Podcasts about cisco

Tae Hea Nahm is a venture capitalist who has invested in over 200 B2B companies leading to 11 unicorns like Marketo, TalkDesk, and Workato. Tae Hea is also the founding CEO of software startup, Airspace (who sold to Cisco for $450 Million) and the co-author of Survival to Thrival. In Today’s show Tae Hea talks about his four steps for nailing your go to market fit so you can unlock your growth and scale your company. He uses a great metaphor of a surfer to hit the point home. We pick apart the steps from Nailing the Customer Journey and solving your customer’s urgent pain (the wave), building the go to market playbook (the surfboard), Operationalizing the playbook and allowing marketing and sales to work together all being backed by clear metrics or magic numbers (continuing to ride the wave). If you are a believer in frameworks for scale, this episode is for you! What You Will Learn What it means to “catch an emerging wave” when starting a business Founder-led growth vs repeatable process-led growth What “go-to-market fit” is, and how it’s all derived from repeatable processes Tae Hea’s surfer metaphor for directed towards B2B CEO’s Why it’s so important to focus the entire customer journey on transforming your customer to a hero The four steps to take when going to market from Tae Hea’s book, Survival to Thrival Why it’s important to clearly identify when your customer receives their first piece of value Where marketing and sales hand off responsibilities in the customer pipeline Why it’s so important, as an investor, to see the business from the founder’s eyes in order to provide guidance effectively Bio: Tae Hea co-founded Storm Ventures, an early stage VC fund based in Silicon Valley and investing worldwide. Storm has invested in nearly 200 B2B software companies leading to 11 unicorns, including Marketo, Pipedrive, Solarisbank, Talkdesk and Workato. At Storm, Tae Hea was the founding CEO of Airespace, a B2B startup, which was later sold to Cisco for $450m. Based on his experience, Tae Hea also co-authored Survival To Thrival to help founders unlock growth by finding go-to-market fit. Tae Hea majored in applied math at Harvard and has a JD from University of Chicago Law School. He was born in Seoul, Korea. Quotes: 07:29 - “The first thing we looked at is, ‘Is there an emerging wave?’ And creating your own wave is almost impossible.” - Tae Hea Nahm 08:05 - “People are only founders, generally, if they’re really passionate about something.” - Tae Hea Nahm 12:00 - “You need product/market fit to have that product-happy customer and the best indicator is retention.” - Tae Hea Nahm 12:50 - “In B2C, you only need the product/market fit but for B2B you need both: product/market fit and go-to-market fit.” - Tae Hea Nahm 15:39 - “That’s how we want to give people the visual feeling of how to unlock growth, is to go from paddling to surfing and become a surfing unicorn.” - Tae Hea Nahm 19:24 - “The most important thing in catching the wave is to identify the urgent pain for your ideal customer profile.” -Tae Hea Nahm 24:07 - “The first step, we say, is you have to nail your customer journey. Where you start, where you end, and every step along the way.” -Tae Hea

In this "Throwback Tuesday" HCI Podcast episode, Dr. Jonathan H. Westover (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathanhwestover/) talks with Ayelet Baron about the future of work and the need for greater conscious leadership (Originally Aired May 14, 2021). See the video here: https://youtu.be/Vjf1B0qyjoU. Ayelet Baron (https://www.linkedin.com/in/ayeletbaron/) is an award winning author, global futurist and healer. She is the former chief strategy and innovation officer for Cisco Canada, where she helped Canada become the #2 revenue generating country for Cisco. Ayelet was on the executive leadership team for IT, Emerging Markets, and Global Sales Strategy. Ayelet has been named by Forbes as one of the top 50 global female futurists, and ranks as one of the top 50 global thought leaders by Thinkers360 in Future Work, Organizational Change Management, Culture, Sustainability and B2B. Her award winning leadership book, Our Journey to Corporate Sanity, outlines seven signposts for creating healthy organizations. Her latest trilogy, F*ck the Bucket List, guides us to explore the illusions of a dying world and asks us to step into another potential, one rooted in the heart of courage and emerging self-awareness. As a futurist for humanity, Ayelet now offers guidance to conscious leaders who are ready to trek into the unknown through her writing, talks, guided sessions and custom project work. Please leave a review wherever you listen to your podcasts! Check out the LinkedIn Alchemizing Human Capital Newsletter: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/alchemizing-human-capital-6884351526333227008/. Check out Dr. Westover's book, 'Bluer than Indigo' Leadership, here: https://www.innovativehumancapital.com/bluerthanindigo. Check out Dr. Westover's book, The Alchemy of Truly Remarkable Leadership, here: https://www.innovativehumancapital.com/leadershipalchemy. Check out the latest issue of the Human Capital Leadership magazine, here: https://www.innovativehumancapital.com/hci-magazine. Ranked #6 Performance Management Podcast: https://blog.feedspot.com/performance_management_podcasts/ Ranked #6 Workplace Podcast: https://blog.feedspot.com/workplace_podcasts/ Ranked #7 HR Podcast: https://blog.feedspot.com/hr_podcasts/ Ranked #12 Talent Management Podcast: https://blog.feedspot.com/talent_management_podcasts/ Ranked in the Top 20 Personal Development and Self-Improvement Podcasts: https://blog.feedspot.com/personal_development_podcasts/ Ranked in the Top 30 Leadership Podcasts: https://blog.feedspot.com/leadership_podcasts/ --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/hcipodcast/support

From flipping hamburgers on Main Street to leading HR for Wall Street, Paul has continually reinvented his distinctive voice to thrive within the craziness of our ever-chaotic world. As an Impostor Syndrome survivor,  Paul has learned to tame his fake and fraud voice and has successfully coached hundreds of leaders and teams to celebrate their Impostor and find their voice of confidence so that they share their inspiration with others. His practical, and sometimes laughable, life experiences led him to author the award-winning coaching book, “Find Your VOICE as a Leader”™ (2016, Aviva Publishing). Paul's coaching portfolio includes working with the talented global teams and leaders at Twitter, Microsoft, Electronic Arts, SAP and Cisco along with many successful life entrepreneurs looking to make their mark on our world.  A certified Marshall Goldsmith Stakeholder Center Coach, a contributing author with Forbes Coaches Council, and the Founder of the Find Your V.O.I.C.E. as a Leader™ Institute, he offers transformative coaching journeys to find & use your distinctive voice of strength to be your best self.   Introducing Paul N Larsen What problem do you solve? He is going to help people celebrate their imposter syndrome so they can thrive with it and not just survive. What three questions are you going to answer for us today? What is impostor syndrome? How do I know when I'm experiencing impostor syndrome versus just having a bad day? What are the steps I can do to integrate it, celebrate it, and overcome it? What can I do that's easy? Show Notes: An easy way to think of impostor syndrome is that it's when we think we have to be somebody else to be successful. You can be a very confident impostor. It's what is happening inside us in our mind that says, "No, you have to be somebody else in order to be successful." The pandemic has offered us an opportunity to open our mind and ask what are we thinking in here? We are so choosy. We let any thought in. The average adult can process more than 12,000 thoughts a day. If we let thoughts nest, they fester. Thoughts have a negativity bias and often come from the day before. We experience impostor syndrome when we have feelings that we're kind of a fake and a fraud in what we're doing. 90% of successful professionals have experienced impostor syndrome at least once in their life. New experiences can make you feel like you're faking it. We feel like we'll be "found out" and someone will say they realize we don't know what we're doing and we must leave. Realize that you are not a fake or a fraud. You have FEELINGS that you are. At the heart of hearts, impostor syndrome is trying to protect us from messing up (if we mess up we can learn). It's a part of me, so I'm gonna make it work for me. Celebrate the voice and realize it means you have room for growth. Take baby steps to help dilute the voice. Recognize impostor syndrome for what it is. Recognize the value of who you are. Stop and take a breath. If I can do it, then anyone can. Paul N Larsen's Recharge Round What habit do you think has led to success in your life? Paul's biggest habit was finding his voice. He then discovered his values, established his outcomes, demonstrated his influence to himself, revealed his courage, and created a lasting expression. If you had one do-over, what would it be? He would spend more time with the people that really matter. Connect with Paul: Paul's website: paulnlarsen.com LinkedIn Facebook Twitter Instagram Learn more about Gary's Mastermind group at goascend.biz/mastermind/

629: In this interview, Jacqueline goes in-depth on the future of work and what changes in culture will come about as a result. Jacqui begins with her purview as a CIO and technology leader at one of the most influential technology companies on the market and how she has curated her team over her three years in-role. She shares lessons on building a strong company culture and maintaining that culture during a hybrid working environment. Jacqui also talks about Cisco's Customer Zero program, the future of work, and how the role of the CIO has evolved. Finally, Jacqui shares a personal story about her career journey, discusses improving the number of women in technology roles, and trends in technology as she looks ahead.

About MaciejMaciej Winnicki is a serverless enthusiast with over 6 years of experience in writing software with no servers whatsoever. Serverless Engineer at Stedi, Cloudash Founder, ex-Engineering Manager, and one of the early employees at Serverless Inc.Links: Cloudash: https://cloudash.dev Maciej Winnicki Twitter: https://twitter.com/mthenw Tomasz Łakomy Twitter: https://twitter.com/tlakomy Cloudash email: hello@cloudash.dev 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 byLaunchDarkly. Take a look at what it takes to get your code into production. I'm going to just guess that it's awful because it's always awful. No one loves their deployment process. What if launching new features didn't require you to do a full-on code and possibly infrastructure deploy? What if you could test on a small subset of users and then roll it back immediately if results aren't what you expect? LaunchDarkly does exactly this. To learn more, visitlaunchdarkly.com and tell them Corey sent you, and watch for the wince.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Rising Cloud, which I hadn't heard of before, but they're doing something vaguely interesting here. They are using AI, which is usually where my eyes glaze over and I lose attention, but they're using it to help developers be more efficient by reducing repetitive tasks. So, the idea being that you can run stateless things without having to worry about scaling, placement, et cetera, and the rest. They claim significant cost savings, and they're able to wind up taking what you're running as it is in AWS with no changes, and run it inside of their data centers that span multiple regions. I'm somewhat skeptical, but their customers seem to really like them, so that's one of those areas where I really have a hard time being too snarky about it because when you solve a customer's problem and they get out there in public and say, “We're solving a problem,” it's very hard to snark about that. Multus Medical, Construx.ai and Stax have seen significant results by using them. And it's worth exploring. So, if you're looking for a smarter, faster, cheaper alternative to EC2, Lambda, or batch, consider checking them out. Visit risingcloud.com/benefits. That's risingcloud.com/benefits, and be sure to tell them that I said you because watching people wince when you mention my name is one of the guilty pleasures of listening to this podcast.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn. And my guest today is Maciej Winnicki, who is the founder of Cloudash. Now, before I dive into the intricacies of what that is, I'm going to just stake out a position that one of the biggest painful parts of working with AWS in any meaningful sense, particularly in a serverless microservices way, is figuring out what the hell's going on in the environment. There's a bunch of tools offered to do this and they're all—yeee, they aspire to mediocrity. Maciej, thank you for joining me today.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn. And my guest today is Maciej Winnicki, who is the founder of Cloudash. Now, before I dive into the intricacies of what that is, I'm going to just stake out a position that one of the biggest painful parts of working with AWS in any meaningful sense, particularly in a serverless microservices way, is figuring out what the hell's going on in the environment. There's a bunch of tools offered to do this and they're all—yeee, they aspire to mediocrity. Maciej, thank you for joining me today.Maciej: Thank you for having me.Corey: So, I turned out to have accidentally blown up Cloudash, sort of before you were really ready for the attention. You, I think, tweeted about it or put it on Hacker News or something; I stumbled over it because it turns out that anything that vaguely touches cloud winds up in my filters because of awesome technology, and personality defects on my part. And I tweeted about it as I set it up and got the thing running, and apparently this led to a surge of attention on this thing that you've built. So, let me start off with an apology. Oops, I didn't realize it was supposed to be a quiet launch.Maciej: I actually thank you for that. Like, that was great. And we get a lot of attention from your tweet thread, actually because at the end, that was the most critical part. At the end of the twitter, you wrote that you're staying as a customer, so we have it on our website and this is perfect. But actually, as you said, that's correct.Our marketing strategy for releasing Cloudash was to post it on LinkedIn. I know this is not, kind of, the best strategy, but that was our plan. Like, it was like, hey, like, me and my friend, Tomasz, who's also working on Cloudash, we thought like, let's just post it on LinkedIn and we'll see how it goes. And accidentally, I'm receiving a notification from Twitter, “Hey, Corey started tweeting about it.” And I was like, “Oh, my God, I'm having a heart attack.” But then I read the, you know—Corey: Oops.Maciej: [laugh]. Yeah. I read the, kind of, conclusion, and I was super happy. And again, thank you for that because this is actually when Cloudash kind of started rolling as a product and as a, kind of, business. So yeah, that was great.Corey: To give a little backstory and context here is, I write a whole bunch of serverless nonsense. I build API's Gateway, I hook them up to Lambda's Function, and then it sort of kind of works. Ish. From there, okay, I would try and track down what was going on because in a microservices land, everything becomes a murder mystery; you're trying to figure out what's broken, and things have exploded. And I became a paying customer of IOpipe. And then New Relic bought them. Well, crap.Then I became a paying customer of Epsagon. And they got acquired by Cisco, at which point I immediately congratulated the founders, who I know on a social basis, and then closed my account because I wanted to get out before Cisco ruins it because, Cisco. Then it was, what am I going to use next? And right around that time is when I stumbled across Cloudash. And it takes a different approach than any other entity in the space that I've seen because you are a native Mac desktop app. I believe your Mac only, but you seem to be Electron, so I could be way off base on that.Maciej: So, we're Linux as well right now and soon we'll be Windows as well. But yeah, so, right now is Mac OS and Linux. Yeah, that's correct. So, our approach is a little bit different.So, let me start by saying what's Cloudash? Like, Cloudash is a desktop app for, kind of, monitoring and troubleshooting serverless architectures services, like, serverless stuff in general. And the approach that we took is a little bit different because we are not web-based, we're desktop-based. And there's a couple of advantages of that approach. The first one is that, like, you don't need to share your data with us because we're not, kind of, downloading your metrics and logs to our back end and to process them, et cetera, et cetera. We are just using the credentials, the AWS profiles that you have defined on your computer, so nothing goes out of your AWS account.And I think this is, like, considering, like, from the security perspective, this is very crucial. You don't need to create a role that you give us access to or anything like that. You just use the stuff that you have on your desktop, and everything stays on your AWS account. So, nothing—we don't download it, we don't process it, we don't do anything from that. And that's one approach—well, that's the one advantage. The other advantage is, like, kind of, onboarding, as I kind of mentioned because we're using the AWS profiles that you have defined in your computer.Corey: Well, you're doing significantly more than that because I have a lot of different accounts configured different ways, and when I go to one of them that uses SSO, it automatically fires me off to the SSO login page if I haven't logged in that day for a 12 hour session—Maciej: Yes.Corey: —for things that have credentials stored locally, it uses those; and for things that are using role-chaining to use assuming roles from the things I have credentials for, and the things that I just do role assumption in, and it works flawlessly. It just works the way that most of my command-line tools do. I've never seen a desktop app that does this.Maciej: Yeah. So, we put a lot of effort into making sure that this works great because we know that, like, no one will use Cloudash if there's—like, not no one, but like, we're targeting, like, serverless teams, maybe, in enterprise companies, or serverless teams working on some startups. And in most cases, those teams or those engineers, they use SSO, or at least MFA, right? So, we have it covered. And as you said, like, it should be the onboarding part is really easy because you just pick your AWS profile, you just pick region, and just pick, right now, a CloudFormation stack because we get the information about your service based on CloudFormation stack. So yeah, we put a lot of effort in making sure that this works without any issues.Corey: There are some challenges to it that I saw while setting it up, and that's also sort of the nature of the fact you are, in fact, integrating with CloudWatch. For example, it's region specific. Well, what if I want to have an app that's multi-region? Well, you're going to have a bad time because doing [laugh] anything multi-region in AWS means you're going to have a bad time that gets particularly obnoxious and EC2 get to when you're doing something like Lambda@Edge, where, oh, where are the logs live; that's going to be in a CloudFront distribution in whatever region it winds up being accessed from. So, it comes down to what distribution endpoint or point of presence did that particular request go through, and it becomes this giant game of whack-a-mole. It's frustrating, and it's obnoxious, and it's also in no way your fault.Maciej: Yeah, I mean, we are at the beginning. Right now, it's the most straightforward, kind of pe—how people think about stacks of serverless. They're think in terms of regions because I think for us, regions, or replicated stacks, or things like that are not really popular yet. Maybe they will become—like, this is how AWS works as a whole, so it's not surprising that we're kind of following this path. I think my point is that our main goal, the ultimate goal, is to make monitoring, as I said, the troubleshooting serverless app as simple as possible.So, once we will hear from our customers, from our users that, “Hey, we would like to get a little bit better experience around regions,” we will definitely implement that because why not, right? And I think the whole point of Cloudash—and maybe we can go more deep into that later—is that we want to bring context into your metrics and logs. If you're seeing a, for example, X-Ray trace ID in your logs, you should be able with one click just see that the trace. It's not yet implemented in Cloudash, but we are having it in the backlog. But my point is that, like, there should be some journey when you're debugging stuff, and you shouldn't be just, like, left alone having, like, 20 tabs, Cloudash tabs open and trying to figure out where I was—like, where's the Lambda? Where's the API Gateway logs? Where are the CloudFront logs? And how I can kind of connect all of that? Because that's—it's an issue right now.Corey: Even what you've done so far is incredibly helpful compared to the baseline experience that folks will often have, where I can define a service that is comprised of a number of different functions—I have one set up right now that has seven functions in it—I grab any one of those things, and I can set how far the lookback is, when I look at that function, ranging from 5 minutes to 30 days. And it shows me at the top the metrics of invocations, the duration that the function runs for, and the number of errors. And then, in the same pane down below it, it shows the CloudWatch logs. So, “Oh, okay, great. I can drag and zoom into a specific timeframe, and I see just the things inside of that.”And I know this sounds like well, what's the hard part here? Yeah, except nothing else does it in an easy-to-use, discoverable way that just sort of hangs out here. Honestly, the biggest win for me is that I don't have to log in to the browser, navigate through some ridiculous other thing to track down what I'm talking about. It hangs out on my desktop all the time, and whether it's open or not, whenever I fire it up, it just works, basically, and I don't have to think about it. It reduces the friction from, “This thing is broken,” to, “Let me see what the logs say.”Very often I can go from not having it open at all to staring at the logs and having to wait a minute because there's some latency before the event happens and it hits CloudWatch logs itself. I'm pretty impressed with it, and I've been keeping an eye on what this thing is costing me. It is effectively nothing in terms of CloudWatch retrieval charges. Because it's not sitting there sucking all this data up all the time, for everything that's running. Like, we've all seen the monitoring system that winds up costing you more than it costs more than they charge you ancillary fees. This doesn't do that.I also—while we're talking about money, I want to make very clear—because disclaiming the direction the money flows in is always important—you haven't paid me a dime, ever, to my understanding. I am a paying customer at full price for this service, and I have been since I discovered it. And that is very much an intentional choice. You did not sponsor this podcast, you are not paying me to say nice things. We're talking because I legitimately adore this thing that you've built, and I want it to exist.Maciej: That's correct. And again, thank you for that. [laugh].Corey: It's true. You can buy my attention, but not my opinion. Now, to be clear, when I did that tweet thread, I did get the sense that this was something that you had built as sort of a side project, as a labor of love. It does not have VC behind it, of which I'm aware, and that's always going to, on some level, shade how I approach a service and how critical I'm going to be on it. Just because it's, yeah, if you've raised a couple 100 million dollars and your user experience is trash, I'm going to call that out.But if this is something where you just soft launched, yeah, I'm not going to be a jerk about weird usability bugs here. I might call it out as “Ooh, this is an area for improvement,” but not, “What jackwagon thought of this?” I am trying to be a kinder, gentler Corey in the new year. But at the same time, I also want to be very clear that there's room for improvement on everything. What surprised me the most about this is how well you nailed the user experience despite not having a full team of people doing UX research.Maciej: That was definitely a priority. So, maybe a little bit of history. So, I started working on Cloudash, I think it was April… 2019. I think? Yeah. It's 2021 right now. Or we're 2022. [unintelligible 00:11:33].Corey: Yeah. 2022, now. I—Maciej: I'm sorry. [laugh].Corey: —I've been screwing that up every time I write the dates myself, I'm with you.Maciej: [laugh]. Okay, so I started working on Cloudash, in 2020, April 2020.Corey: There we go.Maciej: So, after eight months, I released some beta, like, free; you could download it from GitHub. Like, you can still download on GitHub, but at that time, there was no license, you didn't have to buy a license to run it. So, it was, like, very early, like, 0.3 version that was working, but sort of, like, [unintelligible 00:12:00] working. There were some bugs.And that was the first time that I tweeted about it on Twitter. It gets some attention, but, like, some people started using it. I get some feedback, very initial feedback. And I was like, every time I open Cloudash, I get the sense that, like, this is useful. I'm talking about my own tool, but like, [laugh] that's the thing.So, further in the history. So, I'm kind of service engineer by my own. I am a software engineer, I started focusing on serverless, in, like, 2015, 2016. I was working for Serverless Inc. as an early employee.I was then working as an engineering manager for a couple of companies. I work as an engineering manager right now at Stedi; we're also, like, fully serverless. So I, kind of, trying to fix my own issues with serverless, or trying to improve the whole experience around serverless in AWS. So, that's the main purpose why we're building Cloudash: Because we want to improve the experience. And one use case I'm often mentioning is that, let's say that you're kind of on duty. Like, so in the middle of night PagerDuty is calling you, so you need to figure out what's going on with your Lambda or API Gateway.Corey: Yes. PagerDuty, the original [Call of Duty: Nagios 00:13:04]. “It's two in the morning; who is it?” “It's PagerDuty. Wake up, jackass.” Yeah. We all had those moments.Maciej: Exactly. So, the PagerDuty is calling you and you're, kind of, in the middle of night, you're not sure what's going on. So, the kind of thing that we want to optimize is from waking up into understanding what's going on with your serverless stuff should be minimized. And that's the purpose of Cloudash as well. So, you should just run one tool, and you should immediately see what's going on. And that's the purpose.And probably with one or two clicks, you should see the logs responsible, for example, in your Lambda. Again, like that's exactly what we want to cover, that was the initial thing that we want to cover, to kind of minimize the time you spent on troubleshooting serverless apps. Because as we all know, kind of, the longer it's down, the less money you make, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.Corey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Oracle Cloud. Counting the pennies, but still dreaming of deploying apps instead of "Hello, World" demos? Allow me to introduce you to Oracle's Always Free tier. It provides over 20 free services and infrastructure, networking, databases, observability, management, and security. And—let me be clear here—it's actually free. There's no surprise billing until you intentionally and proactively upgrade your account. This means you can provision a virtual machine instance or spin up an autonomous database that manages itself all while gaining the networking load, balancing and storage resources that somehow never quite make it into most free tiers needed to support the application that you want to build. With Always Free, you can do things like run small scale applications or do proof-of-concept testing without spending a dime. You know that I always like to put asterisks next to the word free. This is actually free, no asterisk. Start now. Visit snark.cloud/oci-free that's snark.cloud/oci-free.Corey: One of the things that I appreciate about this is that I have something like five different microservices now that power my newsletter production pipeline every week. And periodically, I'll make a change and something breaks because testing is something that I should really get around to one of these days, but when I'm the only customer, cool. Doesn't really matter until suddenly I'm trying to write something and it doesn't work. Great. Time to go diving in, and always I'm never in my best frame of mind for that because I'm thinking about writing for humans not writing for computers. And that becomes a challenge.And okay, how do I get to the figuring out exactly what is broken this time? Regression testing: It really should be a thing more than it has been for me.Maciej: You should write those tests. [laugh].Corey: Yeah. And then I fire this up, and okay, great. Which sub-service is it? Great. Okay, what happened in the last five minutes on that service? Oh, okay, it says it failed successfully in the logs. Okay, that's on me. I can't really blame you for that. But all right.And then it's a matter of adding more [print or 00:14:54] debug statements, and understanding what the hell is going on, mostly that I'm bad at programming. And then it just sort of works from there. It's a lot easier to, I guess, to reason about this from my perspective than it is to go through the CloudWatch dashboards, where it's okay, here's a whole bunch of metrics on different graphs, most of which you don't actually care about—as opposed to unified view that you offer—and then “Oh, you want to look at logs, that's a whole separate sub-service. That's a different service team, obviously, so go open that up in another browser.” And I'm sitting here going, “I don't know who designed this, but are there any windows in their house? My God.”It's just the saddest thing I can possibly experience when I'm in the middle of trying to troubleshoot. Let's be clear, when I'm troubleshooting, I am in no mood to be charitable to anyone or anything, so that's probably unfair to those teams. But by the same token, it's intensely frustrating when I keep smacking into limitations that get in my way while I'm just trying to get the thing up and running again.Maciej: As you mentioned about UX that, like, we've spent a lot of time thinking about the UX, trying different approaches, trying to understand which metrics are the most important. And as we all know, kind of, serverless simplifies a lot of stuff, and there's, like, way less metrics that you need to look into when something is happening, but we want to make sure that the stuff that we show—which is duration errors, and p95—are probably the most important in most cases, so like, covering most of this stuff. So sorry, I didn't mention that before; it was very important from the very beginning. And also, like, literally, I spent a lot of time, like, working on the colors, which sounds funny, [laugh] but I wanted to get them right. We're not yet working on dark mode, but maybe soon.Anyways, the visual part, it's always close to my heart, so we spent a lot of time going back to what just said. So, definitely the experience around using CloudWatch right now, and CloudWatch logs, CloudWatch metrics, is not really tailored for any specific use case because they have to be generic, right? Because AWS has, like, I don't know, like, 300, or whatever number of services, probably half of them producing logs—maybe not half, maybe—Corey: We shouldn't name a number because they'll release five more between now and when this publishes in 20 minutes.Maciej: [laugh]. So, CloudWatch has to be generic. What we want to do with Cloudash is to take those generic tools—because we use, of course, CloudWatch logs, CloudWatch metrics, we fetch data from them—but make the visual part more tailored for specific use case—in our case, it's the serverless use case—and make sure that it's really, kind of—it shows only the stuff that you need to see, not everything else. So again, like that's the main purpose. And then one more thing, we—like this is also some kind of measurement of success, we want to reduce number of tabs that you need to have open in your browser when you're dealing with CloudWatch. So, we tried to put most important stuff in one view so you don't need to flip between tabs, as you usually do when try to under some kind of broader scope, or broader context of your, you know, error in Lambda.Corey: What inspired you to do this as a desktop application? Because a lot of companies are doing similar things, as SaaS, as webapps. And I have to—as someone who yourself—you're a self-described serverless engineer—it seems to me that building a webapp is sort of like the common description use case of a lot of serverless stuff. And you're sitting here saying, “Nope, it's desktop app time.” Which again, I'm super glad you did. It's exactly what I was looking for. How do you get here?Maciej: I'd been thinking about both kinds of types of apps. So like, definitely webapp was the initial idea how to build something, it was the webapp. Because as you said, like, that's the default mode. Like, we are thinking webapp; like, let's build a webapp because I'm an engineer, right? There is some inspiration coming from Dynobase, which was made by a friend [unintelligible 00:18:55] who also lives in Poland—I didn't mention that; we're based in [Poznań 00:18:58], Poland.And when I started thinking about it, there's a lot of benefits of using this approach. The biggest benefit, as I mentioned, is security; and the second benefit is just most, like, cost-effective because we don't need to run in the backend, right? We don't need to download all your metrics, all your logs. We I think, like, let's think about it, like, from the perspective. Listen, so everyone in the company to start working, they have to download all of your stuff from your AWS account. Like, that sounds insane because you don't need all of that stuff elsewhere.Corey: Store multiple copies of it. Yeah I, generally when I'm looking at this, I care about the last five to ten minutes.Maciej: Exactly.Corey: I don't—Maciej: Exactly.Corey: —really care what happened three-and-a-half years ago on this function. Almost always. But occasionally I want to look back at, “Oh, this has been breaking. How long has it been that way?” But I already have that in the AWS environment unless I've done the right thing and turned on, you know, log expiry.Maciej: Exactly. So, this is a lot of, like, I don't want to be, like, you know, mean to anyone but like, that's a lot of waste. Like, that's a lot of waste of compute power because you need to download it; of cost because you need to get this data out of AWS, which you need to pay for, you know, get metric data and stuff like this. So, you need to—Corey: And almost all of its—what is it? Write once, read never. Because it's, you don't generally look at these things.Maciej: Yeah, yeah. Exactly.Corey: And so much of this, too, for every invocation I have, even though it's low traffic stuff, it's the start with a request ID and what version is running, it tells me ‘latest.' Helpful. A single line of comment in this case says ‘200.' Why it says that, I couldn't tell you. And then it says ‘End request ID.' The end.Now, there's no way to turn that off unless you disabled the ability to write to CloudWatch logs in the function, but ingest on that cost 50 cents a gigabyte, so okay, I guess that's AWS's money-making scam of the year. Good for them. But there's so much of that, it's like looking at—like, when things are working, it's like looking at a low traffic site that's behind a load balancer, where there's a whole—you have gigabytes, in some cases, of load balancer—of web server logs on the thing that's sitting in your auto-scaling group. And those logs are just load balancer health checks. 98% of it is just that.Same type of problem here, I don't care about that, I don't want to pay to store it, I certainly don't want to pay to store it twice. I get it, that makes an awful lot of sense. It also makes your security job a hell of a lot easier because you're not sitting on a whole bunch of confidential data from other people. Because, “Well, it's just logs. What could possibly be confidential in there?” “Oh, my sweet summer child, have you seen some of the crap people put in logs?”Maciej: I've seen many things in logs. I don't want to mention them. But anyways—and also, you know, like, usually when you gave access to your AWS account, it can ruin you. You know, like, there might be a lot of—like, you need to really trust the company to give access to your AWS account. Of course, in most cases, the roles are scoped to, you know, only CloudWatch stuff, actions, et cetera, et cetera, but you know, like, there are some situations in which something may not be properly provisioned. And then you give access to everything.Corey: And you can get an awful lot of data you wouldn't necessarily want out of that stuff. Give me just the PDF printout of last month's bill for a lot of environments, and I can tell you disturbing levels of detail about what your architecture is, just because when you—you can infer an awful lot.Maciej: Yeah.Corey: Yeah, I hear you. It makes your security story super straightforward.Maciej: Yeah, exactly. So, I think just repeat my, like, the some inspiration. And then when I started thinking about Cloudash, like, definitely one of the inspiration was Dynobase, from the, kind of, GUI for, like, more powerful UI for DynamoDB. So, if you're interested in that stuff, you can also check this out.Corey: Oh, yeah, I've been a big fan of that, too. That'll be a separate discussion on a different episode, for sure.Maciej: [laugh]. Yeah.Corey: But looking at all of this, looking at the approach of, the only real concern—well, not even a concern. The only real challenge I have with it for my use case is that when I'm on the road, the only thing that I bring with me for a computer is my iPad Pro. I'm not suggesting by any means that you should build this as a new an iPad app; that strikes me as, like, 15 levels of obnoxious. But it does mean that sometimes I still have to go diving into the CloudWatch console when I'm not home. Which, you know, without this, without Cloudash, that's what I was doing originally anyway.Maciej: You're the only person that requested that. And we will put that into backlog, and we will get to that at some point. [laugh].Corey: No, no, no. Smart question is to offer me a specific enterprise tier pricing—.Maciej: Oh, okay. [laugh].Corey: —that is eye-poppingly high. It's like, “Hey, if you want a subsidize feature development, we're thrilled to empower that.” But—Maciej: [laugh]. Yeah, yeah. To be honest, I like that would be hard to write [unintelligible 00:23:33] implement as iPad app, or iPhone app, or whatever because then, like, what's the story behind? Like, how can I get the credentials, right? It's not possible.Corey: Yeah, you'd have to have some fun with that. There are a couple of ways I can think of offhand, but then that turns into a sandboxing issue, and it becomes something where you have to store credentials locally, regardless, even if they're ephemeral. And that's not great. Maybe turn it into a webapp someday or something. Who knows.What I also appreciate is that we had a conversation when you first launched, and I wound up basically going on a Zoom call with you and more or less tearing apart everything you've built—and ideally constructive way—but looking at a lot of the things you've changed in your website, you listened to an awful lot of feedback. You doubled your pricing, for example. Used to be ten bucks a month; now you're twenty. Great. I'm a big believer in charging more.You absolutely add that kind of value because it's, “Well, twenty bucks a month for a desktop app. That sounds crappy.” It's, “Yeah, jackwagon, what's your time worth?” I was spending seven bucks a month in serverless charges, and 120 or 130 a month for Epsagon, and I was thrilled to pieces to be doing it because the value I got from being able to quickly diagnose what the hell was going on far outstripped what the actual cost of doing these things. Don't fall into the trap of assuming that well, I shouldn't pay for software. I can just do it myself. Your time is never free. People think it is, but it's not.Maciej: That's true. The original price of $9.99, I think that was the price was the launch promo. After some time, we've decided—and after adding more features: API Gateway support—we've decided that this is, like, solving way more problems, so like, you should probably pay a little bit more for that. But you're kind of lucky because you subscribed to it when it was 9.99, and this will be your kind of prize for the end of, you know—Corey: Well, I'm going to argue with you after the show to raise the price on mine, just because it's true. It's the—you want to support the things that you want to exist in the world. I also like the fact that you offered an annual plan because I will go weeks without ever opening the app. And that doesn't mean it isn't adding value. It's that oh, yeah, I will need that now that I'm hitting these issues again.And if I'm paying on a monthly basis, and it shows up with a, “Oh, you got charged again.” “Well, I didn't use it this month; I should cancel.” And [unintelligible 00:25:44] to an awful lot of subscriber churn. But in the course of a year, if I don't have at least one instance in which case, wow, that ten minute span justified the entire $200 annual price tag, then, yeah, you built the wrong thing or it's not for me, but I can think of three incidents so far since I started using it in the past four months that have led to that being worth everything you will charge me a year, and then some, just because it made it so clear what was breaking.Maciej: So, in that regard, we are also thinking about the team licenses, that's definitely on the roadmap. There will be some changes to that. And we definitely working on more and more features. And if we're—like, the roadmap is mostly about supporting more and more AWS services, so right now it's Lambda, API Gateway, we're definitely thinking about SQS, SNS, to get some sense how your messages are going through, probably something, like, DynamoDB metrics. And this is all kind of serverless, but why not going wider? Like, why not going to Fargate? Like, Fargate is theoretically serverless, but you know, like, it's serverless on—Corey: It's serverless with a giant asterisk next to it.Maciej: Yeah, [laugh] exactly. So, but why not? Like, it's exactly the same thing in terms of, there is some user flow, there is some user journey, when you want to debug something. You want to go from API Gateway, maybe to the container to see, I don't know, like, DynamoDB metric or something like that, so it should be all easy. And this is definitely something.Later, why not EC2 metrics? Like, it would be a little bit harder. But I'm just saying, like, first thing here is that you are not, like, at this point, we are serverless, but once we cover serverless, why not going wider? Why not supporting more and more services and just making sure that all those use cases are correctly modeled with the UI and UX, et cetera?Corey: That's going to be an interesting challenge, just because that feels like what a lot of the SaaS monitoring and observability tooling is done. And then you fire this thing up, and it looks an awful lot like the AWS console. And it's, “Yeah, I just want to look at this one application that doesn't use any of the rest of those things.” Again, I have full faith and confidence in your ability to pull this off. You clearly have done that well based upon what we've seen so far. I just wonder how you're going to wind up tackling that challenge when you get there.Maciej: And maybe not EC2. Maybe I went too far. [laugh].Corey: Yeah, honestly, even EC2-land, it feels like that is more or less a solved problem. If you want to treat it as a bunch of EC2, you can use Nagios. It's fine.Maciej: Yeah, totally.Corey: There are tools that have solved that problem. But not much that I've seen has solved the serverless piece the way that I want it solved. You have.Maciej: So, it's definitely a long road to make sure that the serverless—and by serverless, I mean serverless how AWS understands serverless, so including Fargate, for example. So, there's a lot of stuff that we can improve. It's a lot of stuff that can make easier with Cloudash than it is with CloudWatch, just staying inside serverless, it will take us a lot of time to make sure that is all correct. And correctly modeled, correctly designed, et cetera. So yeah, I went too far with EC2 sorry.Corey: Exactly. That's okay. We all go too far with EC2, I assure you.Maciej: Sorry everyone using EC2 instances. [laugh].Corey: If people want to kick the tires on it, where can they find it?Maciej: They can find it on cloudash.dev.Corey: One D in the middle. That one throws me sometimes.Maciej: One D. Actually, after talking to you, we have a double-D domain as well, so we can also try ‘Clouddash' with double-D. [laugh].Corey: Excellent, excellent. Okay, that is fantastic. Because I keep trying to put the double-D in when I'm typing it in my search tool on my desktop, and it doesn't show up. And it's like, “What the—oh, right.” But yeah, we'll get there one of these days.Maciej: Only the domain. It's only the domain. You will be redirected to single-D.Corey: Exactly.Maciej: [laugh].Corey: We'll have to expand later; I'll finance the feature request there. It'll go well. If people want to learn more about what you have to think about these things, where else can they find you?Maciej: On Twitter, and my Twitter handle is @mthenw. M-then-W, which is M-T-H—mthenw. And my co-founder @tlakomy. You can probably add that to [show notes 00:29:35]. [laugh].Corey: Oh, I certainly will. It's fine, yeah. Here's a whole bunch of letters. I hear you. My Twitter handle used to be my amateur radio callsign. It turns out most people don't think like that. And yeah, it's become an iterative learning process. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today and for building this thing. I really appreciate both of them.Maciej: Thank you for having me here. I encourage everyone to visit cloudash.dev, if you have any feature requests, any questions just send us an email at hello@cloudash.dev, or just go to GitHub repository in the issues; just create an issue, describe what you want and we can talk about it.We are always happy to help. The main purpose, the ultimate goal of Cloudash is to make the serverless engineer's life easier, on very high level. And on a little bit lower level, just to make, you know, troubleshooting and debugging serverless apps easier.Corey: Well, from my perspective, you've succeeded.Maciej: Thank you.Corey: Thank you. Maciej Winnicki, founder of Cloudash. 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 telling me exactly why I'm wrong for using an iPad do these things, but not being able to send it because you didn't find a good way to store the credentials.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.

