoming more entwined in their pursuit of global expansion. So where is this relationship in 2021? What are some of the success stories? And what is the potential going forward? This week's guests include: Vivienne Hsu, CMO, Sokin Petrit Berisha, Head of Cryptomedia, Copa90 Alexandra Frean, Chief Corporate Affairs Officer, Starling Bank All of this and much more on today's episode! This episode is sponsored by Temenos. Temenos is the world leader in banking software, serving over 3,000 financial institutions. SCALE 2021 is Temenos' dedicated, virtual developer event, including: insights from industry leaders on current technology trends and how they impact banking; customer presentations; product demonstrations and road-map sessions and opportunities to speak with Temenos experts. Whether you're a developer, consultant or business user, discover the latest technology opportunities and how this can help you deliver bigger, better, faster. Register to attend here. (https://tem.mn/3jYLZlm) This episode is sponsored by LetsDeel. There's a better way to hire internationally, and it starts with Deel. Everything from contract creation, record keeping, payments, and full-time employment is all in one place for teams all over the world. Companies anywhere can hire compliantly everywhere thanks to Deel. It's payroll and compliance built for today's worldwide workforce. To learn more, visit letsdeel/11fs (https://www.letsdeel.com/11fs), and redeem an exclusive offer of 3 months free when you hire a contractor and 20% for your first year when you hire an employee. This episode is sponsored by Blueshift Customers expect more from their digital experience and their personal finance is no exception. Blueshift empowers fintech and financial institutions to create secure customer profiles and intentional, relevant experiences for customers. Whether in app, on site, in branch, or anywhere else, Blueshift's SmartHub CDP helps brands like Lending Tree and ClearScore turn data into personalized experiences that increase retention, satisfaction, and revenue. Learn more about the Blueshift at blueshift.com/11fs. Fintech Insider by 11:FS is a podcast dedicated to all things fintech, banking, technology and financial services. Hosted by a rotation of 11:FS experts including David Brear, Simon Taylor, Jason Bates and Sarah Kocianski and joined by a range of brilliant guests, we cover the latest global news, bring you interviews from industry experts or take a deep dive into subject matters such as APIs, AI or digital banking. If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe and please leave a review Follow us on Twitter: www.twitter.com/fintechinsiders where you can ask the hosts questions, alternatively email podcasts@11fs.com! Special Guests: Alexandra Frean, Petrit Berisha, and Vivienne Hsu.

We have Lexaria Bioscience Chairman and CEO Chris Bunka stopping by for a fascinating discussion on disruption, the art of being a CEO, and their innovative technology DehydraTECH™. DehydraTECH™ improves the way active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) enter the bloodstream by promoting healthier delivery methods and increasing the effectiveness of fat-soluble active molecules and drugs. Chris is a published author and was previously a serial entrepreneur for over three decades. In today's episode, you'll hear: Chris's origin story and what makes him tick The art of being a CEO The thought process behind pivoting Lexaria (and how you can think about pivoting) How Lexaria became what it is today Why you must have your ethics and values in order What is DehydraTECH™ The many potential benefits of DehydraTECH™ The process to get listed on NASDAQ and some things to expect How Chris goes about adding team members (and the number one thing he looks for) What's on the horizon for Lexaria Some of the significant health issues Lexaria is attacking Chris's wellness habits And much more Connect with Chris: Website: https://www.lexariabioscience.com/ Investment platforms: Type LEXX Connect with Julian: Superhuman Optimization & Enhancement Program: https://theartoffitnessandlife.com/us/ Connect with me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/thejulianhayes Connect with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/julianhayes

