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Austin Parker, Community Maintainer at OpenTelemetry, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss OpenTelemetry's mission in the world of observability. Austin explains how the OpenTelemetry community was able to scale the OpenTelemetry project to a commercial offering, and the way Open Telemetry is driving innovation in the data space. Corey and Austin also discuss why Austin decided to write a book on OpenTelemetry, and the book's focus on the evergreen applications of the tool. About AustinAustin Parker is the OpenTelemetry Community Maintainer, as well as an event organizer, public speaker, author, and general bon vivant. They've been a part of OpenTelemetry since its inception in 2019.Links Referenced: OpenTelemetry: https://opentelemetry.io/ Learning OpenTelemetry early release: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/learning-opentelemetry/9781098147174/ Page with Austin's social links: https://social.ap2.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: Look, I get it. Folks are being asked to do more and more. Most companies don't have a dedicated DBA because that person now has a full time job figuring out which one of AWS's multiple managed database offerings is right for every workload. Instead, developers and engineers are being asked to support, and heck, if time allows, optimize their databases. That's where OtterTune comes in. Their AI is your database co-pilot for MySQL and PostgresSQL on Amazon RDS or Aurora. It helps improve performance by up to four x OR reduce costs by 50 percent – both of those are decent options. Go to ottertune dot com to learn more and start a free trial. That's O-T-T-E-R-T-U-N-E dot com.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. It's been a few hundred episodes since I had Austin Parker on to talk about the things that Austin cares about. But it's time to rectify that. Austin is the community maintainer for OpenTelemetry, which is a CNCF project. If you're unfamiliar with, we're probably going to fix that in short order. Austin, Welcome back, it's been a month of Sundays.Austin: It has been a month-and-a-half of Sundays. A whole pandemic-and-a-half.Corey: So, much has happened since then. I tried to instrument something with OpenTelemetry about a year-and-a-half ago, and in defense to the project, my use case is always very strange, but it felt like—a lot of things have sharp edges, but it felt like this had so many sharp edges that you just pivot to being a chainsaw, and I would have been at least a little bit more understanding of why it hurts so very much. But I have heard from people that I trust that the experience has gotten significantly better. Before we get into the nitty-gritty of me lobbing passive-aggressive bug reports at you have for you to fix in a scenario in which you can't possibly refuse me, let's start with the beginning. What is OpenTelemetry?Austin: That's a great question. Thank you for asking it. So, OpenTelemetry is an observability framework. It is run by the CNCF, you know, home of such wonderful award-winning technologies as Kubernetes, and you know, the second biggest source of YAML in the known universe [clear throat].Corey: On some level, it feels like that is right there with hydrogen as far as unlimited resources in our universe.Austin: It really is. And, you know, as we all know, there are two things that make, sort of, the DevOps and cloud world go around: one of them being, as you would probably know, AWS bills; and the second being YAML. But OpenTelemetry tries to kind of carve a path through this, right, because we're interested in observability. And observability, for those that don't know or have been living under a rock or not reading blogs, it's a lot of things. It's a—but we can generally sort of describe it as, like, this is how you understand what your system is doing.I like to describe it as, it's a way that we can model systems, especially complex, distributed, or decentralized software systems that are pretty commonly found in larg—you know, organizations of every shape and size, quite often running on Kubernetes, quite often running in public or private clouds. And the goal of observability is to help you, you know, model this system and understand what it's doing, which is something that I think we can all agree, a pretty important part of our job as software engineers. Where OpenTelemetry fits into this is as the framework that helps you get the telemetry data you need from those systems, put it into a universal format, and then ship it off to some observability back-end, you know, a Prometheus or a Datadog or whatever, in order to analyze that data and get answers to your questions you have.Corey: From where I sit, the value of OTel—or OpenTelemetry; people in software engineering love abbreviations that are impenetrable from the outside, so of course, we're going to lean into that—but what I found for my own use case is the shining value prop was that I could instrument an application with OTel—in theory—and then send whatever I wanted that was emitted in terms of telemetry, be it events, be it logs, be it metrics, et cetera, and send that to any or all of a curation of vendors on a case-by-case basis, which meant that suddenly it was the first step in, I guess, an observability pipeline, which increasingly is starting to feel like a milit—like an industrial-observability complex, where there's so many different companies out there, it seems like a good approach to use, to start, I guess, racing vendors in different areas to see which performs better. One of the challenges I've had with that when I started down that path is it felt like every vendor who was embracing OTel did it from a perspective of their implementation. Here's how to instrument it to—send it to us because we're the best, obviously. And you're a community maintainer, despite working at observability vendors yourself. You have always been one of those community-first types where you care more about the user experience than you do this quarter for any particular employer that you have, which to be very clear, is intended as a compliment, not a terrifying warning. It's why you have this authentic air to you and why you are one of those very few voices that I trust in a space where normally I need to approach it with significant skepticism. How do you see the relationship between vendors and OpenTelemetry?Austin: I think the hard thing is that I know who signs my paychecks at the end of the day, right, and you always have, you know, some level of, you know, let's say bias, right? Because it is a bias to look after, you know, them who brought you to the dance. But I think you can be responsible with balancing, sort of, the needs of your employer, and the needs of the community. You know, the way I've always described this is that if you think about observability as, like, a—you know, as a market, what's the total addressable market there? It's literally everyone that uses software; it's literally every software company.Which means there's plenty of room for people to make their numbers and to buy and sell and trade and do all this sort of stuff. And by taking that approach, by taking sort of the big picture approach and saying, “Well, look, you know, there's going to be—you know, of all these people, there are going to be some of them that are going to use our stuff and there are some of them that are going to use our competitor's stuff.” And that's fine. Let's figure out where we can invest… in an OpenTelemetry, in a way that makes sense for everyone and not just, you know, our people. So, let's build things like documentation, right?You know, one of the things I'm most impressed with, with OpenTelemetry over the past, like, two years is we went from being, as a project, like, if you searched for OpenTelemetry, you would go and you would get five or six or ten different vendor pages coming up trying to tell you, like, “This is how you use it, this is how you use it.” And what we've done as a community is we've said, you know, “If you go looking for documentation, you should find our website. You should find our resources.” And we've managed to get the OpenTelemetry website to basically rank above almost everything else when people are searching for help with OpenTelemetry. And that's been really good because, one, it means that now, rather than vendors or whoever coming in and saying, like, “Well, we can do this better than you,” we can be like, “Well, look, just, you know, put your effort here, right? It's already the top result. It's already where people are coming, and we can prove that.”And two, it means that as people come in, they're going to be put into this process of community feedback, where they can go in, they can look at the docs, and they can say, “Oh, well, I had a bad experience here,” or, “How do I do this?” And we get that feedback and then we can improve the docs for everyone else by acting on that feedback, and the net result of this is that more people are using OpenTelemetry, which means there are more people kind of going into the tippy-tippy top of the funnel, right, that are able to become a customer of one of these myriad observability back ends.Corey: You touched on something very important here, when I first was exploring this—you may have been looking over my shoulder as I went through this process—my impression initially was, oh, this is a ‘CNCF project' in quotes, where—this is not true universally, of course, but there are cases where it clearly—is where this is an, effectively, vendor-captured project, not necessarily by one vendor, but by an almost consortium of them. And that was my takeaway from OpenTelemetry. It was conversations with you, among others, that led me to believe no, no, this is not in that vein. This is clearly something that is a win. There are just a whole bunch of vendors more-or-less falling all over themselves, trying to stake out thought leadership and imply ownership, on some level, of where these things go. But I definitely left with a sense that this is bigger than any one vendor.Austin: I would agree. I think, to even step back further, right, there's almost two different ways that I think vendors—or anyone—can approach OpenTelemetry, you know, from a market perspective, and one is to say, like, “Oh, this is socializing, kind of, the maintenance burden of instrumentation.” Which is a huge cost for commercial players, right? Like, if you're a Datadog or a Splunk or whoever, you know, you have these agents that you go in and they rip telemetry out of your web servers, out of your gRPC libraries, whatever, and it costs a lot of money to pay engineers to maintain those instrumentation agents, right? And the cynical take is, oh, look at all these big companies that are kind of like pushing all that labor onto the open-source community, and you know, I'm not casting any aspersions here, like, I do think that there's an element of truth to it though because, yeah, that is a huge fixed cost.And if you look at the actual lived reality of people and you look at back when SignalFx was still a going concern, right, and they had their APM agents open-sourced, you could go into the SignalFx repo and diff, like, their [Node Express 00:10:15] instrumentation against the Datadog Node Express instrumentation, and it's almost a hundred percent the same, right? Because it's truly a commodity. There's no—there's nothing interesting about how you get that telemetry out. The interesting stuff all happens after you have the telemetry and you've sent it to some back-end, and then you can, you know, analyze it and find interesting things. So, yeah, like, it doesn't make sense for there to be five or six or eight different companies all competing to rebuild the same wheels over and over and over and over when they don't have to.I think the second thing that some people are starting to understand is that it's like, okay, let's take this a step beyond instrumentation, right? Because the goal of OpenTelemetry really is to make sure that this instrumentation is native so that you don't need a third-party agent, you don't need some other process or jar or whatever that you drop in and it instruments stuff for you. The JVM should provide this, your web framework should provide this, your RPC library should provide this right? Like, this data should come from the code itself and be in a normalized fashion that can then be sent to any number of vendors or back ends or whatever. And that changes how—sort of, the competitive landscape a lot, I think, for observability vendors because rather than, kind of, what you have now, which is people will competing on, like, well, how quickly can I throw this agent in and get set up and get a dashboard going, it really becomes more about, like, okay, how are you differentiating yourself against every other person that has access to the same data, right? And you get more interesting use cases and how much more interesting analysis features, and that results in more innovation in, sort of, the industry than we've seen in a very long time.Corey: For me, just from the customer side of the world, one of the biggest problems I had with observability in my career as an SRE-type for years was you would wind up building your observability pipeline around whatever vendor you had selected and that meant emphasizing the things they were good at and de-emphasizing the things that they weren't. And sometimes it's worked to your benefit; usually not. But then you always had this question when it got things that touched on APM or whatnot—or Application Performance Monitoring—where oh, just embed our library into this. Okay, great. But a year-and-a-half ago, my exposure to this was on an application that I was running in distributed fashion on top of AWS Lambda.So great, you can either use an extension for this or you can build in the library yourself, but then there's always a question of precedence where when you have multiple things that are looking at this from different points of view, which one gets done first? Which one is going to see the others? Which one is going to enmesh the other—enclose the others in its own perspective of the world? And it just got incredibly frustrating. One of the—at least for me—bright lights of OTel was that it got away from that where all of the vendors receiving telemetry got the same view.Austin: Yeah. They all get the same view, they all get the same data, and you know, there's a pretty rich collection of tools that we're starting to develop to help you build those pipelines yourselves and really own everything from the point of generation to intermediate collection to actually outputting it to wherever you want to go. For example, a lot of really interesting work has come out of the OpenTelemetry collector recently; one of them is this feature called Connectors. And Connectors let you take the output of certain pipelines and route them as inputs to another pipeline. And as part of that connection, you can transform stuff.So, for example, let's say you have a bunch of [spans 00:14:05] or traces coming from your API endpoints, and you don't necessarily want to keep all those traces in their raw form because maybe they aren't interesting or maybe there's just too high of a volume. So, with Connectors, you can go and you can actually convert all of those spans into metrics and export them to a metrics database. You could continue to save that span data if you want, but you have options now, right? Like, you can take that span data and put it into cold storage or put it into, like, you know, some sort of slow blob storage thing where it's not actively indexed and it's slow lookups, and then keep a metric representation of it in your alerting pipeline, use metadata exemplars or whatever to kind of connect those things back. And so, when you do suddenly see it's like, “Oh, well, there's some interesting p99 behavior,” or we're hitting an alert or violating an SLO or whatever, then you can go back and say, like, “Okay, well, let's go dig through the slow da—you know, let's look at the cold data to figure out what actually happened.”And those are features that, historically, you would have needed to go to a big, important vendor and say, like, “Hey, here's a bunch of money,” right? Like, “Do this for me.” Now, you have the option to kind of do all that more interesting pipeline stuff yourself and then make choices about vendors based on, like, who is making a tool that can help me with the problem that I have? Because most of the time, I don't—I feel like we tend to treat observability tools as—it depends a lot on where you sit in the org—but you certainly seen this movement towards, like, “Well, we don't want a tool; we want a platform. We want to go to Lowe's and we want to get the 48-in-one kit that has a bunch of things in it. And we're going to pay for the 48-in-one kit, even if we only need, like, two things or three things out of it.”OpenTelemetry lets you kind of step back and say, like, “Well, what if we just got, like, really high-quality tools for the two or three things we need, and then for the rest of the stuff, we can use other cheaper options?” Which is, I think, really attractive, especially in today's macroeconomic conditions, let's say.Corey: One thing I'm trying to wrap my head around because we all find when it comes to observability, in my experience, it's the parable of three blind people trying to describe an elephant by touch; depending on where you are on the elephant, you have a very different perspective. What I'm trying to wrap my head around is, what is the vision for OpenTelemetry? Is it specifically envisioned to be the agent that runs wherever the workload is, whether it's an agent on a host or a layer in a Lambda function, or a sidecar or whatnot in a Kubernetes cluster that winds up gathering and sending data out? Or is the vision something different? Because part of what you're saying aligns with my perspective on it, but other parts of it seem to—that there's a misunderstanding somewhere, and it's almost certainly on my part.Austin: I think the long-term vision is that you as a developer, you as an SRE, don't even have to think about OpenTelemetry, that when you are using your container orchestrator or you are using your API framework or you're using your Managed API Gateway, or any kind of software that you're building something with, that the telemetry data from that software is emitted in an OpenTelemetry format, right? And when you are writing your code, you know, and you're using gRPC, let's say, you could just natively expect that OpenTelemetry is kind of there in the background and it's integrated into the actual libraries themselves. And so, you can just call the OpenTelemetry API and it's part of the standard library almost, right? You add some additional metadata to a span and say, like, “Oh, this is the customer ID,” or, “This is some interesting attribute that I want to track for later on,” or, “I'm going to create a histogram here or counter,” whatever it is, and then all that data is just kind of there, right, invisible to you unless you need it. And then when you need it, it's there for you to kind of pick up and send off somewhere to any number of back-ends or databases or whatnot that you could then use to discover problems or better model your system.That's the long-term vision, right, that it's just there, everyone uses it. It is a de facto and du jour standard. I think in the medium term, it does look a little bit more like OpenTelemetry is kind of this Swiss army knife agent that's running on—inside cars in Kubernetes or it's running on your EC2 instance. Until we get to the point of everyone just agrees that we're going to use OpenTelemetry protocol for the data and we're going to use all your stuff and we just natively emit it, then that's going to be how long we're in that midpoint. But that's sort of the medium and long-term vision I think. Does that track?Corey: It does. And I'm trying to equate this to—like the evolution back in the Stone Age was back when I was first getting started, Nagios was the gold standard. It was kind of the original Call of Duty. And it was awful. There were a bunch of problems with it, but it also worked.And I'm not trying to dunk on the people who built that. We all stand on the shoulders of giants. It was an open-source project that was awesome doing exactly what it did, but it was a product built for a very different time. It completely had the wheels fall off as soon as you got to things were even slightly ephemeral because it required this idea of the server needed to know where all of the things that was monitoring lived as an individual host basis, so there was this constant joy of, “Oh, we're going to add things to a cluster.” Its perspective was, “What's a cluster?” Or you'd have these problems with a core switch going down and suddenly everything else would explode as well.And even setting up an on-call rotation for who got paged when was nightmarish. And a bunch of things have evolved since then, which is putting it mildly. Like, you could say that about fire, the invention of the wheel. Yeah, a lot of things have evolved since the invention of the wheel, and here we are tricking sand into thinking. But we find ourselves just—now it seems that the outcome of all of this has been instead of one option that's the de facto standard that's kind of terrible in its own ways, now, we have an entire universe of different products, many of which are best-of-breed at one very specific thing, but nothing's great at everything.It's the multifunction printer conundrum, where you find things that are great at one or two things at most, and then mediocre at best at the rest. I'm excited about the possibility for OpenTelemetry to really get to a point of best-of-breed for everything. But it also feels like the money folks are pushing for consolidation, if you believe a lot of the analyst reports around this of, “We already pay for seven different observability vendors. How about we knock it down to just one that does all of these things?” Because that would be terrible. What do you land on that?Austin: Well, as I intu—or alluded to this earlier, I think the consolidation in the observability space, in general, is very much driven by that force you just pointed out, right? The buyers want to consolidate more and more things into single tools. And I think there's a lot of… there are reasons for that that—you know, there are good reasons for that, but I also feel like a lot of those reasons are driven by fundamentally telemetry-side concerns, right? So like, one example of this is if you were Large Business X, and you see—you are an engineering director and you get a report, that's like, “We have eight different metrics products.” And you're like, “That seems like a lot. Let's just use Brand X.”And Brand X will tell you very, very happily tell you, like, “Oh, you just install our thing everywhere and you can get rid of all these other tools.” And usually, there's two reasons that people pick tools, right? One reason is that they are forced to and then they are forced to do a bunch of integration work to get whatever the old stuff was working in the new way, but the other reason is because they tried a bunch of different things and they found the one tool that actually worked for them. And what happens invariably in these sort of consolidation stories is, you know, the new vendor comes in on a shining horse to consolidate, and you wind up instead of eight distinct metrics tools, now you have nine distinct metrics tools because there's never any bandwidth for people to go back and, you know—you're Nagios example, right, Nag—people still use Nagios every day. What's the economic justification to take all those Nagios installs, if they're working, and put them into something else, right?What's the economic justification to go and take a bunch of old software that hasn't been touched for ten years that still runs and still does what needs to do, like, where's the incentive to go and re-instrument that with OpenTelemetry or anything else? It doesn't necessarily exist, right? And that's a pretty, I think, fundamental decision point in everyone's observability journey, which is what do you do about all the old stuff? Because most of the stuff is the old stuff and the worst part is, most of the stuff that you make money off of is the old stuff as well. So, you can't ignore it, and if you're spending, you know, millions of millions of dollars on the new stuff—like, there was a story that went around a while ago, I think, Coinbase spent something like, what, $60 million on Datadog… I hope they asked for it in real money and not Bitcoin. But—Corey: Yeah, something I've noticed about all the vendors, and even Coinbase themselves, very few of them actually transact in cryptocurrency. It's always cash on the barrelhead, so to speak.Austin: Yeah, smart. But still, like, that's an absurd amount of money [laugh] for any product or service, I would argue, right? But that's just my perspective. I do think though, it goes to show you that you know, it's very easy to get into these sort of things where you're just spending over the barrel to, like, the newest vendor that's going to come in and solve all your problems for you. And just, it often doesn't work that way because most places aren't—especially large organizations—just aren't built in is sort of like, “Oh, we can go through and we can just redo stuff,” right? “We can just roll out a new agent through… whatever.”We have mainframes [unintelligible 00:25:09], mainframes to thinking about, you have… in many cases, you have an awful lot of business systems that most, kind of, cloud people don't like, think about, right, like SAP or Salesforce or ServiceNow, or whatever. And those sort of business process systems are actually responsible for quite a few things that are interesting from an observability point of view. But you don't see—I mean, hell, you don't even see OpenTelemetry going out and saying, like, “Oh, well, here's the thing to let you know, observe Apex applications on Salesforce,” right? It's kind of an undiscovered country in a lot of ways and it's something that I think we will have to grapple with as we go forward. In the shorter term, there's a reason that OpenTelemetry mostly focuses on cloud-native applications because that's a little bit easier to actually do what we're trying to do on them and that's where the heat and light is. But once we get done with that, then the sky is the limit.[midroll 00:26:11]Corey: It still feels like OpenTelemetry is evolving rapidly. It's certainly not, I don't want to say it's not feature complete, which, again, what—software is never done. But it does seem like even quarter-to-quarter or month-to-month, its capabilities expand massively. Because you apparently enjoy pain, you're in the process of writing a book. I think it's in early release or early access that comes out next year, 2024. Why would you do such a thing?Austin: That's a great question. And if I ever figure out the answer I will tell you.Corey: Remember, no one wants to write a book; they want to have written the book.Austin: And the worst part is, is I have written the book and for some reason, I went back for another round. I—Corey: It's like childbirth. No one remembers exactly how horrible it was.Austin: Yeah, my partner could probably attest to that. Although I was in the room, and I don't think I'd want to do it either. So, I think the real, you know, the real reason that I decided to go and kind of write this book—and it's Learning OpenTelemetry; it's in early release right now on the O'Reilly learning platform and it'll be out in print and digital next year, I believe, we're targeting right now, early next year.But the goal is, as you pointed out so eloquently, OpenTelemetry changes a lot. And it changes month to month sometimes. So, why would someone decide—say, “Hey, I'm going to write the book about learning this?” Well, there's a very good reason for that and it is that I've looked at a lot of the other books out there on OpenTelemetry, on observability in general, and they talk a lot about, like, here's how you use the API. Here's how you use the SDK. Here's how you make a trace or a span or a log statement or whatever. And it's very technical; it's very kind of in the weeds.What I was interested in is saying, like, “Okay, let's put all that stuff aside because you don't necessarily…” I'm not saying any of that stuff's going to change. And I'm not saying that how to make a span is going to change tomorrow; it's not, but learning how to actually use something like OpenTelemetry isn't just knowing how to create a measurement or how to create a trace. It's, how do I actually use this in a production system? To my point earlier, how do I use this to get data about, you know, these quote-unquote, “Legacy systems?” How do I use this to monitor a Kubernetes cluster? What's the important parts of building these observability pipelines? If I'm maintaining a library, how should I integrate OpenTelemetry into that library for my users? And so on, and so on, and so forth.And the answers to those questions actually probably aren't going to change a ton over the next four or five years. Which is good because that makes it the perfect thing to write a book about. So, the goal of Learning OpenTelemetry is to help you learn not just how to use OpenTelemetry at an API or SDK level, but it's how to build an observability pipeline with OpenTelemetry, it's how to roll it out to an organization, it's how to convince your boss that this is what you should use, both for new and maybe picking up some legacy development. It's really meant to give you that sort of 10,000-foot view of what are the benefits of this, how does it bring value and how can you use it to build value for an observability practice in an organization?Corey: I think that's fair. Looking at the more quote-unquote, “Evergreen,” style of content as opposed to—like, that's the reason for example, I never wind up doing tutorials on how to use an AWS service because one console change away and suddenly I have to redo the entire thing. That's a treadmill I never had much interest in getting on. One last topic I want to get into before we wind up wrapping the episode—because I almost feel obligated to sprinkle this all over everything because the analysts told me I have to—what's your take on generative AI, specifically with an eye toward observability?Austin: [sigh], gosh, I've been thinking a lot about this. And—hot take alert—as a skeptic of many technological bubbles over the past five or so years, ten years, I'm actually pretty hot on AI—generative AI, large language models, things like that—but not for the reasons that people like to kind of hold them up, right? Not so that we can all make our perfect, funny [sigh], deep dream, meme characters or whatever through Stable Fusion or whatever ChatGPT spits out at us when we ask for a joke. I think the real win here is that this to me is, like, the biggest advance in human-computer interaction since resistive touchscreens. Actually, probably since the mouse.Corey: I would agree with that.Austin: And I don't know if anyone has tried to get someone that is, you know, over the age of 70 to use a computer at any time in their life, but mapping human language to trying to do something on an operating system or do something on a computer on the web is honestly one of the most challenging things that faces interface design, face OS designers, faces anyone. And I think this also applies for dev tools in general, right? Like, if you think about observability, if you think about, like, well, what are the actual tasks involved in observability? It's like, well, you're making—you're asking questions. You're saying, like, “Hey, for this metric named HTTPrequestsByCode,” and there's four or five dimensions, and you say, like, “Okay, well break this down for me.” You know, you have to kind of know the magic words, right? You have to know the magic promQL sequence or whatever else to plug in and to get it to graph that for you.And you as an operator have to have this very, very well developed, like, depth of knowledge and math and statistics to really kind of get a lot of—Corey: You must be at least this smart to ride on this ride.Austin: Yeah. And I think that, like that, to me is the real—the short-term win for certainly generative AI around using, like, large language models, is the ability to create human language interfaces to observability tools, that—Corey: As opposed to learning your own custom SQL dialect, which I see a fair number of times.Austin: Right. And, you know, and it's actually very funny because there was a while for the—like, one of my kind of side projects for the past [sigh] a little bit [unintelligible 00:32:31] idea of, like, well, can we make, like, a universal query language or universal query layer that you could ship your dashboards or ship your alerts or whatever. And then it's like, generative AI kind of just, you know, completely leapfrogs that, right? It just says, like, well, why would you need a query language, if we can just—if you can just ask the computer and it works, right?Corey: The most common programming language is about to become English.Austin: Which I mean, there's an awful lot of externalities there—Corey: Which is great. I want to be clear. I'm not here to gatekeep.Austin: Yeah. I mean, I think there's a lot of externalities there, and there's a lot—and the kind of hype to provable benefit ratio is very skewed right now towards hype. That said, one of the things that is concerning to me as sort of an observability practitioner is the amount of people that are just, like, whole-hog, throwing themselves into, like, oh, we need to integrate generative AI, right? Like, we need to put AI chatbots and we need to have ChatGPT built into our products and da-da-da-da-da. And now you kind of have this perfect storm of people that really don't ha—because they're just using these APIs to integrate gen AI stuff with, they really don't understand what it's doing because a lot you know, it is very complex, and I'll be the first to admit that I really don't understand what a lot of it is doing, you know, on the deep, on the foundational math side.But if we're going to have trust in, kind of, any kind of system, we have to understand what it's doing, right? And so, the only way that we can understand what it's doing is through observability, which means it's incredibly important for organizations and companies that are building products on generative AI to, like, drop what—you know, walk—don't walk, run towards something that is going to give you observability into these language models.Corey: Yeah. “The computer said so,” is strangely dissatisfying.Austin: Yeah. You need to have that base, you know, sort of, performance [goals and signals 00:34:31], obviously, but you also need to really understand what are the questions being asked. As an example, let's say you have something that is tokenizing questions. You really probably do want to have some sort of observability on the hot path there that lets you kind of break down common tokens, especially if you were using, like, custom dialects or, like, vectors or whatever to modify the, you know, neural network model, like, you really want to see, like, well, what's the frequency of the certain tokens that I'm getting they're hitting the vectors versus not right? Like, where can I improve these sorts of things? Where am I getting, like, unexpected results?And maybe even have some sort of continuous feedback mechanism that it could be either analyzing the tone and tenor of end-user responses or you can have the little, like, frowny and happy face, whatever it is, like, something that is giving you that kind of constant feedback about, like, hey, this is how people are actually like interacting with it. Because I think there's way too many stories right now people just kind of like saying, like, “Oh, okay. Here's some AI-powered search,” and people just, like, hating it. Because people are already very primed to distrust AI, I think. And I can't blame anyone.Corey: Well, we've had an entire lifetime of movies telling us that's going to kill us all.Austin: Yeah.Corey: And now you have a bunch of, also, billionaire tech owners who are basically intent on making that reality. But that's neither here nor there.Austin: It isn't, but like I said, it's difficult. It's actually one of the first times I've been like—that I've found myself very conflicted.Corey: Yeah, I'm a booster of this stuff; I love it, but at the same time, you have some of the ridiculous hype around it and the complete lack of attention to safety and humanity aspects of it that it's—I like the technology and I think it has a lot of promise, but I want to get lumped in with that set.Austin: Exactly. Like, the technology is great. The fan base is… ehh, maybe something a little different. But I do think that, for lack of a better—not to be an inevitable-ist or whatever, but I do think that there is a significant amount of, like, this is a genie you can't put back in the bottle and it is going to have, like, wide-ranging, transformative effects on the discipline of, like, software development, software engineering, and white collar work in general, right? Like, there's a lot of—if your job involves, like, putting numbers into Excel and making pretty spreadsheets, then ooh, that doesn't seem like something that's going to do too hot when I can just have Excel do that for me.And I think we do need to be aware of that, right? Like, we do need to have that sort of conversation about, like… what are we actually comfortable doing here in terms of displacing human labor? When we do displace human labor, are we doing it so that we can actually give people leisure time or so that we can just cram even more work down the throats of the humans that are left?Corey: And unfortunately, I think we might know what that answer is, at least on our current path.Austin: That's true. But you know, I'm an optimist.Corey: I… don't do well with disappointment. Which the show has certainly not been. I really want to thank you for taking the time to speak with me today. If people want to learn more, where's the best place for them to find you?Austin: Welp, I—you can find me on most social media. Many, many social medias. I used to be on Twitter a lot, and we all know what happened there. The best place to figure out what's going on is check out my bio, social.ap2.io will give you all the links to where I am. And yeah, been great talking with you.Corey: Likewise. Thank you so much for taking the time out of your day. Austin Parker, community maintainer for OpenTelemetry. 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 pointing out that actually, physicists say the vast majority of the universe's empty space, so that we can later correct you by saying ah, but it's empty whitespace. That's right. YAML wins again.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.