On this episode, we talked about: Looking at emotions and how to deal with them Acknowledging emotions instead of hiding them Externalizing blame on others What's underneath the anger? Overfocusing on negative thoughts Interrupting the anger cycle Universal anger triggers Understanding that we are imperfect Rising in the energetic output of anger Playing around with embarrassment You can't outthink your way from emotions Denying and suppress Getting better at emotional awareness Learning how to be better in all aspects of life Men box culture Serving your needs and those around you Knowing your tools in every situation "Where is the room in this idea of success for things like happiness, or relaxation or contentment?" "One of the major things that we need to work on its self awareness and then you can work on greater self-acceptance" "Our anger, it's our business. My anger it's my business, my problem, it's nobody else's problem, I have to figure it out on my own"   About Dr. John: Dr. John Schinnerer coaches clients to perform at their peak from the boardroom to the bedroom.  Dr. John graduated from U.C.  Berkeley with a Ph.D. in educational psychology.  Dr. John was one of three experts to consult with Pixar on the Academy Award-winning movie, Inside Out. He has spoken to organizations such as Stanford Medical School, U.C. Berkeley, Kaiser Permanente, Sutter Health, Yahoo, AT&T, and the Gap. He has been featured in national media such as U.S. News and World Report, Readers Digest, and SELF Magazine. He is a nationally recognized speaker and an award-winning author. He has been on stage or on air with Lt. Governor John Garamendi, Olympic medalist Paul Kingsman, Dr. Daniel Amen, Dan Millman, Dr. Fred Luskin from Stanford, and Dr. Jonathan Haidt from the University of Virginia. He has impacted individuals at companies such as Okta, Twilio, Indeed, AskJeeves, Visa, Cisco, Starbucks, Yahoo, FedEx, Stanford, Cal, UPS, Schreiber Foods, Kaiser Permanente, and Sutter Health. He was featured in a documentary entitled, Skewed, by Paola Bossola, on the effects of violence in the media. He wrote the award-winning book, “How Can I Be Happy?” His areas of expertise range from high performance, to stress management, to positive psychology, to anger management, to creating happy, thriving relationships.  Over 10,000 people have taken his online anger management course. He recently recorded micro-courses on anger management and forgiveness for Simple Habit; they have been listened to over 60,000 times in the first 4 months. Dr. John hosts a podcast to help men evolve towards greater success, happiness, and connection, The Evolved Caveman. Visit GuideToSelf.com to learn more about Dr. John. Or follow on Instagram at TheEvolvedCaveman.    You can follow and support Dr. John at:  IG: @theevolvedcaveman Web: https://theevolvedcaveman.com/ Podcast: The Evolved Caveman   Let's connect over on Instagram: @Johnny.Elsasser

Take a Network Break! This week we examine Oracle's purchase of network assurance vendor Federos, discuss why Cisco has added a service mesh manager to its Intersight Kubernetes service, explore why some users are frustrated with a crypto-miner in NortonLifelock's anti-virus software, and cover more tech news. The post Network Break 364: Oracle Acquires Federos For Network Assurance; Google Snags Security Startup Siemplify appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Take a Network Break! This week we examine Oracle's purchase of network assurance vendor Federos, discuss why Cisco has added a service mesh manager to its Intersight Kubernetes service, explore why some users are frustrated with a crypto-miner in NortonLifelock's anti-virus software, and cover more tech news. The post Network Break 364: Oracle Acquires Federos For Network Assurance; Google Snags Security Startup Siemplify appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Take a Network Break! This week we examine Oracle's purchase of network assurance vendor Federos, discuss why Cisco has added a service mesh manager to its Intersight Kubernetes service, explore why some users are frustrated with a crypto-miner in NortonLifelock's anti-virus software, and cover more tech news. The post Network Break 364: Oracle Acquires Federos For Network Assurance; Google Snags Security Startup Siemplify appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Looking for interview tips from senior hiring managers sharing real-world examples and answers? In Leap of Fate Pod 81, we go over How to Ace Your Job Interview: Tips and Examples. Leap of Fate's guest Mark Herschberg has been teaching at MIT for 20 years in addition to building multiple startup companies as a CTO. Mark is the author of The Career Toolkit, Essential Skills for Success That No One Taught You. I, Randy, have been a manager of global teams since I was 22 (7+ years now) building out multiple global sales teams across multiple continents for Cisco and Oyster.We start by sharing the 10 key traits that hiring managers normally look for during job interviews. Then we go into specific examples from interviews we have led and workplace situations to provide you actionable and real-world examples. We talk about:1. How to Sell Yourself in Interviews2. What Managers Look for in Interviews3. 3 Key Things To Do Before, During, and After Interviews4. Reference Checks and Creating Good Lasting Relationships5. Great Practice: Be the interviewer to see the opposite side6. Sending Follow Up Emails post InterviewCheck out The Career Toolkit written by Mark for a deep dive into essential kills for success that no one taught you! And use this pod to practice and Ace Your Job Interview to make your 2022 goals and beyond a reality!Links:The Career ToolKitMark's LinkedInSocials: @CareerToolkitBkSupport the show (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrmJ8rY4ivAKnN3zG0W-1_A)

Alexa, open the pod bay doors. Amazon's voice assistant hasn't quite reached the level of HAL, the iconic AI from 2001: A Space Odyssey. However, we learned this week that Alexa is going to space later this year, and around the moon, for a technology demonstration on the Orion deep-space capsule as part of NASA's Artemis 1 mission. Veteran space reporter Alan Boyle, GeekWire contributing editor, joins us on this episode of the GeekWire Podcast to explain what Alexa will be doing during the mission, and what the partners on the demonstration — Lockheed Martin, Amazon and Cisco — hope to prove in the process. Then we discuss some ofthe key milestones from the past year in space, including Blue Origin taking the first paying passenger on a suborbital commercial flight, plus highlights from SpaceX, Virgin Galactic and others. And we look ahead to upcoming events to keep an eye on, as detailed by Alan in his annual space recap and preview. And in our final segment, we come back to Earth, as podcast producer Curt Milton and I discuss celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay's surprising disclosure about what we thought was a well-known Amazon company. Also check out Alan's podcast, Fiction Science.   By the way, we usedAlexa Skill Blueprints to get Alexa to impersonate HAL in the opening of this week's show. You'll hear a very different response if you ask Alexa the same question on your own device.   See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Amazon and Cisco are working with Lockheed Martin to outfit NASA's Orion spacecraft with AI and videoconferencing A Note from the DNS Cop... Google Docs comments weaponized in a new phishing campaign New Mac malware samples underscore a growing threat Rethinking cybersecurity jobs as a vocation instead of a profession Hybrid multi-cloud strategies are keeping the public sector at the forefront of threat mitigation Nearly 50% of people will abandon sites prohibiting password reuse TWiET Host Roundtable: Is SASE really better than Identity Management systems of a decade ago, or is it just a milestone on our way to true zero trust? Hosts: Brian Chee and Curt Franklin Guest: Oliver Rist Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-enterprise-tech. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: progress.com/twit plextrac.com/twit itpro.tv/enterprise use code ENTERPRISE30

Jaguars rookie safety Andre Cisco visits with senior writer John Oehser on the O-Zone Podcast, presented by VyStar.

This week on Economic Update, Prof. Wolff presents updates on Huawei vs Cisco, Europe's exploding energy prices falsely blamed on Covid, Robert Kuttner announces he has become a socialist, polls show big drop in religious affiliation and praying especially among Christians from 2007 to 2021 as secularism accelerates. In the second half of the show, Prof. Wolff is joined by Mike Elk of Payday Report to discuss the growing wave of US strikes since the pandemic began.

Today I'm pleased to introduce you to Courtney Smith Kramer, a friend and an extraordinary woman who has influenced my own and many others' marketing  approaches. She is one of the only 3% of female creative directors in the United States and was named a “Top 200 Global Marketing Influencer” and “Top 20 Agency Strategy Global Influencer” by Onalytica, a UK-based Influencer firm.- Top Global Marketing Influencer. In this episode: Courtney shares her journey from marketing entrepreneur to global marketing influencer. We discuss the importance of PLAY in creativity and how we all have innate creativity. We discover Courtney's favorite way to do business planning and marketing planning to get great results while staying sane (!) Courtney tells us the biggest mistake she sees entrepreneurs make and a simple strategy to avoid it. Courtney Smith Kramer is an accomplished creative strategist, storyteller, writer and designer, she has earned hundreds of creative awards, and her work has been featured in the Print International Design Annual. She has served as a juror for the ADDY Awards, W3 Awards, Davey Awards and the National Student Advertising Competition (NSAC), and is a former board member for the American Advertising Federation (AAF) and World Brand Congress. Courtney has founded two companies with husband Bryan Kramer; Silicon Valley marketing consultancy purematter, and H2H (or Human-to-Human) Companies. Together, they launched the H2H Growth Accelerator, a 12-week hybrid program that helps entrepreneurs recover from burnout in their own businesses. In her career, she has built campaigns for global brands like Plantronics, Cisco, Pitney Bowes, MasterCard, International Culinary Center, IBM and Netflix DVD.com, to name a few. She most recently completed a 4-year tenure as Global Head of Marketing for the Co-Active Training Institute. Her first book, “Be Your Creative Sexy Self: Humorous Stories to Help You Live a Happier Life” launched in July, 2020 at the #1 spot in Business Humor on Amazon. Today, Courtney is helping purpose-driven brands as an outsourced Creative Director and CMO, and inspiring positive change by co-leading the H2H Growth Accelerator alongside co-founder Bryan Kramer. “My value in this world is not what I do; it's who I am, my impact on others, and what I stand for.” – Courtney Smith Kramer To learn more about Courtney and her work, visit her blog, the H2H Growth Accelerator website, or the purematter agency website. You can also follow her on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook or buy her book on Amazon. Let's meet Courtney Smith Kramer. Courtney Smith Kramer Show Notes

CISA says US Federal agencies are now largely in compliance with Log4j risk mitigation guidance. The FTC issues advice and a warning on Log4j to US businesses. A skimmer is installed through cloud-delivered video. The Vice Society's ransomware is meddling with supermarket operations in the UK. The Atlantic Council offers advice on strategy for the grey zone. Hacktivists are expected to punish greenwashing in 2022. Caleb Barlow on recent FBI PIN about how ransomware operators are looking for material non-public information to improve their chances of being paid. Our guest is Helen Patton from Cisco on her book, Navigating the Cybersecurity Career Path. And James Pond is the CEO of hybrid war! For links to all of today's stories check out our CyberWire daily news briefing: https://www.thecyberwire.com/newsletters/daily-briefing/11/3