About RichardHe's also an instructor at Pluralsight, a frequent public speaker, and the author of multiple books on software design and development. Richard maintains a regularly updated blog (seroter.com) on topics of architecture and solution design and can be found on Twitter as @rseroter. Links: Twitter: https://twitter.com/rseroter LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/seroter Seroter.com: https://seroter.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: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Vultr. Spelled V-U-L-T-R because they're all about helping save money, including on things like, you know, vowels. So, what they do is they are a cloud provider that provides surprisingly high performance cloud compute at a price that—while sure they claim its better than AWS pricing—and when they say that they mean it is less money. Sure, I don't dispute that but what I find interesting is that it's predictable. They tell you in advance on a monthly basis what it's going to going to cost. They have a bunch of advanced networking features. They have nineteen global locations and scale things elastically. Not to be confused with openly, because apparently elastic and open can mean the same thing sometimes. They have had over a million users. Deployments take less that sixty seconds across twelve pre-selected operating systems. Or, if you're one of those nutters like me, you can bring your own ISO and install basically any operating system you want. Starting with pricing as low as $2.50 a month for Vultr cloud compute they have plans for developers and businesses of all sizes, except maybe Amazon, who stubbornly insists on having something to scale all on their own. Try Vultr today for free by visiting: vultr.com/screaming, and you'll receive a $100 in credit. Thats v-u-l-t-r.com slash screaming.Corey: You know how git works right?Announcer: Sorta, kinda, not really Please ask someone else!Corey: Thats all of us. Git is how we build things, and Netlify is one of the best way I've found to build those things quickly for the web. Netlify's git based workflows mean you don't have to play slap and tickle with integrating arcane non-sense and web hooks, which are themselves about as well understood as git. Give them a try and see what folks ranging from my fake Twitter for pets startup, to global fortune 2000 companies are raving about. If you end up talking to them, because you don't have to, they get why self service is important—but if you do, be sure to tell them that I sent you and watch all of the blood drain from their faces instantly. You can find them in the AWS marketplace or at www.netlify.com. N-E-T-L-I-F-Y.comCorey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. Once upon a time back in the days of VH1, which was like MTV except it played music videos, would have a show that was, “Where are they now?” Looking at former celebrities. I will not use the term washed up because that's going to be insulting to my guest.Richard Seroter is a returning guest here on Screaming in the Cloud. We spoke to him a year ago when he was brand new in his role at Google as director of outbound product management. At that point, he basically had stars in his eyes and was aspirational around everything he wanted to achieve. And now it's a year later and he has clearly failed because it's Google. So, outbound products are clearly the things that they are going to be deprecating, and in the past year, I am unaware of a single Google Cloud product that has been outright deprecated. Richard, thank you for joining me, and what do you have to say for yourself?Richard: Yeah, “Where are they now?” I feel like I'm the Leif Garrett of cloud here, joining you. So yes, I'm still here, I'm still alive. A little grayer after twelve months in, but happy to be here chatting cloud, chatting whatever else with you.Corey: I joke a little bit about, “Oh, Google winds up killing things.” And let's be clear, your consumer division which, you know, Google is prone to that. And understanding a company's org chart is a challenge. A year or two ago, I was of the opinion that I didn't need to know anything about Google Cloud because it would probably be deprecated before I really had to know about it. My opinion has evolved considerably based upon a number of things I'm seeing from Google.Let's be clear here, I'm not saying this to shine you on or anything like that; it's instead that I've seen some interesting things coming out of Google that I consider to be the right moves. One example of that is publicly signing multiple ten-year deals with very large, serious institutions like Deutsche Bank, and others. Okay, you don't generally sign contracts with companies of that scale and intend not to live up to them. You're hiring Forrest Brazeal as your head of content for Google Cloud, which is not something you should do lightly, and not something that is a short-term play in any respect. And the customer experience has continued to improve; Google Cloud products have not gotten worse, and I'm seeing in my own customer conversations that discussions about Google Cloud have become significantly less dismissive than they were over the past year. Please go ahead and claim credit for all of that.Richard: Yeah. I mean, the changes a year ago when I joined. So, Thomas Kurian has made a huge impact on some of that. You saw us launch the enterprise APIs thing a while back, which was, “Hey, here's, for the most part, every one of our products that has a fixed API. We're not going to deprecate it without a year's notice, whatever it is. We're not going to make certain types of changes.” Maybe that feels like, “Well, you should have had that before.” All right, all we can do is improve things moving forward. So, I think that was a good change.Corey: Oh, I agree. I think that was a great thing to do. You had something like 80-some-odd percent coverage of Google Cloud services, and great, that's going to only increase with time, I can imagine. But I got a little pushback from a few Googlers for not being more congratulatory towards them for doing this, and look, it's a great thing. Don't get me wrong, but you don't exactly get a whole lot of bonus points and kudos and positive press coverage—not that I'm press—for doing the thing you should have been doing [laugh] all along.It's, “This is great. This is necessary.” And it demonstrates a clear awareness that there was—rightly or wrongly—a perception issue around the platform's longevity and that you've gone significantly out of your way to wind up addressing that in ways that go far beyond just yelling at people on Twitter they don't understand the true philosophy of Google Cloud, which is the right thing to do.Richard: Yeah, I mean, as you mentioned, look, the consumer side is very experimental in a lot of cases. I still mourn Google Reader. Like, those things don't matter—Corey: As do we all.Richard: Of course. So, I get that. Google Cloud—and of course we have the same cultural thing, but at the same time, there's a lifecycle management that's different in Google Cloud. We do not deprecate products that much. You know, enterprises make decade-long bets. I can't be swap—changing databases or just turning off messaging things. Instead, we're building a core set of things and making them better.So, I like the fact that we have a pretty stable portfolio that keeps getting a little bit bigger. Not crazy bigger; I like that we're not just throwing everything out there saying, “Rock on.” We have some opinions. But I think that's been a positive trend, customers seem to like that we're making these long-term bets. We're not going anywhere for a long time and our earnings quarter after quarter shows it—boy, this will actually be a profitable business pretty soon.Corey: Oh, yeah. People love to make hay, and by people, I stretch the term slightly and talk about, “Investment analysts say that Google Cloud is terrible because at your last annual report you're losing something like $5 billion a year on Google Cloud.” And everyone looked at me strangely, when I said, “No, this is terrific. What that means is that they're investing in the platform.” Because let's be clear, folks at Google tend to be intelligent, by and large, or at least intelligent enough that they're not going to start selling cloud services for less than it costs to run them.So yeah, it is clearly an investment in the platform and growth of it. The only way it should be turning a profit at this point is if there's no more room to invest that money back into growing the platform, given your market position. I think that's a terrific thing, and I'm not worried at all about it losing money. I don't think anyone should be.Richard: Yeah, I mean, strategically, look, this doesn't have to be the same type of moneymaker that even some other clouds have to be to their portfolio. Look, this is an important part, but you look at those ten-year deals that we've been signing: when you look at Univision, that's a YouTube partnership; you look at Ford that had to do with Android Auto; you look at these others, this is where us being also a consumer and enterprise SaaS company is interesting because this isn't just who's cranking out the best IaaS. I mean, that can be boring stuff over time. It's like, who's actually doing the stuff that maybe makes a traditional company more interesting because they partner on some of those SaaS services. So, those are the sorts of deals and those sorts of arrangements where cloud needs to be awesome, and successful, and make money, doesn't need to be the biggest revenue generator for Google.Corey: So, when we first started talking, you were newly minted as a director of outbound product management. And now, you are not the only one, there are apparently 60 of you there, and I'm no closer to understanding what the role encompasses. What is your remit? Where do you start? Where do you stop?Richard: Yeah, that's a good question. So, there's outbound product management teams, mostly associated with the portfolio area. So network, storage, AI, analytics, database, compute, application modernization-y sort of stuff—which is what I cover—containers, dev tools, serverless. Basically, I am helping make sure the market understands the product and the product understands the market. And not to be totally glib, but a lot of that is, we are amplification.I'm amplifying product out to market, analysts, field people, partners: “Do you understand this thing? Can I help you put this in context?” But then really importantly, I'm trying to help make sure we're also amplifying the market back to our product teams. You're getting real customer feedback: “Do you know what that analyst thinks? Have you heard what happened in the competitive space?”And so sometimes companies seem to miss that, and PMs poke their head up when I'm about to plan a product or I'm about to launch a product because I need some feedback. But keeping that constant pulse on the market, on customers, on what's going on, I think that can be a secret weapon. I'm not sure everybody does that.Corey: Spending as much time as I do on bills, admittedly AWS bills, but this is a pattern that tends to unfold across every provider I've seen. The keynotes are chock-full of awesome managed service announcements, things that are effectively turnkey at further up the stack levels, but the bills invariably look a lot more like, yeah, we spend a bit of money on that and then we run 10,000 virtual instances in a particular environment and we just treat it like it's an extension of our data center. And that's not exciting; that's not fun, quote-unquote, but it's absolutely what customers are doing and I'm not going to sit here and tell them that they're wrong for doing it. That is the hallmark of a terrible consultant of, “I don't understand why you're doing what you're doing, so it must be foolish.” How about you stop and gain some context into why customers do the things that they do?Richard: No, I send around a goofy newsletter every week to a thousand or two people, just on things I'm learning from the field, from customers, trying to make sure we're just thinking bigger. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote an idea about modernization is awesome, and I love when people upgrade their software. By the way, most people migration is a heck of a lot easier than if I can just get this into your cloud, yeah love that; that's not the most interesting thing, to move VMs around, but most people in their budget, don't have time to rewrite every Java app to go. Everybody's not changing .NET framework to .NET core.Like, who do I think everybody is? No, I just need to try to get some incremental value first. Yes, then hopefully I'll swap out my self-managed SQL database for a Spanner or a managed service. Of course, I want all of that, but this idea that I can turn my line of business loan processing app into a thousand functions overnight is goofy. So, how are we instead thinking more pragmatically about migration, and then modernizing some of it? But even that sort of mindset, look, Google thinks about innovation modernization first. So, also just trying to help us take a step back and go, “Gosh, what is the normal path? Well, it's a lot of migration first, some modernization, and then there's some steady-state work there.”Corey: One of the things that surprised me the most about Google Cloud in the market, across the board, has been the enthusiastic uptake for enterprise workloads. And by enterprise workloads, I'm talking about things like SAP HANA is doing a whole bunch of deployments there; we're talking Big Iron-style enterprise-y things that, let's be honest, countervene most of the philosophy that Google has always held and espoused publicly, at least on conference stages, about how software should be built. And I thought that would cut against them and make it very difficult for you folks to gain headway in that market and I could not have been more wrong. I'm talking to large enterprises who are enthusiastically talking about Google Cloud. I've got a level with you, compared to a year or two ago, I don't recognize the place.Richard: Mmm. I mean, some of that, honestly, in the conversations I have, and whatever I do a handful of customer calls every week, I think folks still want something familiar, but you're looking for maybe a further step on some of it. And that means, like, yes, is everybody going to offer VMs? Yeah, of course. Is everyone going to have MySQL? Obviously.But if I'm an enterprise and I'm doing these generational bets, can I cheat a little bit, and maybe if I partner with a more of an innovation partner versus maybe just the easy next step, am I buying some more relevance for the long-term? So, am I getting into environment that has some really cool native zero-trust stuff? Am I getting into environment with global backend services and I'm not just stitching together a bunch of regional stuff? How can I cheat by using a more innovation vendor versus just lifting and shifting to what feels like hosted software in another cloud? I'm seeing more of that because these migrations are tough; nobody should be just randomly switching clouds. That's insane.So, can I make, maybe, one of these big bets with somebody who feels like they might actually even improve my business as a whole because I can work with Google Pay and improve how I do mobile payments, or I could do something here with Android? Or, heck, all my developers are using Angular and Flutter; aren't I going to get some benefit from working with Google? So, we're seeing that, kind of, add-on effect of, “Maybe this is a place not just to host my VMs, but to take a generational leap.”Corey: And I think that you're positioning yourselves in a way to do it. Again, talk about things that you wouldn't have expected to come out of Google of all places, but your console experience has been first-rate and has been for a while. The developer experience is awesome; I don't need to learn the intricacies of 12 different services for what I'm trying to do just in order to get something basic up and running. I can stop all the random little billing things in my experimental project with a single click, which that admittedly has a confirm, which you kind of want. But it lets you reason about these things.It lets you get started building something, and there's a consistency and cohesiveness to the console that, again, I am not a graphic designer, by any stretch of the imagination. My most commonly used user interface is a green-screen shell prompt, and then I'm using Vim to wind up writing something horrifying, ideally in Python, but more often in YAML. And that has been my experience, but just clicking around the console, it's clear that there was significant thought put into the design, the user experience, and the way of approaching folks who are starting to look very different, from a user persona perspective.Richard: I can—I mean, I love our user research team; they're actually fun to hang out with and watch what they do, but you have to remember, Google as a company, I don't know, cloud is the first thing we had to sell. Did have to sell Gmail. I remember 15 years ago, people were waiting for invites. And who buys Maps or who buys YouTube? For the most part, we've had to build things that were naturally interesting and easy-to-use because otherwise, you would just switch to anything else because everything was free.So, some of that does infuse Google Cloud, “Let's just make this really easy to use. And let's just make sure that, maybe, you don't hate yourself when you're done jumping into a shell from the middle of the console.” It's like, that should be really easy to do—or upgrade a database, or make changes to things. So, I think some of the things we've learned from the consumer good side, have made their way to how we think of UX and design because maybe this stuff shouldn't be terrible.Corey: There's a trope going around, where I wound up talking about the next million cloud customers. And I'm going to have to write a sequel to it because it turns out that I've made a fundamental error, in that I've accepted the narrative that all of the large cloud vendors are pushing, to the point where I heard from so many folks I just accepted it unthinkingly and uncritically, and that's not what I should be doing. And we'll get to what I was wrong about in a minute, but the thinking goes that the next big growth area is large enterprises, specifically around corporate IT. And those are folks who are used to managing things in a GUI environment—which is fine—and clicking around in web apps. Now, it's easy to sit here on our high horse and say, “Oh, you should learn to write code,” or YAML, which is basically code. Cool.As an individual, I agree, someone should because as soon as they do that, they are now able to go out and take that skill to a more lucrative role. The company then has to backfill someone into the role that they just got promoted out of, and the company still has that dependency. And you cannot succeed in that market with a philosophy of, “Oh, you built something in the console. Now, throw it away and do it right.” Because that is maddening to that user persona. Rightfully so.I'm not that user persona and I find it maddening when I have to keep tripping over that particular thing. How did that come to be, from your perspective? First, do you think that is where the next million cloud customers come from? And have I adequately captured that user persona, or am I completely often the weeds somewhere?Richard: I mean, I shared your post internally when that one came out because that resonated with me of how we were thinking about it. Again, it's easy to think about the cloud-native operators, it's Spotify doing something amazing, or this team at Twitter doing something, or whatever. And it's not even to be disparaging. Like, look, I spent five years in enterprise IT and I was surrounded by operators who had to run dozen different systems; they weren't dedicated to just this thing or that. So, what are the tools that make my life easy?A lot of software just comes with UIs for quick install and upgrades, and how does that logic translate to this cloud world? I think that stuff does matter. How are you meeting these people a little better where they are? I think the hard part that we will always have in every cloud provider is—I think you've said this in different forums, but how do I not sometimes rub the data center on my cloud or vice versa? I also don't want to change the experience so much where I degrade it over the long term, I've actually somehow done something worse.So, can I meet those people where they are? Can we pull some of those experiences in, but not accidentally do something that kind of messes up the cloud experience? I mean, that's a fine line to walk. Does that make sense to you? Do you see where there's a… I don't know, you could accidentally cater to a certain audience too much, and change the experience for the worse?Corey: Yes, and no. My philosophy on it is that you have to meet customers where they are, but only to a point. At some point, what they're asking for becomes actively harmful or disadvantageous to wind up providing for them. “I want you to run my data center for me,” is on some level what some cloud environments look like, and I'm not going to sit here and tell people they're inherently wrong for that. Their big reason for moving to the cloud was because they keep screwing up replacing failed hard drives in their data center, so we're going to put it in the cloud.Is it more expensive that way? Well, sure in terms of actual cash outlay, it almost certainly is, but they're also not going down every month when a drive fails, so once the value of that? It's a capability story. That becomes interesting to me, and I think that trying to sit here in isolation, and say that, “Oh, this application is not how we would build it at Google.” And it's, “Yeah, you're Google. They are insert an entire universe of different industries that look nothing whatsoever like Google.” The constraints are different, the resources are different, and—Richard: Sure.Corey: —their approach to problem-solving are different. When you built out Google, and even when you're building out Google Cloud, look at some of the oldest craftiest stuff you have in your entire all of Google environment, and then remember that there are companies out there that are hundreds of years old. It's a different order of magnitude as far as era, as far as understanding of what's in the environment, and that's okay. It's a very broad and very diverse world.Richard: Yeah. I mean, that's, again, why I've been thinking more about migration than even some of the modernization piece. Should you bring your network architecture from on-prem to the cloud? I mean, I think most cases, no. But I understand sometimes that edge firewall, internal trust model you had on-prem, okay, trying to replicate that.So, yeah, like you say, I want to meet people where they are. Can we at least find some strategic leverage points to upgrade aspects of things as you get to a cloud, to save you from yourself in some places because all of a sudden, you have ten regions and you only had one data center before. So, many more rooms for mistakes. Where are the right guardrails? We're probably more opinionated than others at Google Cloud.I don't really apologize for that completely, but I understand. I mean, I think we've loosened up a lot more than maybe people [laugh] would have thought a few years ago, from being hyper-opinionated on how you run software.Corey: I will actually push back a bit on the idea that you should not replicate your on-premises data center in your cloud environment. Sure, are there more optimal ways to do it that are arguably more secure? Absolutely. But a common failure mode in moving from data center to cloud is, “All right, we're going to start embracing this entirely new cloud networking paradigm.” And it is confusing, and your team that knows how the data center network works really well are suddenly in way over their heads, and they're inadvertently exposing things they don't intend to or causing issues.The hard part is always people, not technology. So, when I glance at an environment and see things like that, perfect example, are there more optimal ways to do it? Oh, from a technology perspective, absolutely. How many engineers are working on that? What's their skill set? What's their position on all this? What else are they working on? Because you're never going to find a team of folks who are world-class experts in every cloud? It doesn't work that way.Richard: No doubt. No doubt, you're right. There's areas where we have to at least have something that's going to look similar, let you replicate aspects of it. I think it's—it'll just be interesting to watch, and I have enough conversations with customers who do ask, “Hey, where are the places we should make certain changes as we evolve?” And maybe they are tactical, and they're not going to be the big strategic redesign their entire thing. But it is good to see people not just trying to shovel everything from one place to the next.