Podcasts about boston convention center

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 8, 2023 7:39

After a snowy accident, our family switched to snow tires. I have some thoughts on who needs them and which ones to buy. MABEL'S LABELSUse Code SKIMOMS to save 15% off your order. Ski Swap season is here and we are scooping up deals. Smart ski moms know as soon as the new gear comes home it's time for a label. Ski equipment can look VERY similar on a rack, with Mabel's Labels, parents can easily identify their kids' belongings and prevent items from being lost or misplaced. FREE TICKETS TO SNOWBOUND BOSTON EXPOUse code: MOMTRENDS at checkout to get your FREE Earlybird Tickets to the Boston Snowbound Expo.November 3-5, at Boston Convention Center. 3-day expo Support the showKeep up with the Latest from the Ski Moms!Website: www.skimomsfun.comSki Moms Discount Page: https://skimomsfun.com/discountsSki Moms Ski Rental HomesJoin the 10,000+ Ski Moms Facebook GroupInstagram: https://instagram.com/skimomsfun Send us an email and let us know what guests and topics you'd like to hear next! Sarah@skimomsfun.comNicole@skimomsfun.com

smart snow moms labels ski tires quick tips winter driving comnicole momtrends boston convention center showkeep

Getting Strong For Ski Season with Dr. Leslie of ACL Strong

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 2, 2023 38:35

In this episode, we talk with Dr Leslie Desrosiers, PT, DPT, OCS, CSCS, a Doctor of Physical Therapy and the creator of ACL STRONG. ACL Strong is a program that simplifies injury prevention training so that anybody can learn to protect their knees and avoid getting hurt. Over the 6 week program, ACL STRONG transforms athletes (skiers!) making us stronger in the right muscles, more aware of movements, and more resistant to knee, hip, and ankle problems.Dr Leslie shares her ski origin story, which started at age 7 in Dubuque, Iowa. Dr Leslie always knew she wanted to be a physical therapist, she went from graduate school into orthopedics private practice. Later she built her online program focused on ACL injury prevention. We were fascinated to learn that in a 4-6 week training program we can reduce our risk of injury by 50-67%! Dr Leslie has designed a program specifically for skiers called “Snow and Beyond” - that we are doing to get our bodies strong and ready for ski season! We want to keep skiing for as long as possible and do our best to keep up with our kids!Resources:Join us as we get ready for ski season with ACL Strong and use code SKIMOMS for 20% off your membership!Keep up with the Latest from Dr Leslie and ACL Strong!Website: https://aclstrong.com/Instagram: https:/MABEL'S LABELSUse Code SKIMOMS to save 15% off your order. Ski Swap season is here and we are scooping up deals. Smart ski moms know as soon as the new gear comes home it's time for a label. Ski equipment can look VERY similar on a rack, with Mabel's Labels, parents can easily identify their kids' belongings and prevent items from being lost or misplaced. SHOP IKSPLORFrom infants to grown-ups, Iksplor crafts their layers from premium 100% merino wool. Ski Moms members can save 10% off with code: SKIMOM on the Iksplor website. Discover why every adventure feels better when wrapped in the comfort of Iksplor. FREE TICKETS TO SNOWBOUND BOSTON EXPOUse code: MOMTRENDS at checkout to get your FREE Earlybird Tickets to the Boston Snowbound Expo.November 3-5, at Boston Convention Center. 3-day expo Support the showKeep up with the Latest from the Ski Moms!Website: www.skimomsfun.comSki Moms Discount Page: https://skimomsfun.com/discountsSki Moms Ski Rental HomesJoin the 10,000+ Ski Moms Facebook GroupInstagram: https://instagram.com/skimomsfun Send us an email and let us know what guests and topics you'd like to hear next! Sarah@skimomsfun.comNicole@skimomsfun.com

discover doctors travel smart iowa snow labels acl physical therapy skiing ski dpt injury prevention cscs ocs dubuque family travel getting strong winter fun comnicole momtrends boston convention center showkeep

Quick Tips - Saving Money on Your Ski Clothes

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 26, 2023 9:30

In this episode, we share our favorite money saving websites and stores for looking stylish on the slopes. Moms it's time to update your ski season wardrobes! We've done the research so you don't have to. Happy shopping. Resources:Sierra - www.sierra.com (used to be Sierra Trading Post)REI Outlet: www.REI.com/outletSki moms, you might want to consider becoming an REI member. Members get LOADS of benefits (including free tuning). When it comes to your purchases, Co-op profits go back to their source—members get 10% back annually on eligible purchases. (10% is typical but not guaranteed.) Member get extra coupons and savings too. Right now members get an extra 10% on trade-ins. Steep & Cheap: www.steepandcheap.com/Sideline Swap: https://sidelineswap.com Use our referral code - momtrends957 - to get $5.00 off your first purchase at SidelineSwap.ThredUp: www.thredup.comUniqlo: www.uniqlo.com/us/en/Rent the Runway: www.renttherunway.com/pdp/shop/ski_wear/productsMABEL'S LABELSUse Code SKIMOMS to save 15% off your order. Ski Swap season is here and we are scooping up deals. Smart ski moms know as soon as the new gear comes home it's time for a label. Ski equipment can look VERY similar on a rack, with Mabel's Labels, parents can easily identify their kids' belongings and prevent items from being lost or misplaced. FREE TICKETS TO SNOWBOUND BOSTON EXPOUse code: MOMTRENDS at checkout to get your FREE Earlybird Tickets to the Boston Snowbound Expo.November 3-5, at Boston Convention Center. 3-day expo Support the showKeep up with the Latest from the Ski Moms!Website: www.skimomsfun.comSki Moms Discount Page: https://skimomsfun.com/discountsSki Moms Ski Rental HomesJoin the 10,000+ Ski Moms Facebook GroupInstagram: https://instagram.com/skimomsfun Send us an email and let us know what guests and topics you'd like to hear next! Sarah@skimomsfun.comNicole@skimomsfun.com

travel smart moms member rent cheap clothes labels rei loads runway skiing ski quick tips saving money steep thredup winter fun comnicole momtrends sidelineswap boston convention center showkeep

Ski Moms Connect with Mardi Fuller a Backcountry Adventurer Working to Bring Inclusivity to the Outdoors

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 19, 2023 41:39

We talk with Mardi Fuller, a backcountry adventurer, who lives in Boston where she works as a nonprofit communications director and volunteers with the local Outdoor Afro network. Mardi has appeared in Outside Magazine, the BBC, PBS and NPR. We talk about making the outdoors more accessible to everyone! Mardi grew up in New York in a Jamaican-American family. She tells us about her early ski experiences as a child and young adult with her church groups - which ended with a broken ankle. A few winters ago, Mardi explored winter adventuring and skiing. With the support and guidance from her friends in Boston, she's fallen in love with backcountry skiing (also known as skinning or ski touring). Mardi tells us about the alpine touring (AT) equipment she uses to get uphill and earn her turns. And Mardi's clear, she is enjoying moderate terrain and not outrunning avalanches. We were super impressed to hear that Mardi was the first black person to join the Appalachian Mountain Club Four Thousand Footer Club. Mardi passes along her love of the outdoors through a number of programs to that aim to make the outdoors more accessible.Resources:The Ski Monster Ski Shop (Boston)Appalachian Mountain ClubAMC 4K ClubInclusive Ski TouringOutdoor AfroMABEL'S LABELSUse Code SKIMOMS to save 15% off your order. Ski Swap season is here and we are scooping up deals. Smart ski moms know as soon as the new gear comes home it's time for a label. Ski equipment can look VERY similar on a rack, with Mabel's Labels, parents can easily identify their kids' belongings and prevent items from being lost or misplaced. SHOP IKSPLORFrom infants to grown-ups, Iksplor crafts their layers from premium 100% merino wool. Ski Moms members can save 10% off with code: SKIMOM on the Iksplor website. Discover why every adventure feels better when wrapped in the comfort of Iksplor. FREE TICKETS TO SNOWBOUND BOSTON EXPOUse code: MOMTRENDS at checkout to get your FREE Earlybird Tickets to the Boston Snowbound Expo.November 3-5, at Boston Convention Center. 3-day expo Support the showKeep up with the Latest from the Ski Moms!Website: www.skimomsfun.comSki Moms Discount Page: https://skimomsfun.com/discountsSki Moms Ski Rental HomesJoin the 10,000+ Ski Moms Facebook GroupInstagram: https://instagram.com/skimomsfun Send us an email and let us know what guests and topics you'd like to hear next! Sarah@skimomsfun.comNicole@skimomsfun.com

new york discover travel smart bbc moms npr outdoors pbs labels inclusivity fuller adventurers skiing ski mardi backcountry outside magazine jamaican american outdoor afro loon mountain comnicole momtrends boston convention center showkeep

Meet Ski Mom Cassie Abel, the co-founder of Wild Rye (women's outdoor apparel brand)

Fast Five Medtech News Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 28, 2023 35:06

In this episode Nicole and Sarah host Cassie Abel, ski mom and co-founder of Wild Rye. Wild Rye is a women's outdoor apparel brand dedicated to crafting beautiful and technical outdoor apparel for women. Wild Rye is well known for their cycling products, but they also have ski base layers and an active lifestyle collection. Cassie walks us through her winding career path from banking to Smith Optics and finally to co-founding Wild Rye. Cassie saw the gap in the market for technical athletic gear for women and started Wild Rye to fill that gap. Cassie tells us about the journey, challenges and successes that led to Wild Rye (including finding their seamstress on Craigslist!). Wild Rye's clothing products are designed and manufactured with environmental impact in mind. They focus on recycled materials and their fabrics meet rigorous environmental and animal welfare standards. They also make high quality products to ensure they are built to last and don't end up in landfills. Cassie tells us about teaching her son to ski at Sun Valley's Dollar Mountain Progression Park and gives us insight into the Sun Valley business landscape.We loved learning about Wild Rye and can't wait to try their products. Like Nicole said, we're just one outfit away from the perfect workout :)Keep up with the Latest from Wild RyeWebsite: https://wild-rye.comInstagram:https://instagram.com/wild_rye_Facebook:https://www.facebook.com/WildRyeMtnAprlUse code: MOMTRENDS at checkout to get your $1 Earlybird Tickets to the Boston Snowbound Expo.November 3-5, at Boston Convention Center. 3-day expo includes XC and Snowshoe Experience,, Share Winter Trail, Learn to Ski Powered by Wachusett and more. Take the Ski Moms Childcare Survey here. Use your voice to make the outdoor industry more family friendly. This 5-minute survey will identify areas to support moms as they play outdoors.Support the showJoin the Ski Moms Fun Community! Follow us on Instagram @skimomsfunCheck out the Ski Moms Fun Store at www.skimomsfun.comContact us sarah@skimomsfun.com

women co founders wild brand outdoors craigslist apparel xc sun valley wachusett smith optics momtrends boston convention center

Join us at DeviceTalks Boston this week

Play Episode Listen Later May 9, 2023 2:26

Join the MassDevice Fast Five hosts in person at DeviceTalks Boston May 10-11. DeviceTalks Boston is a conference dedicated to bringing attendees insights from some of the top leaders in the medical device industry. With keynote presentations from CEOs at some of the largest medtech companies in the world and panel discussions from industry experts, you won't want to miss an opportunity to connect with medtech's thought leaders. Visit devicetalks.com to register and join the MassDevice team at the Boston Convention Center. We'll be back for our regularly scheduled episodes on Tuesday, May 16. Thank you for listening. In the meantime, read and listen to previous episodes at massdevice.com/podcast.

