Podcasts about Courier

The guys jump right into the historic winner-take-all game five tonight between the Giants and Dodgers before welcoming in David Cloninger of The Post and Courier for a Gamecocks chat. He discusses the offense, play calling, the play of Luke Doty and upcoming men's and women's basketball events in Columbia. David Shelton discusses the Oceanside-Hanahan high school football game tomorrow as well as more than a handful of others with playoff implications before the episode wraps with a golf chat with Scott Glaze, head professional at The Links at Stono Ferry

The start to this school year in South Carolina was a pretty chaotic one. The delta variant of COVID-19 was quickly spreading, infecting students, teachers and staff and sending people into quarantine.Meanwhile, schools couldn't enforce mask mandates. The result: Seven weeks into the year, at least 15 districts, 233 schools, and 156,169 students had reverted back to virtual learning.This week on Understand SC, we talk with Hillary Flynn, editor of The Post and Courier's Education Lab, a recently-launched watchdog enterprise unit within the paper that's focused on in-depth reporting and large-scale projects that examine systemic issues within our state's education system. She gave us some details on what we can expect from the Education Lab, and shared what went into recent report which followed the stories of three people who experienced the first seven weeks of school from different perspectives: a high school student nervous about going back to school in-person and reconnecting with friends, a teacher excited to be teaching in the classroom again but cautious about COVID-19 and a parent who hoped for a return to normalcy and sent her kids to school without masks. Listen now, then check out the latest from the Education Lab.

The guys kick off the Hump Day Bump Day discussing the Braves clinching and getting a pivotal Game 5 in the Dodgers vs. Giants series. Then they get into the Jon Gruden situation and how Randy Moss broke down on the air before he challenged Jason Whitlock to a fight when Whitlock implied there's a time and place for that emotion. Then Purdue beat writer for the Journal & Courier in Lafayette talks about the Boilermakers' football squad ahead of their matchup with the Hawkeyes.

The Gazette's John Steppe has two guests on this week's Hawk Off The Press, our Hawkeye football podcast. First, Mike Carmin of the Lafayette Journal & Courier gives us a Purdue scouting report and previews Saturday's game between the Boilermakers and Hawkeyes. Then, Vanessa Miller discusses https://www.thegazette.com/higher-education/university-of-iowa-will-pay-400k-via-title-ix-athletics-settlement/ (her reporting from last week on Iowa settling a Title IX lawsuit) and how that led to the announcement of a women's wrestling team.

Busy episode with the Braves nearing the NLCS, the Red Sox already into the ALCS and the Astros-White Sox and Giants-Dodgers series set to play tonight. Plus, Jon Gruden, the world of college football, more on the Gamecocks loss to Tennessee and looking ahead towards the Vanderbilt game. Featuring: ESPN play by play announcer Mike Morgan, Gene Sapakoff of The Post and Courier and Keith Allsep, host of the Locked On The Gamecocks Podcast

______________________________________________  Welcome to  Skyjacks: Courier's Call - Season 2!______________________________________________ANNOUNCEMENTS!Backer Surveys, Address Changes and Voting!Be sure to complete those back surveys, send us your change of address and get that voting done if you backed at that level! We got rewards headed towards you and we need that information to make sure it all gets to you on time and safely! TimeskipThe first part of this season picks up after a bit of a time jump. Its been a little over a month since our heroes left Otterbachs and they've stopped at two other locations (port of call #2 and #3) along the six month route of the Red Audron. There were some adventures, some growing pains, some thrilling heroics and even a run in with the infamous Jolly Jack as well as most of their time in Tesh Urt but all that is behind us as our heroes experience their last night in the city before heading out.  If you've enjoyed the show, liked what we've done or just have feelings about this season, feel free to tell us at skyjackscourierscall@gmail.com or to leave us a review on itunes!______________________________________________MORE FROM THE WORLD OF SPEIRIf you want to join the Patreon to get exclusive behind the scenes content (including all eight episodes of the Jolly Jack Adventure!), please see the link below:https://www.patreon.com/oneshotpodcast If you want to get more info on the World of Speir through the Skyjacks World Zine, please see the link below: https://one-shot-podcast.itch.io/the-skyjacks-zine-vol-1______________________________________________CONTENT WARNINGMain Show:  dark magic, some Body Horror, water phobia, almost being kidnapped by an adult, stranger danger, spooky magical effects, trouble breathingDear Red Audron:   Camping Stories______________________________________________CALL TO ACTIONRight Wrongs. Do Mercies. Take Flight! ______________________________________________TALK TO YOUR KIDSCourier's Call  does not condone racism, hate or bigotry of any kind. We stand with Black Lives Matters on these issues and call upon everyone to demand changes to have all people stand on equal footing. No one deserves to be afraid or persecuted for just being who they are. If you wish to talk to your kids about racism and its damaging effects, this is a good resource.  As is this.Courier's Call features non-binary gendered characters. If you are not familiar with non-binary genders or neutral pronouns, this is a good resource for for talking about those concepts with your kids!A section of Season 1 of Courier's Call deals with the kidnapping of a child. While our story may be fictional fantasy, this issue is one that is very real in our world. Talk to your kids about child abduction, what they and you can do to stay safe and be alert. If you need help and/or resources, please check out more information here. ______________________________________________Join Our Mailing List Interact with us online!Twitter: @couriercall  Instagram: @skyjackscourierscallOfficial Art by Jessica Kuczynski  @AngryArtist113 on Twitter* Sound effects for this episode were pulled from freesound.org under a creative commons zero attribution licens