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by something new. Cloud Academy is a training platform built on two primary goals. Having the highest quality content in tech and cloud skills, and building a good community the is rich and full of IT and engineering professionals. You wouldn't think those things go together, but sometimes they do. Its both useful for individuals and large enterprises, but here's what makes it new. I don't use that term lightly. Cloud Academy invites you to showcase just how good your AWS skills are. For the next four weeks you'll have a chance to prove yourself. Compete in four unique lab challenges, where they'll be awarding more than $2000 in cash and prizes. I'm not kidding, first place is a thousand bucks. Pre-register for the first challenge now, one that I picked out myself on Amazon SNS image resizing, by visiting cloudacademy.com/corey. C-O-R-E-Y. That's cloudacademy.com/corey. We're gonna have some fun with this one!Corey: Now, to follow up on what I was saying earlier, what I think I've gotten wrong by accepting the industry talking points on is that the next million cloud customers are big enterprises moving from data centers into the cloud. There's money there, don't get me wrong, but there is a larger opportunity in empowering the creation of companies in your environment. And this is what certain large competitors of yours get very wrong, where it's we're going to launch a whole bunch of different services that you get to build yourself from popsicle sticks. Great. That is not useful.But companies that are trying to do interesting things, or people who want to found companies to do interesting things, want something that looks a lot more turnkey. If you are going to be building cloud offerings, that for example, are terrific building blocks for SaaS companies, then it behooves you to do actual investments, rather than just a generic credit offer, into spurring the creation of those types of companies. If you want to build a company that does payroll systems, in a SaaS, cloud way, “Partner with us. Do it here. We will give you a bunch of credits. We will introduce you to your first ten prospective customers.”And effectively actually invest in a company success, as opposed to pitch-deck invest, which is, “Yeah, we'll give you some discounting and some credits, and that's our quote-unquote, ‘investment.'” actually be there with them as a partner. And that's going to take years for folks to wrap their heads around, but I feel like that is the opportunity that is significantly larger, even than the embedded existing IT space because rather than fighting each other for slices of the pie, I'm much more interested in expanding that pie overall. One of my favorite questions to get asked because I think it is so profoundly missing the point is, “Do you think it's possible for Google to go from number three to number two,” or whatever the number happens to be at some point, and my honest, considered answer is, “Who gives a shit?” Because number three, or number five, or number twelve—it doesn't matter to me—is still how many hundreds of billions of dollars in the fullness of time. Let's be real for a minute here; the total addressable market is expanding faster than any cloud or clouds are going to be able to capture all of.Richard: Yeah. Hey, look, whoever who'll be more profitable solving user problems, I really don't care about the final revenue number. I can be the number one cloud tomorrow by making Google Cloud free. What's the point? That's not a sustainable business. So, if you're just going for who can deploy the most VCPUs or who can deploy the most whatever, there's ways to game that. I want to make sure we are just uniquely solving problems better than anybody else.Corey: Sorry, forgive me. I just sort of zoned out for a second there because I'm just so taken aback and shocked by the idea of someone working at a large cloud provider who expresses a philosophy that isn't lying awake at night fretting over the possibility of someone who isn't them as making money somewhere.Richard: [laugh]. I mean, your idea there, it'll be interesting to watch, kind of, the maker's approach of are you enabling that next round of startups, the next round of people who want to take—I mean, honestly, I like the things we're doing building block-wise, even with our AI: we're not just handing you a vision API, we're giving you a loan processing AI that can process certain types of docs, that more packaged version of AI. Same with healthcare, same with whatever. I can imagine certain startups or a company idea going, “Hey, maybe I could disrupt or serve a new market.”I always love what Square did. They've disrupted emerging markets, small merchants here in North America, wherever, where I didn't need a big expensive point of sale system. You just gave me the nice, right building blocks to disrupt and run my business. Maybe Google Cloud can continue to provide better building blocks, but I do like your idea of actually investment zones, getting part of this. Maybe the next million users are founders and it's not just getting into some of these companies with, frankly, 10, 20, 30,000 people in IT.I think there's still plenty of room in these big enterprises to unlock many more of those companies, much more of their business. But to your point, there's a giant market here that we're not all grabbing yet. For crying out loud, there's tons of opportunity out here. This is not zero-sum.Corey: Take it a step further beyond that, and today, if you have someone who's enterprising, early on in their career, maybe they just got out of school, maybe they have just left their job and are ready to snap, or they have some severance money that they want to throw into something. Great. What do they want to do if they have an idea for a company? Well today, that answer looks a lot like, well, time to go to a boot camp and learn to code for six months so you can build a badly done MVP well enough to get off the ground and get some outside investment, and then go from there. Well, what if we cut that part out entirely?What if there were building blocks of I don't need to know or care that there's a database behind it, or what a database looks like. Picture Visual Basic in a web browser for building apps, and just take this bit of information I give you and store it and give it back to me later. Sure, you're going to have some significant challenges in the architecture or something like that as it goes from this thing that I'm talking about as an MVP to something planet-scale—like a Spotify for example—but that's not most businesses, and that's okay. Get out of the way and let people innovate and iterate on what it is they're doing more rapidly, and make it more accessible to teach people. That becomes huge; that gets the infrastructure bits that cloud providers excel at out of the way, and all it really takes is packaging those things into a golden path of what a given company of a particular profile should be doing, if—unless they have reason to deviate from it—and instead of having this giant paradox of choice issue, it's, “Oh, okay, I'll drag-drop, build things accordingly.”And under the hood, it's doing all the configuration of services and that's great. But suddenly, you've made being a founder of a software company—fundamentally—accessible to people who are not themselves software engineers. And I know that's anathema to some people, and I don't even slightly care because I am done with gatekeeping.Richard: Yeah. No, it's exciting if that can pull off. I mean, it's not the years ago where, how much capital was required to find the rack and do all sorts of things with tech, and hire some developers. And it's an amazing time to be software creators, now. The more we can enable that—yeah, I'm along for that journey, sign me up.Corey: I'm looking forward to seeing how it winds up shaking out. So, I want to talk a little bit about the paradox of choice problem that I just mentioned. If you take a look at the various compute services that every cloud provider offers, there are an awful lot of different choices as far as what you can run. There's the VM model, there's containers—if you're in AWS, you have 17 ways to run those—and you wind up—any of the serverless function story, and other things here and there, and managed services, I mean and honestly, Google has a lot of them, nowhere near as many as you do failed messaging products, but still, an awful lot of compute options. How do customers decide?What is the decision criteria that you see? Because the worst answer you can give someone who doesn't really know what they're doing is, “It depends,” because people don't know how to make that decision. It's, “What factors should I consider then, while making that decision?” And the answer has to be something somewhat authoritative because otherwise, they're going to go on the internet and get yelled at by everyone because no one is ever going to agree on this, except that everyone else is wrong.Richard: Mm-hm. Yeah, I mean, on one hand, look, I like that we intentionally have fewer choices than others because I don't think you need 17 ways to run a container. I think that's excessive. I think more than five is probably excessive because as a customer, what is the trade-off? Now, I would argue first off, I don't care if you have a lot of options as a vendor, but boy, the backends of those better be consistent.Meaning if I have a CI/CD tool in my portfolio and it only writes to two of them, shame on me. Then I should make sure that at least CI/CD, identity management, log management, monitoring, arguably your compute runtime should be a late-binding choice. And maybe that's blasphemous because somebody says, “I want to start up front knowing it's a function,” or, “I want to start it's a VM.” How about, as a developer, I couldn't care less. How about I just build cool software and maybe even at deploy time, I say, “This better fits in running in Kubernetes.” “This is better in a virtual machine.”And my cost of changing that later is meaningless because, hey, if it is in the container, I can switch it between three or four different runtimes, the identity management the same, it logs the exact same way, I can deploy CI/CD the same way. So, first off, if those things aren't the same, then the vendor is messing up. So, the customer shouldn't have to pay the cost of that. And then there gets to be other actual criteria. Look, I think you are looking at the workload itself, the team who makes it, and the strategy to figure out the runtime.It's easy for us. Google Compute Engine for VMs, containers go in GKE, managed services that need some containers, there are some apps around them, are Cloud Functions and Cloud Run. Like, it's fairly straightforward and it's going to be an OR situation—or an AND situation not an OR, which is great. But we're at least saying the premium way to run containers in Google Cloud for systems is GKE. There you go. If you do have a bunch of managed services in your architecture and you're stitching them together, then you want more serverless things like Cloud Run and Cloud Functions. And if you want to just really move some existing workload, GCE is your best choice. I like that that's fairly straightforward. There's still going to be some it depends, but it feels better than nine ways to run Kubernetes engines.Corey: I'm sure we'll see them in the fullness of time.Richard: [laugh].Corey: So, talk about Anthos a bit. That was a thing that was announced a while back and it was extraordinarily unclear what it was. And then I looked at the pricing and it was $10,000 a month with a one-year minimum commitment, and is like, “Oh, it's not for me. That's why I don't get it.” And I haven't really looked back at it since. But it is something else now. It almost feels like a wrapper brand, in some respects. How's it going? [unintelligible 00:29:26]?Richard: Yeah. Consumption, we'll talk more upcoming months on some of the adoption, but we're finally getting the hockey stick, which always comes delayed with platforms because nobody adopts platforms quickly. They buy the platform and a year later they start to actually build new development, migrate the things they have. So, we're starting to see the sort of growth. But back to your first point. And I even think I poorly tried to explain it a year ago with you. Basically, look, Anthos is the ability to manage fleets of GKE clusters, wherever they are. I don't care if they're on-prem, I don't care if they're in Google Cloud, I don't care if they're Amazon. We have one customer who only uses Anthos on AWS. Awesome, rock on.So, how do I put GKE clusters everywhere, but then do fleet management because look, some people are doing an app per cluster. They don't want to jam 50 apps in the cluster from different teams because they don't like the idea that this app requires root access; now you can screw around with mine. Or, you didn't update; that broke the cluster. I don't want any of that. So, you're going to see companies more, doing even app per cluster, app per developer per cluster.So, now I have a fleet problem. How do I keep it in sync? How do I make sure policy is consistent? Those sorts of things. So, Anthos is kind of solving the fleet management challenge and replacing people's first-gen app platform.Seeing a lot of those use cases, “Hey, we're retiring our first version of Docker Enterprise, Mesos, Cloud Foundry, even OpenShift,” saying, “All right, now's the time for our next version of our app platform. How about GKE, plus Cloud Run on top of it, plus other stuff?” Sounds good. So, going well is a, sort of—as you mentioned, there's a brand story here, mainly because we've also done two things that probably matter to you. A, we changed the price a lot.No minimum commit, remarkably at 20% of the cost it was when we launched, on purpose because we've gotten better at this. So, much cheaper, no minimum commit, pay as you go. Be on-premises, on bare metal with GKE. Pay by the hour, I don't care; sounds great. So, you can do that sort of stuff.But then more importantly, if you're a GKE customer and you just want config management, service mesh, things like that, now you can buy all of those independently as well. And Anthos is really the brand for fleet management of GKE. And if you're on Google Cloud only, it adds value. If you're off Google Cloud, if you're multi-cloud, I don't care. But I want to manage fleets of compute clusters and create them. We're going to keep doubling down on that.Corey: The big problem historically for understanding a lot of the adoption paradigm of Kubernetes has been that it was, to some extent, a reimagining of how Google ran and built software internally. And I thought at the time, the idea was—from a cynical perspective—that, “All right, well, your crappy apps don't run well on Google-style infrastructure so we're going to teach the entire world how to write software the way that we do.” And then you end up with people running their blog on top of Kubernetes, where it's one of those, like, the first blog post is, like, “How I spent the last 18 months building Kubernetes.” And, okay, that is certainly a philosophy and an approach, but it's almost approaching Windows 95 launch level of hype, where people who didn't own computers were buying copies of it, on some level. And I see the term come up in conversations in places where it absolutely has no place being brought up. “How do I run a Kubernetes cluster inside of my laptop?” And, “It's what you got going on in there, buddy?”Richard: [laugh].Corey: “What do you think you're trying to do here because you just said something that means something that I think is radically different to me than it is to you.” And again, I'm not here to judge other people's workflows; they're all terrible, except for mine, which is an opinion held by everyone about their own workflow. But understanding where people are, figuring out how to get there, how to meet customers where they are and empower them. And despite how heavily Google has been into the Kubernetes universe since its inception, you're very welcoming to companies—and loud-mouth individuals on Twitter—who have no use for Kubernetes. And working through various products you offer, I don't ever feel like a second-class citizen. There's really something impressive about that, of not letting the hype dictate the product and marketing decisions of it.Richard: Yeah, look, I think I tweeted it recently, I think the future of software is managed services with containers in the gap, for the most part. Whereas—if you can use managed services, please do. Use them wherever you can. And if you have to sling some code, maybe put it in a really portable thing that's really easy to run in lots of places. So, I think that's smart.But for us, look, I think we have the best container workflow from dev tools, and build tools, and artifact registries, and runtimes, but plenty of people are running containers, and you shouldn't be running Kubernetes all over the place. That makes sense for the workload, I think it's better than a VM at the retail edge. Can I run a small cluster, instead of a weird point-of-sale Windows app? Maybe. Maybe it makes sense to have a lightweight Kubernetes cluster there for consistency purposes.So, for me, I think it's a great medium for a subset of software. Google Cloud is going to take whatever you got, which is great. I think containers are great, but at the same time, I'm happily going to let you deploy a function that responds to you adding a storage item to a bucket, where at the same time give you a SaaS service that replaces the need for any code. All of those are terrific. So yeah, we love Kubernetes. We think it's great. We're going to be the best version to run it. But that's not going to be your whole universe.Corey: No, and I would argue it absolutely shouldn't be.Richard: [laugh]. Right. Agreed. Now again, for some companies, it's a great replacement for this giant fleet of VMs that all runs at eight percent utilization. Can I stick this into a bunch of high-density clusters? Absolutely you should. You're going to save an absolute fortune doing that and probably pick up some resilience and functionality benefits.But to your point, “Do I want to run a WordPress site in there?” I don't know, probably not. “Do I need to run my own MySQL?” I'd prefer you not do that. So, in a lot of cases, don't use it unless you have to. That should go for all compute nowadays. Use managed services.Corey: I'm a big believer in going down that approach just because it is so much easier than trying to build it yourself from popsicle sticks because you theoretically might have to move it someday in the future, even though you're not.Richard: [laugh]. Right.Corey: And it lets me feel better about a thing that isn't going to be used by anything that I'm doing in the near future. I just don't pretend to get it.Richard: No, I don't install a general purpose electric charger in my garage for any electric car I may get in the future; I charge for the one I have now. I just want it to work for my car; I don't want to plan for some mythical future. So yeah, premature optimization over architecture, or death in IT, especially nowadays where speed matters, don't waste your time building something that can run in nine clouds.Corey: Richard, I want to thank you for coming on again a year later to suffer my slings, arrows, and other various implements of misfortune. If people want to learn more about what you're doing, how you're doing it, possibly to pull a Forrest Brazeal and go work with you, where can they find you?Richard: Yeah, we're a fun place to work. So, you can find me on Twitter at @rseroter—R-S-E-R-O-T-E-R—hang out on LinkedIn, annoy me on my blog seroter.com as I try to at least explore our tech from time to time and mess around with it. But this is a fun place to work. There's a lot of good stuff going on here, and if you work somewhere else, too, we can still be friends.Corey: Thank you so much for your time today. Richard Seroter, director of outbound product management at Google. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn 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 comment into which you have somehow managed to shove a running container.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.