00:54 - Emily's Superpower: Being a Good Teacher * Greater Than Code Episode 261: Celebrating Computer Science Education with Dave Bock (https://www.greaterthancode.com/celebrating-computer-science-education) * CyberPatriot (https://www.uscyberpatriot.org/) 06:24 - Online College Courses vs In-Person Learning / Emily's Community College Path * Network Engineering (https://www.fieldengineer.com/blogs/what-is-network-engineer-definition) * Virginia Tech (https://vt.edu/) * Guaranteed Transfer Programs (https://blog.collegevine.com/an-introduction-to-guaranteed-transfer-programs/) * Loudoun Codes (http://loudouncodes.org/) * Emily Haggard: My Path to Virginia Tech (http://loudouncodes.org/2020/09/23/path_to_va_tech.html) 11:58 - Computer Science Curriculums * Technical Depth * The Missing Semester of Your CS Education (https://missing.csail.mit.edu/) 19:28 - Being A Good Mentor / Mentor, Student Relationships * Using Intuition * Putting Yourself in Others' Mindsets * Diversity and Focusing On Commonalities * Addressing Gatekeeping in Tech * Celebrating Accomplishments * Bragging Loudly * Grace Hopper Conference (https://ghc.anitab.org/) * Cultural Dynamics Spread 38:24 - Dungeons & Dragons (https://dnd.wizards.com/) * Characters as an Extensions of Players Reflections: Dave: College is what you make of it, not where you went. Arty: Teaching people better who don't have a lot of experience yet. Mandy: “Empowered women, empower women.” Empowered men also empower women. Emily: Your mentor should have different skills from you and you should seek them out for that reason. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode) To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: MANDY: Hey, everybody! Welcome to Episode 265 of Greater Than Code. My name is Mandy Moore and I'm here with our guest panelist, Dave Bock. DAVE: Hi, I'm David Bock and I am here with our usual co-host, Arty Starr. ARTY: Thank you, Dave. And I'm here today with our guest, Emily Haggard. Emily is graduating from Virginia Tech with a Bachelor's in Computer Science this past December so, congratulations. She has a wide variety of experience in technology from web development to kernel programming, and even network engineering and cybersecurity. She is an active member of her community, having founded a cybersecurity club for middle schoolers. In her free time, she enjoys playing Dungeons and Dragons and writing novels. Welcome to the show, Emily. EMILY: Thank you. ARTY: So our first question we always ask is what is your superpower and how did you acquire it? EMILY: So I spent some time thinking about this and I would say that my superpower is that I'm a good teacher and what that means is that the people who come to me with questions wanting to learn something number one, my goal is to help them understand and number two, I think it's very important to make sure that whatever gap we have in our experience doesn't matter and that they don't feel that. So that they could be my 6-year-old brother and I'm trying to teach him algebra, or something and he doesn't feel like he is the 6-year-old trying to learn algebra. DAVE: I'll echo that sentiment about being a good teacher actually on two fronts, Emily. First of all, I am teaching your brother now in high school and just the other day, he credited you towards giving him a lot of background knowledge about the course and the curriculum before we ever started the class. So he seconds that you're a good teacher. And then listeners might remember, I was on a few weeks ago talking about my nonprofit and Emily was there at the beginning of me starting to volunteer in high schools. In fact, the way I met Emily, it was the fall of 2014. The first time I was volunteering at Loudoun Valley High School and one morning prior to class, there was going to be a meeting of a cybersecurity club. There were a bunch to the students milling about and there was this sophomore girl sitting in front of a computer, looking at a PowerPoint presentation of networking IP addresses, how the /24 of an IP address resolves and just all that kind of detail. Like very low-level detail about networking stuff and I was like, “Oh, that's interesting.” I wouldn't have expected a sophomore girl to be so interested in the low-level type of details of IP. And then the club started and she got up and started giving that presentation. That was not a slide deck she was reading; it was a slide deck she was creating. EMILY: Thank you. I actually remember that. [laughs] ARTY: So how did you acquire that superpower? EMILY: I think it was out of necessity. So going back to the story that David mentioned in high school, there was a cybersecurity competition called CyberPatriot that I competed in with friends and one year, all of a sudden, they just introduced network engineering to the competition. We had to configure and troubleshoot a simulated network and no one knew how to do that. So I took it upon myself to just figure it out so that my team could be competitive and win, but then part of the way that I learn actually is being able to teach something like that's how I grasp. I know that I've understood something and I'm ready to move on to the next topic is like, if I could teach this thing. So actually, I started out building all of that as a way to kind of condense my notes and condense my knowledge so that it'd stick in my head for the competition and I just realized it's already here, I should share this. So that's how I started there. Teaching network engineering to high schoolers that don't have any background knowledge is really hard. It forced me to put it in terms that would make sense and take away the really technical aspects of it and I think that built the teaching skill. DAVE: That relates to the club you started at the middle school for a CyberPatriot. How did that start? EMILY: That was initially a desire to have a capstone project and get out of high school a few weeks early. But I was sitting there with my friend and thinking about, “Okay, well, we need to do something that actually helps people. What should we do?” Like some people are going out and they're painting murals in schools, or gardening. It was like, well, we don't really like being outside and we're not really artistic. [chuckles] But what we do have is a lot of technical knowledge from all this work with CyberPatriot and we know that CyberPatriot has a middle school competition. So we actually approached the middle school. We had a sit down with, I think the dean at our local middle school. We talked about what CyberPatriot was and what we wanted to do with the students, which was have them bust over to the high school so we could teach them as an afterschool program. I guess we convinced him and so, a couple months later they're busing students over for us to teach. DAVE: Wow. And did they ever participate in competitions as middle schoolers? EMILY: Yes, they did. DAVE: Very cool. EMILY: Yeah. DAVE: Can you go into what those competitions are like? I don't think most of the audience even knows that exists. EMILY: Yeah, sure. So CyberPatriot, it's a cybersecurity competition for predominantly high schoolers that's run by the Air Force and you have a couple rounds throughout the year, I think it's like five, or so, and at each round you have 6 hours and you're given some virtual machines, which you have to secure and remove viruses from and things, and you get points for doing all of that. They added on network simulation, which was with some Cisco proprietary software, which would simulate your routers, your firewalls, and everything. So you'd have to configure and troubleshoot that as well and you would get points for the same thing. It builds a lot of comradery with all of us having to sit there for 6 hours after school and like, we're getting tired. It's a Friday night, everyone's a little bit loopy and all we've eaten is pizza for 6 hours. [laughs] DAVE: Well, that's a good jumpstart to your career, I think. [laughs] EMILY: Yes, for sure. MANDY: So while in college, I'm guessing that – well, I'm assuming that you've been pretty impacted by COVID and doing in-person learning versus online learning. How's that been for you? EMILY: I've actually found it pushes me to challenge the status quo. Online college classes, for the most part, the lectures aren't that helpful. They're not that great. So I had to pick up a lot of skills, like learning to teach myself, reading books, and figuring out ways to discern if I needed to research something further, if I really understood it yet, or not. That's a really hard question to ask actually is if you don't have the knowledge, how do you know that you don't have that knowledge? That's something I kind of had – it's a skill that you have to work on. So that is something I developed over the time when we were online and I've actually also done – I worked time for a year after high school and I took mostly online classes at the community college. Those skills started there, too and then I just built on them when I came to Virginia Tech and we had COVID happen. DAVE: Actually, I'd like to ask about that community college time. I know you had an interesting path into Virginia Tech, one that I'm really interested in for my own kids as well. Can you talk about that? EMILY: Yeah. So I, out of high school, always thought I'm going to – I'm a first-generation student. My parents did not go to college. They went to the military and grandparents before them. So I had always had it in my head that I am going to go and get that 4-year degree. That's what I want for myself. At the end of high school, I applied to Virginia Tech. I had a dream school. I wanted to go to Georgia Tech. They rejected me. Oh, well, that dream shot. I need to find something new. So I applied to Virginia Tech thinking it was going to be a safe bet. It's an in-state school, I was a very good student; they would never reject me and so, I applied for the engineering program and I was rejected. They did admit me for the neuroscience program, but it wasn't going to be what I wanted and I was realizing that I did not like either chemistry, or biology, so that would never work. And then at the same time, because of my work with CyberPatriot, I was able to get an internship in network engineering at a college not too far from where I lived. After I graduated high school, they offered me a job as a network engineer, which I took because my team was fantastic, I really liked my manager, and I was comfortable there. I took this job and I said, “Okay, I'm going to keep working on the college thing because it's what I always wanted for myself.” So I just signed up for community college and that was pretty tough working a full-time and doing community college until 11 o'clock at night and getting up the next day and doing it all over again. And from there, I decided that Virginia Tech was going to be the best option for me, just from a very logical perspective. I kind of thought Virginia Tech was a bit cult-y. I was never really gung-ho about going, but it made the most sense being an in-state school that's very well-known. I worked through community college and I applied to Virginia Tech again after 1 year at community college and they rejected me again. so I was like, “Oh no, now what do I do I?” And I realized I needed to make use of the guaranteed transfer program. One of the really cool things in Virginia at least is that a lot of the state schools have agreements with the community college, where if you get an associates with a specific GPA, you can transfer into that program and the university and your transfer's guaranteed, they can't reject you. So I was like, “Aha, they can't get rid of me this time.” Yeah, I did it and it's kind of a messy process. I actually went into that in a blog post on David has a nonprofit called Loudoun Codes. I wrote a blog post for his website and detailed that entire – being a transfer student is hard because there's a lot of credits that may not get transferred over because Virginia Tech is a little bit – all 4-year colleges are a little bit elitist in their attitude towards community college and they didn't take some of the credits that I had, which put me behind quite far, even though I had that knowledge, they said I didn't. So that added on some extra time and some extra summer semesters while I was at Tech. ARTY: Yeah. I did something similar with doing community college and then what you're talking about with the whole elitist attitude with the transfer and having a whole bunch of your credits not transferring and I'm definitely familiar with that whole experience. DAVE: Yeah. EMILY: And even now that I think about it, I remember community college, too. It's built for one specific type of student, which is great. I think they're really good at helping people who just weren't present, or weren't able to do the work and make the progress in high school. They're really good at helping those types of students. But as someone who did a whole bunch of AP classes, had a crazy GPA, they just didn't really know how to handle me. They said, “Okay, you've tested out of pretty much all of our math classes, but you are still lacking some credits.” So I had to take multi-variable calculus in community college in order to get credit to replace the fact that I tested out of pre-cal and which was kind of silly, but in the long run, it was great because I hear multi-variable calculus at Tech is pretty hard. But definitely, there's a lot of bureaucratic nonsense about college. Education is important. It's great. I've learned a lot of things, but there's still all these old ways of thinking and people are just not ready for change in college a lot of the time. The people who make decisions that is. DAVE: Well, I'd like to ask a little bit about the computer science curriculum that you've had and the angle I'm asking from when I worked at LivingSocial, I worked with one of the first group of people that had graduated from our bootcamp program and had transferred from other careers, spent 12 weeks learning software engineering skills, and then were integrated with a group of software engineers at LivingSocial. We would occasionally get into conversations about, well, if I learned to be a software engineer in 12 weeks, what do you learn in 4 years of college? So we started to do these internal brown bags that were kind of the Discovery Channel version of computer science. A lot of that material I've since recycled into the presentations I do at high school. But for your typical person who might have sidelined into this career from a different perspective, what's been your curriculum like? EMILY: I really like the parts of the curriculum that had technical depth because coming into it at my level, that's what I was lacking in certain areas. I had built the foundation really strong, but the details of it, I didn't have. The classes that Virginia Tech, like the notorious systems class and a cybersecurity class I have taken this semester, that have gone in detail with technology and pushed what I understood, those were my most valuable classes. There was a lot of it that I would've been happy without [laughs] because I'm not sure it will apply so much to my life going forward. I'm a very practical person. Engineer mindset; I don't want to worry about things that can actually be applied to the real world so much. So for me this semester, actually, it's been really challenging because I've taken a data structures and algorithms class where we're talking about NP complete versus NP hard, and what it would mean if we could solve an NP complete problem in polynomial time. It's really hard to care. It's really hard to see how that [laughs] helps. It's interesting from a pure math perspective, but coming into it as someone who was already in the adult world and very grounded, it feels like bloat. DAVE: Yeah. That stuff is interesting if you're are designing databases, but most of us are just using databases and that – [overtalk] EMILY: Right. DAVE: Stuff is all kind of baked in. EMILY: Yeah. DAVE: For the average person on a technical career path, we're far more interested in the business problems than the math problems. ARTY: I'm curious, too. There's also lots of stuff that seems like it's missing in college curriculum from just really fundamental things that you need to know as a software engineer. So did you have things like source control and continuous integration? I think back to my own college experience and I didn't learn about source control until I got out of college. [laughs] And why is that? Why is that? It seems so backwards because there's these fundamental things that we need to learn and within 4 years, can we not somehow get that in the curriculum? I'm wondering what your experience has been like. EMILY: So Virginia Tech, I think the CS department head is actually really good at being reflective because he requires every senior to take a seminar class as they exit. It's a one credit class; it's mostly just feedback for the school and I think it's really cool because he asks all of us to make a presentation, just record ourselves talking over some slides about our experience and the things we would change. That really impressed me that this guy who gets to make so many decisions is listening to the people who are just kind of peons of the system and what I said was that there are certain classes that they give background knowledge. Like there's one in particular where it's essentially the closest crossover we have with the electrical engineering department and it's really painful, as someone who works with software, to try and put myself in a hardware mindset working with AND gates, OR gates, and all that, and trying to deal with these simulated chips. It's awful and then it never comes back. We never talk about again in the curriculum and it's a prerequisite for the systems class, which has nothing at all to do with that, really. This segues into another thing. I've had an internship while I've been at Virginia Tech that's a web consultant role, or a development consultant role with a company called Acceleration. They run just a small office in Blacksburg and they have a really cool business model. They take students at Virginia Tech and at Radford, a neighboring school, and they have us work with clients on real software development projects. They pair us with mentors who have 5, 10 years of experiences, software consultants, and we get to learn all those things that school doesn't teach us. So that's actually how I learned Git, Scrum, and all that stuff that isn't taught in college even now and I went back to the CS department head and I said, “Replace that class with the class that teaches us Git, Scrum, Kanban, and even just a brief overview of Docker, AWS, and the concepts so that people have a foundation when they try to go to work and they're trying to read all this documentation, or they're asked to build a container image and they have no idea what it's talking about, or what it's for.” Yeah, going back to the original question, no, I didn't learn version control in college, but the weird thing is that I was expected to know it in my classes without ever being taught it because, especially in the upper level like 3,004 level, or 1,000 level classes, they have you work on group projects where Git is essential and some of them, especially the capstone project, are long-term projects and you really need to use Scrum, or use some sort of methodology rather than just the how you would treat a two-week project. Actually, it's interesting because David was my sponsor on my capstone project in college and he really helped my team with the whole project planning, sprint planning, and just understanding how Scrum and all that works and what it's for. DAVE: Yeah. I just shared a link that is a series of videos from MIT called The Missing Semester of Your Computer Science Education that talks about Git, version control and command line, using the back shell, stuff about using a database, how to use a debugger; just all that kind of stuff is stuff that you're expected to know, but never formally taught. ARTY: What about unit testing? EMILY: Okay. So that's an interesting exception to the rule, but I don't think they really carried it through, through my entire experience at Tech. So in the earlier classes, we were actually forced to write unit tests that was part of our assignments and they would look to see that we had – I think we had to have a 100% testing coverage, or very close to it. So that was good, but then it kind of dropped away as we went to the upper-level classes and you just had to be a good programmer and you had to know to test small chunks of your code because we'd have these massive projects and there would be a testing framework to see if the entire thing worked, but there was no unit testing, really. Whereas, at work in my internship, unit tests are paramount, like [laughs], we put a huge emphasis on that. ARTY: So earlier Emily, you had had mentioned teaching people that had no experience at all and the challenge of trying to be able to help and support people and learning to understand regardless of what their gap was in existing experience. So what are some of the ideas, principles, things that you've learned on how to do that effectively? EMILY: That's a really tough question because I've worked on building intuition rather than a set of rules. But I think a few of the major things probably are thinking about it long enough beforehand, because there's always a lot of background context that they need. Usually, you don't present a solution before you've presented the problem and so, it's important to spend time thinking about that and especially how you're going to order concepts. I've noticed, too with some of the best teachers I've had in college is they were very careful with the order in which they introduced topics to build the necessary context and that's something that's really important with complete beginners. The thing is sometimes you have to build that context very quickly, which the best trick I have for that is just to create an analogy that has nothing to do with technology at all, create it out of a shared experience that you have, or something that they've probably experienced. Like a lot of times analogies for IP addressing use the mailing service, houses on a street and things like that, things that are common to our experience. I guess, maybe that's the foundation of it is you're trying to figure out what you have in common with this person that can take them from where they are to where you are currently and that requires a lot of social skills, intuition, and practice, so. DAVE: That's a really good observation because one of the things I find teaching high school, and this has been a skill I've had to learn, is being able to put my mindset in the point of view of the student that I need to go to where they are and use a good metaphor analogy to bring them up a step. That's a real challenge to be able to strip away all the knowledge I have and be like, “Oh, this must be the understanding of the problem they have” and try to figure out how to walk them forward. EMILY: Yeah. DAVE: That's a valuable skill. EMILY: I think that's really rewarding, though because when I see in their eyes that they've understood it, or I watch them solve the problem, then I know that I did it well and that's really rewarding. It's like, okay, cool. I got them to where I wanted them to be. ARTY: Reminds me. I was helping out mentoring college students for a while and I hadn't really been involved with college for a really long time. I was working with folks that knew very, very little and it was just astounding to me one, just realizing how much I actually knew. That's easy to take for granted. But also, just that if you can dial back and be patient, it's really rewarding I found to just be able to help people, to see that little light go on where they start connecting the dots and they're able to make something appear on the screen for the first time. That experience of “I made that! I made that happen.” I feel like that's one of the most exciting things about software and in programming is that experience of being able to create and make something come to life in that way. Just mentoring as an experience is something, I think is valuable in a lot of ways beyond just the immediate being able to help someone things, like it's a cool experience being a mentor as well. EMILY: And I think it's really important, too as a mentor to have good mentors yourself. I was really lucky to have David just show up in my high school one day [laughs] and I've been really lucky consistently with the mentors in my life. In my internship that I mentioned, I worked with fantastic engineers who are really good teachers. It's difficult to figure out how to good teacher without having first had good teachers yourself and regardless of the level of experience I have, I think I will always want to have that mentor relationship so that I can keep learning. One of the things, too is a lot of my mentors are quite different from mine. Like I am a very quiet introvert person. I would not say I'm very charismatic. I would say David is the opposite of all those things. So wanting to build those skills myself, it's good to have a role model who has them. DAVE: Well, thank you for that compliment. EMILY: Yeah. MANDY: That's really interesting that you said to find mentor that's the opposite of yourself. I literally just heard the same thing said by a different person last week that was like, “Yeah, you should totally find someone who you want to be, or emulate,” and I thought that was really good advice. EMILY: I agree with that completely. There's a lot of conversation around diversity in computer science and that's definitely a problem. Women do not have the representation they should, like I've always gone through classes and been 1 of 3 women in the class. [chuckles] But I think one of the ways in which we can approach this, besides just increasing the enrollment number, is focusing on commonalities—kind of what I mentioned before— from the perspective of mentors who are different than their students. Maybe a male mentor trying to mentor a female student. Focusing on your commonalities rather than naturally gravitating towards people who are like you; trying to find commonalities with people who are different from you. I think that's important. From the student perspective, it's less about finding commonalities more about, like you said, finding the things you want to emulate. Looking at other groups of people and figuring out what they're good at and what things you would like to take from them. [laughs] So. DAVE: Yeah, that's been an interesting challenge I've noticed in the school system is that in the elementary school years, boys and girls are equally competent and interested in this material. By the time they get to high school, we have that 70/30 split of males versus females. In the middle school, the numbers are all over place, but in the formal classes, it seems to be at 70/30 split by 7th grade and I can't really find any single root cause that causes that. Unfortunately, I think I saw some stuff this week with Computer Science Education Week where students as young as first grade are working with small robots in small groups and there always seems to be the extrovert boy that is like, “It's a robot. I'm going to be the one that plays with it,” and he gatekeeps access to girls who are like, “It's my turn.” It's really discouraging to see that behavior ingrained at such a young age. Any attempt I try to address it at the high school level – well, not any attempt, but I feel like a lot of times I can come off as the creepy old guy trying to encourage high school age girls to be more interested in computer science. It's a hard place for me to be. EMILY: Yeah. I don't think you're the creepy old guy. [laughter] I think this is a larger topic in society right now is it's ingrained in women to be meek and to not be as confident, and that's really hard to overcome. That sounds terrible. I don't think people consciously do that all the time. I don't think men are consciously trying to speak over women all the time, but it it's definitely happened to me all over the place—it's happened at work, it's happened in interviews. I think getting over that is definitely really tough, but some of the things that have helped me are to see and celebrate women's accomplishments. Like every time I hear about Grace Hopper, it makes me so happy. I know one time in high school, David took a few other female students and I to a celebration of women's accomplishments and the whole thing, there were male allies there, but the topic of the night was women bragging loudly about the things that they've accomplished. Because that's not something that's encouraged for us to do, but it's something that it builds our confidence and also changes how other people see us. Because the thing is, it's easy to brag and it's saddening that people will just implicitly believe that the more you say you did. So the more frequently you brag about how smart you are, the more inclined people are to believe it because we're pretty suggestible as humans. When women don't do that, that subtly over time changes the perspective of us. We have to, very intently – I can't think of a word I'm trying to say, but be very intentional about bragging about ourselves regardless of how uncomfortable it is, regardless of whether we think we deserve it, or not. MANDY: I also think it's really important for women to also amplify other women, like empowered women empower women. So when we step up and say, “Look at this thing Emily did, isn't that cool?” EMILY: Yeah. MANDY: That's something that we should be doing to highlight and amplify others' accomplishments. EMILY: For sure. I've been to the Grace Hopper conference virtually because it was during COVID times, but that was a huge component of it was there would be these networking circles where women just talk about the amazing things that they've done and you just meet all these strangers who have done really cool things. It goes in both directions, like you said, you get to raise them up and also be encouraged yourself and have something to look forward to. ARTY: It sounds like just being exposed to that culture was a powerful experience for you. EMILY: For sure. ARTY: I was thinking about our conversation earlier about role models and finding someone to look up to that you're like, “You're a really cool person. I admire you.” Having strong women as role models makes it much easier for us to operate a certain way when we interact with other people, and stay solid within ourself and confident within ourself and not cave in. When all the examples around us of women are backing off, caving in, and just being submissive in the way that they interact with the world, those are the sort of patterns we pick up and learn. Likewise, the mixed gender conversations and things that happen. We pick up on those play of dynamics, the things that we see, and if we have strong role models, then it helps us shift those other conversations. So if we have exp more experience with these things, like the Grace Hopper conference and being able to go into these other that have a culture built around strong women and supporting being a strong woman, then you can take some of those things back with you in these other environments and then also be a role model for others. Because people see you being strong and standing up for yourself, being confident and they might have the same reaction to you of like, “Wow, I really admire her. She's really cool.” And then they start to emulate those things too. So these cultural dynamics, they spread and it's this subconscious spreading thing that happens. But maybe if we can get more experiences in these positive environments, we can iteratively take some of those things back with us and influence our other environments that, that maybe aren't so healthy. EMILY: Yeah. I agree. And I think also, it's important to be honest and open about where you started because it's easy, if you're a really confident woman walking into the room, for people to think you've always been that way. I think it's important to tell the stories about when you weren't, because that's how other people are going to connect with you and see a path forward for themselves. Definitely. I'll start by telling a story. I think it's just a million small experiences. I was a strong student in high school. I was very good at math. We had study halls where we'd sit in the auditorium and we'd all be doing homework, and students would often go to the guy in my math class who knew less than I did and ask for help. I would just sit there and listen to him poorly help the other students and mostly just brag about himself, and just be quiet and think about how angry it made me, but not really be able to speak up, or say anything. I'm very different now. Because of the exposure that I've had, I am much more quick to shut that down and to give a different perspective when someone's acting that way. MANDY: But how cool would it have been if that guy would've been like, “Don't ask me, ask Emily”? DAVE: That's a really important point because I hear women talk about this problem all the time and I don't think the solution is a 100% in the women's hands. I think that it's men in the room. My own personal experience, most of my career has been spent in government contracting space and, in that space, the percentage of women to men is much higher. It's still not great, but I think there's a better attempt at inclusion during recruiting. I think that there's a lot of just forces in that environment that are more amenable to that as a career path for women. And then when I started consultancy with my two business partners, Kim and Karen, that was an unheard-of thing that I had two women business partners and at the time we started it, I didn't think it was that big of a deal at all. But then we were suddenly in the commercial space and people thought it was some scam I was running to be a minority owned company and my partner was my wife, or I'd go into a meeting and somebody thought I brought a secretary and I was like, “No, she's an engineer and she's good, if not better than me.” It opened my eyes to the assumptions that people make about what the consulting rates even should be for men versus women and it's in that environment I learned that I had to speak up. I had to represent to be a solution to that problem. I think you can get in an argument with other guys where they aren't even convinced there's a problem to solve. They'll start talking about, “Oh, well, women just aren't as interested in this career path.” It's like, I've known plenty that are and end up leaving. EMILY: I think definitely having support from both sides has been really important because it is typically men in places of authority and to have them be encouraging and not necessarily forcing you into the spotlight, but definitely trying to raise you up and encourage you to speak out means a lot. ARTY: Yeah. I found most of the teams I've been on, I was the only woman on the team, or one of two maybe and early on, when nobody knows you, people make a lot of assumptions about things. The typical thing I've seen happen is when you've got a woman programmer is often, the bit is flipped pretty early on of that oh, she doesn't know what she's doing and stuff, we don't need to listen to what she says kind of thing and then it becomes those initial conversations and how things are framed, tend to affect a lot of how the relationships on the team are moving forward. One of the things that I learn as just an adaptive thing is I was really smart. So what I do, the first thing on the team I'd find out what the hardest problem was, that none of the guys could solve and figure it out, and then I would go after that one. My first thing on the team, I would go and tackle the hardest thing. I found that once you kick the ass of the biggest baddy on the yard, respect. [laughter] So I ended up not having problems moving forward and that the guys would be more submissive toward me, even as opposed to the other way around. But it's like you come into a culture that is dominated by certain ways of thinking in this masculine hierarchy, alpha male thing going on and if that's the dominant culture, you have to learn to play that game and stake yourself in that game. Generally speaking, in this engineering world, intelligence is fairly respected. So I've at least found that that's been a way for me to operate and be able to reset that playing field anyway. MID-ROLL: This episode is supported by Compiler, an original podcast from Red Hat discussing tech topics big, small, and strange. Compiler unravels industry topics, trends, and the things you've always wanted to know about tech, through interviews with the people who know it best. On their show, you will hear a chorus of perspectives from the diverse communities behind the code. Compiler brings together a curious team of Red Hatters to tackle big questions in tech like, what is technical debt? What are tech hiring managers actually looking for? And do you have to know how to code to get started in open source? I checked out the “Should Managers Code?” episode of Compiler, and I thought it was interesting how the hosts spoke with Red Hatters who are vocal about what role, if any, that managers should have in code bases—and why they often fight to keep their hands on keys for as long as they can. Listen to Compiler on Apple Podcasts, or anywhere you listen to podcasts. We'll also include a link in the show notes. Our thanks to Compiler for their support. ARTY: Well, speaking of games, Arty, one of the things that Emily mentions in her bio is playing Dungeons and Dragons and this is an area where as well as I know Emily from her high school years, this is not something I know much about Emily at all. So I'd like to talk about that. Play, or DM, Emily? EMILY: Both. But I really enjoy DMing because it's all about creating problems to solve, in my opinion, like you throw out a bunch of story threads. The way I approach things is I try actually, unlike a lot of DMs, I do not do a lot of world building for places my players haven't been. I pretty much, there are bright light at the center of the world and anything the light doesn't touch doesn't exist. I haven't written it and I don't really look at it that often. So I'm constantly throwing out story threads to try and see what they latch onto and I'll dive into their character backstory to see what they are more predisposed to be interested in. It's like writing a weekly web comic. You don't have necessarily a set beginning and end and you don't really know where you're going to end up in between, but you end up with all these cool threads and you can tie them together in new and interesting ways. Just seeing the connections between those and being able to change what you want something to be on the fly is really cool and just very stimulating mentally for me. So it's like a puzzle exercise the whole time and it is also an interesting social exercise because you're trying to balance the needs of each person. I feel like D&D allows you to know people on a really deep level, because a lot of times, our characters are just – that we're playing. I guess, I didn't really explain what D&D is; I just made an assumption that people would know. It's a tabletop role playing game where you make a character. You're usually heroic and you're going about on this adventure trying to help people solve problems and these characters tend to be just naturally an extension of ourselves. So you get to see all the things that subconsciously the person doesn't real about themselves, but that show up in their character. I think that's really cool. DAVE: So do you have a weekly game, or how often do you play? EMILY: I try to run a weekly game. College often gets in the way. [laughs] DAVE: How many players? EMILY: It ranges from 3 to 4, sometimes 5. It's really cool because it's also, most of them are people that I met during the pandemic. So we've played predominantly online and this is the way we've gotten to know each other. We've become really close in the year, or so since we started playing together through the game that I DM and through the game that one other person in the group DMs and it's cool. It's definitely a way to kind of transcend the boundaries of Zoom and of video calls in general. DAVE: Hmm. ARTY: How did you end up getting into that? EMILY: It was just a friend group in high school. Someone said, “Hey, I would like to run a Dungeon and Dragons game. Do you want to play?” And I said, “Oh, what's that?” I've always loved books and reading so it was kind of a natural progression to go from reading a story to making a story collaboratively with other people. So that just immediately, I had a connection with it and I loved the game and that's been a huge part of my hobbies and my outside of tech life ever since. DAVE: Yeah. I played D&D as a kid in the late 70s, early 80s, but my mom took all my stuff away from me when that Tom Hanks movie came out that started the whole Satan panic thing. So I didn't play for a long time until my own kids were interested after getting hooked on Magic. Seeing my own kids interested in D&D, the story building, the writing, the math that they had to do, like I don't know why any parent wouldn't encourage their kids to play this game. It's just phenomenal. The collaborative, creative, sharing, math; it's got everything. EMILY: Yeah. I'm an introverted person so it takes a lot to make me feel motivated to be in a group with other people consistently, but D&D does that and it does it in a way that's not, I guess, prohibitive to people who are naturally shy. Because you're pretending to be someone else and you're not necessarily having to totally be yourself and you're able to explore the world through a lens that you find comfortable. DAVE: That's really cool. EMILY: I guess, also, it kind of goes back to our conversation about teaching. Being a DM, a lot of my players are people who have not played before, or very, very new. Like, maybe they've read a lot about it, maybe they've watched them [43:18] shows, but they maybe haven't necessarily played. D&D does require a lot of math and there's a lot of optimization, like you can get very into the weeds with your character sheet trying to make the most efficient battle machine, whatever and that's not really always approachable. Especially when I started introducing my younger siblings to D&D, I used versions, D&D like games that were similar, but not quite D&D. Like less math, a very similar amplified character sheets so you're looking at fewer numbers, or fewer calculations involved just to kind of get the essence, because there's a few core concepts in D&D. You have six statistics about your character that they change a little bit between different types of role-playing games, but they're pretty universal, I think for the most part. It's constitution, strength, dexterity, wisdom, intelligence, and charisma. Once you kind of nail those concepts down and once a person understands what those skills are supposed to mean, that really opens the gates to understanding a lot more about the core mechanics of D&D outside of the spell casting stuff and all the other math that's involved. I think just simplifying the game down to that makes them fall in love with the narrative and collaborative aspect of the game, and then be more motivated to figure out the math, if they weren't already predisposed to that. DAVE: So if somebody were interested in picking up a game trying to figure it out, where would they start? EMILY: It really to depends on the age group. If you're going to play with high school students, I would definitely say if none of you have played before, then pick up a player's handbook, maybe a dungeon master's guide if you're going to DM, you've never DM before because it gives a lot of tips for just dealing with the problems that arise in a collaborative storytelling game. And then probably just a prewritten module so you don't have to worry about building your own story, because these modules are stories that are written by professional game developers and you can take pieces of them and iterate it on yourself so you don't have to start with nothing. But if you are going for a much younger audience, I can't remember off the top of my head what it was, but it's essentially an animal adventure game. It's very much D&D without using the word D&D because I think it's a different company, it's copyrighted, and whatnot. But you have these little cute dog characters and they're trying to defeat an evil animal overlord who wants to ruin the town festival. It's very family friendly, like there's no death like there is in regular D&D and it's just a chance to engage with the character creation aspect of it. MANDY: That's really cool. So we're about heading towards our time, but I really appreciate you coming on the show, Emily and I wanted to just ask you, if you could give any advice to young girls looking to get into tech, or software engineering, what advice would you give them? EMILY: I think don't be afraid to walk off the path. A lot of my life has been kind of bucking the prewritten path that a lot of people are told is the best one because it didn't work for me, or whatever reason, and I think it's important just to not be afraid of that and to be courageous in making your own path. MANDY: That's great advice. So should we head into reflections, everyone? Who wants to start us off? DAVE: I'll start with one. I mentioned that when asked Emily about her path into college, that I was interested in a similar path for my own kids. I had a really strange college path that I started out a music major, ended up a computer science major, and had a non-traditional path. I've always believed that college is what you make of it, not where you went. Where you went might help you get your first job, but from then on, it's networking, it's personality, it's how well you did the job. Talking to Emily about her path, just reinforces that to me and helps me plot a path for what I might have my own children do. I have triplet boys that are in 9th grade. So we're starting to think about that path and not only would a path through Virginia Community College save us a fortune, [laughs] it would also be a guaranteed admission into Virginia Tech, or one of the Virginia schools so it's definitely something worth to consider. So I appreciate that knowledge, Emily. ARTY: I've been thinking a lot about how we can better teach people that don't have a lot of experience yet. We've got so much stuff going on in this field of software engineering and it's really easy to not realize how far that this plateau of knowledge that we live in and work with every day to do our jobs, and how important it is to bring up new folks that are trying to learn. One of the things you said, Emily was about teaching is being able to find those shared things where we've got a common understanding about something—you used metaphor of male delivery to talk about IP addresses, for example. But to be thinking in those ways of how do we find something shared and be able to get more involved with mentoring, reaching back, and helping support people to learn because software is super cool. It really is! We can build amazing, amazing things. It'd be awesome if more of us were able to get involved and have that experience and having good mentors, having good role models, all of those things make a big difference. MANDY: I just love the conversation that we had about men and women in technology and for me, I love to reiterate the fact that empowered women empower women and I even want to take that a step further by saying especially right now in our field, empowered men also empower women. So I think that that's something that really needs to be said and heard and not perceived as like Dave said oh, he felt like the creepy guy encouraging girls, or women to get involved in tech. I think it's cool. Dave has personally, he's mentored me. He's gotten me more interested. I used to do assistant work and now I'm learning programming and it's because I've been encouraged to do so by a lot of different men in the industry that I've been lucky to know. DAVE: Well, thank you, Mandy. You certainly have a who's who of mentors. MANDY: I am very, very lucky to know the people I know. DAVE: I'm quite honored to even be named on that list of people you know. [laughter] EMILY: I think the thought I keep coming back to is one that I've mentioned, but didn't really crystallize in my head until this morning when I was preparing for this recording is, I listened to David's interview and I thought about like, “Oh wow, he did really well on the podcast, all these things that I wish I did.” It really crystallized the idea that your mentor should be different from you and should have skills you don't, and you should seek them out for that reason. Mentors tend to be the people that I run into and I haven't really thought about it that way before, but that gives me a different perspective to go out and intentionally seek out those people. That definitely gives some food for thought for me. [laughs] MANDY: I love intentionally seeking out people who are different from myself in general, just to learn and get perspectives that I might have never even thought of before. But with that, I guess we will wrap up. Emily, it's been so nice having you on the show. Congratulations and best of luck on your exams. I know being – [overtalk] DAVE: I can't believe you took the time to do this with your exams coming up. MANDY: I know! EMILY: I'm procrastinating as hard as I can. [laughter] MANDY: But it's been so nice to have you on the show. Dave, thank you for coming and being a guest panelist and Arty, it's always wonderful to host with you. So I just wish everybody a happy new year and we'll see you next week! Special Guests: Dave Bock and Emily Haggard.