We are used to delays in the mail at Christmas, but during the pandemic the backlog of packages has become so unmanageable, Australia Post had to suspend parcel pick-ups for several days to sort it all out, but the problem hasn't gone away. As millions of us continue to work from home and rely on online shopping, the ongoing delays continue to cause frustration for businesses and customers, so why is this still happening and what is the solution? The Quicky speaks to an AusPost executive and a postal workers union representative to find out what it's been like for posties and couriers trying to cope with unprecedented demand, and if we should be sending our Christmas gifts even earlier in 2021? CREDITS  Host/Producer: Claire Murphy Executive Producer: Siobhán Moran-McFarlane Audio Producer: Ian Camilleri Guests: Michelle Skehan - Australia Post General Manager of Corporate Affairs Nicole Robinson - Communication Workers Union (CWU) National Assistant Secretary (Postal) Subscribe to The Quicky at... https://mamamia.com.au/the-quicky/ CONTACT US Got a topic you'd like us to cover? Send us an email at thequicky@mamamia.com.au Mamamia acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the Land we have recorded this podcast on, the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. We pay our respects to their Elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures. Support the show: https://www.mamamia.com.au/mplus/ See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode #50 – Uncharted Worlds: Worst. Rolls. Ever. Music from https://filmmusic.io “Take a Chance” by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com) License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Fun fact: This week is the 81st annual National Newspaper Week. As our way of celebrating, we're bringing you a conversation about our newspaper. Recently, The Post and Courier named a new executive editor. Autumn Phillips, who became the paper's managing editor in early 2018, stepped into the role in late August. This week, we spoke with Phillips about some of the big things happening for the paper, like fundraising to support investigative journalism, expanding to markets across the state and collaborating with community newspapers on stories exposing corruption.She also shared what got her into journalism in the first place and what drew her to local newspapers, in particular. Listen now, and then check out the projects we discussed:Uncovered: Shining a light on South Carolina corruption and misconductEducation Lab 

JB and Goldwater dive right into last night's Dodgers walk off over the Cardinals and today's pair of ALDS games before shifting gears to a Gamecocks conversation with David Cloninger of The Post and Courier. After a look at some of the weekend's top games through our Post Up Careers college football week six resume, David Shelton joins the show for the weekly high school football report. The episode wraps with Scott Glaze, head professional at The Links at Stono Ferry discussing the latest Match and more.