Recording date: Oct 21, 2021John Papa @John_PapaWard Bell @WardBellDan Wahlin @DanWahlinCraig Shoemaker @craigshoemakerMax Lynch @MaxLynchBrought to you byAG GridIdeaBladeResources:Ted Lasso TV showBantr mobile app on Ted LassoIonic FrameworkWhy is Android more popular globally, while iOS rules the US?AngularReactVueSvelteCapacitorPWATailwind CSSMicrosoft and Google Collaborate on Angular 2 Framework TypeScript LanguageTypeScriptServerless ComputingDevOpsIonic CLICapacitor CLIWeb AssemblySQL LiteIndexed DBJquery mobileSeeTimejumps01:15 Guest introduction04:26 How would you build Ted Lasso's Bantr07:31 Is Android easier to develop for?08:44 Sponsor: Ag Grid09:42 What tools and options are there to start with Ionic?15:23 Which framework is most used these days?18:07 How are APIs being hosted?22:07 Sponsor: IdeaBlade23:06 What is the devops process?31:23 Where do you see mobile vs non-mobile in the future?34:15 What do you recommend for routing?39:19 Final thoughtsPodcast editing on this episode done by Chris Enns of Lemon Productions.

Matthew Coatney, CIO at Thompson Hine, and author of The Human Cloud sits down and talks about what he sees as the transformation of how we work. According to Coatney, freelancing and project-based work (The Human Cloud) combined with Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (The Machine Cloud) will soon disrupt the way we deliver work. Law firms will not be exempt from this disruption. Matters are really just projects. Contract attorneys are freelancers. According to some experts, 80% of work to be done by organizations in the 2030s will be project-based work. And AI and ML will eat into the other 20%. Coatney says that we are missing out on an opportunity if we are not preparing for this reality. We asked how life as a CIO has changed over the past couple of decades for a CIO in a law firm and Coatney says that a CIO of 2000 would have culture shock if they were to be transported to today. CIOs are still the brand ambassadors of the IT departments, but Chief Technology Officers and Chief Data Officers are making their way into the fold to help offload some of the overwhelming responsibility that many of today's CIOs find falls on their shoulders. Matt also co-hosts The Human Cloud Podcast with Matthew Mottola where they put out twice-weekly episodes diving deeper into these topics. Go check out "The Matthews" on their own pod if you're curious about how the structure of work is going to change. Information Inspirations You may have noticed that we took last week off from this podcast, but we were busy recording other podcasts to fill the void. Greg went on the Legal Value Network's "Off the Clock" podcast and talked with Keith Maziarek of Katten and Percipent's Chad Main about the recent increase of available APIs from a number of legal information vendors. These APIs may very well open the door to a much easier method of pulling data in from vendors directly into internal law firm databases to better prepare firms to handle clients' needs. Marlene hosted an ILTA podcast panel on How Virtual Hearings Altered the Fabric of Dispute Resolution with Florida Circuit Judge Christopher Sprysenski, Trial Consultant with Paul Hastings, Jeremy Cooper, and Jackson Walker Partner, Richard Howell. The three give their personal experiences on how they handled virtual trials over the past twenty months. Contact Us Twitter: @gebauerm or @glambert. Voicemail: 713-487-7270 Email: geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com. Music: As always, the great music you hear on the podcast is from Jerry David DeCicca. Transcripts available on 3 Geeks and a Law Blog.

At Moderne, they automatically identify and patch security holes in your code, freeing you to create, build, and make exciting new things. Olga Kundzich and Jonathan Schneider join me on the Tech Talks Daily podcast to discuss the downsides of cloud-native application development and maintaining modern applications. It has become clear that modern cloud-native applications require a tremendous amount of maintenance to keep up with the constant changes to all of the components used to build them. This includes managing thousands of APIs and open source components. It is an enormous challenge for any size company, taking up to 30% of the development team's time, which acts as a tremendous drag on innovation and software quality. I learn how Moderne was founded to tackle this enormous problem. Moderne's technology is based on OpenRewrite, a large-scale tool for code maintenance that Moderne co-founder Jonathan Schneider developed while working at Netflix. Moderne has picked up OpenRewrite and expanded its scope.

Rambo longs to get back to UI development, John releases a new open source project, and the two embark on part one of their deep dive into Swift's new concurrency system. Also, organizing devices, and mechanical keyboards. Sponsored by Shortcut: The project management tool built specifically for software development teams. Start your extended two-month free trial at shortcut.com/sundell Sponsored by RevenueCat: RevenueCat makes it easy to build and manage in-app purchases on iOS, Android, and the web. Learn more.  Download MP3 Hosts Gui on Twitter: @_inside John on Twitter: @johnsundell Links Swift by Sundell episode with Christian Selig CollectionConcurrencyKit The new, concurrent version of Publish Async sequences and streams Sketch NSXPCConnection Swift's concurrency system The WIP MultipeerKit concurrency implementation Adding pull-to-refresh to a SwiftUI List using async/await Making URLSession's async APIs backward compatible Task An example of running async unit tests on Linux Keychron K2 Subscribe 🟣 Apple Podcasts🟠 Overcast🟢 Spotify If you have any feedback about the show, feel free to reach out on Twitter or send us an email.

My guest today is Dave Connor, a DAO member at API3. API3 is a platform for decentralized API services targeted at the web3 infrastructure. Data feeds are served and governed in a decentralized manner. In the standard internet web, API3's stated goal is to allow decentralized versions of APIs to be built, managed, and monetized at scale. As blockchain technology plays an even bigger role in the economy — from decentralized finance to supply chain management — the team behind this project says it has never been more important for smart contracts to provide “timely, reliable real-world data.” Oracles are a form of middleware that sits in between APIs and smart contracts — increasing costs and centralization. API3 intends to get around this problem by enabling API providers to operate their very own nodes. Dave is an experienced operations lead, having experience as a VP Of Business Development with a demonstrated history of working in the information technology and blockchain industry. Our conversation covers API3 and decentralized oracles, Smart Cities, real-world examples of the integration of blockchain and data. We begin our conversation by discussing API3 and decentralized oracles. Dave dives deep into oracles, the oracle problem, and the current limitations with on-chain data. We continue our conversation about oracles by discussing API3 and their approach to scaling a decentralized oracle. We finish our conversation about oracles by discussing the importance of providing superior data transparency all the way to the factual data source level to have a truly robust system. This naturally leads our conversation to how this technology is fundamental to building "Smart Cities." We begin our conversation about Smart Cities by discussing the lego blocks that trusted decentralized data can enable, we discuss for example how a developer could build a decentralized version of Uber with roughly 3 APIs. Our conversation continues by discussing how this technology can be extrapolated and applied at a larger scale like in cities. Dave also stresses the importance of building these systems with the necessary precautions to protect individual liberties and maintain individual data sovereignty to truly unlock the potential of Web3. We finish our conversation on Smart Cities by discussing how society will benefit from removing friction and creating a more interconnected society through the amalgamation of these services by this technology. We finish our discussion by discussing real-world examples of the integration of blockchain and data. We begin our conversation by discussing parametric insurance contracts. Dave does an excellent job at explaining the complexities of insurance contracts and why the insurance industry will be dramatically disrupted by blockchain and Web3. We also discuss how DAO's will disrupt Venture capital and HOAs. We continue our conversation by stressing the importance of providing superior data transparency all the way to the factual data source level to build systems that provide enough infrastructure to begin merging the traditional world with the crypto-world. Dave closes the conversation by discussing how DAOs are innovating governance and the differences between DAOs and traditional companies. --- ParaSwap: If you want to make a swap at the best price across the DeFi market, check out https://untoldstories.link/paraswap. ParaSwap's state-of-the-art algorithm beats the market price across all major DEXs and brings you the most optimized swaps with the best prices, and lowest slippage. Public: Start investing with as little as $1 and get a free slice of stock up to $50 when you join Public.com today. Visit public.com/UNTOLDSTORIES to download the app and sign up. -- This podcast is powered by Blockworks. For exclusive content and events that provide insights into the crypto and blockchain space, visit them at https://blockworks.co

Our expert hosts, Ross Gallagher and Gwera Kiwana, are joined by some great guests to talk about the most notable fintech, financial services and banking news from the past week. This week's guests include: Eric Johansson, Tech Editor, Verdict Douglas Mackenzie, Chief Content Officer, Fintech Finance Gustavo Brigatto, Founder and Editor-in-Chief, Startups With soundclips from: Hasan Luongo, VP of Global Marketing, Chipper Cash Oli Cook, CEO & Co-Founder, Ekko We cover the following stories from the fintech and financial services space: Brazil's Nubank targets over $50 billion valuation in U.S. IPO - 6:30 Chipper Cash gets $2B valuation with $150M extension round led by FTX (sound clip from Hasan Luongo, VP of Global Marketing, Chipper Cash) - 18:30 Eco-conscious debit card Ekko launches on first day of COP26 (sound clip from Oli Cook, CEO & Co-Founder, Ekko) - 32:23 Klarna sets collision course with Amazon in reported $1bn Pricerunner deal - 45:05 ING to wind down Payvision - 54:14 New UK fintech Cleva launches money management platform for carers - 56:00 Greenlight Creates a Platform for the 45% Of Parents Who Are Not Confident Investing - 57:28 Quentin Tarantino to offer seven uncut scenes from ‘Pulp Fiction' as NFTs - 58:38 This episode is sponsored by Temenos. Temenos is the world leader in banking software, serving over 3,000 financial institutions. SCALE 2021 is Temenos' dedicated, virtual developer event, including: insights from industry leaders on current technology trends and how they impact banking; customer presentations; product demonstrations and road-map sessions and opportunities to speak with Temenos experts. Whether you're a developer, consultant or business user, discover the latest technology opportunities and how this can help you deliver bigger, better, faster. Register to attend here. (https://tem.mn/3jYLZlm) This episode is sponsored by LetsDeel. There's a better way to hire internationally, and it starts with Deel. Everything from contract creation, record keeping, payments, and full-time employment is all in one place for teams all over the world. Companies anywhere can hire compliantly everywhere thanks to Deel. It's payroll and compliance built for today's worldwide workforce. To learn more, visit letsdeel/11fs (https://www.letsdeel.com/11fs), and redeem an exclusive offer of 3 months free when you hire a contractor and 20% for your first year when you hire an employee. This episode is sponsored by Blueshift Customers expect more from their digital experience and their personal finance is no exception. Blueshift empowers fintech and financial institutions to create secure customer profiles and intentional, relevant experiences for customers. Whether in app, on site, in branch, or anywhere else, Blueshift's SmartHub CDP helps brands like Lending Tree and ClearScore turn data into personalized experiences that increase retention, satisfaction, and revenue. Learn more about the Blueshift at blueshift.com/11fs. Fintech Insider by 11:FS is a podcast dedicated to all things fintech, banking, technology and financial services. Hosted by a rotation of 11:FS experts including David Brear, Simon Taylor, Jason Bates and Sarah Kocianski and joined by a range of brilliant guests, we cover the latest global news, bring you interviews from industry experts or take a deep dive into subject matters such as APIs, AI or digital banking. If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe and please leave a review Follow us on Twitter: www.twitter.com/fintechinsiders where you can ask the hosts questions, alternatively email podcasts@11fs.com! Special Guests: Douglas Mackenzie, Eric Johansson, and Gustavo Brigatto.