Have You Checked If Your Email Is On The Dark Web? Let's Do It Now! Do you know how to find out if you have had your private information stolen? Well, you know, the odds are probably pretty bad, but where was it stolen? When? What has been stolen? How about your password and how safe is that password? We're going to show you real hard evidence, and what you can do to fix things! [Following is an automated transcript] [00:00:16] Knowing whether or not your data has been stolen and what's been stolen is very important. [00:00:24] And there is a service out there that you can go to. They don't charge you a thin dime, nothing, and you can right there find out which of your account has been compromised. And. Out on the dark web. Now the dark web is the place that the criminals go. That's where they exchange information they've stolen. [00:00:49] That's where they sell it. That's where you can buy a tool to do ransomware hacking all on your own. Far less than 50 bucks. In fact, ransomware as a service is available where they'll do absolutely everything except infect people. So you just go ahead and you sign up with them, you pay them a 20% or sometimes more commission. [00:01:12] You get somebody to download in fact to themselves with the ransomware and they do everything else. They take the phone call, they find out what it is. Company is doing and they set the ransom and they provide tech support for the person that got ransomed in order to buy Bitcoin or sometimes some of these other cryptocurrencies. [00:01:38] In fact, we've got another article in the newsletter this week about cryptocurrencies and how they may be falling through. Floor because of ransomware. We're going to talk about that a little later here, but here's the bottom line. You really want to know this. You want to know if the bad guys are trading your information on the dark web, you want to know what information they have, so you can keep an eye on. [00:02:11] Now you guys are the best and brightest, you know, you gotta be cautious or you wouldn't be listening today. And because, you know, you've been caught need to be cautious. You have been cautious, but the time you need to be the most cautious is right after one of the websites that you use, that hasn't been hacked because the fresher, the information, the more it's worth on the dark web, your identity can be bought on the dark web for. [00:02:38] Penny's depending on how much information is there. If a bad guy has your name, your email, the password you've used on a few different website, your home address, social security number, basically the whole shooting match. They can sell your personal information for as little as. $2 on the dark web. That is really bad. [00:03:02] That's sad. In fact, because it takes you a hundred or more hours. A few years ago, they were saying about 300 hours nowadays. It's less in order to get your identity kind of back in control. I suspect it probably is closer to 300, frankly, because you. To call anybody that pops up on your credit report. Oh, and of course you have to get your credit report. [00:03:29] You have to review them closely. You have to put a freeze on your. Got an email this week from a listener whose wife had her information stolen. He had lost a wallet some years ago and she found because of a letter that came saying, Hey, thanks for opening an account that someone had opened an account in her name. [00:03:51] Now the good news for her is that it had a zero balance. Caught it on time. And because it was a zero balance, it was easy for her to close the account and he's had some problems as well because of the lost wallet a few years back. So again, some basic tips don't carry things like your social security card in your wallet. [00:04:17] Now you got to carry your driver's license because if you're driving, the police wanted, okay. Nowadays there's in some ways less and less of a reason to have that, but our driver's license, as you might've noticed on the back, many of them have either a QR code or they've got a kind of a bar code scan on them, but that big QR code contains all kinds of information about. [00:04:41] You that would normally be in the online database. So maybe you don't want to carry a bunch of cash. Although, you know, cash is king and credit cards can be problematic. It kind of depends. And the same thing is true with any other personal identifiable information. Keep it to a minimum in your wall. But there is a place online that I mentioned just a minute ago that does have the ability to track much of the dark web. [00:05:13] Now this guy that put it together, his name's Troy hunt, and Troy's an Australian he's been doing this. Public service for forever. He tried to sell his little company, but the qualifications for buying it included, you will keep it free. And there are billions of people, or I shouldn't say people there's billions of requests to his website about people's private information. [00:05:42] So, how do you deal with this? What do you do? Well, the website is called, have I been poned? Have I been E and poned P w N E D. Ponying is an old term that comes from. Uh, these video games before they were online. And it means that basically I own you, I own all of your properties. You've been postponed and that's what Troy kind of followed here. [00:06:11] Have I been postponed to.com is a website that you can go to now. They have a whole bunch of other things. They have API calls. For those of you who are programmers and might want to keep an eye out for your company's record. Because it does have that ability as well. And it has a tie ins too, with some of the password managers, like one password to be able to tell is my new password, any good. [00:06:41] And which websites have been hacked. Does that make sense? And so that is a very good thing, too, because if you know that a website that you use has been hacked, I would like to get an email from them. So the first thing right there in the homepage, you're going to want to do. Is click on notify me. So you ensure in your email address, I'm going to do that right now, while we're talking, they've got a recapture. [00:07:12] I'm not a robot. So go ahead and click that. And then you click on the button. Notify. a lot of people are concerned nowadays about the security and safety of their information. They may not want to put their email address into a site like this. Let me assure you that Troy. Is on the op and up, he really is trying to help. [00:07:39] He does not use any of the information that you provide on his website for evil. He is just trying to be very, very helpful. Now his site might get hacked, I suppose, but it has been just a huge target of. Characters and because of that, he has a lot of security stuff in place. So once you've put your email address right into the notify me box, click on notify me of [00:08:06] Of course you got to click the I'm not a robot. So once you've done that, It sends you a verification email. So all you have to do at that point, it's just like my website. When you sign up for my newsletter, keep an eye out for an email from Troy from have I been poned.com asking you if you signed up for his notification service? [00:08:31] Obviously it is a very good idea to click on his link in the email. Now I caution people, it costs. And you guys all of the time about clicking on links and emails, because so many of them are malicious, but in the case of like Troy or my website, or maybe another one that you sign up for, if you just signed up for. [00:08:54] You should expect an email to come to your mailbox within a matter of a couple of minutes, and then you should spend just that minute or so. It takes to click on that email to confirm that you do want to get the emails from the website, because if you don't hit that confirmation, you're not going to get the emails. [00:09:17] Let me explain a little bit about why that is. Good guys on the internet don't want to spam you. They don't want to overload you with all kinds of emails that may matter may not matter, et cetera. They just want to get you information. So every legitimate, basic a guy out there business, a organization, charity that is legitimate is going to send you a confirmation email. [00:09:50] The reason is they don't want someone to who doesn't like you let's say to sign you up on a few hundred different emails site. And now all of a sudden you're getting. Well, these emails that you didn't want, I had that happen to me years and years ago, and it wasn't sites that I had signed up for. In fact, some of them were rather pornographic and they kept sending me emails all of the time. [00:10:19] So Troy is going to send you just like I do another legitimate website, send you an email. The link that you must click. If you do not click his link, you are not going to get the emails. It's really that simple. Now, Troy looking at a site right now has information on 11 billion pond account poned accounts. [00:10:47] Really? That is huge. It is the largest collection that's publicly available of. To count. So I'm, we're going to talk about that a little bit more. And what information does he have? How does he protect it? What else can you find out from? Have I been poned? This is an important site. One of the most important sites you can visit in order to keep yourself safe. [00:11:16] Next to mine. Right? Make sure you visit right now. Craig peterson.com/subscribe and sign up for my newsletter and expect that confirmation email to. [00:11:29] Have you been hit by ransomware before? Well, it is a terrible thing if you have, but what's the future of ransomware? Where is it going? We've talked about the past and we'll start with that and then move into what we're expecting to come. [00:11:46] The future of ransomware is an interesting one. And we kind of have to look at the past in ransomware. [00:11:55] Ransomware was pretty popular in that bad guy. Just loved it. They still do because it is a simple thing to do. And it gives them incredible amounts of flexibility in going after whoever they want to go. After initially they were sending out ransomware to anybody's email address. They could find and hoping people would click on it. [00:12:24] And unfortunately, many people did click. But back then the ransoms were maybe a couple hundred dollars and you paid the ransom and 50% chance you got your data back. Isn't that terrible 50% chance. So what do you do? How do you make all of this better? Make your life better? Well, ransomware really, really drove up the value of Bitcoin. [00:12:54] Bitcoins Ascension was largely based on ransomware because the bad guys needed a way that was difficult to trace in order to get paid. They didn't want the bank to just sweep the money back out of your account. They didn't want the FBI or other agencies to know what they were doing and where they were located. [00:13:20] So, what they did is, uh, they decided, Hey, wait a minute. Now this whole crypto game sounds interesting. And of course talking about crypto currency game, because from their viewpoint, it was anonymous. So they started demanding ransoms instead of dollars, PayPal, even gift certificates that they would receive from you. [00:13:46] They decided we're going to use some of the cryptocurrencies. And of course the big one that they started using was Bitcoin and Bitcoin has been rather volatile. Hasn't it over the years. And its founding was ethically. Empty, basically what they did and how they did it. It's just disgusting again, how bad some people really are, but they managed to manipulate the cryptocurrency themselves. [00:14:17] These people that were the early. There's of the cryptocurrency called Bitcoin and they manipulated it. They manipulated people into buying it and accepting it, and then they managed to drive the price up. And then the, the hackers found, oh, there's a great way to do it. We're going to use Bitcoin. And so they demanded ransoms and Bitcoin, and they found that no longer did they have to get like a hundred dollar gifts, different kid for Amazon. [00:14:46] Now they could charge a thousand dollars, maybe even a million dollars or more, which is what we saw in 2021 and get it paid in Bitcoin. Now Bitcoin is kind of useful, kind of not useful. Most places don't take Bitcoin as payment, some have started to because they see it might be an investment in the future. [00:15:11] I do not use Bitcoin and I don't promote it at all, but here's what we've been seeing. Uh, and this is from the chief technology officer over tripwire, his name's Dave Meltzer. What we've seen with ransom. Attacks here. And the tie to Bitcoin want to cry back in 2017 was terrible and it destroyed multiple companies. [00:15:39] One of our clients had us protecting one of their divisions and. We were using really good software. We were keeping an eye on it. In fact, in the 30 years I've been protecting businesses from cyber intrusions. We have never, ever had a successful intrusion. That's how effectively. And I'm very, very proud of that. [00:16:05] Very proud of that. We've we've seen ransomware attacks come and go. This wanna cry. Ransomware attack destroyed every part of the company, except for. The one division we were protecting, and this is a big company that had professional it, people who really weren't very professional. Right. And how, how do you decide, how do you figure out if someone really knows what they're talking about? [00:16:32] If all they're doing is throwing around buzzwords, aren't, that's a huge problem for the hiring managers. But anyways, I digress because having a. Particular series of letters after your name representing tests that you might've passed doesn't mean you're actually any good at anything. That's always been one of my little pet peeves over the decades. [00:16:55] Okay. But another shift in the targeting of ransomware now is showing a major uptick in attacks. Operational technology. Now that's a real big thing. We've had some huge hits. Uh, we think of what happened with solar winds and how it got into solar wind software, which is used to monitor computers had been. [00:17:24] And had inserted into it. This one little nice little piece of code that let the bad guys into thousands of networks. Now we've got another operational technology hack in progress. As we speak called vog for J or log for shell. Huge right now, we're seeing 40% of corporate networks are right now being targeted by attackers who are trying to exploit this log for J. [00:17:53] So in both cases, it's operational software. It's software businesses are using. Part of their operations. So we're, and part of that is because we're seeing this convergence of it, which is of course information technology and operational technology environment. In many times in the past, we've seen, for instance, the sales department going out and getting sales force or, or something else online or off. [00:18:25] They're not it professionals in the sales department or the marketing department. And with all of these kids now that have grown up and are in these it departments in their thirties and think, wow, you know, I've been using technology my whole life. I understand this stuff. No, you don't. That has really hurt a lot of bigger companies. [00:18:48] Then that's why some companies have come to me and saying, Hey, we need help. We need some real adult supervision. There's, there's so many people who don't have the decades of experience that you need in order to see the types of holes. So. We've got the it and OT kind of coming together and they've exposed a technology gap and a skills gap. [00:19:16] The businesses are trying to solve right now in order to protect themselves. They're moving very quickly in order to try and solve it. And there they've been pretty much unable to. And w we use for our clients, some very advanced systems. Hardware software and tools, because again, it goes back to the kind of the one pane of glass. [00:19:38] Cisco doesn't really only have one pane of glass, but that's where it goes back to. And there's a lot of potential for hackers to get into systems, but having that unified system. That Cisco offers really helps a lot. So that's kinda my, my little inside secret there, but we walk into companies that have Cisco and they're completely misusing them. [00:20:02] In fact, one of these, uh, what do you, would you call it? Well, it's called a school administrative unit in my state and it's kind of a super school board, super school district where there's multiple school districts. Hold two. And they put out an RFP because they knew we liked Cisco and what some of the advantages were. [00:20:22] So they put out a request for proposal for Cisco gear and lo and behold, they got Cisco gear, but they didn't get it configured properly, not even close. They would have been better off buying something cheap and being still exposed. Like, you know, uh, I'm not going to name some of this stuff you don't want to buy. [00:20:42] Don't want to give them any, uh, any airtime as it were. But what we're finding now is law enforcement has gotten better at tracking the digital paper trail from cryptocurrencies because cryptocurrencies do have a. Paper trail and the bad guys didn't realize this. At first, they're starting to now because the secret service and the FBI have been taking down a number of these huge ransomware gangs, which is great. [00:21:16] Thank you very much for doing that. It has been phenomenal because they've been able to stop much of the ransomware by taking down these gangs. But criminal activity that's been supported by nation states like North Korea, China, and Russia is much harder to take down. There's not much that our law enforcement can do about it. [00:21:42] So w how does this tie into ransomware and cryptocurrency while ultimately. The ability to tr address the trail. That's left behind a ransom payment. There's been a massive shift in the focus from government trying to tackle the underlying problem of these parolees secured curdle Infor critical infrastructure sites. [00:22:06] And that's what I did training for. The eyes infra guard program on for a couple of years, it has shifted. Now we've got executive orders. As I mentioned earlier, from various presidents to try and tighten it up and increase government regulation mandate. But the big question is, should you pay or not? And I recommend to everyone out there, including the federal government recommends this, by the way, don't pay ransoms because you're just encouraging them. [00:22:40] Well, as fewer and fewer ransoms are paid, what's going to happen to Bitcoin. What's going to happen to cryptocurrencies while the massive rise we saw in the value of Bitcoins will deteriorate. Because we won't have businesses trying to buy Bitcoin before they're even ransomed in order to mitigate any future compromise. [00:23:06] So I love this. I think this is great. And I think that getting more sophisticated systems like what, like my company mainstream does for businesses that I've been doing for over 30 years is going to draw. Well, some of these cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin down no longer will the cryptocurrencies be supported by criminals and ransomware. [00:23:35] So that's my hope anyways. And that's also the hope of David Meltzer, chief technology officer over at tripwire hope you're having a great year so far. You're listening to Craig Peter sohn.com. Sign up for my. At Craig peterson.com. And hopefully I can help you have a little bit of a better year ahead. [00:23:57] All of these data breaches that the hackers got are not graded equal. So we're going to go through a few more types of hacks, what they got. And what does it mean to you and what can you do about it? [00:24:13] Have I been B EEN poned P w N E d.com. And this is a website that has been put together by a guy by the name of Troy hunt. He's an Australian and it goes through the details of various. So that he has found now it's not just him. There are a lot of people who are out there on the dark web, looking for hacks, and there's a few different types of hacks. [00:24:43] And of course, a lot of different types of information that has been compromised and gathered by the bad guys. And, um, stat just out this week is talking about how businesses are so easy. To compromise. It is crazy. This was a study that was done by a company called positive technologies, and they had a look at businesses. [00:25:11] Basically they did white hacking of those businesses and found that 93% of tested networks now. 3% of tested networks are vulnerable to breaches. Now that is incredible. And according to them in dark reading, it says the vast majority of businesses can be compromised within one month by a motivated attacker using common tech. [00:25:42] Such as compromising credentials, exploiting, known vulnerabilities in software and web applications or taking advantage of configuration flaw. Isn't that something in 93% of cases, an external attacker could breach a target company's network and gain access to local devices and systems in 71% of cases, the attacker could affect the business in a way deemed unacceptable. [00:26:13] For example, every. Bank tested by positive technologies could be attacked in a way, the disrupted business processes and reduced their quality of service. It's a very big deal. And much of this has to do with the fact that we're not taking cyber secure. Seriously as businesses or as government agencies. [00:26:41] Now, the government agencies have been trying to pull up their socks. I got to give a handout to president Biden. He really started squeezing many of these federal contractors to get security in place. President Trump really pushed it even back to president Obama, who. Pushed this fairly heavily. Now we're starting to see a little bit of movement, but how about the smaller guys? [00:27:08] How about private businesses? What are you doing? So I'm going through right now. Some of the basic things you can get from, have I been poned and what you can do with all of that data, all of that information, what does it mean to you? So I'm looking right now at my business email address, which isCraig@mainstream.net, pretty simple Craig and mainstream gotten that. [00:27:36] And I found because this email address is about 30 years old. Yeah. I've been using it a long time, about 14 data breaches and. Paste. All right. So what does that mean? What is a paste? Well, pastes are a little bit different than a regular hack. All right. The paste is information that has been pasted to a publicly facing. [00:28:03] Website. Now there's many of them out there. There've been a lot of breaches of Amazon site of Amazon databases, Azure, all of these types of things. But we're, we're talking about here are these websites that are designed to. People to share whatever they want. So for instance, you might have a real cool program, wants to people, those to try out to you don't have the bandwidth to send it to them. [00:28:28] You certainly can send it via email because it's much, much, much too big. So sites like Pastebin or out there to allow you to go ahead and paste stuff in and share the link. Pretty simple, fairly straightforward. Well, these pay sites are also used by hackers to make it even easier for them to anonymously share information. [00:28:55] And many times the first place that a breach appears is on one of these paste sites. So have I been poned searches through these different pastes that are broadcast by a Twitter account called dump Mon, which is a site where again, bad guys are putting information out about dumps had been found as well as good guys. [00:29:20] All right. And they. Port, uh, on, in the dump mom dump MUN Twitter account. If you're interested, it's at D U M P M O N. They report emails that are potential indicator of a breach. So finding an email address in a paste. Necessarily mean it's been disclosed as a result of a breach, but you should have a look at the paste and determine whether or not your account has been legitimately compromised as part of that breach or not. [00:29:53] All right. So in my case again, for theCraig@mainstream.net email address, it was involved. In a paste. So let me see what it says. So let me see. It shows it involved in a pace. This is pace title AA from July, 2015. So this is information from published to a publicly facing website. I don't know if I click on that. [00:30:22] What does it do? Yeah. Okay. So it actually has a link to the paste on AEs to ban. And in this case it's gone, right? It's been deleted. It could have been deleted by the Pastebin staff. Somebody told them to take it down, whatever it is. But again, have I been poned allows you to see all of the information that has been found by the top security. [00:30:48] Researchers in the world, including various government agencies and allows you to know what's up. So let's have a look here at passwords. So if you click passwords at the very top, this is the other tool you should be looking at. You can safely type in the passwords you use. What have I been poned does is instead of taking the passwords from these hacks in the clear and storing them, it creates a check some of the password. [00:31:21] So if you type a password into this, I'm going to type in P a S S w Z. Oh, excuse me. Uh, oh, is that, let me use a better password. P at S S w zero RD. One of the most common passwords on the internet, common passwords ever. Okay. So it says, oh no, poned this password has been seen 73,586 times B four. Okay. It says it, the passwords previously. [00:31:53] Appeared in a data breach and should never be used if you've ever used it anywhere before change it. You see, that's why you need to check your passwords here. Are they even safe to use because what the bad guys have done in order to counter us using. Longer passwords. Cause it's not the complexity of the password that matters so much. [00:32:16] It's the length of the password. So they don't have enough CPU resources in order to try every possible password from eight characters through 20 characters long, they could never do that. Would take forever or going to try and hack in. So what they do is they use the database of stolen passwords in order to try and get in to your account. [00:32:42] Hey, I'm going to try and summarize all of this in the newsletter. So keep your eye. For that. And again, the only way you're going to find that out and get my summary today, including the links to all of this stuff is by being on my email list. Craig Peterson.com/subscribe. That's Craig Peterson, S O n.com/subscribe, stick around. [00:33:09] Did you know, there is a site you can check your password against to see if other people have used it. And if that password has been stolen, it's a really great site called have I been postponed? And we're going to talk about it more right now. [00:33:26] You know, I've been doing cyber security pretty much as a primary job function here in my career for about, let me see. [00:33:37] Not since 92. So my goodness, uh, yeah, an anniversary this year. Okay. 30 years. So you're listening to a lot of experience here as I have. Protect some of the biggest companies in the world, the department of defense, defense, and military contractors all the way down through our local dentist's office. So over 5,000 companies over the years, and I helped perform what are called virtual CIS services. [00:34:11] Which are services to help companies make sure that they have their security all lined up. And we also have kind of a hacker audit whether or not you are vulnerable as a business to being hacked. So we'll go in, we'll look at your systems. We can even do a little bit of white hat hacking in order to let you know what information is out there available about your company. [00:34:39] And that's really where. Have I been poned comes in. It's a very simple tool to use and it gives you some great information, some really good information about what it is that you should be doing. What is that? I had a meeting with the FBI, one of my client's sites, because they had been hacked and my client said, yeah, go ahead and bring them in. [00:35:03] And it turned out to be the worst infection that the Boston office of the FBI has ever seen. There were active Chinese backdoors in there stealing their information. Their plans are designed everything from them. Right there. Right. And, oh, it was just incredible to see this thing that it all started because they said they had an email problem. [00:35:30] We started looking at more closely and we found him indications of compromise, et cetera. So it gets bad. I've been doing this for a long time. But one of the things that you can do, cause I understand not everybody can do what we do. There are some very complicated tools we use and methods, methodologies, but this is something anyone can do. [00:35:53] Again, this site's called, have I been poned.com? You don't have to be a white hat hacker to use this. This is not a tool for the black hats, for another words, for the bad guys, for the hackers out there. This is a tool for you, whether you're a business person or a home user. And we talked about how you can sign up there to get a notification. [00:36:18] If your account has been hacked. So I'm going to the site right now. Have I been poned, which is spelled P w N E D. Have I being B E N poned P w N E d.com. And I'm going to type in me@craigpetersong.com, which is my main email address for the radio show and others. So good news. It says. Postage found. In other words, this particular email address has not been found in any of the hacks on the dark web that Troy has access to. [00:36:56] Now, remember, Troy does not know about every hack that's occurred. He does not know about every data breach that has occurred, but he knows about a whole lot of them. And I mean, a lot. If you look on his site right there in the homepage, you'll see the largest breaches that he knows about drug. For instance, 510 million Facebook accounts that were hacked. [00:37:24] He has the most recently added breaches. We just got an addition from the United Kingdom, from their police service over there. Some of the more recent ones include Gravatar accounts. Gravatar you might have a, it's a very common, in fact, 114 million Gravatar accounts information were compromised. So me at Craig Peterson is safe. [00:37:52] Well, let me check. My mainstream email address now, mainstream.net is the website that I've been using for about 30 years now online. And this is the company that I own that is looking at how do we protect businesses? No. And we're a small company, basically a family operation, and we use a lot of different people to help out with specific specialties. [00:38:21] But let me seeCraig@mainstream.net, this one's guaranteed to be poned all right, because again, that email addressCraig@mainstream.net is close to 30 years old. Uh, okay. So here we go. 14 data breaches. It says my business email address has been involved. Eight tracks back in 2017 and it says compromised data was emails and passwords. [00:38:48] The Apollo breach in July of 2018. This was a sales engagement startup email address, employer, geographic location, job, title, name, phone number salutation, social media profiles. Now you see this information that they got about me from this Apollo breach. Is the type of information that they need in order to fish you now, we're talking about phishing, P H I S H I N G. [00:39:17] And the whole idea behind fishing is they trick you into doing something that you probably. Should not do. And boy, do they trick you into it? Okay. So the data left, exposed by a Paulo was used in their revenue acceleration platform and it's data that they had gathered. That's fishing stuff. So for instance, I know my company name, they know where it's located. [00:39:44] They know what my job title is, uh, phone numbers, uh, how to address me, right. Not my pronouns, but salutations, uh, and social media profile information interest in it. So think about all of that and how they could try and trick me into doing something that really is against my best judgment. My better interest makes sense. [00:40:09] Co this big collection collection. Number one in January, 2019, they found this massive collection of, of a credential stuffing lists. So that's combinations of email addresses and passwords. It's the, uh, 773 million record collection. So what password stuffing is, is where they have your username. They have your passwords that are used on multiple accounts. [00:40:40] Now, usually the username is your email address and that's a problem. And it really bothers me when websites require your email address for you to log in, as opposed to just some name that you make up. And I make up a lot of really cool names based on random words. Plus I have 5,000 identities that are completely fabricated that I use on various social media sites or other sites where I don't care if they have my right information. [00:41:14] Now, obviously the bank's gonna need your information. You can't give it to the, you know, the fake stuff to law enforcement. Too anyways, but that's what credential stuffing is. They will use the email address that you have, that they found online in one of these massive dumps, or maybe one of the smaller ones are long with the passwords. [00:41:39] They found that you use on those websites and they will stuff them and other. They'll use them on a website. They will continually go ahead and just try different username, different password combinations until they get in. Now, that is a very, very big problem called credential stuffing. And that's why you want to make sure that you change your password when a breach occurs. [00:42:10] And it isn't a bad idea to change it every six months or so. We'll talk more about this when we get back, but I want you to make sure you go right now because we've got bootcamps and other things starting up with just probably mid to late January. And you only find out about them@craigpeterson.com. [00:42:32] Make sure you subscribed. .