About LaurenLauren Hasson is the Founder of DevelopHer, an award-winning career development platform that has empowered thousands of women in tech to get ahead, stand out, and earn more in their careers. She also works full-time on the frontlines of tech herself. By day, she is an accomplished software engineer at a leading Silicon Valley payments company where she is the architect of their voice payment system and messaging capabilities and is chiefly responsible for all of application security.Through DevelopHer, she's partnered with top tech companies like Google, Dell, Intuit, Armor, and more and has worked with top universities including Indiana and Tufts to bridge the gender gap in leadership, opportunity, and pay in tech for good. Additionally, she was invited to the United Nations to collaborate on the global EQUALS initiative to bridge the global gender divide in technology. Sought after across the globe for her insight and passionate voice, Lauren has started a movement that inspires women around the world to seek an understanding of their true value and to learn and continually grow.  Her work has been featured by industry-leading publications like IEEE Women in Engineering Magazine and Thrive Global and her ground-breaking platform has been recognized with fourteen prestigious awards for entrepreneurship, product innovation, diversity and leadership including the Women in IT Awards Silicon Valley Diversity Initiative of the Year Award, three Female Executive of the Year Awards, and recognition as a Finalist for the United Nations WSIS Stakeholder Prize.Links: DevelopHer: https://developher.com The DevelopHer Playbook: https://www.amazon.com/DevelopHer-Playbook-Simple-Advocate-Yourself-ebook/dp/B08SQM4P5J TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: You could build you go ahead and build your own coding and mapping notification system, but it takes time, and it sucks! Alternately, consider Courier, who is sponsoring this episode. They make it easy. You can call a single send API for all of your notifications and channels. You can control the complexity around routing, retries, and deliverability and simplify your notification sequences with automation rules. Visit courier.com today and get started for free. If you wind up talking to them, tell them I sent you and watch them wince—because everyone does when you bring up my name. Thats the glorious part of being me. Once again, you could build your own notification system but why on god's flat earth would you do that?Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by Honeycomb. When production is running slow, it's hard to know where problems originate: is it your application code, users, or the underlying systems? I've got five bucks on DNS, personally. Why scroll through endless dashboards, while dealing with alert floods, going from tool to tool to tool that you employ, guessing at which puzzle pieces matter? Context switching and tool sprawl are slowly killing both your team and your business. You should care more about one of those than the other, which one is up to you. Drop the separate pillars and enter a world of getting one unified understanding of the one thing driving your business: production. With Honeycomb, you guess less and know more. Try it for free at Honeycomb.io/screaminginthecloud. Observability, it's more than just hipster monitoring. Corey: You could build you go ahead and build your own coding and mapping notification system, but it takes time, and it sucks! Alternately, consider Courier, who is sponsoring this episode. They make it easy. You can call a single send API for all of your notifications and channels. You can control the complexity around routing, retries, and deliverability and simplify your notification sequences with automation rules. Visit courier.com today and get started for free. If you wind up talking to them, tell them I sent you and watch them wince—because everyone does when you bring up my name. Thats the glorious part of being me. Once again, you could build your own notification system but why on god's flat earth would you do that?Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Jellyfish. So, you're sitting in front of your office chair, bleary eyed, parked in front of a powerpoint and—oh my sweet feathery Jesus its the night before the board meeting, because of course it is! As you slot that crappy screenshot of traffic light colored excel tables into your deck, or sift through endless spreadsheets looking for just the right data set, have you ever wondered, why is it that sales and marketing get all this shiny, awesome analytics and inside tools? Whereas, engineering basically gets left with the dregs. Well, the founders of Jellyfish certainly did. That's why they created the Jellyfish Engineering Management Platform, but don't you dare call it JEMP! Designed to make it simple to analyze your engineering organization, Jellyfish ingests signals from your tech stack. Including JIRA, Git, and collaborative tools. Yes, depressing to think of those things as your tech stack but this is 2021. They use that to create a model that accurately reflects just how the breakdown of engineering work aligns with your wider business objectives. In other words, it translates from code into spreadsheet. When you have to explain what you're doing from an engineering perspective to people whose primary IDE is Microsoft Powerpoint, consider Jellyfish. Thats Jellyfish.co and tell them Corey sent you! Watch for the wince, thats my favorite part.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. A somewhat recurring theme of this show has been the business of cloud, and that touches on a lot of different things. One thing I've generally cognizant of not doing is talking to folks who don't look like me and asking them questions like, “Oh, that's great, but let's ignore everything that you're doing, and instead talk about what it's like not to be a cis-gendered white dude in tech,” because that's crappy. Today, we're sort of deviating from that because my guest is Lauren Hasson, the founder of DevelopHer, which is a career development platform that empowers women in tech to get ahead. Lauren, thanks for joining me.Lauren: Thanks so much for having me, Corey.Corey: So, you're the founder of DevelopHer, and that is ‘develop-her' as in ‘she'. I'm not going to be as distinct on that pronunciation, so if you think I'm saying ‘developer' and it doesn't make intellectual sense, listener, that's what's going on. But you're also a speaker, you're an author, and you work on the front lines of tech yourself. That's a lot of stuff. What's your story?Lauren: Yeah, I do. So, I'm not only the founder-developer, but I'm just like many of your listeners: I work on the front lines of tech myself. I work remotely from my home in Dallas for a Silicon Valley payments company, where I'm the architect of our voice payment system, and I up until recently was chiefly responsible for all of application security. Yeah, and I do keep busy.Corey: It certainly seems like it. Let's go back to, I guess, the headline item here. You are the founder of DevelopHer, and one thing that always drives me a little nutty is when people take a glance at what I do and then try and tell the story, and then effectively mess the whole thing up. What is DevelopHer?Lauren: So, DevelopHer is what I wish I had ten years ago—or actually nine years ago. It's an empowerment platform that helps individual women—men, too—get ahead in their careers, earn more, and stand out. And part of my story, you know, I have the degrees from undergrad in electrical engineering and computer science, but I went a completely different direction after graduating. And at the end of the Great Recession, I found myself with no job with no technical skills, and I mean, no job prospects, at all. It was really, really bad, ugly crying on my couch bad, Corey.And I took a number of steps to get ahead and really relearn my tech skills, and I only got one offer to give myself a chance. It was a 90-days to prove myself, to get ahead, and teach myself iOS. And I remember it was one of the most terrifying things I've ever done. And within two years, I not only managed to survive that 90-day period and keep that job, but I had completely managed to thrive. My work had been featured in Apple's iOS7 keynote, I'd won the company-wide award at a national agency four times, I had won the SXSW international Hackathon, twice in a row.And then probably the pinnacle of it all is I was one of 100 tech innovators worldwide invited to attend the [UKG 00:03:41] Innovation Conference. And they flew me there on a private 747 jet, and it was just unreal. And so I founded DevelopHer because I needed this ten years ago, when I was at rock bottom, to figure out how to get ahead: how do I get into my career; how do I stand out? And of course, you know there's more to the story, but I also found out I was underpaid after achieving all of that, that a male peer was paid exactly what I was paid, with no credentials, despite all of the awards that I won. And I went out and learned to negotiate, and tripled my salary in two years, and turned around and said, “I'm going to teach other women—and men, too—how to get real change in their own life.”Corey: I love hearing stories where people discover that they're underpaid. I mean, it's a bittersweet moment because on the one hand it's, “Wait, you mean they've been taking advantage of me?” And you feel bad for people, but at the same time, you're sort of watching the blindfold fall away from their eyes of, “Yeah, but it's been this way, and now you know about it. And now you're in a position to potentially do something about it.” I gave a talk at a tech conference a few years back called “Weasel your Way to the Top: How to Handle a Job Interview” and it was a fun talk.I really enjoyed it, but what I discovered was after I'd given it I got some very direct feedback of, “That's a great talk and you give a lot of really useful advice. What if I don't look like you?” And I realized, “Oh, my God, I built this out of things that worked for me and I unconsciously built all of my own biases and all of my own privilege into that talk.” At which point I immediately stopped giving it until I could relaunch it as a separate talk with a friend of mine, Sonia Gupta, who does not look like me. And between the two of us, it became a much stronger, much better talk.Lauren: It's good that you understand what you were bringing to the table and how you can appeal to an even larger audience. And what I've done is really said, “Here's my experience as a woman in tech, and here's what's worked for me.” And what's been surprising is men have said, “Yeah, that's what I did.” Except for I put a woman in tech spin on it and… I mean, I knew it worked for me; I have more than quintupled my base salary—just my base salary alone—in nine years. And the results that women are getting from my programming—I had one woman who earned $80,000 more in a single negotiation, which tells me, one, she was really underpaid, but she didn't just get one offer at $80,000 more; she got at least two. I mean, that changed her life.And I think the lowest I've heard is, like, $30,000 difference change. I mean, this is, this is life-changing for a lot of women. And the scary thing is that it's not just, say it's $50,000 a year. Well, over ten years, that's half a million dollars. Over 20 years, that's a million, and that's not even interest and inflation and compounding going into that. So, that's a huge difference.Corey: It absolutely is. It's one of those things that continues to set people further and further back. One thing that I think California got very right is they've outlawed recently asking what someone's previous compensation was because, “Oh, we don't want to give someone too big of a raise,” is a way you perpetuate the systemic inequality. And that's something that I wish more employers would do.Lauren: It's huge. I know the women and proponents who had moved that forward; some of them