In this episode we dig into Grzegorz Róg's history and background, and how he established the largest Polish online education platform, and many other ventures. The biggest lesson to take from this podcast is important. Automation has explosive potential to transform organisations. The move towards No Code and APIs which connect “best of class” software applications creates tremendous opportunities for productivity enhancements in companies that embrace this way of doing things. It used to be said you should fear competitors who love what they do. Grzegorz's version of this idea is that you should fear competitors who know how to automate. This podcast is a convincing explanation of why this is true. About our guest Developing smarter, tech-driven online education. Serial entrepreneur running multiple online ventures. A great proponent of automation and no-code movement using robots to help grow online businesses. Fortune 500 companies consultant, author of over a hundred courses, books and articles. Goal oriented and always learning. Some of his projects: eduweb.pl - skillshare for Poland, 200k+ customers, 500+ courses, recording them in-house learnux.io - my ui/ux trainings in EN, 3 years running on automations alone systemflow.co - framework for Webflow zautomatyzowani.pl - automation project (automatify.io) with programme + automation house easycart.pl - 1-click checkout based on Stripe niekoduj.pl - no-code and webflow programme codeless.how - infoproduct - badass video tutorials on automating your business EN easytools.pl - tools for creators (just starting, few tools in private beta) ahoy.so - polish tech communities (2000+ people), for now UI/UX and nocode/automation The NBN Entrepreneurship and Leadership podcast aims to educate and entertain, sharing insights based on the personal story of our carefully selected guests aiming for the atmosphere of an informal conversation in a bar or over a cup of coffee.  About Kimon Fountoukidis Twitter Linkedin Kimon is the founder of both Argos Multilingual and PMR. Both companies were founded in the mid 90s with zero capital and both have gone on to become market leaders in their respective sectors. Kimon was born in New York and moved to Krakow, Poland in 1993. Listen to his story here, About Richard Lucas Twitter Linkedin Richard is a business and social entrepreneur who founded or invested in more than 30 businesses, including investments in Argos Multilingual, PMR and, in 2020, the New Books Network. Richard has been a TEDx event organiser, supports the pro-entrepreneurship ecosystem, and leads entrepreneurship workshops at all levels: from pre- to business schools. Richard was born in Oxford and moved to Poland in 1991. Read more here. Listen to his story in an autobiographical TEDx talk here, Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Fitbit was founded in 2007, originally as Healthy Metrics Research, Inc, by James Park and Eric Friedman. They had a goal to bring fitness trackers to market. They didn't invent the pedometer and in fact wanted to go far further. That prize goes to Abraham-Louis Perrelet of Switzerland in 1780 or possibly back to da Vinci. And there are stories of calculating the distance armies moved using various mechanisms that used automations based on steps or the spinning of wagon wheels. The era of wearables arguably began in 1953 when the transistor radio showed up and Akio Morita and Masaru Ibuka started Sony. People started to get accustomed to carrying around technology. 1961 and Claude Shannon and Edward Thorp build a small computer to time when balls would land in roulette. Which they put in a shoe. Meanwhile sensors that could detect motion and the other chips to essentially create a small computer in a watch-sized package were coming down in price. Apple had already released the Nike+iPod Sports Kit the year before, with a little sensor that went in my running shoes. And Fitbit capitalized on an exploding market for tracking fitness. Apple effectively proved the concept was ready for higher end customers. But remember that while the iPod was incredibly popular at the time, what about everyone else? Park and Friedman raised $400,000 on the idea in a pre-seed round and built a prototype. No, it wasn't actually a wearable, it was a bunch of sensors in a wooden box. That enabled them to shop around for more investors to actually finish a marketable device. By 2008 they were ready to take the idea to TechCrunch 50 and Tim O'Reilly and other panelists from TechCrunch loved it. And they picked up a whopping 2,000 pre-release orders. Only problem is they weren't exactly ready to take that kind of volume. So they toured suppliers around Asia for months and worked overtime in hotel rooms fixing design and architecture issues. And in 2009 they were finally ready and took 25,000 orders, shipping about one fifth of them. That device was called the Fitbit Tracker and took on a goal of 10,000 steps that became a popular goal in Japan in the 1960s. It's a little money-clip sized device with just one button that shows the status towards that 10,000 step goal. And once synchronized we could not only see tons of information about how many calories we burned and other statistics but we could also see Those first orders were sold directly through the web site. The next batch would be much different, going through Best Buy. The margins selling directly were much better and so they needed to tune those production lines. They went to four stores, then ten times that, then 15 times that. They announced the Fitbit Ultra in 2011. Here we got a screen that showed a clock but also came with a stopwatch. That would evolve into the Fitbit One in 2012. Bluetooth now allowed us to sync with our phones. That original device would over time evolve to the Zip and then the Inspire Clip. They grew fast in those first few years and enjoyed a large swathe of the market initially, but any time one vendor proves a market others are quick to fast-follow. The Nike Fuelband came along in 2012. There were also dozens of cheap $15 knock-offs in stores like Fry's. But those didn't have nearly as awesome an experience. A simple experience was the Fitbit Flex, released in 2013. The Fitbit could now be worn on the wrist. It looked more like the original tracker but a little smaller so it could slide in and out of a wristband. It could vibrate so could wake us up and remind us to get up and move. And the Fitbit Force came out that year, which could scroll through information on the screen, like our current step count. But that got some bad press for the nickel used on the device so the Charge came out the next year, doing much of the same stuff. And here we see the price slowly going up from below a hundred dollars to $130 as new models with better accelerometers came along. In 2014 they released a mobile app for all the major mobile platforms that allowed us to track devices through Bluetooth and opened up a ton of options to show other people our information. Chuck Schumer was concerned about privacy but the options for fitness tracking were about to explode in the other direction, becoming even less private. That's the same year the LG G Watch came out, sporting a Qualcomm Snapdragon chip. The ocean was getting redder and devices were becoming more like miniature computers that happened to do tracking as well. After Android Wear was released in 2014, now called Wear OS, the ocean was bound to get much, much redder. And yet, they continued to grow and thrive. They did an IPO, or Initial Public Offering, in 2015 on the back of selling over 21 million devices. They were ready to reach a larger market. Devices were now in stores like Walmart and Target, and they had badges. It was an era of gamification and they were one of the best in the market at that. Walk enough steps to have circumnavigated the sun? There's a badge for that. Walk the distance of the Nile? There's a badge for that. Do a round trip to the moon and back? Yup, there's a badge for that as well. And we could add friends in the app. Now we could compete to see who got more steps on the day. And of course some people cheated. Once I was wearing a Fitbit on my wrist I got 60,000 steps one day as I painted the kitchen. So we sometimes didn't even mean to cheat. And an ecosystem had sprung up around Fitbit. Like Fitstar, a personal training coach, which got acquired by Fitbit and rebranded as Fitbit Coach. 2015 was also when the Apple Watch was released. The Apple Watch added many of the same features like badges and similar statistics. By then there were models of the Fitbit that could show who was calling our phone or display a text message we got. And that was certainly part of the Wear OS for of Android. But those other devices were more expensive and Fitbit was still able to own the less expensive part of the market and spend on R&D to still compete at the higher end. They were flush with cash by 2016 so while selling 22 million more devices, they bought Coin and Pebble that year, taking in technology developed through crowdfunding sources and helping mass market it. That's the same year we got the Fitbit Alta, effectively merging the Charge and Alta and we got HR models of some devices, which stands for Heart Rate. Yup, they could now track that too. They bought Vector Watch SRL in 2017, the same year they released the Ionic smartwatch, based somewhat on the technology acquired from Pebble. But the stock took a nosedive, and the market capitalization was cut in half. They added weather to the Ionic and merged that tech with that from the Blaze, released the year before. Here, we see technology changing quickly - Pebble was merged with Blaze but Wear OS from Google and Watch OS from Apple were forcing changes all the faster. The apps on other platforms were a clear gap as were the sensors baked into so many different integrated circuit packages. But Fitbit could still compete. In 2018 they released a cheaper version of the smartwatch called the Versa. They also released an API that allowed for a considerable amount of third party development, as well as Fitbit OS 3. They also bought Twine Health in 2018 Partnered with Adidas in 2018 for the ionic. Partnered with Blue Cross Blue Shield to reduce insurance rates 2018 released the Charge 3 with oxygen saturation sensors and a 40% larger screen than the Charge 2. From there the products got even more difficult to keep track of, as they poked at every different corner of the market. The Inspire, Inspire HR, Versa 2, Versa Lite, Charge 4, Versa 3, Sense, Inspire 2, Luxe. I wasn't sure if they were going to figure out the killer device or not when Fitbit was acquired by Google in 2021. And that's where their story ends and the story of the ubiquitous ecosystem of Google begins. Maybe they continue with their own kernels or maybe they're moving all of their devices to WearOS. Maybe Google figures out how to pull together all of their home automation and personal tracking devices into one compelling offer. Now they get to compete with Amazon who now has the Halo to help attack the bottom of the market. Or maybe Google leaves the Fitbit team alone to do what they do. Fitbit has sold over 100 million devices and sports well over 25 million active users. The Apple Watch surpassed that number and blew right past it. WearOS lives in a much more distributed environment where companies like Asus, Samsung, and LG sell products but it appears to have a similar installation base. And it's a market still growing and likely looking for a leader, as it's easy to imagine a day when most people have a smart watch. But the world has certainly changed since Mark Weiser was the Chief Technologist at the famed Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, or Xerox Parc in 1988 when he coined the term "ubiquitous computing.” Technology hadn't entered every aspect of our lives at the time like it has now. The team at Fitbit didn't invent wearables. George Atwood invented them in 1783. That was mostly pulleys and mechanics. Per V. Brüel first commercialized the piezoelectric accelerometer in 1943. It certainly took a long time to get packaged into an integrated circuit and from there it took plenty of time to end up on my belt loop. But from there it took less than a few years to go on my wrist and then once there were apps for all the things true innovation came way faster. Because it turns out that once we open up a bunch of APIs, we have no idea the amazing things people use with what then go from devices to platforms. But none of that would have happened had Fitbit not helped prove the market was ready for Weiser's ubiquitous computing. And now we get to wrestle with the fallout while innovation is moving even faster. Because telemetry is the opposite of privacy. And if we forget to protect just one of those API endpoints, like not implementing rate throttling or messing up the permissions, or leaving a micro-service open to all the things, we can certainly end up telling the world all about things. Because the world is watching, whether we think we're important enough to watch or not.

Now that the WordPress acquisition market has cooled a bit, it's time to stoke the fire on all things Gatsby and JAMStack-y-ness….again. Don't let Full Site Editing steal all of the thunder, there's still so much happening around headless WordPress and the ability to integrate 3rd party APIs to take the place of plugins. Look, I know it's a polarizing thought process to some of us, but if we want WordPress to continue to grow -- we need to give it some room for new use cases. I'm joined by Alexandra Spolato to talk about her company GatsbyWPThemes and how this hotness comes with some red hot opportunity. If you're wondering how to make money in the WordPress theme space headed into 2022, look no further than this conversation. Get schooled on the technology and learn how the heck she found her co-founder along with their recipe to success splitting the responsibilities.

Our expert host, Gwera Kiwana, is joined by some great guests to talk about all things Big Data. Large banks were some of the first big believers in the power of Big Data – but issues meant that initial hopes weren't quite achieved. However, the potential of Big Data has progressed since those early days, and it's time to revisit where we go from here. So what have been the successes? What has proved challenging? And how can Big Data help us unlock the future of AI among other innovations? This week's guests include: Richard Hamerton-Stove, Director of Consulting, 11:FS Todd Winship - Product Director, Analytics, Temenos Sarah Welch, Managing Director, Curinos All of this and much more on today's episode! This episode is sponsored by Temenos. Temenos is the world leader in banking software, serving over 3,000 financial institutions. SCALE 2021 is Temenos' dedicated, virtual developer event, including: insights from industry leaders on current technology trends and how they impact banking; customer presentations; product demonstrations and road-map sessions and opportunities to speak with Temenos experts. Whether you're a developer, consultant or business user, discover the latest technology opportunities and how this can help you deliver bigger, better, faster. Register to attend here. (https://tem.mn/3jYLZlm) This episode is sponsored by LetsDeel. There's a better way to hire internationally, and it starts with Deel. Everything from contract creation, record keeping, payments, and full-time employment is all in one place for teams all over the world. Companies anywhere can hire compliantly everywhere thanks to Deel. It's payroll and compliance built for today's worldwide workforce. To learn more, visit letsdeel/11fs (https://www.letsdeel.com/11fs), and redeem an exclusive offer of 3 months free when you hire a contractor and 20% for your first year when you hire an employee. This episode is sponsored by Blueshift Customers expect more from their digital experience and their personal finance is no exception. Blueshift empowers fintech and financial institutions to create secure customer profiles and intentional, relevant experiences for customers. Whether in app, on site, in branch, or anywhere else, Blueshift's SmartHub CDP helps brands like Lending Tree and ClearScore turn data into personalized experiences that increase retention, satisfaction, and revenue. Learn more about the Blueshift at blueshift.com/11fs. Fintech Insider by 11:FS is a podcast dedicated to all things fintech, banking, technology and financial services. Hosted by a rotation of 11:FS experts including David Brear, Simon Taylor, Jason Bates and Sarah Kocianski and joined by a range of brilliant guests, we cover the latest global news, bring you interviews from industry experts or take a deep dive into subject matters such as APIs, AI or digital banking. If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe and please leave a review Follow us on Twitter: www.twitter.com/fintechinsiders where you can ask the hosts questions, alternatively email podcasts@11fs.com! Special Guests: Richard Hamerton-Stove, Sarah Welch, and Todd Winship.

Zeev Avidan, Chief Product Officer at OpenLegacy, discusses ways to extend the value and impact of legacy systems through the use of open APIs. Many organizations continue to work with legacy systems that are years -- sometimes decades -- old. What are the implications? And how can we use APIs to speed the pace of innovation, leverage the cloud, and extend the value and impact of legacy systems? Host, Kevin Craine Do you want to be a guest?    