Jonah Barber is the co-founder of MRX Xtractors. Learn how profitable cannabis oil extraction can be and the different business models available to those in the business or entering this business. Key Takeaways:– From lab testing flower to extraction company – A lot of oil on the market is not good, here's why – The profit margin on a gram of extracted cannabis oil – Throughput from different extraction machines – The different business models in extraction Learn more at http://mrxxtractors.com/   Transcript: As the cannabis market continues to grow around the world, there's an increased focus on extraction, and for good reason. Extracted cannabis oil is arguably the most profitable and integral ingredient for cannabis companies. Here to tell us more about the extraction industry and his extraction solutions is Jonah Barber from MRX Xtractors. Jonah, welcome to CannaInsider. Jonah: Thanks, Matt. It's great to be here. Really excited to speak with you today. Matthew: Give us a sense of geography. Where are you in the world today? Jonah: In the beautiful green state of Oregon. Specifically, Canby, Oregon, which is located about 20 miles south of Downtown Portland. Matthew: Thanks for getting up so early to do this interview. I should tell everybody, it's about [7:00] your time. So thank you. Jonah: Absolutely. Glad to do it. Matthew: So what is MRX at a high level? Jonah: So MRX is an OEM that makes super-critical CO2 and ethanol extraction systems, and we bring kinda complete turnkey solutions for our customers all the way through the whole entire extraction process. Matthew: Okay. And give us a little bit of a sense about your background and journey, and how you got to this point, and why you started MRX? Jonah: You know, the cannabis and hemp industry is something I've always been incredibly passionate about. You know, they always say, "Do what you love," which I always thought was cliché until I actually got to work in this industry. And, you know, how we actually got started was, you know, we looked...You know, Oregon's always been a leading state, as far as a medical cannabis program, you know, having a strong medical program for over 20 years. And when we saw that Colorado went legal, you know, Oregon had almost passed a couple times going legal, and we knew it'd be a matter of time. And we wanted to get in the industry, but we wanted to get into it in a way we thought would utilize our skill sets. We weren't, you know, master growers like a lot of your listeners are and we didn't have any retail experience, and so our background is very technology. And so we wanted to fit in on the technology side on cannabis, and we saw that there was gonna be the need for standardization and quality control when it came to analytical testing laboratories. And when we looked at the landscape about 4 years, we didn't see a lot of that. And so we felt like we had the opportunity to kinda set the standard for what an analytical testing laboratory should be with quality controls, transparency, new state-of-the-art equipment, qualified staff with degrees. It was really kind of the Wild West there for a while, with a lot of people just pumping out high-potency numbers and kinda everything getting a pass for pesticides. And then we really wanted to help set the standard, so we opened up...MRX Labs is actually how we started in the industry. Matthew: Okay. Yeah. It's almost, it can be a huge advantage sometimes to just come in as an outsider because you don't have any concept of the way things should be done. And if you come to the market with skills, you can just start fresh. Whereas people in the industry already can only make kind of iterative changes, where you can start where you wanna start and not have to worry about any kinda legacy. Is that how you felt when you were getting into it? Jonah: We did. We really felt like we had the opportunity to really, I mean, develop a lot of the new methods and technologies, and stuff that just hadn't been developed before. And a lot of that wasn't because someone necessarily couldn't do it, you know, skill set-wise. But it was just because they really didn't have the access or ability to freely work with, you know, cannabis in a research and development capacity. And so we felt very fortunate to be kind of the forefront, to help develop a lot of those, you know, methodologies and things like that, when it came to standardizing testing. Matthew: Okay. Okay. And how many customers have you helped so far? Jonah: You know, from the...Well, there's two different answers. I guess, you know, when we started the lab in 2014, we grew to one of the largest cannabis/hemp testing labs in the U.S. And we ended up working with, you know, thousands of customers here in Oregon. And then on the MRX Xtractors side, where we're the OEM and build all the equipment, we've helped place about 80 different machines in about 10 different states and a couple different countries now. Yeah. So we have about 80 different customers on the extraction side. Matthew: Okay. Okay. Now, the thing I kinda wanna help listeners understand is how you and your partner approach the extraction business. I guess, perhaps, maybe if you could just talk about, you know, frame how other extraction companies look at extraction and how to provide extraction solutions, and then how you and your partner approach it and perhaps how it's a little bit different or better? Jonah: Yeah. So, you know, we do approach it quite differently, how we even came into the extraction industry. And with my partner's background, we've always looked at industries and found deficiencies or bottlenecks and came up with, you know, a better mousetrap, if you will. And so how we got really started on the extraction side was actually based off analytical test results. And so, you know, we started testing everything coming into our lab, and we started seeing all this oil about really flood into our lab. It was really almost overnight. You know, it went from like a lot of flower, then about 3 1/2 years ago, it just started flooding into our lab. And at the time, it was still all medical. And so when we looked at the quality of the oil, you know, it didn't look good, it didn't smell good from an analytical standpoint. When we did, like, a terpene test, it was nonexistent. When we did a solvents test, a lot of it still either had some hydrocarbons left in it or there was a lot of ethanol left in the oil. We actually saw a lot of products coming in in [sounds like] propylene glycol as well. And, you know, it was really concerning from our standpoint. You know, being an analytical testing laboratory, our job is to keep the public safe. And a lot of the products and a lot of the stuff we saw in the products, what people were using for medical purposes, were concerning in the fact that they could potentially cause, you know, some additional damage to whatever ailments they were treating. And I even remember the very first time, you know, I tried CO2 oil. I so badly wanted to like it because I loved the concept, I loved the fact that CO2 was used as the solvent. And to be honest, I absolutely hated it when I first tried it. It tasted kinda like a burnt popcorn to me. And also, after the fact, when I looked at the test results, which it wasn't tested by us, it was like 35% cannabinoids, which meant 50% of it was propylene glycol as well. Matthew: Ooh. Jonah: Yeah. And it just wasn't a pleasant experience. But at the same time, it was flying off the shelves. Like people could not make enough of it. You know, people really like the accessibility and discreteness of vape pens. But at the same time, it was like, "Okay, there's a market for this. But this isn't what we'd consider safe or a high-quality product." Matthew: So Jonah, it sounds like being in kinda the testing part of the cannabis industry, you're in a unique vantage point. You're kind of like the hub where companies that are sending you extracted material or flower are coming to you and talking to you, and you're kinda getting the lay of the land of how this whole extraction business works. Can you talk a little bit about that and what you learned? Jonah: Yeah. We really had a unique perspective because, coming from the testing side, we're kinda like Switzerland. We worked with everybody in the industry. And so we got a chance to talk to all of our customers that were using other extraction technologies and techniques, and kinda got together a list of what they didn't like, what could be improved. And really, kind of our three hallmarks that we came up with was that there was really no repeatability. And so a lot of people were relying upon an extraction artist or the one person that knew how to make the secret sauce or, you know, someone that knew how to stand in front of a machine and adjust 12 different knobs and try to keep it in a tight zone for temperature and pressure. And we just knew that wasn't commercially scalable from that side. You know, we knew that the industry, the way it was growing, had to have repeatability, no matter who ran the machine, that they could follow SLPs, and put the same product in there and get the same high-quality oil coming out. And we just weren't seeing that. And just because they also didn't have control over their process, a lot of people were destroying terpenes. And that's actually where CO2 had gotten the knock on it about 4 or 5 years ago. That just kinda produced an inferior product because it stripped the product of the terpenes. And I'd say, rightfully so, at the time, it got that knock because, you know, people were destroying a lot of the terpenes. Matthew: Yeah. Jonah: And then the third thing is the engineering, and a lot of the equipment we saw just wasn't safe and it would never be permitted and approved by fire marshals in a regulated market. And so that was kind of our three hallmarks was we wanted repeatability, we wanted control of your process to produce the highest quality product, and we wanted safe equipment that would be permitted by fire marshals. And that's how we set out to build Xtractors from that side. Matthew: Okay. That makes sense. Yeah. I could see why being dependent on an extraction artist would be...you know, it's problem. Because then, you're at the whims of that person instead of having a process or, you know, some kind of standard mode with your equipment where you can just repeat it over and over again independent of different people or personalities. And actually, I've met a lot of people that are in that exact case, where they're dependent on a specific employee and they really don't know how the sausage is made. So I'm glad you brought that up. Okay. So let's get into a little bit about throughput and what people talk about with throughput. Actually, before we talk about throughput, can you mention why you didn't like the flavor of the CO2 oil when you first tried it? Did you prefer, like, butane extraction or something? Jonah: You know, it wasn't so much that I preferred something over the other. It was really just, the primary reason was that the people, or the equipment that was making that extract, they didn't have control over their process and they destroyed a lot of the terpenes and overcooked the product in there. And so it almost had like, the best way I could describe it was like a burnt popcorn kinda taste. And it just wasn't even a really pleasant experience, just even like kinda agitating the throat and things like that too. Matthew: Okay. Actually, before we talk about throughput, let's talk a little bit about what the different kind of outputs are from the MRX machines, what you can actually extract and make and do. Jonah: Yeah. So, you know, about 90% of all of our customers wanna make as many full-spectrum vape oil pens as they can. They just cannot make enough to satisfy the market. Matthew: Okay. Jonah: And so that's what the majority of our customers wanna do. However, the more we've gotten into the industry here, the more diverse kinda the product lines are, and the more specialized and unique they are. And people have some really interesting ideas that they like to make. And so one of the things we always do is like talk to our customers about, "Okay, what's your goals? What's your throughput, and how much do you wanna do a day? What kind of products do you wanna make?" Then, we're able to actually bring kind of a complete turnkey solution. Matthew: Jonah, tell us, just give us a sense of what kind of products can be created, what the most popular ones are, and what customers are asking for. So we can get a sense of the different things that your extraction equipment can do and just where the extraction market is at, in general. Jonah: Yeah. Well, the majority of our customers are really going after one of the largest market segments, which really is the vape pens, the cartridges for the vape pens, and making some full-spectrum oil, which is a very high desirable product for that. And so that's about 90% of our customers just make as many vape pens as they can. But what's been interesting is there's been a lot more, you know, development, product development as well, too, with all of our customers coming with really unique products. And so, you know, what we usually always like to do is actually talk to our customers and identify, before they even start, you know, "What kind of products do you wanna make? What kind of throughput do you want to do per day?" And then put together a kind of complete and tailored package with all the equipment they need to achieve their goals. And so what's unique about the CO2 side is that you can really stop it just about anywhere along the way. And so, you know, from going to a full-spectrum oil, or you can do further refinement or post-processing into like a distillate or then [inaudible [00:14:06] distillate, you can turn it into an isolate. And so you really have a lot of variety in [inaudible [00:14:15] different products you can make with it, is how we approach it and what a lot of our customers are making. Matthew: Okay. So just to review, can you review, and can you just tell us what you mean when you say "full-spectrum oil," "isolate," and "distillate," so everybody's on the same page? Jonah: Yeah. So full-spectrum oil is going to be an oil that preserves the majority of the original plant. Obviously, you're not pulling out, like, the plant material and the chlorophylls, and you're removing all the waxes and fats and lipids. So what you're left with is a cannabinoid oil that has, not just your THC or your CBD, but also minor cannabinoids as well. And then, also having good terpene preservation, and that's where all that kinda works together, is what a lot of people call or is known as like the "entourage effect." Which those cannabinoids and terpenes working together make for a much more pleasant high, or a lot more therapeutic or medicinal benefits, all that stuff working together in, like, a full-spectrum oil. And that's a very desirable product for a vape pen. And something like that, if you're doing a cannabinoid potency percentage, would test typically somewhere in like the 60% to 75% cannabinoids. And then [what a lot of our customers will do] then too is, you know, distillate is a popular product as well too, for...It's very popular such as like the edible makers. Because with edibles, you typically don't want to taste the terpenes. And it's a more higher concentrated dosage, and so that is easier to control in your quality control for your recipes and things like that, hitting your certain dosing for your THC or your CBD. Matthew: Okay. Jonah: And so that's what they call "distillate." And that's what that is, is just further post-processing or refinement. And typically, people will use either like a short-path or wiped-film technology. And what that does is further concentrate your THC or CBD, and it pulls out and separates, like, a lot of your terpenes and some of your minor cannabinoids as well. And so that same full-spectrum oil, if you ran it through a short-path or wiped-film would probably end up testing closer to like that 80% to low 90% THC or CBD. And then from there, you can do further post-processing and take the product into isolate as well, which can be more like a powder or a crystal. And that's removing everything except the cannabinoid that you're looking to concentrate. And so one of the biggest and most popular things right now on the market [inaudible 00:17:03] like, CBD isolate. And so we've also developed some new technology to do CBD isolate at a high throughput as well. Matthew: Okay. That's a good...Well, you know, let's just talk about vape cartridges for a minute there. They were wildly popular a couple years ago, and they still are. And they've just gotten better and better. Now, you know, you mentioned full-spectrum, is you can get a lot more out of a vape cartridge than you used to be able to. Is there any sense that the market's starting to stabilize and there's enough supply? Because it's something I've been hearing for years is just like the demand for vape cartridges is just insane. What's your thoughts [sounds like]? Jonah: I'll say, it's still not there yet. You can't really make enough to support the market right now. Because if you actually look at, too, a lot of the...especially in the states that have now gone recreational, if you look at a lot of the economic data on the products that are really moving, you know, there's a lot of new social users coming on and trying things that maybe hadn't in the past. And a lot of these people just don't wanna feel that they're doing a drug, or they don't have the where for all, they don't have a dab rig, they don't have a bong, they don't know how to roll a joint. And they just want ease and discretion. And so that's where if you look at, you know, all the economic data, all the new social users or people that are kind of, you know, sitting back and not really partaking much, but now that it's legal, saying, "Oh, I wanna try that," they're really drawn to the vape pens, and also edibles from that side. And, you know, what's I think also desirable about the vape pens is that you can really control your dosing, in a sense, too. Like, you know, if someone wanted to take a little puff here, [inaudible 00:18:49] pretty much know, you know, how that's gonna affect them. And they can control, you know, how high or how medicated that they would like to get. Matthew: Yeah. Jonah: And so that's where I think a lot of people are more drawn. And then, now you just kinda see them everywhere now, too. You know, people don't typically know if it's a nicotine or a cannabis, or hemp cartridge that people have. Matthew: Yeah. I'm sure there's gonna be some novel use of cannabis oil that might displace vape cartridges in the future. But it'll still be some form of extracted oil. And it's gonna, you know, come in some product form or drink. For me, I feel like kinda what's gonna happen is there's gonna be some company that come along that can consistently deliver the same mood over and over again, and they're available widely. And they're really gonna capture a lot of the market because right now it's just so fragmented, which is good. And I think there's always gonna be the equivalent of microbreweries, you know, doing really well. But, you know, it's nice to be able to be in California, then Oregon, then Illinois, then, you know, New York, and get maybe one vape cartridge that's the exact same everywhere I go, or one drink or one edible that is exact same. Maybe that'll be done with like an intel-inside model, where it's gonna be like, "Hey, this extract, this contains, you know, this many milligrams of this kind of extracted oil with terpenes." But I feel like it's gotta move from that direction. Am I totally off base on that? Or where do you think it's going? Jonah: I would say you're 100% correct. You know, when we first started too, there was really no repeatability. There was really no, even, specific product lines. And people would just run whatever trim or material they had that day and put a label on it, and sometimes it wasn't always even what it might have been labeled as, because people didn't know, you know, when they bought trim. And as the markets become more standard and more tracking, you're really dialing in specific strains. And now, with the amount of testing you can do and even the separation, with different equipment and stuff like we have too, you can separate different cannabinoids. And you can really dial in your dosing and have a repeatable product. And that's absolutely where it's going. Especially, as you see, it's gonna become more of a nationwide product at some point. And that's what people are gonna expect is, you know, going into one state and buying a product, and then going into the other one and having the same thing. And so you're absolutely correct in that standpoint. We're already starting to see it go that direction. And it'll just continue to do so, I think, more so in the next 5 years. Matthew: Now, we touched on throughput there. And maybe you can dive into that a little bit by telling us, you know, how we should think about throughput? Because you say you have clients coming to you and you ask them, you know, how much do they need. And aren't they just gonna say, "I wanna produce as much as I can?" Or where are kinda the limitation breakpoints with each of your extraction solutions? Or how should they be thinking about that, in terms of running 24/7 or how much throughput they need? What can you tell us about throughput? Jonah: Yeah. It's really been amazing too, how far the industry has grown even in the last 3 years. You know, when we first started the extraction site about 3 years ago, we started building a 20-liter extractor, which was about the largest anybody was building that I'm aware of. You know, most people were building a 5 or 10-liter, so we said, "We're gonna build a 20-liter, you know, because that's gonna be a larger commercial system." And typically, on a 20-liter, a lot of your [inaudible 00:22:35] customers run about 6 to 10 pounds at a time. There's ways to kinda engineer the material to put 20 to 30 pounds in there. But, you know, most people are doing 6 to 10-pound strain-specific runs at a time, which is great. You know, it's great to be able to...And at the time, you know, a lot of people would sometimes only have, you know, 6 to 20 pounds of the same strain. Matthew: Right. Jonah: But now, some of these grows are, you know, 100,000-square foot grows, and they have thousands of pounds of the same strain. And on top of it too just, you know, we do a lot of stuff on the hemp side as well. And, you know, Oregon has been kind of a leader in the U.S. here in hemp as well, having the ninth biggest hemp program over the last 4 years. And when we first started with the hemp farmers 4 years ago, if you had 5 acres, that was a lot. You know, that was...You know, 2,000 pounds an acre, that's 10,000 pounds, that's a lot of biomass. Matthew: Right. Jonah: And then, 3 years ago, it was like, "Okay, 20 acres, wow." And then, 2 years ago, it was 50 acres. And then, last year, it was 100 acres. And now, we know some farms are a few hundred acres, and you're talking about millions of pounds of biomass. And so it's pretty amazing how fast everything has scaled. And so that's where we've also developed additional new technology to keep up with the market's demands for a higher throughput, bat the same time, not sacrificing quality. And that's where there might be a lot of manufacturers who will sacrifice quality with throughput by just saying, "Okay, you know, we're just gonna hit it at 5,000 psi and pull more plant material out." But, you know, you destroy a lot of the good cannabinoids and terpenes doing that. And we don't believe in sacrificing the quality with throughput. And so with some of our new equipment here, we have really game-changing CO2 equipment, [pumps] like 100C, which is 2 50-liter vessels that cycle back and forth between each vessel, designed to never stop. And so, as soon as one vessel is done, it switches, and then that person can load the next one. And you know, people can get tricky sometimes when you talk about throughput, and sometimes people [sounds like] can give you the very best throughput on the very best day with the very best material. And, you know, we like to give real numbers, [inaudible 00:24:50] historical averages. And a lot of it too, depends on your starting cannabinoid percentage when it comes to CO2. If you have something that has, you know, like 6% CBD or THC versus 12%, it's gonna take longer to pull that 12% out versus that 6%. But a lot of our throughput now, in like the CO2, can be, you know, upwards from 100 to 300 pounds a day. And then we've also developed full ethanol processing centers that are desired to, not batch, but to be continuous extraction, that are looking at doing more in that 500 to 1,000-plus pounds a day as well. Matthew: That's crazy. Jonah: So we kinda have anything and everything in between, as far as if customers wanna do small batch stuff or if they wanna do full acres that weekend [inaudible [00:25:42]. Matthew: Okay. So you can pretty much do whatever the customer wants within reason, it sounds like. So with the two vessels, you can operate 24/7. So if you have one vessel full, or you have both vessels full, and the extraction machine is running, when it finishes with the first vessel, how long does it take to finish the second one, assuming it's full and your typical extraction machine? Like how many hours do they have before they have to fill it again? Jonah: Yeah. Like on the 100C, we're looking at closer like to that 2 to 4 hours per kinda 15, 20 pounds per vessel. Matthew: Okay. So I'm a businessowner. I'm thinking about buying an extraction machine. And the first question you would ask me is, "How many pounds do you want to do per run?" Is that kinda the first question? Jonah: Yeah. Actually, the question I'd more probably ask is, "How much throughput do you wanna do per day or per week?" is typically what we would ask them. And then, "What kinda products do you wanna make?" Matthew: Okay. Okay. I wanna kinda dive into some business models here and looking at return on investment and things, because extraction is really, as I said in the intro, becoming a bigger and bigger part of the business. And it's also gonna be an ingredient to all of this, amazing products that are being created. But the people that are gonna buy your machines are like, "Hey, what can I do with that? How much money can I make? What should my business model be?" When a customer or a potential customer, or a friend says, "Hey, what can I expect to make with an extraction machine?" I've heard a lot of great scenarios, but how do you kind of describe, like, the ROI on an extraction machine? Jonah: So, you know, we always like to look at, you know, your gross margin. Or it doesn't necessarily even, you know, potentially matter what your gross is, you know, as far as your gross sales. But, you know, what kind of gross margin are you looking at? And also too, just how big of a company they want to have versus maybe a smaller company that can make similar margins, but not have as many people. And so, you know, some people want to be the biggest and best, you know, vape company in their state, or launched from state to state, and that's a big business. I mean, you have, you know, your material acquisition, your new supply chain. You have your compliance, your testing, your cartridges, your consumables, you know, your sales, marketing, packaging, distribution. That can quickly, you know, go from a small scale of, you know, 10 people up to hundreds of people from that side. And, you know, the other side being is, or, "I wanna be, you know, an oil house or a toll processer," or you actually are just making bulk oil and/or doing contract processing to hire. That's a much simpler business model, and it's a very needed businesses model for a lot of either...You know, there's a lot of great farmers that wanna have their own product lines, but they don't want to be an extractor. Matthew: Right. Jonah: And so they look to some of these third parties to use their award-winning flowers and strains to make oil that complements that. Or there are some companies that want to have end products, but don't want to make the oil, and they want someone to make oil to their specifications. That's a much simpler, smaller business model, but it's also still very profitable and you can still make a lot of the same margins that you'd be making, you know, versus going to a full-scale cartridge line as well, too. And so there's needs from both those sides. That's kinda where we wanna talk to people and see what their goals are, what they want to do. And some of it too, just comes down to what's gonna be the most profitable for them and the least amount of headache potentially too? Matthew: Okay. And let's talk, what's the typical cost for a gram of oil right now? Jonah: So I guess, I can answer that three ways, is, you know, if you look at the retail side, you know, with compliance and testing now and everything too, in Oregon...I'll use Oregon and California right now, as kinda the metrics for that. But typically, a gram of oil is gonna end up costing somewhere typically between probably $50 to $80 a gram, typically, is what that would sell at a dispensary to the end consumer. Matthew: Okay. And if you were to say, "Hey, my average client, they're..." I mean, I'm sure it ranges wildly, but kinda the middle of the bell curve, it's being sold at $80 a gram at the dispensary. What does it cost to make that same gram on average? Jonah: You know, so as it goes through the supply chain, you know, from your side as an extractor, a lot of it depends on how much you're getting your biomass for. And that's where it's incredibly important to be able to do your own quality control testing before you even buy products, buy biomass to extract, if you're buying it. Because, you know, you can't just have a blanket price like, "Okay, I'm gonna get everything at $100 a pound, or $200 a pound." There's a big difference between something that tests at, you know, 8% THC trim or kind of B-buds, versus something that's like 12% or 15%. And that's directly gonna affect your yield primarily. It won't so much affect the quality of the end product. You'll still have a great product. It's just, "How much yield are you gonna have come out of there?" is gonna be directly dependent upon your starting cannabinoid percentages. And so if you're buying product at $200 a pound, it typically costs about $5 to $6 to produce a gram of full-spectrum oil. Matthew: [inaudible [00:32:27] Jonah: Yeah. If you're closer at buying trim, you know, at the $100 a pound, you're closer to that kinda $3 to $4 a gram, is what it costs. And then what a lot of these companies do is they will actually then sell to other distributors or people that wanna make their products, and they'll typically sell that, you know, between $8 to $10 a gram. And so that gets sold to then someone that's gonna take that oil, and that's bulk oil. And that's where people are moving a lot of kilos or pounds doing that. And then other companies will then take that oil and put it in a cartridge, package it, brand it, market it. And then, you know, that will typically then go to a dispensary or a distributor, depending on, you know, what state you're in. And then that will typically then get sold, you know, in that $20 to $40 a gram. And then, so once it gets in the dispensary, then that's where then, it goes to, you know, that maybe $50 to $80 a gram, is typically how that works. Michael: Okay. And how do you preserve terpenes as you go through this process? I mean, is it a matter of temperature and pressure? 'Cuz I'm kinda boomeranging all over the place here but, you know, you talked about how critical it is for the experience and for the end product. And also, end customers are getting much more savvy about this and they talk to each other, and you really wanna make sure you maintain terpenes. What's the art and the science of doing that just right? Jonah: So the biggest thing is having control over your process. And you hit pretty much two of the most important parts when it comes from a CO2 site is terpene preservation is maintained primarily per your temperature control and control over your pressure. And so temperature is so critical to your extraction process. And I feel like sometimes that's an afterthought. Sometimes people will just use an off-the-market kinda chiller or hot water bath. And, you know, if you look at the specifications on some of those, you know, off-the-shelf kinda chillers, sometimes they're +/-5 degrees. And we have built for us, heater/chiller combinations that are exactly specified per machine specifications. So when we set our temperature, this stays typically about 1 degree. And so we have really tight control over our temperature. And then from the pressure standpoint, see, a lot of times people will just want...they'll try to do more throughput. And they can achieve more throughput if they go through 3,000, 4,000, or 5,000 psi. But what happens is, at those higher levels, if you look at, you know, like a whitepaper, typically anything over 1,800 psi, you start to degrade some of the cannabinoids, the terpenes, you pull on additional plant material and chlorophylls. And so you really start to degrade a lot of the great therapeutic benefits of some of those things. And then you have to spend a lot of time in your post-processing and cleaning up. And so where we increase throughput without sacrificing the quality is with temperature and then also what we call "flow rate," which is, you know, essentially, how fast CO2 or a solvent moves through your product. And so that's how we're able to preserve, you know, the majority of our terpenes through the extraction process. Matthew: Okay. Jonah: I will say too, you also do have the ability, terpenes you can actually run very low, like almost like a subcritical, in the very beginning of your extraction run. But some customers like to try to pull those terpenes in like that first half-hour to hour, and then they'll just change the settings. You don't have the stop the machine to change the settings. And they'll take a pull and pull those...Especially, if their goal is to go to distillate later, they'll just pull those terpenes, and then set them aside and use them later, either reintroduce them or use them for a different product, because they're very valuable. Matthew: Now, we touched on this briefly, but I just want to be really clear for listeners about the most common business paths for people buying extraction machines. So you get to create your own brand or line of products, there's a toll processer, which you mentioned, and then there's the bulk oil house. Are those kinda the big buckets you would say exist? Jonah: Yes. Those are the three that our customers really focus on. There's incredible opportunities to be a toll processor or kind of a bulk oil house. And primarily that's because the extraction site, you know, there's a capital investment that comes with it, and also I think sometimes people are just like, "Well, I don't know anything about extraction." You know? Even amazing growers that are great growers that know cannabis better than [inaudible 00:37:16] anyone, they sometimes are just like, "Well, I just don't know about extraction or what to do." Matthew: Okay. Jonah: So I think some people are kind of, maybe [sounds like] a little nervous just thinking of, "Can I do that?" You know? And so a lot of times there's not enough processors, or toll processors to handle the amount of extraction that needs to take place. And so that's where there's been these industries that have stepped up to where, I had one customer here in Oregon, a company called "Tosmos" [sp], that was initially gonna do their own cartridge line. And then they got offered a pretty lucrative contract to do toll processing for one of the biggest cannabis companies out there that just wanted them to toll process. And so they did that and they started with a 20-liter. They added a second 20-liter, and then a third 20-liter, and then a 100-liter, and they just kept adding more equipment. And they've really found their niche in doing toll processing extractions. Matthew: So toll processing, again, is just taking other people's trim or your own trim and extracting it, and then selling it to another business, not a... Jonah: That's correct. Matthew: ...retail operation? Okay. Jonah: Yes. But now, on the toll processing, it's more you're specifically extracting it to that customer's needs and specifications and wants. And that's where you have to have good quality control and repeatability to satisfy the customer there. And so, yes, a lot of times, they'll provide their trim or product, and then you extract it and turn it into, you know, a full-spectrum oil or a distillate. Matthew: Okay. Jonah: And then, the bulk oil side...And a lot of our customers will do a combinate of one, two, or all three of these businesses too. Because when you're doing the toll processing, it's also just natural that you could be almost like a bulk oil, like a Cisco, that kind of thing, to where you're even sourcing your own trim or your own...And here in Oregon, too, I mean, now with the cost of flower, the overproduction, a lot of the extraction companies are now running flower because they can get outdoor really good A, B-buds, or $200, $300 a pound, which really change the... Matthew: Whoa. Jonah: Yeah. Matthew: I've heard about the overproduction. It was overproduction. It was kind of a subjective term. But I've heard that there's a big supply in Oregon. So that's amazing, $200 or $300 a pound. Jonah: Oh, it is. And it's really changed even the whole quality of your yields. You know, so now instead of maybe historically getting a 10% to 12% yield, you know, of full-spectrum oil, now some of our customers are getting closer to, you know, 13%, 15%, which really changes your financials modeling, when you're getting that kinda return in yields. And so a lot of the customers will also then just make bulk oil and just sell that to edible companies, you know, sell it in pounds or kilos at a time to edible companies or vape companies that don't wanna do their own processing, but wanna have oil made that meets their standards and quality. Matthew: Okay. So the toll processor already has in mind exactly what they need, and they have specifications. And when a company comes to a toll processor, they say, "Make x, y, and z for me with these specifications." A bulk oil house has like a menu you can pick from of extracted oils and products. Is that right? Jonah: That's a great analogy. Yes. You got it. Matthew: Okay. And then, of course, before that we mentioned creating your own brand. So we just went through creating your own brand, the toll processor, and a bulk oil house. I think it's amazing how these niches are kind of evolving. They overlap, but its kind of fragmentation with industry is we're starting to see specialization. So that is really amazing. And just to review those numbers again Jonah said...And we won't quote you on that, Jonah, just because, you know, the market's always a moving target. But you said sometimes... Jonah: It is. Yeah. Matthew: ...the input costs were $1 a gram or $3 or $4 a gram, but oil was selling for $80 a gram at a dispensary. So you can get a sense of how profitable this can be for a mass that's very small. I mean, a gram is a tiny, tiny amount of a mass. So that's really just incredible. And one of the reasons I'm so excited about it, it's also exciting too because compared to cultivating, extraction is kind of an esoteric thing still. People really, they don't know how to get into it. It seems really opaque. It's just, you know, "What do I do?" There's all these insiders, and they don't wanna really talk about it because it's going so well from them. Not uncommon to hear from people to pay for their extraction machines in a week, and these are expensive machines. So it's really something that's just remarkable. We're in a remarkable spot in history here. And actually, it was 2 or 3 years ago, I was talking about this, but this opportunity still exists. So I want to just move forward with some other topics here. So we've talked about the three different types of businesses most of your clients operate under. We talked about preserving terpenes. But I want to talk a little bit about your partner's background and what he's brought to the business. Because in talking to you earlier, he sounds like an interesting character and has brought a lot of cool things, just kinda cool skills to the extraction realm. So if you can talk about him a little bit? Jonah: Yeah. I'm very blessed. I couldn't ask for a better partner. His name is Paul Tomaso. He's my partner and our CEO of our company here. And when we decided that we were gonna set up an analytical testing laboratory, he was back on the East Coast doing some of the largest solar rooftop and fuel cell installations in North America. And he was the very first call because we knew with his background that, once he got into the cannabis and hemp industry, not only would he help us set up the most professional lab with quality controls and standardization, and new methods, but we knew once he got in the industry, he would identify bottlenecks and deficiencies and come up with better solutions. And that's exactly what he did. And his background is really unique in the sense that, it's like his whole life culmination has come together to develop the best extraction equipment, which he never, ever would have expected. You know? And so, you know, he came from actually a military background, joining the military when he was 17. And then he actually ended up working for John Fluke, doing Fluke multimeters up there in Seattle area. And then he did, like, the TERCOM [sounds like] section of the Tomahawk Missile, the layout for that. He did some stuff on the NASA space shuttle, some contract work. And then he developed some of the fastest laser technology in the world for laser marking and engraving. And then he even developed some robotic pick-and-place equipment that you could take any image, any photograph, any customer logo, and it would pixelate it into, you know, 1/2-inch by 1/2-inch or 1-inch by 1-inch tiles. And it would robotically go grab those tiles, place them, and then you'd have like a beautiful mural. Like he did the D-Day Map in the Eisenhower Building, back in Washington as well. And so he's had all these...Everything he's ever done, he's developed new technology. And I don't know. When it comes to extraction, you know, and the fact that we do automation on everything which is unusual, a lot of equipment's just not automated, whether it be CO2 or ethanol, or butane, and we automate everything to have control over your process and also, you know, reduce the cost of labor. And so the fact that I don't know of any other person that has the electrical, the mechanical, the controls, the pressure to have all those knowledges over his life experience to bring them together to build extraction equipment. Yeah. So I've very, very fortunate to have someone like that as a partner, because he's really the driving force and the genius kinda behind all the technology that we build here. Matthew: That's great. Now, he went from military applications to cannabis. That's a huge divergence. Jonah: Oh. Yeah. But, you know, Paul, he's a big believer in the medicinal benefits. You know, he's even seen that himself in a sense, where he loves CBD, in particular. You know, his mind never stops, and also he always has to be very alert. And so he doesn't really partake so much on the THC side. But the CBD side, he's a big believer on. And, you know, he's taken some full-spectrum CBD capsules, just goes to bed, you know, let's the mind shut off for a little bit, and just wakes up refreshed. And that was one of the biggest changes for him is realizing, "Wow, this stuff really, really works." Matthew: Yeah. Jonah: And so he's just incredibly passionate about helping people. You know, and him being a veteran too, you know, he really likes to help a lot of the veterans. And that's been one of the biggest things, we've enjoyed helping and seeing how many veterans that cannabis has really helped and saved their lives even. And we also like to hire a lot of veterans as well. And so anyways, that's been special to him as well, from that side. Matthew: How do you see the extraction business changing and morphing, evolving, in the next 3 to 5 years as the industry just...I mean, there's more and more demand. There's gonna be more and more biomass coming in. Where do you see it going? Jonah: Yeah. It's gonna be higher, faster, more efficient throughput with maintaining the best, highest quality, and repeatability is really where it's gonna go. And you'd hit on part of that, is it's gonna become even more standardized to where your product lines, even by a state-by-state basis, are gonna be repeatable. And so there's gonna be just more and more quality control. There's probably gonna end up being more requirements for good, you know, GNP kinda stuff too, for good practices for manufacturing. It's really gonna turn more, I think, into somewhat of a pharmaceutical environment with some of the production of stuff, whether it be edibles and oils. But just having that repeatability and quality control over your product. Matthew: Yeah. It's funny because, you know, I've met some people from the pharmaceutical industry that have come over to the cannabis industry, and they're kinda bringing their best practices. But I don't think it'll be long before the cannabis industry is giving other industries their best practices. Because so much capital is moving into cannabis, and there's not any legacy architecture or systems. So it's all being built fresh. So we don't have to, you know, rely on kind of sclerotic processes. But with that, talk a little bit about your ISO-certified processing center. What is ISO? Why should we care about that? And what's important to know about it? Jonah: Yeah. Well, you know, ISO is actually International Organization of Standards, who publishes quality standards or just good manufacturing processes. Matthew: Okay. Jonah: And it's really important because it helps, you know, answer the question, "You know, what is the best way to do this when it comes to manufacturing and to uphold certain standards as well?" And, you know, our background is in engineering, and you'll find that we created a lot of the standards to achieve, you know, high-quality extracts. And also, too, it's going into different jurisdictions, or even countries for that matter, or different states. You know, they all have different standards, but things like ISO or CE and things like that, those are all accepted. And so it's important for our customers in whatever jurisdictions or states, or cities, or countries we go into, that we have really high-quality engineering and documentation so that they can get through a permitting process as well, too. And so that's been incredibly important from our customer side. Matthew: Okay. And so how long does it take? If someone's listening and they're like, "Hey, I want to reach out to MRX and find out if they have an extraction machine that works for me," how long does the whole process take from initial order to completion? And is there any sense on cost that you can give us, so we can kinda get an idea about this? Jonah: Yes. So typically, you know, we build everything to order. Matthew: Okay. Jonah: And, you know, we require a 50% deposit, and we start building. And, you know, we have machines priced anywhere from the $150,000 up to $850,000, and then kinda anywhere and everywhere in between. And so typically, you know, on some of our smaller systems, a 6 to 8-week build time is fairly typical. Then, some of our bigger systems, like our 100C or our ethanol processing center, those are typically gonna be closer to the 12 to 16 weeks. But it usually works out really well timing-wise. Of course, every once in a while, we get the guys or existing customers that need another machine right away. And we're usually able to accommodate that in some way. But typically, that lead time is the right lead time in the sense that, once they put their deposit down, we start working with their team, helping with facility layout and design. And because what we see with a lot of our customers too, is not just their needs right now, like, "Okay, I need, you know, two 20-liters." "Okay. But what about your second phase or your third phase?" And you can do a lot of infrastructure stuff up front with not a lot of additional capital but make it a lot easier to win. Because we've seen it over and over, where every 3 months, 6 months, our customers who start from a machine, and then they need more equipment. And then if they don't prepare for that on the front end, you know, they're moving things around, trying to bring more electrical in. And so we try to help in the beginning with a lot of their facility layout and design. That's not something we charge extra for. That's just part of kinda the value-added working with us. And we just kinda help them through their facility readiness, as well, making sure their facility is ready so when the equipment arrives. And a lot of times, too, we'll even have our customers come in and do training. We always go do training onsite, as well. But a lot of times, we'll invite our customers to come in before their equipment even ships and come spend, you know, a few days here at our facility, learning about the equipment, you know, learning the extraction process. And that way, they have a good foundation, and it really shortens the learning curve when their equipment arrives. Matthew: Well, that's good. Those are helpful services. I mean, just quickly, when's the most appropriate time to...When you're designing an extraction facility, maybe it's adjacent to a grow or part of some business planning, when is the ideal time to bring in you? Like when the architect and the general contractor have kinda been picked and blueprints are being drawn, be like, "Hey, we wanna bring in, you know, MRX to talk a little bit about this facility and just to make sure that we're implementing the best practices?" 'Cuz I've seen a lot of people and a lot of businesses doing that, like wondering when to pull in who in the planning process. Jonah: That's exactly it, is we like to typically be involved in that at least at 4 to 6 out before you want to be processing. And we work more and more now with architects, designers, engineering firms, from the very beginning, just helping spec in the equipment, and then also with, like I said, the facility layout and stuff. And so, yeah. You know, that 4 to 6 months is usually when we get involved. Matthew: Okay. Well, Jonah, I'd like to ask some personal development questions to help listeners get a better sense of who you are personally. With that, is there a book that's had a big impact on your life or way of thinking that you'd like to share? Jonah: You know, the one book that I really took a lot from was a book called "From Good to Great," I think the author is Jim Collins. Matthew: Mm-hmm. Jonah: And as an entrepreneur, you know, when you start a company, you know, it's usually you and two or three other crazy partners that start to build that company. And there's only, you know, so much you can do and keep taking it in yourself and pushing forward. And, you know, I can't stress the importance and need of getting good, quality people in building your team. And what I reference about that book is that it took a bunch of case studies from different companies that were good companies, and built to a certain part, and then took them to the next level. And one of the things I really took out of that was identifying the right people to kinda hire. And a lot of times though, too, you don't always sometimes just hire for a very specific position, which is common. It's what you usually do, like, "I need this position." And we still do that a lot of times. But a lot of times, you know, I'll just meet somebody or talk with them, or have some informational interviews, and you'll find someone with a really good work ethic, hungry, they want to learn, and they have unique skill sets, and you kinda almost find a position for them. And that's one of the things... Matthew: Get them on the bus, right? Is that what they call that? Jonah: Yeah. Yeah. Matthew: Get them on the bus. Jonah: Yep. Exactly. And so that's one of the things I really took from that book and I thought was really helpful to me, as far as a book like that. Matthew: Okay. I should also ask, you know, you're a growing business, what's the type of skill set, like degree, are you looking for chemists, mechanical engineers, electrical engineers...I mean, what's the type of skill set for the employees of your company now? Like what does it look like? So I wanna, A, give young people listening or people looking to make a career transition, looking for what skills are, like, in demand. What would you say is in demand? Jonah: Yep. You hit two of my top ones right there, is kinda that chemistry background and then that mechanical engineer side. You know, people with kinda [inaudible [00:56:46] HVAC kind of experience or refrigeration experience is very helpful to us from that side. Matthew: Okay. Jonah: But, you know, we're always just looking for just good, talented people that are hard workers, that are not afraid to get their hands dirty and work hard. And, you know, we do a lot of training in-house too. And so we don't necessarily have to have a degree, but those are two degrees that we do tend to hire a lot of. Matthew: Yeah. And one more personal development question. Is there a tool, web-based or otherwise, that you consider vital to your business or productivity individually?? Jonah: Yeah. You know, one is something that everybody already knows, but it's amazing the amount of texting that now happens in this industry. And just being able to use, like, voice text, I use that. I never thought I would use something like that to that level, but the amount of texts you get in a day can be 50, 100 texts. Matthew: Yeah. Jonah: And so that's something I use a lot of. But then, more on our side, specifically, we use a program called like, "Vtiger," which it's a little more than just a CRM, which is a, you know, customer relationship manager. And from our side, it's incredibly important to have to keep track of the data and your customers. I'm not just talking about sales leads, per se, but your existing customers. And we even have a whole customer portal built in for when our customers get equipment. You know, they have their own login, their own [inaudible [00:58:25]. So we can communicate with them through that... Matthew: Well, that's cool. Jonah: ...and track everything through the whole entire process. Matthew: Yeah. Jonah: And so that's been a very valuable tool for us, Vtiger, because it kinda ties in the potential new sales opportunities, it ties in our existing customers, and it also kinda syncs and manages all the calendars and stuff too, with visits and things like that. So that's been a pretty good tool that we use a lot. Matthew: And how do you spell that? Jonah: V as in Victor, and then just tiger. Matthew: Okay. Cool. I've never heard of that one. Well, Jonah, this has been very educational. Thanks so much for coming on the show and teaching us about everything you're doing. This sounds like just an incredible business opportunity, not just for you, but for also your clients. And so I wish you all the best, and I hope you come back on and tell us how the industry is evolving. Jonah: Oh, I'd be happy to do that. I really appreciate you taking the time. And I sure enjoyed getting a chance to speak with you.