Episode Summary Join Harry Duran, host of Vertical Farming Podcast, as he welcomes to the show, CEO and co-founder of Fifth Season, Austin Webb. Fifth Season is a consumer tech company and indoor farming pioneer with Carnegie Mellon University roots that is creating a new era of fresh foods. Its commercial-scale indoor vertical farms use proprietary robotics, AI, and smart operations technology to grow leafy greens and herbs at affordable prices year-round. Today, Harry and Austin talk about the origin story of Fifth Season, the relationship he has with the city of Braddock and how Austin initially got involved in vertical farming. Austin expounds on the concepts of smart manufacturing and pest pressure and speaks to the learning curve he's experienced as a first-time CEO. Finally, Austin speaks to the mission of Fifth Season and what excites him most about his future endeavors. Episode Sponsor CULTIVATD Key Takeaways 03:14 – Harry welcomes to the show Austin Webb, who trends he's noticed post-pandemic, his relationship with Carnegie Mellon University and the origin story of Fifth Season 08:53 – Austin speaks to when he first got involved in vertical farming 11:50 – How Fifth Season is applying robotics to the vertical farming industry 16:27 – Austin reflects on some of the memorable challenges and obstacles Fifth Season overcame throughout its journey 20:18 – Austin talks about Fifth Season's accomplishment of achieving a 100% Food Safety Audit ranking 25:32 – Austin explains what ‘pest pressure' means 28:21 – Austin talks about the relationship Fifth Season has with the city of Braddock and the impact they have had on the community 34:44 – Austin speaks to the learning curve he's experienced as a first-time CEO 37:41 – A tough question Austin has had to ask himself recently 38:07 – Harry thanks Austin for joining the show and let's listeners know where they can learn more about Fifth Season and connect with Austin Tweetable Quotes “We wanted to create this whole new platform to really change the way we think about vertical farming, to therefore make it an economic reality today instead of just a pipe dream for the future.”(08:43) (Austin) “We don't really consider ourselves a vertical farming company. We're a new food system pioneer that's creating a whole new era of fresh foods and we started that journey with vertical farming.”(19:18) (Austin) “The first Carnegie Library was in Braddock. So when you think of how we're changing the way that we think about growing food and then creating this whole new consumer experience around changing the definition of what fresh food should taste like and making it fun again. And then creating this joy and delight around eating healthy because again you're just creating this whole new category of fresh food and making it more ubiquitous and making it easier to eat healthier.”(29:37) (Austin) “It [the CEO role] is just a very hard job. And, you just think about your team, your key responsibilities that are both internal and external, and you just have to learn to manage the time. And decision making has to be at the forefront because you don't help your team if you've gotten yourself into a position of decision fatigue.”(35:51) (Austin) Links Mentioned Austin's LinkedIn Fifth Season Fresh Website Fifth Season LinkedIn Fifth Season Twitter Fifth Season Instagram Fifth Season Facebook Sponsor Info: Cultivatd Website Cultivatd Instagram Cultivatd's Twitter Cultivatd's Facebook

About AustinAustin makes problems with computers, and sometimes solves them. He's an open source maintainer, observability nerd, devops junkie, and poster. You can find him ignoring HN threads and making dumb jokes on Twitter. He wrote a book about distributed tracing, taught some college courses, streams on Twitch, and also ran a DevOps conference in Animal Crossing.Links: Lightstep: https://lightstep.com/ Lightstep Sandbox: https://lightstep.com/sandbox Desert Island DevOps: https://desertedislanddevops.com lastweekinAWS.com Resources: https://lastweekinAWS.com/resources Distributed Tracing in Practice: https://www.amazon.com/Distributed-Tracing-Practice-Instrumenting-Microservices/dp/1492056634 Twitter: https://twitter.com/austinlparker Personal Blog: https://aparker.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 Thinkst. This is going to take a minute to explain, so bear with me. I linked against an early version of their tool, canarytokens.org in the very early days of my newsletter, and what it does is relatively simple and straightforward. It winds up embedding credentials, files, that sort of thing in various parts of your environment, wherever you want to; it gives you fake AWS API credentials, for example. And the only thing that these things do is alert you whenever someone attempts to use those things. It's an awesome approach. I've used something similar for years. Check them out. But wait, there's more. They also have an enterprise option that you should be very much aware of canary.tools. You can take a look at this, but what it does is it provides an enterprise approach to drive these things throughout your entire environment. You can get a physical device that hangs out on your network and impersonates whatever you want to. When it gets Nmap scanned, or someone attempts to log into it, or access files on it, you get instant alerts. It's awesome. If you don't do something like this, you're likely to find out that you've gotten breached, the hard way. Take a look at this. It's one of those few things that I look at and say, “Wow, that is an amazing idea. I love it.” That's canarytokens.org and canary.tools. The first one is free. The second one is enterprise-y. Take a look. I'm a big fan of this. More from them in the coming weeks.Corey: This episode is sponsored by ExtraHop. ExtraHop provides threat detection and response for the Enterprise (not the starship). On-prem security doesn't translate well to cloud or multi-cloud environments, and that's not even counting IoT. ExtraHop automatically discovers everything inside the perimeter, including your cloud workloads and IoT devices, detects these threats up to 35 percent faster, and helps you act immediately. Ask for a free trial of detection and response for AWS today at extrahop.com/trial.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. I'm joined this week by Austin Parker, who's a principal developer advocate at Lightstep. Austin, welcome to the show.Austin: Hey, it's great to be here.Corey: It really is. I love coming here. It's one of my favorite places to go. So, let's get the obvious stuff out of the way. You're a principal developer advocate at Lightstep. I know this because I said it a whole sentence ago, which is about the limit of my attention span. What is Lightstep? And what does your job mean?Austin: So, Lightstep is an observability platform. We take traces, and metrics, and logs, and all that good stuff, throw them together in a big old swamp of data, and then, kind of, give you some really cool workflows to help you make sense of it, figure out, hey, where is the slow SQL query? Where is the performance bad?Corey: The way to figure out, in most of my environments, where's the performance bad is git blame, figure out what part I wrote.Austin: But imagine there were, like, 1000, or 100,000 of you all working on this massive distributed system, and you didn't know half—Corey: It would snark itself to death before it ever got off the ground.Austin: Yeah. I mean, I think that's actually most large companies, right? We deliver shippable software only through inertia.Corey: Yeah. Just because at some point, it bounces off all the walls, there's nowhere else for it to go but to production.Austin: Yep. But yeah, you have thousands of people, hundreds of people, however many people, right? I think the whole distributed workforce thing that most people are dealing with now has really made observability rise to the top of your concern list because you don't have the luxury of just going and poking your head around the corner and saying, “Hey, Joanne. What the heck? Why did things break?” You can't just poke someone anymore. Or you can, but you never know what you're going to have to deal with.Corey: It feels weird to call them at home or bug their family members to poke them or whatnot. It just seems weird.Austin: It does. And until Amazon comes out with a minder drone that just, kind of like, hovers over your shoulder at all times, and pokes you, when someone is like, “Hey, you broke the build.” Then I think we're going to need observability so that people can sort of self-serve, figure out what's going on with their systems.Corey: Cool. One of the things I'm going to point out is that I've had a bunch of people attempt to explain what distributed tracing is and how observability works, and it never really stuck. And one of the things that I found that did help explain it—and we didn't even talk about this in the pre-show, while we figure out how to pronounce each other's names—but one of the things that has always stuck with me is the interactive sandbox on Lightstep, which used to be prominently featured on your page; now it's buried in the menu somewhere. But it's an interactive sandbox that sets up a scenario, problem you're trying to solve, gives you data—so it gets away from the problem of, “Step one, have a distributed application where it's all instrumented and reporting things in.” Because in a lot of shops, that's not exactly a small lift that you can do in an afternoon to start testing things like this out. It's genius. It shows what the product does, how it works, mapped to the type of problems people will generally encounter. And after I played with this, “Oh, my stars, I get it.”Austin: We actually just recently updated that to add some new stuff to it because we shipped a feature called ‘Change Intelligence' where you can take actual time-series metrics, and then overlay those on traces and say, “Hey, I saw a weird spike,” and highlight that, and then we go through, look at all the traces for that service and its related services during that time, and tell you, “Hey, we think it might be this. Here's things that are highly correlated in those time windows.” So, if you haven't checked it out recently, go back and check it out. It's—yeah, a little more hidden than it used to be, but I believe you can find it at lightstep.com/sandbox.Corey: Yeah. And there's no sign up to do this. It's free access. It asked for an email address, but that's okay, I just use yours. No, I'm not kidding. I actually did. And, yeah, it works; it shows exactly what it is. It even has, instead of ‘start' it says ‘play' because that's fundamentally what it is. If you're trying to wrap your head around distributed tracing, take a look at this.Austin: Yes, definitely. I have a long-standing Jira ticket to add achievements to that.Corey: Oh, that could be fun. You could bury some, too, like misusing services as databases—Austin: Ooh.Corey: —or most expensive query to get the right answer.Austin: Yeah. And then maybe, like, there's just one span, kind of, hidden there where it's ‘using Route 53 as a database.'Corey: I keep seeing that cropping up more and more places. That's something I get to own and that's an awful lot of fun. Speaking of gamification and playing in strange ways, one of the things you did last year that I wasn't paying attention to—because, you know, there was a pandemic on—was you were one of the organizers behind Desert Island DevOps which is a strange thing that I've only recently delved into—delven into—gone spelunking inside of. There we go.It wasn't instrumented for observability—buh-dum-tss. But it's fundamentally a DevOpsDays that takes place inside the animated world of Animal Crossing's New Horizon, which is apparently a Nintendo game, which is apparently a game company.Austin: Yeah.Corey: It is not really my space. I don't want to misspeak.Austin: No, you hit it. ‘Deserted.' Deserted Island [crosstalk 00:05:43].Corey: Oh, ‘Deserted.' Ah, got it. And don't spell it as ‘dessert' either, as in this would be a delicious game to play.Austin: I mean, it is a delicious and comforting sort of experience. If you aren't familiar with Animal Crossing, the short 30-second explanation is it is a life simulator, building game where, you as your character, you are on an island, and there are relatively adorable animal NPCs that are your villagers, and you can talk to them, and they will say funny things to you. You can go around and do chores like picking up fruit or fishing. And the purpose is, kind of, do these chores, get some in-game currency, and then go spend that in-game currency on furniture so that you can make a pretty house, or buy pretty clothing. And it came out at a perfect time last year because everyone was about to bundle inside for the—well, we're still inside—but everyone had to go inside. And suddenly, here's this like, “Oh, it's just this cute, sort of like, putz around and do whatever.”Corey: It was community-oriented. It was more of a building-oriented game than a destruction game.Austin: Yeah.Corey: It's the sort of thing that is a great way of taking your mind off your troubles. It is accessible to a bunch of people that aren't generally perceived as gamers when you think of that subculture. It really is an encompassing, warm, wonderful thing—by all accounts—and you looked at it and figured, “All right, how can we ruin something?” And the correct answer you got to is, “Let's pour DevOps on it.”Austin: Yeah. Let's use this as an event platform, and let's really just tech-bro this shit up.Corey: And it seems to work super well. At the time of this recording, I have submitted a talk that I live-streamed my submission around, and I have not heard in either direction. To be perfectly frank, I forget what I wound up submitting, which is always a bit of a challenge, just because I make so many throwaway random jokes that, cool. Well, we'll see how it plays out. I think you were even in the audience for that on the Twitch stream.Austin: Yeah. You found some bugs on the CFP form [laugh] that I had to fix.Corey: To be clear, the reason I do those things is not because it's a look how clever I am, but rather to instead talk about how it's not scary to submit a talk proposal. Everyone has a story that they can tell. And you don't need a big platform or decades of experience in this space to tell a story. And that was my goal, and I think I succeeded. You would have the numbers more than I do; I hope people wound up submitting based upon seeing that. I want to hear voices that, frankly, aren't ours all the time.Austin: I think in, like, a week, we basically got more submissions than we did for the entire CFP last year. One thing that I kind of think is interesting to bring up because you bring up, oh, we don't hear a variety of voices, right? One thing I tell people, and I know that it's not universally applicable advice, but I got into DevRel as a—not quite luck, but, like, everything in my life is luck, on some level. It always plays some level of importance. But I didn't go to school to get into DevRel, I didn't do a lot of things.I have actually been in tech, maybe—depending on how you want to count it—in terms of actually being in a software development job or primarily software development job, maybe, like, five or six years, give or take. And before that, I did a lot of stuff. I was a short-order cook; I worked at gas stations; I did tech support for Blackberry, and I did a lot of community organization. I was a union organizer for a little while. I like DevRel because it's like, oh, this kind of integrates a lot of things I'm interested in, right?I enjoy teaching, helping people, and helping people learn, but I also like talking; I like to go and be a public figure, and I like to build a platform and use that to get a message out. And I think what I did with Deserted Island, or what the impetus there was, we suddenly were in a situation where it's like, “Hey, there's a bunch of people that normally get together and they fly around the globe in decent airplane seats, and people come and see us talk.” Because why? Because they think we know what we're talking about, or because we have something that shows we know what we're talking about, or however you want to say it. But in a lot of cases, I think people are coming for that sort of community, they're coming because, “Hey, I can go to a room and I can sit in some weird little hotel, or conference center, or whatnot, and everyone I look at, everyone I see is someone that is doing what I'm doing, on some level. These are all people that are working in technology, they're building things, they're solving problems.”And that goes away really quickly when you get into this remote-first world, and when we can't travel, and we don't have that visual aspect. So, what I wanted to do with Deserted Island, what I thought what was important about it is, I was already sick of Zoom by the time, everyone went to Zoom; I was already sick of the idea of, oh my god, a year or two years of these sort of events and these community things just being, like, everyone's staring at a bunch of slides and a talking head. Didn't sound very appealing, so what if we try something different? What if we do something where it's like, look, we're going to take people out of their day; we're going to put them in somewhere else. And maybe that's somewhere else is just, hey, you're watching people run around on an Animal Crossing Island on a Twitch stream.But that sort of moment of just, like, this isn't what you would normally be doing, I think takes people's heads out of their normal routine and puts them in a place where they can learn, and they can feel community, and they can feel, like, a kinship. I also think it's really important because it's that whole stupid New Yorker joke of, “On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog.” We have this really cool opportunity to craft who we are as people, and how we present that to the world. And for a lot of people, you're stuck inside; you don't get that self-expression, so here's a way to be expressive, right? Here's a way to communicate who you are on a level that isn't just a profile picture or something, or things that don't work as well over Zoom.It's a way to help project your identity. And that, I think, gives more weight to what you're saying because when you feel like, “Hey, this is more of who I am,” or, “This is a representation of me. I can show something about who I am.” And that helps you speak. And that helps you deliver, I think, an effective talk. And that, again, builds community and builds these bonds.Corey: I want to talk to you about that, specifically because you are one of those people that aligns very much with my view of the world on developer marketing. But I don't want to lead you too much on this, so why don't you start? Take it away. Where do you stand on developer marketing? And what do people get wrong?Austin: I think the thing that a lot of people get wrong is that they try to monetize the idea of community. If you go and you search, insert major company name here; you search “Amazon community,” or you search “Microsoft community,” or you search “Google community,”—well, if you do that, you'll get no results, but whatever, right? You get the picture that marketers in a way have turned the idea of developer community into something that you can just throw a KPI or throw an OKR on and squeeze it for money. And I don't like that. I'm not very comfortable with that idea of community—because I think community in a lot of ways, it's like family. And the families that you like the best are the ones you choose. I think this is—Corey: The family you choose is an important concept.Austin: Right. And for the most part… so much of human experience activity is built around finding those people you choose, and those communities develop out of that. I use AWS sometimes, I don't necessarily know if I would put myself in a community with every other AWS user. I—Corey: Oh, I certainly wouldn't. This is the problem. Everyone thinks when you talk about community or a group of people doing something, they're ‘other people' that are in some level of otherness. And that's—like there are entire communities around AWS that I do not talk to, I do not see, I do not pretend to understand.Austin: Yeah, even at Lightstep. We're not a massive, massive company by any means, but we have a bunch of different users that are using our tool in different ways. And they all have different needs, and they all have different wants. So, I could say, “Oh, here's the Lightstep community.” But it's not a useful abstraction.It's not a useful way to abstract all of our users because any tool that's worth using is going to be this collection of other abstractions and building blocks. Like, you… I don't know, look at something like Notion, or look at something like Airtable, or the popularity of low or no-code stuff, where someone built a platform and then other people are building stuff on top of that platform, if you go to those user groups or you go to those forums, and it's just like, there's a million, million different varied use cases, and people are doing it in different ways, and some people are building this kind of application, or that kind of application, or whatever. So, the idea of, oh, there's a community and we can monetize that community somehow, I'm uncomfortable with that from, sort of, a base level. And I'm uncomfortable with the idea of the DevRel industry—or the developer marketing industry—kind of moving towards this idea of, like, we're going to become community marketers or whatever. I think you have to approach people as individuals.And individuals are motivated by a lot of things. They're motivated by, can you solve this problem? Do I like you? Are you funny? Whatever. And I believe that if you're a developer tool, and you are trying to attract developers, then [sigh] it works a lot better, I think, to have just individuals, to have people that can help influence the much broader—the superset of all developers that might have an interest in what you're doing by being different, I guess.Being something that's like, hey, this is entertaining, or this is informative, or this is interesting. The world is not a meritocracy. The world is governed by many, many different things. You're not going to win over the developer industry simply by going out and having the best white papers, or having one more ad read than your competitor. You need to do something to get people interested and excited in [sigh] a way that they can see themselves using it.It's like, why did Apple go and do ‘Think Different' ads? Because it's like, you using a Mac, that's kind of like being Einstein, or that's kind of like being Picasso. This is basic marketing stuff that I feel like a lot of technical marketers or developer marketers sort of leave at the door because they think the audience is too sophisticated for it, or their—Corey: I'll even soft-launch it here because I haven't at this point in time, talked about it in public, but if you go to lastweekinAWS.com/resources we wrote our own developer marketing guide because I got tired of explaining the same type of thing again, and again, and again. It asks for an email address and it sends it to you—I know, I'm as guilty as any. And I, of course, called it ‘Devreloper,' which is absolutely a problem with me and I talk about things. But I'm right.And it goes to an awful lot of what you're saying. An example that you just talked about of giving people something rather than trying to treat them as metrics, one of the best marketing things I've seen you do, for example, is you wrote O'Reilly's Distributed Tracing in Practice which means if someone has a question about distributed tracing and how it's supposed to work, well, that's not a half-bad resource. And okay, I've read it and I have some further questions. Let me track down the author and ask them. Oh, you work at a company that is in this space? Huh. Maybe I'll look into this. And it's a very long-tail story. And how do you attribute that as far as, did this lead come from someone who read your book or not will drive marketers crazy.Austin: Oh, it's super hard. And it does drive them crazy. [laugh].Corey: Yeah, my answer is, I don't know and I don't care. One of the early sponsors of this podcast sponsored for a month and then didn't continue because they saw no value. A month goes by, they bought out everything that held still long enough, and, “Thank you for your business.” “Can you explain to me what changed?” “Oh, we talked to some of our big customers and it turned out the two of them had heard about us for the first time on your show.”And that inspired them to start digging into it and reaching things out, but big companies, corporate games of telephone, there was no way to attribute that. My firm belief is, on some level, that if you get in front of an audience with a message that resonates and—and this is the part some people miss—is something that solves an actual problem that they have. It works. It's not necessarily predictable and it's hard to say that this thing is going to go big and this thing isn't. So, the solution, on some level is just keep publishing things that speak to your audience. But it works, long term. I'm living proof of this.Austin: Yeah. I think that it makes a lot more sense to… rather than to do, sort of, I don't want to say vanity metrics, but kind of vanity metrics around, like, oh, this many stars, or this many forks, or whatever. There's a lot of people, especially in this OSS proximate world. Where you have a lot of businesses that are implicitly or explicitly built on top of an open-source project, not everyone that is using your open-source project is going to, one, be capable of converting into a paid user, or two, be super interested in it. And I would rather spend time thinking about, well, what is the value someone gets out of this product?And even if that only thing is, is that, hey, we know what we're talking about because we've got a bunch of really smart people that are building this product that would solve their problem. If you want to go out and build your own internal observability solution using completely open-source tools Grafanas and Prometheuses of the world, great. Go for it. I'm not going to hold you back. And for a lot of people, if they come to me and say, “Well, this is what we got, and this what we're thinking about.”I'll say, “Yeah. Go for it. You don't need what we're offering.” But I can guarantee you that as it scales and as it grows, then you're going to have a moment where you have to ask yourself the question of, “Do I want to keep spending a bunch of time stitching together all these different data sources, and care and feeding of these databases, and this long term storage, and dealing with requests from end-users, or I just want to pay someone else to solve that problem for me? And if I'm going to pay someone else, shouldn't I pay the people who literally spend all day every day thinking about these problems and have had decades of experience solving these problems at really big companies that have a lot of time and effort to invest in this?”Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Lumigo. If you've built anything from serverless, you know that if there's one thing that can be said universally about these applications, it's that it turns every outage into a murder mystery. Lumigo helps make sense of all of the various functions that wind up tying together to build applications. It offers one-click distributed tracing so you can effortlessly find and fix issues in your serverless and microservices environment. You've created more problems for yourself; make one of them go away. To learn more, visit lumigo.io.Corey: Oh, yeah. We're doing some new content experiments on our site, and what we're doing is we're having some folks write content for us. Now, when people hear that, what a lot of marketers will immediately do is dive down the path of, “Ah. I'm going to go ahead and hire some content farm.” Well, that doesn't work, I found that we wound up working with individual people that work super well.And these are people who are able to talk about these things because their day job is managing a team of 30 SREs or something like that, where they are very clearly experts in the space. And I want to be very clear, I'm not claiming credit for our content writers; they get their own bylines on these things.Austin: Yeah.Corey: And it turns out that that, over time, leads to good outcomes because it helps people what they need. There's the mystical SEO Juju that I don't pretend to understand, but okay, I'm told it's important, so fine, whatever. And it makes for an easier onboarding story, where there are now resources that I can trust and edit if I need to, as things change, that I can point people to, that isn't a rotating selection of sketchy sites.Austin: Mm-hm. I think that's one thing that I would love to see more of, just not in any one particular part of the tech industry, but overall, the one thing I've noticed, at least in the pandemic, during this whole work-from-home, whatever, whatever, we don't talk enough. And it sounds maybe weird, but I think this actually goes back to what you're saying earlier, about everyone having a story to tell. People don't feel comfortable, I think, putting their opinion out there or saying, “Hey, this is what worked. This is what didn't work.”And so if you want to go find that out—like, if I wanted to go write something about, hey, these are the five things you should do to ensure you have great observability, then that's going to involve a lot of me going around and sort of Sherlocking my way through StackOverflow posts, and forums, and reaching out to people individually for stories and comments and whatever. And I would love to see us get to a point where we're just like, “Actually, no. This isn't—we should just be sharing this. Let's write blogs about it.” If you're sitting there thinking no one's going to find this useful, right—like, you solve a problem, or you see something that could have worked better, and you're like, “Eh, no one else is going to find that valuable.”I can almost guarantee you that someone is going to find that valuable. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but go ahead and write about your experiences, write about the problems you've solved, write about the things that have vexed you, and put that on the internet because it's really easy to publish stuff on the internet.Corey: Yes. Which is a blessing and a curse. That is very much a double-edged sword.Austin: That very much is a double-edged sword. But I think that by biasing towards being more open, by biasing towards transparency and sharing what works, what doesn't work, and having that just kind of be the default state, I'm a big proponent of things like radical transparency in terms of incident reports, or outages, or hiring, or anything. The more information that you can put in the world is going to—it might not make it better, but it at least helps change the conversation, gives more data points. There was a whole blow-up on Twitter this week, where someone posted like, “Hey, this is a salary I'm looking for.” I think you—Corey: Oh, yeah. She's great.Austin: Yeah, she's worth it, right? And the thing that got everyone's bee in a bonnet was, like, she's saying, “Oh, I want $185k.” And it's like, “Well, why don't we just publish that information?” Why isn't everyone just very open and honest about their salary expectations? And I know why: because the paucity of information is a benefit to employers and it works against employees.There was a lady that left—gosh, where was it? [sigh] I forget the company, but she left because she found out she was systemically underpaid compared to their male peers. Having these sort of information imbalances don't really help the people at the bottom of the pyramid. They don't help the little guys. They really only help the people that are in the very large companies with a lot of clout and ability to control narratives.And they want it to stay that way; they don't necessarily want you to know what everyone's salary is because then it gives you, as someone trying to get a job, a better negotiating position because you know what someone with your level of experience is worth to them.Corey: It's important to understand the context behind these salary negotiations and how to go about getting interviews and the rest. The entire job-hunting process is heavily biased in favor of employers because, especially at large employers, they go through this multiple times a week, whereas we go through this, as employees basically, every time we change jobs. Which for most people is every couple of years and for me, because of my mouth, it's every three weeks.Austin: Yeah. I'm not saying it's a simple solution. I am advocating for, sort of, societal, or just cultural shifts, but I think that it all comes full circle in the sense that, hey, a big part of observability is the idea that you need to be able to ask arbitrary questions. You want to know about unknown unknowns. And maybe that's why I like it so much as a field, why I like tracing, why I like this idea.Because, yeah, a lot of things in the world would be interesting, and different, and maybe more equitable if we did have more observability about not just, hey, I use Kafka, I use these parameters on it, and that gives me better throughput, but what if you had observability for how HR runs? What if you had observability for how hiring is done? And that was something that you could see outside of the organization as well. What if we shared all this stuff more, and more, and more, and we treated a few less things as trade secrets? I don't know if that's ever going to happen in my lifetime, but it's my default position. Let's share more rather than less.Corey: Yes, absolutely. Especially those of us with inordinate amounts of privilege. And that privilege takes different forms; there's the usual stuff people are talking about in terms of the fact that we are over-represented in tech in many respects, but there are other forms of privilege, too. There's a privilege that comes with seniority in the space, there is a privilege with being a published author, in your case, there is privilege in having a broad audience, like I do. And it just becomes this incredibly nuanced story.The easiest part of it to lose sight of—at least for me—is I tell stories about what has worked for me and how I've done what I do, and I have to be constantly conscious of the fact that there is that privilege baked in and call it out where I can. I've gotten much better at that, but it's an ongoing process. Because what works for me does not work for other people across a wide variety of different axes. And I don't want people to feel bad based upon what I say.Austin: Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I'm in the same boat. Like, I tend to be very irreverent and/or shitpost-y and I don't have much of an explanation other than, I learned at some point in my life, that it's just… [sigh] I would rather go through life shitposting on Twitter, rather than be employable. It's just who I am. There's—I'm sure some people think I come off as rude. I don't know. I also agree, you'd never punch down. You only punch up. But you never know how other people are going to take that, and I don't think that it always gets interpreted in the spirit it was meant. And I can always do better, right?Corey: As can we all. The hard part for, I think, a lot of us is to suppress that initial flash of defensiveness when someone says you didn't quite get there, and learn from the experience. One of the ways I do that, personally, is I walk away before responding, sometimes. I want to be a better version of myself, but when I get called out of—like, this tweet thread is the whitest thing I've seen since I redid my bathroom walls, and I get a flash of defensiveness, “Excuse me. That's not accurate.”And… and then I stop and I think, and then sanity prevails, where it's, yeah. There's a lot of privilege baked into my existence, and if I don't see it, that doesn't mean it's not there. I have made it a firm rule of not responding defensively to things like that, ever. And there are times when I get called out for aspects of how I present that I don't believe are justified, to be very honest. But that is a me thing; that is not them, and I welcome the feedback, regardless. If you make people feel like a jerk for giving you feedback, they stop giving you feedback. And then where are you?Austin: Yeah. Funny anecdote. I wrote a blog for my personal blog a little while ago about, oh, togetherness, community, something like that. But I wrote—the intro was something like, talking about why people love Sweet Caroline, right? Favorite song in the world.Corey: [sings].Austin: [joins in]. Yeah.Corey: Yeah. I'm not allowed to play with that song here at The Duckbill Group because one of our employees is named Caroline and, firm rule: don't make fun of people's names. They're sensitive about it, and let's not kid ourselves here, I own the company. Even if she says, “It's fine, I love it.” That doesn't help because I own the company. There is a power imbalance here.Austin: Yeah.Corey: I don't know that she would feel that she had the psychological safety to say, “That's not funny.” I absolutely hope she would because that's the culture that I spend significant effort on building, but I can't depend on that. So, I don't go down the path of making those jokes. But I—yes, I love the intro to the song. Please continue.Austin: It's great. Everyone loves it. So, the intro of my initial paragraph was ruminating on that. And this post went around enough that it got submitted to Hacker News a few times, and the only comment it got was some mendacious busybody Hacker News type going on about why I would be so racist against white people. [laugh]. And I was just like, “And this is why I don't come to this website at all.”Corey: Yeah. There are so many things on Twitter that are challenging and difficult and obnoxious, and it's still the best thing we have for a sense of community. This has replaced IRC for me, to be perfectly honest.Austin: Yeah. No, I used to be big on IRC, and then I left because [sigh], well, a couple reasons. One, I really liked being able to post gifs.Corey: Yeah, that is something where the IRC experience is substandard. I was Freenode network staff for years—Austin: Oh wow.Corey: —and that was the thing to do. Now, turns out that the open-source dialogue and the community dialogue have shifted form. And I still hang out there periodically for specific things, but by and large, it's not where the discourse is.Austin: Yeah, it is interesting. It's something that concerns me, kind of, in a long term sense about not only our identity but also, sort of, the actual organic communities we formed, we've put on to these extremely unaccountable privately held platforms whose goal is monetization and growth so that they can continue to make money. And for as much as anyone can rightfully say, “Hey, Twitter's missed the mark,” a lot of times, it is a hard balance to strike. They don't have simple questions to answer, and I don't necessarily know if the nuance of their solutions has really risen to the challenge of answering those well, but it's a hard thing for them to do. That said, I think we're in a really awkward position where suddenly you've got the world's collection of open-source software is being hosted on a platform that is run by Microsoft, and I am old enough to remember. “Embrace, extend, extinguish.”Corey: Oh, yeah. I made an entire personality out of hating Microsoft.Austin: Yeah. And I mean, a lot of people still do. I read MacRumors sometimes, and they're all posting there still. Or Slashdot.Corey: I wondered where they'd gone. I didn't think everyone had changed their mind.Austin: I had just a very out-of-body moment yesterday because someone replied to a comment on mine about Slashdot on it, and then the Slashdot Twitter account liked it. And there exists a photo of me from when I was a teenager, where I owned a Slashdot ballcap. And that picture is somewhere in the world. Probably not on the internet, though, for very good reason.Corey: I'm mostly just still reeling at the discovery that there's a Slashdot Twitter account. But I guess time does evolve.Austin: It does. It makes fools of us all.Corey: It really does. Well, Austin, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. If people want to learn more about what you're up to, how you view the world, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Where can they find you?Austin: So, you can find me on Twitter, mostly, at @austinlparker. You can find my blog with various musings that is updated frequently at aparker.io and you can learn more about Deserted Island DevOps 2021, coming on April 30th this year, at desertedislanddevops.com.Corey: Excellent. And we will put links to all of that in the [show notes 00:34:01]. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. I appreciate it.Austin: Thank you for having me. This was a lot of fun.Corey: It really was. Austin Parker, principal developer advocate at Lightstep. 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 and then a giant series of comments that all reference one another and then completely lose track of how they all interrelate and be unable to diagnose performance issues.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.This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

01:04 - Austin’s Superpower: Pain Tolerance 02:06 - Deserted Island DevOps (https://desertedisland.club/) (Running an Online/Virtual Conference in Animal Crossing (https://animal-crossing.com/) or Other Mediums) * Deserted Island DevOps 2020 on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVUQjiv8GtwL-B9AJJ-rNdiDtcU2wo7Gy) * Software Circus (https://www.youtube.com/c/SoftwareCircus) * The Great Cloud Native Bakeoff (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koT08purWDc) * Making Real-Time Audience/Human Connection * Streaming * Watch Parties * Austin Parker: Virtual Events Suck. (https://aparker.io/posts/virtual-events-suck/) 24:09 - Failure; Making it Safe to Fail * Technical Failure * Psychological Failure * Underpromise, Overdeliver 32:51 - Safety and Setting Expectations (The Problem with More is Better) * OKRs * Open Source Principles (https://opensource.com/principles) Reflections: John: The creativity of new ways to experience a conference. Coraline: The importance of moderation. Austin: How to communicate feelings of failure and setting expectations about it to people you’re working with. Jacob: Find a conference that has been thoughtful about interaction when not in person and go. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode) To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: CORALINE: Hello and welcome to Episode 231 of Greater Than Code podcast. I’m so happy to be here with you today. My name is Coraline Ada Ehmke and I’m joined by my friend, John Sawers. JOHN: Thanks, Coraline. And I’m here with Jacob Stoebel. JACOB: Thanks. John! It’s my pleasure to introduce our guest this week, Austin Parker. Austin makes problems with computers and sometimes solves them. He’s an open-source maintainer, observability nerd, DevOps junkie, and poster. You can find him ignoring Hacker News threads and making dumb jokes on Twitter. He wrote a book about distributed tracing, taught some college courses, streams on Twitch, and also ran a DevOps conference in Animal Crossing. Such a nice pleasure to have you on the show. AUSTIN: It's fantastic to be here. JACOB: We can start the show like we always do by asking you a question. What's your superpower and how did you develop it? AUSTIN: Right now, my superpower is I'm 50% through a COVID-19 vaccine and I developed it by staying indoors for the past year, but more hilariously I guess, I developed a strong resistance to burns by working as a gas station cook for quite a while, back in my younger days. So I ran the fryer and you get really good at ignoring hot oil spattering on you. So I'd like to think that that level of pain tolerance is what helped me get through a lot of DevOps stuff and getting used to computers. [laughter] CORALINE: Yeah. I hate Kubernetes and it's hot oil splashing. They should do something about that. It's open source. I guess, I could open my PR, but . AUSTIN: Yeah. Well, they say PR is welcome, but that's the open-source maintainers. Bless your heart, right? CORALINE: Yeah, exactly. So Austin, I want to know more about this DevOps conference that you ran in Animal Crossing. AUSTIN: So let's start at the beginning, let's take everyone back to just about a year ago now where we were all kind of settling in for our wonderful pandemic that has been extremely not wonderful for most people, but I think everyone was coming to grips with how long it would take at first. My day job, I work as in developer relations. I'm a marketer, effectively. But I remember a lot of people were talking, the marketing team and certainly, the entire events space like, “Oh, what's this going to do about the summer events, what's this going to do about the fall events?” and I'm sitting here like, “Hey, I think this is going to last a little longer than till June.” So the conversation kind of pivots as everything gets progressively worse and people are starting to come to grips like, “Well, can we do a virtual event?” I don't think anyone at the time really had a good idea of what a virtual event would be. We all know video conferencing certainly is something that we've come to rely on in our day-to-day lives over the past year. Even if you weren't already in tech, or weren't already working remotely, Zoom is – it’s been Q-tip. It's been Kleenex. It's a no matter what you're using, you're Zooming someone. So they have that going for them, I guess. People, I think there was a lot of possibility and not a lot of real, strong ideas about what does this actually mean? So I wanted to try something different. I was joking around on Twitter and I had just gotten a copy of Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and I was staging with screenshots with like, “Oh look, this is funny. It's like a conference booth.” It's like ha, ha, we're all giving out t-shirts and laughing. And the code people picked up on and they were like, “Oh, that's funny. I bet you could actually do a conference in Animal Crossing and stream it out” because you can actually have people like join you, come over to your island and stand around. I was like, “Well, actually, you could just composite that video from the output of the game over some slides and what's the difference?” Someone's talking, someone's clicking through slides, and it spiraled from a joke. I put up a page, a landing page on April 1st, which is the best time to announce anything thing. Because if people don't go for it, you can always be like, “Ha, ha, April fools. Got you!” [laughter] But I put up a landing page and we had a 100 people register for more information that first day, I messaged them on Slack, and I'm like, “Well, I’ve got to do it now; a 100 people one day. That's great.” CORALINE: Yeah. AUSTIN: So long story short, over the next 30 days, we basically put together, myself and then my co-organizer, Katie @thekatertot on Twitter, or Katie Farmer, a virtual conference inside of Animal Crossing. It's called Deserted Island DevOps. You can go watch it on YouTube, the one from last year. We're doing another one this year on April 30th. It's just a one-day live stream. If you're watching it, you're just watching it on Twitch. We have a Discord that you can talk and do the hallway track stuff and ask questions and network. But the gimmick is basically, everyone's presenting has a Switch and they are in Animal Crossing. They're on this island, they're dressing up their little Animal Crossing character and we overlay their slides with the video coming out of the Switch so they can emote and react and it's cute experience to watch. But I think it's also interesting because what I saw, last year at least, is that it solves a lot of the problems, I think most virtual conferences don't quite nail, which is, I think a good event is something that takes you out of your day-to-day. It takes you out of where you are and put you somewhere else. Now, if you go into KubeCon, or re:Invent, or even devopdays, if you're doing this physically like, you're not at your office, you're not at home, you're somewhere else talking to people, literally, you have changed the physical location you're in. But most virtual events, it still boils down to, “Hey, I'm watching a Zoom effectively and I'm talking to people in Slack.” If I wanted to do that, I could just do my actual job. So I think one of the things that people appreciated about Deserted Island and continue to is the idea that this is produced differently. There's a couple other people that are doing stuff like this. I think Software Circus out of the UK, they've done a lot of themed events, themed virtual events like this, where the presenters are wearing costumes. Or there was The Great Kubernetes Bake-Off, I want to say where it’s a cloud kitchen theme so everyone has their chefs’ hats. I think having that concept also gives presenters a lot of mileage in terms of hey, you can theme what you're talking about. Here is an analogy in a box, here is a world that you can put your talk in and you have an idea that everyone can use those shared experiences, that shared language to develop your talk and give people an anchor for it, which I think is one of the good ways you help people learn. If you give them something they know about and then you tie your concept into that concept, then they're going to get more out of it. The other thing is that it's a great way to be expressive. In Animal Crossing, you are who you are, you are whoever your avatar is. So you don't get any of the – I hate being on camera a lot. It gets exhausting because you feel like you're performing for the camera. It’s not the same, but in this, nobody's seeing your actual face; they're hearing your voice and then you can dress your Animal Crossing your avatar whatever. So you can be creative. You can be who you are without having that weird performance pressure of a bunch of people that you can't see staring at your face JOHN: This is an important topic these days because there's still everything's online and will be for a while and I think so many people are still learning how to do online events and those skills are going to need to keep happening over the next coming years. I think because you can do now online events, which are more accessible to more people all over the world, you don't have to be the sort of person who can fly places in order to attend certain events. Having them online is a great accessibility option. So finding new modalities for making that interesting and not just sitting on Zoom all day, I think is a worthy endeavor. AUSTIN: Yeah, and it's super challenging. I don't want to sound like I'm like dragging people's work because I know CNCF has had to move a lot of stuff virtual. I know of the entire devopsdays community has had to move a lot of stuff virtual. This is super hard to do. It's not easy. It requires a lot of intentionality; a lot of planning and I think we will all get better at it over time. The future is not necessarily going to be like the past, I don't know if there's ever going to be a day where we just kind of flip a switch and it's all like, “Oh, we're back to how we were before March of 2020,” I think. So there's still going to be a desire for virtual events and there's still going to be a desire for figuring out ways to be more inclusive and to bring people in, especially because of climate change and everything like that. At some point, we have to come to a reckoning about the actual cost of a global travel-based society but that's maybe a slightly different topic. I don't know. CORALINE: I actually think a good side effect of all this is a focus on accessibility and like you said, a lot of people aren't people to travel. It's expensive. I know conferences, typically in-person conferences, used to spend quite a bit of money with programs to bring in marginalized folks who maybe couldn't afford the travel. But one thing I do miss is getting that audience reaction. Especially as a storyteller, I tend to tell a lot of stories in my talk and I like to be able to see, is the audience with me, is the audience getting what I'm saying? I can tune my presentation in real-time based on audience reactions and I really miss that. I really missed that aspect of it, that feedback aspect of it, because at the end of people are like, “Oh, great talk.” I'm like, “Yeah, but did it get to you?” AUSTIN: Yeah, did you connect with it? CORALINE: Yeah, and that's so hard. AUSTIN: It's challenging, especially because so many of – on the production side, there's a bias, I think in virtual events to prerecord, due to a lot of factors and this is not a diss on prerecording. I personally hate it. I basically have stopped doing any event that's like, “Oh, we want you to prerecord.” I'm just like, “Eh, I'd rather not” because that’s the style, that's the way I talk. I agree with this idea of storytelling like, you're not just reading slides. If I just want someone to read slides, I could just hand them a book. But what's weird to me is one of the things that I think that we did, that I haven't seen anyone else really do, is there's already a way that people do this. If you watch Twitch, if you watch twitch.tv, or live streams like the kids do these days, there is a real-time chat and people are reacting in real-time. It's a little bit delayed. It's a couple seconds delayed, but I don't know why you haven't seen other virtual event platforms take that idea and really try to have even just a button like a clap button, or a sparkle fingers button, or something to kind of let people know that there's people out there watching you and that they're reacting positively and maybe not negatively, but they're reacting. That they are cognizant of what you're saying. It's really surprising to me that we haven't seen more like that and I would love if some of these event platforms thought about that. How do you make that actual, immediate real-time, or near real-time audience connection with the speaker? CORALINE: The Twitch thing is really interesting. Back in October, I started streaming in addition to everything else I do in my life—I'm a musician—and I started streaming, recording, and music production and I have a weekly show. You're right, the audience interaction is great and I incorporate that into my show. I'll stop what I'm doing after I finish laying down one track and I'll ask the people in chat, “What instrument should I pick up next?” Or, “What sound would you like to hear there?” Things like that. It does make that more interactive and it brings some of that human connection back and I think you're right. That's what's missing from a lot of these online conferences is that connection. CORALINE: Yeah, and I actually think you've hit on it right there with streaming. There's been a big question – I don't know how much you follow the CNCF, KubeCon EU talk acceptance drama that kind of popped off a week, or so ago. But the short version is obviously, KubeCon is a very prominent conference in the Cloud Native world and it gets a lot of submissions and because it gets a lot of submissions, a lot of talks get dropped, a lot of things get cut. That's every event; there's always more submissions than there are slots for people to speak, but it turned into a bit of a blow up on Twitter and they actually wrote a blog post that's very explicitly described again hey, this is how we pick these talks. There's a lot of factors that go into it. The thing that occurred to me and I've seen some people talk about, especially people that have been in the industry for a while is, what really is the benefit of a conference at all? When you have things like Twitch and you can build an audience for yourself and it's easier than it's ever been to get a platform. Some people in the world have used that for good ends and some people in the world have used that for ill ends, but regardless, I could go out and just say, “I'm not doing talks and I'm not doing conferences anymore. I'm just going to stream. I'm going to produce things and put them on YouTube.” The only reason you would be at a conference at that point is as like okay, this is a quality filter. These are some people saying, or suggesting that these talks, or these individuals have a higher value to the community because we got a bunch of people, smart people to look at it and say like, “Yeah, we think this one's better than that one.” But I really wonder if all of this with COVID, with the pandemic, with the change in events is going to inspire a different model going forward, where there's less of a centralization factor of you haven’t made it until you've done a KubeCon keynote, or you haven't made it until you've done the devopsdays circuit, or you haven't made it until you've written a book, or whatever. If you’ve got something to say, go say it and I think maybe that's a better way because that also is more accessible. You don't have to necessarily – there's less gatekeepers and a lot of times, gatekeepers and experts are useful because they help cut through all the chaff. But on the flip side, it can be harmful, too because everyone has biases and even the best process is never going to weed out bias and most of the time, you don't want it to weed out bias. You want it to be biased for good things, not bad things. I don't know. I feel like there's a conversation that needs to happen about this that hasn't quite gotten off the ground yet. I'm interested to see where it goes. JACOB: One thing that sounds interesting about this Animal Crossing conferences, you talked about it was a different modality altogether and I'm just curious if did this conference include, or at least was it like there was a side-effect of conference goers just playing the game with each other? AUSTIN: Yeah, actually that was one of my really interesting learnings from it was that when you have a community started, just the best thing to do is just let them go do stuff. We had a bunch of people form impromptu watch parties where they would open up their island and invite people are watching to come and be in the same game space as them as viewers and run around together while watching the stream. So they would tweet out pictures like you would do at an actual conference, where it's like, “Oh, hanging out with the besties,” and then tweet out a picture, a screenshot of their island with people sitting. Some people went really into this; they built little watch party rooms where everyone had chairs and a little movie projector set up. Some people had coffee machines and a little snack plates, or whatever in the game. It was really interesting to me how, when you kind of let people be creative about it and you let people try to build what they want inside this modality, this world, this bigger world, I guess, of being at a virtual conference, that they'll do stuff with it because it's fun and because it gets you engaged. Again, it's not just watching another Zoom. It's not just chatting on Slack. It's, you're doing something and the really good thing about that is if you are doing something, if you do make it a unique experience, people will actually take the time for it. One thing that I think gets lost in a lot of these virtual events right now is that it's not something you're blocking off time for. You're saying like, “Okay, I've got maybe two, or three talks I really want to watch. So I'm going to block off 45 minutes in my calendar here and there and I'm going to watch this different screen for a minute.” But with this, what we saw was people had blocked the entire day off. It was a 6-hour, maybe 5 hours total and people were there the entire time. We had 8,000, 9,000 people watching basically consistently from the beginning to the end and about 15,000 people total watched it over the course of the day. So nearly 50% of that were people that were there the whole time roughly. I think by giving people that space to make time for themselves and to say like, “I'm going to treat this like an actual thing and not just something I'm going to pop back into.” That meant they could do the networking. They could do the chatting. They could react in Twitch and they could do the little clap emojis and the sparkle emojis. They could have those hallway track conversations and network and bond and get that social jazz you get by talking to people that have this similar problems, or have overcome challenges and are like, “Oh, this is how I solved X and Y problem in Kubernetes,” or even, “Oh yeah, this is a strategy I learned for dealing with managers that don't understand me, or making sure that we – how do I communicate this technical concept to the business?” It wasn't just, “I want to talk about really cool IP tables configs.” It really was like, “Hey, we're all people trying to solve these problems,” and that was, I think, wonderful to see and something that I'm really hoping that we can nail again this year. JACOB: I think the wonderful thing about conferences is that, as someone who has a good deal of social anxiety, or shyness, is the in-person experience is an excuse to sort of – well, it was like it prevented me from having the excuse of like, “Oh, I could just watch it on – is this something I can just watch it on YouTube?” I was able to like, convince myself, like, “No, you actually have to go there and you have to sit next to someone you don't know and introduce yourself.” I feel like conferences that I could get the exact same experience just watching the video anyway, I lose that side effect, which is, I think the more valuable thing is that there's an experience that I would miss out on if I wasn't there. So it made me think about what Caroline is saying about that immediacy of being a speaker and I guess, what I’m wondering is maybe the secret is if you can't reproduce the immediacy of people being in the same room together, and I'm not certain that's true, or not whatever it is, maybe the trick is how do you use technology to your advantage rather than thinking about it as a barrier to get around? AUSTIN: Yeah. I'm not going to say I have all the answers, certainly. The thing that I really hope, because I wrote a big thing about it on my blog and I feel like there's a progression of events, virtual events that have happened where people are experimenting and trying new things. I would like to think they're trying to get to that point. How do you use the technology we have to enhance connections rather than viewing it as just like, “Oh, this is a thing we’ve got to do until we can get everyone back on a plane”? CORALINE: And really, that's the best thing about technology is when you find an unexpected use for it. When you find something outside the use case that it's designed for and you get that feeling of delight, I think that's when tech is at its best. AUSTIN: Yeah. I think that was one of the things. The two big things about Deserted Island is the idea that this is a deliberately delightful and cute and comfortable place. It is the softest game you can imagine. There are no harsh edges. There is no failure state. I don't think there's a 90-degree angle in that entire game, but it also gives you enormous constraints because it's a very crafted world and so, working around and through those constraints, but also having sort of the delight of overcoming them and figuring out like, “Oh, this is this really soft round space that I can do stuff in, but I have these walls. I have these barriers set up that I have to work around.” I mean, that's why I'm in technology; it’s because it's endless source of challenges and it's an endless source of like, “Oh, here's a hill I can overcome.” I was never super popular, or fast, or anything. I sucked at sports. I still suck at sports. The one time I went skiing, I tore my ACL in 15 minutes. I'm just not a coordinated guy, but in technology, there's always a new hill to summit. There's always something new to learn. There's always a new challenge that presents itself. That, to me, is that's why I stick with it. I could do other things, but here's something that's always going to challenge me and it's always going to give me something new to do. That, I think is worth celebrating in itself and if we can find a way to blend all these things together, blend all the different ideas about events and the delight and constraints and challenges of technology and dah, dah, dah, dah, and throw that together in a Twitch stream. Cool, rad, let's do that. I think that was a lot of the inspiration. It was just like, “Hey, this might blow up in my face. This might fail terribly, but it's better to try it and see what happens.” Every day when I'm sitting here thinking, “Oh my God, it's never going to be as big of a success. Everyone's going to hate me,” whatever, I come back to that like, “Well, better to try and just like fall on my face than it is to wonder what might've been if I hadn't tried.” CORALINE: That reminds me of safety and something that we talk about at least in workplaces is making more places safe to fail and I think at the event level, the fear of failure has got to be a lot more on a different level. So were you prepared to fail and how did you prepare to fail? AUSTIN: It’s a great question. To be super honest, I'm not sure I was prepared to fail by the time it actually – so there's two types of failure. There was the technical failure and that was something that I did have plans for. There's a lot of technical failure that can happen during a live event production; my computer could have crashed, my internet could have gone down, a presenter's internet could have died. In preparation for that, there was a playbook effectively of okay, if this goes wrong, then do this. If this goes wrong, do that. Now, in doing so, I actually discovered a lot of other things that I didn't think could go wrong that did go wrong. One example was, we had very strong moderation in the chat because it's the internet, it's a public thing. There's no registration. Anyone could come into the Twitch chat and say whatever. So I was pretty biased towards okay, now let's crank up the moderation filters and make sure that people aren't going to just come in and say some mean things. One thing I didn't think to ask any of the presenters is like, “Hey, do you have something that's interactive outside of this?” One of them did, they had an interactive presentation where people went to Slido, or something and could that had its own chat input, text input. Any large enough Twitch stream, you had some trolls that had come in and started typing some slurs and other non-code of conduct things. So it's like, “Oh, crud,” and switch that scene off really quick and try to make sure, coordinate in chat like, “Hey, are you aware of what's going on with the speaker?” In real-time while they were continuing to present. We managed to deal with that and then cut out the offensive language in the video on demand version. So it's not there and it didn't disrupt things. there was a blip of like, “Ah,” and then we dealt. I think beyond that, though, the actual psychological failure because my expectations were pretty low in terms of like, “Oh, what is a success?” Because we didn't spend a lot of money on it. I didn't have any sponsors. I think I had an email list with 1,500 people on it and I was like, “Well, 50 roughly, you have some sort of webinar, or whatever, you get 50% of the sign-ups and that's a good one.” A 100 people sign up and 50 people show up. Great, you're doing fantastic. So my expectations were like, “Oh, here's my bar, 1,500.” If we hit that, if we hit anything close to that, we're doing great and then we hit 8,000. So the problem coming back to this a year later is oh, now the expectations are so much higher and we've taken sponsorship. We have sponsors now; we have a sponsor money in order to fund things like scholarships. One of the problems last year was you had to have a Switch to participate. This year we've come, I've gone around and said, “Hey, if you want to sponsor this and pay