are personal friends of mine, and it's huge. And that's actually something that I trained specifically for is how to handle difficult questions like, “How much are you currently making?” Which you can't legally get asked in California, although it still happens, so how do you handle it if you still get asked and you don't want to rule yourself out? Or even worse—which they still can ask—which is, “How much do you want to make?”And a lot of times, people get asked that before they know anything about the job. And they basically, if you give an answer upfront, you're negotiating against yourself. And so I tackle tough things like that head-on. And I'm very much an engineer at heart, so for me, it's very methodical; I prepare scripts in advance to handle the pushback that I'm going to get, to handle the difficult questions. Without a doubt, I know all of my numbers, and that's where I'm getting real results for women is by taking the methodical approach to it.Corey: So, I spent my 20s in crippling credit card debt, and I was extremely mercenary, as a result. This wasn't because of some grand lost vision or something. Nope. I had terrible financial habits. So, every decision I made in that period of my life was extraordinarily mercenary. I would leave jobs I enjoyed for a job I couldn't stand because it paid $10,000 more.And the thing that I picked up from all of this, especially now having been on the other side of that running a company myself, is I'm not suggesting at any point that people should make career decisions based upon where they can make the most money, but that should factor in. One thing we do here at The Duckbill Group, in every job posting we put up is we post the salary range for the position. And I want to be clear here, it is less than anyone here could make at one of the big tech unicorns or a very hot startup that's growing meteorically, and we're upfront about that. We know that if money is the thing you're after and that is the driving force behind what you're going for, great; I don't fault you for that.This might not be the best role for you and that's perfectly okay. I get it. But you absolutely should know what your market worth is so you can make that decision from a place of being informed, rather than being naive and later discovering that you were taken advantage of.Lauren: So, I want to unpack just a couple things. There's just so many gold nuggets in that. Number one, for any employer listening out there, that is such a great best practice, to post the range. You're going to attract the right candidates when you post the right range. The last thing you want is to get to the end of the process to find out that, hey, you guys were totally off, and all the time invested could have been avoided if you'd had some sort of expectation set, upfront.That said, that's actually where I start with my negotiation training. A lot of people think I start with the money and that it's all about the money. That's not where I start. The very first thing I train women, and the men who've taken it, too, on the course is, figure out what success looks like to you. And not just the number success, but what does your life look like? What does your lifestyle look like? What does it feel like? What kinds of things do you do? What kinds of things do you value?Money is one of those components, but it's not all. And here's the reason I did that: because at a certain point in my life, I only got out at—broke even out of debt, you know, within the last five years. That's how underpaid I was at the time. But then once I started climbing out of debt, I started realizing it's not all about money. And that's actually how I ended up in my dream position.I mean, I'm living out how I define success today. Could I be making a lot more money at a big tech unicorn? Yeah, I could. But I also have this incredible lifestyle; it's sustainable. I get on apps like Blind and other internet forums, and I hear just horror stories of people burning out and the toxic cultures they work with. I don't have that at all. I have something that I could easily do for the next 50 years of my life if I live that long.But it's not by accident that I'm in the role that I'm in right now. I actually took the time to figure out what success looks like to me, and so when this opportunity came along—and I was looking at it alongside other opportunities that honestly paid more, I recognized this opportunity for what it was because I'd put in the work up front to figure out what success looks like to me. And so that's why what you guys are saying, “Hey, it's a lifestyle that you guys are supporting and mission that you're joining that's so important.” And you need to know that and do that work up front.Corey: That's I think what it really comes down to is understanding that in many cases… in fact, I'm going to take that back—in all cases, there's an inherent adversarial nature to the discussions you have about compensation with your employer or your prospective employer. And I say ‘adversarial' not antagonistic because you are misaligned as far as the ultimate purpose of the conversation. I'm not going to paint myself as some saint here and say that, oh, I'm on the side of every person I'm negotiating against, trying to get them to take a salary that's less than they deserve. Because, first, although I view myself that I'm not in that position, you have to take that on faith from me, and I think that is too far of a bridge to cross. So, take even what I'm saying now from the position as someone who has a vested interest in the outcomes of that negotiation.I mean, we're not one of those unicorn startups; we can't outbid Netflix and we wouldn't even try to. We're one of those old-fashioned businesses that has taken no investment and we fund ourselves through the magic of revenue and profitability, which means we don't have a SoftBank-sized [laugh] war chest sitting in the bank that we can use to just hurl ridiculous money at people and see who pans out. Hiring has to be intentional and thoughtful because we're a very small team. And if you're looking for something that doesn't align with that, great; I certainly don't blame you. That isn't this, and that's okay, I'm not trying to hire everyone.And if it's not going to work out, why wouldn't we say that upfront to avoid trying to get to all the way at the end of a very expensive interview process—both in terms of time and investment and emotionally—only to figure out that we're worlds apart on comp, and it's never going to work.Lauren: A hundred percent agree. I mean, I've been through it on both ends, both as someone who is being hired and also as a hiring manager, and I understand it. And you need to find alignment, and that's what negotiation is all about is finding an alignment, finding something where everyone feels like they're winning in the situation. And I'm a big proponent—and this is going to go so counterculture—I think a lot of people overlook a lot of opportunities that are just golden nuggets. I think there's a lot of idol worship of the big tech companies.And don't get me wrong; I'm sure they pay really well, great opportunity for your career, but I think people are overlooking a lot of really great career opportunities to get experience, and responsibility, and have good pay and lifestyle. And I'm a big proponent and looking for those golden nuggets rather than shooting for one of the big tech unicorns.Corey: And other people are going to have a very different perspective on that, and that is absolutely okay. So, tell me a little bit more about what it is that DevelopHer does and how you go about doing it because it's one thing to say, “Oh, we help women figure out that they are being underpaid,” but there's a whole lot of questions that opens up because great. How do you do that?Lauren: I do a number of things. So, it's not all about pay either. Part of it's building your value, building your confidence, standing out, getting ahead. DevelopHer started, actually, as a podcast. Funny story; I wanted to solve the problem of, we need more technical women as visible leaders out there, and I said, “Where are the architects? Where are the CTOs? Where are the CSOs?”And I didn't think anyone would care about me. I mean, I'm not Sheryl Sandberg; I'm not [laugh] the CEO of Facebook. Who's going to listen to me? And then I was actually surprised when people cared about my own story, about coming back from being underpaid and then getting back into tech and figuring out how to stand out in such a short amount of time. And other women were saying, “Well, how did you do it?”And it wasn't just women; it was men, too, saying, “Hey, I also don't know how to effectively advocate for myself.” And then it was companies saying, “Hey, can you come in and help us build our internal bench, recruit more women to come work for us, and build our own women leaders?” And then I've started working with universities to help bridge the gap before it even starts. I partnered with major universities to license my program and train them, not only how do you negotiate for what you're worth, for your first salary, but also how do you come in and immediately make an impact and accelerate your career growth? And then, of course, I work with individual women.I've talked about I have a salary negotiation course that's won a couple awards for the work, the results that it's getting, but then I just recently wrote a book because I wanted to reach women and men at scale and help them really get ahead. And this was literally my playbook. It's called The DevelopHer Playbook. And it's, how did I break into tech? And then once I was in tech, how did I get ahead so quickly? And it's not rocket science. And that's what I'm working on is training other people do it. And look, I'm still learning; I'm still paving my own path forward in tech, myself.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Jellyfish. So, you're sitting in front of your office chair, bleary eyed, parked in front of a powerpoint and—oh my sweet feathery Jesus its the night before the board meeting, because of course it is! As you slot that crappy screenshot of traffic light colored excel tables into your deck, or sift through endless spreadsheets looking for just the right data set, have you ever wondered, why is it that sales and marketing get all this shiny, awesome analytics and inside tools? Whereas, engineering basically gets left with the dregs. Well, the founders of Jellyfish certainly did. That's why they created the Jellyfish Engineering Management Platform, but don't you dare call it JEMP! Designed to make it simple to analyze your engineering organization, Jellyfish ingests signals from your tech stack. Including JIRA, Git, and collaborative tools. Yes, depressing to think of those things as your tech stack but this is 2021. They use that to create a model that accurately reflects just how the breakdown of engineering work aligns with your wider business objectives. In other words, it translates from code into spreadsheet. When you have to explain what you're doing from an engineering perspective to people whose primary IDE is Microsoft Powerpoint, consider Jellyfish. Thats Jellyfish.co and tell them Corey sent you! Watch for the wince, thats my favorite part.Corey: I feel like no one really has a great plan for, “Oh, where are you going next in tech? Do you have this whole thing charted out?” “Of course not. I'm doing this fly by night, seat of my pants, if I'm being perfectly honest with you.” And it's hard to know where to go next.What's interesting to me is that you talk about helping people individually—generally women—through your program, but you also work directly with companies. And when you're talking about things like salary negotiation, I think a natural question that flows from that is, are there aspects of what you wind up talking to individuals about versus what you do when talking to companies that are in opposition to each other?Lauren: Yeah, so that's a great question. So, the answer is there are some progressive