ceos boston convention center

Remote Work and Finding Your Voice with Jeff Smith

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 26, 2022 40:42

About JeffJeff Smith has been in the technology industry for over 20 years, oscillating between management and individual contributor. Jeff currently serves as the Director of Production Operations for Basis Technologies (formerly Centro), an advertising software company headquartered in Chicago, Illinois. Before that he served as the Manager of Site Reliability Engineering at Grubhub.Jeff is passionate about DevOps transformations in organizations large and small, with a particular interest in the psychological aspects of problems in companies. He lives in Chicago with his wife Stephanie and their two kids Ella and Xander.Jeff is also the author of Operations Anti-Patterns, DevOps Solutions with Manning publishing. (https://www.manning.com/books/operations-anti-patterns-devops-solutions) Links Referenced: Basis Technologies: https://basis.net/ Operations Anti-Patterns: https://attainabledevops.com/book Personal Site: https://attainabledevops.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffery-smith-devops/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DarkAndNerdy Medium: https://medium.com/@jefferysmith duckbillgroup.com: https://duckbillgroup.com TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Fortinet. Fortinet's partnership with AWS is a better-together combination that ensures your workloads on AWS are protected by best-in-class security solutions powered by comprehensive threat intelligence and more than 20 years of cybersecurity experience. Integrations with key AWS services simplify security management, ensure full visibility across environments, and provide broad protection across your workloads and applications. Visit them at AWS re:Inforce to see the latest trends in cybersecurity on July 25-26 at the Boston Convention Center. Just go over to the Fortinet booth and tell them Corey Quinn sent you and watch for the flinch. My thanks again to my friends at Fortinet.Corey: Let's face it, on-call firefighting at 2am is stressful! So there's good news and there's bad news. The bad news is that you probably can't prevent incidents from happening, but the good news is that incident.io makes incidents less stressful and a lot more valuable. incident.io is a Slack-native incident management platform that allows you to automate incident processes, focus on fixing the issues and learn from incident insights to improve site reliability and fix your vulnerabilities. Try incident.io, recover faster and sleep more.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. One of the fun things about doing this show for long enough is that you eventually get to catch up with people and follow up on previous conversations that you've had. Many years ago—which sounds like I'm being sarcastic, but is increasingly actually true—Jeff Smith was on the show talking about a book that was about to release. Well, time has passed and things have changed. And Jeff Smith is back once again. He's the Director of Product Operations at Basis Technologies, and the author of DevOps Anti-Patterns? Or what was the actual title of the book it was—Jeff: Operations Anti-Patterns.Corey: I got hung up in the anti-patterns part because it's amazing. I love the title.Jeff: Yeah, Operations Anti-Patterns, DevOps Solutions.Corey: Got you. Usually in my experience, alway been operations anti-patterns, and here I am to make them worse, probably by doing something like using DNS as a database or some godforsaken thing. But you were talking about the book aspirationally a few years ago, and now it's published and it has been sent out to the world. And it went well enough that they translated it to Japanese, I believe, and it has seen significant uptick. What was your experience of it? How did it go?Jeff: You know, it was a great experience. This is definitely the first book that I've written. And the Manning process was extremely smooth. You know, they sort of hold your hand through the entire process. But even after launch, just getting feedback from readers and hearing how it resonated with folks was extremely powerful.I was surprised to find out that they turned it into an audiobook as well. So, everyone reaches out and says, “Did you read the audiobook? I was going to buy it, but I wasn't sure.” I was like, “No, unfortunately, I don't read it.” But you know, still cool to have it out there.Corey: My theory has been for a while now that no one wants to actually write a book; they want to have written a book. Now that you're on the other side, how accurate is that? Are you in a position of, “Wow, sure glad that's done?” Or are you, “That was fun. Let's do it again because I like being sad all the time.” I mean, you do work Kubernetes for God's sake. I mean, there's a bit of masochism inherent to all of us in this space.Jeff: Yeah. Kubernetes makes me cry a little bit more than the writing process. But it's one of the things when you look back on it, you're like, “Wow, that was fun,” but not in the heat of the moment, right? So, I totally agree with the sentiment that people want to have written a book but not actually gone through the process. And that's evident by the fact that how many people try to start a book on their own without a publisher behind them, and they end up writing it for 15 years. The process is pretty grueling. The feedback is intense at first, but you start to get into a groove and you—I could see, you know, in a little while wanting to write another book. So, I can see the appeal.Corey: And the last time you were on the show, I didn't really bother to go in a particular topical direction because, what's the point? It didn't really seem like it was a top-of-mind issue to really bring up because what's it matter; it's a small percentage of the workforce. Now I feel like talking about remote work is suddenly taking on a bit of a different sheen than it was before the dark times arrived. Where do you land on the broad spectrum of opinions around the idea of remote work, given that you have specialized in anti-patterns, and well, as sarcastic as I am, I tend to look at almost every place I've ever worked is expressing different anti-patterns from time to time. So, where do you land on the topic?Jeff: So, it's funny, I started as a staunch office supporter, right? I like being in the office. I like collaborating in person; I thought we were way more productive. Since the pandemic, all of us are forced into remote work, I've hired almost half of my team now as remote. And I am somewhat of a convert, but I'm not on the bandwagon of remote work is just as good or is better as in person work.I've firmly landed in the camp of remote work is good. It's got its shortcomings, but it's worth the trade off. And I think acknowledging what those trade-offs are important to keeping the team afloat. We just recently had a conversation with the team where we were discussing, like, you know, there's definitely been a drop in productivity over the past six months to a year. And in that conversation, a lot of the things that came up were things that are different remote that were better in person, right, Slack etiquette—which is something, you know, I could talk a little bit about as well—but, you know, Slack etiquette in terms of getting feedback quickly, just the sort of camaraderie and the lack of building that camaraderie with new team members as they come on board and not having those rituals to replace the in-person rituals. But through all that, oddly enough, no one suggested going back into the office. [laugh].Corey: For some strange reason, yeah. I need to be careful what I say here, I want to disclaim the position that I'm in. There is a power imbalance and nothing I say is going to be able to necessarily address that because I own the company and if my team members are listening to this, they're going to read a lot into what I say that I might not necessarily intend. But The Duckbill Group, since its founding, has been a fully distributed company. My business partner lives in a different state than I do so there's never been the crappy version of remote, which is, well, we're all going to be in the same city, except for Theodore. Theodore is going to be timezones away and then wonder why he doesn't get to participate in some of the conversations where the real decisions get made.Like that's crappy. I don't like that striated approach to things. We don't have many people who are co-located in any real sense, nor have we for the majority of the company's life. But there are times when I am able to work on a project in a room with one of my colleagues, and things go a lot more smoothly. As much as we want to pretend that video is the same, it quite simply isn't.It is a somewhat poor substitute for the very high bandwidth of a face-to-face interaction. And yes, I understand this is also a somewhat neurotypical perspective, let's be clear with that as well, and it's not for everyone. But I think that for the base case, a lot of the remote work advocates are not being fully, I guess, honest with themselves about some of the shortcomings remote has. That is where I've mostly landed on this. Does that generally land with where you are?Jeff: Yeah, that's exactly where I'm at. I completely agree. And when we take work out of the equation, I think the shortcomings lay themselves bare, right? Like I was having a conversation with a friend and we were like, well, if you had a major breakup, right, I would never be like, “Oh, man. Grab a beer and hop on Zoom,” right? [laugh]. “Let's talk it out.”No, you're like, hey, let's get in person and let's talk, right? We can do all of that conversation over Zoom, but the magic of being in person and having that personal connection, you know, can't be replaced. So, you know, if it's not going to work, commiserating over beers, right? I can't imagine it's going to work, diagramming some complex workflows and trying to come to an answer or a solution on that. So again, not to say that, you know, remote work is not valuable, it's just different.And I think organizations are really going to have to figure out, like, okay, if I want to entice people back into the office, what are the things that I need to do to make this realistic? We've opened the floodgates on remote hiring, right, so now it's like, okay, everyone's janky office setup needs to get fixed, right? So, I can't have a scenario where it's like, “Oh, just point your laptop at the whiteboard, right?” [laugh]. Like that can't exist, we have to have office spaces that are first-class citizens for our remote counterparts as well.Corey: Right because otherwise, the alternative is, “Great, I expect you to take the home that you pay for and turn it into an area fit for office use. Of course, we're not going to compensate you for that, despite the fact that, let's be realistic, rent is often larger than the AWS bill.” Which I know, gasp, I'm as shocked as anyone affected by that, but it's true. “But oh, you want to work from home? Great. That just means you can work more hours.”I am not of the school of thought where I consider time in the office to be an indicator of anything meaningful. I care if the work gets done and at small-scale, this works. Let me also be clear, we're an 11-person company. A lot of what I'm talking about simply will not scale to companies that are orders of magnitude larger than this. And from where I sit, that's okay. It doesn't need to.Jeff: Right. And I think a lot of the things that you talk about will scale, right? Because in most scenarios, you're not scaling it organizationally so much as you are with a handful of teams, right? Because when I think about all the different teams I interact with, I never really interact with the organization as a whole, I interact with my little neighborhood in the organization. So, it is definitely something that scales.But again, when it comes to companies, like, enticing people back into the office, now that I'm talking about working from home five days a week, I've invested in my home setup. I've got the monitor I want, I've got the chair that I want, I've got the mouse and keyboard that I want. So, you're going to bring me back to the office so I can have some standard Dell keyboard and mouse with some janky, you know—maybe—21-inch monitor or something like that, right? Like, you really have to decide, like, okay, we're going to make the office a destination, we're going to make it where people want to go there where it's not just even about the collaboration aspect, but people can still work and be effective.And on top of that, I think how we look at what the office delivers is going to change, right? Because now when I go to the office now, I do very little work. It's connections, right? It's like, you know, “Oh, I haven't seen you in forever. Let's catch up.” And a lot of that stuff is valuable. You know, there's these hallway conversations that exist that just weren't happening previously because how do I accidentally bump into you on Slack? [laugh]. Right, it has to be much more it of a—Corey: Right. It takes some contrivance to wind up making that happen. I remember back in the days of working in offices, I remember here in San Francisco where we had unlimited sick time and unlimited PTO, I would often fake a sick day, but just stay home and get work done. Because I knew if I was in the office, I'd be constantly subjected to drive-bys the entire time of just drive-by requests, people stopping by to ask, “Oh, can you just help me with this one thing,” that completely derails my train of thought. Then at the end of the day, they'd tell me, “You seem distractible and you didn't get a lot of work done.”It's, “Well, no kidding. Of course not. Are you surprised?” And one of the nice things about starting your own company—because there are a lot of downsides, let me be very clear—one of the nice things is you get to decide how you want to work. And that was a study in, first, amazement, and then frustration.It was, “All right, I just landed a big customer. I'm off to the races and going to take this seriously for a good six to twelve months. Great sky's the limit, I'm going to do up my home office.” And then you see how little money it takes to have a nice chair, a good standing desk, a monitor that makes sense and you remember fighting tooth-and-nail for nothing that even approached this quality at companies and they acted like it was going to cost them 20-grand. And here, it's two grand at most, when I decorated this place the first time.And it was… “What the hell?” Like, it feels like the scales fall away from your eyes, and you start seeing things that you didn't realize were a thing. Now I worry that five years in, there's no way in the world I'm ever fit to be an employee again, so this is probably the last job I'll ever have. Just because I've basically made myself completely unemployable across six different axes.Jeff: [laugh]. And I think one of the things when it comes to, like, furniture, keyboard, stuff like that, I feel like part of it was just, like, this sort of enforced conformity, right, that the office provided us the ability to do. We can make sure everyone's got the same monitor, the same keyboard that way, when it breaks, we can replace it easily. In a lot of organizations that I've been in, you know, that sort of like, you know, even if it was the same amount or ordering a custom keyboard was a big exception process, right? Like, “Oh, we've got to do a whole thing.” And it's just like, “Well, it doesn't have to be that complicated.”And like you said, it doesn't cost much to allow someone to get the tools that they want and prefer and they're going to be more productive with. But to your point really quickly about work in the office, until the pandemic, I personally didn't recognize how difficult it actually was to get work done in the office. I don't think I appreciated it. And now that I'm remote, I'm like, wow, it is so much easier for me to close this door, put my headphones on, mute Slack and go heads down. You know, the only drive-by I've got is my wife wondering if I want to go for a walk, and that's usually a text message that I can ignore and come back to later.Corey: The thing that just continues to be strange for me and breaks in some of the weirdest ways has just been the growing awareness of how much of office life is unnecessary and ridiculous. When you're in the office every day, you have to find a way to make it work and be productive and you have this passive-aggressive story of this open office, it's for collaboration purposes. Yeah, I can definitively say that is not true. I had a boss who once told me that there was such benefits to working in an open plan office that if magically it were less expensive to give people individual offices, he would spare the extra expense for open plan. That was the day I learned he would lie to me while looking me in the eye. Because of course you wouldn't.And it's for collaboration. Yeah, it means two loud people—often me—are collaborating and everyone else wears noise-canceling headphones trying desperately to get work done, coming in early, hours before everyone else to get things done before people show up and distracted me. What the hell kind of day-to-day work environment is that?Jeff: What's interesting about that, though, is those same distractions are the things that get cited as being missed from the perspective of the person doing the distracting. So, everyone universally hates that sort of drive-by distractions, but everyone sort of universally misses the ability to say like, “Hey, can I just pull on your ear for a second and get your feedback on this?” Or, “Can we just walk through this really quickly?” That's the thing that people miss, and I don't think that they ever connect it to the idea that if you're not the interruptee, you're the interruptor, [laugh] and what that might do to someone else's productivity. So, you would think something like Slack would help with that, but in reality, what ends up happening is if you don't have proper Slack etiquette, there's a lot of signals that go out that get misconstrued, misinterpreted, internalized, and then it ends up impacting morale.Corey: And that's the most painful part of a lot of that too. Is that yeah, I want to go ahead and spend some time doing some nonsense—as one does; imagine that—and I know that if I'm going to go into an office or meet up with my colleagues, okay, that afternoon or that day, yeah, I'm planning that I'm probably not going to get a whole lot of deep coding done. Okay, great. But when that becomes 40 hours a week, well, that's a challenge. I feel like being full remote doesn't work out, but also being in the office 40 hours a week also feels a little sadistic, more than almost anything else.I don't know what the future looks like and I am privileged enough that I don't have to because we have been full remote the entire time. But what we don't spend on office space we spend on plane tickets back and forth so people can have meetings. In the before times, we were very good about that. Now it's, we're hesitant to do it just because it's we don't want people traveling before the feel that it's safe to do so. We've also learned, for example, when dealing with our clients, that we can get an awful lot done without being on site with them and be extraordinarily effective.It was always weird have traveled to some faraway city to meet with the client, and then you're on a Zoom call from their office with the rest of the team. It's… I could have done this from my living room.Jeff: Yeah. I find those sorts of hybrid meetings are often worse than if we were all just remote, right? It's just so much easier because now it's like, all right, three of us are going to crowd around one person's laptop, and then all of the things that we want to do to take advantage of being in person are excluding the people that are remote, so you got to do this careful dance. The way we've been sort of tackling it so far—and we're still experimenting—is we're not requiring anyone to come back into the office, but some people find it useful to go to the office as a change of scenery, to sort of, like break things up from their typical routine, and they like the break and the change. But it's something that they do sort of ad hoc.So, we've got a small group that meets, like, every Thursday, just as a day to sort of go into the office and switch things up. I think the idea of saying everyone has to come into the office two or three days a week is probably broken when there's no purpose behind it. So, my wife technically should go into the office twice a week, but her entire team is in Europe. [laugh]. So, what point does that make other than I am a body in a chair? So, I think companies are going to have to get flexible with this sort of hybrid environment.But then it makes you wonder, like, is it worth the office space and how many people are actually taking advantage of it when it's not mandated? We find that our office time centers around some event, right? And that event might be someone in town that's typically remote. That might be a particular project that we're working on where we want to get ideas and collaborate and have a workshop. But the idea of just, like, you know, we're going to systematically require people to be in the office x many days, I don't see that in our future.Corey: No, and I hope you're right. But it also feels like a lot of folks are also doing some weird things around the idea of remote such as, “Oh, we're full remote but we're going to pay you based upon where you happen to be sitting geographically.” And we find that the way that we've done this—and again, I'm not saying there's a right answer for everyone—but we wind up paying what the value of the work is for us. In many cases, that means that we would be hard-pressed to hire someone in the Bay Area, for example. On the other hand, it means that when we hire people who are in places with relatively low cost of living, they feel like they've just hit the lottery, on some level.And yeah, some of them, I guess it does sort of cause a weird imbalance if you're a large Amazon-scale company where you want to start not disrupting local economies. We're not hiring that many people, I promise. So, there's this idea of figuring out how that works out. And then where does the headquarters live? And well, what state laws do we wind up following on what we're doing? Just seems odd.Jeff: Yeah. So, you know, one thing I wanted to comment on that you'd mentioned earlier, too, was the weird things that people are doing, and organizations are doing with this, sort of, remote work thing, especially the geographic base pay. And you know, a lot of it is, how can we manipulate the situation to better us in a way that sounds good on paper, right? So, it sounds perfectly reasonable. Like, oh, you live in New York, I'm going to pay you in New York rates, right?But, like, you live in Des Moines, so I'm going to pay you Des Moines rates. And on the surface, when you just go you're like, oh, yeah, that makes sense, but then you think about it, you're like, “Wait, why does that matter?” Right? And then, like, how do I, as a manager, you know, level that across my employees, right? It's like, “Oh, so and so is getting paid 30 grand less. Oh, but they live in a cheaper area, right?” I don't know what your personal situation is, and how much that actually resonates or matters.Corey: Does