for someone that doesn't have access to a Switch, or Animal Crossing, or whatever, you can sponsor us by buying that person the equipment thingy to join this because not everyone can afford that.” Obviously, it's some level of exclusionary, like not everyone has internet, but within the group of people, the class people are giving talks to this, I figured that's about what we can do. Especially since you don't need a good camera, you just need a microphone. But because they're sponsors now, because there were so many people last year. It's like, “How do I set myself up for the chance that this is a failure psychologically?” And that, I don't have a great answer to. Therapy, I guess, is the answer to that. I talked to my therapist about this stuff. But it is. I think the psychological effects are actually much harder to plan around and much like in a workplace, psychological safety is significantly harder than technical safety. So my advice is to be very open and honest and transparent with the people that you're organizing with and to talk about it. I think this is the problem with most things is we don't talk about failure enough and we don't talk about how does it feel to fail? How do you get back up after you failed? By keeping all that inside, that leads to a lot of negative stress outcomes and stuff and you just feel like crud. So normalize talking about failure. JOHN: Were there any specific structures, or just communications that you set up with your organizing team around that to get everyone on the same page about thinking through failure and how it feels and how you're going to react to it, anything like that? AUSTIN: So that's also a really great question. It's an area that I could do better at. The organizing team is very small and informal for this like, it's mostly just me and Katie, and I've wound up doing quite a bit of it just for a variety of reasons that are really important. But we've had a lot of conversations about, I think that level of nervousness and that level of stress that you can have. A lot of it is both of us talking ourselves down right and being nobody – and some of it also just being very straightforward with people, with external people. When I did this last year, literally the expectations were very, very low and when people applied to speak, it's like, “Well, you know what you're getting into.” I didn't pretend this was anything other than what it is. This year as well, when I'm going and I'm talking about it, or I'm putting together sponsorship perspectives, or whatever, I'm saying, “Look, here's what happened last year. I can't guarantee you the same level of thing, but I'm also not asking a ton from you.” So I think one lesson from this is preemptive de-escalation. It's better, or maybe a better way to say this is under promise/overdeliver. The perspectives is very clear. It's like, “Look, this is historically what we had. Here's what I'm asking from you and here's what you're getting for it.” I've seen what a lot of conferences charge for sponsorships, I'm asking you for much less and maybe compared to those, you're not getting as much. You're getting a 30-second ad a couple of times over the day, you're getting your logo, you're getting some shoutouts and that's it. You're not getting leads. You're not getting an attendee list because there is none. That's one nice thing, I think about doing stuff like this is you don't have to be super aggro about stuff because it's like well, this doesn't exist. There's no registration so I can't tell you who's attending. But by lowering the stakes a little bit, people are still willing to throw you a couple grand, or whatever on a community conference, because one, that's a rounding error in most places’ event budgets. Two, even if you only get a 1,000 people and you expected 8,000, the video's going to be there. It's a long-term asset. Those videos are going to be on YouTube forever and they're going to be something that people go back and watch so, under promise. And the third thing really is and this actually makes it worse, not better, but this is probably the longest I've talked about this to anyone, this podcast right here. Most of the promotion for this has come from people that attended last year and spoke last year that are going around and talking it up and being like, “Oh no, this was the best thing I did in 2020. You should definitely put this on your calendar.” That actually makes it worse because that's all of your internet friends are like, “Oh my God, this was so great,” and you're just sitting here like, “Wow, I hope I don't let all these people down,” but that's life. I'm not going to tell people, “Hey, don't talk good about this because I'm worried that it's going to fail.” Let those external expectations try to lift you up a little. If everyone knew what it was last year and if you can deliver that again at least, then you're probably going to be doing all right. JOHN: There's two threads I wanted to pull on with that. First of all, you talked about having multiple different people, different constituencies like there's you as the organizing team, there's you and the speakers, there's you and the attendees, there's you in the sponsors. There's all these different groups and there's different levels of safety with each of them that. A different type of relationship with each of those and they each have a different level of communication and setting expectations. And then I think the other thing that really jumped out was the setting of expectations. I think that's such a key to managing an emotional reaction to something because so often those negative reactions come from missed expectations and that proactive communication about where things can land and what's possible and what's likely is a great way of keeping everyone on the same page. AUSTIN: Absolutely. So I want to actually start on that second one about expectations because I think this is something that catches me a lot and probably catches a lot of other people that are – wherever you are in your career, really, but there's both a tyranny of low expectations and a tyranny of high expectations. We tend to focus on one, or the other, but the hardest thing in the world is actually figuring out what that band is in the middle between your expectations are too low and your expectations are too high. I think the tech industry is absolute hot garbage just stem to stern. There's a ton of practices we have in the industry that I think because we're so afraid because the way capitalism works, the way funding works, the way everything works, every incentive is tuned towards preventing you from ever setting expectations too low. So if you look at OKRs, the concept of OKRs, the idea is the objective and key result and you should always set those as something you'll never hit; you should never set your key result too low. I think the Google-y way to think about this as if you achieve 70% of OKR, then that's good. That's what you should expect. To me, that's terrible. I hate that with every fiber of my being because you're giving me an objective that I'm always going to fail. That's how I perceive it and I get why we do this because it's always bad to be too low and I think a lot of this is cultural. It's the success win whatever business culture that's infested technology, where we would much rather set a very high bar for ourselves and then not meet it rather than set a low bar and clear it because if you set a low bar and you clear it, then that means you weren't pushing yourself. Because of the way that all of the money works an d how monetized we make all of our labor, if you aren't doing enough, you might as well not have done anything at all. So the thinking is better to have that high bar and then miss it. But that's extremely, I think just dismantles people that aren't super neurotypical. It certainly dismantles me and I'm whoever, I'm Austin, I'm one person in the distance. But I think it's prevalent throughout everything in tech and I would love to see that interrogated more. You're starting to see a lot of the golden geese of the tech industry being interrogated because of the pandemic. Things like the value of people working in person with each other, or the value of having companies in San Francisco, or the value of hiding your pay, of pay inequity. I think this idea of what should our expectations of ourselves be, of our teams, of the performance of our software even, I made a joke the other day that’s like, I want to see smaller applications written by fewer people that are paid more, that don't work as well and I'm not kidding. Because I think that the idea of oh no, we want the Googles, we want the big companies of the world to encompass everything. We want this one-stop shop. It's not great. It's harmful, it's actively harmful, and I know that there's a lot of voices and people are like, “Well, you can't just dismantle, you can't just cut Google into two pieces, or five pieces, or Amazon into five pieces and have it all worked out.” I agree, you need to be intentional about this. But I remember when I was growing up in the 80s and I remember what technology was like a little more than and the idea that someone could go into business for themselves maintaining a library and just selling a license for people to use that library. Maybe they figured out a really fast way to do a bubble sword and it's like, “Okay, I'm going to sell you a library, a Pascal library that you can link to and it does this work really fast and if you have a problem with it, then you get support from me and you email me, or whatever and I fix this bug for you.” We've taken all those things that people used to be able to do and build and craft and just said, “Hey, we're going to socialize all that expensive maintenance and put it on the open source community and have them do that for free and then we're going to build businesses around extracting value from all that labor.” CORALINE: That's one of the seven criteria of the ethical source principles is that we have a right to be paid. We have a right to have the value of our work respected and if you're making billions off of an open source library, you would better be giving back. AUSTIN: Yeah, and I think but it feeds back from – this all goes back to the capitalism.exe; It's all from the same source and a lot of ways. But I think that idea of expectations setting and never setting the bar low; that is a product of this and it's all intersectional. It's all interrelated. There is no one evil other than really big sociological complex sociotechnical human systems, or whatever and we can make it better, but we can't fix it without equally big changes. JOHN: Yeah. I think that the capitalism more is always better rule is what's poisoning this because you could make a small app and it can be successful and it could be two people on the team and those people could be very happy. But everything in society is saying, “Well, make it bigger, add a bigger team, do more things, blah, blah, blah.” I remember reading a story about, at one point a couple of years ago, the Uber like iPhone app was growing by 1 megabyte of compiled code per week because they were adding all this stuff to it and that just boggled my mind. It's like, it's Uber. They do really just one thing and they were having to do all these things and they kept bumping up against iOS store limits of the size of the binary. Just that mentality of let's do all the things because we can and let's stress ourselves out and work ourselves raw just because more is better. AUSTIN: Yeah, and I think it's a team problem. It's an organizational problem. Because how does that happen without you having so many people working in the same small space that are duplicating effort, that are duplicating features even, or other things behind the scenes? You just keep hiring and hiring, you keep growing and growing because that's all you can do, because that's the only way you can exist in society as a corporation, or as people building a product, or whatever is to constantly consume and grow and grow. This goes into Non-Fungible Tokens, NFTs, that have taken, at least my corner of the internet, by storm and the idea that oh, this is a way that you can introduce scarcity into digital art and it's like, “Oh my God, it's such a bad idea.” Every blockchain thing is so, so awful. But the amount of energy it takes to actually encode these things under the blockchain, even on Ethereum blockchain, because of how proof of work algorithms function, the only purpose of these things is to consume more energy for a completely pointless purpose. If you're consuming energy for the sake of consuming energy, to prove that you're doing some work in order to “prove that you own something.” You can't own a tweet; Twitter technically owns that tweet. There are people who are selling cryptographic signatures like, “Oh, it's like a signed tweet. You own the signed tweet.” It's like you own a link and that I'm not even sure that you can own that from any sort of legal, or moral, or ethical standard. That's not how ownership works, especially intellectual property ownership. Oh my God, this industry. Every day, it makes me want to move to the woods and raise alpaca. CORALINE: Well, maybe there'll be an alpaca feature added to Animal Crossing soon. [laughter] AUSTIN: Maybe, yeah. Just live out my alpaca farming dreams in Animal Crossing. It’s a shame that we need money to live. JOHN: So we've come to the time on the show and we go into our reflections, which is a where each of us talks about the things that we're going to take away from this conversation. Maybe the things we're going to keep thinking about, or any new ideas that we were exposed to and just what's going to stick with us. So for me, I think I heard about Deserted Island DevOps last year when it happened, I think some of my friends presented there, but hearing you talk about it more in-depth in behind the scenes, should we a bit more about the creativity, both on your side and in the audience as they put together new ways to experience the conference. I am really excited by that because it's not a place where I've seen a ton of creativity being expressed and finding new ways to have a conference-like experience like different mediations, different ways of participating, I think are really valuable because right now, we're copying online what we used to do in-person, but kind of and it's not always working out great. So if you just sort of throw away all the stuff and start over from, this is our platform and these are our constraints, I think that that leads to creativity and so, it's nice to see that. CORALINE: And I'm thinking about what you said about moderation and the importance of moderation. I was involved in the famous tech feminist wars of the 2010s and I was one of the voices calling for codes of conduct at in-person conferences. I think that becomes even more important with virtual conferences and the need for moderation. I don't think we do a good job, as an industry, of thinking about what moderation means, thinking about how to manage random people on the internet coming to a virtual space and I'm hoping that virtual events continue to invest some more technology. I think Twitch does a great job of giving us tools and I'm hoping that that idea of really investing in moderation takes off because I think that will have ripple effects in a lot of different domains. AUSTIN: I'm going to reflect, I think when you were talking about with failure and psychological safety and how to communicate failure, or those feelings of failure and setting expectations about it to not only peers, but also to people I'm organizing events with, or two people I'm working with. Because I think that one thing that this conversation really led me to realize is that I don't actually communicate it as well as I thought I had, or there's things I don't think about. Sometimes, you need someone to mention it to really piggy back up. I'm wondering if there's ways that we can develop toolkits, or playbooks, or even just point by point, like, “Hey, here's a guide to have these conversations,” because they're hard conversations and they're conversations that maybe you think you're ready to have, or that you think you've communicated. But it's like, “Well, did you think about this?” So that's something I'm definitely going to take away from this. I will put it out in the moderation thing. I used your code of conduct for the Deserted Island one. So yes, I appreciate the work that went into that because it was invaluable to me to make a good one for this. CORALINE: I'm glad to hear that. Thank you, Austin. JACOB: I haven’t been to any conference since the pandemic started and I think part of it is that being stuck at home like pretty much everyone else, hopefully, is that I think I was always telling myself, “Do I really need to take time off when I would probably be bored and restless and would wish I could just watch the video later anyway?” I think I was kind of missing the point because I think maybe what I really need to do is find a conference like this one that has been thoughtful about how participants can interact when not in-person and make the leap and force myself to take the day off, or days off. That’s the only thing I’m doing and force myself to be engaged with it because I’ve got nothing else to do just like any in-person conference. I’m going to give it a shot. CORALINE: Well, Austin, it’s been great talking to you today. Thank you for your openness, your honesty, your vulnerability, and you great ideas. I think we all have a lot to take away from this conversation so, it was really great talking to you today. Thank you so much. AUSTIN: Thanks! It was wonderful to be here. Special Guest: Austin Parker.

I bombed a recent rewrite of my comedy half-hour spec, and now I've got to lay it to rest, even though it isn't done. Some new script beckons. If you'd like to fall flat on your face trying to rewrite something that's pretty good-ish, listen and learn!  Proof that this script placed in the second round at Austin: It's called Sacred Heart and I'm called Kathleen Jones, scroll down to find me.  hellokathleenjones.com fun blogs and all my scripts and stuff instagram.com/hellokathleenj I obsessively check my DMs please say hi instagram.com/writingmywritingdown I'll share anything you tag me in-- write stuff down! Show me! I'm already proud of you. twitter.com/hellokathleenj  I try to be cool & make jokes with other screenwriters. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/hellokathleenj/support

Show #914   Good morning, good afternoon and good evening wherever you are in the world, welcome to EV News Daily for Thursday 22nd October. It’s Martyn Lee here and I go through every EV story so you don't have to.   Thank you to MYEV.com for helping make this show, they’ve built the first marketplace specifically for Electric Vehicles. It’s a totally free marketplace that simplifies the buying and selling process, and help you learn about EVs along the way too.   Tesla (TSLA) has just published their financial results and also the shareholders letter for Q3 2020. Plus then then have a conference call to discuss it.   And I'll say now, remember (although who could forget) this is all against a backdrop of a global pandemic.   The earnings call featured: Martin Viecha -- Senior Director of Investor Relations Elon Musk -- Chief Executive Officer Zachary Kirkhorn -- Chief Financial Officer RJ Johnson -- Global Head of Commercial Energy Drew Baglino -- Senior Vice President, Powertrain and Energy Engineering ; Vice President, Technology Carl Peterson -- Director of Engineering     fifth consecutive quarterly profit   record revenue of $8.8 billion (up from 6.3 billion last year)   cash of $14.5bn (recent capital raise of $5bn)   Revenue from the sale of regulatory credits made up $397 million. 1.18 billion so far this year   2020 target of 500,000 vehicles - "Achieving this target depends primarily on quarter over quarter increases in Model Y and Shanghai production". They need to deliver over 181,000 vehicles this quarter.   840,000 to 1 million vehicles next year "in the vicinity". That would be upt o100% increase. The revenue allows them to invest more.   Cybertruck orders will be delivered in 2022, or toward the end of 2021 the earliest.   SBC (stock based compensation) expense increased to $543M (driven by 2018 CEO award milestones)   Tesla: "“The third quarter of 2020 was a record quarter on many levels. Over the past four quarters, we generated over $1.9B of free cash flow while spending $2.4B on new production capacity, service centers, Supercharging locations and other capital investments. While we took additional SBC expense in Q3, our GAAP operating margin reached 9.2%. For the trailing 12 months, we achieved an operating margin of 6.3%. We expect our operating margin will continue to grow over time, ultimately reaching industry-leading levels with capacity expansion and localization plans underway.”   But I want to start with this quote. It's profound, it's a laser focus on what they do. This IS their blueprint or ethos. I still see people online asking the questions how are you going to stimulate demand. For the last 10 years critics have said "but they'll struggle when other automakers start": "In addition to reducing the cost of the car, we're making the cars better. And that's the formula to sell the volume. That's what we're focused on."     ELON'S OPENING STATEMENT The importance of one million cars providing a feedback loop for corner case situations (aka Google). Because of the nature of spool up a new plant with new technology, it will start off very slow at first.   FINANCIAL Could be spending 5bn a year on capital expenditures. This Q was 1bn capex.   CELLS 350 kilowatts for charging on their cars. Right now the max is obviously 250kW. The pilot line in California will export 4680 cells to Germany for the Model Ys. Annual rate of 10GWh.   ANNUAL CAPACITY Shanghai - 250,000 vehicles based on just Model 3 Fremont - 590,000 for S3XY   CREDITS As Reuters explains: "Pollution credits became a more meaningful source of revenue for Tesla about a year ago when California and other U.S. states increased the mandatory share of zero-emission vehicles sold per manufacturer."   FREMONT "We have recently increased capacity of Model 3 / Model Y to 500,000 units a year. In order to do this, we restarted our second paint shop, installed the largest diecasting machine in the world and upgraded our Model Y general assembly line. Production should reach full capacity toward the end of this year or beginning of next year. "   SHANGHAI Not from Tesla themselves but Shanghai contributed ~34,000 Model 3's in Q3 "“We are currently building Model Y capacity at Gigafactory Shanghai, Gigafactory Berlin and Gigafactory Texas, and remain on track to start deliveries from each location in 2021”" "Model 3 production capacity has increased to 250,000 units a year. We reduced the price of Model 3 to 249,900 RMB after incentives, making it the lowest-price premium mid-sized sedan in China. This was enabled both by lower-cost batteries and an increased level of local procurement. As a result of this shift in cost and starting price, we recently added a third production shift to our Model 3 factory. "   BERLIN Construction of the Gigafactory in Berlin continues to progress rapidly. Buildings are under construction and equipment move-in will start over the coming weeks. At the same time, the Giga Berlin team continues to grow. Production is expected to start in 2021.. We are not dependent on internal cell production in 2021. "GigaBerlin will see our first battery line at scale"   TWEET TESLA IS A CORRELATION OF STARTUPS @elonmusk: "“Tesla  should really be thought of as roughly a dozen technology startups, many of which have little to no correlation with traditional automotive companies.”"   He sees a product line and a factory as a startup. So S,3,X,Y,C,R,S is 7 from vehicles. Nevada, Fremont, Shanghai, Berlin, Austin, Buffalo. Plus car insurance, solar and storage.   Elon sees it as Autonomy, Chips, Service, Sales, Drive Units, Superchargers, Insurance ("Could be 30-40% of the automotive business.")   Startups are never "finished". They ship a new build every week, for instance.   CYBERTRUCK "I was in the studio last Friday with Franz and the team looking over some improvements on the Cybertruck. There are a lot of small improvements compared to what was unveiled. I think it’s going to be better than what we showed."   Production depends on Austin: "It’s dependent on completing that factory and there are some new technologies with the high hardness exoskeleton. This has never been done before so there will probably be some challenges."   SEMI TRUCK “We continue the development of the Semi. And in particular, Megachargers, we realized that the 350-kW or so that we are looking for cars is not going to be enough for Semi. So we’re looking for something much more powerful than that, that can achieve essentially charging the Semi during a break, between your driving time so that you can drive until the next break. So there is no usable or efficient time wasted for charging the Semi. We’re working with other parties to make sure that there is a standard infrastructure that will be able to be deployed for all customers. Yes. That’s probably all I can say at this point. Just we’re not working in isolation. We have to invent it because it doesn’t exist. But we’re trying to invent something that could be helpful for everybody”   Sounds like CharIN to me.   ROADSTER Zero mention. It's a branding exercise, if/when they make it. As irrelevant to the bottom line as S & X.     You can listen to all 913 previous episodes of this this for free, where you get your podcasts from, plus the blog https://www.evnewsdaily.com/ – remember to subscribe, which means you don’t have to think about downloading the show each day, plus you get it first and free and automatically.   It would mean a lot if you could take 2mins to leave a quick review on whichever platform you download the podcast.   And  if you have an Amazon Echo, download our Alexa Skill, search for EV News Daily and add it as a flash briefing.   Come and say hi on Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter just search EV News Daily, have a wonderful day, I’ll catch you tomorrow and remember…there’s no such thing as a self-charging hybrid.     PHIL ROBERTS / ELECTRIC FUTURE (PREMIUM PARTNER) BRAD CROSBY (PREMIUM PARTNER) AVID TECHNOLOGY (PREMIUM PARTNER) PORSCHE OF THE VILLAGE CINCINNATI (PREMIUM PARTNER) AUDI CINCINNATI EAST (PREMIUM PARTNER) VOLVO CARS CINCINNATI EAST (PREMIUM PARTNER) NATIONALCARCHARGING.COM and ALOHACHARGE.COM  (PREMIUM PARTNER) DEREK REILLY FROM THE EV REVIEW IRELAND YOUTUBE CHANNEL (PREMIUM PARTNER) RICHARD AT RSYMONS.CO.UK – THE ELECTRIC VEHICLE SPECIALIST (PREMIUM PARTNER)   DAVID AND LISA ALLEN (PARTNER) OEM AUDIO OF NEW ZEALAND AND EVPOWER.CO.NZ (PARTNER) GARETH HAMER eMOBILITY NORWAY HTTPS://WWW.EMOBILITYNORWAY.COM/  (PARTNER) BOB BOOTHBY – MILLBROOK COTTAGES AND ELOPEMENT WEDDING VENUE (PARTNER) DARIN MCLESKEY FROM DENOVO REAL ESTATE (PARTNER) JUKKA KUKONEN FROM WWW.SHIFT2ELECTRIC.COM RAJEEV NARAYAN (PARTNER)   ALAN ROBSON (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) ALAN SHEDD (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) ALEX BANAHENE (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) ALEXANDER FRANK @ https://www.youtube.com/c/alexsuniverse42 ANDERS HOVE (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) ANDREA JEFFERSON (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) ASEER KHALID (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) ASHLEY HILL (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) BÅRD FJUKSTAD (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) BRIAN THOMPSON (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) BRUCE BOHANNAN (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) CHARLES HALL (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) CHRIS HOPKINS (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) COLIN HENNESSY AND CAMBSEV (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) CRAIG COLES (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) CRAIG ROGERS (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) DAMIEN DAVIS (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) DARREN FEATCH (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) DAVE DEWSON (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) DAVID FINCH (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) DAVID MOORE (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) DAVID PARTINGTON (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) DAVID PRESCOTT (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) DON MCALLISTER / SCREENCASTSONLINE.COM (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) ERU KYEYUNE-NYOMBI (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) FREDRIK ROVIK (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) GENE RUBIN (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) GILBERTO ROSADO (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) GEOFF LOWE (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) HEDLEY WRIGHT (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) IAN GRIFFITHS (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) IAN SEAR (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) IAN (WATTIE) WATKINS (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) JACK OAKLEY (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) JAMES STORR (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) JIM MORRIS (EXECUTIVE PRODICERS) JON AKA BEARDY MCBEARDFACE FROM KENT EVS (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) JON MANCHAK (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) JUAN GONZALEZ (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) KEN MORRIS (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) KEVIN MEYERSON (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) KYLE MAHAN (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) LARS DAHLAGER (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) LAURENCE D ALLEN (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) LEE BROWN (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) LUKE CULLEY (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) MARCEL WARD (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) MARK BOSSERT (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) MARTY YOUNG  (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) MATT PISCIONE (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) MIA OPPELSTRUP (PARTNER) MICHAEL PASTRONE (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) MIKE WINTER (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) NATHAN GORE-BROWN (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) NEIL E ROBERTS FROM SUSSEX EVS (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) NICHOLAS MILLER (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) NIGEL MILES (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) OHAD ASTON (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) PAUL RIDINGS (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) PAUL STEPHENSON (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) PETE GLASS (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) PETE GORTON (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) PETER & DEE ROBERTS FROM OXON EVS (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) PHIL MOUCHET (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) PHILIP TRAUTMAN (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) RAJ BADWAL (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) RENE KEEMIK (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) RENÉ SCHNEIDER (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) RICHARD LUPINSKY (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) ROB HERMANS (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) ROB FROM THE RSTHINKS EV CHANNEL ON YOUTUBE (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) RUPERT MITCHELL (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) SEIKI PAYNE (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) STEPHEN PENN (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) STEVE JOHN (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER) THOMAS J. 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Some of the highlights of the show include The diplomacy that's required between software engineers and management, and why influence is needed to move projects forward to completion. Driving factors behind Ygrene's Kubernetes migration, which included an infrastructure bottleneck, a need to streamline deployment, and a desire to leverage their internal team of cloud experts. Management's request to ship code faster, and why it was important to the organization.  How the company's engineers responded to the request to ship code faster, and overcame disconnects with management. How the team obtained executive buy-in for a Kubernetes migration. Key cultural changes that were required to make the migration to Kubernetes successful. How unexpected challenges forced the team to learn the “depths of Kubernetes,” and how it helped with root cause analysis. Why the transition to Kubernetes was a success, enabling the team to ship code faster, deliver more value, secure more customers, and drive more revenue.  