companies that have brought me in to do salary negotiation training. Complete candor, most companies aren't interested. It's my Zero-To-Hero DevelopHer Playbook program which is, how do you get ahead? How do you build your value, become an asset at the company?So, it's less focused on pay, but more how do you become more valuable, and get ahead and add more value to the company? And that's where I work with the individuals and the companies on that front.Corey: It does seem like it would be a difficult sell, in most enterprise scenarios, to get a company to pay someone to come in to teach their staff how to more effectively [laugh] negotiate their next raise. I love the vision.Lauren: It has happened. I also thought it was crazy, but it has happened. But no, most of my corporate clients say, “We not only want to encourage more women into tech, but we already have a lot of women who are already in our ranks, and we want to encourage them to really feel like they're empowered and to stand out and reach the next levels.” And that's my sweet spot for corporate.Corey: Somewhat recently, I was asked on a Twitter Spaces—which is like Clubhouse but somehow different and strange—did I think that the privilege that I brought to what I do had enabled me to do these things, being white, being a man, being cis-gendered—speaking English as my primary language was an interesting one that I hadn't heard contextualized like that before—and whether that had advantaged me as I went through these things? And I think it's impossible to say anything other than absolutely because it's easy to, on some level, take a step back and think, “Well, I've built this company, and this media platform, and the rest. And that wasn't given to me; I had to build it.” And that's absolutely true. I did have to build it, and it wasn't given to me.But as I was building it, the winds were at my back not against me. I was not surrounded by people who are telling me I couldn't do it. Every misstep I made wasn't questioned as, well, you sure you should be doing this thing that you're not really doing? It was very much a fail-forward. And if you think that applies to everyone, then you are grievously mistaken.Lauren: I think that's a healthy perspective, which is why I consider you one of developers in my strongest allies, the fact that you're willing to look at yourself and go, “What advantages did I have? And how might I need to adapt my messaging or my advice so that it's applicable to even more people?” But it's also something I've experienced myself. I mean, I set out to help women in tech because I'm in women in tech myself. And I was surprised by a couple of things.Number one, I was surprised that men were [laugh] asking me for advice as well. And individuals and medicine, and finance, and law, in business not even related to tech, but what I'm really proud of that I didn't set out to build because I didn't feel qualified, but I'm really glad that I've been able to serve is that there were three populations that I've been really able to serve, especially at the university level. Number one, international students who, you mentioned yourself, English might not be their first language, but they're not familiar with the US hiring and advancement and pay process, and I help normalize that. And that's something that I myself in the benefit of, having been born here in the US. People who, where English isn't their first language; you think it's hard enough to answer, “Why do you think you should be promoted?”Or, “How much do you think you should make for this role? What do you want?” In your first language? Try answering it in your third, right? And then when I'm really proud of is, especially at the university level, I've been really able to help students where they're first-generation college students, where they don't have a professional mentor within their immediate family.And providing them a roadmap—or actually, the playbook to how to get ahead and then how to advocate for yourself. And these were things that I didn't feel qualified to help, but these are the individuals who've ended up coming and utilizing my program, and finding a lot of benefit from that. And it made me realize that I'm doing something bigger than I even set out to do, and that is very meaningful to me.Corey: You mentioned that you give guidance on salary negotiation and career advancement to not just women, but also men, and not just people who are in tech, but people who are in other business areas as well. How does what you're advising people to do shift—if at all—from folks who are women working in tech?Lauren: So, that's the key is it really doesn't shift. What I'm teaching are fundamentals and, spoiler alert, I teach grounding yourself in data, and knowing your data, and taking the emotion out of the process, whether you're trying to get ahead, to stand out, to earn more. And I teach fundamentals, which is five-point process.Number one, you got to figure out what success looks like to you. I talked a little bit about that earlier, but it's foundational. I mean, I start with that because that alone changed my life. I would still be pursuing success today and not have reached it, but I'm living out how I defined success because I started there.Then you got to really know your worth. Absolutely without a doubt, know how much you're worth. And for me, this was transformational. I mean, eye-opening. Like you said earlier, the blindfold coming off. When I saw for a fact how much employers paid other people with my skill sets, it was a game-changer for me. And so I—without a shadow of a doubt, I use four different strategies, multiple resources in each strategy to know comprehensively how much I'm worth.And then I teach knowing your numbers. It's not an emotional thing; it's very much scientific, so I talked about knowing your key numbers, your target, your ask, and your walk away, and those are all very dependent on your employment and financial situation, so it's different from person to person. And then I talk about—and this is a little different than what other people teach—is I talk about finding leverage, what you uniquely bring to the table, or identifying companies where you uniquely add value, where you can either lock in an offer or negotiate a premium.And then I prepare. I prepare. Just like you prepare for an interview, I prepare for a negotiation, and if I'm asking for the right amount of money, I am going to be prepared for pushback and I want to be able to handle that, and I don't want to just know it on the fly; I want to have scripts and questions prepared to handle that pushback. I want to be prepared to answer some of the most difficult questions that you're going—get asked, like we talked about earlier.And then the final step is I practice over and over and over again, just like a sporting event. I am ready to go into action and get a great thing. So, those are the fundamentals. I've marketed to women in tech because I'm a woman in tech and we don't have enough women in tech, and women are 82 cents on the dollar in tech, but what I found is that doctors were using the same methodology. I wasn't marketing it to them. Lawyers, business people, finance people were using it because I was teaching such fundamentals.Corey: Taking it one step further, if someone is listening to this and starting to get a glimmering of the sense that they're not where they could be career-wise, either in terms of compensation, advancement, et cetera, what advice would you have for them as far as things to focus on first? Not to effectively extract the entire content of your course into podcast form, but where do they start?Lauren: Yeah. So, you start by investing in yourself and investing in the change that you want. And that first investment might be figuring out how much you're worth, you know, doing that research to figure out how much you're worth. And then going out and learning the skills. And look, I have a course, I have a book that you can use to get ahead; if I'm not the right fit, there are a ton of resources out there. The trick is to find the best fit for you.And my only regret as I look back over the last 10, 15 years of my career is that I didn't invest in myself sooner and that I didn't go out and figure out how much I was worth, and that I—when they said, “Well, you're just not there yet,” when I asked for more money, that I believed them. And that was on me that I didn't go out and go, “I wonder how much I'm worth?” And do the research. And then, I regret not hiring a career coach earlier. I wish I'd gotten back into tech sooner.And I wish that I had learned to negotiate and advocate for myself sooner. But my knack, Corey—and I believe things happen to me for a reason—is my special skills is I take things that were meant not necessarily intentionally to harm me, but things that hurt me, I learned from them, I turn it around in the best way possible, and then I teach and I create programs to help uplift other people. And that's my special skill set; that's sort of my mission and purpose in life, and now I'm just trying to really exploit it and make this into a big movement that impacts millions of lives.Corey: So, what's next for you? You've built this platform, you've put yourself out there, you've clearly made a dent in the direction that you're heading in. What's next?Lauren: [laugh]. I am looking to scale. I'm just like any company; I've really focused on delivering value proof of concept. What a lot of people don't realize is not only did I build DevelopHer in quote, “my spare time,” but I did this without any outside investors. I funded it at all myself, built it on my own sweat equity—Corey: [laugh]. That one resonates.Lauren: Yeah. [laugh]. I know you know what that feels like. And so for me, I'm focused on scale: bringing in more corporate partners; bringing in more university clients, to scale and bridge the gap before it even starts; and scaling and reaching more women and men and anyone who wants to figure out how to get ahead, stand out, and earn more. And so the next year, two years are really focused on scale.Corey: If people want to learn more about what you do, how you do it, or potentially look at improving their own situations, where can they find you?Lauren: I am online. Go to developher.com. I have resources for individuals; I have a book, which is a great, cost-effective way to learn a lot.I have an award-winning negotiation course that helps you go out and earn what you're truly worth, and I have a membership to connect with me and other like-minded individuals. If you're a company leader, I work with companies all the time to train their women—and men, too—to get ahead and build their value. And then also, I work with universities as well to help bridge the gender wage gap before it starts, and builds future leaders.Corey: And we will, of course, include links to that in the [show notes 00:27:55]. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. I really appreciate it.Lauren: Corey, thank you so much for having me, and I really mean it. You know, Corey is a strong ally. We connected, and I am glad to count you as not only my own ally but an ally of DevelopHer.Corey: Well, thank you. That's incredibly touching to hear. I appreciate it.Lauren: I mean it.Corey: Thank you. Sometimes all you can say to a sincere compliment is, “Thank you.” Arguing it is an insult, and I'm not that bold. [laugh].Lauren: That's actually really good advice that I give women is, so many times, we cut down our own compliments. And so that's a great example right there, and it is not just women who sometimes I have a challenge with it; men, too. When someone gives you a compliment, just say, “Thank you.”Corey: Good advice for any age, in any era. Lauren Hasson, founder of DevelopHer, speaker, author, frontline engineer some days. 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 an insulting comment telling me that my company is never going to succeed if I don't attempt to outbid Netflix.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.