the value that they provide to your company materially change based upon where they happen to be sitting that week?Jeff: Right, exactly. But it's a good story that you can tell, it sounds fair at first examination. But then when you start to scratch the surface, you're like, “Wait a second, this is BS.” So, that's one thing.Corey: It's like tipping on some level. If you can't afford the tip, you can't afford to eat out. Same story here. If you can't afford to compensate people the value that they're worth, you can't afford to employ people. And figure that out before you wind up disappointing people and possibly becoming today's Twitter main character.Jeff: Right. And then the state law thing is interesting. You know, when you see states like California adopting laws similar to, like, GDPR. And it's like, do you have to start planning for the most stringent possibility across every hire just to be safe and to avoid having to have this sort of patchwork of rules and policies based on where someone lives? You might say like, “Okay, Delaware has the most stringent employer law, so we're going to apply Delaware's laws across the board.” So, it'll be interesting to see how that sort of plays out in the long run. Luckily, that's not a problem I have to solve, but it'll be interesting to see how it shakes out.Corey: It is something we had to solve. We have an HR consultancy that helps out with a lot of these things, but the short answer is that we make sure that we obey with local laws, but the way that we operate is as if everyone were a San Francisco employee because that is—so far—the locale that, one, I live here, but also of every jurisdiction we've looked at in the United States, it tends to have the most advantageous to the employee restrictions and requirements. Like one thing we do is kind of ridiculous—and we have to do for me and one other person, but almost no one else, but we do it for everyone—is we have to provide stipends every month for electricity, for cellphone usage, for internet. They have to be broken out for each one of those categories, so we do 20 bucks a month for each of those. It adds up to 100 bucks, as I recall, and we call it good. And employees say, “Okay. Do we just send you receipts? Please don't.”I don't want to look at your cell phone bill. It's not my business. I don't want to know. We're doing this to comply with the law. I mean, if it were up to me, it would be this is ridiculous. Can we just give everyone $100 a month raise and call it good? Nope. The forms must be obeyed. So, all right.We do the same thing with PTO accrual. If you've acquired time off and you leave the company, we pay it out. Not every state requires that. But paying for cell phone access and internet access as well, is something Amazon is currently facing a class action about because they didn't do that for a number of their California employees. And even talking to Amazonians, like, “Well, they did, but you had to jump through a bunch of hoops.”We have the apparatus administratively to handle that in a way that employees don't. Why on earth would we make them do it unless we didn't want to pay them? Oh, I think I figured out this sneaky, sneaky plan. I'm not here to build a business by exploiting people. If that's the only way to succeed, and the business doesn't deserve to exist. That's my hot take of the day on that topic.Jeff: No, I totally agree. And what's interesting is these insidious costs that sneak up that employees tend to discount, like, one thing I always talk about with my team is all that time you're thinking about a problem at work, right, like when you're in the shower, when you're at dinner, when you're talking it over with your spouse, right? That's work. That's work. And it's work that you're doing on your time.But we don't account for it that way because we're not typing; we're not writing code. But, like, think about how much more effective as people, as employees, we would be if we had time dedicated to just sit and think, right? If I could just sit and think about a problem without needing to type but just critically think about it. But then it's like, well, what does that look like in the office, right? If I'm just sitting there in my chair like this, it doesn't look like I'm doing anything.But that's so important to be able to, like, break down and digest some of the complex problems that we're dealing with. And we just sort of write it off, right? So, I'm like, you know, you got to think about how that bleeds into your personal time and take that into account. So yeah, maybe you leave three hours early today, but I guarantee you, you're going to spend three hours throughout the week thinking about work. It's the same thing with these cellphone costs that you're talking about, right? “Oh, I've got a cell phone anyways; I've got internet anyways.” But still, that's something that you're contributing to the business that they're not on the hook for, so it seems fair that you get compensated for that.Corey: I just think about that stuff all the time from that perspective, and now that I you know, own the place, it's one of those which pocket of mine does it come out of? But I hold myself to a far higher standard about that stuff than I do the staff, where it's, for example, I could theoretically justify paying my internet bill here because we have business-class internet and an insane WiFi system because of all of the ridiculous video production I do. Now. It's like, like, if anyone else on the team was doing this, yes, I will insist we pay it, but for me, it just it feels a little close to the edge. So, it's one of those areas where I'm very conservative around things like that.The thing that also continues to just vex me, on some level, is this idea that time in a seat is somehow considered work. I'll never forget one of the last jobs I had before I started this place. My boss walked past me and saw that I was on Reddit. And, “Is that really the best use of your time right now?” May I use the bathroom when I'm done with this, sir?Yeah, of course it is. It sounds ridiculous, but one of the most valuable things I can do for The Duckbill Group now is go on the internet and start shit posting on Twitter, which sounds ridiculous, but it's also true. There's a brand awareness story there, on some level. And that's just wild to me. It's weird, we start treating people like adults, they start behaving that way. And if you start micromanaging them, they live up or down to the expectations you tend to hold. I'm a big believer in if I have to micromanage someone, I should just do the job myself.Jeff: Yeah. The Reddit story makes me think of, like, how few organizations have systematic ways of getting vital information. So, the first thing I think about is, like, security and security vulnerabilities, right? So, how does Basis Technologies, as an organization, know about these things? Right now, it's like, well, my team knows because we're plugged into Reddit and Twitter, right, but if we were gone Basis, right, may not necessarily get that information.So, that's something we're trying to correct, but it just sort of highlights the importance of freedom for these employees, right? Because yeah, I'm on Reddit, but I'm on /r/sysadmin. I'm on /r/AWS, right, I'm on /r/Atlassian. Now I'm finding out about this zero-day vulnerability and it's like, “Oh, guys, we got to act. I just heard about this thing.” And people are like, “Oh, where did this come from?” And it's like it came from my network, right? And my network—Corey: Mm-hm.Jeff: Is on Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit. So, the idea that someone browsing the internet on any site, really, is somehow not a productive use of their time, you better be ready to itemize exactly what that means and what that looks like. “Oh, you can do this on Reddit but you can't do that on Reddit.”Corey: I have no boss now, I have no oversight, but somehow I still show up with a work ethic and get things done.Jeff: Right. [laugh].Corey: Wow, I guess I didn't need someone over my shoulder the whole time. Who knew?Jeff: Right. That's all that matters, right? And if you do it in 30 hours or 40 hours, that doesn't really matter to me, you know? You want to do it at night because you're more productive there, right, like, let's figure out a way to make that happen. And remote work is actually empowering us ways to really retain people that wasn't possible before I had an employee that was like, you know, I really want to travel. I'm like, “Dude, go to Europe. Work from Europe. Just do it. Work from Europe,” right? We've got senior leaders on the C-suite that are doing it. One of the chief—Corey: I'm told they have the internet, even there. Imagine that?Jeff: Yeah. [laugh]. So, our chief program officer, she was in Greece for four weeks. And it worked. It worked great. They had a process. You know, she would spent one week on and then one week off on vacation. But you know, she was able to have this incredible, long experience, and still deliver. And it's like, you know, we can use that as a model to say, like—Corey: And somehow the work got done. Wow, she must be amazing. No, that's the baseline expectation that people can be self-managing in that respect.Jeff: Right.Corey: They aren't toddlers.Jeff: So, if she can do that, I'm sure you can figure out how to code in China or wherever you want to visit. So, it's a great way to stay ahead of some of these companies that have a bit more lethargic policies around that stuff, where it's like, you know, all right, I'm not getting that insane salary, but guess what, I'm going to spend three weeks in New Zealand hanging out and not using any time off or anything like that, and you know, being able to enjoy life. I wish this pandemic had happened pre-kids because—Corey: Yeah. [laugh].Jeff: —you know, we would really take advantage of this.Corey: You and me both. It would have very different experience.Jeff: Yeah. [laugh]. Absolutely, right? But with kids in school, and all that stuff, we've been tethered down. But man, I you know, I want to encourage the young people or the single people on my team to just, like, hey, really, really embrace this time and take advantage of it.Corey: I come bearing ill tidings. Developers are responsible for more than ever these days. Not just the code that they write, but also the containers and the cloud infrastructure that their apps run on. Because serverless means it's still somebody's problem. And a big part of that responsibility is app security from code to cloud. And that's where our friend Snyk comes in. Snyk is a frictionless security platform that meets developers where they are - Finding and fixing vulnerabilities right from the CLI, IDEs, Repos, and Pipelines. Snyk integrates seamlessly with AWS offerings like code pipeline, EKS, ECR, and more! As well as things you're actually likely to be using. Deploy on AWS, secure with Snyk. Learn more at Snyk.co/scream That's S-N-Y-K.co/screamCorey: One last topic I want to get into before we call it an episode is, I admit, I read an awful lot of books, it's a guilty pleasure. And it's easy to fall into the trap, especially when you know the author, of assuming that snapshot of their state of mind at a very fixed point in time is somehow who they are, like a fly frozen in amber, and it's never true. So, my question for you is, quite simply, what have you learned since your book came out?Jeff: Oh, man, great question. So, when I was writing the book, I was really nervous about if my audience was as big as I thought it was, the people that I was targeting with the book.Corey: Okay, that keeps me up at night, too. I have no argument there.Jeff: Yeah. You know what I mean?Corey: Please, continue.Jeff: I'm surrounded, you know, by—Corey: Is anyone actually listening to this? Yeah.Jeff: Right. [laugh]. So, after the book got finished and it got published, I would get tons of feedback from people that so thoroughly enjoyed the book, they would say things like, you know, “It feels like you were in our office like a fly on the wall.” And that was exciting, one, because I felt like these were experiences that sort of resonated, but, two, it sort of proved this thesis that sometimes you don't have to do something revolutionary to be a positive contribution to other people, right? So, like, when I lay out the tips and things that I do in the book, it's nothing earth-shattering that I expect Google to adopt. Like, oh, my God, this is the most unique view ever.But being able to talk to an audience in a way that resonates with them, that connects with them, that shows that I understand their problem and have been there, it was really humbling and enlightening to just see that there are people out there that they're not on the bleeding edge, but they just need someone to talk to them in a language that they understand and resonate with. So, I think the biggest thing that I learned was this idea that your voice is important, your voice matters, and how you tell your story may be the difference between someone understanding a concept and someone not understanding a concept. So, there's always an audience for you out there as you're writing, whether it be your blog post, the videos that you produce, the podcasts that you make, somewhere there's someone that needs to hear what you have to say, and the unique way that you can say it. So, that was extremely powerful.Corey: Part of the challenge that I found is when I start talking to other people, back in the before times, trying to push them into conference talks and these days, write blog posts, the biggest objection I get sometimes is, “Well, I don't have anything worth saying.” That is provably not true. One of my favorite parts about writing Last Week in AWS is as I troll the internet looking for topics about AWS that I find interesting, I keep coming across people who are very involved in one area or another of this ecosystem and have stories they want to tell. And I love, “Hey, would you like to write a guest post for Last Week in AWS?” It's always invite only and every single one of them has been paid because people die of exposure and I'm not about that exploitation lifestyle.A couple have said, “Oh, I can't accept payment for a variety of reasons.” Great. Pick a charity that you would like it to go to instead because we do not accept volunteer work, we are a for-profit entity. That is the way it works here. And that has been just one of the absolute favorite parts about what I do just because you get to sort of discover new voices.And what I find really neat is that for a lot of these folks, this is their start to writing and telling the story, but they don't stop there, they start telling their story in other areas, too. It leads to interesting career opportunities for them, it leads to interesting exposure that they wouldn't have necessarily had—again, not that they're getting paid in exposure, but the fact that they are able to be exposed to different methodologies, different ways of thinking—I love that. It's one of my favorite parts about doing what I do. And it seems to scale a hell of a lot better than me sitting down with someone for two hours to help them build a CFP that they wind up not getting accepted or whatnot.Jeff: Right. It's a great opportunity that you provide folks, too, because of, like, an instant audience, I think that's one of the things that has made Medium so successful as, like, a blogging platform is, you know, everyone wants to go out and build their own WordPress site and launch it, but then it like, you write your blog post and it's crickets. So, the ability for you to, you know, use your platform to also expose those voices is great and extremely powerful. But you're right, once they do it, it lights a fire in a way that is admirable to watch. I have a person that I'm mentoring and that was my biggest piece of advice I can give. It was like, you know, write. Just write.It's the one thing that you can do without anyone else. And you can reinforce your own knowledge of a thing. If you just say, you know, I'm going to teach this thing that I just learned, just the writing process helps you solidify, like, okay, I know this stuff. I'm demonstrating that I know it and then four years from now, when you're applying for a job, someone's like, “Oh, I found your blog post and I see that you actually do know how to set up a Kubernetes cluster,” or whatever. It's just extremely great and it—Corey: It's always fun. You're googling for how to do something and you find something you wrote five years ago.Jeff: Right, yeah. [laugh]. And it's like code where you're like, “Oh, man, I would do that so much differently now.”Corey: Since we last spoke, one of the things I've been doing is I have been on the hook to write between a one to two-thousand-word blog post every week, and I've done that like clockwork, for about a year-and-a-half now. And I was no slouch at storytelling before I started doing that. I've given a few hundred conference talks in the before times. And I do obviously long Twitter threads in the past and I write reports a lot. But forcing me to go through that process every week and then sit with an editor and go ahead and get it improved, has made me a far better writer, it's made me a better storyteller, I am far better at articulating my point of view.It is absolutely just unlocking a host of benefits that I would have thought I was, oh, I passed all this. I'm already good at these things. And I was, but I'm better now. I think that writing is one of those things that people need to do a lot more of.Jeff: Absolutely. And it's funny that you mentioned that because I just recently, back in April, started to do the same thing I said, I'm going to write a blog post every week, right? I'm going to get three or four in the can, so that if life comes up and I miss a beat, right, I'm not actually missing the production schedule, so I have a steady—and you're right. Even after writing a book, I'm still learning stuff through the writing process, articulating my point of view.It's just something that carries over, and it carries over into the workforce, too. Like, if you've ever read a bad piece of documentation, right, that comes from—Corey: No.Jeff: Right? [laugh]. That comes from an inability to write. Like, you know, you end up asking these questions like who's the audience for this? What is ‘it' in this sentence? [laugh].Corey: Part of it too, is that people writing these things are so close to the problem themselves that the fact that, “Well, I'm not an expert in this.” That's why you should write about it. Talk about your experience. You're afraid everyone's going to say, “Oh, you're a fool. You didn't understand how this works.”Yeah, my lived experiences instead—and admittedly, I have the winds of privilege of my back on this—but it's also yeah, I didn't understand that either. It turns out that you're never the only person who has trouble with a concept. And by calling it out, you're normalizing it and doing a tremendous service for others in your shoes.Jeff: Especially when you're not an expert because I wrote some documentation about the SSL process and it didn't occur to me that these people don't use the AWS command line, right? Like, you know, in our organization, we sort of mask that from them through a bunch of in-house automation. Now we're starting to expose it to them and simple things like oh, you need to preface the AWS command with a profile name. So, then when we're going through the setup, we're like, “Oh. What if they already have an existing profile, right?” Like, we don't want to clobber that.SSo, it just changed the way you write the documentation. But like, that's not something that initially came to mind for me. It wasn't until someone went through the docs, and they're like, “Uh, this is blowing up in a weird way.” And I was like, “Oh, right. You know, like, I need to also teach you about profile management.”Corey: Also, everyone has a slightly different workflow for the way they interact with AWS accounts, and their shell prompts, and the way they set up local dev environments.Jeff: Yeah, absolutely. So, not being an expert on a thing is key because you're coming to it with virgin eyes, right, and you're able to look at it from a fresh perspective.Corey: So, much documentation out there is always coming from the perspective of someone who is intimately familiar with the problem space. Some of the more interesting episodes that I have, from a challenge perspective, are people who are deep technologists in a particular area and they love they fallen in love with the thing that they are building. Great. Can you explain it to the rest of us mere mortals so that we can actually we can share your excitement on this? And it's very hard to get them to come down to a level where it's coherent to folks who haven't spent years thinking deeply about that particular problem space.Jeff: Man, the number one culprit for that is, like, the AWS blogs where they have, like, a how-to article. You follow that thing and you're like, “None of this is working.” [laugh]. Right? And then you realize, oh, they made an assumption that I knew this, but I didn't right?So, it's like, you know, I didn't realize this was supposed to be, like, a handwritten JSON document just jammed into the value field. Because I didn't know that, I'm not pulling those values out as JSON. I'm expecting that just to be, like, a straight string value. And that has happened more and more times on the AWS blog than I can count. [laugh].Corey: Oh, yeah, very often. And then there's other problems, too. “Oh, yeah. Set up your IAM permissions properly.” That's left as an exercise for the reader. And then you wonder why everything's full of stars. Okay.Jeff: Right. Yep, exactly, exactly.Corey: Ugh. It's so great to catch up with you and see what you've been working on. If people want to learn more, where's the best place to find you?Jeff: So, the best place is probably my website, attainabledevops.com. That's a place where you can find me on all the other places. I don't really update that site much, but you can find me on LinkedIn, Twitter, from that jumping off point, links to the book are there if anyone's interested in that. Perfect stocking stuffers. Mom would love it, grandma would love it, so definitely, definitely buy multiple copies of that.Corey: Yeah, it's going to be one of my two-year-old's learning to read books, it'd be great.Jeff: Yeah, it's perfect. You know, you just throw it in the crib and walk away, right? They're asleep at no time. Like I said, I've also been taking to, you know, blogging on Medium, so you can catch me there, the links will be there on Attainable DevOps as well.Corey: Excellent. And that link will of course, be in the show notes. Thank you so much for being so generous with your time. I really do appreciate it. And it's great to talk to you again.Jeff: It was great to catch up.Corey: Really was. Jeff Smith, Director of Product Operations at Basis Technologies. 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 or smash the like and subscribe buttons on the YouTubes, whereas if you've hated this podcast, do the exact same thing—five-star review, smash the buttons—but also leave an angry, incoherent comment that you're then going to have edited and every week you're going to come back and write another incoherent comment that you get edited. And in the fullness of time, you'll get much better at writing angry, incoherent comments.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