Kafka Streams is a native streaming library for Apache Kafka® that consumes messages from Kafka to perform operations like filtering a topic's message and producing output back into Kafka. After working as a developer in stream processing, Bill Bejeck (Apache Kafka Committer and Integration Architect, Confluent) has found his calling in sharing knowledge and authoring his book, “Kafka Streams in Action.” As a Kafka Streams expert, Bill is also the author of the Kafka Streams 101 course on Confluent Developer, where he delves into what Kafka Streams is, how to use it, and how it works. Kafka Streams provides the abstraction over Kafka consumers and producers by minimizing administrative details like the need to code and manage frameworks required when using plain Kafka consumers and producers to process streams. Kafka Streams is declarative—you can state what you want to do, rather than how to do it. Kafka Streams leverages the KafkaConsumer protocol internally; it inherits its dynamic scaling properties and the consumer group protocol to dynamically redistribute the workload. When Kafka Streams applications are deployed separately but have the same application.id, they are logically still one application. Kafka Streams has two processing APIs, the declarative API or domain-specific language (DSL)  is a high-level language that enables you to build anything needed with a processor topology, whereas the Processor API lets you specify a processor typology node by node, providing the ultimate flexibility. To underline the differences between the two APIs, Bill says it's almost like using the object-relational mapping framework (ORM) versus SQL. The Kafka Streams 101 course is designed to get you started with Kafka Streams and to help you learn the fundamentals of: How streams and tables work How stateless and stateful operations work How to handle time windows and out of order dataHow to deploy Kafka StreamsEPISODE LINKSKafka Streams 101 courseA Guide to Kafka Streams and Its UsesKafka Streams 101 meetupWatch the video version of this podcastJoin the Confluent CommunityLearn more with Kafka tutorials, resources, and guides at Confluent DeveloperLive demo: Intro to Event-Driven Microservices with ConfluentUse podcon19 to get 40% off "Kafka Streams in Action"Use podcon19 to get 40% off "Event Streaming with Kafka Streams and ksqlDB"Use PODCAST100 to get $100 of free Confluent Cloud usage (details)

In this episode of Syntax, Scott and Wes are back with another edition of “Stump'd!” where they try to stump each other with interview questions. Sanity - Sponsor Sanity.io is a real-time headless CMS with a fully customizable Content Studio built in React. Get a Sanity powered site up and running in minutes at sanity.io/create. Get an awesome supercharged free developer plan on sanity.io/syntax. Sentry - Sponsor If you want to know what's happening with your code, track errors and monitor performance with Sentry. Sentry's Application Monitoring platform helps developers see performance issues, fix errors faster, and optimize their code health. Cut your time on error resolution from hours to minutes. It works with any language and integrates with dozens of other services. Syntax listeners new to Sentry can get two months for free by visiting Sentry.io and using the coupon code TASTYTREAT during sign up. Cloudinary - Sponsor Cloudinary is the best way to manage images and videos in the cloud. Edit and transform for any use case, from performance to personalization, using Cloudinary's APIs, SDKs, widgets, and integrations. Show Notes 06:05 - Which property allows you to control the shape or appearance of the marker of a list? 06:33 - What is a pseudo element? What is a pseudo class? 09:15 - What is the difference between block, inline and inline-block elements? 10:15 - What is a combinator selector? 11:12 - What is specificity? How do you calculate specificity? 14:37 - True or False — The translate() function can move the position of an element on the z-axis? 16:44 - What is the difference between “resetting” and “normalizing” CSS? 17:51 - How can you load CSS resources conditionally? 19:45 - Is there any reason you'd want to use translate() instead of absolute positioning, or vice-versa? 22:30 - When to use CSS grid vs flexbox? 25:12 - What are all eight @-rules in CSS? 28:01 - Which property is used to underline, overline, and strikethrough text? 29:52 - What is DOM reflow? 32:14 - How do you serve your pages for feature-constrained browsers? What techniques do you use? 34:00 - What is the property for controlling image-scroll? 36:23 - What are the three different types of CSS gradients? Links https://github.com/sudheerj/javascript-interview-questions https://github.com/learning-zone/css-interview-questions ××× SIIIIICK ××× PIIIICKS ××× Scott: https://height.app/ Wes: Anker Mini Car Charger Shameless Plugs Scott: Astro Course - Sign up for the year and save 25%! Wes: Advanced React Course - Use the coupon code ‘Syntax' for $10 off! Tweet us your tasty treats! Scott's Instagram LevelUpTutorials Instagram Wes' Instagram Wes' Twitter Wes' Facebook Scott's Twitter Make sure to include @SyntaxFM in your tweets

Have you ever felt like you were too caught up in the minute details of day-to-day living to realize the amount of change that occurred around you? Often, progress happens in increments and these shifts can be tracked in retrospect. However, being mindful of these new trends and circumstances can take some practice.  When it comes to data, information is evolving at an unprecedented pace; not just in terms of volume but in speed as well. The size, depth, and speed of all the knowledge we have at our hands can become overwhelming, especially when we have never been properly equipped to deal with our own data in the first place.  The TARTLE marketplace is an opportunity for individuals to adapt to this new reality and take control over their data. In a world where historically, corporations have gotten away with profiting off of our personal information, we are committed to helping the people on the ground get their voice back. It's a worldwide initiative that we have decided to undertake to aid in humanity's progress.   Keeping an Ear to the Ground: The Race for Innovation and Relevance - There is a constant pressure for companies to innovate. Plenty of old tech companies that played such an important role in our childhood eventually became obsolete due to their inability to keep up with the times—such as Kodak, Blockbusters, and Toys R Us. It's a tough lesson for any business: if you don't keep up, you will be left behind. One pertinent example is the use of the Internet of Things (IoT) in the healthcare industry. IoT has immense potential in helping health researchers and doctors keep entire populations healthy. This is because it captures large swathes of information in real time. TARTLE is committed to integrating these APIs into its marketplace, so that users have the opportunity to turn it into a fungible data packet and share it with causes that they support. On an individual level, we are also constantly reinventing ourselves on multiple levels. We try out new looks, styles, relationships, thought patterns, and beliefs. Human nature compels us to always adjust, to always be in the search of something that works. This challenge to be better is what makes life so exciting and meaningful. Regardless of whether we speak of individuals or businesses, resistance to change can be fatal. If the first step forward is hidden under a mountain of bureaucracy and red tape, then communication can become impossible. It is easy to find comfort in a routine, or in a process that's worked for as long as you can remember— but this is not an excuse to shut out the possibility for change.   Lending a Voice to the Oppressed - One big challenge in our progress of understanding countries in conflict is that gathering reliable sources of information on the ground can be incredibly difficult, if not impossible. Organizations have problems establishing the foundation needed to conduct their operations, while the people on the ground may not have the opportunity to think of reaching out when their top priority is survival. In any conflicted situation, connection can play a pivotal role in giving privileged actors the capacity to help the disenfranchised. TARTLE gives the oppressed individuals in these scenarios an opportunity to anonymously share data packets about their experiences.   Closing Thoughts: Learning to Bend, Not Break - TARTLE is on a constant mission to make sure that it is flexible enough to adapt to any trend or circumstance. The platform's first priority is the progress of humanity as a collective. Amidst constant growth and evolution, it is important that the marketplace is matched with the amount of people that interact with the system and the way in which they interact with it.  The marketplace is an avenue to create new tools and features out of a genuine need to solve a problem, instead of creating more bloatware or products for show. It opens conversations and discussions with individuals who are directly affected by all the serious issues we are facing today, compelling those in power to face some harsh truths about the world we live in—and the responsibility we have in changing it for the better. Your data is timeless. Now, it's time to find out what it's worth. www.tartle.co   Tcast is brought to you by TARTLE. A global personal data marketplace that allows users to sell their personal information anonymously when they want to, while allowing buyers to access clean ready to analyze data sets on digital identities from all across the globe.   The show is hosted by Co-Founder and Source Data Pioneer Alexander McCaig and Head of Conscious Marketing Jason Rigby.   What's your data worth?   Find out at: https://tartle.co/   YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TARTLE   Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TARTLEofficial/   Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tartle_official/   Twitter: https://twitter.com/TARTLEofficial   Spread the word!

This week, we welcome Peter Klimek, Director of Technology, Office of the CTO at Imperva! Peter will talk to the challenges he's hearing from customers and partners about managing the security of APIs and what considerations organizations need to make in 2022 to better protect these growing ecosystems. In the AppSec News, Mike & John talk: Discourse SNS webhook RCE, a checklist for a Minimum Viable Secure Product, WhatsApp security assessment, privacy engineering specialties, & DevOps presentations!   Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/asw172 Visit https://securityweekly.com/imperva to learn more about them!   Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/asw for all the latest episodes! Follow us on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/securityweekly Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/secweekly