Links: HerdX: https://www.herdx.com/ Ygrene: https://ygrene.com/ Austin Twitter: https://twitter.com/_austbot Austin LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/austbot/ Arnold's book on publisher site: https://www.packtpub.com/cloud-networking/the-kubernetes-workshop  Arnold's book on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Kubernetes-Workshop-Interactive-Approach-Learning/dp/1838820752/ TranscriptAnnouncer: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native podcast where we explore how end users talk and think about the transition to Kubernetes and cloud-native architectures.Emily: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native. My name is Emily Omier, and I am here with Austin Adams and Zack Arnold, and we are here to talk about why companies go cloud-native.Austin: So, I'm currently the CTO of a small Agrotech startup called HerdX. And that means I spend my days designing software, designing architecture for how distributed systems talk, and also leading teams of engineers to build proof-of-concepts and then production systems as they take over the projects that I've designed. Emily: And then, what did you do at Ygrene? Austin: I did the exact same thing, except for without the CTO title. And I also had other higher-level engineers working with me at Ygrene. So, we made a lot of technical decisions together. We all migrated to Kubernetes together, and Zack was a chief proponent of that, especially with the culture change. So, I focused on the designing software that teams of implementation engineers could take over and actually build out for the long run. And I think Zack really focused on—oh, I'll let Zack say what he focused on. [laughs].Emily: Go for it, Zach.Zach: Hello. I'm Zack. I also no longer work for Ygrene, although I have a lot of admiration and respect for the people who do. It was a fantastic company. So, Austin called me up a while back and asked me to think about participating in a DevOps engineering role at Ygrene. And he sort of said at the outset, we don't really know what it looks like, and we're pretty sure that we just created a position out of a culture, but would you be willing to embody it? And up until this point, I'd had cloud experience, and I had had software engineering experience, but I didn't really spend a ton of time focused on the actual movement of software from developer's laptops to production with as few hiccups, and as many tests, and as much safety as possible in between. So, I always told people the role felt like it was three parts. It was part IT automation expert, part software engineer, and then part diplomat. And the diplomacy was mostly in between people who are more operations focused. So, support engineers, project managers, and people who were on-call day in and day out, and being a go-between higher levels of management and software engineers themselves because there's this awkward, coordinated motion that has to really happen at a fine-grained level in order to get DevOps to really work at a company. What I mean by that is, essentially, Dev and Ops seem to on the surface have opposing goals, the operation staff, it's job is to maintain stability, and the development side's job is to introduce change, which invariably introduces instability. So, that dichotomy means that being able to simultaneously satisfy both desires is really a goal of DevOps, but it's difficult to achieve at an organizational level without dealing with some pretty critical cultural components. So, what do I spend my day on? The answer to that question is, yes. It really depends on the day. Sometimes it's cloud engineers. Sometimes it's QA folks, sometimes it's management. Sometimes I'm heads-down writing software for integrations in between tools. And every now and again, I get to contribute to open-source. So, a lot of different actual daily tasks take place in my position.Emily: Tell me a little bit more about this diplomacy between software engineers and management.Zach: [laughs]. Well, I'm not sure who's going to be listening in this amazing audience of ours, but I assume, because people are human, that they have capital O-pinions about how things should work, especially as it pertains to either software development lifecycle, the ITIL process of introducing change into a datacenter, into a cloud environment, compliance, security. There's lots of, I'll call them thought frameworks that have a very narrow focus on how we should be doing something with respect to software. So, diplomacy is the—well, I guess in true statecraft, it's being able to work in between countries. But in this particular case, diplomacy is using relational equity or influence, to be able to have every group achieve a common and shared purpose. At the end of the day, in most companies the goal is actually to be able to produce a product that people would want to pay for, and we can do so as quickly and as efficiently as possible. To do that, though, it again requires a lot of people with differing goals to work together towards that shared purpose. So, the diplomacy looks like, aside from just having way too many meetings, it actually looks like being able to communicate other thought frameworks to different stakeholders and being able to synthesize all of the different narrow-focused frameworks into a common shared, overarching process. So, I'll give you a concrete example because it feels like I just spewed a bunch of buzzwords. A concrete example would be, let's say in the common feature that's being delivered for ABC Company, for this feature it requires X number of hours of software development; X number of hours of testing; X number of hours of preparing, either capacity planning, or fleet size recommendations, or some form of operational pre-work; and then the actual deployment, and running, and monitoring. So, in the company that I currently work for, we just described roughly 20 different teams that would have to work together in order to achieve the delivery of this feature as rapidly as possible. So, the process of DevOps and the diplomacy of DevOps, for me looks like—aside from trying to automate as much as humanly possible and to provide what I call interface guarantees, which are basically shared agreements of functionality between two teams. So, the way that the developers will speak to the QA engineers is through Git. They develop new software, and they push it into shared code repositories, the way that the QA engineers will speak to people who are going to be handling the deployments—or at management in this particular case—is going to be through a well-formatted XML test file. So, providing automation around those particular interfaces and then ensuring that everyone's shared goals are met at the particular period of time where they're going to be invoked over the course of the delivery of that feature, is the “subtle art,”—air quotes, you can't see but—to me of DevOps diplomacy. That kind of help?Emily: Yeah, absolutely. Let's take, actually, just a little bit of a step back. Can you talk about what some of the business goals were behind moving to Kubernetes for Ygrene? Who was the champion of this move? Was it business stakeholders saying, “Hey, we really need this to change,” or engineering going to business stakeholders? Who needed a change. I believe that the desire for Kubernetes came from a bottleneck of infrastructure. Not so much around performance, such as the applications weren't performing due to scale. We had projected scale that we were coming to where it would cause a problem potentially, but it was also in the ease of deployment. It had a very operations mindset as Zack was saying, our infrastructure was almost entirely managed—of the core applications set—by outsourcing. And so, we depended on them to innovate, we depended on them to spin up new environments and services. But we also have this internal competing team that always had this cloud background. And so, what we were trying to do was lessen the time between idea to deployment by utilizing platforms that were more scalable, more flexible, and all the things that Docker gives with the Dev/Prod Parity, the ease of packaging your environment together so that small team can ship an entire application. And so, I think our main goal with that was to take that team that already had a lot of cloud experience, and give them more power to drive the innovation and not be bottlenecked just by what the outsourcing team could do. Which, by the way, just for the record, the outsourcing team was an amazing team, but they didn't have the Kubernetes or cloud experience, either. So, in terms of a hero or champion of it, it just started as an idea between me and the new CTO, or CIO that came in, talking about how can we ship code faster? So, one of the things that happened in my career was the desire for a rapid response team which, that sounds like a buzzword or something, but it was this idea that Ygrene was shipping software fairly slow, and we wanted to get faster. So, really the CIO, and one of the development managers, they were the really big champions of, “Hey, let's deliver value to the business faster.” And they had the experience to ask their engineers how to make that happen, and then trust Zack and I through this process of delivering Kubernetes, and Istio, and container security, and all these different things that eventually got implemented.Emily: Why do you think shipping code faster matters?Austin: I think, for this company, why it mattered was the PACE financing industry is relatively new. And while financing has some old established patterns, I feel like there's still always room for innovation. If you hear the early days of the Bridgewater Financial Hedge Fund, they were a source of innovation and they used technology to deliver new types of assets and things like that. And so, our team at Ygrene was excellent because they wanted to try new things. They wanted to try new patterns of PACE financing, or ways of getting in front of the customer, or connections with different analytics so they could understand their customer better. So, it was important to be able to try things, experiment to see what was going to be successful. To get things out into the real world to know, okay, this is actually going to work, or no, this isn't going to work. And then, also, one of the things within financing is—especially newer financing—is there's a lot of speed bumps along the way. Compliance laws can come into effect, as well as working with cities and governments that have specialized rules and specialized things that they need—because everyone's an expert when it comes to legislation, apparently—they decide that they need X, and they give us a time when we have to get it done. And so, we actually have another customer out there, which is the legislative bodies. So, they have to get the software—their features that are needed within the financing system out by certain dates, or we're no longer eligible to operate in those counties. So, one of it was a core business risk, so we needed to be able to deliver faster. The other was how can we grow the business?Emily: Zach, this might be a question for you. Was there anything that was lost in translation as you were explaining what engineering was going to do in order to meet this goal of shipping code faster, of being more agile, when you were talking to C level management? How did they understand, and did anything get lost in translation?Zach: One of the largest disconnects, both on a technical and from a high level speaking to management issue I had was explaining how we were no longer going to be managing application servers as though they were pets. When you come from an on-premise setup, and you've got your VMware ESXi, and you're managing virtual machines, the most important thing that you have is backups because you want to keep those machines exactly as they are, and you install new software on those machines. When Kubernetes says, I'm going to put your pods wherever they fit on the cluster, assuming it conforms with the scheduling pattern, and if a node dies, it's totally fine, I'm going to spin a new one up for you, and move pods around and ensure that the application is exactly as you had stated—as in, it's in its desired state—that kind of thinking from switching from infrastructure as pets to infrastructure as cattle, is difficult to explain to people who have spent their careers in building and maintaining datacenters. And I think a lot—well, it's not guaranteed that this is across the board, but if you want to talk about a generational divide, people that usually occupy the C level office chairs are familiar with—in their heyday of their career—a datacenter-based setup. In a cloud-based consumption model where it really doesn't matter—I can just spin up anything anywhere—when you talk about moving from reasoning about your application as the servers it comprises and instead talking about your application as the workload it comprises, it becomes a place where you have to really, really concretely explain to people exactly how it's going to work that the entire earth will not come crashing down if you lose a server, or if you lose a pod, or if a container hiccups and gets restarted by Kubernetes on that node. I think that was the real key one. And the reason why that actually became incredibly beneficial for us is because once we actually had that executive buy-off when it came to, while I still may not understand, I trust that you know what you're doing and that this infrastructure really is replaceable, it allowed us to get a little bit more aggressive with how we managed our resources. So, now using Horizontal Pod Autoscaling, using the Kubernetes Cluster Autoscaler, and leveraging Amazon EC2 Spot Fleets, we were only ever paying for the exact amount of infrastructure that was required to run our business. And I think that is usually the thing that translates the best to management and non-technical leadership. Because when it comes down to if I'm aware that using this tool, and using a cloud-native approach to running my application, I am only ever going to be paying for the computational resource that I need in that exact minute to run my business, then the budget discussions become a lot easier, because everyone is aware that this is your exact run-rate when it comes to technology. Does that make sense? Emily: Absolutely. How important was having that executive buy-in? My understanding is that a lot of companies, they think that they're going to get all these savings from Kubernetes, and it doesn't always materialize. So, I'm just curious, it sounds like it really did for Ygrene.Zach: There was two things that really worked well for us when this transformation was taking place. The first was, Ygrene was still growing, so if the budget grew alongside of the growth of the company, nobody noticed. So, that was one really incredible thing that happened that, I think, now having had different positions in the industry, I don't know if I appreciated that enough because if you're attempting to make a cost-neutral migration to the Cloud, or to adopt cloud-native management principles, you're going to probably move too little, too late. And when that happens, you run the risk of really doing a poor job of adopting cloud-native, and then scrapping that project, because it never materialized the benefit, as you just described, that some people didn't experience. And the other benefit that we had, I think was the fact that because there were enough incredibly senior technical people—and again, I learned everything from these people—working with us, and because we were all, for the most part, on the same page when it came to this migration, it was easy to have a unified front with our management because every engineer saw the value of this new way of running our infrastructure and running our application. In one non—and this obviously helps with our engineers—one non-monetary benefit that helped really get the buy-in was the fact that, with Kubernetes, our on-call SEV-1 pages went down, I want to say, by over 40 percent which was insane because Kubernetes was automatically intervening in the case where servers went down. JVMs run out of memory, exceptions cause strange things, but a simple restart usually fixes the vast majority of them. Well, now Kubernetes was doing this and we didn't need to wake somebody up in order to keep the machine running.Emily: From when you started this transition to when you, I should say, when you probably left the company, but what were some of the surprises, either surprises for you, or surprises for other people in the organization?Austin: The initial surprise was the yes that we got. So, initially I pitched it and started talking about it, and then the culture started changing to where we realized we really needed to change, and bringing Zack on and then getting the yes from management was the initial surprise. And—Emily: Why was that a surprise?Austin: It was just surprising because, when you work as an engineer—I mean, none of us were C suite, or Dev managers, or anything. We were just highly respected engineers working in the HQ. So, it was just a surprise that what we felt was a semi-crazy idea at the time—because Kubernetes was a little bit earlier. I mean, EKS wasn't even a thing from Amazon. We ran our Kubernetes clusters from the hip, which is using kops, which is—kops is a great tool, but obviously it wasn't managed. It was managed by us, mainly by Zach and his team, to be honest. So, that was a surprise that they would trust a billion-dollar financing engine to run on the proposal of two engineers. And then, the next ones were just how much the single-server, vertical scaling, and depending on running on the same server was into our applications. So, as we started to look at the core applications and moving them into a containerized environment, but also into an environment that can be spun up and spun down, looking at the assumptions the application was making around being on the same server; having specific IP addresses, or hostnames; and things like that, where we had to take those assumptions out and make things more flexible. So, we had to remove some stateful assumptions in the applications, that was a surprise. We also had to enforce more of the idea of idempotency, especially when introducing Istio, and [00:21:44 retryable] connections and retryable logic around circuit breaking and service-to-service communication. So, some of those were the bigger surprises, is the paradigm shift between, “Okay, we've got this service that's always going to run on the same machine, and it's always going to have local access to its files,” to, “Now we're on a pod that's got a volume mounted, and there's 50 of them.” And it's just different. So, that was a big—[laughs], that was a big surprise for us.Emily: Was there anything that you'd call a pleasant surprise? Things that went well that you anticipated to be really difficult?Zach: Oh, my gosh, yes. When you read through Kubernetes for the first time, you tend to have this—especially if somebody else told you, “Hey, we're going to do this,” this sinking feeling of, “Oh my god, I don't even know nothing,” because it's so immense in its complexity. It requires a retooling of how you think, but there have been lots of open-source community efforts to improve the cluster lifecycle management of Kubernetes, and one such project that really helped us get going—do you remember this Austin?—was kops.Austin: Yep. Yep, kops is great.Zach: I want to say Justin Santa Barbara was the original creator of that project, and it's still open source, and I think he still maintains it. But to have a production-ready, and we really mean production-ready: it was private, everything was isolated, the CNI was provisioned correctly, everything was in the right place, to have a fully production-ready Kubernetes cluster ready to go within a few hours of us being able to learn about this tool in AWS was huge because then we could start to focus on what we didn't even understand inside of the cluster. Because there were lots of—Kubernetes is—there's two sides of it, and both of them are confusing. There's the infrastructure that participates in the cluster, and there's the actual components inside of the cluster which get orchestrated to make your application possible. So, not having to initially focus on the infrastructure that made up the cluster, so we could just figure out the difference between our butt and the hole in the ground, when it came to our application inside of Kubernetes was immensely helpful to us. I mean, there are a lot of tools these days that do that now: GKE, EKS, AKS, but we got into Kubernetes right after it went GA, and this was huge to help with that.Emily: Can you tell me also a little bit about the cultural changes that had to happen? And what were these cultural changes, and then how did it go?Zach: As Austin said, the notion of—I think a lot—and I don't want to offer this as a sweeping statement—but I think the vast majority of the engineers that we had in Seattle, in San Jose, and in Petaluma where the company was headquartered, I think, even if they didn't understand what the word idempotent meant, they understood more or less how that was going to work. The larger challenge for us was actually in helping our contractors, who actually made up the vast majority of our labor force towards the end of my tenure there, how a lot of these principles worked in software. So, take a perfect example: part of the application is written in Ruby on Rails, and in Ruby on Rails, there's a concept of one-off tasks called rake tasks. When you are running a single server, and you're sending lots of emails that have attachments, those attachments have to be on the file system. And this is the phrase I always said to people, as we refactor the code together, I repeated the statement, “You have to pretend this request is going to start on one server and finish on a different one, and you don't know what either of them are, ahead of time.” And I think using just that simple nugget really helped, culturally, start to reshape this skill of people because when you can't use or depend on something like the file system, or you can't depend on that I'm still on the same server, you begin to break your task into components, and you begin to store those components in either a central database or a central file system like Amazon S3. And adopting those parts of, I would call, cloud-native engineering were critical to the cultural adoption of this tool. I think the other thing was, obviously, lots of training had to take place. And I think a lot of operational handoff had to take place. I remember for, basically, a fairly long stretch of time, I was on-call along with whoever was also on-call because I had the vast majority of the operational knowledge of Kubernetes for that particular team. So, I think there was a good bit of rescaling and mindset shift from the technical side of being able to adopt a cloud-native approach to software building. Does that make sense?Emily: Absolutely. What do you think actually were some of the biggest challenges or the biggest pain points? Zach: So, challenges of cultural shift, or challenges of specifically Kubernetes adoption?Emily: I was thinking challenges of Kubernetes adoption, but I'm also curious about the cultural shift if that's one of the biggest pain points.Zach: It really was for us. I think—because now it wouldn't—if you wanted to take out Kubernetes and replace it with Nomad there? All of the engineers would know what you're talking about. It wouldn't take but whatever the amount of time it would to migrate your Kubernetes manifests to Nomad HCL files. So, I do think the rescaling and the mindset shift, culturally speaking, was probably the thing that helped solidify it from an engineering level. But Kubernetes adoption—or at least problems in Kubernetes adoption, there was a lot of migration horror stories that we encountered. A lot of cluster instability in earlier versions of Kubernetes prevented any form of smooth upgrades. I had to leave—it was with my brother's—it was his wedding, what was it—oh, rehearsal dinner, that's what it was. I had to leave his rehearsal dinner because the production cluster for Ygrene went down, and we needed to get it back up. So, lots of funny stories like that. Or Nordstrom did a really fantastic talk on this in KubeCon in Austin in 2017. But the [00:28:57 unintelligible] split-brain problem where suddenly the consensus in between all of the Kubernetes master nodes began to fail for one reason or another. And because they were serving incorrect information to the controller managers, then the controller managers were acting on incorrect information and causing the schedulers to do really crazy things, like delete entire deployments, or move pods, or kill nodes, or lots of interesting things. I think we unnecessarily bit off a little bit too much when it came to trying to do tricky stuff when it came to infrastructure. We introduced a good bit of instability when it came to Amazon EC2 Spot that I think, all things considered, I would have revised the decision on that. Because we faced a lot of node instability, which translated into application instability, which would cause really, really interesting edge cases to show up basically only in production.Austin: One of the more notable ones—and I think this is the symptom of one of the larger challenges was during testing, one of our project managers that also helped out in the testing side—technical project managers—which we nicknamed the Edge Case Factory, because she was just, anointed, or somehow had this superpower to find the most interesting edge cases, and things that never went wrong for anyone else always went wrong for her, and it really helped us build more robust software for sure, but there's some people out there with mutant powers to catch bugs, and she was one of them. We had two clusters, we had lower environment clusters, and then we had production cluster. The production cluster hosted two namespaces: the staging namespace, which is supposed to be an exact copy of production; and then the production namespace, so that you can smoke-test legitimate production resources, and blah blah blah. So, one time, we started to get some calls that, all of a sudden, people were getting the staging environment underneath the production URL. Zach: Yeah.Austin: And we were like, “Uh… excuse me?” It comes down to—we eventually figured it out. It was something within the networking layer. But it was this thing, as we rolled along, the deeper understanding of, okay, how does this—to use a term that Zack Arnold coined—this benevolent botnet, how does this thing even work, at the most fundamental and most detailed levels? And so, as problems and issues would occur, pre-production or even in production, we had to really learn the depths of Kubernetes. And I think the reason we had to learn it at that stage was because of how new Kubernetes was, all things considered. But I think now with a lot more of the managed systems, I would say it's not necessary, but it's definitely helpful to really know how Kubernetes works down in the depths. So, that was one of the big challenges was, to put it succinctly, when an issue comes up, knowing really what's going on under the hood, really, really helped us as we discovered and learned things about Kubernetes.Zach: And what you're saying, Austin, was really illuminated by the fact that the telemetry that we had in production was not sufficient, in our minds, at least until very recently, to be able to adequately capture all the data necessary to accurately do root cause analyses on particular issues. In early days, there was far too much root cause analysis by, “It was probably this,” and then we moved on. Now having actually taken the time to instrument tracing, to instrument metrics, to instrument logs with correlation, we used, eventually, Datadog, but working our way through the various telemetry tools to achieve this, we really struggled being able to give accurate information to stakeholders about what was really going wrong in production. And I think Austin was probably the first person in the headquarters side of the company—I'm not entirely certain about some of our satellite dev offices—but to really champion a data-driven way of actually running software. Which, it seems trivial now because obviously that's how a lot of these tools work out of the box. But for us, it was really like, “Oh, I guess we really do need to think about the HTTP error rate.” [laughs].Emily: So, taking another step back here, do you think that Ygrene got everything that it expected, or that it wanted out of moving to Kubernetes?Austin: I think we're obviously playing up some of the challenges that we had because it was our day-to-day, but I do believe that trust in the dev team grew, we were able to deploy code during the day, which we could have done that in the beginning, even with vertically scaled infrastructure, we would have done it with downtime, but it really was that as we started to show that Kubernetes and these cloud-native tools like Fluentd, Prometheus, Istio, and other things like that when you set them up properly, they do take a lot of the risk out. It added trust in the development team. It gave more responsibility to the developers to manage their own code in production, which is the DevOps culture, the DevOps mindset. And I think in the end, we were able to ship code faster, we were able to deliver more value, we were able to go into new jurisdictions and markets quicker, to get more customers, and to ultimately increase the amount of revenue that Ygrene had. So, it built a bridge between the data science side of things, the development side of things, the project management side of things, and the compliance side of things. So, I definitely think they got a lot out of trusting us with this migration. I think that were we to continue, probably Zack and I even to this day, we would have been able to implement more, and more, and more. Obviously, I left the company, Zach left the company to pursue other opportunities, but I do believe we left them in a good spot to take this ecosystem that was put in place and run with it. To continue to innovate and do experiments to get more business.Zach: Emily, I'd characterize it with an anecdote. After our Chief Information Officer left the company, our Chief Operating Officer actually took over the management of the Technology Group, and aside from basically giving dev management carte blanche authority to do as they needed to, I think there was so much trust there that we didn't have at the beginning of our journey with technology and Ygrene. And it was characterized in, we had monthly calls with all of the regional account managers, which are basically our out-of-office sales staff. And generally, the project managers from our group would have to sit in those meetings and hear just about how terrible our technology was relative to the competition, either lacking in features, lacking in stability, lacking in design quality, lacking in user interface design, or way overdoing the amount of compliance we had to have. And towards the end of my tenure, those complaints dropped to zero, which I think was really a testament to the fact that we were running things stably, the amount of on-call pages went down tremendously, the amount of user-impacting production outages was dramatically reduced, and I think the overall quality of software increased with every release. And to be able to say that, as a finance company, we were able to deploy 10 times during the day if we needed to, and not because it was an emergency, but because it was genuinely a value-added feature for customers. I think that that really demonstrated that we reached a level of success adopting Kubernetes and cloud-native, that really helped our business win. And we positioned them, basically, now to make experiments that they thought would work from a business sense we implement the technology behind it, and then we find out whether or not we were right.Emily: Let's go ahead and wrap up. We're nearing the top of the hour, but just two questions for both of you. One is, where could listeners find you or connect with you? And the second one is, do you have a can't-live-without engineering tool?Austin: Yeah, so I'll go first. Listeners can find me on Twitter @_austbot, or on LinkedIn. Those are really the only tools I use. And I can't really live without Prometheus and Grafana. I really love being able to see everything that's happening in my applications. I love instrumentation. I'm very data-driven on what's happening inside. So, obviously Kubernetes is there, but it's almost become that Kubernetes is the Cloud. I don't even think about it anymore. It's these other tools that help us monitor and create active monitoring paradigms in our application so we can deploy fast, and know if we broke something. Zach: And if you want to stay in contact with me, I would recommend not using Twitter, I lost my password and I'm not entirely certain how to get it back. I don't have a blue checkmark, so I can't talk to Twitter about that. I probably am on LinkedIn… you know what, you can find me in my house. I'm currently working. The engineering tool that I really can't live without, I think my IDE. I use IntelliJ by JetBrains, and—Austin: Yeah, it's good stuff.Zach: —I think I wouldn't be able to program without it. I fear for my next coding interview because I'll be pretending that there's type ahead completion in a Google Doc, and it just won't work. So, yeah, I think that would be the tool I'd keep forever.Austin: And if any of Zach's managers are listening, he's not planning on doing any coding interviews anytime soon.Zach: [laughs]. Yes, obviously.Emily: Well, thank you so much. Zach: Emily Omier, thank you so much for your time.Austin: Right, thanks.Austin: And don't forget Zack is an author. He and his team worked very hard on that book.Emily: Zack, do you want to give a plug to your book?Zach: Oh, yeah. Some really intelligent people that, for some reason, dragged me along, worked on a book. Basically it started as an introduction to Kubernetes, and it turned into a Master's Course on Kubernetes. It's from Packt Publishing and yeah, you can find it there, amazon.com or steal it on the internet. If you're looking to get started with Kubernetes I cannot recommend the team that worked on this book enough. It was a real honor to be able to work with people I consider to be heavyweights in the industry. It was really fun.Emily: Thank you so much.Announcer: Thank you for listening to The Business of Cloud Native podcast. Keep up with the latest on the podcast at thebusinessofcloudnative.com and subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever fine podcasts are distributed. We'll see you next time.This has been HumblePod production. Stay humble.