united states god new york director amazon california chicago europe google china work talk san francisco zoom japanese new zealand mom illinois bs medium reddit cloud greece integration bay area wifi i am developers delaware basis centro slack wordpress cfp last week manning remote work screaming gdpr aws des moines finding your voice devops pto dns ides pipelines grubhub deploy kubernetes atlassian ssl jeff smith json repos cli fortinet sso ecr eks snyk site reliability engineering corey quinn amazonians inforce jeff it jeff man jeff yeah duckbill group jeff no jeff you jeff oh jeff so chief cloud economist jeff is boston convention center jeff right last week in aws humblepod corey is

Cloud-Hosted Database Services with Benjamin Anderson

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 21, 2022 35:39

About BenjaminBenjamin Anderson is CTO, Cloud at EDB, where he is responsible for developing and driving strategy for the company's Postgres-based cloud offerings. Ben brings over ten years' experience building and running distributed database systems in the cloud for multiple startups and large enterprises. Prior to EDB, he served as chief architect of IBM's Cloud Databases organization, built an SRE practice at database startup Cloudant, and founded a Y Combinator-funded hardware startup.Links Referenced: EDB: https://www.enterprisedb.com/ BigAnimal: biganimal.com TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.I come bearing ill tidings. Developers are responsible for more than ever these days. Not just the code that they write, but also the containers and the cloud infrastructure that their apps run on. Because serverless means it's still somebody's problem. And a big part of that responsibility is app security from code to cloud. And that's where our friend Snyk comes in. Snyk is a frictionless security platform that meets developers where they are - Finding and fixing vulnerabilities right from the CLI, IDEs, Repos, and Pipelines. Snyk integrates seamlessly with AWS offerings like code pipeline, EKS, ECR, and more! As well as things you're actually likely to be using. Deploy on AWS, secure with Snyk. Learn more at Snyk.co/scream That's S-N-Y-K.co/screamCorey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Fortinet. Fortinet's partnership with AWS is a better-together combination that ensures your workloads on AWS are protected by best-in-class security solutions powered by comprehensive threat intelligence and more than 20 years of cybersecurity experience. Integrations with key AWS services simplify security management, ensure full visibility across environments, and provide broad protection across your workloads and applications. Visit them at AWS re:Inforce to see the latest trends in cybersecurity on July 25-26 at the Boston Convention Center. Just go over to the Fortinet booth and tell them Corey Quinn sent you and watch for the flinch. My thanks again to my friends at Fortinet.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. This promoted guest episode is brought to us by our friends at EDB. And not only do they bring us this promoted episode, they bring me their CTO for Cloud, Benjamin Anderson. Benjamin, thank you so much for agreeing to suffer the slings and arrows that I will no doubt throw at you in a professional context, because EDB is a database company, and I suck at those things.Benjamin: [laugh]. Thanks, Corey. Nice to be here.Corey: Of course. So, databases are an interesting and varied space. I think we can all agree—or agree to disagree—that the best database is, of course, Route 53, when you misuse TXT records as a database. Everything else is generally vying for number two. EDB was—back in the days that I was your customer—was EnterpriseDB, now rebranded as EDB, which is way faster to say, and I approve of that.But you were always the escalation point of last resort. When you're stuck with a really weird and interesting Postgres problem, EDB was where you went because if you folks couldn't solve the problem, it was likely not going to get solved. I always contextualized you folks as a consulting shop. That's not really what you do. You are the CTO for Cloud.And, ah, interesting. Do databases behave differently in cloud environments? Well, they do when you host them as a managed service, which is an area you folks have somewhat recently branched into. How'd you get there?Benjamin: Ah, that's interesting. So, there's a bunch of stuff to unpack there. I think EDB has been around for a long time. It's something like 13, 14, 15 years, something like that, and really it's just been kind of slowly growing, right? We did start very much as a product company. We built some technology to help customers get from Oracle database on to Postgres, way back in 2007, 2008.That business has just slowly been growing. It's been going quite well. Frankly, I only joined about 18 months ago, and it's really cool tech, right? We natively understand some things that Oracle is doing. Customers don't have to change their schemas to migrate from Oracle to Postgres. There's some cool technology in there.But as you point out, I think a lot of our position in the market has not been that product focused. There's been a lot of people seeing us as the Postgres experts, and as people who can solve Postgres problems, in general. We have, for a long time, employed a lot of really sharp Postgres people. We still employ a lot of really sharp Postgres people. That's very much, in a lot of ways, our bread and butter. That we're going to fix Postgres problems as they come up.Now, over the past few years, we've definitely tried to shift quite a bit into being more of a product company. We've brought on a bunch of people who've been doing more enterprise software product type development over the past few years, and really focusing ourselves more and more on building products and investing in ourselves as a product company. We're not a services company. We're not a consulting company. We do, I think, provide the best Postgres support in the market. But it's been a journey. The cloud has been a significant part of that as well, right? You can't get away.Corey: Oh, yeah. These days, when someone's spinning up a new workload, it's unlikely—in most cases—they're going to wind up spinning up a new data center, if they don't already have one. Yes, there's still a whole bunch of on-prem workloads. But increasingly, the default has become cloud. Instead of, “Why cloud?” The question's become, “Why not?”Benjamin: Right, exactly. Then, as people are more and more accepting of managed services, you have to be a product company. You have to be building products in order to support your database customers because what they want his managed services. I was working in managed databases and service, something like, ten years ago, and it was like pulling teeth. This is after RDS launched. This was still pulling teeth trying to get people to think about, oh, I'm going to let you run my database. Whereas, now obviously, it's just completely different. We have to build great products in order to succeed in the database business, in general.Corey: One thing that jumped out at me when you first announced this was the URL is enterprisedb.com. That doesn't exactly speak to, you know, non-large companies, and EDB is what you do. You have a very corporate logo, but your managed service is called BigAnimal, which I absolutely love. It actually expresses a sense of whimsy and personality that I can no doubt guess that a whole bunch of people argued against, but BigAnimal, it is. It won through. I love that. Was that as contentious as I'm painting it to be, or people actually have a sense of humor sometimes?Benjamin: [laugh]. Both, it was extremely contentious. I, frankly, was one of the people who was not in favor of it at first. I was in favor of something that was whimsical, but maybe not quite that whimsical.Corey: Well, I call it Postgres-squeal, so let's be very clear here that we're probably not going to see eye-to-eye on most anything in pronunciation things. But we can set those differences aside and have a conversation.Benjamin: Absolutely, no consider that. It was deliberate, though, to try to step away a little bit from the blue-suit-and-tie, enterprise, DB-type branding. Obviously, a lot of our customers are big enterprises. We're good at that. We're not trying to be the hip, young startup targeting business in a lot of ways. We have a wide range of customers, but we want to branch out a little bit.Corey: One of the challenges right now is if I spin up an environment inside of AWS, as one does, and I decide I certainly don't want to take the traditional approach of running a database on top of an EC2 instance—the way that we did in the olden days—because RDS was crappy. Now that it's slightly less crappy, that becomes a not ideal path. I start looking at their managed database offerings, and there are something like 15 distinct managed databases that they offer, and they never turn anything off. And they continue to launch things into the far future. And it really feels, on some level, like 20 years from now—what we call a DBA today—their primary role is going to look a lot more like helping a company figure out which of Amazon's 40 managed databases is the appropriate fit for this given workload. Yet, when I look around at what the industry has done, it seems that when we're talking about relational databases. Postgres has emerged back when I was, more or less, abusing servers in person in my data center days, it was always MySQL. These days, Postgres is the de facto standard, full stop. I admit that I was mostly keeping my aura away from any data that was irreplaceable at that time. What happened? What did I miss?Benjamin: It's a really good question. And I certainly am not a hundred percent on all the trends that went on there. I know there's a lot of folks that are not happy about the MySQL acquisition by Oracle. I think there's a lot of energy that was adopted by the NoSQL movement, as well. You have people who didn't really care about transactional semantics that were using MySQL because they needed a place to store their data. And then, things like MongoDB and that type of system comes along where it's significantly easier than MySQL, and that subset of the population just sort of drifts away from MySQL.Corey: And in turn, those NoSQL projects eventually turn into something where, okay, now we're trying to build a banking system on top of it, and it's, you know, I guess you can use a torque wrench as a hammer if you're really creative about it, but it seems like there's a better approach.Benjamin: Yeah, exactly. And those folks are coming back around to the relational databases, exactly. At the same time, the advancements in Postgres from the early eight series to today are significant, right? We shouldn't underestimate how much Postgres has really moved forward. It wasn't that long ago that replication was hardly a thing and Postgres, right? It's been a journey.Corey: One thing that your website talks about is that you accelerate your open-sourced database transformation. And this is a bit of a hobby horse I get on from time to time. I think that there are a lot of misunderstandings when people talk about this. You have the open-source purists—of which I shamefully admit I used to be one—saying that, “Oh, it's about the idea of purity and open and free as in software.” Great. Okay, awesome. But when I find that corporate customers are talking about when they say open-source database, they don't particularly care if they have access to the source code because they're not going to go in and patch a database engine, we hope. But what they do care about is regardless of where they are today—even if they're perfectly happy there—they don't want to wind up beholden to a commercial database provider, and/or they don't want to wind up beholden to the environment that is running within. There's a strategic Exodus that's available in theory, which on some level serves to make people feel better about not actually Exodus-ing, but it also means if they're doing a migration at some point, they don't also have to completely redo their entire data plan.Benjamin: Yeah, I think that's a really good point. I mean, I like to talk—there's a big rat's nest of questions and problems in here—but I generally like talk to about open APIs, talk about standards, talk about how much is going to have to change if you eliminate this vendor. We're definitely not open-source purists. Well, we employ a lot of open-source purists. I also used to be an open—Corey: Don't let them hear you say that, then. Fair enough. Fair enough.Benjamin: [laugh] we have proprietary software at EDB, as well. There's a kind of wide range of businesses that we participate in. Glad to hear you also mention this where-it's-hosted angle, as well. I think there's some degree to which people are—they figured out that having at least open APIs or an open-source-ish database is a good idea rather than being beholden to proprietary database. But then, immediately forget that when they're picking a cloud vendor, right? And realizing that putting their data in Cloud Vendor A versus Cloud Vendor B is also putting them in a similar difficult situation. They need to be really wary of when they're doing that. Now, obviously, I work at an independent software company, and I have some incentive to say this, but I do think it's true. And you know, there's meaningful data gravity risk.Corey: I assure you, I have no incentive. I don't care what cloud provider you're on. My guidance has been, for years, to—as a general rule—pick a provider, I care about which one, and go all in until there's a significant reason to switch. Trying to build an optionality, “Oh, everything we do should be fully portable at an instance notice.” Great. Unless you're actually doing it, you're more or less, giving up a whole bunch of shortcuts and feature velocity you could otherwise have, in the hopes of one day you'll do a thing, but all the assumptions you're surrounded by baked themselves in regardless. So, you're more or less just creating extra work for yourself for no defined benefit. This is not popular in some circles, where people try to sell something that requires someone to go multi-cloud, but here we are.Benjamin: No, I think you're right. I think people underestimate the degree to which the abstractions are just not very good, right, and the degree to which those cloud-specific details are going to leak in if you're going to try to get anything done, you end up in kind of a difficult place. What I see more frequently is situations where we have a big enterprise—not even big, even medium-sized companies where maybe they've done an acquisition or two, they've got business units that are trying to do things on their own. And they end up in two or three clouds, sort of by happenstance. It's not like they're trying to do replication live between two clouds, but they've got one business unit in AWS and one business unit and Azure, and somebody in the corporate—say enterprise architect or something like that—really would like to make things consistent between the two so they get a consistent security posture and things like that. So, there are situations where the multi-cloud is a reality at a certain level, but maybe not at a concrete technical level. But I think it's still really useful for a lot of customers.Corey: You position your cloud offering in two different ways. One of them is the idea of BigAnimal, and the other—well, it sort of harkens back to when I was in sixth grade going through the American public school system. They had a cop come in and talk to us and paint to this imaginary story of people trying to push drugs. “Hey, kid. You want to try some of this?” And I'm reading this and it says EDB, Postgres for Kubernetes. And I'm sent back there, where it's like, “Hey, kid. You want to run your stateful databases on top of Kubernetes?” And my default answer to that is good lord, no. What am I missing?Benjamin: That's a good question. Kubernetes has come a long way—I think is part of that.Corey: Oh, truly. I used to think of containers as a pure story for stateless things. And then, of course, I put state into them, and then, everything exploded everywhere because it turns out, I'm bad at computers. Great. And it has come a long way. I have been tracking a lot of that. But it still feels like the idea being that you'd want to have your database endpoints somewhere a lot less, I guess I'll call it fickle, if that makes sense.Benjamin: It's an interesting problem because we are seeing a lot of people who are interested in our Kubernetes-based products. It's actually based on—we recently open-sourced the core of it under a project called cloud-native PG. It's a cool piece of technology. If you think about sort of two by two. In one corner, you've got self-managed on-premise databases. So, you're very, very slow-moving, big-iron type, old-school database deployments. And on the opposite corner, you've got fully-managed, in the cloud, BigAnimal, Amazon RDS, that type of thing. There's a place on that map where you've got customers that want a self-service type experience. Whether that's for production, or maybe it's even for dev tests, something like that. But you don't want to be giving the management capability off to a third party.For folks that want that type of experience, trying to build that themselves by, like, wiring up EC2 instances, or doing something in their own data center with VMware, or something like that, can be extremely difficult. Whereas if you've go to a Kubernetes-based product, you can get that type of self-service experience really easily, right? And customers can get a lot more flexibility out of how they run their databases and operate their databases. And what sort of control they give to, say application developers who want to spin up a new database for a test or for some sort of small microservice, that type of thing. Those types of workloads tend to work really well with this first-party Kubernetes-based offering. I've been doing databases on Kubernetes in managed services for a long time as well. And I don't, frankly, have any concerns about doing it. There are definitely some sharp edges. And if you wanted to do to-scale, you need to really know what you're doing with Kubernetes because the naive thing will shoot you in the foot.Corey: Oh, yes. So, some it feels almost like people want to cosplay working for Google, but they don't want to pass the technical interview along the way. It's a bit of a weird moment for it.Benjamin: Yeah, I would agree.Corey: I have to go back to my own experiences with using RDS back at my last real job before I went down this path. We were migrating from EC2-Classic to VPC. So, you could imagine what dates me reasonably effectively. And the big problem was the database. And the joy that we had was, “Okay, we have to quiesce the application.” So, the database is now quiet, stop writes, take a snapshot, restore that snapshot into the environment. And whenever we talk to AWS folks, it's like, “So, how long is this going to take?” And the answer was, “Guess.” And that was not exactly reassuring. It went off without a hitch because every migration has one problem. We were sideswiped in an Uber on the way home. But that's neither here nor there. This was two o'clock in the morning, and we finished in half the maintenance time we had allotted. But it was the fact that, well, guess we're going to have to take the database down for many hours with no real visibility, and we hope it'll be up by morning. That wasn't great. But that was the big one going on, on an ongoing basis, there were maintenance windows with a database. We just stopped databasing for a period of time during a fairly broad maintenance window. And that led to a whole lot of unfortunate associations in my mind with using relational databases for an awful lot of stuff. How do you handle maintenance windows and upgrading and not tearing down someone's application? Because I have to assume, “Oh, we just never patch anything. It turns out that's way easier,” is in fact, the wrong answer.Benjamin: Yeah, definitely. As you point out, there's a bunch of fundamental limitations here, if we start to talk about how Postgres actually fits together, right? Pretty much everybody in RDS is a little bit weird. The older RDS offerings are a little bit weird in terms of how they do replication. But most folks are using Postgres streaming replication, to do high availability, Postgres in managed services. And honestly, of course—Corey: That winds up failing over, or the application's aware of both endpoints and switches to the other one?Benjamin: Yeah—Corey: Sort of a database pooling connection or some sort of proxy?Benjamin: Right. There's a bunch of subtleties that get into their way. You say, well, did the [vit 00:16:16] failover too early, did the application try to connect and start making requests before the secondaries available? That sort of thing.Corey: Or you misconfigure it and point to the secondary, suddenly, when there's a switchover of some database, suddenly, nothing can write, it can only read, then you cause a massive outage on the weekend?Benjamin: Yeah. Yeah.Corey: That may have been of an actual story I made up.Benjamin: [laugh] yeah, you should use a managed service.Corey: Yeah.Benjamin: So, it's complicated, but even with managed services, you end up in situations where you have downtime, you have maintenance windows. And with Postgres, especially—and other databases as well—especially with Postgres, one of the biggest concerns you have is major version upgrades, right? So, if I want to go from Postgres 12 to 13, 13 to 14, I can't do that live. I can't have a single cluster that is streaming one Postgres version to another Postgres version, right?So, every year, people want to put things off for two years, three years sometimes—which is obviously not to their benefit—you have this maintenance, you have some sort of downtime, where you perform a Postgres upgrade. At EDB, we've got—so this is a big problem, this is a problem for us. We're involved in the Postgres community. We know this is challenging. That's just a well-known thing. Some of the folks that are working EDB are folks who worked on the Postgres logical replication tech, which arrived in Postgres 10. Logical replication is really a nice tool for doing things like change data capture, you can do Walter JSON, all these types of things are based on logical replication tech.It's not really a thing, at least, the code that's in Postgres itself doesn't really support high availability, though. It's not really something that you can use to build a leader-follower type cluster on top of. We have some techs, some proprietary tech within EDB that used to be called bi-directional replication. There used to be an open-source project called bi-directional replication. This is a kind of a descendant of that. It's now called Postgres Distributed, or EDB Postgres Distributed is the product name. And that tech actually allows us—because it's based on logical replication—allows us to do multiple major versions at the same time, right? So, we can upgrade one node in a cluster to Postgres 14, while the other nodes in the clusters are at Postgres 13. We can then upgrade the next node. We can support these types of operations in a kind of wide range of maintenance operations without taking a cluster down from maintenance.So, there's a lot of interesting opportunities here when we start to say, well, let's step back from what your typical assumptions are for Postgres streaming replication. Give ourselves a little bit more freedom by using logical replication instead of physical streaming replication. And then, what type of services, and what type of patterns can we build on top of that, that ultimately help customers build, whether it's faster databases, more highly available databases, so on and so forth.Corey: Let's face it, on-call firefighting at 2am is stressful! So there's good news and there's bad news. The bad news is that you probably can't prevent incidents from happening, but the good news is that incident.io makes incidents less stressful and a lot more valuable. incident.io is a Slack-native incident management platform that allows you to automate incident processes, focus on fixing the issues and learn from incident insights to improve site reliability and fix your vulnerabilities. Try incident.io, recover faster and sleep more.Corey: One approach that I took for, I guess you could call it backup sort of, was intentionally staggering replication between the primary and the replica about 15 minutes or so. So, if I drop a production table or something like that, I have 15 short minutes to realize what has happened and sever the replication before it is now committed to the replica and now I'm living in hell. It felt like this was not, like, option A, B, or C, or the right way to do things. But given that meeting customers where they are as important, is that the sort of thing that you support with BigAnimal, or do you try to talk customers into not being ridiculous?Benjamin: That's not something we support now. It's not actually something that I hear that many asks for these days. It's kind of interesting, that's a pattern that I've run into a lot in the past.Corey: I was an ancient, grumpy sysadmin. Again, I'm dating myself here. These days, I just store everything at DNS text records, and it's way easier. But I digress.Benjamin: [laugh] yeah, it's something that we see a lot for and we had support for a point-in-time restore, like pretty much anybody else in the business at this point. And that's usually the, “I fat-fingered something,” type response. Honestly, I think there's room to be a bit more flexible and room to do some more interesting things. I think RDS is setting a bar and a lot of database services out there and kind of just meeting that bar. And we all kind of need to be pushing a little bit more into more interesting spaces and figuring out how to get customers more value, get customers to get more out of their money for the database, honestly.Corey: One of the problems we tend to see, in the database ecosystem at large, without naming names or companies or anything like that, is that it's a pretty thin and blurry line between database advocate, database evangelist, and database zealot. Where it feels like instead, we're arguing about religion more than actual technical constraints and concerns. So, here's a fun question that hopefully isn't too much of a gotcha. But what sort of workloads would you actively advise someone not to use BigAnimal for in the database world? But yes, again, if you try to run a DNS server, it's probably not fit for purpose without at least a shim in the way there. But what sort of workloads are you not targeting that a customer is likely to have a relatively unfortunate time with?Benjamin: Large-scale analytical workloads is the easy answer to that, right? If you've got a problem where you're choosing between Postgres and Snowflake, you're seriously considering—you actually have as much data that you seriously be considering Snowflake? You probably don't want to be using Postgres, right? You want to be using something that's column, or you want to be using a query planner that really understands a columnar layout that's going to get you the sorts of performance that you need for those analytical workloads. We don't try to touch that space.Corey: Yeah, we're doing some of that right now with just the sheer volume of client AWS bills we have. We don't really need a relational model for a lot of it. And Athena is basically fallen down on the job in some cases, and, “Oh, do you want to use Redshift, that's basically Postgres.” It's like, “Yeah, it's Postgres, if it decided to run on bars of gold.” No, thank you. It just becomes this ridiculously overwrought solution for what feels like it should be a lot similar. So, it's weird, six months ago or so I wouldn't have had much of an idea what you're talking about. I see it a lot better now. Generally, by virtue of trying to do something the precise wrong way that someone should.Benjamin: Right. Yeah, exactly. I think there's interesting room for Postgres to expand here. It's not something that we're actively working on. I'm not aware of a lot happening in the community that Postgres is, for better or worse, extremely extensible, right? And if you see the JSON-supported Postgres, it didn't exist, I don't know, five, six years ago. And now it's incredibly powerful. It's incredibly flexible. And you can do a lot of quote-unquote, schemaless stuff straight in Postgres. Or you look at PostGIS, right, for doing GIS geographical data, right? That's really a fantastic integration directly in the database.Corey: Yeah, before that people start doing ridiculous things almost looks similar to a graph database or a columnar store somehow, and yeah.Benjamin: Yeah, exactly. I think sometimes somebody will do a good column store that's an open-source deeply integrated into Postgres, rather than—Corey: I've seen someone build one on top of S3 bucket with that head, a quarter of a trillion objects in it. Professional advice, don't do that.Benjamin: [laugh]. Unless you're Snowflake. So, I mean, it's something that I'd like to see Postgres expand into. I think that's an interesting space, but not something that, at least especially for BigAnimal, and frankly, for a lot of EDB customers. It's not something we're trying to push people toward.Corey: One thing that I think we are seeing a schism around is the idea that some vendors are one side of it, some are on the other, where on the one side, you have, oh, every workload should have a bespoke, purpose-built database that is exactly for this type of workload. And the other school of thought is you should generally buy us for a general-purpose database until you have a workload that is scaled and significant to a point where running that on its own purpose-built database begins to make sense. I don't necessarily think that is a binary choice, where do you tend to fall on that spectrum?Benjamin: I think everybody should use Postgres. And I say not just because I work in a Postgres company.Corey: Well, let's be clear. Before this, you were at IBM for five years working on a whole bunch of database stuff over there, not just Postgres. And you, so far, have not struck me as the kind of person who's like, “Oh, so what's your favorite database?” “The one that pays me.” We've met people like that, let's be very clear. But you seem very even-handed in those conversations.Benjamin: Yeah, I got my start in databases, actually, with Apache CouchDB. I am a committer on CouchDB. I worked on a managed at CouchDB service ten years ago. At IBM, I worked on something in nine different open-source databases and managed services. But I love having conversations about, like, well, I've got this workload, should I use Postgres, rr should I use Mongo, should I use Cassandra, all of those types of discussions. Frankly, though, I think in a lot of cases people are—they don't understand how much power they're missing out on if they don't choose a relational database. If they don't understand the relational model well enough to understand that they really actually want that. In a lot of cases, people are also just over-optimizing too early, right? It's just going to be much faster for them to get off the ground, get product in customers hands, if they start with something that they don't have to think twice about. And they don't end up with this architecture with 45 different databases, and there's only one guy in the company that knows how to manage the whole thing.Corey: Oh, the same story of picking a cloud provider. It's, “Okay, you hire a team, you're going to build a thing. Which cloud provider do you pick?” Every cloud provider has a whole matrix and sales deck, and the rest. The right answer, of course, is the one your team's already familiar with because learning a new cloud provider while trying not to run out of money at your startup, can't really doesn't work super well.Benjamin: Exactly. Yeah.Corey: One thing that I think has been sort of interesting, and when I saw it, it was one of those, “Oh, I sort of like them.” Because I had that instinctive reaction and I don't think I'm alone in this. As of this recording a couple of weeks ago, you folks received a sizable investment from private equity. And default reaction to that is, “Oh, well, I guess I put a fork in the company, they're done.” Because the narrative is that once private equity takes an investment, well, that company's best days are probably not in front of it. Now, the counterpoint is that this is not the first time private equity has invested in EDB, and you folks from what I can tell are significantly better than you were when I was your customer a decade ago. So clearly, there is something wrong with that mental model. What am I missing?Benjamin: Yeah. Frankly, I don't know. I'm no expert in funding models and all of those sorts of things. I will say that my experience has been what I've seen at EDB, has definitely been that maybe there's private equity, and then there's private equity. We're in this to build better products and become a better product company. We were previously owned by a private equity firm for the past four years or so. And during the course of those four years, we brought on a bunch of folks who were very product-focused, new leadership. We made a significant acquisition of a company called 2ndQuadrant, which they employed a lot of the European best Postgres company. Now, they're part of EDB and most of them have stayed with us. And we built the managed cloud service, right? So, this is a pretty significant—private equity company buying us to invest in the company. I'm optimistic that that's what we're looking at going forward.Corey: I want to be clear as well, I'm not worried about what I normally would be in a private equity story about this, where they're there to save money and cut costs, and, “Do we really need all these database replicas floating around,” and, “These backups, seems like that's something we don't need.” You have, at last count, 32 Postgres contributors, 7 Postgres committers, and 3 core members. All of whom would run away screaming loudly and publicly, in the event that such a thing were taking place. Of all the challenges and concerns I might have about someone running a cloud service in the modern day. I do not have any fear that you folks are not doing what will very clearly be shown to be the right thing by your customers for the technology that you're building on top of. That is not a concern. There are companies I do not have that confidence in, to be clear.Benjamin: Yeah, I'm glad to hear that. I'm a hundred percent on board as well. I work here, but I think we're doing the right thing, and we're going to be doing great stuff going forward.Corey: One last topic I do want to get into a little bit is, on some level, launching in this decade, a cloud-hosted database offering at a time when Amazon—whose product strategy of yes is in full display—it seems like something ridiculous, that is not necessarily well thought out that why would you ever try to do this? Now, I will temper that by the fact that you are clearly succeeding in this direction. You have customers who say nice things about you, and the reviews have been almost universally positive anywhere I can see things. The negative ones are largely complaining about databases, which I admit might be coming from me.Benjamin: Right, it is a crowded space. There's a lot of things happening. Obviously, Amazon, Microsoft, Google are doing great things, both—Corey: Terrible things, but great, yes. Yes.Benjamin: [laugh] right, there's good products coming in. I think AlloyDB is not necessarily a great product. I haven't used it myself yet, but it's an interesting step in the direction. I'm excited to see development happening. But at the end of the day, we're a database company. Our focus is on building great databases and supporting great databases. We're not entering this business to try to take on Amazon from an infrastructure point of view. In fact, the way that we're structuring the product is really to try to get the strengths of both worlds. We want to give customers the ability to get the most out of the AWS or Azure infrastructure that they can, but come to us for their database.Frankly, we know Postgres better than anybody else. We have a greater ability to get bugs fixed in Postgres than anybody else. We've got folks working on the database in the open. We got folks working on the database proprietary for us. So, we give customers things like break/fix support on that database. If there is a bug in Postgres, there's a bug in the tech that sits around Postgres. Because obviously, Postgres is not a batteries-included system, really. We're going to fix that for you. That's part of the contract that we're giving to our customers. And I know a lot of smaller companies maybe haven't been burned by this sort of thing very much. We start to talk about enterprise customers and medium, larger-scale customers, this starts to get really valuable. The ability to have assurance on top of your open-source product. So, I think there's a lot of interesting things there, a lot of value that we can provide there.I think also that I talked a little bit about this earlier, but like the box, this sort of RDS-shaped box, I think is a bit too small. There's an opportunity for smaller players to come in and try to push the boundaries of that. For example, giving customers more support by default to do a good job using their database. We have folks on board that can help consult with customers to say, “No, you shouldn't be designing your schemas that way. You should be designing your schemas this way. You should be using indexes here,” that sort of stuff. That's been part of our business for a long time. Now, with a managed service, we can bake that right into the managed service. And that gives us the ability to kind of make that—you talk about shared responsibility between the service writer and the customer—we can change the boundaries of that shared responsibility a little bit, so that customers can get more value out of the managed database service than they might expect otherwise.Corey: There aren't these harsh separations and clearly defined lines across which nothing shall pass, when it makes sense to do that in a controlled responsible way.Benjamin: Right, exactly. Some of that is because we're a database company, and some of that is because, frankly, we're much smaller.Corey: I'll take it a step further beyond that, as well, that I have seen this pattern evolve a number of times where you have a customer running databases on EC2, and their AWS account managers suggests move to RDS. So, they do. Then, move to Aurora. So, they do. Then, I move this to DynamoDB. At which point, it's like, what do you think your job is here, exactly? Because it seems like every time we move databases, you show up in a nicer car. So, what exactly is the story here, and what are the incentives? Where it just feels like there is a, “Whatever you're doing is not the way that it should be done. So, it's time to do, yet, another migration.”There's something to be said for companies who are focused around a specific aspect of things. Then once that is up and working and running, great. Keep on going. This is fine. As opposed to trying to chase the latest shiny, on some level. I have a big sense of, I guess, affinity for companies that wind up knowing where they start, and most notably, where they stop.Benjamin: Yeah, I think that's a really good point. I don't think that we will be building an application platform anytime soon.Corey: “We're going to run Lambda functions on top of a database.” It's like, “Congratulations. That is the weirdest stored procedure I can imagine this week, but I'm sure we can come up with a worse one soon.”Benjamin: Exactly.Corey: I really want to thank you for taking the time to speak with me so much about how you're thinking about this, and what you've been building over there. If people want to learn more, where's the best place to go to find you?Benjamin: biganimal.com.Corey: Excellent. We will throw a link to that in the show notes and it only just occurred to me that the Postgres mascot is an elephant, and now I understand why it's called BigAnimal. Yeah, that's right. He who laughs last, thinks slowest, and today, that's me. I really want to thank you for being so generous with your time. I appreciate it.Benjamin: Thank you. I really appreciate it.Corey: Benjamin Anderson, CTO for Cloud at EDB. 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 that you then wind up stuffing into a SQLite database, converting to Base64, and somehow stuffing into the comment field.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

american amazon google european microsoft professional uber exodus services cloud honestly customers integration ibm congratulations oracle developers route cto slack pg generally screaming aws databases snowflakes apis db devops azure y combinator gis logical vmware dns s3 ides pipelines deploy kubernetes lambda dba rds sre mongodb json mysql mongo repos cli fortinet nosql redshift txt postgres ecr eks sqlite snyk ec2 vpc dynamodb corey quinn edb couchdb amazon rds inforce base64 duckbill group postgis at ibm enterprisedb chief cloud economist boston convention center last week in aws humblepod