Summary On this special episode of COMMERCE NOW, Steve Kremer, Director of Sales in the Payments division at Diebold Nixdorf, and Sarah Grotta, Director of Debit and Alternative Products Advisory Service at Mercator Advisory Group, sat down with PaymentsJournal to discuss the most popular payment method, both in the United States and globally: Debit.  Listen in for a  discussion of why modernizing debit payments is crucial in both the banking and retail sectors. Related Content:  https://www.dieboldnixdorf.com/en-us/banking/insights/blog/get-your-message-out https://www.dieboldnixdorf.com/-/media/diebold/files/banking/insights/qa-faq/mindshare-payments-innovation.pdf Related Links: https://www.paymentsjournal.com/the-time-to-revitalize-debit-rails-is-now/ LinkedIn Profiles - Steve Kremer Sarah Grotta Transcription:  Speaker 1: On this special episode of COMMERCE NOW, DN Steve Creamer, Director of Sales in the Payments Division joins the PaymentsJournal's, Ryan Mac, for a discussion on why modernizing debit payments is crucial in both the banking and retail sectors. Speaker 2: Welcome to the PaymentsJournal Podcast. In here is your host, Ryan Mac Ryan: Welcome to the PaymentsJournal Podcast, I'm your host Ryan Mac. Now, debit is the most popular form of payment in the US and globally and it is influenced by the growing popularity of digital payments and preferences of millennials. Now, it is projected that debit transactions will continue to grow and remain the highest transaction type of consumer payment. Now, modernizing these payment systems will become table stakes. And solutions that have reusable technology that can support multiple channels are key when implemented in phases, especially when starting with one that has the high rewards and low risks, AKA debit. To unpack this further, I'm joined by Steve Creamer, who is the Director of Sales for the Payments Division at Diebold Nixdorf and Sarah Grotta who is the Director of the Debit and Alternative Products Advisory Service at Mercator Advisor Group. So, there's certainly a lot of information to unpack on today's episode. Ryan: So, without any further delays, let's start the show. So, Steve and Sarah, it's an absolute pleasure to have you on today's episode. And I'm really excited to talk about our subject to hear today that's really focusing around debit because of all of the interesting news and statistics that we've started to see come out of just the debit side of the paintings' ecosystem here. Now, to get our conversation started here today, we've got this fantastic chart provided to us by Mercator Advisor Group that's taking a look at MasterCard and Visa Debit and prepaid volumes versus credit and charge card volumes in the United States. So, Steven, if you could, maybe you could kind of unpack this chart for our audience here today and maybe pull out some of the kind of the key highlights or what you find interesting of what this data is representing. Steve: Thanks, Ryan. In seeing this data, I really had to pause for a moment and let this information sink in. It certainly is very interesting that in United States, the dollar amount spent with debit cards increased by 14% in 2020, and also that debit card transactions continued to outpace credit cards two to one, the terms of number of transactions. We may all have our own personal bias on preference between debit and credit and some of us may have a preference for using credit over debit for certain types of transactions, but we need to be careful not to our own views, to administer relevance of the data on the continued strong debit usage. Steve: Did the impact of the pandemic and stimulus money have some impact on increase of debit usage in 2020? I think it did, but I also think that the pandemic also accelerated the consumer migration to digital payment channels and debit is still the most popular form of retail payment, and it's not going away at any time soon. Once you really look at the information that Sarah summarized so well, it really makes a lot of sense, especially when including the influence of younger generations that are growing in importance and how debit is leveraged on a global basis. Close to 83% of younger consumers use a debit card and not credit and that's understandable at their age. Many may have not had the ability to obtain credit, and they also seen or heard so many negative stories about how credit card debt that they formulate a consumer behavior outside of credit usage. Steve: Given the high percentage use of debit now, and with the ever-growing payment e-commerce options, we can really see why debit usage continues to grow. An important note is that the continued popular debit is by no means unique to United States. For instance, in India, I think there are 900 million debit cards versus only 55 million credit cards. And in Europe it varies by country, but debit continues to make a very, very strong showing. From a consumer convenience standpoint, we can see the advantages of using debit over other payment rails. And then finally for the retailer, there are real economic advantages of debit based processing solutions as debit interchange fees are typically much lower than for credit cards. I think at this point, it probably be good to turn over to Sarah and allow her to provide some additional insights into her report. Sarah: Yeah. Thanks so much for that. And really, I liked your overview, particularly the comparison with other countries. Certainly, I think the US is somewhat unique in its history, its legacy of being very credit card-focused that isn't necessarily the case around the world. And certainly, things like the economics play into that. The fact that particularly in the US, we really, really love those credit card rewards. So, it was kind of interesting, I agree, I think this was really pushed by the pandemic when we saw the debit card volumes for the first time tip over in above the credit card numbers. And let me clarify, looking at this chart, that we are looking at debit card purchases. We did make some calculations to extract some of the debit push payments, right? So, that would be MasterCard send or Visa Direct. Sarah: So, we're really looking at something closer to an apples-apples comparison of just debit card purchases from MasterCard and Visa in comparison to what's happening on the credit card side. So, I think as we look forward and as we start to see purchasing habits maybe coming back to something that looked a little bit more like pre-pandemic patterns, so more things like purchases for eating out purchases, for travel in particular, I think that we'll start to see the credit card numbers start to come back up again. But I do think for many of the reasons that you pointed out Steve, I think that we will still continue to see very, very strong debit card growth for the foreseeable future. Ryan: Steven and Sarah, thank you so much for that. Now, to kind of just recap a lot of what was said there, obviously historically, in the US we have seen debit cards outpace credit in terms of transaction volumes. But also, then as we were kind of pointing out, in 2020, we did see that percentage gap changed dramatically with debit card volume seeing that 14% growth over 2019 numbers. Now, Steven, as you pointed out, I think that there's a fair amount of that double digit growth was related and due to the pandemic. And as Sarah kind of stated there at the end that she foresees this growth in debit being a continuing trend. But beyond the pandemic, are there other reasons that you could kind of sight or maybe glean to, of why it is that debit may remain a preferred payment method of choice for consumers? Steve: Yeah. Ryan, I think that's a great question. And in that, I think it's always important to keep the customer experience in the forefront. And the thing about debit is that it's a 24/7 always-on experience. Consumers expect to seamlessly get cash out of, if they're using an ATM or if they're making a purchase, they expect it to be approved right away. And that's true if it's in-person or if it's a debit being used online. As noted in Sarah's report, 40% of debit transactions, I think in US were made in a card-not-present mode. So, consumers want to make sure their cards and data are safe and that they can quickly pay for what they want. But what we're hearing from our customers, both banks and retailers, but primarily the banks, are that the debit networks are being challenged with new payment types and they're spending a lot of time and money on the overall upkeep and maintenance of their debit networks. Steve: As you know, the debit system has been around since the early 1970s and many of the systems that are used to process these cards have really not changed since, or if they have, it's been for band aid updates for their old technology. Legacy debit payment platforms were designed to quickly and securely approve and process of payment or withdrawal, which has always been authenticated with a card. The future payments is not so straightforward. The method of authentication may be different based on the channel, for example, tokens, biometrics, things like that. And the funding could combine payment methods including 'buy now pay later', or other variations. Modernizing this payment infrastructure, and not necessarily just the debit side, is really the key for banks to remain relevant. Steve: Diebold Nixdorf has been a global leader in the processing of debit-based solutions for the last 40 years. And now we're leveraging this experience with our Vynamics payment solution. Vynamics payments is a modern system that it's built using cloud-native technology and microservices architecture that allows banks and processors to not only improve their debit channel, but quickly and efficiently handle other newer payment types and innovations like request to pay and buy now pay later. Which is where we see things moving, will help kind of perpetuate the predominance of debit going forward. Just time out. I'll turn it back over to Sarah for her insights on that same question. Sarah: Yeah. I think that the whole idea of core and payment modernization is really very interesting. And sort of tying that back to debit, it is kind of interesting even though to your point, debit has been around for a really long time. There are still things that we can do as an industry to improve that user-experience, that kind of dovetails into the ideas and concepts around modernizing the infrastructure. So, I talk to issuers about things like making sure that they can digitally issue debit cards as an example, so that they could really make that seamless transition for immediate account acquisition or provide a really great experience should a debit card ever get lost or stolen, or for whatever reason needs to be replaced. So, I think that's a very interesting part of the payment ecosystem right now, is sort of the intersection of things like debit cards and more modern infrastructure. Ryan: Yeah. So, I think that it's really interesting. And one of the keywords that I kind of hear a lot is that the modernization side of things here, and obviously as we continue to look as Sarah pointed out to kind of add enhancements to kind of really improve that consumer experience here. And then Steven, at the end of your commentary, you had broadened up a little bit about your organization, Diebold Nixdorf here, and how it's kind of going through a little bit of modernization here and what it's doing to help their consumers. So, I want to dive into that a little bit more because I think it's certainly fine to talk about it at a high level, but I really kind of want to get into some specifics. And with your insight into the industry, maybe you can give us a few more examples of what you're seeing that your customers are doing to revitalize kind of their debit rails, so to speak. Steve: Yeah, that's a great point, Ryan. Thank you for asking. Really when, when Diebold Nixdorf set out to develop our next generation payments platform, we try to approach payments with a fresh perspective. We ask where would it make the biggest impact and provide the greatest opportunities for our clients? And as you ask, as an example, we recently began a multi-year, multi-phase implementation with a top 10 US bank. This bank is using Vynamic payments to deliver substantial TCO benefits to their organization. They are currently using our terminal software as well as our device handling in the Vynamic's platform for approximately 16,000 ATM's. And the bank has also started to deliver on their roadmap to provide switching and cloud processing as the next phase in their migration to Vynamic payments. Steve: And by doing this, they're taking a modular multi-phase approach and we have successfully maximized their greatest opportunity, which in their case started with the debit rails. And now, we have laid a foundation to scale for the future. In the age of technology, limitations on handling the current demand of transactions and the expense for trying to keep it up-to-date has oftentimes made the debit network the best place to start. And at Diebold Nixdorf, our cloud-native microservices architecture has enabled new functionality, such as handling the card-not-present transactions and digital wallet-based transactions. Steve: We also add the ability to reuse certain components or services such as authorization, routing, and authentication, that provides a single platform that can easily transition to credit or real-time payments or other payment rails. It's truly a build once but use often design that will reduce over-operational costs and pre-speeder market for alternative payment methods. And I'll turn over to Sarah for her perspective on that. Sarah: Yeah, actually, I think I've got another question for you given those comments, if you don't mind. I hear a lot of financial institutions in particular, talking about the need to modernize their technology infrastructure so that they can be more responsive, particularly at the user-experience layer, thinking about things like breaking down silos to better manage data and better manage data for fraud. But when financial institutions are thinking about modernizing their infrastructure, do you see that payments is often an instigator for a lot of these modernization demands or the idea that financial institution wants to move forward with a modernization project? Steve: Sarah, I think it does. And I know I threw on this term 'build once, use often' is kind of a code word for modernization, and it does sound simple enough to build once and use often. However, really the benefits are very, very powerful and widespread. As we talked about with mobile and contact-less payments, continuing to grow and support for QR codes, digital currencies, request to pay and peer to peer payment applications are added, many larger banks are opting to build separate in-house silos to process these new payment types. And given the large number of dedicated channels that are required to process this vast array of payments, it quickly becomes a very complex undertaking that generates significant cost to support. Steve: Meanwhile, smaller banks are tackling the same challenge by outsourcing services to vendors. While this may work in a short term, it too, can become very expensive and really stifles differentiation and creates barriers to innovation with this 'build once, use often' as the goal to consolidate these single use channels by deploying a payments platform, it is built with the microservice architecture and API connectivity. These platforms really do enable banks to realize the desired end state of building once, but using across multiple payment rails. And to be a bit more specific, if a bank's priority is to start with the modernization of their debit platform, which is part of our topic today, and by the way, often is a logical place to start given that 1st Generation debit payment platforms are quite cumbersome and channel specific. Steve: And really these older debit platforms are edging closer to critical [Inaudible], and effectively the end of life. There are many ways that 'build once, use often' methodology yields significant benefits to the deploying institution. And some examples of that is to add credit to the same system that's used for debit, the settlement and clearing services can really be reused. Another example is in the fraud area where fraud mitigation and some of the limiting safeguards can be implemented once and then used often across multiple channels. Steve: So, with Vynamic payments, we're able to later on the promise of 'build once, use often'. And Diebold Nixdorf is really kind of moving digital payments processing to a new era, introducing an open APIs integrating with best of breed FinTech solutions across banking and retail, and really delivering seamless customer-centric journeys on a state of the art platform. So, quite simply, it is a great time to speak with Diebold Nixdorf about the future of retail payments. Ryan: Excellent Steven, I think that was absolutely fantastic. And I think we'll end it there on that note. Oh, so, Steven, Sarah, thank you so much for taking the time today for speaking to us about the debit rail here and also the very interesting consumer changes that we've seen in the industry of the debit versus credit. And I hope to have you both back on the podcast real soon. Steve: Pleasure. Sarah: Thanks Ryan.

Our expert hosts, Gwera Kiwana and Alex Hooper, are joined by some great guests to talk about the most notable fintech, financial services and banking news from the past week. This week's guests include: Paul Williamson, Head of Revenue and Partnerships, Plaid Jeremy Takle, Co-Founder & CEO, Pennyworth Rob Berrisford, General Manager, TAP, Button We cover the following stories from the fintech and financial services space: Plaid Builds Partner Ecosystem to Simplify A2A Payments 5:56 Klarna and Stripe announce ‘buy now, pay later' partnership 17:30 New neobank Pennyworth launches 30:49 Bunq launches ‘Local Currencies' to enable users to bank without borders (sound clip from Ali Niknam, CEO and Founder, Bunq) 40:45 Extend raises $40M for its virtual card offering to help banks better compete with fintechs 49:43 Carbon footprint tracker Cogo raises $20M ahead of COP26 (sound clip from Ben Gleisner, Founder and CEO, Cogo) 51:46 Chime In Talks To Go Public At $35 Billion To $45 Billion Valuation 55:00 Monzo launches London bus ad campaign and Twitter account 56:00 This episode is sponsored by Temenos. Temenos is the world leader in banking software, serving over 3,000 financial institutions. SCALE 2021 is Temenos' dedicated, virtual developer event, including: insights from industry leaders on current technology trends and how they impact banking; customer presentations; product demonstrations and road-map sessions and opportunities to speak with Temenos experts. Whether you're a developer, consultant or business user, discover the latest technology opportunities and how this can help you deliver bigger, better, faster. Register to attend here. (https://tem.mn/3jYLZlm) This episode is sponsored by LetsDeel. There's a better way to hire internationally, and it starts with Deel. Everything from contract creation, record keeping, payments, and full-time employment is all in one place for teams all over the world. Companies anywhere can hire compliantly everywhere thanks to Deel. It's payroll and compliance built for today's worldwide workforce. To learn more, visit letsdeel/11fs (https://www.letsdeel.com/11fs), and redeem an exclusive offer of 3 months free when you hire a contractor and 20% for your first year when you hire an employee. This episode is sponsored by Blueshift Customers expect more from their digital experience and their personal finance is no exception. Blueshift empowers fintech and financial institutions to create secure customer profiles and intentional, relevant experiences for customers. Whether in app, on site, in branch, or anywhere else, Blueshift's SmartHub CDP helps brands like Lending Tree and ClearScore turn data into personalized experiences that increase retention, satisfaction, and revenue. Learn more about the Blueshift at blueshift.com/11fs. Fintech Insider by 11:FS is a podcast dedicated to all things fintech, banking, technology and financial services. Hosted by a rotation of 11:FS experts including David Brear, Simon Taylor, Jason Bates and Sarah Kocianski and joined by a range of brilliant guests, we cover the latest global news, bring you interviews from industry experts or take a deep dive into subject matters such as APIs, AI or digital banking. If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe and please leave a review Follow us on Twitter: www.twitter.com/fintechinsiders where you can ask the hosts questions, alternatively email podcasts@11fs.com! Special Guests: Jeremy Takle, Paul Williamson, and Rob Berrisford.

Our expert host, Benjamin Ensor, is joined by some great guests to talk about all things Cloud-based Banking. Cloud-based platforms have the potential to revolutionise the banking sector as we know it, but the findings of our latest report with nCino suggest there's still a long way to go. So what is Cloud-based Banking? Why do banks need to embrace it? And what are challenges and opportunities? This week's guests include: Sim Rai, Senior Customer Strategist, 11:FS  Emmanuel Lambert, Digital Transformation Officer, CKV  Mo Fadaei, Head of Technology, Change & Transformation, Recognise All of this and much more on today's episode! This episode is sponsored by Temenos. Temenos is the world leader in banking software, serving over 3,000 financial institutions. SCALE 2021 is Temenos' dedicated, virtual developer event, including: insights from industry leaders on current technology trends and how they impact banking; customer presentations; product demonstrations and road-map sessions and opportunities to speak with Temenos experts. Whether you're a developer, consultant or business user, discover the latest technology opportunities and how this can help you deliver bigger, better, faster. Register to attend here. (https://tem.mn/3jYLZlm) This episode is sponsored by LetsDeel. There's a better way to hire internationally, and it starts with Deel. Everything from contract creation, record keeping, payments, and full-time employment is all in one place for teams all over the world. Companies anywhere can hire compliantly everywhere thanks to Deel. It's payroll and compliance built for today's worldwide workforce. To learn more, visit letsdeel/11fs (https://www.letsdeel.com/11fs), and redeem an exclusive offer of 3 months free when you hire a contractor and 20% for your first year when you hire an employee. This episode is sponsored by Blueshift Customers expect more from their digital experience and their personal finance is no exception. Blueshift empowers fintech and financial institutions to create secure customer profiles and intentional, relevant experiences for customers. Whether in app, on site, in branch, or anywhere else, Blueshift's SmartHub CDP helps brands like Lending Tree and ClearScore turn data into personalized experiences that increase retention, satisfaction, and revenue. Learn more about the Blueshift at blueshift.com/11fs. Fintech Insider by 11:FS is a podcast dedicated to all things fintech, banking, technology and financial services. Hosted by a rotation of 11:FS experts including David Brear, Simon Taylor, Jason Bates and Sarah Kocianski and joined by a range of brilliant guests, we cover the latest global news, bring you interviews from industry experts or take a deep dive into subject matters such as APIs, AI or digital banking. If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe and please leave a review Follow us on Twitter: www.twitter.com/fintechinsiders where you can ask the hosts questions, alternatively email podcasts@11fs.com! Special Guests: Emmanuel Lambert, Mo Fadaei, and Sim Rai.