NCAA Champ and USA World Team member Dustin Schlatter sits down for a chat where we discuss growing up in Ohio, coaching the Gopher Wrestling Club, and learn all about the Minnesota Storm. It’s a fun time with pals! 0:00:20 - Welcome to another podcast! This one was recorded January 23rd. I start things off by continuing to mess up the episode numbers. 0:02:30 - Why does Flo cover what they cover? I will tell you. 0:09:30 - When wrestling wins, Flo wins, plain and simple, end of story. Now here’s the Schlatter Man. 0:11:20 - Dustin’s impression of Austin? It is hot, but the food is amazing. 0:14:12 - The Dustin Schlatter origin story begins. 0:19:00 - When did Dustin know he wanted to compete at the highest level in the world, and how did the then prepare himself to reach that goal? 0:27:00 - Dustin was 56-0 at Fargo, won 6 titles and was three-time OW at freestyle. Pretty decent. 0:30:30 - A look back at how far Minnesota has come since Dustin got to Minneapolis. 0:35:00 - Is international wrestling headed in the right direction? The good and the bad. 0:44:00 - Takeaways from training in Dagestan, which is an awesome place for wrestling. 0:50:00 - How do USAW RTCs and the NCAA work together? 0:54:15 - RTC vs RTC competitions? Dustin would love that. 0:56:30 - What is the Minnesota Storm? 1:04:30 - The future of the Gopher Wrestling Club, which involves a trip to Cuba and hosting the NCAAs. 1:18:30 - Wrapping up another stupid podcast that was actually not stupid at all because of our excellent guest, the great Dustin Schlatter.

After a quick catch up, Savannah and Charlotte take some time to discuss Zombieland, the OG and the sequel. Or Durham and Austin? It isn't clear the rules on those nicknames.

We’re getting vulnerable as we discuss our struggles to see ourselves as the leaders as others see us. Billy first struggled with identity when he started his business and hired his dad (who he also shares a name with!). Ashley’s struggle with identity came when we first got married. We now embrace our roles as leaders in our community but have moments of weakness when Imposter Syndrome sneaks in. We share the ways we have overcome this and how we continue to step up/lean in as leaders. Music “Sunny” by Bensound.com. What We Talked about in this Episode: How Ashley struggled with identity early in our relationship Ashley moved to Austin, TX for Billy and early on was being introduced or recognized by others as Billy’s significant other Billy didn’t always understand but encouraged her to get out and create her own identity Through new jobs, Ashley found more of her identity because they pushed her out in the Austin community Billy reflects on similar situations with struggling with identity When he started his business, he sold his dad to clients and hid behind him On the rare occasion they work with clients together now, Billy still defers to his dad despite both being seen as leadership experts Also, as the youngest of 4 siblings Billy often had to live up to great expectations from teachers The comparisons served as motivation to be his best unique self How Imposter Syndrome snuck in years later for Ashley Ashley struggled with accepting public recognition for her leadership in Austin It was hard to hear encouragement from her mom and Billy, but a colleague motivated her to think “if you aren’t recognizing yourself as a leader, what is the example you are setting for everyone else who looks up to you?” Billy’s turning point in his leadership journey At a young age, Billy was asked to put together a board of young professionals for a local university Now thinks back, and says “Ok, he believed in me, that means I can handle pretty much anything” How leaders need to continue to step up Embrace the leadership roles others put you in Recognize the voices that are missing from the conversation and invite them in As leaders, we need to build up other leaders Stop finding reasons to say no, and just say YES

Austin and Andrew talk about astrology from a lived perspectice. The conversation runs through ways in which both have worked with the planets magically to grow as people and achieve practical magic. This is conversation is a rarity in which the actual application of planetary magic gets to be the star of the show.  Think about how much you've enjoyed the podcast and how many episodes you listened to and think consider if it is time tosupport the  Patreon You can do so here. If you want more of this in your life you can subscribe by RSS , iTunes, Stitcher, or email. You can find Austin on his website here. His newsletter is defintely worth reading.   Thanks for listening! If you dig this please subscribe and share with those who would like it.   Andrew   If you are interested in booking time with Andrew either in Toronto or by phone or Skype from anywhere click here.   Transcription   ANDREW: Welcome to another installment of The Hermit's Lamp podcast. I am here today with Austin Coppock. And I know Austin from his wonderful chats with Gordon White on Gordon's podcast, where they do a twice a year sort of check in about what's going on astrologically and what's coming down the line. And, you know, it's always very insightful and it sets a nice framework for sort of thinking about the bigger pictures of what's going on. So, I've been listening enjoyably to those and thinking that having Austin on here to chat about what happens as we live with astrology and think about astrology and you know, all that kind of stuff as we go through our lives would be wonderful.  But, in case people don't know who you are, Austin, why don't you give us an introduction?  AUSTIN: Okay. I suppose I'll start with my most public face. I am a professional astrologer. I write about what's happening, what's going to happen, in different time frames, ranging from the daily to the decadely. I've also been a consulting astrologer full time for the last ten years as well -- eleven years -- and I also teach a variety of classes about astrology and also some about the astrological magic tradition. ANDREW: Mmmhmm. And, how did -- I'm curious how you got into astrological magic. Because I came out of sort of western ceremonial stuff, which I got into as a teenager and spent a long time playing with and working with, and one of the things that was my favorite was this sort of planetary work and those kinds of things. You know? And it's actually one of the few pieces that sort of endures from that time, as something that I still sort of play with in my life and in my practice, but where did that come from for you? How did you find your way into that?  AUSTIN: That's a good question. I have a convoluted but hopefully coherent answer. [laughs] So, when I got -- when I first got really into astrology, when I was maybe 19, 20, it had a lot of paradigmatic implications to me. The fact that it worked -- and it didn't just work in a fun -- it was more than just the extremely colorful Rorschach test, which I thought it was at first. ANDREW: Mmmhmm. AUSTIN: And, it does function very well in that regard, right? But it's -- when I started seeing it reflecting life and death level events -- I actually predicted some deaths that happened during that time, which is not something I do in my practice now. Maybe, maybe, if someone really wants to do that, and I think their reasons are good, but you know, I didn't take it seriously.  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. AUSTIN: And so that's a pretty good way to get you to take things seriously. To just -- ANDREW: Yeah!  AUSTIN: To throw death in there, right? [laughs] And so, that got me -- that also made me take seriously the paradigmatic implications of astrology. If, you know, if astrology could say things that serious, then a lot of what I had been taught about the world was either incorrect or woefully incomplete.  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. AUSTIN: And, around that same time, I started training with some people who did internal martial arts, where -- cause I'd been doing martial arts for, I don't know, since I was a kid -- but, I'd never really experienced anybody who could do anything that made me think that chi was anything more than a metaphor -- ANDREW: Mmmhmm. AUSTIN: But then I started training with a guy who was from a school, and then I went to that school, and, you know, the teacher could do things that were impossible if, you know, if this chi wasn't actually describing part of reality. [laughs]  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. AUSTIN: And so that brought, I'd say, that played a, that was another piece in changing what I thought was real, right? You know? In a very physical way. You know, getting your ass kicked by something you can't explain really makes you think about it.  ANDREW: Yeah.  AUSTIN: And so, as I got -- I started doing massive amounts of chi gong and meditation, and that -- it was sort of in the space that that opened up, that's where the magic came through for me, and it came through hard and fast and confusing, as I think it does for a certain percentage of practitioners -- ANDREW: Sure.  AUSTIN: And so, I, you know, I'd intersected with some magical material before. You know, you're ... Back when people went to bookstores, or ... like, you know, you go to the astrology section, and right next to it, is, you know, there is Crowley.  ANDREW: Yeah. AUSTIN: And there's Modern Magic. And, you know, I popped those open, and there are tables of astrological correspondences. So, I was aware of this material because of its proximity to astrology, both physically and as an art, like literally the books were next to each other, right? Which is, by the way, you know, a reason to go to bookstores, right? [laughs] Yeah, I mean, yeah, I can get it on Amazon, but a good bookstore, you're going to encounter things that are proximal to, you know, to what you're doing. It may be that what you think you want is actually just, you know, a pathway to the thing that's right across from it on the shelf, right?  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. AUSTIN: Anyway. And so, yeah, I jumped into the magic, I memorized, the, you know, Golden Dawn correspondences, and I went crazy with some shadow tarot and Typhonian OTO stuff, and spirits, big spirits popped into my life from traditions I'd never had any intersection with, which was very, that was some of the most confusing. Some of the -- you know, some of the spirits whose names are, you know, primarily found in Haitian vodou popped into my life, and I literally had to look up what these awesomely powerful figures were, cause I didn't even know the names.  ANDREW: I think there's some sort of fundamental connection between that sort of Thelemic occurrence, right? And those African diasporic spirits, right? AUSTIN: I -- ANDREW: Not to interrupt your whole line of thought.  AUSTIN: No no no no no, that's a really interesting, there's the, well, I'm not, it would be impossible to characterize me as a Thelemite at any point, but, you know, if we're talking about the larger Thelemic current, you know going from Crowley and then to Grant and then working with Linda Falorio's, I don't know, you could call it reification of the tunnels? What I found -- what I got from that was like a deep magical enema! [laughs] It like blew open, it opened up all of these channels. It made all of these ... It created all of these wonderful emptinesses and absences, which you need ... A channel needs to be empty in the middle, right?  ANDREW: Yeah. AUSTIN: And that allowed a lot of stuff to come in.  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. AUSTIN: And that's funny, I don't hear people talking about that material in terms of creating, sort of, you know, it's sort of like draining out the nightmares from a tunnel, so that there's a ... so that that beautiful and fecund absence can then, you know, things can emerge from that, that more primordial state. ANDREW: Mmmhmm. AUSTIN: And part of my experience was probably because I was coming from, you know, a couple of years of intense Taoist practice ... ANDREW: Right. AUSTIN: You know, where, there's a lot of ... there's a big focus on returning to the fertile void state, or Wu Chi, and then you're supposed to do that at the beginning of every Tai Chi form, and every pretty much any internal form ... and you know returning to that, and then emerging out of it, and so that was, you know, it's still a very important space. But anyway, that's what I ... that's part of what I got out of that tunnels work. And I was led by various loa to make some excellent changes in my life, and when then not too much longer ... or you know, and I experimented with some of the sort of Golden Dawn lodge-style planetary magic ... ANDREW: Mmmhmm. AUSTIN: You know the six and seven stars, and the Denning and Phillips Planetary Magic book, and that was interesting, but it didn't ... It didn't quite sing.  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. AUSTIN: Actually, you know, just a funny anecdote. The first sort of formal astrological magic operation I did was this evocation of the spirit of Jupiter -- or it was like a -- yeah, it was an evocation of the spirit of Jupiter, and I got this figure that was like this good-natured pigheaded mayor of, you know, like, he was like, "I'm the mayor!" you know, like kind of big and jovial, and I was like, "Pigheaded, huh?" Like not stubborn, but like literally had a big hog head.  ANDREW: Yeah.  AUSTIN: And only maybe last year I was reading Jeffrey Kotyk's dissertation, and Jeffrey Kotyk does some really interesting work. He's looking at astrological texts in Tang era China, and what he's finding are translations of core Hellenistic astrologer, astrology texts, like Dorotheus, as well as a lot of Persian and Indian material, and it's being kind of received, and redescribed, and it gets all the way to Japan, all of that material gets all the way to Japan by the 10th century, which is a very different shape of transmission than what most people have been thinking. Anyway.  So, in one of these texts is like, how to make a magical image so that this planet, you know, you'll have this planet's favor, and it won't fuck you up. And the Jupiter one is, involves the hog. Like in some of those traditions they see the animal of Jupiter consistently being the pig. And so, these are, you know, these are these funny things where you just experience something and then you find out, you know, sometimes years later, that, oh yeah, thousands of people saw exactly that when they looked, you know, deeper into Jupiter's sphere.  ANDREW: Mmmhmm.  AUSTIN: But anyways, you know, so I was doing experiments, and then the -- someone placed the Picatrix in my hand and said "I think you'll know what to do with this," and this was -- this was -- I think this was 2007. And this was when -- this was before the Warnock Greer translation of the Latin, and it was the first volume from Ouroborus Press, and that was all that was available then, and so, I cracked that open and read it, and I was like, "Oh yes, this is it," and went about experimenting immediately. Well, as soon as the next favorable election was.  ANDREW: Right.  AUSTIN: Because the ... That current of traditional talismanic astrological magic doesn't, how shall we say, it brings all of the sophisticated timing that astrology provides directly to bear on the operation, and it -- in my experience, it allows for a much much much much much higher voltage current, to transform the things around one, than the lodge style approach to planetary magic.  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. I think it's -- I've done both, at different times? You know, I've spent a lot of time in the OTO and, you know, doing a lot of that kind of stuff, and in the Aurum Solis, and doing that sort of planetary work -- AUSTIN: Mmm. ANDREW: Within that, and so on-- but, you know, it's funny, like the things, a lot of the more formal stuff was fruitful for whatever it was that it was being worked on, but some of the better things that I ever did were works where I was only focused on myself, right? They were sort of like these internal planetary workings, you know?  AUSTIN: Mmmhmm, mmmhmm. ANDREW: So like I remember, the most significant of which was that I spent a year invoking the moon at each of its transitions between the signs, and doing essentially like a communion ceremony with that, and internalizing that energy as a way of attempting to redress the imbalances that I experienced, both through my understanding of my chart, which was fairly limited at that time, but also through sort of my psychological and emotional imbalances that I was experiencing, you know, and that sort of repeated cyclical work was so helpful at shifting those things, you know? And I no longer remember where I got the idea from, because it's not anything I ever really came across, it was sort of definitely came out of a hybrid of what I was seeing done and it's almost the extent, the depth at which I felt I needed to work in order to make those shifts, right? So, yeah, I think there's a lot -- it's fascinating. AUSTIN: That 100% makes sense to me. And I've also sort of ended up doing stuff like that. I still do stuff like that, even though, you know, there wasn't a text that suggests that. ANDREW: Mmmhmm. AUSTIN: I think that that cycle of work, or course of work model, with a particular planet is ... That is, that's sort of the slowly sanding down the rough edges of that sphere within you and the way that it manifests in your life, and that in many ways I would say that that's the foundation of, how shall we say, being like the archetypal perfect astrological magician. Is that you get to know, and you do your best to perfect all of the spheres within you.  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. AUSTIN: Now, that makes -- that's connected very closely to some traditions of astrology in India. I've recently begun studying the Parashara tradition with a teacher, with a lineage holding teacher. And the way that they address, one of the ways that they address remediation is, I don't know, you know, my Mercury sucks, so how do I improve that area of my life, right? ANDREW: Yeah.  AUSTIN: Is that [missing time -- 00:16:33-16:55]  ANDREW: Can you hear me?  AUSTIN: It happens. ANDREW: So, you were just talking about, basically you just started mentioning the India thing, and how they were remediating their Mercury, or whatever they were going to -- AUSTIN: Yeah. Right. So, the ... One approach to remediation is basically, it's basically a cycle of planetary work. You know, they'll use a deity connected to a planet. ANDREW: Mmmhmm. AUSTIN: And so, you know, you'll do a particular mantra, which is -- You know, when you really look at the structure of mantras and how they're used, you know, it's a blurry line between prayer, spell, conjuration, and mantra, in a lot of cases, but you know, you would do that, you would do your work regularly according to the astrological calendar. Like if you're working on your Mercury, you'd work Mercury, every, you know, every Wednesday during a particular planetary hour, and, you know, for your Mercury you might use, you know, a Ganesh mantra, where [missing time 00:18:00-18:07] whereas another person might use -- divine forms associated with each planet, it's not just one for one, but that's very, you know, when you look at it from a distance, it's very similar to doing a cycle of work. ANDREW: Yeah. AUSTIN: I -- have you ever done, sort of like a planetary prayer or attunement every day on the day and hour of the planet for a week or two?  ANDREW: I mean, not so much with that. You know, I mean, I did Resh, so the four points of the day, for a long time, the solar adorations, and I did, you know, I did a lot of sort of working with and invoking those kinds of things, but a lot of my other practices that were ongoing were structured purely at the times that were convenient, so I would ... I did a year of mantra work and I would just do it at the same time every morning every day because that was the only time that fit into my lifestyle, so I didn't have the luxury of, or maybe even the consideration at that point of time of tying it to other forces.  ANDREW: Well, we're stuck again.  AUSTIN: Yeah. I found some ...  ANDREW: So, you were just asking me if I had done a sort of series of works that were tied to a planetary hour, which isn't really something that I had done, in a concrete way. I mean, transitions and stuff like with the moon, whatever time of day it changed signs, I tried my best to be in the temple at that time, but otherwise, not so much, but I'm assuming from your question that you have. AUSTIN: Oh yeah. It's a not terribly difficult or time-intensive way to really get a sense of what the different planetary currents are, in an experiential way ...  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. AUSTIN: And, you know, and, by, you know, essentially kind of sipping from that cup, every day, you get a sense of both what the planet's essential quality is, as well as how that is changed, modified, obstructed, or supercharged by what's happening now with that planet. ANDREW: Mmmhmm. AUSTIN: And so yeah, that's something I just kind of, I didn't set it as like, you know, we're going to do this every day for a month. It's just something I probably do, five to seven times a week. It's just, you know, I just, you know, take 15 minutes. They're not big rites, but it's just hooking in, because the day itself, that's sort of the juice the day itself is running on, the quality of time, which intersects with the day. It's an easy and useful course of work. I believe Gordon White actually suggests that to his members in his membership sort of group project area. I was happy to see that.  ANDREW: Yeah. Well, I think it's so helpful to really understand astrology, at least in my experience, to have more experiences of it. Right? So often people come into my shop for a reading or whatever, like, I want a reading for this person, giving them some advice, and they're like "Oh, I have this sign, so I could never do that," so I'm like, "All right. But, like, I think you have options, right?" But people have these notions that they've acquired about what their charts mean or what this and that means. But these practical experiences of it, you know, I think they hand the real truth of the ability that we have to shape or modify or soften or ameliorate things to our advantage, as well as building that understanding about how we interact with what's going on now both in the world and in the sky AUSTIN: Yeah, totally. I find myself thinking about working with the energies present, you know, on whatever day as well as those present in my natal chart. I tend to default to thinking about them in Chinese medical terms, traditional Chinese medical terms? Right, you can, with any, you know, any point on the energy meridians, you can tonify it, you can basically boost it, you can strengthen that energy, you can disperse that energy, you can work on circulating it or cleaning it, you know, in a sense there's like pacify, clarify, and stimulate.  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. AUSTIN: You know, and you might have a chart where, oh, let's say, Mercury is playing a really key role. Like let's say you have Mercury in the 10th house, and so you know, what you're going to be ... That means that your professional life will demand a lot of mercurial action from you. I for example have Mercury in the 10th, and so it's my ... I always have to put things into words ... ANDREW: Mmmhmm. AUSTIN: Because I speak and write about these topics. And so, there are ... there's a lot of demand for Mercury, in my professional life.  ANDREW: Right. AUSTIN: Now, you can have a situation in a chart where a particular energy is of pivotal importance, but you don't necessarily, you aren't necessarily blessed with the abundance and clarity of that energy that you need or that, you know, it would be really nice if you had a little bit more of that.  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. AUSTIN: And so, you know, that would be an example where you wanted to boost that energy. Right? Cause where you're like, no no, I need more, I have like 12 more pages in this book and it's due, you know, in three days, the draft is due in three days ... ANDREW: Yeah!  AUSTIN: And so, you know, that would be an example of like, needs more. You know, that's where you'd stimulate or add a bunch more Mercury to it. Then you might have, oh, I don't know, maybe a gnarly configuration, let's say Saturn conjunct, oh, let's just say Saturn ruling your 7th house, right, where Saturn is going to speak to the development of romantic matters in your life and let's say Saturn's in kind of a rough condition, and it's, you know, it's just kind of all Saturn all the time. Even when you're with somebody, you feel, you know, you feel confined or alone, you have a hard time breaking through your own walls, right, there's too much Saturn. And so that would be, you know that would be a point where you'd want to calm or sedate Saturn.  ANDREW: Yeah. AUSTIN: And this is actually something I've been thinking about a lot lately. Partially because I'm teaching a class on traditional astrological talismans for the first time, but, there are other reasons as well, it's just come up, is that, is looking at the structure of conjurations and prayers, to the planets particularly, there's a big, there's a difference between praising, you know praising, exalting, and thereby evoking the energy and power of that sphere. Like that stimulates it. Whereas, you know, if you look at, I don't know, for example, some of the Orphic hymns, the Orphic hymn to Mars, is really, it's a "don't hurt me, bro" prayer.  ANDREW: [laughs] AUSTIN: It's not a like, "oh lord of the battlefield, fill me with Viking strength," right? It's a like, "you do all these things, and I recognize that, so could you not do that to me? Would that be cool?" ANDREW: Exactly. "How about you do that outside the walls of my city, or my house, or my heart," or whatever?  AUSTIN: Right. You know, "oh, lord of the forge, let's beat some swords into ploughshares, right, cause you can do that too, that's not maybe your favorite thing but you can do, let's do that version of it?"  ANDREW: Yeah.  AUSTIN: And, anyway, I've just been thinking about how, cause you know, in the past, those are the differences in function of the different planetary calls and conjurations have been less distinct for me. And also, you know, in the Parashara tradition, there's not one god, one planet. Well, there kind of is, but there kind of isn't. You would address, so, I don't know, let's find a good example. Okay! Let's ... for gods that intersect with Mars. Right? Let's ... There's Aries, obviously ... ANDREW: Sure. AUSTIN: And then -- But we could also look at Ogun. Right? Ogun is not Mars. But Ogun can definitely work through and help you work with martial energy. Right? It's important not to conflate them. But, you know if we compare the stories and the quality of the Greek Aries with the West African Ogun, there are different elements that are emphasized. Ogun, for example, has a very constructive quality, you know, industrial strength labor. The ability to heat, beat, and shape the metal and thereby the material world. Right?  ANDREW: Sure.  AUSTIN: And the machete not only chops off heads, it also clears the pathway, right? It clears the forest. And so, if we look at the traditional planetary significations of Mars, Mars is absolutely the, you know, the planet where you see blacksmithing and heavy industry, you know, it's all there. And so, you're going to get a different, you know, if you're sort of going through a planet to get to a god, and then you're asking a god to shape that planet, or help you work with that planet, you know, the different figures that, you know, the basically, the name that you pick, the god that you see in dwelling the planet is going to change the nature of the operations as a result. Does that make sense?  ANDREW: Yeah, for sure. AUSTIN: Okay. ANDREW: You really want to shape it by being clear what you need, right, and what you want. Whether that's more or less or a particular aspect, or hey, do what you're doing but don't do it in the house, or you know, whatever, right?  AUSTIN: [laughs] Yeah.  ANDREW: You know, I think of -- I have Mars in Aries, right, and I think -- AUSTIN: Oh, okay! ANDREW: About it. Number 1, it's the gas in the tank. I have a lot of gas in the tank a lot of the time. Right? Sometimes I rely on it too much and that doesn't go so well. But it's also the thing that had me doing martial arts for a long time and constantly being like, more, harder, faster, let's go, let's go, let's push the limit, right? And then you know, there came this point where I was like, "less, less of that! That is not helpful!" You know? And I remember, explicitly, I went skydiving with a bunch of friends, and everybody landed and was like "Oh my god, it's the best thing ever," and I landed, and my pulse wasn't even going, because I was doing so much high adrenaline stuff all the time ... AUSTIN: [laughing] ANDREW: And I was like, "Yeah, it was cool, whatever." And then a few days later I was like, "No, this has to stop. This is not -- that energy is too unbridled for whatever reasons, and now I need to pull that back," right?  AUSTIN: Well -- so generally speaking, a planet that is in a sign that it rules, like Mars in Aries, one, it, unless it's being interfered with by other planets, that area just works naturally, it's like "Oh yeah, you know, like, how do, what do you do when it's go time? Oh, you just go!" Like, that's the Mars in Aries answer.  ANDREW: Yeah.  AUSTIN: Whereas, you know, Mars in Cancer might be like, "Yeah, but it's really uncomfortable to go, and I might, you know, like, you know ..." There's the sideways crab walking.  ANDREW: Yeah.  AUSTIN: So, it's great to have a planet in the sign that it rules, but there is the danger of excess, because that feels so natural and easy, even if it's hard.  ANDREW: Yeah! AUSTIN: Right? Mars is how we deal with things that are hard and fast, but you're like, oh no, it's natural and easy to deal with things that are hard and fast.  ANDREW: For sure, my motto back at that time was, "If I'm afraid, I should do it, and if I'm really afraid, I should do it now." [laughs] That was it. That was a number of years of my life, right?  AUSTIN: Well, that is a recipe for maximum adrenaline, right?  ANDREW: Right, exactly! You know? So, it's fascinating. But then there's also this thing where, it's time to turn it down, right? Time to roll that back into other things, you know? And so, there was then that process of kind of shifting that focus and doing some work and switching more to internal martial arts -- AUSTIN: Oh! ANDREW: The Qigong and Tai Chi type stuff, you know coincided with my interest in the I Ching, and a lot of explorations through that and so on, so you know, yeah, it's one of those things where yeah, I grabbed that energy by the horns and like slow it down, and it was very frustrating for a period of time, because it did not want to be slow. But you learn a lot, you know?  AUSTIN: I had a very similar experience. [laughs] ANDREW: Yeah, for sure! Go ahead!  