Developer Advocacy, Empathy, and Imposter Syndrome with Brandon West

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 19, 2022 35:46

About BrandonBrandon West was raised in part by video games and BBSes and has been working on web applications since 1999. He entered the world of Developer Relations in 2011 as an evangelist for a small startup called SendGrid and has since held leadership roles at companies like AWS. At Datadog, Brandon is focused on helping developers improve the performance and developer experience of the things they build. He lives in Seattle where enjoys paddle-boarding, fishing, and playing music.Links Referenced: Datadog: https://www.datadoghq.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/bwest 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 Honeycomb. When production is running slow, it's hard to know where problems originate. Is it your application code, users, or the underlying systems? I've got five bucks on DNS, personally. Why scroll through endless dashboards while dealing with alert floods, going from tool to tool to tool that you employ, guessing at which puzzle pieces matter? Context switching and tool sprawl are slowly killing both your team and your business. You should care more about one of those than the other; which one is up to you. Drop the separate pillars and enter a world of getting one unified understanding of the one thing driving your business: production. With Honeycomb, you guess less and know more. Try it for free at honeycomb.io/screaminginthecloud. Observability: it's more than just hipster monitoring.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Fortinet. Fortinet's partnership with AWS is a better-together combination that ensures your workloads on AWS are protected by best-in-class security solutions powered by comprehensive threat intelligence and more than 20 years of cybersecurity experience. Integrations with key AWS services simplify security management, ensure full visibility across environments, and provide broad protection across your workloads and applications. Visit them at AWS re:Inforce to see the latest trends in cybersecurity on July 25-26 at the Boston Convention Center. Just go over to the Fortinet booth and tell them Corey Quinn sent you and watch for the flinch. My thanks again to my friends at Fortinet.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. My guest today is someone I've been trying to get on the show for years, but I'm very bad at, you know, following up and sending the messages and all the rest because we all struggle with our internal demons. My guest instead struggles with external demons. He is the team lead for developer experience and tools advocacy at what I can only assume is a Tinder for Pets style company, Date-A-Dog. Brendon West, thank you for joining me today.Brandon: Hey, Corey, thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. Finally, like you said, it's been a couple of years. But glad that it's happening. And yeah, I'm on the DevRel team at Datadog.Corey: Yes, I'm getting a note here in the headset of breaking news coming in. Yes, you're not apparently a dog dating company, you are a monitoring slash observability slash whatever the cool kids are calling it today telemetry outputer dingus nonsense. Anyone who has ever been to a community or corporate event has no doubt been tackled by one of the badge scanners that you folks have orbiting your booth, but what is it that you folks do?Brandon: Well, the observability, the monitoring, the distributed tracing, all that stuff that you mentioned. And then a lot of other interesting things that are happening. Security is a big focus—InfoSec—so we're adding some products around that, automated security monitoring, very cool. And then the sort of stuff that I'm representing is stuff that helps developers provide a better experience to their end-users. So, things like front-end monitoring, real-time user monitoring, synthetic testing of your APIs, whatever it might be.Corey: Your path has been somewhat interesting because you—well, everyone's path has been somewhat interesting; yours has been really interesting because back in 2011, you entered the world of developer relations, or being a DevReloper as I insist on calling it. And you were in a—you call it a small startup called SendGrid. Which is, on some level, hilarious from my point of view. I've been working with you folks—you folks being SendGrid—for many years now. I cared a lot about email once upon a time.And now I send an email newsletter every week, that deep under the hood, through a couple of vendor abstraction layers is still SendGrid, and I don't care about email because that's something that I can pay someone else to worry about. You went on as well to build out DevRel teams at AWS. You decided okay, you're going to take some time off after that. You went to a small scrappy startup and ah, nice. You could really do things right and you have a glorious half of the year and then surprise, you got acquired by Datadog. Congratu-dolances on that because now you're right back in the thick of things at big company-style approaches. Have I generally nailed the trajectory of the past decade for you?Brandon: Yeah, I think the broad strokes are all correct there. SendGrid was a small company when I joined, you know? There were 30 of us or so. So, got to see that grow into what it is today, which was super, super awesome. But other than that, yeah, I think that's the correct path.Corey: It's interesting to me, in that you were more or less doing developer relations before that was really a thing in the ecosystem. And I understand the challenge that you would have in a place like SendGrid because that is large-scale email sending, transactional or otherwise, and that is something that by and large, has slipped below the surface level of awareness for an awful lot of folks in your target market. It's, “Oh, okay, and then we'll just have the thing send an email,” they say, hand-waving over what is an incredibly deep and murky pool. And understanding that is a hard thing requires a certain level of technical sophistication. So, you started doing developer relations for something that very clearly needed some storytelling chops. How did you fall into it originally?Brandon: Well, I wanted to do something that let me use those storytelling chops, honestly. I had been writing code at an agency for coal mines and gold mines and really actively inserting evil into the world, power plants, and that sort of thing. And, you know, I went to school for English literature. I loved writing. I played in thrash metal bands when I was a kid, so I've been up on stage being cussed at and told that I suck. So I—Corey: Oh, I get that conference talks all the time.Brandon: Yeah, right? So, that's why when people ask me to speak, I'm like, “Absolutely.” There's no way I can bomb harder than I've bombed before. No fear, right? So yeah, I wanted to use those skills. I wanted to do something different.And one of my buddies had a company that he had co-founded that was going through TechStars in Boulder. SendGrid was the first accelerator-backed company to IPO which is pretty cool. But they had gone through TechStars in 2009. They were looking for a developer evangelist. So, SendGrid was looking for developer evangelist and my friend introduced me said, “I think you'd be good at this. You should have a conversation.” My immediate thought was what the hell is a developer evangelist?Corey: And what might a SendGrid be? And all the rest. Yes, it's that whole, “Oh, how do I learn to swim?” Someone throws you off the end of the dock and then retrospect, it's, “I don't think they were trying to teach me how to swim.” Yeah. Hindsight.Brandon: Yeah. It worked out great. I will say, though, that I think DevRel has been around for a long time, you know? The title has been around since the original Macintosh at Apple in 1980-ish. There's a whole large part of the tech world that would like you to think that it's new because of all the terrible things that their DevRel team did at Microsoft in the late-90s.And you can go read all about this. There were trials about it. These documents were released to the public, James Plamondon is the lead architect of all of this nastiness. But I think there was then a concerted effort to memory-hole that and say, “No, DevRel is new and shiny.” And then Google came along and said, “Well, it's not evangelism anymore. It's advocacy.”Corey: It's not sysadmin work anymore. It's SRE. It's not on-prem, it's Sparkling Kubernetes, et cetera, et cetera.Brandon: Yeah, so there's this sense in a lot of places that DevRel is new, but it's actually been around a long time. And you can learn a lot from reading about the history and understanding it, something I've given a talk on and written a bit about. So.Corey: My philosophy around developer relations for a while has been that in many cases, its biggest obstacle is the way that it is great at telling stories about fantastically complex, deeply technical things; it can tell stories about almost anything except itself. And I keep seeing similar expressions of the same problem again, and again, and again. I mean, AWS, where you worked, as an example: they love to talk about their developer advocates, and you read the job descriptions and these are high-level roles with sweeping responsibilities, broad basis of experience being able to handle things at a borderline executive level. And then they almost neuter the entire thing by slapping a developer advocate title on top of those people, which means that some of the people that would be most effectively served by talking to them will dismiss them as, “Well, I'm a director”—or a VP—“What am I going to do talking to a developer advocate?” It feels like there's a swing and a miss as far as encapsulating the value that the function provides.I want to be clear, I am not sitting here shitting on DevRel or its practitioners, I see a problem with how it [laugh] is being expressed. Now, feel free to argue with me and just scream at me for the next 20 minutes, and this becomes a real short show. But—Brandon: [laugh].Corey: —It'll be great. Hit me.Brandon: No, you're correct in many ways, which makes me sad because these are the same conversations that I've been having for the 11, 12 years that I've been in DevRel now. And I thought we would have moved past this at some point, but the problem is that we are bad at advocating for advocacy. We do a bad job of relating to people about DevRel because we spend so much time worried about stuff that doesn't really matter. And we get very loud voices in the echo chamber screaming about titles and evangelism versus advocate versus community manager, and which department you should report up to, and all of these things that ultimately don't matter. And it just seems like bickering from the outside. I think that the core of what we do is super awesome. And I don't think it's very hard to articulate. It's just that we don't spend the time to do that.Corey: It's always odd to me when I talk to someone like, “Oh, you're in DevRel. What does that mean?” And their immediate response is, “Well, it's not marketing, I'll tell you that.” It's feels like there might be some trauma that is being expressed in some strange ways. I do view it as marketing, personally, and people who take umbrage at that don't generally tend to understand what marketing is.Yeah, you can look at any area of business or any function and judge it by some of the worst examples that we've all seen, but when someone tells me they work in sales, I don't automatically assume that they are sending me horrifyingly passive-aggressive drip campaigns, or trying to hassle me in a car lot. It's no, there's a broad spectrum of people. Just like I don't assume that you're an engineer. And I immediately think, oh, you can't solve FizzBuzz on a whiteboard. No, there's always going to be a broad spectrum of experience.Marketing is one of those awesome areas of business that's dramatically misunderstood a lot. Similarly to the fact that, you know, DevRel can't tell stories, you think marketing could tell stories about itself, but it's still struggles, too, in a bunch of ways. But I do believe that even if they're not one of the same, developer relations and marketing are aligned around an awful lot of things like being able to articulate value that is hard to quantify.Brandon: I completely agree with that. And if I meet someone in DevRel that starts off the conversation by saying that they're not in marketing, then I know they're probably not that great at their job. I mean, I think there's a place of tech hubris, where we want to disrespect anything that's not a hard skill where it's not putting zeros and ones into a chip—Corey: And spoiler, they're all very hard skills.Brandon: [laugh]. Yeah. And so, first off, like, stop disrespecting marketing. It's important; your business probably wouldn't survive if you didn't have it. And second of all, you're not immune to it, right?Like, Heartbleed had a logo and a name for vulnerability because tech people are so susceptible to it, right? People don't just wake up and wait in line for three days for a new iPhone because tech marketing doesn't work, right?Corey: “Oh, tech marketing doesn't work on me,” says someone who's devoted last five years of their life to working on Kubernetes. Yeah, sure it doesn't.Brandon: Yeah exactly. So, that whole perspective is silly. I think part of the problem is that they don't want to invest in learning how to communicate what they do to a marketing org. They don't want to spend the time to say, “Here's how the marketing world thinks, and here's how we can fit into that perspective.” They want to come in and say, “Well, you don't understand DevRel. Let me define DevRel for you and tell you what we do.” And all those sorts of things. It's too prescriptive and less collaborative.Corey: Anytime you start getting into the idea of metrics around how do you measure someone in a developer advocacy role, the answer is, “Well, your metrics that you're using are wrong, and any metrics you use are wrong, and there's no good way to do it.” And I am sympathetic to that. When I started this place, I knew that if I went to a bunch of events and did my thing, good things would happen for the business. And how did I articulate that? Gut feel, but when you own the place, you can do that.Whereas when you are a function inside of another org, inside of another org, and you start looking at from the executive leadership position at these things, it's, “Okay, so let me get this straight. You cost as much as an engineer, you cost as much as that again, in your expenses because you're traveling all the time, you write zero production code, whenever people ask you what it is you do here, you have a very strange answer, and from what we can tell, it looks like you hang out with your friends in exotic locations, give a 15-minute talk from time to time that mentions our name at the beginning, and nothing else relevant to our business, and then you go around and the entire story is ‘just trust me, I'm adding value.'” Yeah, when it's time to tighten belts and start cutting back, is it any wonder that the developer advocacy is often one of the first departments hit from that perspective?Brandon: It doesn't surprise me. I mean, I've been a part of DevRel teams where we had some large number of events that we had attended for the year—I think 450-something—and the director of the team was very excited to show that off, right, you should have seen the CFOs face when he heard that, right, because all he sees is outgoing dollar signs. Like, how much expense? What's the ROI on 450 events?Corey: Yeah, “450 events? That's more than one a day. Okay, great. That's a big number and I already know what we're spending. Great. How much business came out of that?”And that's when the hemming and hawing starts. Like, well, sort of, and yadda—and yeah, it doesn't present well in the language that they are prepared to speak. But marketing can tell those stories because they have for ages. Like, “Okay, how much business came from our Superbowl ad?” “I dunno. The point is, is that there's a brand awareness play, there's the chance to remain top of the mental stack when people think about this space. And over the next few months, we can definitely see there's been a dramatic uptick in our business. Now, how do we attribute that back? Well, I don't know.”There's a saying in marketing, that half of your marketing budget is wasted. Now, figuring out which half will spend the rest of your career, you'll never get even close. Because people don't know the journey that customers go through, not really. Even customers don't often see it.Take this podcast, for example. I have sponsors that I do love and appreciate who say things from time to time on this show. And people will hear it and occasionally will become customers of those sponsors. But very often, it's, “Oh, I heard about that on the podcast. I'll Google it when I get to work and then I'll have a conversation with my team and we'll agree to investigate that.”And any UTM tracking has long since fallen by the wayside. You might get to that from discussions with users in their interview process, but very often, they won't remember where it came up. And it's one of those impossible to quantify things. Now, I sound like one of those folks where I'm trying to say, “Oh, buy sponsorships that you can never prove add value.” But that is functionally how advertising tends to work, back in the days before it spied on you.Brandon: Yeah, absolutely. And we've added a bunch of instrumentation to allow us to try and put that multi-touch attribution model together after the fact, but I'm still not sure that that's worth the squeeze, right? You don't get much juice out. One of the problems with metrics in DevRel is that the things that you can measure are very production-focused. It's how many talks did you give? How many audience members did you reach?Some developer relations folks do actually write production code, so it might be how many of the official SDK that you support got downloaded? That can be more directly attributed to business impact, those sorts of things are fantastic. But a lot of it is kind of fuzzy and because it's production-focused, it can lead to burnout because it's disconnected from business impact. “It's how many widgets did your line produce today?” “Well, we gave all these talks and we had 150,000 engaged developer hours.” “Well, cool, what was the business outcome?” And if you can't answer that for your own team and for your own self in your role, that leads pretty quickly to burnout.Corey: Anytime you start measuring something and grading people based on it, they're going to optimize for what you measure. For example, I send an email newsletter out, at time of this recording, to 31,000 people every week and that's awesome. I also periodically do webinars about the joys of AWS bill optimization, and you know, 50 people might show up to one of those things. Okay, well, from a broad numbers perspective, yeah, I'd much rather go and send something out to those 31,000, folks until you realize that the kind of person that's going to devote half an hour, forty-five minutes to having a discussion with you about AWS bill optimization is far likelier to care about this to the point where they become a customer than someone who just happens to be in an audience for something that is orthogonally-related. And that is the trick because otherwise, we would just all be optimizing for the single biggest platforms out there if oh, I'm going to go talk at this conference and that conference, not because they're not germane to what we do, but because they have more people showing up.And that doesn't work. When you see that even on the podcast world, you have Joe Rogan, as the largest podcast in the world—let's not make too many comparisons in different ways because I don't want to be associated with that kind of tomfoolery—but there's a reason that his advertisers, by and large, are targeting a mass-market audience, whereas mine are targeting B2B SaaS, by and large. I'm not here shilling for various mattress companies. I'm instead talking much more about things that solve the kind of problem that listeners to this show are likely to have. It's the old-school of thought of advertising, where this is a problem that is germane to a certain type of audience, and that certain type of audience listens to shows like this. That was my whole school of thought.Brandon: Absolutely. I mean, the core value that you need to do DevRel, in my opinion is empathy. It's all about what Maya Angelou said, right? “People may not remember what you said, but they'll definitely remember how you made them feel.” And I found that to be incredibly true.Like, the moments that I regret the most in DevRel are the times when someone that I've met and spent time with before comes up to have a conversation and I don't remember them because I met 200 people that night. And then I feel terrible, right? So, those are the metrics that I use internally. It's hearts and minds. It's how do people feel? Am I making them feel empowered and better at their craft through the work that I do?That's why I love DevRel. If I didn't get that fulfillment, I'd go write code again. But I don't get that sense of satisfaction, and wow, I made an impact on this person's trajectory through their career that I do from DevRel. So.Corey: I come bearing ill tidings. Developers are responsible for more than ever these days. Not just the code that they write, but also the containers and the cloud infrastructure that their apps run on. Because serverless means it's still somebody's problem. And a big part of that responsibility is app security from code to cloud. And that's where our friend Snyk comes in. Snyk is a frictionless security platform that meets developers where they are - Finding and fixing vulnerabilities right from the CLI, IDEs, Repos, and Pipelines. Snyk integrates seamlessly with AWS offerings like code pipeline, EKS, ECR, and more! As well as things you're actually likely to be using. Deploy on AWS, secure with Snyk. Learn more at Snyk.co/scream That's S-N-Y-K.co/screamCorey: The way that I tend to see it, too, is that there's almost a bit of a broadening of DevRel. And let's be clear, it's a varied field with a lot of different ways to handle that approach. I'm have a terrible public speaker, so I'm not going to ever succeed in DevRel. Well, that's certainly not true. People need to write blog posts; people need to wind up writing some of the sample code, in some cases; people need to talk to customers in a small group environment, as opposed to in front of 3000 people and talk about the things that they're seeing, and the rest.There's a broad field and different ways that it applies. But I also see that there are different breeds of developer advocate as well. There are folks, like you for example. You and I have roughly the same amount of time in the industry working on different things, whereas there's also folks who it seems like they graduate from a boot camp, and a year later, they're working in a developer advocacy role. Does that mean that they're bad developer advocates?I don't think so, but I think that if they try and present things the same way that you were I do from years spent in the trenches working on these things, they don't have that basis of experience to fall back on, so they need to take a different narrative path. And the successful ones absolutely do.Brandon: Yeah.Corey: I think it's a nuanced and broad field. I wish that there was more acceptance and awareness of that.Brandon: That's absolutely true. And part of the reason people criticize DevRel and don't take it seriously, as they say, “Well, it's inconsistent. This org, it reports to product; or, this org, it reports up to marketing; this other place, it's part of engineering.” You know, it's poorly defined. But I think that's true of a lot of roles in tech.Like, engineering is usually done a different way, very differently at some orgs compared to others. Product teams can have completely different methodologies for how they track and manage and estimate their time and all of those things. So, I would like to see people stop using that as a cudgel against the whole profession. It just doesn't make any sense. At the same time, two of the best evangelist I ever hired were right out of university, so you're completely correct.The key thing to keep in mind there is, like, who's the audience, right, because ultimately, it's about building trust with the audience. There's a lot of rooms where if you and I walk into the room; if it's like a college hackathon, we're going to have a—[laugh], we're going to struggle.Corey: Yeah, we have some real, “Hello fellow kids,” energy going on when we do that.Brandon: Yeah. Which is also why I think it's incredibly important for developer relations teams to be aware of the makeup of their team. Like, how diverse is your team, and how diverse are the audiences you're speaking to? And if you don't have someone who can connect, whether it's because of age or lived experience or background, then you're going to fail because like I said that the number one thing you need to be successful in this role is empathy, in my opinion.Corey: I think that a lot of the efforts around a lot of this—trying to clarify what it is—some cases gone in well, I guess I'm going to call it the wrong direction. And I know that sounds judgy and I'm going to have to live with that, I suppose, but talk to me a bit about the, I guess, rebranding that we've seen in some recent years around developer advocates. Specifically, like, I like calling folks DevRelopers because it's cutesy, it's a bit of a portmanteau. Great. But it's also not something I seriously suggest most people put on business cards.But there are people who are starting to, I think, take a similar joke and actually identify with it where they call themselves developer avocados, which I don't fully understand. I have opinions on it, but again, having opinions that are not based in data is something I try not to start shouting from the rooftops wherever I can. You live in that world a lot more posted than I do, where do you stand?Brandon: So, I think it was well-intentioned and it was an attempt to do some of the awareness and brand building for DevRel, broadly, that we had lacked. But I see lots of problems with it. One, we already struggle to be taken seriously in many instances, as we've been discussing, and I don't think we do ourselves any favors by giving ourselves cutesy nicknames that sort of infantilize the role like I can't think of any other job that has a pet name for the work that they do.Corey: Yeah. The “ooh-woo accounting”. Yeah, I sort of don't see that happening very often in most business orgs.Brandon: Yeah. It's strange to me at the same time, a lot of the people who came up with it and popularized it are people that I consider friends and good colleagues. So hopefully, they won't be too offended, but I really think that it kind of set us back in many ways. I don't want to represent the work that I do with an emoji.Corey: Funny, you bring that up. As we record this through the first recording, I have on my new ridiculous desktop computer thing from Apple, which I have named after a—you know, the same naming convention that you would expect from an AWS region—it's us-shitpost-one. Instead of the word shit, it has the poop emoji. And you'd be amazed at the number of things that just melt when you start trying to incorporate that. GitHub has a problem with that being the name of an SSH key, for example.I don't know if I'll keep it or I'll just fall back to just spelling words out, but right now, at least, it really is causing all kinds of strange computer problems. Similarly, it causes strange cultural problems when you start having that dissonance and seeing something new and different like that in a business context. Because in some cases, yeah, it helps you interact with your audience and build rapport; in many others, it erodes trust and confidence that you know what you're talking about because people expect things to be cast a certain way. I'm not saying they're right. There's a shitload of bias that bakes into that, but at the same time, I'd like to at least bias for choosing when and where I'm going to break those expectations.There's a reason that increasingly, my Duckbillgroup.com website speaks in business terms, rather than in platypus metaphors, whereas lastweekinaws.com, very much leans into the platypus. And that is the way that the branding is breaking down, just because people expect different things in different places.Brandon: Yeah and, you know, this framing matters. And I've gone through two exercises now where I've helped rename an evangelism team to an advocacy team, not because I think it's important to me—it's a bunch of bikeshedding—but it has external implications, right? Especially evangelism, in certain parts of the world, has connotations. It's just easier to avoid those. And how we present ourselves, the titles that we choose are important.I wish we would spend way less time arguing about them, you know, advocacy has won evangelism, don't use it. DevRel, if you don't want to pick one, great. DevRel is broader umbrella. If you've got community managers, people who can't write code that do things involving your events or whatever, program managers, if they're on your team, DevRel, great description. I wish we could just settle that. Lots of wasted air discussing that one.Corey: Constantly. It feels like this is a giant distraction that detracts from the value of DevRel. Because I don't know about you, but when I pick what I want to do next in my career, the things I want to explain to people and spend that energy on are never, I want to explain what it is that I do. Like I've never liked those approaches where you have to first educate someone before they're going to be in a position where they want to become your customer.I think, honestly, that's one of the things that Datadog has gotten very right. One of the early criticisms lobbed against Datadog when it first came out was, “Oh, this is basically monitoring by Fisher-Price.” Like, “This isn't the deep-dive stuff.” Well yeah, but it turns out a lot of your buying audience are fundamentally toddlers with no visibility into what's going on. For an awful lot of what I do, I want it to be click, click, done.I am a Datadog customer for a reason. It's not because I don't have loud and angry opinions about observability; it's because I just want there to be a dashboard that I can look at and see what's working, what's not, and do I need to care about things today? And it solves that job admirably because if I have those kinds of opinions about every aspect, I'm never going to be your customer anyway, or anyone's customer. I'm going to go build my own and either launch a competitor or realize this is my what I truly love doing and go work at a company in this space, possibly yours. There's something to be said for understanding the customer journey that those customers do not look like you.And I think that's what's going on with a lot of the articulation around what developer relations is or isn't. The people on stage who go to watch someone in DevRel give a talk, do not care, by and large, what DevRel is. They care about the content that they're about to hear about, and when the first half of it is explaining what the person's job is or isn't, people lose interest. I don't even like intros at the beginning of a talk. Give me a hook. Talk for 45 seconds. Give me a story about why I should care before you tell me who you are, what your credentials are, what your job title is, who you work for. Hit me with something big upfront and then we'll figure it out from there.Brandon: Yeah, I agree with you. I give this speaking advice to people constantly. Do not get up on stage and introduce yourself. You're not a carnival hawker. You're not trying to get people to roll up and see the show.They're already sitting in the seat. You've established your credibility. If they had questions about it, they read your abstract, and then they went and checked you out on LinkedIn, right? So, get to the point; make it engaging and entertaining.Corey: I have a pet theory about what's going on in some cases where, I think, on some level, it's an outgrowth of an impostor-syndrome-like behavior, where people don't believe that they deserve to be onstage talking about things, so they start backing up their bona fides to almost reassure themselves because they don't believe that they should be up there and if they don't believe it, why would anyone else. It's the wrong approach. By holding the microphone, you inherently deserve to hold the microphone. And go ahead and tell your story. If people care enough to dig into you and who you are and well, “What is this person's background, really?” Rest assured the internet is pretty easy to use these days, people will find out. So, let them do that research if they care. If they don't, then there's an entire line of people in this world who are going to dislike you or say you're not qualified for what it is you're doing or you don't deserve it. Don't be in that line, let alone at the front of it.Brandon: So, you mentioned imposter syndrome and it got me thinking a little bit. And hopefully this doesn't offend anyone, but I kind of starting to think that imposter syndrome is in many ways invented by people to put the blame on you for something that's their fault. It's like a carbon footprint to the oil and gas industry, right? These companies can't provide you psychological safety and now they've gone and convinced you that it's your fault and that you're suffering from this syndrome, rather than the fact that they're not actually making you feel prepared and confident and ready to get up on that stage, even if it's your first time giving a talk, right?Corey: I hadn't considered it like that before. And again, I do tend to avoid straying into mental health territory on this show because I'm not an—Brandon: Yes.Corey: Expert. I'm a loud, confident white guy in tech. My failure mode is a board seat and a book deal, but I am not board-certified, let's be clear. But I think you're onto something here because early on in my career, I was very often faced with a whole lot of nebulous job description-style stuff and I was never sure if I was working on the right thing. Now that I'm at this stage of my career, and as you become more senior, you inherently find yourselves in roles, most of the time, that are themselves mired in uncertainty. That is, on some level, what seniority leads to.And that's fine, but early on in your career, not knowing if you're succeeding or failing, I got surprise-fired a number of times when I thought I was doing great. There are also times that I thought I was about to be fired on the spot and, “Come on in; shut the door.” And yeah, “Here's a raise because you're just killing it.” And it took me a few years after that point to realize, wait a minute. They were underpaying me. That's what that was, and they hope they didn't know.But it's that whole approach of just trying to understand your place in the world. Do I rock? Do I suck? And it's that constant uncertainty and unknowing. And I think companies do a terrible job, by and large, of letting people know that they're okay, they're safe, and they belong.Brandon: I completely agree. And this is why I would strongly encourage people—if you have the privilege—please do not work at a company that does not want you to bring your whole self to work, or that bans politics, or however they want to describe it. Because that's just a code word for we won't provide you psychological safety. Or if they're going to, it ends at a very hard border somewhere between work and life. And I just don't think anyone can be successful in those environments.Corey: I'm sure it's possible, but it does bias for folks who, frankly, have a tremendous amount of privilege in many respects where I mentioned about, like, I'm a white dude in tech—you are too—and when we say things, we are presumed competent and people don't argue with us by default. And that is a very easy to forget thing. Not everyone who looks like us is going to have very similar experiences. I have gotten it hilariously wrong before when I gave talks on how to wind up negotiating for salaries, for example, because well, it worked for me, what's the problem? Yeah, I basically burned that talk with fire, redid the entire thing and wound up giving it with a friend of mine who was basically everything that I am not.She was an attorney, she was a woman of color, et cetera, et cetera. And suddenly, it was a much stronger talk because it wasn't just, “How to Succeed for White Guys.” There's value in that, but you also have to be open to hearing that and acknowledging that you were born on third; you didn't hit a triple. There's a difference. And please forgive the sports metaphor. They do not sound natural coming from me.Brandon: [laugh]. I don't think I have anything more interesting to add on that topic.Corey: [laugh]. So, I really want to thank you for taking the time to speak with me today. If people want to learn more about what you're up to and how you view the world, what's the best place to find you.Brandon: So, I'm most active on Twitter at @bwest, but you know, it's a mix of things so you may or may not just get tech. Most recently, I've been posting about a—Corey: Oh, heaven forbid you bring your whole self to school.Brandon: Right? I think most recently, I've been posting about a drill press that I'm restoring. So, all kinds of fun stuff on there.Corey: I don't know it sounds kind of—wait for it—boring to me. Bud-dum-tiss.Brandon: [laugh]. [sigh]. I can't believe I missed that one.Corey: You're welcome.Brandon: Well, done. Well, done. And then I also will be hiring for a couple of developer relations folks at Datadogs soon, so if that's interesting and you like the words I say about how to do DevRel, then reach out.Corey: And you can find all of that in the show notes, of course. I want to thank you for being so generous with your time. I really appreciate it.Brandon: Hey, thank you, Corey. I'm glad that we got to catch up after all this time. And hopefully get to chat with you again sometime soon.Corey: Brandon West, team lead for developer experience and tools advocacy at Datadog. 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 and insulting comment that is talking about how I completely misunderstand the role of developer advocacy. And somehow that rebuttal features no fewer than 400 emoji shoved into it.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