Facebook ahora es Meta / Meta prepara un reloj inteligente / Eliminar imágenes de menores de Google / Francia contra el envío de libros físicos / Wikimedia Enterprise / Niantic y Nintendo lo intentan de nuevo / Nvidia+ARM sigue sin el OK europeo Patrocinador: BluaU de Sanitas http://bluau.es/ es el nuevo complemento digital del seguro médico de Sanitas que incorpora la más alta tecnología para ayudarte en el cuidado de tu salud y la de tu familia. — BluaU lanza Conecta con tu Salud http://bluau.es/, un nuevo servicio que te permite comunicar directamente tu actividad y estado físico con tus médicos, psicólogos, nutricionistas y entrenadores personales. Facebook ahora es Meta / Meta prepara un reloj inteligente / Eliminar imágenes de menores de Google / Francia contra el envío de libros físicos / Wikimedia Enterprise / Niantic y Nintendo lo intentan de nuevo / Nvidia+ARM sigue sin el OK europeo Ⓜ️ Facebook cambia el nombre de la empresa a Meta. La plataforma social seguirá llamándose Facebook, y la nueva nomenclatura https://www.europapress.es/portaltic/internet/noticia-facebook-connect-despliega-potencial-metaverso-desarrollara-nueva-identidad-meta-20211028202646.html intenta limpiar su imagen tanto como avanzar su propia narrativa del Metaverso, un concepto que sus ejecutivos consideran que será "el sucesor de Internet".

Alexander Pugh discusses why and when to use Robotic Process Automation (RPA). Host Jeremy Jung spoke with Pugh about interacting with systems without APIs like mainframes; the importance of having developers involved when building bots; the difficulty...

Our expert hosts, David M. Brear and Lindsey Kistler, are joined by some great guests to talk about the most notable fintech, financial services and banking news from the past week. This week's guests include: Richard Jones, Director and Chief Product Officer, GoHenry Gabriel Le Roux, Co-Founder, Primer With sound clips from: Simon Taylor, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer, 11:FS Brian McKenney, Chief Innovation Officer, HSBC We cover the following stories from the fintech and financial services space: Primer raises $50M at a $425M valuation - 6:02 Klarna to offer pay now option ahead of FCA review - 17:55 GoHenry Launches New In-App Gamified Education for Financial Literacy - 25:02 Tala raises $145 million to expand globally and into crypto - 34:10 11:FS Foundry announces partnership with Google Cloud (Clip from Simon Taylor, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer, 11:FS) - 42:02 Challenger bank N26 raises $900 million at $9 billion valuation - 44:10 HSBC to launch Banking as a Service (Clip from Brian McKenney, Chief Innovation Officer, HSBC) - 45:50 Facial recognition cameras installed in UK school canteens - 49:15 This episode is sponsored by Temenos. Temenos is the world leader in banking software, serving over 3,000 financial institutions. SCALE 2021 is Temenos' dedicated, virtual developer event, including: insights from industry leaders on current technology trends and how they impact banking; customer presentations; product demonstrations and road-map sessions and opportunities to speak with Temenos experts. Whether you're a developer, consultant or business user, discover the latest technology opportunities and how this can help you deliver bigger, better, faster. Register to attend here. (https://tem.mn/3jYLZlm) This episode is sponsored by LetsDeel. There's a better way to hire internationally, and it starts with Deel. Everything from contract creation, record keeping, payments, and full-time employment is all in one place for teams all over the world. Companies anywhere can hire compliantly everywhere thanks to Deel. It's payroll and compliance built for today's worldwide workforce. To learn more, visit letsdeel/11fs (https://www.letsdeel.com/11fs), and redeem an exclusive offer of 3 months free when you hire a contractor and 20% for your first year when you hire an employee. This episode is sponsored by Blueshift Customers expect more from their digital experience and their personal finance is no exception. Blueshift empowers fintech and financial institutions to create secure customer profiles and intentional, relevant experiences for customers. Whether in app, on site, in branch, or anywhere else, Blueshift's SmartHub CDP helps brands like Lending Tree and ClearScore turn data into personalized experiences that increase retention, satisfaction, and revenue. Learn more about the Blueshift at blueshift.com/11fs. Fintech Insider by 11:FS is a podcast dedicated to all things fintech, banking, technology and financial services. Hosted by a rotation of 11:FS experts including David Brear, Simon Taylor and Jason Bates who are joined by a range of brilliant guests, we cover the latest global news, bring you interviews from industry experts or take a deep dive into subject matters such as APIs, AI or digital banking. If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe and please leave a review Follow us on Twitter: www.twitter.com/fintechinsiders where you can ask the hosts questions, alternatively email podcasts@11fs.com! Special Guests: Gabriel le Roux and Richard Jones.

Our expert host, David M. Brear, is joined by some great guests to take a deep dive into all things Agile. What is it? What are the pros and cons? Where does Agile fit into day-to-day operations? What do other solutions offer, what does the future look like, and what advice can our panel give to companies looking to scale with Agile? This week's guests include: Deepa Anikhindi, Lead Product Manager, 11:FS Alexa Guenoun, Chief Operating Officer, Temenos Lars Trunin, Head of UK Product, Wise All of this and much more on today's episode! This episode is sponsored by Temenos. Temenos is the world leader in banking software, serving over 3,000 financial institutions. SCALE 2021 is Temenos' dedicated, virtual developer event, including: insights from industry leaders on current technology trends and how they impact banking; customer presentations; product demonstrations and road-map sessions and opportunities to speak with Temenos experts. Whether you're a developer, consultant or business user, discover the latest technology opportunities and how this can help you deliver bigger, better, faster. Register to attend here. (https://tem.mn/3jYLZlm) This episode is sponsored by LetsDeel. There's a better way to hire internationally, and it starts with Deel. Everything from contract creation, record keeping, payments, and full-time employment is all in one place for teams all over the world. Companies anywhere can hire compliantly everywhere thanks to Deel. It's payroll and compliance built for today's worldwide workforce. To learn more, visit letsdeel/11fs (https://www.letsdeel.com/11fs), and redeem an exclusive offer of 3 months free when you hire a contractor and 20% for your first year when you hire an employee. This episode is sponsored by Blueshift Customers expect more from their digital experience and their personal finance is no exception. Blueshift empowers fintech and financial institutions to create secure customer profiles and intentional, relevant experiences for customers. Whether in app, on site, in branch, or anywhere else, Blueshift's SmartHub CDP helps brands like Lending Tree and ClearScore turn data into personalized experiences that increase retention, satisfaction, and revenue. Learn more about the Blueshift at blueshift.com/11fs. Fintech Insider by 11:FS is a podcast dedicated to all things fintech, banking, technology and financial services. Hosted by a rotation of 11:FS experts including David Brear, Simon Taylor, Jason Bates and Sarah Kocianski and joined by a range of brilliant guests, we cover the latest global news, bring you interviews from industry experts or take a deep dive into subject matters such as APIs, AI or digital banking. If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe and please leave a review Follow us on Twitter: www.twitter.com/fintechinsiders where you can ask the hosts questions, alternatively email podcasts@11fs.com! Special Guests: Alexa Guenoun, Deepa Anikhindi, and Lars Trunin .

It's another Potluck! In this episode, Scott and Wes answer your questions about privacy policies, coding for kids, MongaDB hosting, cloud backups, system design, #NoMoreFoo, and much more! Prismic - Sponsor Prismic is a Headless CMS that makes it easy to build website pages as a set of components. Break pages into sections of components using React, Vue, or whatever you like. Make corresponding Slices in Prismic. Start building pages dynamically in minutes. Get started at prismic.io/syntax. Sentry - Sponsor If you want to know what's happening with your code, track errors and monitor performance with Sentry. Sentry's Application Monitoring platform helps developers see performance issues, fix errors faster, and optimize their code health. Cut your time on error resolution from hours to minutes. It works with any language and integrates with dozens of other services. Syntax listeners new to Sentry can get two months for free by visiting Sentry.io and using the coupon code TASTYTREAT during sign up. Cloudinary - Sponsor Cloudinary is the best way to manage images and videos in the cloud. Edit and transform for any use case, from performance to personalization, using Cloudinary's APIs, SDKs, widgets, and integrations. Show Notes 04:49 - Ben Lamers: Heyo Scott and Wes! I am building a web app currently with my brother, and I was wondering when we get to launch it how do you go about correctly writing/adding Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. I'm assuming this may be quite different depending on the platform so maybe general resources or tips for this. Thanks! 06:45 - Fumbles O'Brian: Do you have any recommendations for teaching young children how to code? I have a 5-year-old niece in kindergarten who is absolutely fascinated watching me work, and I'd like to start teaching her basic concepts when she's able to read/write better. For example, she loves watching me make UI changes in React, it blows her mind that changing letters on one screen changes what a website looks like. 11:01 - Kenny: Gentlemen! Love this show and the content you put out. It keeps me occupied during my 5 and 6 mile runs. Thank you both for working so hard to keep it active, I know it takes a lot of work. I'm curious what you think about hosting your own MongoDB server? I'm relatively new to Mongo but want to start working with it for smaller projects. I've used MySQL for a decade, hosted online with shared hosting. Worked well for my relational db needs. Should I host my own Mongo when I'm ready for production, or pay the reasonable costs for something like Linode or maybe even Atlas? I have experience in Linux (enough to get by) and have my own virtualization cluster that I can spin up a server in seconds, along with an enterprise level firewall for managing traffic to and from. I actually just spun up a docker server this week and have a Mongo container running on it, though it's not accessible outside my network. This is purely for my development environments. Despite the firewall, my concern is security. Is it worth paying for a trusted solution like Linode, or should I put a little time in locking down my own Mongo container for my own use? Thank you both! Keep up the great work. 14:42 - Mike: Not a question but more of a rant… It's 2021, almost 2022, can we all stop using ‘foo' and ‘bar' and ‘baz' when teaching a programming concept? I applaud both of you because I don't recall seeing any of your content ever using such atrocious terms, however, I'm sad to see other prominent educators in the web development community use these terms from time to time. I feel like there are so many better examples that we could use to explain a concept and the use of ‘foo' is just confusing to beginners. That's all, just wanted to get that off my chest. Thanks for a wonderful podcast! #nomorefoo 18:53 - Amir: Hey Wes and Scott, thank you for your awesome podcast. What are the best cities in Canada and USA to get (more quantity, highest-paying) developer jobs? 23:44 - LW: Hi guys, I am finally starting to get into GraphQL and I don't get it. Specifically I am working to convert an existing REST API to GraphQL. This seems really tough and there is not much guidance out there on how to do it. The main part I am unsure of is how to write resolvers. If I use the existing query then GraphQL just seems like an over-engineered filter method. If I write an individual resolver for each column in the table - that's gonna be 100s of resolvers and super annoying to write. Have either of you ever moved something from REST to GraphQL? And, if so, how did you handle this? 27:57 - Dan: How does someone learn and actually practice using these system design topics like load balancing, caching, and database sharding. I have never had the need to use some of these things in my day-to-day work, but recently been interviewing and in the system design portion of the interview I feel a little lost. I've read about these topics and watched videos but haven't really seen how to implement these things. Any good resource recommendations? 31:57 - Matt: How do you know if you can trust an NPM package, from an unknown developer, that does not have many GitHub stars and has relatively few downloads? (The repo that made me ask this question is https://github.com/Wondermarin/react-color-palette). NPM audit automatically runs when you install a package, do any of you ever use additional security checks? 38:32 - Yosef: Hi I'm a beginner front-end developer and I heard you saying that being able to copy prototypes is a valuable skill, so I found some Figma free template and I copied them, the question is can I put them in my portfolio or deploy them? 40:00 - Nick: Hey dudes! I picked up a freelance project to make a brochure-style website and found myself having trouble to decide on what tools to pick for this site. I wanted to ask you and get your take, what tools/tech would you use to build a brochure site? By this, I mean the site should have mainly company information that is ideally editable by the stakeholders and has a contact form. Thanks! 44:22 - Casey: Hi Scooter and Wild Wes! Why do I feel so dirty when I'm forced to use negative values in CSS? 45:45 - Gnommer: Do you use some cloud sync service to backup your directory with projects? I mean OneDrive, Dropbox etc. I tried to use it alongside with Git, and it just messed my files so badly. On the other side I feel very uncomfortable without any backup apart from Github. BTW, according to last Potluck: polish ‘ł/Ł' is pronounced like ‘w' in ‘what a sick podcast you have'. Best from Poland ;) Links https://www.ryzerobotics.com/tello https://www.mongodb.com/cloud/atlas https://snyk.io/ https://deno.land/ https://kit.svelte.dev/ https://astro.build/ https://www.gatsbyjs.com/ https://www.dropbox.com/ https://www.backblaze.com/ https://www.synology.com/ https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201250 ××× SIIIIICK ××× PIIIICKS ××× Scott: The Way Down Wes: Wooster Shortcut Shameless Plugs Scott: Modern GraphQL with Prisma - Sign up for the year and save 25%! Wes: All Courses - Use the coupon code ‘Syntax' for $10 off! Tweet us your tasty treats! Scott's Instagram LevelUpTutorials Instagram Wes' Instagram Wes' Twitter Wes' Facebook Scott's Twitter Make sure to include @SyntaxFM in your tweets