This week my guest is Hanna Raskin. Hanna spent the past 8 years as food editor, and chief critic for The Post and Courier in Charleston, S.C. During her time there, she was nominated for four James Beard Foundation awards, winning the organization's first-ever prize for local impact journalism. She recently left the newspaper to begin publishing The Food Section, a twice-weekly Substack newsletter that will bring original, inclusive, and independent food journalism to underserved cities and states across the American South. The Food Section launched on September 15th. On the show, we talk about her experiences as a restaurant reviewer, the state of dining during Covid in South Carolina, and her decision to abstain from reviewing restaurants during the pandemic. We discuss whether or not a chef or restaurateur's behavior should be considered when reviewing a place. And, of course, you'll learn all about her newsletter The Food Section.  Looking to hire employees for your restaurant? This week's sponsor is Savory Jobs, a job site only for restaurants. For just $50, get unlimited job postings for an entire year. Use discount code SAVORY10 to save 10%.===========Hanna Raskin===========Hanna's TwitterThe Food SectionArticle -"Unpublished 1936 guide to Black life in Charleston reveals city's first restaurant critic"Review- "Malagon serves marvelous food to those allowed into downtown Charleston restaurant"================CONNECT WITH US================SUPPORT US ON PATREONGet the Chefs Without Restaurants NewsletterVisit Our Amazon Store (we get paid when you buy stuff)Connect on ClubhouseCheck out our websites (they have different stuff) https://chefswithoutrestaurants.org/ & https://chefswithoutrestaurants.com/Like our Facebook pageJoin the private Facebook groupJoin the conversation on TwitterCheck our Instagram picsFounder Chris Spear's personal chef business Perfect Little Bites https://perfectlittlebites.com/Watch on YouTubeIf you want to support the show, our Venmo name is ChefWoRestos and can be found at https://venmo.com/ChefWoRestos. If you enjoy the show, have ever received a job through one of our referrals, have been a guest,  or simply want to help, it would be much appreciated. Feel free to let us know if you have any questions.