amazon english google apple marketing talk super bowl seattle microsoft drop iphone security product empathy tinder cloud imposters succeed roi joe rogan imposter syndrome pets integration context developers gut boulder colorado ipo screaming aws hindsight github maya angelou bud apis devops dns ides cfos pipelines techstars deploy kubernetes b2b saas macintosh sdks sre infosec honeycomb repos cli ssh fortinet fisher price observability datadog developer relations utm white guys ecr devrel eks snyk heartbleed sendgrid developer advocacy corey quinn inforce brandon west duckbill group bbses fizzbuzz chief cloud economist brandon it boston convention center last week in aws humblepod

Technical Lineage and Careers in Tech with Sheeri Cabral

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 12, 2022 35:50

About SheeriAfter almost 2 decades as a database administrator and award-winning thought leader, Sheeri Cabral pivoted to technical product management. Her super power of “new customer” empathy informs her presentations and explanations. Sheeri has developed unique insights into working together and planning, having survived numerous reorganizations, “best practices”, and efficiency models. Her experience is the result of having worked at everything from scrappy startups such as Guardium – later bought by IBM – to influential tech companies like Mozilla and MongoDB, to large established organizations like Salesforce.Links Referenced: Collibra: https://www.collibra.com WildAid GitHub: https://github.com/wildaid Twitter: https://twitter.com/sheeri Personal Blog: https://sheeri.org 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 by our friends at Fortinet. Fortinet's partnership with AWS is a better-together combination that ensures your workloads on AWS are protected by best-in-class security solutions powered by comprehensive threat intelligence and more than 20 years of cybersecurity experience. Integrations with key AWS services simplify security management, ensure full visibility across environments, and provide broad protection across your workloads and applications. Visit them at AWS re:Inforce to see the latest trends in cybersecurity on July 25-26 at the Boston Convention Center. Just go over to the Fortinet booth and tell them Corey Quinn sent you and watch for the flinch. My thanks again to my friends at Fortinet.Corey: Let's face it, on-call firefighting at 2am is stressful! So there's good news and there's bad news. The bad news is that you probably can't prevent incidents from happening, but the good news is that incident.io makes incidents less stressful and a lot more valuable. incident.io is a Slack-native incident management platform that allows you to automate incident processes, focus on fixing the issues and learn from incident insights to improve site reliability and fix your vulnerabilities. Try incident.io, recover faster and sleep more.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud, I'm Corey Quinn. My guest today is Sheeri Cabral, who's a Senior Product Manager of ETL lineage at Collibra. And that is an awful lot of words that I understand approximately none of, except maybe manager. But we'll get there. The origin story has very little to do with that.I was following Sheeri on Twitter for a long time and really enjoyed the conversations that we had back and forth. And over time, I started to realize that there were a lot of things that didn't necessarily line up. And one of the more interesting and burning questions I had is, what is it you do, exactly? Because you're all over the map. First, thank you for taking the time to speak with me today. And what is it you'd say it is you do here? To quote a somewhat bizarre and aged movie now.Sheeri: Well, since your listeners are technical, I do like to match what I say with the audience. First of all, hi. Thanks for having me. I'm Sheeri Cabral. I am a product manager for technical and ETL tools and I can break that down for this technical audience. If it's not a technical audience, I might say something—like if I'm at a party, and people ask what I do—I'll say, “I'm a product manager for technical data tool.” And if they ask what a product manager does, I'll say I helped make sure that, you know, we deliver a product the customer wants. So, you know, ETL tools are tools that transform, extract, and load your data from one place to another.Corey: Like AWS Glue, but for some of them, reportedly, you don't have to pay AWS by the gigabyte-second.Sheeri: Correct. Correct. We actually have an AWS Glue technical lineage tool in beta right now. So, the technical lineage is how data flows from one place to another. So, when you're extracting, possibly transforming, and loading your data from one place to another, you're moving it around; you want to see where it goes. Why do you want to see where it goes? Glad you asked. You didn't really ask. Do you care? Do you want to know why it's important?Corey: Oh, I absolutely do. Because it's—again, people who are, like, “What do you do?” “Oh, it's boring, and you won't care.” It's like when people aren't even excited themselves about what they work on, it's always a strange dynamic. There's a sense that people aren't really invested in what they do.I'm not saying you have to have this overwhelming passion and do this in your spare time, necessarily, but you should, at least in an ideal world, like what you do enough to light up a bit when you talk about it. You very clearly do. I'm not wanting to stop you. Please continue.Sheeri: I do. I love data and I love helping people. So, technical lineage does a few things. For example, a DBA—which I used to be a DBA—can use technical lineage to predict the impact of a schema update or migration, right? So, if I'm going to change the name of this column, what uses it downstream? What's going to be affected? What scripts do I need to change? Because if the name changes other thing—you know, then I need to not get errors everywhere.And from a data governance perspective, which Collibra is data governance tool, it helps organizations see if, you know, you have private data in a source, does it remain private throughout its journey, right? So, you can take a column like email address or government ID number and see where it's used down the line, right? GDPR compliance, CCPA compliance. The CCPA is a little newer; people might not know that acronym. It's California Consumer Privacy Act.I forget what GDPR is, but it's another privacy act. It also can help the business see where data comes from so if you have technical lineage all the way down to your reports, then you know whether or not you can trust the data, right? So, you have a report and it shows salary ranges for job titles. So, where did the data come from? Did it come from a survey? Did it come from job sites? Or did it come from a government source like the IRS, right? So, now you know, like, what you get to trust the most.Corey: Wait, you can do that without a blockchain? I kid, I kid, I kid. Please don't make me talk about blockchains. No, it's important. The provenance of data, being able to establish a almost a chain-of-custody style approach for a lot of these things is extraordinarily important.Sheeri: Yep.Corey: I was always a little hazy on the whole idea of ETL until I started, you know, working with large-volume AWS bills. And it turns out that, “Well, why do you have to wind up moving and transforming all of these things?” “Oh, because in its raw form, it's complete nonsense. That's why. Thank you for asking.” It becomes a problem—Sheeri: [laugh]. Oh, I thought you're going to say because AWS has 14 different products for things, so you have to move it from one product to the other to use the features.Corey: And two of them are good. It's a wild experience.Sheeri: [laugh].Corey: But this is also something of a new career for you. You were a DBA for a long time. You're also incredibly engaging, you have a personality, you're extraordinarily creative, and that—if I can slander an entire profession for a second—does not feel like it is a common DBA trait. It's right up there with an overly creative accountant. When your accountant has done a stand-up comedy, you're watching and you're laughing and thinking, “I am going to federal prison.” It's one of those weird things that doesn't quite gel, if we're speaking purely in terms of stereotypes. What has your career been like?Sheeri: I was a nerd growing up. So, to kind of say, like, I have a personality, like, my personality is very nerdish. And I get along with other nerdy people and we have a lot of fun, but when I was younger, like, when I was, I don't know, seven or eight, one of the things I really love to do is I had a penny collection—you know, like you do—and I love to sort it by date. So, in the states anyway, we have these pennies that have the date that they were minted on it. And so, I would organize—and I probably had, like, five bucks worth a pennies.So, you're talking about 500 pennies and I would sort them and I'd be like, “Oh, this is 1969. This was 1971.” And then when I was done, I wanted to sort things more, so I would start to, like, sort them in order how shiny the pennies were. So, I think that from an early age, it was clear that I wanted to be a DBA from that sorting of my data and ordering it, but I never really had a, like, “Oh, I want to be this when I grew up.” I kind of had a stint when I was in, like, middle school where I was like, maybe I'll be a creative writer and I wasn't as creative a writer as I wanted to be, so I was like, “Ah, whatever.”And I ended up actually coming to computer science just completely through random circumstance. I wanted to do neuroscience because I thought it was completely fascinating at how the brain works and how, like, you and I are, like, 99.999—we're, like, five-nines the same except for, like, a couple of genetic, whatever. But, like, how our brain wiring right how the neuron, how the electricity flows through it—Corey: Yeah, it feels like I want to store a whole bunch of data, that's okay. I'll remember it. I'll keep it in my head. And you're, like, rolling up the sleeves and grabbing, like, the combination software package off the shelf and a scalpel. Like, “Not yet, but you're about to.” You're right, there is an interesting point of commonality on this. It comes down to almost data organization and the—Sheeri: Yeah.Corey: —relationship between data nodes if that's a fair assessment.Sheeri: Yeah. Well, so what happened was, so I went to university and in order to take introductory neuroscience, I had to take, like, chemistry, organic chemistry, biology, I was basically doing a pre-med track. And so, in the beginning of my junior year, I went to go take introductory neuroscience and I got a D-minus. And a D-minus level doesn't even count for the major. And I'm like, “Well, I want to graduate in three semesters.”And I had this—I got all my requirements done, except for the pesky little major thing. So, I was already starting to take, like, a computer science, you know, basic courses and so I kind of went whole-hog, all-in did four or five computer science courses a semester and got my degree in computer science. Because it was like math, so it kind of came a little easy to me. So taking, you know, logic courses, and you know, linear algebra courses was like, “Yeah, that's great.” And then it was the year 2000, when I got my bachelor's, the turn of the century.And my university offered a fifth-year master's degree program. And I said, I don't know who's going to look at me and say, conscious bias, unconscious bias, “She's a woman, she can't do computer science, so, like, let me just get this master's degree.” I, like, fill out a one page form, I didn't have to take a GRE. And it was the year 2000. You were around back then.You know what it was like. The jobs were like—they were handing jobs out like candy. I literally had a friend who was like, “My company”—that he founded. He's like, just come, you know, it's Monday in May—“Just start, you will just bring your resume the first day and we'll put it on file.” And I was like, no, no, I have this great opportunity to get a master's degree in one year at 25% off the cost because I got a tuition reduction or whatever for being in the program. I was like, “What could possibly go wrong in one year?”And what happened was his company didn't exist the next year, and, like, everyone was in a hiring freeze in 2001. So, it was the best decision I ever made without really knowing because I would have had a job for six months had been laid off with everyone else at the end of 2000 and… and that's it. So, that's how I became a DBA is I, you know, got a master's degree in computer science, really wanted to use databases. There weren't any database jobs in 2001, but I did get a job as a sysadmin, which we now call SREs.Corey: Well, for some of the younger folks in the audience, I do want to call out the fact that regardless of how they think we all rode dinosaurs to school, databases did absolutely exist back in that era. There's a reason that Oracle is as large as it is of a company. And it's not because people just love doing business with them, but technology was head and shoulders above everything else for a long time, to the point where people worked with them in spite of their reputation, not because of it. These days, it seems like in the database universe, you have an explosion of different options and different ways that are great at different things. The best, of course, is Route 53 or other DNS TXT records. Everything else is competing for second place on that. But no matter what it is, you're after, there are options available. This was not the case back then. It was like, you had a few options, all of them with serious drawbacks, but you had to pick your poison.Sheeri: Yeah. In fact, I learned on Postgres in university because you know, that was freely available. And you know, you'd like, “Well, why not MySQL? Isn't that kind of easier to learn?” It's like, yeah, but I went to college from '96 to 2001. MySQL 1.0 or whatever was released in '95. By the time I graduated, it was six years old.Corey: And academia is not usually the early adopter of a lot of emerging technologies like that. That's not a dig on them any because otherwise, you wind up with a major that doesn't exist by the time that the first crop of students graduates.Sheeri: Right. And they didn't have, you know, transactions. They didn't have—they barely had replication, you know? So, it wasn't a full-fledged database at the time. And then I became a MySQL DBA. But yeah, as a systems administrator, you know, we did websites, right? We did what web—are they called web administrators now? What are they called? Web admins? Webmaster?Corey: Web admins, I think that they became subsumed into sysadmins, by and large and now we call them DevOps, or SRE, which means the exact same thing except you get paid 60% more and your primary job is arguing about which one of those you're not.Sheeri: Right. Right. Like we were still separated from network operations, but database stuff that stuff and, you know, website stuff, it's stuff we all did, back when your [laugh] webmail was your Horde based on PHP and you had a database behind it. And yeah, it was fun times.Corey: I worked at a whole bunch of companies in that era. And that's where basically where I formed my early opinion of a bunch of DBA-leaning sysadmins. Like the DBA in and a lot of these companies, it was, I don't want to say toxic, but there's a reason that if I were to say, “I'm writing a memoir about a career track in tech called The Legend of Surly McBastard,” people are going to say, “Oh, is it about the DBA?” There's a reason behind this. It always felt like there was a sense of elitism and a sense of, “Well, that's not my job, so you do your job, but if anything goes even slightly wrong, it's certainly not my fault.” And to be fair, all of these fields have evolved significantly since then, but a lot of those biases that started early in our career are difficult to shake, particularly when they're unconscious.Sheeri: They are. I'd never ran into that person. Like, I never ran into anyone who—like a developer who treated me poorly because the last DBA was a jerk and whatever, but I heard a lot of stories, especially with things like granting access. In fact, I remember, my first job as an actual DBA and not as a sysadmin that also the DBA stuff was at an online gay dating site, and the CTO rage-quit. Literally yelled, stormed out of the office, slammed the door, and never came back.And a couple of weeks later, you know, we found out that the customer service guys who were in-house—and they were all guys, so I say guys although we also referred to them as ladies because it was an online gay dating site.Corey: Gals works well too, in those scenarios. “Oh, guys is unisex.” “Cool. So's ‘gals' by that theory. So gals, how we doing?” And people get very offended by that and suddenly, yeah, maybe ‘folks' is not a terrible direction to go in. I digress. Please continue.Sheeri: When they hired me, they were like, are you sure you're okay with this? I'm like, “I get it. There's, like, half-naked men posters on the wall. That's fine.” But they would call they'd be, like, “Ladies, let's go to our meeting.” And I'm like, “Do you want me also?” Because I had to ask because that was when ladies actually might not have included me because they meant, you know.Corey: I did a brief stint myself as the director of TechOps at Grindr. That was a wild experience in a variety of different ways.Sheeri: Yeah.Corey: It's over a decade ago, but it was still this… it was a very interesting experience in a bunch of ways. And still, to this day, it remains the single biggest source of InfoSec nightmares that kept me awake at night. Just because when I'm working at a bank—which I've also done—it's only money, which sounds ridiculous to say, especially if you're in a regulated profession, but here in reality where I'm talking about it, it's I'm dealing instead, with cool, this data leaks, people will die. Most of what I do is not life or death, but that was and that weighed very heavily on me.Sheeri: Yeah, there's a reason I don't work for a bank or a hospital. You know, I make mistakes. I'm human, right?Corey: There's a reason I work on databases for that exact same reason. Please, continue.Sheeri: Yeah. So, the CTO rage-quit. A couple of weeks later, the head of customer service comes to me and be like, “Can we have his spot as an admin for customer service?” And I'm like, “What do you mean?” He's like, “Well, he told us, we had, like, ten slots of permission and he was one of them so we could have have, like, nine people.”And, like, I went and looked, and they put permission in the htaccess file. So, this former CTO had just wielded his power to be like, “Nope, can't do that. Sorry, limitations.” When there weren't any. I'm like, “You could have a hundred. You want every customer service person to be an admin? Whatever. Here you go.” So, I did hear stories about that. And yeah, that's not the kind of DBA I was.Corey: No, it's the more senior you get, the less you want to have admin rights on things. But when I leave a job, like, the number one thing I want you to do is revoke my credentials. Not—Sheeri: Please.Corey: Because I'm going to do anything nefarious; because I don't want to get blamed for it. Because we have a long standing tradition in tech at a lot of places of, “Okay, something just broke. Whose fault is it? Well, who's the most recent person to leave the company? Let's blame them because they're not here to refute the character assassination and they're not going to be angling for a raise here; the rest of us are so let's see who we can throw under the bus that can't defend themselves.” Never a great plan.Sheeri: Yeah. So yeah, I mean, you know, my theory in life is I like helping. So, I liked helping developers as a DBA. I would often run workshops to be like, here's how to do an explain and find your explain plan and see if you have indexes and why isn't the database doing what you think it's supposed to do? And so, I like helping customers as a product manager, right? So…Corey: I am very interested in watching how people start drifting in a variety of different directions. It's a, you're doing product management now and it's an ETL lineage product, it is not something that is directly aligned with your previous positioning in the market. And those career transitions are always very interesting to me because there's often a mistaken belief by people in their career realizing they're doing something they don't want to do. They want to go work in a different field and there's this pervasive belief that, “Oh, time for me to go back to square one and take an entry level job.” No, you have a career. You have experience. Find the orthogonal move.Often, if that's challenging because it's too far apart, you find the half-step job that blends the thing you do now with something a lot closer, and then a year or two later, you complete the transition into that thing. But starting over from scratch, it's why would you do that? I can't quite wrap my head around jumping off the corporate ladder to go climb another one. You very clearly have done a lateral move in that direction into a career field that is surprisingly distant, at least in my view. How'd that happen?Sheeri: Yeah, so after being on call for 18 years or so, [laugh] I decided—no, I had a baby, actually. I had a baby. He was great. And then I another one. But after the first baby, I went back to work, and I was on call again. And you know, I had a good maternity leave or whatever, but you know, I had a newborn who was six, eight months old and I was getting paged.And I was like, you know, this is more exhausting than having a newborn. Like, having a baby who sleeps three hours at a time, like, in three hour chunks was less exhausting than being on call. Because when you have a baby, first of all, it's very rare that they wake up and crying in the midnight it's an emergency, right? Like they have to go to the hospital, right? Very rare. Thankfully, I never had to do it.But basically, like, as much as I had no brain cells, and sometimes I couldn't even go through this list, right: they need to be fed; they need to be comforted; they're tired, and they're crying because they're tired, right, you can't make them go to sleep, but you're like, just go to sleep—what is it—or their diaper needs changing, right? There's, like, four things. When you get that beep of that pager in the middle of the night it could be anything. It could be logs filling up disk space, you're like, “Alright, I'll rotate the logs and be done with it.” You know? It could be something you need snoozed.Corey: “Issue closed. Status, I no longer give a shit what it is.” At some point, it's one of those things where—Sheeri: Replication lag.Corey: Right.Sheeri: Not actionable.Corey: Don't get me started down that particular path. Yeah. This is the area where DBAs and my sysadmin roots started to overlap a bit. Like, as the DBA was great at data analysis, the table structure and the rest, but the backups of the thing, of course that fell to the sysadmin group. And replication lag, it's, “Okay.”