AUSTIN: Oh no. If I keep going, I'll tangent on martial arts for an hour, so -- ANDREW: [laughing] Well, that'll be a separate episode. We'll have some martial arts talk. So, I think that one of the things that always interests me about astrology is this sort of, this notion of, it can explain everything, in a certain way, like that's definitely sort of the sense of it, right? There's patterns, there's the pieces, there's what's going on. But you know, I hit this point in my own astrology studies where I felt like I had to choose between continuing to proceed full on into tarot stuff, which you know I felt like kind of my superpower area, and the level of study that I would need to kind of continue to understand these complexities and that. And the one thing that I found, though, kind of over time, was that there were things that emerged that I started looking at that were never what I really would have expected. You know, I find the indirects in my chart super-instructive, whether that's just my chart or whether that's the nature of them, or, you know, like those kinds of things, but I'm curious, like, what are, you know, and people know what their sun and their moon and whatever are probably, right? But like, what are some of the other ideas or other things that you look at that are maybe not, you know, a first glance, you know, from reading a book on it kind of idea? What are the placements, or the angles, what are things that sort of stand out to you as things that seem significant? AUSTIN: Well. I mean, that's a big question.  ANDREW: I know! AUSTIN: I mean starting with sun, moon, and rising sign -- ANDREW: And if it's too big a question or too unfair-- AUSTIN: I think I can chunk it down.  ANDREW: Yeah. AUSTIN: So, two things. One, so, you know, the very basics of astrology are the positions of all the planets in the zodiac and those positions in the houses, so that's actually quite a bit, right there, and then the relationship between the significant angles or relationships between those planets, the aspects and their meaning, and then, a lot of people after some study will get that far, but the one thing that's been underemphasized before the semi-recent traditional revival is the role of essential dignity in a chart, which is, you know, what is the difference between a planet in a sign that it rules versus a sign where it's exalted, versus detriment, what is triplicity dignity and all these things, and that gives you a whole.... That gives you a tremendous amount of depth, and it also allows you to gauge not just the type of result -- and we could say, oh, you know, Mars rules the 7th house of relationship, and so we will see, you know, that person will tend to be in fiery and passionate affairs, they don't want to get bored, they don't mind a little adrenaline in the bedroom. But is it ... There are much more functional and much less functional versions of that. And that's -- you know, judging not just type of event, but quality of event. You know, you could have something that was fast and violent but very favorable, and of course you can have things that are fast and violent and extremely unfavorable, and so, essential dignity plays a very important role in being able to predict that appropriately.  A lot of people are aware to some degree of transits, which is, of course, the relationship of where the planets are now to where they are in your natal chart, and that's a widely used prognostic technique. But one of the -- And that's, you know, the 20th century's made good use of and developed that particular technique. But one of the things that is an absolute staple in any sort of pre-18th century astrology, going back a solid 2000 years are what could be classed as a whole ... Time lord techniques. And so, time lord techniques basically will give you periods of your life that are ruled by a particular planet. And so, you know, for example, the largest scale one is called zodiacal releasing, which is from the second century work of an astrologer named Vettius Valens. And so, in zodiacal releasing, you'll have these big chapters of your life which last between eight and 30 years, and, you know, they're ruled by a particular planet, and so this gives you a tool for looking at biographies, and like, you know, the ... What does it mean to come to the end of a 15-year chapter of your life? It's a huge thing, right? And so, the idea, though, let's say Mars is a 15-year chapter. The idea isn't just that yeah, it's Marsy, it's that's the time period where all the significations and meanings of your natal Mars will become obvious and enfleshed in your life. The time lord techniques are, they're basically, the metaphor I usually use is, they're the mechanism by which the latent becomes apparent in a person's life, with any given planetary position, they're an internal clock like puberty, right?  ANDREW: Right.  AUSTIN: You know, it's getting ... It's growing hair in new places time; that's just what time it is. And that can be favorable, that can be unfavorable; the environment can facilitate that, the environment can impede that, but it's that time. And so, time lord techniques as a whole give you that clock for when you'll see that part of a person's life unfold. Right cause we, you can look at your chart and you can find all of those spheres within you at any given time, but it's not, excuse me, they're not characterizing the theater of life and what's actually happening equally all the time. It's sort of whose turn is it? So that provides a whole perspective on a chart and life, and I would say is essential to making even reasonably accurate ... It's essential to making consistently accurate predictions about what a time period will be like for someone. ANDREW: Mmmhmm. That's fascinating because we all have these pieces, right? But when are they active, and what does that mean? And what does it mean to have something that's active later in life than earlier, whatever, right, because you're not tied to, if I understand you correctly, they're not tied to exactly the same way that everybody's Saturn return is at roughly the same time, they're tied to different patterns, right?  AUSTIN: Exactly. Exactly.  ANDREW: And so hence why somebody peaks early or peaks late or overcomes obstacles at some point or you know, those things, it's their chart, right?  AUSTIN: Or they wake up one day and they're like, you know, I feel like, they're just sort of ... So if you do consulting work, so when you get consulting work sometimes somebody will be like, "yeah, I just, I don't know, I'm doing this and it's fine but I just feel like I'm going somewhere else and I don't know what it is," and consistently, somebody will come to me with that, and it's like, well yeah, you're moving out of a 27-year period into a 30-year period, of course it's going to be kind of disorienting. Like, people can feel those shifts. And that's part of learning astrology and appreciating astrology, is like seeing, oh, this person doesn't know this obscure Roman astrological technique, but what they're telling me is exactly what this says.  ANDREW: Mmmhmm.  AUSTIN: And of course, when you have perfect matches like that, you can be like, well, this technique says exactly that about your life, and we can talk a little bit about, you know we can contrast the nature of where you're coming from and where you're going to, and help you see it more clearly, but there's also, there's something grounding in finding out that it's not just all in your head. If a stranger can do math on the positions of the planets in your birth chart and figure out that you would be in this place emotionally at this time, then it must not just be an eccentricity. You're responding to something deeper. ANDREW: Mmmhmm. AUSTIN: You know, the deep weave of the fabric of your own life.  ANDREW: Yeah. Well and I think it, I personally love it when people are experiencing that even if they don't have the words for it, right? Because then when you can bring it up with them, whether it's what you're talking about or like, I did a reading for somebody recently and the central card was the Hierophant in their reading, and about halfway through the reading, they're like, "So, I'm going to tell you now, I didn't want to tell you earlier, but like, this card's been coming up for like the last year ALL the time," and we had this big conversation about it, and I was like, "Oh, perfect," which goes with what I was telling them in the beginning which they were arguing with me about, which was "you actually already know everything that's going on here, and exactly what you need to be doing, but let's talk it through and talk about why you're not owning that," you know?  AUSTIN: Mmmhmm. ANDREW: And so, like they ... having those moments when you can pinpoint something like that and hand that back to a person is so empowering, right? Because then it takes us back to this place where ... back to the earlier part of this conversation really where we're experiencing these things, and if we're attentive, if we have space in ourselves and our lives where we can feel those things or be mindful of them, then we can do something with them, and even if we don't know what we're doing with them, we can go and find someone to help us do something with them.  AUSTIN: Mmmhmm, Mmmhmm, Mmmhmm. Yeah, it's, I think an important part of astrology is really paying attention to the quality of different time periods and realizing that, you know, time is as dramatic a landscape as space ... ANDREW: Mmmhmm. AUSTIN: You know that they're, you know, there are times that are hot and dry, and there are those that are cold and wet, and there are, you know, there are those that are abundant and full of life, there are different landscapes, and, you know, if you bring the desert protocol to the meadow, you're going to be out of sync, right? And if you bring the meadow protocol to the desert, you're going to be very unhappy.  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. Yeah. And I think that, you know, well, I wonder, were people more living closely with the cycles of nature and the cycles of things. You know, these things make a lot of sense, right? You know, I had the good pleasure of doing ceremony on the same piece of land every month for two years, right? The cycle of, you know, there are those times when I was standing there and there was like a foot of snow and it was blizzarding and I was looking at this tree and doing the ceremony, and there were those times where it was like, you know, so hot, like 35 degrees Celsius, and sunny and clear and standing there looking at those trees, you know, and being in those spaces through all the cycles, I think really can cue us into those planetary changes too, and the way in which the same thing is different at different times. You know and which we -- AUSTIN: Ohhhh. ANDREW: ... have this false continuity of things, which they continue but they're different, right?  AUSTIN: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Would you say the same space is different at different times? Or the same place?  ANDREW: Yeah. AUSTIN: Like -- I think that's a really nice way to put it. Yeah, and the seasons are the, you know, the place to start with that, for that realization, and then that is most certainly a rabbit hole, cause it goes beyond the seasons. But that -- just living with the seasons teaches you that that is true, that the same place is different at different times, and once you realize that that is the quality, then you can follow that to more subtle levels.  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. Yeah. And I also love it when there are options to see the planets themselves and so on. I remember, when I was, maybe 15 years ago, or so, back when Mars was maybe the closest it would be for some time, that sort of zenith of that arc ... AUSTIN: Yeah. ANDREW: And I remember the balcony of my house, we could see it, going across the sky, you know? And we would just go out there and turn off all the lights in the house and watch Mars move and watch the moon move across the sky and the various other things, and you know, it's such an amazing, to be able to sort of sit and connect with those things, you know?  AUSTIN: Oh yeah. And you can feel 'em. [phone rings] I'm an asshole. Let me turn my phone off. That was our invocation of Mars calling for disruption. I apologize, giant podcast faux pas, I'm actually so not a phone person that I forget that it's around ... ANDREW: Mmmhmm.  AUSTIN: Anyway. But yeah, with the light, the visible light of the planets is important. And that's another piece that astrologers have done a really good job recovering over the last 20 years, is making, reminding astrologers that a chart with 12 signs and houses -- and glyphs -- is a very useful thing, but that is an, that is a way of looking at the sky, it's like a decoder ring -- ANDREW: Mmmhmm. AUSTIN: But the sky is primary, right? That is the fundamental and primordial thing, and we can do things with it. And especially if you're doing any sort of energetic or magical work with the planets -- ANDREW: Mmmhmm. AUSTIN: [laughs] It's certainly much more useful to be able to see them and feel them. I mean who hasn't looked up at a full moon and been like "Whoa!" and just gotten a little blast from that?  ANDREW: Yeah. AUSTIN: Not just cognitively but energetically, you're like "Ooooookay!" That is strong drink, sir!  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. Well and just like that you know you see the -- you know, it's on the horizon there, when the moon's coming up over the horizon it's huge, and you don't expect it to be that size, where the colors are different and all these things, you know? Yeah.  AUSTIN: Yeah, and that's -- yeah, that's in a sense the root of astrology, but sometimes, when a tree grows tall enough, the little flowers haven't had a chance to meet the root, or don't realize what's feeding them, and so, one of -- it's interesting astrology a lot -- in a way that's almost parallel to magic -- has benefitted immensely from a surfeit of translations of older works. You know, we have, you know most of the 2100 or so years of the astrological tradition in textual form and available now for the first time in a very long time.  ANDREW: Mmmhmm.  AUSTIN: And so-- ANDREW: And that's a profound depth of history, right? You know, like, people come to tarot and be like, oh, it's from wherever, and like, yeah, it's not that old. But astrology's that old, right?  AUSTIN: Well, and yeah, that is, to that 2100-year-old figure, that is the age of pretty much exactly the same system that people are using in the 20th century, people in the 20th century are missing some pieces, you know, cause things don't necessarily move in an evolutionary manner, right? It's not better every year -- ANDREW: Sure. AUSTIN: It's, you know, things get lost in transmission, things get added, things get lost again. But that core signs, houses, planets, aspects, angles, is there 2100 years ago. And, you know, a magical and prognostic relationship to the sky of course has to predate that immensely. If we're going to follow that, we're going to end up at a time depth that is so far beyond written documentation. ANDREW: Yeah. AUSTIN: And so, you know, astrology's benefited immensely from recovering its own history, which can, which, you know, and sometimes, and you've probably seen this in magicland, where people recover a piece of history, and they're like, "Oh, well you have to do it like the Hygromanteia. Everything you're doing in a Golden Dawn-style lodge is incorrect because this older thing says something different. Right? There's that sort of cranky traditionalist approach, and we get, we have, we certainly have some of that in astrology, but you know, as long as we can avoid that excess, it helps not only does it give us access to quite literally the wisdom of our ancestors in a tradition, but it can also contextualize new developments, you're like, "Oh, I think, this other technique, I came up with this new technique," well, now you have a context for that, and you can see examples using the same logic from different traditions, and so properly rated, the tomb is fertile soil for new life.  ANDREW: Yeah. If you approach this stuff with curiosity, as opposed to like with the fervor of fanaticism, or the dismissiveness of what you're doing, then what can be fruitful will really emerge, right?  AUSTIN: Yeah.  ANDREW: Oh, yeah, you know what, let's bring back this piece. Let's try this for some time and see what happens, right?  AUSTIN: Yeah, yeah, I mean, reconstruction is also inherently experimental, I think?  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. AUSTIN: It can be approached with dogmatic fervor, but you don't know what's going to happen when you perfect the reconstruction. You can hope that it'll be a better version of the thing that you're already doing, but you literally don't know because you've never done it. You know, you've never -- one of the metaphors Gordon White likes to use for some elements of magic is that it's, you know, it's like plans to build an alien spaceship?  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. AUSTIN: You know, it's alien technology, and the instructions for how to build it are all in the book, but you won't know what it's like to fly that thing or what it's really gonna do until you put it back together.  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. AUSTIN: And you know, astrology, I would say, especially from our point of view in the contemporary West, very much alien technology. It implies an entire worldview and thinking and mechanics that are alien.  ANDREW: Yeah, I think, that's interesting. So, one of my biggest magical focuses recently has been centered around leaving the earth, as sort of a notion, right?  AUSTIN: Mmmhmm. ANDREW: And coinciding with that, I've been collecting meteorites and working with meteorites, as a sort of energetic connection to this sort of interstellar traveler, right?  AUSTIN: Mmmhmm. ANDREW: That idea of, "I need to go somewhere else and I need to be somewhere bigger," is the notion that I often come back to, but it's exactly that, I have no idea what exactly that means, right? And I don't really know what that technology is going to be like in action, and as I've been doing it over the last six or eight months and working with these things, I'm noticing the changes and some of them are not at all what I would have expected, right? You know, obviously I'm not actually leaving the Earth, or you know, so on, but I'm trying to use this as a metaphor and a model for changing consciousness, and you know, it really, it's fascinating how that makes pathways to ideas that never even existed, and it's amazing what comes along for the ride. Oh, you know what, I don't remember putting that in the hold, but I guess that is part of the journey, then, right?  AUSTIN: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. On a general note, it seems like the stellar and perhaps even the interstellar as a layer of the real has been beckoning to the human over the last couple years -- ANDREW: Mmmhmm. AUSTIN: I've felt increasingly drawn to work with the stellar layer of astrology and astrological magic and it did things, exposing myself to that radiation did some interesting things. [laughs] ANDREW: Fair enough. So, what does the stellar or the intergalactic mean in terms of astrology, like?  AUSTIN: So, on a really simple level, but very important level, the planets move, and the stars don't. From our point of view. And certainly, you know, the planets are, they're racing around the sun, and first they're against this stellar backdrop, and now they're in line with that star, and you know, that's what planet means. The Greek root for planet means wanderer. It's a wandering star as opposed to a fixed star. And the planets are also quite literally subservient to the sun, to our star, they are all once pieces of the same undifferentiated matter, and they, you know, they obey the sun in motion and are fed by its light. Right?  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. AUSTIN: So, we're dealing with, you know, something, we're dealing with the children of stars rather than stars.  ANDREW: Yeah.  AUSTIN: Whereas each of the stars whose light reaches into our system is its own sovereign; it's its own parent. If we're looking on a ... just on a physical level at ranks of beings in the physical world, there's nothing really beyond stars. Maybe black holes? I don't know. Their nature is still illusive. But like stars are the biggest things, they're the biggest distinct beings or entities. ANDREW: Yeah.  AUSTIN: And, so, what's interesting is the stars are considered ... So, if we look at the Picatrix, which is, for people who aren't familiar with it, the big book of astrological magic ... ANDREW: Yeah. AUSTIN: It's an 11th century, originally written in Arabic, translated and modified a little bit, showed up in Latin a few centuries later and has been tremendously influential. You know, so the Picatrix, when talking about the intersection between stellar and planetary, says that you know if you want something to, you know if you're doing a working, right, and you want the pattern that you're impressing into the world to be enduring, and you know, eternal, enduring to not just be a quick change or a difference next month, that you then align, you align the power of a star and a planet. You let that star manifest through that planet. You get -- the planet is like the lens that brings it into our system, but the star is going to provide a higher-octane laser with which to etch a pattern into life.  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. AUSTIN: Anyway, there's so much to talk about with stars.  ANDREW: Not un -- not dissimilar in some ways to using a god to come through a planet or using, you know, you're lining up those other energies and then you are creating a bigger vibration or power or possibility through them, right?  AUSTIN: Exactly. Well and that's the art, the traditional astrological talismanic art, is you have the planet, right? and that is, we can see that as one link on a chain of being, but you don't just, you know, you don't just heat up that planet, you have the words that you speak, the way that you're dressed, as well as the way that you speak, should all be of the same nature, your surroundings ideally should be of the same nature, and the material you make the talisman of should be a representation of the same nature at the level of stone, right? The incense should be made of plants that are of the same nature at the vegetative level, right? And, you know, basically, when the art is perfect, everything at every point in the chain of being, you know, from the unnamable all the way down to the dirt beneath your feet should be exactly of one nature, and that's, you know, there's a huge difference experientially and results-wise when you bring every level to bear on making -- impressing a change into reality.  ANDREW: Mmmhmm.  AUSTIN: So, you know... whereas, you can get away with not having the incense, or just doing a paper talisman instead of stone, and you know, maybe having the planet like, not in the best condition, you can do stuff, and stuff'll happen, but it's when, it's when you have, it's in a sense on every level the same reality as far as you know. And it's all tuned to the same, you know, you get that pow. ANDREW: Mmmhmm. Cause I mean, necessity wins out when you have to do something today for something tomorrow, that's the end of the conversation, just do the thing, right? AUSTIN: Well and, what I would say, cause again I've been teaching this material for the first time, traditional astrological talismanic magic is absolutely not emergency magic. It's making lasting permanent life-altering changes. It's like building -- it's literally carving a stone, and it's carving the stone of your life. It's building a temple. It's building the pyramids. It's big and lasting, and so you can actually fuck yourself up pretty good if you use that protocol when the elements aren't aligned very well, because you'll impress really deeply into, you know, into the talisman, a pattern that might be good enough for tomorrow, but you don't want to let that pattern colonize your life. You know, some of my sort of hard core astro-talismanic friends, all of us have stories ranging from horrible to hilarious about when we thought this was good enough and made it anyway and we knew we were wrong. Like a friend of mine told me a story about how she made this fixed star talisman, and basically there are a lot of things that are good about the star, but if you look at the lore, there's this association with wounded feet ... ANDREW: Okay.  AUSTIN: And then, she picked a time where ... she picked a time to work that star where Mars was extremely prominent and configured to that star, and she got ... and she was wearing the talisman for a couple weeks, and all the good things that are associated with that talisman happened, and she fell down the stairs and couldn't walk properly for six months.  ANDREW: Right.  AUSTIN: And that wasn't what she asked for, it's just that that's what that moment in time could provide. And if, you know, if she just did a sort of like, more of a petition, like a quickie spell, to that star, just got enough juice to, you know, move that brick three feet over, or to have the energy to do, you know, whatever labors were demanded over the next week wouldn't have had that, but with the full on talismanic art, you're impressing that pattern really deeply, and you'll get the pieces of that moment in time that you didn't ask for but are part of it anyway. ANDREW: You get the whole picture. AUSTIN: Yeah. And that's why the rules are so picky. You can be like, yeah, but what if I have to? Then don't do a talisman, don't do that style of talisman, do a planetary position, you can do that, it'll work.  ANDREW: Go to the Picatrix and call somebody up, and be like, "hey, come and help me with this thing for a few days," whatever.  AUSTIN: Yeah. Exactly. I do micro-planetary magic every day. You know I'll heat up the altar, I've got little informal planetary altars all around my office and house, and so you know during my ten minutes of just, like, checking in and tasting the brew, I might do a little thing to nudge something, cause that's all I need, and I don't need a lot of power to nudge it. You don't need to go full talisman for most things.  ANDREW: Yeah. Yeah. I had Jason Miller on recently and we were talking about, don't do emergency, try not to let it get to emergency magic level, cause that sort of stuff always comes up at some point in our lives, but let's have relationships, let's be in the magic, let's live the magic, let's be in the flow of the magic and work with that, and hopefully we'll be in that place where things become required. And like you say those little adjustments, right?  AUSTIN: Yeah. Always steering? It's funny that you bring Jason up, because, so, I absolutely have to plug my book that's coming out? Because -- I say mine, but there are eleven other authors. I coedited it -- it feels like my baby, but, you know, even a baby is not your possession, right? Although one does tend to be possessive. So, this is an anthology of essays about astrological magic. It's going to be -- it's being published by Three Hands Press; I coedited it with Daniel Schulke, and it's got an essay by me on the fixed stars, and Daniel on the planetary viscera of witchcraft, which is a wonderful meditation, I had the pleasure of editing that recently. But Jason is also one of the contributors. And I brought Jason on for exactly what he delivered, which is you know, okay, when the stars aren't right, what can you do? How can you maybe get something that looks Venusian from Mars? You know, it's that practical, you know, getting into it, I brought him into it for the nuances of practice and how, the better you understand the planets, the more you can do with any one sphere, and he gave the example of how, there's a person who's having trouble with their love life, and all the Venus work in the world wasn't really changing things, but when Mars got brought on, and the focal point was the courage to face rejection, and the willingness to assert oneself, then everything clicked in, right? And so, we can say, relationships are Venusian, and that's true, but if when we're trying to untangle a particular knot, sometimes, in that particular case, it was Mars that needed to be tugged on, not Venus. And then, so, what I tried to do with the contributors that I invited was to provide both a historical overview and also to get people to articulate the traditional principles, and there are several people who did that really well, and then I also wanted -- I'd say the other half are about working with that material, and what you discover in practice, and what are maybe other ways of looking at things, what are -- how shall we say -- what are details of practice that aren't covered in thousand year old books, and what comes up along the way, and so, I believe at this point that we did a really nice job of sort of bridging the present, past, and future. But that will be up to the reader to decide. So that's called -- [cross talking 00:47:57]  AUSTIN: Yeah, I'm looking forward to it. It took a long time! [laughs] So I'm rather looking forward to its publication. It should be out in May and is called The Celestial Art.  ANDREW: The Celestial Art. Lovely. Well, maybe this is a good point to -- I think that I could spend all day talking with you about these things, but maybe we should wrap this up here for now, and why don't you tell people where they should come and hang out with you? You have a great newsletter, and stuff like that, so, yeah, where are you?  AUSTIN: Yeah. So, I'm at myname.com, I'm at AustinCoppock.com, and I offer online classes, both live and as well as the library of past material, I write on a -- not a weekly but a decanly basis, I wrote a book on the decans, or the division of sky and time into 36, and I've started doing my astrological column on that pattern rather than the weekly as an experiment. And I also write a short paragraph about every day's astrology, just a little bit about okay, here's what's in the air at a given time, and so yeah, you'll be able to find all my stuff there, and I'm on Facebook, I'm on Twitter. I didn't quite make it onto Instagram or anything that came after Twitter. I'm at that age where I'd adapted enough and began to ossify and dry out and wither.  ANDREW: [laughing] AUSTIN: I was like, I can't do any more of this! Another one!  ANDREW: There's another astrological endeavor, right? Which signs and or placements give people predilection for one platform over another? Because I think Instagram is the pinnacle of social media and the best thing ever, so.  AUSTIN: That -- I -- well what I was going to say is that totally -- we could say it's definitely fiery -- ANDREW: Mmmhmm. AUSTIN: Right, it's not as textual? It's more image based, it's a little bit more dynamic, yeah, and so you said you were ... you sun was in Sagitarrius and Mars in Aries?  ANDREW: Yeah.  AUSTIN: That's a great start for fire! [laughs] ANDREW: For sure.  AUSTIN: If nothing else is in fire then you are more than sufficiently enflamed.  ANDREW: My ascendant is in Leo, and yeah, I've got a bunch of, a pile of stuff in Sagittarius, so, yeah -- AUSTIN: Okay! [laughs] ANDREW: I got gallons of fire, yeah, for sure!  AUSTIN: I'm more water than anything else -- ANDREW: Mmmhmm. AUSTIN: So, I don't, yeah, Instagram seems a little loud for me, visually and otherwise. [laughing] ANDREW: Fair enough, fair enough. Well, thank you so much for making the time today, Austin, it's been a real pleasure. AUSTIN: Yeah, it has. Yeah. I enjoyed it. 