HAPPY NEW YEAR! Final thoughts on the series of Issa Rae's Insecure, why tsunamis would be the worst natural disaster, and are your passwords strong enough? Tune in every week with Woodsy, Cisco, and Justin for more conversations just like this. AND... don't forget to tap that subscribe button!Hit us on our socials, we'd love to hear your thoughts!Instagram: @ifeelthat.podcastTwitter: @ifeelthat_podTikTok: @ifeelthatpodcast

LastPass, T-Mobile, Cisco, HP, Ubisoft and more are all part of this week's data breaches!!

Episode 141. Getting your Cisco CCNA, CCNP and CCIE in Beautiful Pattaya, Thailand. https://youtu.be/ZoqCzFwkAtM --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/getajobintech/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/getajobintech/support

Photo by Sincerely Media on Unsplash Join us for Part 2 of our crossover with another great podcast: He Said, Dee Said with Dee Kapila from Miro and Ryan Roch from Cisco. We continue our Pop Culture thread on how Video Games, Music, and Video does or doesn’t apply to Customer Education. We range far and wide with this final episode of 2021! Happy New Year from CELab and all of us in the Customer Education community! And as always, check below for a full transcript of the show!

Today, lets talk cloud and the march towards its dominance. What I'm predicting for 2022 in this space. This is the Business of Tech's 2022 Prediction Series.     Learn about Cisco's Partner Program! https://lnkd.in/gsydMya/ Want to get the show on your podcast app, or get the written versions of the stories? Subscribe to the Business of Tech: https://www.businessof.tech/ Support the show on Patreon: https://patreon.com/mspradio/ Want our stuff? Cool Merch? Wear “Why Do We Care?” - Visit https://mspradio.myspreadshop.com Follow us on: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mspradionews/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/mspradionews/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mspradio/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/28908079/

Today on the podcast Kariz Matic and I have an insightful conversation exploring psychology and technology and how connected the two are. Kariz has spent 20+ years creating systems and technology for companies like Cisco, Nestle and Genentech with work that has led to 7-figure cost reductions and revenue growth. She is the CEO of The Matic (a consultancy that helps ambitious leaders, their teams and their products become more productive, competitive and profitable), a mom, philanthropist, maker, mentor and so much more. She believes systems make space for us to discover more ways to share our talents, serve our community and deliver our value. That's why she's dedicated her career to finding those refinements one product, workflow and data point at a time. I recently took a systems building course from Kariz and I was blown away by Kariz and also about the constant ah ha moments of how similar technology and everything I have been learning about psychology relate to one another.  During this episode we explore: Psychology & Technology: Enable Simple Systems For Individuals & Communities To Thrive It's more important to learn than be perfect The cycle of continuous improvement and self discovery - always asking the question - who am I? How systems building relates to community building Rewiring the limiting beliefs around embracing femininity in a masculine dominated industry Technology is the enabler - manifestation of many individuals ideas put together The power of breaking it down to simple, small steps with psychology & technology AND SO MUCH MORE! Thank you so much for listening in today for being open to the curiosity of what healing might look like for you. If this conversation has you curious and wanting more you can find Kariz's contact information in the show notes below. In addition, I have created a FREE journal prompt pdf to help you breakthrough the cycles that are causing you to feel stuck! - to access click > FREE JOURNAL PDF : BEautifully Unwind One Page at a Time Have a magical day my friends! CONNECT WITH KARIZ   Instagram Personal: @karizmatic Professional: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karizmatic/ https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-matic-inc/ CONNECT WITH TISHA Instagram : @beautifullyunwinding Blog: www.beautifullyunwinding.com Subscribe to the BEautifully Unwinding Podcast so you never miss one of these powerful and impactful conversations. 