“It's doing some work in the middle of the night; that's normal, and the network is fine. And why are you waking me up with things that are not actionable? Stop it.” I'm yelling at the computer at that point, not the person—Sheeri: Right,right.Corey: —to be very clear. But at some point, it's don't wake me up with trivial nonsense. If I'm getting woken up in the middle of the night, it better be a disaster. My entire business now is built around a problem that's business-hours only for that explicit reason. It's the not wanting to deal with that. And I don't envy that, but product management. That's a strange one.Sheeri: Yeah, so what happened was, I was unhappy at my job at the time, and I was like, “I need a new job.” So, I went to, like, the MySQL Slack instance because that was 2018, 2019. Very end of 2018, beginning of 2019. And I said, “I need something new.” Like, maybe a data architect, or maybe, like, a data analyst, or data scientist, which was pretty cool.And I was looking at data scientist jobs, and I was an expert MySQL DBA and it took a long time for me to be able to say, “I'm an expert,” without feeling like oh, you're just ballooning yourself up. And I was like, “No, I'm literally a world-renowned expert DBA.” Like, I just have to say it and get comfortable with it. And so, you know, I wasn't making a junior data scientist's salary. [laugh].I am the sole breadwinner for my household, so at that point, I had one kid and a husband and I was like, how do I support this family on a junior data scientist's salary when I live in the city of Boston? So, I needed something that could pay a little bit more. And a former I won't even say coworker, but colleague in the MySQL world—because is was the MySQL Slack after all—said, “I think you should come at MongoDB, be a product manager like me.”Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by Honeycomb. When production is running slow, it's hard to know where problems originate. Is it your application code, users, or the underlying systems? I've got five bucks on DNS, personally. Why scroll through endless dashboards while dealing with alert floods, going from tool to tool to tool that you employ, guessing at which puzzle pieces matter? Context switching and tool sprawl are slowly killing both your team and your business. You should care more about one of those than the other; which one is up to you. Drop the separate pillars and enter a world of getting one unified understanding of the one thing driving your business: production. With Honeycomb, you guess less and know more. Try it for free at honeycomb.io/screaminginthecloud. Observability: it's more than just hipster monitoring. Corey: If I've ever said, “Hey, you should come work with me and do anything like me,” people will have the blood drain from their face. And like, “What did you just say to me? That's terrible.” Yeah, it turns out that I have very hard to explain slash predict, in some ways. It's always fun. It's always wild to go down that particular path, but, you know, here we are.Sheeri: Yeah. But I had the same question everybody else does, which was, what's a product manager? What does the product manager do? And he gave me a list of things a product manager does, which there was some stuff that I had the skills for, like, you have to talk to customers and listen to them.Well, I've done consulting. I could get yelled at; that's fine. You can tell me things are terrible and I have to fix it. I've done that. No problem with that. Then there are things like you have to give presentations about how features were okay, I can do that. I've done presentations. You know, I started the Boston MySQL Meetup group and ran it for ten years until I had a kid and foisted it off on somebody else.And then the things that I didn't have the skills in, like, running a beta program were like, “Ooh, that sounds fascinating. Tell me more.” So, I was like, “Yeah, let's do it.” And I talked to some folks, they were looking for a technical product manager for MongoDB's sharding product. And they had been looking for someone, like, insanely technical for a while, and they found me; I'm insanely technical.And so, that was great. And so, for a year, I did that at MongoDB. One of the nice things about them is that they invest in people, right? So, my manager left, the team was like, we really can't support someone who doesn't have the product management skills that we need yet because you know, I wasn't a master in a year, believe it or not. And so, they were like, “Why don't you find another department?” I was like, “Okay.”And I ended up finding a place in engineering communications, doing, like, you know, some keynote demos, doing some other projects and stuff. And then after—that was a kind of a year-long project, and after that ended, I ended up doing product management for developer relations at MongoDB. Also, this was during the pandemic, right, so this is 2019, until '21; beginning of 2019, to end of 2020, so it was, you know, three full years. You know, I kind of like woke up from the pandemic fog and I was like, “What am I doing? Do I want to really want to be a content product manager?” And I was like, “I want to get back to databases.”One of the interesting things I learned actually in looking for a job because I did it a couple of times at MongoDB because I changed departments and I was also looking externally when I did that. I had the idea when I became a product manager, I was like, “This is great because now I'm product manager for databases and so, I'm kind of leveraging that database skill and then I'll learn the product manager stuff. And then I can be a product manager for any technical product, right?”Corey: I like the idea. Of some level, it feels like the product managers likeliest to succeed at least have a grounding or baseline in the area that they're in. This gets into the age-old debate of how important is industry-specific experience? Very often you'll see a bunch of job ads just put that in as a matter of course. And for some roles, yeah, it's extremely important.For other roles it's—for example, I don't know, hypothetically, you're looking for someone to fix the AWS bill, it doesn't necessarily matter whether you're a services company, a product company, or a VC-backed company whose primary output is losing money, it doesn't matter because it's a bounded problem space and that does not transform much from company to company. Same story with sysadmin types to be very direct. But the product stuff does seem to get into that industry specific stuff.Sheeri: Yeah, and especially with tech stuff, you have to understand what your customer is saying when they're saying, “I have a problem doing X and Y,” right? The interesting part of my folly in that was that part of the time that I was looking was during the pandemic, when you know, everyone was like, “Oh, my God, it's a seller's market. If you're looking for a job, employers are chomping at the bit for you.” And I had trouble finding something because so many people were also looking for jobs, that if I went to look for something, for example, as a storage product manager, right—now, databases and storage solutions have a lot in common; databases are storage solutions, in fact; but file systems and databases have much in common—but all that they needed was one person with file system experience that had more experience than I did in storage solutions, right? And they were going to choose them over me. So, it was an interesting kind of wake-up call for me that, like, yeah, probably data and databases are going to be my niche. And that's okay because that is literally why they pay me the literal big bucks. If I'm going to go niche that I don't have 20 years of experience and they shouldn't pay me as big a bucks right?Corey: Yeah, depending on what you're doing, sure. I don't necessarily believe in the idea that well you're new to this particular type of role so we're going to basically pay you a lot less. From my perspective it's always been, like, there's a value in having a person in a role. The value to the company is X and, “Well, I have an excuse now to pay you less for that,” has never resonated with me. It's if you're not, I guess, worth—the value-added not worth being paid what the stated rate for a position is, you are probably not going to find success in that role and the role has to change. That has always been my baseline operating philosophy. Not to yell at people on this, but it's, uh, I am very tired of watching companies more or less dunk on people from a position of power.Sheeri: Yeah. And I mean, you can even take the power out of that and take, like, location-based. And yes, I understand the cost of living is different in different places, but why do people get paid differently if the value is the same? Like if I want to get a promotion, right, my company is going to be like, “Well, show me how you've added value. And we only pay your value. We don't pay because—you know, you don't just automatically get promoted after seven years, right? You have to show the value and whatever.” Which is, I believe, correct, right?And yet, there are seniority things, there are this many years experience. And you know, there's the old caveat of do you have ten years experience or do you have two years of experience five times?Corey: That is the big problem is that there has to be a sense of movement that pushes people forward. You're not the first person that I've had on the show and talked to about a 20 year career. But often, I do wind up talking to folks as I move through the world where they basically have one year of experience repeated 20 times. And as the industry continues to evolve and move on and skill sets don't keep current, in some cases, it feels like they have lost touch, on some level. And they're talking about the world that was and still is in some circles, but it's a market in long-term decline as opposed to keeping abreast of what is functionally a booming industry.Sheeri: Their skills have depreciated because they haven't learned more skills.Corey: Yeah. Tech across the board is a field where I feel like you have to constantly be learning. And there's a bit of an evolve-or-die dinosaur approach. And I have some, I do have some fallbacks on this. If I ever decide I am tired of learning and keeping up with AWS, all I have to do is go and work in an environment that uses GovCloud because that's, like, AWS five years ago.And that buys me the five years to find something else to be doing until a GovCloud catches up with the modern day of when I decided to make that decision. That's a little insulting and also very accurate for those who have found themselves in that environment. But I digress.Sheeri: No, and I find it to with myself. Like, I got to the point with MySQL where I was like, okay, great. I know MySQL back and forth. Do I want to learn all this other stuff? Literally just today, I was looking at my DMs on Twitter and somebody DMed me in May, saying, “Hi, ma'am. I am a DBA and how can I use below service: Lambda, Step Functions, DynamoDB, AWS Session Manager, and CloudWatch?”And I was like, “You know, I don't know. I have not ever used any of those technologies. And I haven't evolved my DBA skills because it's been, you know, six years since I was a DBA.” No, six years, four or five? I can't do math.Corey: Yeah. Which you think would be a limiting factor to a DBA but apparently not. One last question that [laugh] I want to ask you, before we wind up calling this a show. You've done an awful lot across the board. As you look at all of it, what is it you would say that you're the most proud of?Sheeri: Oh, great question. What I'm most proud of is my work with WildAid. So, when I was at MongoDB—I referenced a job with engineering communications, and they hired me to be a product manager because they wanted to do a collaboration with a not-for-profit and make a reference application. So, make an application using MongoDB technology and make it something that was going to be used, but people can also see it. So, we made this open-source project called o-fish.And you know, we can give GitHub links: it's github.com/wildaid, and it has—that's the organization's GitHub which we created, so it only has the o-fish projects in it. But it is a mobile and web app where governments who patrol waters, patrol, like, marine protected areas—which are like national parks but in the water, right, so they are these, you know, wildlife preserves in the water—and they make sure that people aren't doing things they shouldn't do: they're not throwing trash in the ocean, they're not taking turtles out of the Galapagos Island area, you know, things like that. And they need software to track that and do that because at the time, they were literally writing, you know, with pencil on paper, and, you know, had stacks and stacks of this paper to do data entry.And MongoDB had just bought the Realm database and had just integrated it, and so there was, you know, some great features about offline syncing that you didn't have to do; it did all the foundational plumbing for you. And then the reason though, that I'm proud of that project is not just because it's pretty freaking cool that, you know, doing something that actually makes a difference in the world and helps fight climate change and all that kind of stuff, the reason I was proud of it is I was the sole product manager. It was the first time that I'd really had sole ownership of a product and so all the mistakes were my own and the credit was my own, too. And so, it was really just a great learning experience and it turned out really well.Corey: There's a lot to be said for pitching in and helping out with good causes in a way that your skill set winds up benefitting. I found that I was a lot happier with a lot of the volunteer stuff that I did when it was instead of licking envelopes, it started being things that I had a bit of proficiency in. “Hey, can I fix your AWS bill?” It turns out as some value to certain nonprofits. You have to be at a certain scale before it makes sense, otherwise it's just easier to maybe not do it that way, but there's a lot of value to doing something that puts good back into the world. I wish more people did that.Sheeri: Yeah. And it's something to do in your off-time that you know is helping. It might feel like work, it might not feel like work, but it gives you a sense of accomplishment at the end of the day. I remember my first job, one of the interview questions was—no, it wasn't. [laugh]. It wasn't an interview question until after I was hired and they asked me the question, and then they made it an interview question.And the question was, what video games do you play? And I said, “I don't play video games. I spend all day at work staring at a computer screen. Why would I go home and spend another 12 hours till three in the morning, right—five in the morning—playing video games?” And they were like, we clearly need to change our interview questions. This was again, back when the dinosaurs roamed the earth. So, people are are culturally sensitive now.Corey: These days, people ask me, “What's your favorite video game?” My answer is, “Twitter.”Sheeri: Right. [laugh]. Exactly. It's like whack-a-mole—Corey: Yeah.Sheeri: —you know? So, for me having a tangible hobby, like, I do a lot of art, I knit, I paint, I carve stamps, I spin wool into yarn. I know that's not a metaphor for storytelling. That is I literally spin wool into yarn. And having something tangible, you work on something and you're like, “Look. It was nothing and now it's this,” is so satisfying.Corey: I really want to thank you for taking the time to speak with me today about where you've been, where you are, and where you're going, and as well as helping me put a little bit more of a human angle on Twitter, which is intensely dehumanizing at times. It turns out that 280 characters is not the best way to express the entirety of what makes someone a person. You need to use a multi-tweet thread for that. If people want to learn more about you, where can they find you?Sheeri: Oh, they can find me on Twitter. I'm @sheeri—S-H-E-E-R-I—on Twitter. And I've started to write a little bit more on my blog at sheeri.org. So hopefully, I'll continue that since I've now told people to go there.Corey: I really want to thank you again for being so generous with your time. I appreciate it.Sheeri: Thanks to you, Corey, too. You take the time to interview people, too, so I appreciate it.Corey: I do my best. Sheeri Cabral, Senior Product Manager of ETL lineage at Collibra. 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 or smash the like and subscribe buttons on the YouTubes, whereas if you've hated it, do exactly the same thing—like and subscribe, hit those buttons, five-star review—but also leave a ridiculous comment where we will then use an ETL pipeline to transform it into something that isn't complete bullshit.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

god amazon tech drop ladies web cloud id status integration careers context ibm oracle route dms technical irs cto vc slack salesforce correct realm screaming gdpr aws github devops grindr lineage php cabral dns mozilla horde lambda senior product manager dba sre infosec mongodb gre ccpa honeycomb galapagos islands mysql fortinet observability webmasters etl postgres california consumer privacy act dmed dbas sres dynamodb corey quinn collibra techops inforce cloudwatch wildaid duckbill group aws glue govcloud chief cloud economist boston convention center last week in aws humblepod guardium