Episode #49 – Uncharted Worlds: Our ‘hero' Starrion Riku wakes up on a starship, bound for the vacation planet of Havenworth. But not is all drinks with umbrellas on this trip. Music from https://filmmusic.io “Take a Chance” by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com) License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Brothers J and Eric discuss the 2020 Benedict Cumberbatch cold war spy drama The Courier. It's low-key good stuff.   Along the way they discuss the word "penguin," “War Pigs” by Faith No More and by Samantha Fish, local government, “The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics” by Leonard Susskind, “The Last Tribe” by Brad Manuel, house centipedes, and Chuck Palahniuk. Housekeeping begins at 1:07:22 File length 1:48:11 File Size 79.3 MB Theme by Jul Big Green via SongFinch Subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts Listen to us on Stitcher Like us on Facebook Follow us on Twitter Send your comments to show@notinacreepyway.com Visit the show website at www.notinacreepyway.com

Who doesn't like a good old fashioned Cold War spy movie? The Courier takes a shot to compete with some of the greats in the category. Don't worry, we'll tell you how we think they did. (Spoilers)Don't forget to subscribe to the show!You can also follow us on other social media Facebook: @WereYouNotEntertainedTwitter: @WYNEpodcast#TheCourier #Amazon #PrimeVideo #MoviesatHome #MovieReview #movies #podcast #podernfamily #MoviePodSquad