Austin was stuck in a job he hated. But given his non-traditional background and lack of Silicon Valley network, he knew he'd have to work extra hard to launch a career in tech. In this podcast, he details the steps he took to land interviews at Google, Twitter, and other prestigious companies that led to his dream job. Written by Austin Belcak: https://cultivatedculture.com Read by Abbey Rennemeyer: https://twitter.com/abbeyrenn Original article: https://fcc.im/2F8uE2H Learn to code for free at: https://www.freecodecamp.org Intro music by Vangough: https://fcc.im/2APOG02 Transcript: Shortly after college, I began chasing something many people want but few ever get: a job they love. I left school with a biology degree and a job in the medical field. It took me about two weeks to realize I absolutely hated it. I was working 6 days a week, waking up at 3:30am in order to be at the hospital by 5:30. Making next to nothing, I quickly racked up $10,000 in credit card debt. I knew I deserved more, but I had no idea how to get it. I saw people in my graduating class living in New York or San Francisco, making six figure salaries and going on exotic trips. I often wondered what they had figured out that I hadn’t. What was their secret? I dedicated the next 12 months of my life to finding the answer. In this article I’m going to share everything I learned along the way. First, I’ll walk you through the exact process you can use to get a job interview at your dream company even if you don’t know a single person there — you won’t even need to apply online. Next, I’ll teach you how to ace the interview process, get the offer, and land a salary you deserve. I personally used these exact strategies to get interviews and offers at companies like Google, Uber and Twitter. They are also the same tactics that my students have used to land interviews and offers at Google, Microsoft, Slack, Deloitte, PWC, American Express, ESPN and more. Referrals Are The Most Effective Way To Get Hired A recent LinkedIn survey on talent trends showed that 1 in 3 people were actively looking for new work. As of January 2017, the population of employed people in the United States was 123 million. This means that, at any given time, 41 million people are looking for work. On average, an open role at a well known company gets ~250 resumes. 75% of these resumes came from some sort of online portal (like the company’s online application, or a career aggregator site like Indeed.com). Once submitted, these applications are screened by Applicant Tracking software that scans them for keywords. At the end of the process, ~5 resumes make it into the hands of a recruiter. That’s 2% at best. Additionally, The Wall Street Journal published an article stating that 80% of jobs aren’t advertised online. That means that 75% of people applying for jobs are all competing for 20% of the opportunities! Oops. When it comes to getting hired, referrals are the most effective way to secure an interview and land the offer. Here are some stats from a recent Jobvite survey: 40% of hires come from referrals, the next largest channel is via career sites at 21% (almost half as many) Referrals get hired in an average of 3 weeks while other applicants take up to 7 weeks Referrals get paid more on average than cold applicants 40% of hires come from referrals (courtesy of Jobvite.com) Finally, over 50% of six figure jobs are filled via referral. Moral of the story? If we want to get hired at our dream job, we need to find another way to get a referral from an insider. The problem is, many of us don’t happen to have friends or family working at places like Google. Part 1: How To Get A Job Interview When You Don’t Know A Single Person At The Company Know Your Role (And Find It) The first step is having a solid idea of the specific role you are looking for, down to the company and title if possible. Next, you need to make sure that role is available. For today, let’s assume that you want to be an Account Manager in the Technology B2B vertical at Google. Looks like a spot is open in New York: Locate Potential Influencers Next, you are going to find someone who not only knows about the role, but could potentially have an impact on hiring for it. Time to fire up LinkedIn. In the search bar, plug in the company name + all of the information I highlighted above (title, vertical/industry, preferred city). However, before you hit “Search,” we need to remember that you are looking for someone who can influence the hiring process. With that in mind, I usually use a title that is one level up from the position that I’m looking for. If you’re not familiar with title hierarchy structures in the corporate world, here is a quick guide (if you are already familiar with how titles are structured, feel free to skip this section): Side Note: A Brief Guide To Company Organizational Structures By Title Every company has a hierarchy starting at the top with the CEO/Founder all the way down to the entry level employees. When researching companies, especially people to speak to within those companies, it helps to know where certain titles fit in the food chain. That way you can ensure you are talking to the right person. Here is a general list of titles that fits almost any company, starting at the top: C-­Level (CEO, CTO, CFO, COO, etc.) Vice President (VP) Director Senior Manager Manager Coordinator (Entry Level) Associates, Executives, and Seniors In many companies, the above titles have some sort of variation that allows for greater segmentation within that level. The most common forms of this are Associate, Executive, and Senior. Here is what those mean: Associate: this title is usually given to someone who is halfway between positions for some reason (maybe there is typically a 4 year gap between levels and they are 2 years in). A person with Associate in their title is usually one notch below a person with the original title. For example, an Associate Account Manager would most likely be one level below an Account Manager. Senior: ­this title is the more experienced version of an Associate. People with Senior in their title are usually one notch above the original title. For example, a Senior Account Manager would be one notch above an Account Manager. Executive: ­this title is usually given to people who are very senior, or around the level of Vice President. The two most common cases are Sales Executive/Account Executive (synonymous terms for a senior salesperson) or Executive Vice President who is two notches above a Vice President and one notch above a Senior Vice President. That should be all the info you need to make an educated decision around where people stand within the company you are researching. Now that you’re familiar with the company structure, let’s get back to finding that influencer who can help you land this job. Since we are looking for an Account Manager role, the next step up would be Senior Account Manager so your LinkedIn search would look like this: Our first result? A Senior Account Manager who works in B2B at Google: Obtaining Contact Info Now we’re going to reach out and set up a meeting. It’s best to do these in person but over the phone can work well if you’re dream job is in another state or country. In order to get in touch with our influencer, we’re going to need their contact info. Here are 3 strategies you can use to find almost anyone’s corporate email address: LinkedIn This one is obvious but it’s a big time saver and definitely worth the 10 seconds it takes to check. On the person’s profile, right under their picture, there can be a button labeled “Contact Info” (I say “can be” because people have the option to remove it). Occasionally, people will have their email address listed right there — voila! If not, let’s move right along… Reverse Lookup Head over to Voila Norbert and enter the first and last name of the person you are searching for, as well as their company’s website. For example, if we were trying to find Larry Page’s email, our form would look like this: Once it spits out their email you can confirm it using MailTester. Matching Formats If that doesn’t work, you can try finding someone else’s email at the company and use that format reverse engineering your target email address. For example, using Larry Page again, if I know that my buddy John Smith’s email is john at google.com then I can assume that Larry’s email is larry at google.com. The easiest way to get a hold of a company email address is to reach out to someone in sales or media because both of these departments usually have inbound lead forms and people on the other end ready to pounce on those leads. We can also use our LinkedIn method here and target salespeople. Salespeople almost always have their corporate email listed on their LinkedIn because it’s a free win for them. If someone is looking for their product and then finds them on LinkedIn, boom — they just got an effortless inbound lead. Once you have the format, you can use MailTester to confirm your target email address. Research, Research, Research Now that you have your potential influencer, it’s time to do some research so you can effectively reach out and build that relationship. Start with the usual suspects — LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. and look for common points of interest. To be honest, most people are better at this online research thing than I am, so I’ll get back to the meat here. One thing I will say is, don’t skimp. The more you get to know this person beforehand, the better your chances of landing a referral from them. Some people have said to me, “Austin, isn’t this a little weird? I feel like I’m kind of stalking this person.” I totally get it. However, this information is critical for quickly building a strong relationship and getting that referral. Also, in my experience, people tend to expect that you’ve done some research on them. The key is to understand what is kosher to bring up out of the blue and what isn’t. People are OK with you checking out their LinkedIn, but they may be a little weirded out if you mention that picture from Saturday’s Bar Crawl you saw on Facebook. My general rule of thumb is this: if it exists on LinkedIn, it’s fair game to bring up. If you found it somewhere else (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) use a different method. For example, if I see that my influencer is a skiing fanatic, I may bring up that I went on a ski trip a few weeks beforehand. Sending The Email Now that you have your potential influencer and their contact info, it’s time to reach out. Not only is this one of the scarier parts of this process, it is also the most pivotal. To help you get past that hump, I’ve included the exact email script that I used to reach out to people. In this case, I’m reaching out to Tim who works at Google: Subject: Quick Question Hi Tim, My name is Austin and I currently work at Cultivated Culture. I was browsing through LinkedIn and came across your information — I hope you don’t mind me reaching out of the blue here. I saw that you have extensive experience in Google’s Technology B2B vertical and I’m very interested in learning more about that space. I would love to have the opportunity to run some questions by you, as well as tap into any advice you may have given your knowledge of the industry. I know that your time is extremely valuable so please don’t feel to need to respond in depth. If you do have 5 minutes to chat, I would really appreciate it. Best, Austin There are a few key points to the email above: Address the person you are emailing by name State who you are and make it personable Include some flattery that positions the person as an “expert” As for the subject, Fast Company did a study where they emailed 1,000 C-level executives from Fortune & Inc 500 companies. They found that the subject line “Quick Question” made up 66.7% of total replies. I saw similar results. All of that said, this script is just a framework. You will most likely need to tweak your emails to fit the situation. When that time comes, I recommend checking out Sam Parr’s incredible guide on how to cold email like a boss (Sam has started conversations with Jeff Bezos and Brian Lee (aka Jessica Alba’s Honest co-founder) via cold email). It’s the same guide I used to help craft my email templates. Now hit Send! Prepare For Your Meeting In order to prepare, we have to know what we’re preparing for. The goal of your meeting is to position your influencer as an expert, make them feel special, and build a relationship. You should not and will not mention anything about the opening at their company. People innately enjoy helping others and if you follow the steps above, they will bring this up naturally. You will want to prepare a list of questions that gets them to open up about themselves and the company. I like to ask them several softballs to get things warmed up and then hit them with a few questions they are guaranteed to remember. Here is a quick set that I’ve had success with in the past (I’ve found the last one really seems to stick): I saw you worked at [Previous Companies]. How did you end up going from [First Industry] to becoming interested in [Current Company]? You hear a lot about [Current Company] in the news, but I’d love to hear more about why you love working there. What’s your favorite part? What is one totally unexpected lesson you’ve learned from working at [Current Company]? The “Million Dollar” Question Regardless of the questions you choose, there is one that you must always be sure to ask: “What is the biggest challenge your team is facing right now?” Really dig in here, get them to be specific. This information is going to be critical in helping you land a referral from this person, as well as getting the offer farther down the road. Your Homework: Adding Value (In A Big Way) Okay, so you met with your influencer, things went great, and you identified a major pain point that the team is having. Now we’re going to focus on that last piece. Over the next week you are going to research the crap out of your influencer’s problem. Then you are going to come up with a solution and draft up a proposal for how you would solve it. Your proposal should include: A summary of the problem (to illustrate that you understand their pain) A step-by-step framework of how you would solve this problem A brief outline of how your skill set positions you as an asset to implement that solution Truthfully, this process deserves a post of its own but this should give you a good idea of what you need to do. If you’re the type of person that likes concrete examples, check out this guerrilla usability test that Raghav Haran ran for Airbnb. Once you have all of this information, consolidate it into a Word document, head over to Upwork, and hire a graphic designer to make your proposal look amazing. If you’ve never hired on Upwork before, here is an amazing guide by Dave Nevogt on how to do it right. Following Up With Your Proposal Now we’re going to reach back out to our influencer with the proposal. Here’s the template I used: Hi [Influencer], Thanks again for taking the time out to chat last week. I spent a lot of time thinking about what you said regarding [team’s biggest challenge]. In fact, I created a short framework that should help you solve it. Please find that attached. If you have some time, I would love to chat about it in more detail. Please let me know if you have any questions, I’m looking forward to hearing your thoughts! Best, Austin It’s very important that you do not mention the open position in any of your emails or the proposal. Be patient and wait for their response. When they do get back to you, they will not only bring up the opening but they will ask you if you’re interested. Kindly accept and play it cool. You’re in! Part 2: How To Breeze Through The Interview Process Fast forward — our influencer passed along our resume to HR and they have reached out to set up a phone screen. Once we get past that, we’ll be on to interviewing with the team, and then getting the job. A note to developers: The advice below does not cover technical interviews, which are typically required for developer/software roles. However, the advice below will help create more time to prepare for technical interviews by minimizing the amount of preparation needed for other parts of the interview process. If you are applying for a development role, I suggest you read Cracking The Coding Interview by Gayle Laakmann McDowell. Interviews can be daunting, especially at companies like Google, Amazon, or Uber. I’m sure you’ve read the horror stories about crazy questions they ask people like “Quick — How many golf balls can fit inside a school bus,” or, “how many gas stations are there in Manhattan?” The truth is, most of these companies have done away with those questions. They crunched the numbers and found that the answers didn’t correlate with high employee performance (shocker, I know). In fact, Google’s own Senior Vice President of People Operations called them a “complete waste of time.” These companies have since reverted back to the standard style of interviews, which is great for us because it makes it much easier to identify patterns. We can essentially “guess” what questions will be on the test and prepare answers that will blow our interviewers away (it works way better than it did in college, I swear). Here is the process I used to prepare for each one. Nailing The Basics: Questions You’ll Get In Every Interview According to renowned career guru Penelope Trunk, one of the easiest ways to be a better interviewer is to prepare for the most obvious questions. You may be saying “well duh,” but you’d be surprised by how many people spread themselves too thin by trying to prepare answers to every possible question. 99% of the interviews you go on will follow the exact same template. If you can master the format, your confidence will skyrocket and you’ll be prepared for almost any situation you get thrown into. The Universal Job Interview Format: Tell me about yourself (your experience, why you are interested in this role, etc.) A mix of behavioral questions, which we’ll dive into shortly What questions do you have for me (the interviewer)? Let’s tackle each individually. Tell Me About Yourself This is your first impression. More importantly, it’s the only part of the interview that you totally control. Do NOT rattle off your resume like a grocery list. In order to nail this part you need to craft an interesting story — your story. You want it to be concise (around 2–3 minutes) and you need to think about what you want to convey. I recommend: Choosing 2–3 themes to build your story around (for me, those themes were Persistence, Agility, and Success) Including quantitative metrics whenever possible Addressing the question of why you want to leave your current position (they are going to ask you this anyways, addressing it early shows that you’re aware it’s a concern of theirs and helps put them at ease) To help get you started, here is what my story looked like. To give you some context, I was a biology major who was interested in landing a job in digital marketing: Growing up, like most people, I wanted to be a doctor. I went to [college] where I majored in biology and planned my course to medical school. Not long after, I decided that pre-med wasn’t for me. I wanted to get into digital marketing, and I wanted to be in New York. I set my sights on this goal and created a plan that would get me there. In 2013, I graduated with my biology degree and took a job in medical device sales where I worked from 5:30am — 12:30pm covering surgical cases in the operating room. Then, every day, I would come home and study digital marketing until 8:00pm. In order to gain relevant experience, I got certified in Google Analytics & AdWords and created my own consulting firm that focused on using search engine marketing to generate leads for private golf communities. We were able to increase home sales by an average of 20% while reducing the cost per lead by around 10%. Armed with my new credentials, I began to look for positions in New York. Eventually, I was offered a position at my current company (a promotional analytics company in New York). During my tenure there I have grown my book of business by 467%, spearheaded the creation of an internal group dedicated to marketing the company on the internet, and helped close the second largest deal in company history. However, the company has restructured several times since I was brought on. I’ve had 3 different managers over the past year, as well as 3 titles with different sets of responsibilities. I’m looking for something a bit more stable and [company I am interviewing at] has been somewhere that I have wanted to work since I got into this industry. I’m really excited to have this opportunity. Pro Tip: You are telling a story. Don’t be afraid to embellish a bit. I’m not saying you should lie or make up stories, but you want to sell yourself and you can bet your butt that your competition isn’t afraid to inflate their credentials. Behavioral Questions Next up is the dreaded set of behavioral questions. The ones meant to tease out your thought process and your ability to be a “team player.” This is the part where our educated “guesses” are going to come in handy. The behavioral section is broken down into two parts that I call Standard Questions and Company Specific Questions. Let’s start with the former. Standard Questions You are going to be asked a variation of one, if not all, of these questions in every single interview you go to: Why do you want to work for us? Tell me about a time you exhibited leadership Tell me about a time where you had to work as a team Tell me about a time you’ve had to work with a difficult person, or difficult people Tell me about a time you failed Tell me about a time you overcame an obstacle Tell me about a time when you had success If you can answer these 6 questions, you can handle 9 out of 10 interviews with no other preparation and be totally fine. Just follow the same set of rules I mentioned above in the Tell Me About Yourself section: Craft a concise story Make sure to include quantitative metrics that illustrate your success Anticipate and address objections Company Specific Questions These are questions that fall in the middle of the 7 listed above and “why are man hole covers round?” Never fear though, we can anticipate these too. Head over to GlassDoor. If you’ve never heard of GlassDoor, it’s a great resource for any job seeker that includes salaries, reviews, and interview information for almost any company in the world. First, you are going to search for the position you’re applying for. In keeping with our theme, we’ll search for “Google” under Companies & Reviews: Next, we’re going to click on the “Interviews” Tab: Then scroll down and click on “Filter Interviews” which will bring up some advanced settings. Here we’ll type in the title of the job we want (Account Manager, in this case) and the location (New York, NY). We’ll also select “Received Offer” because the people who didn’t receive offers tend to be slightly, ahem, biased: This will pull up a list of reviews from everyone who interviewed and received an offer for that position. The general comments are really helpful, but we want to focus on a section called Interview Questions towards the bottom. I usually comb through 10–15 of these and add all of the interview questions into a Word doc so I can answer them later: Now you have your second set of questions to prepare for. What Questions Do You Have For Me? Finally, once they are done peppering you with questions, your interviewer will ask if you have any questions for them. This is the most crucial part of the interview. Why? Because so many people neglect it. If you can ask some questions that are even slightly outside of the box, I’ve found that really sticks with the interviewer more than any other part of the meeting. After every interview I’ve been on, I asked for feedback. Without fail, the interviewer made a positive comment about the questions I asked. The good news for you is that I asked the same exact questions in every single one. Here they are: What is your favorite part about working here? What is the biggest challenge you are facing right now? Let’s say that, in one year, you are looking back on this hire. What has that person done to exceed expectations on every level? Ask about a current event (for example — I saw that [Competitor X] came out with this product. How do you see that affecting your business?) What is the most unexpected lesson you’ve learned while working at [company]? Tell me a little bit more about you, what do you like to do outside of work? These questions work because they are based on specific principles of behavioral psychology. They break down barriers and help build a positive association in your interviewer’s mind. If you’re interested in the details, you can read more about it here. Say Thank You While we’re on the subject, be absolutely sure to send a thank you note to everyone you interviewed with. Also include a personal touch to each one (something that you gained from that last question). Many people I talk to say “but I don’t have their email.” Ask for it! At the end of every interview always, always ask for a business card or write down the person’s email in your notebook. If you forget, try using the techniques I outlined above for finding people’s emails and you should be fine. Part 3 — Following Up & What To Do If They Say No This is one of the most common mistakes I see from job applicants. I understand how nerve wracking it is to sit there and wait while everything is completely out of your hands. One of the toughest things I had to learn throughout my interview process was that, while this is a HUGE deal to you, it’s really just another agenda item on the hiring manager’s schedule. They will get back to you, and if they don’t? You don’t want to work for someone who doesn’t have the courtesy of replying to the people they do business with. When Can I Send Them A Reminder? The rule of thumb is one business week. If you interviewed on a Tuesday, wait until the next Tuesday to email them (as J.T. O'Donnell says, never send a nudge on a Monday). When you do, don’t push or be blunt. Keep it short and sweet: Hi [Interviewer], I hope you had a great week! I wanted to quickly follow up and see if there was anything else I could help with regarding the application process. If so, please let me know. Best, Austin That’s it. If they don’t respond to that after another 3–4 days, you have your answer and it’s time to move on. What Happens If They Say No? Ugh. The worst case scenario. Don’t get down just yet though, we’re not done here. I have this quality where I have trouble taking “no” as an answer. When I was interviewing with Google, the initial screener told me that she wasn’t going to put me through because she “didn’t think I was qualified, and didn’t want to waste the team’s time.” I was not happy. So I sent her this: Hi [Recruiter], Thank you again for carving out the time to speak this afternoon. I really appreciate your feedback, and I wanted to add one final note: I completely understand your concerns regarding my experience with [skill]. You are correct that I didn’t have much experience with that at [previous company]. That said, this doesn’t stem from an inability to produce results, but rather a lack of opportunity to do so. While my experience on paper may not match up to the initial expectations of the position’s description, I have do have two qualities that work in my favor: I am an extremely efficient learner, and am also very effective at translating those learnings into practice. Second, I’m much more tenacious than your average individual. My career has hinged on these two qualities. I left college with no digital experience and a biology degree — all of my digital knowledge was obtained through self study. I spent 8 months selling myself without the on-paper experience to back it up. When I was finally given the opportunity to apply my knowledge in a business setting, I playing a critical role in landing the company’s 2nd largest deal in history. I am confident that I can have the same success in this role. I have the resources necessary to learn what I need in order to be successful at [company], and am prepared to do whatever it takes to make that happen. I understand that [company’s] interview process is extremely challenging, and that only the top talent ends up with an offer letter at the end. I also believe that I am worthy of a shot at that letter. [Company] is known for hiring people who excel at the intangibles, as well the ability to learn new things and apply them to existing knowledge. That is my forte. I am not asking for an offer. I am simply asking for the opportunity to speak with the hiring manager to make my case for the position. I’m sure you will find the best person for the position, I would just like to have a legitimate shot at being that person. If you give me that chance, my next set of answers will not disappoint. Thank you again for your continued consideration. Best, Austin Now that may be a little aggressive… Ok, it was pretty aggressive. But she wrote me back an hour later and pushed me through to the next round! Mission accomplished. The moral of the story here is, don’t give up if you get a “No.” Try to identify why you were turned down and then send a note to hiring manager addressing those items (feel free to copy mine). Taking Action There you have it. The exhaustive, step-by-step guide to landing an interview and then getting an offer from the company of your dreams. What are you waiting for? Get out there and start researching!

https://thedaytripper.com/podcasts-uploads/Daytripper_Podcast_BigBend_July2016_Ep029.mp3   It's summertime in Texas and it's HOT!  And just about anything with water is fair game when we are looking for ways to stay cool….rivers, lakes, the coast, retention ponds… Join us as we relive childhood memories at swimming holes and discover new ones with Jordan Breal (@jordanbreal on Twitter) and Courtney Bond (@clbond on Twitter) from Texas Monthly. The inspiration for this podcast came from their recent issue called “Splash” that is all about swimming in Texas. Swimming spots we discuss include: The Frio River at Garner State Park (because of course, it's a Texan rite of passage! We suggest checking out Neal's Lodges) San Felipe Creek in Del Rio (Texas Monthly says it's great for frolicking…) Gus Fruh in Austin (It's sort of a secret hideaway and there's a rope swing…what more do you need?) Hamilton Pool in Dripping Springs is a must-see (just be prepared, you must make reservations) The Blue Hole in Wimberley is always a Texas favorite (and it makes for a great road trip!)  Port Aransas Coast, McGee Beach or Matagorda Bay are great for attempted surfing (or boogie boarding) Check out Boykin Springs for breathtaking waterfalls The Comal River in New Braunfels (Perfect for tubing…just hold on to your stuff on the tube shoot!) For SCUBA diving, San Solomon Springs in Balmorhea and the Athens SCUBA Park are two of our favorites! Two of the best kept Texas secrets are Reimer's Ranch and The Narrows in the Blanco River (sorry folks, this one's on private land) If you'd like to up your swimming hole difficulty level, check out Devils River (Warning: No cell phone service!) or the Lower Pecos River (Texas Monthly spent 6 days paddling it!) You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Stitcher and the Windows store! This endeavor is generously supported by Mighty Fine Burgers Fries Shakes.