About Serena Serena is a Network Engineer who specializes in Data Center Compute and Virtualization. She has degrees in Computer Information Systems with a concentration on networking and information security and is currently pursuing a master's in Data Center Systems Engineering. She is most known for her content on TikTok and Twitter as Shenetworks. Serena's content focuses on networking and security for beginners which has included popular videos on bug bounties, switch spoofing, VLAN hoping, and passing the Security+ certification in 24 hours.Links: TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@shenetworks Twitter: https://twitter.com/notshenetworks?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor 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: It seems like there is a new security breach every day. Are you confident that an old SSH key, or a shared admin account, isn't going to come back and bite you? If not, check out Teleport. Teleport is the easiest, most secure way to access all of your infrastructure. The open source Teleport Access Plane consolidates everything you need for secure access to your Linux and Windows servers—and I assure you there is no third option there. Kubernetes clusters, databases, and internal applications like AWS Management Console, Yankins, GitLab, Grafana, Jupyter Notebooks, and more. Teleport's unique approach is not only more secure, it also improves developer productivity. To learn more visit: goteleport.com. And not, that is not me telling you to go away, it is: goteleport.com.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Redis, the company behind the incredibly popular open source database that is not the bind DNS server. If you're tired of managing open source Redis on your own, or you're using one of the vanilla cloud caching services, these folks have you covered with the go to manage Redis service for global caching and primary database capabilities; Redis Enterprise. To learn more and deploy not only a cache but a single operational data platform for one Redis experience, visit redis.com/hero. Thats r-e-d-i-s.com/hero. And my thanks to my friends at Redis for sponsoring my ridiculous non-sense.  Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. Once upon a time, I was a grumpy Unix systems administrator—because it's not like there's a second kind of Unix systems administrator—then I decided it was time to get better at the networking piece, so I got a CCNA one year. Did this make me a competent network engineer? Absolutely not. But it made me a slightly better systems person.My guest today is coming from the other side of the world, specifically someone who is, in fact, good at the networking things. Serena—or @SheNetworks as you might know her from TikTok or @notshenetworks from the Twitters—thank you for joining me, I appreciate your time.Serena: Yeah, thanks for inviting me on.Corey: So, at a very high level, you are a network engineer, and you specialize in data center compute and virtualization, which is fun because I remember doing a lot of that once upon a time before I went basically all in on Cloud consulting, and then sort of forgot that data centers existed. That's still a thing that's still going well, and there are computers out there that don't belong to what are the three biggest tech companies in the world?Serena: Yeah. Shockingly, there's still a ton of data centers out there, still a lot of private hosting, and a lot of the environments that we see are mixed environment; they will have some cloud, some on-prem. But yes, data centers are still relevant. [laugh].Corey: On some level, it feels like once you get into the world of cloud, you don't have to really think about networking anymore. You know, until there's a big outage, and suddenly everyone had think about the networks. But it also feels like it is abstractions piled upon abstractions in the cloud infrastructure space. How much of what happens in data centers these days maps to what happens in these hyperscaler provider environments?Serena: That's a good question. I think—so I have two CCNAs; I'm very familiar with networking, I'm very familiar with virtualization, and I went and got my AWS certification because as we're talking about a lot of cloud things happening now, it's big, it's good to know about it. And underlying infrastructure under the cloud is all the data centers that I work with, all the networking things that I work with. So, it maps very well to me. I thought I had, like, a really easy time studying for my AWS certification because a lot of the concepts just had, like, a different fancy name for AWS versus just what you know, as, like, NAT, or, you know, DNS, different things like that.Corey: Of course, NAT used to be a thing that was—everyone would yell at you, “It's not security,” even though there are—I would argue there are security elements tied into it. But honestly, that feels like one of the best ways to pick fights with people who are way better at this than I am. Nowadays, of course, I just view NAT through a lens of, “Yeah, I totally want to pay an extra four-and-a-half cents per gigabyte passing through a managed NAT gateway,” which remains, of course, my nemesis. The intersection of security, networking, and billing leads to basically just being very angry all the time.Serena: Yeah. You come into the field, like, so ready to go, and then sometimes you do get beat down. But it's worth it, I think. I really like what I do.Corey: And what you do is something of an anomaly because most people who focus on this world of data center networking and the security aspects thereof, and the virtualization stuff, are all—how do I put it politely?—old, grumpy and unpleasant. I mean, I guess I'm not going to put it politely because I'm just going to be honest with it. Because I'm one of those people, let's be clear here. Instead, you are creating a whole bunch of content on Twitter and on TikTok, where I've got to say that the union set in the Venn diagram between TikTok and deep-dive networking and cybersecurity is basically you. How did you get there?Serena: That's a really good question. To your first point, the, you know, old grumpy, kind of, stereotype, those are honestly some of my favorite people, truly, because I don't know what it is, but I just vibe with them in a work environment so well. And it's funny, you know, when I got my first job out of college, I was definitely the youngest person on my team by far. And we would all go out to lunch, I would mess with all of them, we'd all play pranks on each other. Just integrating into the teams was always super easy for me, which I'm really lucky that—not everybody has that experience, especially in their first job; things are a little rough.But it's always great. Like, I love the diversity in tech. And to your second point, how did I end up here, right, with this kind of intersection from this networking world to TikTok? People are always confused. Like, how did that happen? How are you finding followers on TikTok that are interested in networking?And I'm just as shocked honestly. [laugh]. I started making this content this time last year, and… you know, at first I was like, nobody wants to learn about DNS on TikTok. This is where people dance and play pranks and all this stuff.Corey: And if there's dancing when it comes to DNS, at some point, something has gone other hilarious or terrifyingly. That again, I use it as a database, so who am I to talk?Serena: [laugh]. Yeah, but it's been fun. I am shocked. But there's such a wide variety of people now using TikTok and it's growing so quickly. Early on in my TikTok career, I had messages and emails from people who are vice presidents at major Fortune 100 companies asking me, you know, if I'd be interested in working there or, you know, something like that, and I was just—I was so shocked because there was a company that was a Fortune 100, and one of their VPs joined one of my Lives, and was asking me questions, just about, like, my background career, and then they sent me a follow up email [laugh] to be like, “Hey.”So, I was like, “Did I just get interviewed on my Live on TikTok?” And that they always, like, cracked me up. And at that point, I knew I was like, okay, this is something different; like, this is interesting. Because, you know, at the end of the day, you see the views and the numbers and the followers, but you don't have, really, faces to put to them or names, and you don't really know where a lot of these people are from, so you don't know who's seeing it. And a lot of times, I think I made the assumption that they are younger kids. Which is true, but there are also a lot of very seasoned professionals that have been in this field for a very long time that also follow me, and comment on my videos, and add great input and things like that.Corey: There's a giant misunderstanding, I think across the industry, that the executives at the big serious companies, you know, the ones whose mottos may as well be, “That's not funny,” have no personality themselves as people and that they live their entire lives in this corporate bubble where they talk to their kids primarily via I don't know, Microsoft Teams, or WebEx, or something else equally sad. And in practice, that just doesn't work that way. They're human beings, too. And granted, you have to present in certain ways in certain rooms, but the idea that, oh, you're only going to reach developers with attitude problems by having a personality of being on modern platforms. I mean, it's an easy mistake to make.I know this because I spent years making it myself with the nonsense that I do until suddenly people are reaching out and it's, “Huh. You sure did use a lot of high-level strategic terms for a developer.” And you start digging into it, and it's like, “Oh, you're your chief operating officer to giant company. I bet your code is terrible.” Is it? It's like, “Yeah. Turns out, maybe I'm not looking at that through the right lens.” Meeting people where they are with engaging content is important, and I think that a lot of folks completely miss that bus.Serena: Yeah, I agree. And this is a small field, right, so it gets kind of nerve wracking sometimes because sometimes you say things and it's so easy to be like, this is how I joke with my friends. But I'm still somewhat in a professional capacity because of me associating with my career, right? And then when my videos reach a million, half-a-million views, when we think about how many people are actually in this field that would be interested in viewing that content, you realize, oh, wow. Like, this is a huge mixed bag of people, which does include very high level executives, all the way to people that are in high school that are just interested in learning more. So, it's definitely been interesting to figure that out along the way. [laugh]. But yeah, they will have regular personalities. They all like TikTok too. If they don't, they're lying. [laugh].Corey: I used to be very down on the whole TikTok thing, but I started experimenting with it. And yeah, it turns out I have a face for radio and, you know, the social graces for Twitter. So, it's not really my cup of tea, but I enjoy watching it. I found that I'm not really a video person, but something about the TikTok format means I'm just going to start scrolling. And oh, dear, it's been six hours and my phone battery died. Thank God, or I'd still be there. There's something very captivating about it and I really like the format.The problem I always had with looking at a lot of the deeply technical content out there is so many companies are out there producing this and selling this. And that's fine. Like, money is not the end all, be all [of this 00:09:40]. I'm about to spend weeks of my life on something, the fact that it cost me 30 or 50 bucks or whatnot is really not economic thing I should be concerning myself with. But it all feels like it's classroom stuff. It's if you give people an option, are you going to go to a college lecture or are you going to go to a comedy show? Does the idea of, I want to be entertained. If you can teach me something while entertaining me, that feels like the winning combination, and you've absolutely nailed that.Serena: I think a lot of these companies that are producing content, hold themselves back a lot. And that is why they're not successful, right? Because there's so many stipulations, and there's teams of people, and boardrooms of approvals, and all these things, and me, all I'm doing—I record all my TikToks on my iPhone, and I just use in-app editing. I spend a lot of time kind of researching, right, maybe I will experiment with different formats, but the best format that's worked for me is just being authentic, kind of, not having that corporate vibe, right? And also not really expecting anything in return.So, a lot of times, corporations are putting out content because they obviously want to drive traffic to their websites, and different things like that, but the companies that do the best are the ones that are just putting out content for free, and really not necessarily expecting anything in return. And they also give themselves so much more leeway into the type of content that they create because they're not thinking about the numbers at the end of it, right? You just got to put stuff out there and people will see it. For me, I just put stuff out there, I don't need to wait for someone to approve my TikTok for me to push it out and have this content there. So, that is a big difference.And I've learned that through working with sponsors where they'll send you a giant list of talking points they want you to say and I'm like, “You guys know this is a 60-second video, right?” It needs to be really small. You need to, like, really learn how to get the really important stuff out there because the rest of the smaller stuff doesn't matter as much. Like, sell them on one big thing, and that really makes a difference.Corey: Oh, very much so. I see that sometimes with this show where people will reach out and ask about sponsoring, and they'll want to have a URL that I read into the microphone, and it's with UTM tracking parameters and the rest. And it's, like, “I appreciate where you're coming from and your intention here, however, that is not generally how this format works, so let's talk about this and the outcome.” And again, it's a brave new world out there. Yeah, if you're used to buying display ads in various places, that is exactly what you do.For some reason, there's this corporate mentality toward we're going to spend $25 million on a billboard saturation campaign, and not really give any thought about what we're actually going to say now that we have all of that visual real estate to get people's attention with. It's, there's not enough focus on the message itself, and I think that is a giant lost opportunity. Enterprise marketing doesn't have to be boring, it can be a lot of fun.Serena: I agree. And I think podcasting was the last, probably, big area that people budgeted for marketing, right? So, you have your traditional TV commercials and there was YouTube, and—you know, TV commercials, billboards, newspapers, then there's YouTube, and then podcasts, I would say, probably came a little bit later, as far as these companies look at for marketing potential. And now TikTok is so new and a lot of these marketing companies have no idea how to be successful on it because it's just so different. It's Gen Z, the humor is different.It's kind of like [laugh] the wild west on social media where things are just, like, crazy, and you have to fight the algorithm because on TikTok it's, if you don't like it, you just scroll within three seconds. The attention span is so short. So, you really have to capture people's attention within those first three seconds. Versus a podcast, you have the whole, let's say, first 20 minutes to get people, kind of, interested before you can be like, oh, hey, and here's my sponsor. So, it's very different versus TikTok, they'll just, like, oh, scroll. So, [laugh] you have to get creative and think differently.Corey: Many moons ago, when I was getting my CCNA, I worked at a company where we wound up getting a core switches for the data center, which was at the time, something like 65 grand. Great. And then we rented—because we had configured it in our office—and then a couple of us had to rent a commercial van, which I think ran something like $30,000 itself to transport this thing 20 miles to the data center, and I'm sitting there going, like, “Wow, the switch is worth way more than the van that's sitting within. Also were really shitty movers and that doesn't seem like the best idea for anything.” But I just think they remember that, and it left an impression on me.What I like about cloud with what I do is I can take a credit card and then spend less than $10 on AWS—or theoretically, Azure, or Google Cloud or, you know, $2 million on IBM because oops-a-doozy, but fine—and I wind up coming out the other side of that with having done some interesting disaster stuff. You are teaching people about how this stuff works, but in a data center world, it seems to me that the startup costs of, “Oh, I'm going to buy this random router or switch to wind up doing some demonstration stuff for,” it feels like the startup costs of getting hands on that equipment would be out of reach for an awful lot of people. Am I just completely out of touch with how that world works?Serena: No, you're right, you're one hundred percent, right. It is difficult. So, in college, my undergraduate degree is computer information systems, and they had a Cisco Networking Academy. And so we had old switches, old layer 3 switches, and then we had some routers, and this is all stuff that was EOL, donated equipment, right? And this is going to—Corey: It breaks down you're bidding against very faraway places with no budget on eBay for replacements. Oh, yes.Serena: Yeah, exactly. And it was a lot of IOS stuff, right? And so when I was in college, I had no idea that NX-OS existed, which is the data center Nexus version operating system for their switches and things. And so when I got to my first job and saw NX-OS, I was like, “Oh, crap, [laugh] like, what is this?” Right?Because I honestly didn't even know. I graduated and did not know that existed. And I didn't know a lot of the stuff that I was working on at my first shop existed. And I really had to rely on, kind of, the fundamentals. And they are transferable, right? That's why it's good to kind of get into—like, I know what these routing protocols are. I know, layer 2, I know this cabling, so let me just learn these command differences and things like that.And once you get into a production environment in general, out of a lab, it hits the fan. Like, everything you feel like you've learned is gone almost because there's so many layers and now all of a sudden, you have these firewalls, when before you were just trying to get, like, your routing neighborships to establish [laugh] and you weren't worried about rules on a firewall somewhere. And [crosstalk 00:16:39]—Corey: “Oh, and by the way, in this environment, that link that you're working on goes down, every minute it's down, here is the number of commas in the amount of money that we're losing, and yes, that's a plural.” It's, “Okay, so I guess I'm going to double-check everything I run first.” Yeah, it's that caution that gives people a bit of credence there. [unintelligible 00:16:58] do these things in a, more or less, cowboy style in these environments, at least not for very long. Because you can break individual servers; that's fine, but if you break the network suddenly, you may as well not have the computers.Serena: Yeah. It can be paralyzing, truly. It can be very overwhelming your first networking job. Especially for me, I was just dealing with outages constantly because I worked for a vendor, and I was [laugh] like, I was just scared, you know? Because I would get these cases and it would be a hospital outage.And I'm like, “I just graduated college. Like, what do you want from me?” You know, and back to your original point, it is difficult in a data center space because the equipment's so expensive. So, a lot of people ask, “Do you have a home lab?” And one—there's a couple of reasons I don't really have a significant home lab. One, I move so much.Corey: Oh, and in the spare room basically is always 90 degrees and sounds like a jet engine taking off.Serena: Yeah.Corey: Yeah, it's one of those, I should probably find a different place where I don't live, to have that equipment. Yeah.Serena: Yeah. And I have access, like, remotely to all the lab equipment that I really need. So, I don't personally have one, but a lot of things that I do work with are so expensive, that I'm like, I can't afford to put this data center equipment in my house. That doesn't make any sense.And there is luckily now a lot of virtual labs that you can do. There's some sandboxes by Cisco and other vendors, where you can kind of get a little bit of hands-on experience. A lot of it relates to their certifications. You can rent racks, but that gets pretty pricey, too. So, it is difficult, and sometimes that's why a lot of these jobs, I think I have a lot of people who are looking for entry-level work, and it's hard to get into a specifically a data center space.And aside from racking, stacking, working in a data center—maybe a NOC—if you want to get into the actual,s I'm configuring Nexus switches, I'm configuring, you know, Palo Alto firewalls, it can be difficult because it's hard to get to that point, there's not a clear path.Corey: What is the entry path these days? I entered tech by working on a help desk, and those aren't really the jobs that they once were, in a lot of different ways. So, I've stopped talking to entry-level folks with the position of, “Oh, yeah, this is what you should do because that's what I did.” It turns into, like, “Okay, Boomer. Great job. Tell me a little bit more, though, about what the Great War was like, first.” No, we aren't going to go down that path. It's just I don't know what the entry-level point is for someone who's legitimately interested in these things these days.Serena: Nobody does. It's crazy. And you're right at the, “Okay, Boomer,” thing. See, networking was one of those… things that just got pushed onto people in, just, a general IT department, right? So, that's when everything was like, “Okay, we need to get on the internet, so, you know, hey, you handle some of the computer stuff. It's your job now. Good luck. Figure it out.”And so, people started doing that and they kind of just got pushed into it, and then as the internet grew, as our capabilities grew, then the job became, like, a little bit more specialized. And now we have, you know, dedicated network engineers, we have people running data centers. But that's not necessarily a viable path now for people just because there's so much to it now. There's cloud, there's security risks, there's data center, wireless, pho—I mean, you can be an engineer just for phones, right? So, it's a little bit difficult for, especially, the younger people coming in, and the people that I talk to, and figuring out, well, how do I get to what you're doing?And the way that I did is I went and got a four-year degree and then joined a new college graduate program at a Fortune 100 company. Which is a great path, I highly recommend it to anybody that can do it, but it's also not available for everybody, right, because not everybody has the means to get a four-year education, nor do you necessarily need one to do what I do. So, everybody's kind of has this different path, and it's very confusing for people who are aspiring network engineers, or aspiring cloud engineers, even.Corey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Oracle HeatWave is a new high-performance accelerator for the Oracle MySQL Database Service. Although I insist on calling it “my squirrel.” While MySQL has long been the worlds most popular open source database, shifting from transacting to analytics required way too much overhead and, ya know, work. With HeatWave you can run your OLTP and OLAP, don't ask me to ever say those acronyms again, workloads directly from your MySQL database and eliminate the time consuming data movement and integration work, while also performing 1100X faster than Amazon Aurora, and 2.5X faster than Amazon Redshift, at a third of the cost. My thanks again to Oracle Cloud for sponsoring this ridiculous nonsense.Corey: The narrative the cloud companies have been pushing for a while—like, and I'm in that space deeply enough that I haven't really thought to go super deep into questioning this—is that well, the future is all cloud, the data center is basically this legacy thing that the tide is slowly eroding, in the fullness of time, because everything will one day be cloud. Do you think that's accurate?Serena: I don't. I really don't think that's accurate. Don't get me wrong, I think that the cloud is here to stay, and a lot of people are going to be using it. And it's going to be—and it currently is a huge part of our lives. Like, as we've seen recently with a few of the AWS outages, when it goes down and goes down hard because everything's so centralized.And people like to think, like, oh, you know, we have all this redundancy, yadda, yadda. That has not protected us so far, [laugh] like, from these major outages, right? And a lot of places that I see—especially when you're looking at public sector—is a hybrid, where you do have data center on-prem and you have cloud. And I think that, personally, is the best way to go. Unless, you know, maybe you're a fast growing startup and AWS or Azure makes a lot of sense to you.And it does. There's great use cases for that, right? But they're—not only aside from the whole cloud shift, there's another shift of, you know, making our data centers eco-friendly, too, and workload optimization. So, maybe the price point that you're looking for, what's going to save your business the most money, is doing that hybrid. So, I'm going to store a lot of my private documents on site, I'm going to have this as a backup disaster recovery, but we're also going to operate in the cloud. I don't think that the data centers as we know them are going to go extinct. [laugh]. I think they will be around.Corey: Well, AWS finally made their Outpost—the smaller ones; read as servers that run AWS services on in your facility—available a year after announcing them. And I looked at it like, oh, wow, these things are 600 bucks a month. Which is not nothing, but certainly something I could afford to wind up exploring and doing some content. But okay, first, it's a three-year commitment. So, that's 20 grand or so. Okay, not ideal, but fine.That would effectively almost double my AWS bill, but that's not the hardest part because, oh, and to get one of these, you have to have enterprise support. And when I pointed this out to some Amazonian friends, their response was, “Well, what's the problem on this?” Yeah, enterprise support starts at $15,000 a month minimum, and that means that people aren't going to pick these up to do proof of concept work. They're going to do it when they already have a significant infrastructure out there, and I think that's leaving an awful lot of money on the table by making people jump through sales hoops, and getting proof of concept credits, and doing all the other stuff for this. It's just ship me a box for a few weeks and let me kick the tires on in my environment and see if it works or doesn't work.Worst case, I'll ship it back to you. Worst, worst case, I lose the thing, and then you charge me whatever it costs to replace this. But it still feels like they are really doing the whole, “Oh, it's only big legacy companies that have on-premises stuff.” I don't like that narrative.Serena: I don't either. And I honestly think it's a bad idea, right, because if you do put all of your eggs in the AWS basket and they have all the power, that's not going to give us a lot of bargaining, right? That's not going to give people a lot of—because they'll know. They know how hard it is to get off of AWS at that point: They know it's costly, it takes manpower, it takes knowledge, right? And I think that it is in people's best interest to kind of have that mixed environment. Just for long-term, I'm just very wary of centralizing everything in one area. I think it's a bad idea. [laugh]. I think that we need to be prepared for ourselves, and that means also relying a little bit on ourselves. We can't just, in my opinion, put everything in the AWS basket. [laugh].Corey: Not very long anyway. It just doesn't seem to work.Serena: Right. And it's a great product.Corey: Oh, it absolutely is, but—Serena: There's so many positive things about using cloud. Because I'm not the type of person that likes to, kind of, talk crap about any vendor. I think everybody has their pros, cons, flaws, whatever. It's really about what works best for your environment, and that's part of being a network engineer or an architect is evaluating your environment and figuring out what is going to be the best for you, right? There's no one size fits all, unfortunately.Corey: Yeah. And AWS is uniformly excellent, let's be very clear. Okay, not—maybe not uniformly. Some services are significantly better than others, but I have an opinion piece in the information—paywalled, unfortunately, but I'm working on i—the general thesis that AWS has gotten too big to fail, in that when it's not—like, first, they are going to have better uptime than you or I will running our own data centers, across the board.They are very good at keeping things up, but when they do go down, it's not just your company or my company anymore having an outage, it is a significant portion of, you know, the global economy, and that is an awful lot of systemic concentrated risk. I'm not suggesting they did anything wrong, as far as how they sold these things—though, some people will want to argue with that—but it's the, “What does this mean?” Are we ready to reckon with that as a society that whenever us-east-1 has a bad day, so does the stock market? Is that something we're really prepared to accept or wrangle with? Or worse than that, there are life-critical services now. Does that mean that we're going to accept there is some number of people who will die when there's an outage of a data center? And that's new territory for me. I have not worked in environments where it was life or death consequential. At least not directly.Serena: Yeah, I have. So, I have definitely worked in those environments, right, and it's very scary, and especially when it's outside of your control. So, if you are relying, or just waiting on AWS to get back up, you don't have the control to get in there and start fixing things yourself, which is my instinct, right? Like, I immediately want to get hands-on. I put my troubleshooting hat on, like, let's figure this out, let me look through logs, let me do this.And you don't have that option with AWS when it's a significant outage that's impacting multiple people, it's not some configuration internally to you, right?And that's scary. It's a scary place to be. And I think that we need to really consider the cascading effects that will happen, which a lot of these outages that are kind of starting to show us, right? And luckily, there hasn't been anything major catastrophic, but we do need to really consider life when we're talking about, you know, hospitals, 911 systems, all of these critical infrastructures that are going to be cloud managed, and out of our control, and centralized.So, you know, you lose one 911 system, okay, well, you can do a backup, right? You may be able to route all your calls to the city over because their 911 systems are up and running. Well, what if there's are out now, too, because you're both hosted on AWS?Corey: Or you're, “Ah, we're going to diversify and we're going to have this other one on a different cloud provider.” That's great, but there's a critical third-party dependency that's right back to the thing you're trying to avoid. And there you go again.Serena: Yep. And that's dependency hell, right? [laugh].Corey: Oh, yeah. And I don't know how we get away from that.Serena: Yeah.Corey: Like, we don't want everyone writing all their own stuff from scratch, like starting with assembly, move up the stack. But here we are.Serena: Right. And it's funny because these AWS outages specifically effects—or cloud outages, right? I feel like I'm picking on them. I'm not trying to—sorry, AWS, but [laugh] don't come for me.But you know, explaining to my mom, why her Ring doorbell is not working and her Roomba stopped working when that outage happened, right, she's like, “Why is this not—it won't connect.” Like, “I don't understand.” She's like, “What's AWS?” And then to tell my mom that the company that she buys her socks from, like, that she goes online and, like, buys on Amazon is the company that also is hosting her Roomba, you know, services, her Ring services, it's so interesting to have those conversations. And a lot of people who aren't in our field don't understand that. They don't understand cloud, they don't understand on-prem versus, you know, hosted by a third-party. So, it's interesting to watch that kind of unfold now because it's very new. It's very new territory.Corey: And one last question before we wind up calling it an episode. It is remarkably clear in talking to you that you are in no way, shape, or form, junior. You are not a beginner. You know exactly how this stuff works in significant depth. Your content that you put out is aimed at beginners. I do something very similar. So, to be very clear, this is not a criticism in the slightest, but I am curious as to why that's the direction you went in.Serena: I think there's a few reasons. Well, I might have this knowledge, right? I still consider myself very junior in my career, very early in my career. There's so many things that I don't know and I recognize that. When you're first starting out, you might have this kind of inflated sense of knowledge where you're like—like, me, I was like, “Oh, yeah. I know all about OSPF and running on IOS and the command line,” until I figured out there was an NX-OS and I'm like, “Oh crap, what else do I not know about?” Right? [laugh].Corey: Oh, by the way, that never goes away. I feel exactly the same way 20 years into my career, now. I still have absolutely no idea what I'm doing. So smile, nod, and get used to it is the only insight I've got there. But please, go on.Serena: And even on Twitter sometimes, I'm reading people's stuff, and I'm like, “How did you get into these obscure protocols and all these things?” And, you know, I just kind of dive deeper into there. But I think the big reason that I create a lot of my content for beginners is because I remember so well how it was at the beginning, learning about subnetting, and that IOS—[laugh]—[unintelligible 00:30:52] learning about subnetting, and all of the different models that we have, right? And I was overwhelmed, and I was stressed out, and it just seems so… just, like, a giant mountain to climb. It seems so daunting in the beginning, for me it did because there's so much, right?And it felt like everybody was so far ahead of me. And I don't want other people to really feel like that. Like, I don't want people to be turned off from networking because they feel like the bar is too high, that we're not letting enough new people enter because we're discouraging them from the beginning by saying, “Oh, well, you're going to have to know all this. And let me throw this certification book at you.” And they're big. Like, my certification books—and these are massive. And this is for one half of the CCNA.Corey: For those who aren't, like, on the video call—it's not being recorded video-wise—she's holding a book that you could use to kill a mid-sized dog by accident if it falls off a table. It looks like a phonebook with a hardcover on it.Serena: Yeah. [laugh]. It's huge, right? And there are thousands of pages, and we just give this to somebody and say, like, “Here you go. Make sure you remember all this.” And this is all new information.Corey: And does it still cover things like EIGRP? Like Cisco's proprietary routing protocols that I've never once seen in the wild?Serena: Yeah. So, sometimes you will have to learn that, and they've changed it recently, too. They update their certification exam. So, you will learn about some legacy protocols because sometimes you do run into them.Corey: Oh, yes. That's when I have the good sense to pay professionals who know what they're doing.Serena: [laugh]. Yeah. Exactly. So yeah, you do run into those sometimes. But it feels so daunting for new people, and I totally recognize that. And by nature of TikTok I, especially when I first start making content, I assume that most of the people on there are going to be people who are younger, who are interested in this career.And as you know, in tech in general, especially networking, security, cloud, there's a massive shortage of people, and how are we solving that, right? And my contribution to helping solve that is by getting people interested. And now I have people that DM me and say, “I passed my [Network+ 00:33:01],” or, “I just took the CCNA,” or, “This has been helping me with my class so much.” And that is like, okay, this is great.Like, that's exactly what I want. I want to help the pipeline, I want to get more people interested and help a diverse group of people get interested in tech and say, “Hey, like, this is, you know, where I came from. And I did it; you can do it; let's do it together,” type situation.Corey: I really want to thank you for being so generous with your time. If people want to learn more, as they absolutely should, where can they find you?Serena: I am on TikTok as @SheNetworks. I am on Twitter as @notshenetworks because somebody else—Corey: That is very confusing.Serena: [laugh]. I know. Well, my initial thing was like, I didn't really use Twitter that much, and I would just like—I kind of used it as, like, a backchannel to my TikTok, right, where I would just, like, “Hey, I'm going to go live,” or do this. And then my Twitter, kind of, got a little out of control [laugh] and out of my hands. And so—Corey: It does that sometimes.Serena: Yeah. I had no idea there would be so much interest. And it surprises me every day. So, it's exciting though. I really love all the people that I've met, and I feel like I fit in, and I've met so many good friends that it's been great. But yeah, so @notshenetworks on Twitter because somebody had shenetworks and it was a joke. And [laugh] so if you want to find me there, you could also find me there.Corey: And we will, of course, put links to that in the [show notes 00:34:20]. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. I really do appreciate it.Serena: Thank you for having me. This has been great. [laugh].Corey: Serena, also known as @SheNetworks, networking content creator to the stars. I'm cloud economist, Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice and then a long, angry, rambling comment about how the network isn't that important that you're then not going to be able to submit because the network isn't working.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.

Join us on Be Brave at Work as we speak with Paul N Larsen. As an Impostor Syndrome survivor, Paul has learned to tame his fake and fraud voice and has successfully coached hundreds of leaders and teams to celebrate their Impostor and find their voice of confidence so that they share their inspiration with others. His practical, and sometimes laughable, life experiences led him to author the award-winning coaching book, “Find Your VOICE as a Leader.” Paul's coaching portfolio includes working with the talented global teams and leaders at Twitter, Microsoft, Electronic Arts, SAP and Cisco along with many successful life entrepreneurs looking to make their mark on our world. A certified Marshall Goldsmith Stakeholder Center Coach, a contributing author with Forbes, and the Founder of the Find Your V.O.I.C.E. as a Leader™ Institute, he offers transformative coaching journeys to find & use your distinctive voice of strength to be your best-self…to your-self. Links of Interest LinkedIn Twitter Facebook Website Find Your VOICE as a Leader A special thank you to our sponsor, Cabot Risk Strategies. For more information, please visit them at CabotRisk.com Please click the button to subscribe so you don't miss any episodes and leave a review if your favorite podcast app has that ability. Thank you! More information about Ed, visit Excellius.com © 2021 Ed Evarts

In this episode, we speak to Cari Jaquet, the VP of marketing at BigPanda, and Jamie Barnett, investor and marketing advisor, about the path to the CMO office, the difference between a VP of marketing and a CMO, and they both share their advice to current and aspiring CMOs. About Cari JaquetCari, the VP of marketing at BigPanda, is a full-stack marketer with a track record of leading happy teams who build tight relationships with the field and deliver bottom line results for the business. Cari is responsible for cross-organizational strategy and development of marketing initiatives that support corporate goals and revenue targets. Prior to BigPanda, Cari has run marketing at several highly-successful tech companies including Rimini Street, Paxata, SAP, Hyperion/Oracle and Cisco. About Jamie BarnettJamie Barnett is an advisor, investor, and board member for high-technology startups. She has spent most of her career as a product and marketing leader in high-technology with a focus on artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and cybersecurity. She served as chief marketing officer for AppZen and Netskope, as well as chief customer officer at Scalyr. Jamie has a bachelors degree from U.C. Berkeley, an MBA from Stanford University, and is a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP). She also was an adjunct lecturer at University of San Francisco, where she taught Strategic Communications in the Executive MBA program. She is a die-hard Monty Python fan with a zest for movie lines, terrible puns, and practical jokes.Read Jamie's blog of best practices and marketing templates here: https://jamiecatherinebarnett.medium.com/ More about Plannuh here.More about The Next CMO podcast here.Join The Next CMO community here.  Produced by PodForte  

In this episode Brady Volpe of Nimble This and The Volpe Firm, and John Downey (of Cisco) elaborate on how to use PNM tools to identify house amps, Cable Modems with filter issues, etc. So houses can be identified with incompatible filters for intended UpStream spectrum deployments. Want to know what might be interesting and The post House amps, Cable Modems with filter issues appeared first on Volpe Firm.