Enterprise Developer Advocacy with Maish Saidel-Keesing

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 5, 2022 30:14

About MaishMaish Saidel-Keesing is a Senior Enterprise Developer Advocate @AWS working on containers and has been working in IT for the past 20 years and with a stronger focus on cloud and automation for the past 7.He has extensive experience with AWS Cloud technologies, DevOps and Agile practices and implementations, containers, Kubernetes, virtualization and, and a number of fun things he has done along the wayHe is constantly trying to bridge the gap between Developers and Operators to allow all of us provide a better service for our customers (and not wake up from pages in the middle of the night). He is an avid practitioner of dissolving silos - educating Ops how to code and explaining to Devs what the hell is OperationsLinks Referenced: @maishsk: https://twitter.com/maishsk duckbillgroup.com: https://duckbillgroup.com TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Fortinet. Fortinet's partnership with AWS is a better-together combination that ensures your workloads on AWS are protected by best-in-class security solutions powered by comprehensive threat intelligence and more than 20 years of cybersecurity experience. Integrations with key AWS services simplify security management, ensure full visibility across environments, and provide broad protection across your workloads and applications. Visit them at AWS re:Inforce to see the latest trends in cybersecurity on July 25-26 at the Boston Convention Center. Just go over to the Fortinet booth and tell them Corey Quinn sent you and watch for the flinch. My thanks again to my friends at Fortinet.Corey: Let's face it, on-call firefighting at 2am is stressful! So there's good news and there's bad news. The bad news is that you probably can't prevent incidents from happening, but the good news is that incident.io makes incidents less stressful and a lot more valuable. incident.io is a Slack-native incident management platform that allows you to automate incident processes, focus on fixing the issues and learn from incident insights to improve site reliability and fix your vulnerabilities. Try incident.io, recover faster and sleep more.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. I'm a cloud economist at The Duckbill Group, and that was a fun thing for me to become because when you're starting to set out to solve a problem, well, what do you call yourself? I find that if you create a job title for yourself, well, no one knows quite how to categorize you and it leads to really interesting outcomes as a result. My guest today did something very similar. Maish Saidel-Keesing is an EntReloper, or Enterprise Developer Advocate, specifically for container services at AWS. Maish, thank you for joining me.Maish: Thank you for having me on the show, Corey. It's great to be here.Corey: So, how did you wind up taking a whole bunch of words such as enterprise, developer, advocate because I feel like the way you really express seniority at big companies, almost as a display of dominance, is to have additional words in your job title, which all those words are very enterprise-y, very business-y, and very serious. And in container services to boot, which is a somewhat interesting culture, just looking at the enterprise adoption of the pattern. And then at AWS, whose entire sense of humor can be distilled down into, “That's not funny.” You have the flexibility to refer to yourself as an EntReloper in public. I love it. Is it just something you started doing? Was there, like, 18 forms of approval you had to go through to do it? How did this happen? I love it.Maish: So, no. I didn't have to go through approval, of course. Same way, you didn't call yourself a cloud economist with anybody else's approval. But I got the idea mostly from you because I love your term of coining everybody who's in developer advocacy or developer relations as a DevReloper. And specifically, the reason that I coined the term of an EntReloper—and actually looked it up on Google to see if anybody had actually used that term before, and no they haven't—it's the fact of I came into the position on the premise of trying to bring the enterprise voice of the customer into developer advocacy.When we speak about developer advocates today, most of them are the people who are the small startups, developers who write the code, and we kind of forget that there is a whole big world outside of, besides small startups, which are these big, massive, behemoth sort of enterprise companies who kind of do things differently because they've been around for many, many years; they have many, many silos inside their organizations. And it's not the most simple thing to open up your laptop, and install whatever software you want on, because some of these people don't even give you admin rights on your laptop, or you're allowed to ssh out to a computer in the cloud because also the same thing: everything is blocked by corporate firewalls where you have to put in a ticket in order to get access to the outside world. I worked in companies like that when I was—before I moved to Amazon. So, I want to bring that perspective to the table on behalf of our customers.Corey: Bias is a very funny thing. I spent the overwhelming majority of my career in small environments like you describe. To me a big company is one that has 200 people there, and it turns out that there's a whole ‘nother sense of scale that goes beyond that. And there's, like, 18 different tiers beyond. But I still bias based upon my own experiences when I talk about how I do things and how I think about things to a certain persona that closely resembles my own experiences where, “Just install this thing as a tool and it'll be great,” ignoring entirely, the very realistic fact that you've got an entire universe out there of people who are not empowered to install things on their own laptop, for example.How is developer advocacy different within enterprises than in the common case of, “We're a startup. We're going to change the world with our amazing SaaS.” Great, maybe you will. Statistically, you won't. But enterprises have different concerns, different challenges, and absolutely a different sense of scale. How is the practice of advocacy different in those environments?Maish: So, I think the fact is, mostly working on standardization from the get-go that these big enterprises want things to work in a standard way where they can control it, they can monitor it, they can log everything, they can secure it mostly, of course, the most important thing. But it's also the fact that as a developer advocate, you don't always talk to developers within the enterprise. You also have to talk to the security team and to the network team and to the business itself or the C-level to understand. And as you also probably have found out as well in your job, you connect the people with inside the business one to another, these different groups, and get them talking to each other to make these decisions together. So, we act as kind of a bridge in between the people with inside their own company where they don't really talk to each other, or don't have the right connections, or the right conduit in order for them to start that conversation and make things better for themselves.Corey: On some level, my line about developer relations, developer advocacy, has generally taken the track of, “What does that mean? Well, it means you work in marketing, but they're scared to tell you that.” Do you view what you do as being within marketing, aligned with marketing, subtly different and I'm completely wrong, et cetera, et cetera? All positions are legitimate, by the way.Maish: So, I think, at the position that I'm currently in, which is a developer advocate but for the service team, is slightly different than a marketing developer advocate. The marketing developer advocate—and we have many of them which are amazing people and doing amazing work within AWS—their job is to teach everybody about the services and the capabilities available within AWS. That is also part of my job, but I would think that is the 40% of my job. I also go on stage, I go on podcasts like this, I present at conferences, I write blog posts. I also do the kind of marketing work as well.But the other 60% of my job as a service developer advocate is to seek out the feedback, or the signals, or the sentiment from our customers, and bring that back into the service teams, into the product management, into the engineering teams. And, as I said, sit as the enterprise customer in the chair in those meetings, to voice their concerns… their opinions, how they would like the products to go, how we can make the products better. So, the 60% is mostly what we call inbound, which is taking feedback from our customers back into the service teams directly in order to have some influence on the roadmap. And 40% is the outbound work, which we do, as I said, conferences, blog posts, and things like this.Corey: I have a perception. And I am thrilled to be corrected on this because it's not backed by data; it's backed by my own biases—and some people tend to conflate the two; I strive not to—that there's a—I think the term that I heard bandied around at one point was ‘the dark matter developers.' These are folks that primarily work in .NET or Java. They work for companies that are not themselves tech companies, but rather tech is a supporting function, usually in a central IT-style organization, that supports what the business actually does, and they generally are not visible to a lot of traditional developer advocacy approaches.They, by and large, don't go to conferences, they don't go on Twitter to yell at people about things, they commit the terrible sin—according to many startup folks—of daring to view the craft of writing software as this artistic thing, and they just view it as a job and a thing to make money for—filthy casuals—as opposed to this higher calling that's changing the world. Which I think is wild take. But there are a tremendous number of people out there who do fit the profile of they show up, they do their jobs working on this stuff, they don't go to conferences, they don't go out into the community, and they just do their job and go home. The end. Is that an accurate perception? Are there large swaths of folks like that in the industry, and if so, do they centralize or congregate more around enterprises than they do around smaller companies?Maish: I think that your perception is correct. Specifically, for my experience, when I worked, for example, my first two years before I was a developer advocate, I was an enterprise solutions architect which I worked with financial institutions, which are banks, which usually have software which are older than me, which are written in languages, which are older than I am. So, there are people which, as they say, they come there to—they do their job. They're not interested in looking at Twitter, or writing blog posts, or participating in any kind of thing which is outgoing. And they just, they're there to write the code. They go home at the end of the day.They also usually don't have pagers that page them in middle of the night because that's what you have operations teams for, not developers because they're completely different entities. So, I do think your perception might be correct, yes. There are people like that when you say, these dark matter people, dark matter developers.Corey: And I don't have any particular problem. I'm not here to cast shade on anything that they're doing, to be very clear.Maish: Not at all.Corey: Everyone makes different choices and that's great. I don't think necessarily everyone should have a job that is all-consuming, that eats them alive. I wish I didn't, some days. [laugh]. The challenge I have for you then is, as an EntReloper, how do you reach folks in positions like that? Or don't you?Maish: I think the way to reach those people is to firstly, expose them to technology, expose them to the capabilities that they can use in AWS in the cloud, specifically with my position in container services, and gain their trust because that's one of the LPs in Amazon itself: customer obsession. And we work consistently in order to—with our customers to gain their trust and help them along their journey, whatever it may be. If it might be the fact, okay, I only want to write software for nine to five and go home and do everything afterwards, which most normal people do without having to worry about work, or they still want to continue working and adopt the full model of you build it, you own it; manage everything in production on their own and go into the new world of modern software, which many enterprises, unfortunately, are not all the way there yet, but hopefully, they will get there sooner than later.Corey: There's a misguided perception in many corners that you have to be able to reach everyone at all times; wherever they are, you have to be able to go there. I don't think that's true. I think that showing up and badgering people who are just trying to get a job done into, “Hey, have you heard the good word of cloud?” It's like, evangelists knocking on your door at seven o'clock in the morning on a weekend and you're trying to sleep in because the kids are somewhere else for the week. Yeah, I might be projecting a little bit on that.I think that is the wrong direction to go. And I find that being able and willing to meet people where they are is key to success on this. I'm also a big believer in the idea that in any kind of developer advocacy role, regardless whether their targets are large, small, or in my case, patently ridiculous because my company is in fact ridiculous in some ways, you have to meet them where they are. There's no choice around that. Do you find that there are very different concerns that you have to wind up addressing with your audience versus a more, “Mainstream,” quote-unquote, developer advocacy role?Maish: For the enterprise audience, they need to, I would say, relate to what we're talking to. For an example, I gave a talk a couple of weeks ago on the AWS Summit here in Tel Aviv, of how to use App Runner. So, instead of explaining to the audiences how you use the console, this is what it does, you can deploy here, this is how the deployments work, blue, green, et cetera, et cetera, I made up an imaginary company and told the story of how the three people in the startup of this company would start working using App Runner in order to make the thing more relatable, something which people can hopefully remember and understand, okay, this is something which I would do as a startup, or this is what my project, which I'm doing or starting to work on, something I can use. So, to answer your question, in two words, tell stories instead of demo products.Corey: It feels like that's a… heavy lift, in many cases, because I guess it's also partially a perception issue on my part, where I'm looking at this across the board, where I see a company that has 5000 developers working there and, like, how do you wind up getting them to adopt cloud, or adopt new practices, or change anything? It feels like it's a Herculean, impossible task. But in practice, I feel like you don't try and do all of that at once. You start with small teams, you start with specific projects, and move on. Is that directionally accurate?Maish: Completely accurate. There's no way to move a huge mothership in one direction at one time. You have to do, as you say, start small, find the projects, which are going to bring value to the company or the business, and start small with those projects and those small teams, and continue that education within the organization and help the people with your teaching or introducing them to the cloud, to help others within inside their own organization. Make them, or enable them, or empower them to become leaders within their own organization. That's what I tried to do, at least.Corey: You and I have a somewhat similar background, which is weird given that we've just spent a fair bit of time talking about how different our upbringings were in tech at scales of companies and whatnot, but we're alike in that we are both fairly crusty, old operations-side folks, sysadmins—Maish: [laugh]. Yep.Corey: —grumpy people.Maish: Grumpy old sysadmins. Yeah, exactly.Corey: Exactly. Because do you ever notice there's never a happy one? Imagine that. And DevOps was always a meeting of the development and operations, meaning everyone's unhappy. And there's a school of thought that—like, I used to think that, “Oh, this is just what we call sysadmins once they want a better title and more money, but it's still the same job.”But then I started meeting a bunch of DevOps types who had come from the exact opposite of our background, where they were software developers and then they wound up having to learn not so much how the code stuff works the way that we did, but rather how systems work, how infrastructure works. Compare and contrast those for me. Who makes, I guess, the more successful DevOps engineer when you look at it through that lens?Maish: So, I might be crucified for this on the social media from a number of people from the other side of the fence, but I have the firm belief that the people who make the best DevOps engineers—and I hate that term—but people who move DevOps initiatives or changes or transformations with organization is actually the operations people because they usually have a broader perspective of what is going on around them besides writing code. Too many times in my career, I've been burned by DNS, by a network cable, by a power outage, by somebody making a misconfiguration in the Puppet module, or whatever it might have been, somebody wrote it to deploy to 15,000 machines, whatever it may be. These are things where developers, at least my perception of what developers have been doing up until now, don't really do that. In a previous organization I used to work for, the fact was, there was a very, very clear delineation about between the operations people, and the developers who wrote the software. We had very hard times getting them into rotations for on-call, we had very hard times educating them about the fact that not every single log line has to be written to the log because it doesn't interest anybody.But from developer perspective, of course, we need that log because we need to know what's happening in the end. But there are 15, different thousand… turtles all the way down, which have implications about the number of log lines which are written into a piece of software. So, I am very much of the belief that the people that make the best DevOps engineers—if we can use that term still today—are actually people which come from an operations background because it's easier to teach them how to write code or become a programmer than the other way round of teaching a developer how to become an operations person. So, the change or the move from one direction from operations to adding the additional toil of writing software is much easier to accomplish than the other way around, from a developer learning how to run infrastructure at scale.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friend EnterpriseDB. EnterpriseDB has been powering enterprise applications with PostgreSQL for 15 years. And now EnterpriseDB has you covered wherever you deploy PostgreSQL on-premises, private cloud, and they just announced a fully-managed service on AWS and Azure called BigAnimal, all one word. Don't leave managing your database to your cloud vendor because they're too busy launching another half-dozen managed databases to focus on any one of them that they didn't build themselves. Instead, work with the experts over at EnterpriseDB. They can save you time and money, they can even help you migrate legacy applications—including Oracle—to the cloud. To learn more, try BigAnimal for free. Go to biganimal.com/snark, and tell them Corey sent you.Corey: I once believed much the same because—and it made sense coming from the background that I was in. Everyone intellectually knows that if you're having trouble with a piece of equipment, have you made sure that it's plugged in? Yes, everyone knows that intellectually. But there's something about having worked on a thing for three hours that wasn't working and only discover it wasn't plugged in, that really sears that lesson into your bones. The most confidence-inspiring thing you can ever hear from someone an operations role is, “Oh, I've seen this problem before. Here's how we fixed it.”It feels like there are no junior DevOps engineers, for lack of a better term. And for a long time, I believed that the upcoming and operational side of the world were in fact, the better DevOps types. And in the fullness of time, I think a lot of that—at least my position on it—was rooted in some level of insecurity because I didn't know how to write code and the thing that I saw happening was my job that I had done historically was eroding. Today, I don't know that it's possible to be in the operation space and not be at least basically conversant with how code works. There's a reason most of these job interviews turn into algorithm hazing.And my articulation of it was rooted, for me at least—at least in a small way—in a sense of defensiveness and wanting to validate the thing that I had done with my career that I defined myself by, I was under threat. And obviously, the thing that I do is the best thing because otherwise it's almost a tacit admission that I made poor career choices at some point. And I don't think that's true, either. But for me, at least psychologically, it was very much centered in that. And honestly, I found that the right answer for me was, in fact, neither of those two things because I have met a couple of people in my life that I would consider to be full-stack engineers.And there's a colloquialism these days, that means oh, you do front-end and back-end. Yeah. The people I'm thinking of did front-end, they did back-end, they did mobile software, they did C-level programming, they wrote their own freaking device drivers at one point. Like, they have done basically everything. And they were the sort of person you could throw any technical issue whatsoever at and get out of their way because it was going to get solved. Those people are, as it turns out, the best. Like, who does a better job developer or operations, folks? Yes. Specifically, both of those things together.Maish: Exactly.Corey: And I think that is a hard thing to talk about. I think that it's a hard—it's certainly a hard thing to find. It turns out that there's a reason that I only know two or three of those folks in the course of my entire career. They're out there, but they're really, really hard to track down.Maish: I completely agree.Corey: A challenge that I hear articulated in some cases—and while we're saying things that are going to get us yelled out on social media, let's go for the fences on this one—a concern that comes up when talking about enterprises moving to cloud is that they have a bunch of existing sysadmin types—while we're on the topic—and well, those people need to learn to work within cloud. And the reality is, in many cases that first, that's a whole new skill set that not everyone is going to be willing or able to pick up. For those who can they have just found that their market rate has effectively doubled. And that seems, on some level, to pose a significant challenge to companies undergoing this, and the larger the company, the more significant the challenge.Because it's my belief that you pay market rate for the talent you have whether you want to or not. And if companies don't increase compensation, these people will leave for things that double their income. And if they raise compensation internally, good for them, but that does have a massive drag on their budget that may not have been accounted for in a lot of the TCO analyses. How do you find that the companies you talk to wind up squaring that circle?Maish: I don't think I have a correct answer for that. I do completely agree—Corey: Oh, I'm not convinced there's a correct answer at all. I'm just trying [laugh] to figure out how to even think about it.Maish: I… have seen this as well in companies which I used to work for and companies that were customers that I have also worked with as part of my tenure in AWS. It's the fact of, when companies are trying to move to the cloud and they start upskilling their people, there's always the concern in the back of their mind of the fact, “Okay, I'm now training this person with new technology. I'm investing time, I'm investing money. And why would I do this if I know that, for example, as soon as I finish this, I'm going to have to just say, I have to pay them more because they can go somewhere else and get the same job with a better pay? So, why would we invest amount of time and resources into upscaling the people?”And these are questions which I have received and conversations which I've had with customers many times over the last two, three years. And the answer, from my perspective always, is the fact is because, number one, you're making the world a better place. Number two, you're making your employees feel more appreciated, giving them better knowledge. And if you're afraid of the fact of teaching somebody to become better is going to have negative effects on your organization then, unfortunately, you deserve to have that person leave and let them find a better job because you're not taking good care of your people. And it's sometimes hard for companies to hear that.Sometimes we get, “You know what? You're completely right.” Sometimes I don't agree with you because I need to compete there, get to the bottom line, and make sure that I stay within my budget or my TCO. But the most important thing is to have the conversation, let people hear different ideas, see how it can benefit them, not only by giving people more options to maybe leave the company, but it can actually make their whole organization a lot better in the long run.Corey: I think that you have to do right by people because reputations last a long time. Even at big companies it becomes a very slow thing to change and almost impossible to do in the short term. So, people tell stories when they feel wronged. That becomes a problem. I do want to pivot a little bit because you're not merely an EntReloper; you are an EntReloper specifically focusing on container services.Maish: Correct.Corey: Increasingly, I am viewing containers as what amounts to effectively a packaging format. That is the framework through which I am increasingly seeing. How are you seeing customers use containers? Is that directionally correct? Is it completely moonbat stuff compared to what you're seeing in the wild, or something else?Maish: I don't think it's a packaging format; I think it's more as an accelerator to enable the customers to develop in a more modern way with using twelve-factor apps with modern technology and not necessarily have their own huge, sticky, big monolith of whatever it might be, written in C# or whatever, or C++ whatever it may be, as they've been using up until now, but they now have the option and the technology and the background in order to split it up into smaller services and develop in the way that most of the modern world—or at least, the what we perceive as the modern world—is developing and creating applications today.Corey: I feel like on some level, containers were a radical change to how companies envisioned software. They definitely provide a path of modernizing things that were very tied to hardware previously. It let some companies even just leapfrog the virtualization migration that they'd been considering doing. But, on some level, I also feel like it runs counter to the ideas of DevOps, where you have development and operations working in partnership, where now it's like, welp, inside the container is a development thing and outside the container, ops problem now. It feels almost, on some level, like, it reinforces a wall. But in a lot of cultures and a lot of companies, that wall is there and there's no getting rid of it anytime soon. So, I confess that I'm conflicted on that.Maish: I think you might be right, and it depends, of course, on the company and the company culture, but what I think that companies need to do is understand that there will never be one hundred percent of people writing software that want to know one hundred percent of how the underlying infrastructure works. And the opposite direction as well: that there will never be people which maintain infrastructure and understand how computers and CPUs and memory buses and NUMA works on motherboards, that they don't need to know how to write the most beautiful enticing and wonderful software for programs, for the world. There's always going to have to be a compromise of who's going to be doing this or who's going to be doing that, and how comfortable they are with taking at least part of the responsibility of the other side into their own realm of what they should be doing. So, there's going to be a compromise on both sides, but there is some kind of divide today of separating, okay, you just write the Helm chart for your Kubernetes Pod spec, or your ECS task, or whatever task definition, whatever you would like. And don't worry about the things in the background because they're just going to magically happen in the end. But they do have to understand exactly what is happening at the background in the end because if something goes wrong, and of course, something will go wrong, eventually, one day somewhere, somehow, they're going to have to know how to take care of it.Corey: I really want to thank you for taking the time to speak with me today about, well, I guess a wide ranging variety of topics, some of which will absolutely inspire people to take to their feet—or at least their Twitter accounts—and tell us, “You know what your problem is?” And I honestly live for that. If you don't evoke that kind of reaction on some level, have you ever really had an opinion in the first place? So, I'm looking forward to that. If people want to learn more about you, your beliefs, call set beliefs misguided, et cetera, et cetera, where's the best place to find you?Maish: So, I'm on Twitter under @maishsk. I assume that will be in the [show notes 00:26:31]. I pontificate some time on technology, on cooking every now and again, on Friday before the end of the weekend, a little bit of politics, but you can find me @maishsk on Twitter. Or maishsk everywhere else social that's possible.Corey: Excellent. We will toss links to that, of course, in the [show notes 00:26:50]. Thank you so much for being so generous with your time. I appreciate it.Maish: Thank you very much, Corey. It was fun.Corey: Maish Saidel-Keesing, EntReloper of container services at AWS. 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 it, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an angry comment that your 5000 enterprise developer colleagues can all pile on.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

amazon google cloud integration oracle saas developers enterprise slack mainstream compare tel aviv agile puppets screaming aws java helm devops azure numa devs ops lps operators dns kubernetes statistically herculean cpus fortinet ecs tco postgresql developer advocacy aws cloud corey quinn aws summit inforce duckbill group enterprisedb chief cloud economist boston convention center last week in aws humblepod

Hospital Entrances Lined With Boston Marathon Daffodils

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 17, 2020 0:47

The Boston Convention Center has been dubbed Boston Hope after being transformed into a field hospital. It's now been decorated with daffodils that line the entrance, which were intended to line the Boston Marathon race route. WBZ NewsRadio's James Rojas reports.

covid-19 coronavirus hospitals field convention boston marathon rojas daffodils lined entrances boston convention center

Hospital Entrances Lined With Boston Marathon Daffodils

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 17, 2020 0:47

covid-19 coronavirus hospitals field convention boston marathon rojas daffodils lined entrances james rojas boston convention center

Seafood Expo North America In Boston Postponed Amid Coronavirus Concerns

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 4, 2020 0:34

WBZ NewsRadio's James Rojas reports on the postponing of the 40th North American Seafood Expo which was planned for March 15-17 at the Boston Convention Center.

coronavirus concerns amid convention expo canceled rojas seafood postponed seafood expo north america boston convention center

Seafood Expo North America In Boston Postponed Amid Coronavirus Concerns

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 4, 2020 0:34

WBZ NewsRadio's James Rojas reports on the postponing of the 40th North American Seafood Expo which was planned for March 15-17 at the Boston Convention Center.

coronavirus concerns amid convention expo canceled rojas seafood postponed james rojas seafood expo north america boston convention center

Sony Drops Out Of PAX East Over Coronavirus Concerns