סייבר במשפט אחד הפודקאסט על הגנת סייבר, אבטחת מידע, פרטיות ומה שביניהם. עו"ד יעקב עוז משוחח עם ישראל גרטי מנכ"ל ובעלים של פורום סוכנות לביטוח על ביטוח סייבר, מוכנות ומודעות סוכניות הביטוח להגנת סייבר, מידע ופרטיות. ועוד... *בשיתוף Cisco ישראל

We talk with Nathan Willson about GEMS, his collaborative music generator written in LiveView. He explains how it's built, the JS sound library integrations, what could be done by Phoenix and what is done in the browser. Nathan shares how he deployed it globally to 10 regions using Fly.io. We go over some of the challenges he overcame creating an audio focused web application. It's a fun open-source project that pushes the boundaries of what we think LiveView apps can do! Show Notes online - http://podcast.thinkingelixir.com/79 (http://podcast.thinkingelixir.com/79) Elixir Community News - https://twitter.com/josevalim/status/1472956310207533057 (https://twitter.com/josevalim/status/1472956310207533057) – José Valim concluded his Advent of Code live streaming. - https://www.twitch.tv/josevalim (https://www.twitch.tv/josevalim) – Find them all on his Twitch Channel. - https://groups.google.com/g/elixir-lang-core/c/jesGwAl8E1s (https://groups.google.com/g/elixir-lang-core/c/jesGwAl8E1s) – New Elixir proposal for "for" comprehensions - https://gist.github.com/josevalim/fe6b0bcc728539a5adf9b2821bd4a0f5 (https://gist.github.com/josevalim/fe6b0bcc728539a5adf9b2821bd4a0f5) – Github gist showing proposed change - https://twitter.com/guieevc/status/1002494428748140544 (https://twitter.com/guieevc/status/1002494428748140544) – Presentation picture about ~90% of all internet traffic goes through Erlang-controlled nodes, with Cisco alone shipping 2 million devices a year that use Erlang. - https://erlef.org/wg/machine-learning (https://erlef.org/wg/machine-learning) – The Machine Learning working group has worked on many projects this year. You can get involved. - https://twitter.com/sean_moriarity/status/1473017611994734593 (https://twitter.com/sean_moriarity/status/1473017611994734593) – Dockyard sponsoring Sean Moriarity's work on Nx and Axon - https://twitter.com/importantshock/status/1471585318658793485 (https://twitter.com/importantshock/status/1471585318658793485) – GitHub's syntax highlighting now uses the Tree-sitter grammar for Elixir - https://twitter.com/wilton_quinn/status/1471803799064887300 (https://twitter.com/wilton_quinn/status/1471803799064887300) – Quinn Wilton's explanation on significance - https://github.com/michalmuskala/jason/releases/tag/v1.3.0 (https://github.com/michalmuskala/jason/releases/tag/v1.3.0) – Jason 1.3 released with new features - https://www.lambdadays.org/lambdadays2022/ (https://www.lambdadays.org/lambdadays2022/) – Lambda Days conference will be Feb 10-11, 2022 and will be a hybrid conference Do you have some Elixir news to share? Tell us at @ThinkingElixir (https://twitter.com/ThinkingElixir) or email at show@thinkingelixir.com (mailto:show@thinkingelixir.com) Discussion Resources - https://twitter.com/nathanwillson/status/1466389153503866892 (https://twitter.com/nathanwillson/status/1466389153503866892) - https://gems.nathanwillson.com/ (https://gems.nathanwillson.com/) – Play with it online - https://github.com/nbw/gems (https://github.com/nbw/gems) – Source code - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yukihiro_Matsumoto (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yukihiro_Matsumoto) - https://tonejs.github.io/ (https://tonejs.github.io/) - https://webassembly.org/ (https://webassembly.org/) – WASM - https://www.ableton.com/en/ (https://www.ableton.com/en/) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIDI (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIDI) - https://webaudio.github.io/web-midi-api/ (https://webaudio.github.io/web-midi-api/) - https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-06-human-ear-half-millisecond.html (https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-06-human-ear-half-millisecond.html) – The human ear detects a half-millisecond delay in sound - https://fly.io/docs/reference/regions/ (https://fly.io/docs/reference/regions/) – The set of global regions that Fly.io supports - https://github.com/bitwalker/libcluster (https://github.com/bitwalker/libcluster) - https://twitter.com/gotbones (https://twitter.com/gotbones) – Bitwalker on Twitter - https://www.erlang.org/doc/man/pg.html (https://www.erlang.org/doc/man/pg.html) Guest Information - https://twitter.com/nathanwillson (https://twitter.com/nathanwillson) – on Twitter - https://github.com/nbw/ (https://github.com/nbw/) – on Github - https://nathanwillson.com (https://nathanwillson.com) – Blog - https://gems.nathanwillson.com (https://gems.nathanwillson.com) – GEMS project running online Find us online - Message the show - @ThinkingElixir (https://twitter.com/ThinkingElixir) - Email the show - show@thinkingelixir.com (mailto:show@thinkingelixir.com) - Mark Ericksen - @brainlid (https://twitter.com/brainlid) - David Bernheisel - @bernheisel (https://twitter.com/bernheisel) - Cade Ward - @cadebward (https://twitter.com/cadebward)

Cisco states that 82% of all internet traffic will be video-based by 2022. And with the right tools and mindset, you can take your video content to the next level to be prepared to enter the next year with great video content. Jimmy's tip: Don't worry about it being perfect. Filming authentic content is far better than a pretty video that doesn't provide a valuable message. And, in this episode, he discusses his top video tech tools for real estate agents.  Find the right camera: Apple iPhone cameras are a great resource to film. If you haven't upgraded your phone recently, this is a great time to do so! If you're looking for professional quality, Jimmy uses the Sony A7III with an 18-105mm lens. However, he also started with an iPhone. Nail the proper lighting: Natural lighting is the best form of lighting and should be used whenever possible. If possible, situate your camera so that you're facing windows or other light sources. If natural light isn't available, consider purchasing a selfie ring light to provide an even light around whatever target you want.  Capture ideal audio: Wireless mics (like a Saramonic blink 500 wireless mic set) are a great investment to ensure quality audio. And, if your video involves multiple people or interview-style content, having an extra mic is necessary. For professional-grade audio, the Sennheiser MKE 600 boom mic gives studio-quality sound and is well worth the investment to take your audio to the next level. Use the right editing tools: Fiverr is a great resource to hire a freelancer to create an attention-grabbing intro for relatively little money.  Apple iMovie is a free resource for mac users that allows you to trim, sync audio and more. Camtasia Studio is easy to use and a great tool to edit video content. Adobe Premiere is the ultimate tool and an excellent investment to get a comprehensive video editing platform. Sometimes, we overthink video. But remember, it doesn't need to be perfect! Determine what messaging your ideal client wants, and make it happen. The quality will take care of itself.  Do you have a video or content idea that is perfect for your business? Share it with Jimmy! Connect with Jimmy Burgess on LinkedIn and Facebook and his YouTube channel.  If you like what you heard today, we'd love it if you'd share a rating or review and then subscribe to the podcast and tell others about it as well. You can find The Real Estate Sales Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Audible, and our website, The Real Estate Sales Podcast.

Who would win in a Verzuz between Kanye and Drake? And why do people spoil movies??? Tune in every week with Woodsy, Cisco, and Justin for more conversations just like this. AND... don't forget to tap that subscribe button!Hit us on our socials, we'd love to hear your thoughts!Instagram: @ifeelthat.podcastTwitter: @ifeelthat_podTikTok: @ifeelthatpodcast

Photo by Ian Schneider on Unsplash In previous years, our year-end episode is where we like to kick back and have some fun! We've done episodes on what Radiohead and David Bowie can teach us about Customer Education. But this year we thought we'd mix it up and do a crossover with another great podcast: He Said, Dee Said. Where the Dee in question is our friend Dee Kapila, who leads Customer Education at Miro! And the He in question, is her husband Ryan Roch who a Customer Success Executive at Cisco. Join us for Part 1 where we share a Pop Culture topic – something we’ve enjoyed in the last year (or in the pandemic) and debate how it does/doesn’t apply to Customer Education! We range wide over a ton of subjects and there are true gems! Make sure you catch He Said, Dee Said too. How are Roguelikes like Enterprise SaaS software? Well … you’ll just have to listen to find out!

This week on a special edition of The Texan's “Weekly Roundup,” the team discusses some Texas Christmas stories, including an ill-fated 1927 bank robbery by Santa in the town of Cisco, a look back at the Cowboys' Christmas Ball in Anson, and some classic Texas Christmas music.

One of the most powerful ways to lead and to teach people is through stories. I am so excited to bring you a master of storytelling who is also an incredibly successful business coach, author, speaker, and consultant.Recognized as one of America's top business coaches, Chris Westfall has created transformational results across a wide variety of industries and organizations. Coaching clients onto Shark Tank, Dragons' Den (Canada), and also Shark Tank Australia, he's helped launch many dozens of successful businesses. Working with executive leaders at Fortune 100 companies, he's helped Experian, DISCOVER, Unilever, HP, Cisco, and many other companies discover new insights and new results. The publisher of seven books, his guidance and advice is regularly featured in Forbes Magazine. In addition, Chris works with thousands of entrepreneurs, business owners, founders, and inventors each year. From college campuses to the C-Suite, Chris provides one-of-a-kind insights designed to help you to elevate your understanding—and your results.You will want to hear this episode if you are interested in...The keys to helping people share their stories (1:54)How important collaboration is to our success (5:46)Why our minds are never set to crave creativity (9:20)How to create boundaries in partnerships (13:32)What helps Chris to keep a positive upbeat attitude (17:56)How zooming out helps us to find our potential (23:31)How to understand the future of work (31:24)How we can “surf” through life (39:17)Resources & People MentionedEasier bookConnect with ChrisTheir websiteOn InstagramOn TwitterOn LinkedinOn FacebookOn YouTubeConnect With Peter O. Estévezwww.peteroestevezshow.com Follow on Facebook Follow Peter O. Estevéz Show on InstagramFollow Peter on Instagram

Women often face unique challenges on their path to long-term career success. How can you embrace your leadership role and excel at it in order to achieve a seat at the table? About the Interview In this episode of Hilary Topper on Air, Hilary speaks with Ellen Snee EdD, Author of Lead: How Women In Charge Claim Their Authority. Learn about Ellen's experience as a former nun, her research at Harvard University, and her professional experiences. Hear how she used that background to help other women learn to become effective leaders and then take that advice and author her book. About Ellen Ellen has been at the forefront of women's leadership development for more than 25 years. Her original research at Harvard University on women's experience in roles of authority formed the foundation of her company's with Fortune 500 companies such as Cisco, Goodyear, Marriott, Pfizer, and Schwab. Later, as Global VP of Leadership Development at VMware, she launched its business initiative, VMwomen, to attract, develop, advance, and retain talented women. About Lead: How Women In Charge Claim Their Authority During Ellen Snee's eighteen years as a Catholic nun, she gained a number of essential—and, happily, transferable—skills: how to discern a call or deep desire, how to work collaboratively with other women, and how to be a savvy operator within male hierarchies. In Lead, she draws on that knowledge—as well as lessons learned and insights gained from her Harvard dissertation on psychological dimensions of authority for women, two decades of work with executive women as CEO of Fine Line Consulting, and five years as VP of Organizational & Leadership Development at VMware, a global technology leader—to address the exercise of authority by women. Lead guides readers through specific challenges of leadership Snee has identified as most vital to success through her own corporate experience and consulting work: developing resilience, presenting with authority, gaining financial literacy, managing in every direction, and more. Throughout, Snee urges women to find and speak with their unique voice and claim their personal power. Full of illuminating personal and client anecdotes and surprising research insights, Lead is an accessible, instructive, and empowering road map. To learn more about Ellen and her book, Lead, visit www.ellensnee.com.

Jon Stine is the Executive Director and founder of the Open Voice Network. Prior to founding OVN, Stine was global director of retail sales at Intel and a director of North American retail at Cisco. He has an MS in telecommunications from the University of Oregon. Today we talk about voice assistant interoperability, standards, and keeping AI systems open and consumer-friendly. 

Changing careers can be overwhelming at any point in your life. For Consulting Systems Engineer Micheline Murphy, this change came after two decades of practicing law as a successful trial lawyer. Listen in as Micheline recounts the story of how she used Cisco certifications to make a drastic shift in her career path.

In this episode, host John Laurito is joined by a Relationship Economics Advisor, Educator, and Executive Coach, David Nour. Clients call Nour when they want to leverage the value of their greatest off-balance sheet asset: their relationships. They talked about his new book, Curve Benders, and discussed the importance of building and keeping relationships. Nour wants you to realize the missed opportunity when you're not fully leveraging the soft skill of relationship building.For 20 years, David Nour helped leading organizations recognize the many quantifiable ways that relationships drive everything: strategy, innovation, growth, and profitability. He speaks 50-60 times a year and have written eleven books, translated into eight languages including best-selling Relationship Economics (Wiley), ConnectAbility (McGraw-Hill), Return on Impact (Josey-Bass), Co-Create (St. Martin's Press), and the newly released, Curve Benders (Wiley, 2021).His past work includes engagements with executives at Cisco, HP, Gen Re, Chubb, KPMG, Siemens, Deloitte, Disney, ThyssenKrupp, Marriott, Microsoft, IBM, Equifax, as well as leading industry associations and academic forums.He serves as an independent director on the boards of two privately-held, venture-backed tech companies, and very much enjoy such roles. On numerous occasions, he moderates senior leadership/board retreats that focus on critical strategic priorities for these organizations. A native of Iran he immigrated to the United States in 1981 with a suitcase, $100, limited family ties, and no fluency in English. His life since then is completely a function of my ability to develop - and nurture - strong relationships.Reach out to Nour:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidnour/Web: https://nourgroup.com/Grab a copy of his book: Curve Benders - https://www.amazon.com/Curve-Benders-Strategic-Relationships-Non-Linear/dp/1119764211Show notes:[1:33] Nour's background and the importance of relationships[4:43] Networking vs. relationships[7:07] Relationship currency deposit[11:18] Being too focused on operations[15:23] Lookup relationships and reconnect when you travel[16:20] Diving deeper into Curve Benders[20:00] OutroGet a copy of Tomorrow's Leader on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/huseae9hText LEADER to 617-393-5383 to receive The Top 10 Things That The Best Leaders Are Doing Right NowFor questions, suggestions, or speaker inquiries, contact me at john@lauritogroup.com

Changing Channels host Larry Walsh recounts the highlights of 2021's 26 episodes with some of our top guests and industry luminaries. Many people in the world would say that 2021 is not a year they'd want to repeat, given the ongoing pandemic, inflation, and supply-chain disruptions. Suffice it to say that the world is hardly back to normal. But the channel perseveres. In 2021, Changing Channels invited some of the top channel executives and thought leaders to share their experiences and insights on a variety of strategic and operational topics. Over the course of 26 episodes, our guests spoke about enabling fluid workforces, pricing strategies and methodologies, cloud adoption trends, partner enablement, management strategies, international expansion, and much more. Picking our favorite moments from more than 14 hours of conversations wasn't easy, but we did manage to select some memorable highlights, including these: Lori Cornmesser, vice president of worldwide channel sales at CyCognito, on becoming a channel chief again (time mark: 2:06) Christian Alvarez, senior vice president of worldwide channel sales at Nutanix, on building respected key performance indicators (time mark: 5:40) Frank Rauch, head of worldwide channel sales at Check Point Software Technologies, on gaining executive support for channel programs (time mark: 8:20) Joe Sykora, senior vice president of worldwide channel and partner sales at Proofpoint, on the changing dynamics of partner incentives (time mark: 11:34) Alyssa Fitzpatrick, general manager of worldwide partner sales at Microsoft, on the vendor's co-selling strategies (time mark: 13:45) Renee Bergeron, senior vice president and general manager at AppSmart, on enabling partners to sell through marketplaces (time mark: 16:37) Bill Cate, vice president of marketing and channels at Zebra Technologies, on leveraging the influence of non-transacting partners (time mark: 19:04) Mary Beth Walker, head of global channel strategy at HP, on incorporating sustainability as a value proposition in go-to-market strategies and channel programs (time mark: 20:42) Denzil Samuels, vice president of the global CX Partner Practice at Cisco, on making customer experience a core outcome of channel-delivered services (time mark: 24:25) Follow us, Like us, and Subscribe! Channelnomics: https://channelnomics.com/  LinkedIn: https://bit.ly/2NC6Vli  Twitter: https://twitter.com/Channelnomics    Changing Channels Is a Channelnomics Production Follow @Channelnomics to stay current on the latest #research, #bestpractices, and #resources. At @Channelnomics – the voice of thought leadership – we define #channel trends, chart new #GTM strategies, and #partner with industry leaders to champion #diversity in the channel.     Episode Resources Host, Larry Walsh: https://bit.ly/3beZfOa   Guests Lori Cornmesser: https://www.linkedin.com/in/loricornmesser/ Christian Alvarez: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christianaalvarez/ Frank Rauch: https://www.linkedin.com/in/frankrauch/ Joe Sykora: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joesykora/ Alyssa Fitzpatrick: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alysfitz/ Renee Bergeron: https://www.linkedin.com/in/reneebergeron/ Bill Cate: https://www.linkedin.com/in/billcate/ Mary Beth Walker: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mary-beth-walker-a276b2184/ Denzil Samuels: https://www.linkedin.com/in/denzilsamuels/   Credits Production: Changing Channels is produced by Modern Podcasting. For virtual content capture and video-first podcasts, check out http://www.modpodstudio.com. Host Larry Walsh: https://bit.ly/3beZfOa Voice-Over: Denise Quan

It's another switcheroo week on Hysteria 51 as the boys from Canada take over to tell the tale of Donald Shrum and the Cisco UFO Encounter The Cisco UFO Encounter In 1964, then 26-year-old Donald Shrum, with two of his close friends, traveled up into the Sierra Nevada mountain range of Northeastern California. Known to history as “Gold Country” the mountains not only possess rich mineral variety but also boast an impressive abundance of plant and animal life. Shrum and his companions were set to participate in a leisurely weekend of bowhunting among the pristine forests and rugged ridges set within Tahoe National Park. Shrum had no idea that on this trip he would have an experience that would fill his nightmares for years. An experience that would stay locked within the files of official UFO investigators until finally brought to light in 2005. This case file, join the Theorists as they talk about archery and shaft work in... The Cisco UFO Encounter Follow Alien Theorists Theorizing https://linktr.ee/alientheoristspodcast  Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/Hysteria51 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We welcome YOU back to America's leading higher education podcast, The EdUp Experience! It's YOUR time to #EdUp In this episode, YOUR guest is Renee Patton, Global Education & Healthcare Director, Industry Solutions Group at Cisco Systems, Inc., YOUR special guest cohost is Julian Alssid, Chief Marketplace Engagement Officer at Unmudl, YOUR host is Dr. Joe Sallustio, aka, THE Voice of Education, & YOUR sponsor is MDT Marketing! Listen in as Joe & Julian talk with Renee about some of the challenges that higher education institutions are facing when it comes to data security. They also talk about how Cisco looks at education & the value of a college degree versus other paths. Plus, Renee mentions some really great programs & initiatives at Cisco that are helping others become more successful! Renee Patton is the leader of Global Education & Healthcare at Cisco. In this role, she is responsible for Cisco's go-to-market strategy for these two industries & manages a team of education & healthcare consultants who help customers realize their visions through the logical placement of technology within schools, colleges, universities, & healthcare institutions. She has over 25 years of business, management, sales, & marketing experience in both small start-up & large corporate environments, including Siemens. She ran her own marketing consulting firm for over seven years prior to joining Cisco full time. Another awesome episode with YOUR sponsor MDT Marketing! Get YOUR free marketing consultation today! mdtmarketing.com/edup Thank YOU so much for tuning in. Join us on the next episode for YOUR time to EdUp! Connect with YOUR EdUp Team - Elvin Freytes & Dr. Joe Sallustio ● Learn more about what others are saying about their EdUp experience ● Join YOUR EdUp community at The EdUp Experience! ● YOU can follow us on Facebook | Instagram | LinkedIn | Twitter | YouTube Thank YOU for listening! We make education YOUR business!

In 1927 a bank was robbed in Cisco, Texas by a man wearing a Santa Claus suit and his three accomplices. Many people were wounded during an intense gun battle, and a week-long manhunt ensued. The locals themselves made sure Santa aka Marshall Ratliff was punished for his crime.Webcrawlerspod@gmail.com626-604-6262Discord / Twitter / Instagram / Patreon / MerchSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/webcrawlers. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Es ist der Tag vor Heiligabend im Jahr 1927, als ein Weihnachtsmann in voller Montur über die Straßen in der texanischen Kleinstadt Cisco geht. Kinder werden auf ihn aufmerksam, folgen ihm und sprechen ihn an. Doch Santa ignoriert sie. Er betritt eine Bank. Unauffällig folgen ihm zwei Männer. Und plötzlich ziehen Santa und seine beiden Kollegen die Waffen. So beginnt die Geschichte eines Banküberfalls, der in die texanische Kriminalgeschichte eingehen wird. Doch der Santa, der hier die Bank überfällt, ist nicht der Einzige, der das Kostüm von Santa Claus für seien kriminellen Machenschaften nutzt. ***Werbung*** Jetzt gleich alle Folgen von „Eldorado KaDeWe – Jetzt ist unsere Zeit“ ansehen in der ARD Mediathek: www.ardmediathek.de Mit unserem Code SCHWARZEAKTE erhaltet ihr 5% Rabatt bei KoRo: www.korodrogerie.de Die Links zu unseren anderen Werbepartnern findet ihr unter https://linktr.ee/schwarzeakte ***Mord am Wochenende*** Die neuen Folgen der Schwarzen Akte könnt ihr auch ohne Werbung und schon am Samstag für 2,99€ / Monat hören! Weitere Infos hört ihr hier: https://bit.ly/akte-werbefrei ***Fallvorschläge*** Du hast von einem mysteriösen Fall gehört, den wir uns mal genauer anschauen sollten? Gerne immer her damit! Damit wir keinen Fall übersehen, schick uns deinen Vorschlag am besten über unser Formular. Das findest du unter www.bit.ly/akte-vorschlag Danke für deine Unterstützung! ***Links zum Fall*** Foto der First National Bank damals in Cisco: https://bit.ly/akte84-bank *** Grundriss der Bank mit Laufwegen: https://bit.ly/akte84-wege *** Foto der Erinnerungstafel: https://bit.ly/akte84-tafel ***Wir übernehmen keine Haftung für die Inhalte externer Links*** Herzlich Willkommen bei der Schwarzen Akte - dem Mystery True Crime Podcast. Es sind Details, die ein gewöhnliches Verbrechen von einem unglaublichen Mysterium unterscheiden. Wir stellen euch hier Fälle vor, bei denen sich eure Nackenhaare sträuben und von denen ihr bislang steif und fest behauptet hättet, dass so etwas nie im Leben passieren kann. Jeden Dienstag veröffentlichen wir eine neue Folge mit außergewöhnlichen Kriminalfällen und überlegen, ob auch an der merkwürdigsten Spekulation doch ein Fünkchen Wahrheit zu erkennen ist. Schreibt uns gern eure Theorien und weitere spannende Fälle an schwarzeakte@julep.de, auf Instagram an @schwarzeakte, auf Facebook an @SchwarzeAktePodcast oder YouTube an @SchwarzeAkteTrueCrimePodcast Hosts: Anne & Christopher Redaktion: Silva Hanekamp Produktion: Falko Schulte Eine Produktion der Julep Studios ***SPOILER*** In diesem Fall wurde ein Urteile gesprochen.

Partnerships drive the success of a business. They can lend credibility to a fledgling company and give it the boost it needs to grow the business. R2 Unified Technologies recognized this and successfully partnered with two big names in the B2B technology space: Cisco and Ingram Micro. Rita Richa speaks with Jason Doherty, vice president of sales at R2 Unified Technologies, and James Skelton, senior account executive at Ingram Micro, about: - How the partnerships between Cisco and Ingram Micro came to be - Positive impacts of the Ingram Micro partnership - Successes with Cisco's digital network architecture - Perks related to working with Ingram Micro For more information, reach out to R2 Unified Technologies (info@r2ut.com) or to your Ingram Micro rep. To join the discussion, follow us on Twitter @IngramTechSol #B2BTechTalk Listen to this episode and more like it by subscribing to B2B Tech Talk on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or Stitcher. Or, tune in on our website.

Which is the better music streaming platform: Apple Music or Spotify? The fellas debate this and also discuss where they wanted to go to college if they didn't get into UCLA. AND cool english teachers!!! Tune in every week with Woodsy, Cisco, and Justin for more conversations just like this. AND... don't forget to tap that subscribe button!Hit us on our socials, we'd love to hear your thoughts!Instagram: @ifeelthat.podcastTwitter: @ifeelthat_podTikTok: @ifeelthatpodcast

n This Episode: Cisco talks new show, "VH1 Family Reunion: Love & Hip-Hop Edition" + The Creep Squad is forced to settle the score with each other + How the squad will face a new adversary + What happens when you confront past beef in order to grow as an individual + "University of Dope" R&B Edition + more...

It has been remarkable to witness the enterprise transition to the cloud in just a few short years -- but what is next? Multi-cloud networking is the new way for enterprises to manage applications worldwide for dispersed and remote users. Managing applications in the cloud - and through multiple cloud service providers (CSPs) -- can mean a host of benefits, including reduced latency, more affordable transit costs, and heightened security. However, we are not there yet. Most organizations are still struggling with the complex networking infrastructures needed to achieve "a multi-cloud networking Nirvana." Ramesh Prabagaran, co-founder and CEO of Prosimo, recognized the opportunity for a newer type of infrastructure -- one that would provide enterprises a better way to network to multiple CSPs - a safer, less complex, and more affordable way. As the former co-founder of Viptela, acquired by Cisco for $610 million in 2017, Ramesh is one of the pioneers in the SD Wan field - and is no stranger to overcoming serious networking challenges. Ramesh and his team at Prosimo have developed a single, vertically integrated infrastructure stack to deliver an application experience that balances performance, security, and costs across multi-cloud environments. Just months out of stealth, the team has had early success with several enterprise customers, including Flexport, announced partnerships with Google Cloud, AWS, and Verizon, and was recently included in the 2021 Gartner Market Guide for Cloud Networking Software. Multi-cloud networking is complex and not easy to do or even understand. Still, in today's episode, Ramesh breaks it down and explains it all in a language everyone can understand. He also shares his own story, which involves a series of successes and innovations.

In this week’s episode A.J. and Andy interview David Alicea! While David was exposed to the Cisco Networking Academy at a young age in High School he actually didn’t land in Networking until later on. Since then he has been a career Network Engineer and recently landed himself a position at the mothership, Cisco. HearContinue reading "Ep 73 – Zeros and Wons"