Hanna Raskin, most recently a reporter and restaurant critic for the Charleston Post and Courier, just launched The Food Section, a Substack devoted to food and related issues across the American South. The online journal, delivered to subscribers' email inboxes twice weekly, offers  everything from  news and investigative journalism to restaurant reviews, opinion columns, and features.  On today's pod, Hanna calls in from Charleston to discuss her move into this growing journalism sector, and describe some of her first stories for The Food Section, including a look at the state (and advisability) of "friends and family" nights in restaurants, and the tale of a neighborhood that banded together to push back against a local bar that had overtaken its streets.Andrew Talks to Chefs is a fully independent podcast and no longer affiliated with our former host network; please visit and bookmark our official website for all show updates, blog posts, personal and virtual appearances, and related information.

Busy guest lineup for today's episode as soon as the guys get some Mac and Cheese ice cream talk out of the way (seriously) The Post and Courier's David Cloninger on the Gamecocks offensive struggles, OC Marcus Satterfield's comments and this weekend's game with Troy Former South Carolina pitching coach, longtime friend of the show and current Troy head baseball coach Skylar Meade Our high school football report with David Shelton of The Post and Courier Wrapping the Ryder Cup with Scott Glaze, head professional at The Links at Stono Ferry

About Jesse Jesse Vincent is the cofounder and CTO of Keyboardio, where he designs and manufactures high-quality ergonomic mechanical keyboards. In previous lives, he served as the COO of VaccinateCA, volunteered as the project lead for the Perl programming language, created both the leading open source issue tracking system RT: Request tracker and K-9 Mail for Android.Links: Keyboardio: https://keyboard.io Obra: https://twitter.com/obra TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: You could build you go ahead and build your own coding and mapping notification system, but it takes time, and it sucks! Alternately, consider Courier, who is sponsoring this episode. They make it easy. You can call a single send API for all of your notifications and channels. You can control the complexity around routing, retries, and deliverability and simplify your notification sequences with automation rules. Visit courier.com today and get started for free. If you wind up talking to them, tell them I sent you and watch them wince—because everyone does when you bring up my name. Thats the glorious part of being me. Once again, you could build your own notification system but why on god's flat earth would you do that?Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Jellyfish. So, you're sitting in front of your office chair, bleary eyed, parked in front of a powerpoint and—oh my sweet feathery Jesus its the night before the board meeting, because of course it is! As you slot that crappy screenshot of traffic light colored excel tables into your deck, or sift through endless spreadsheets looking for just the right data set, have you ever wondered, why is it that sales and marketing get all this shiny, awesome analytics and inside tools? Whereas, engineering basically gets left with the dregs. Well, the founders of Jellyfish certainly did. That's why they created the Jellyfish Engineering Management Platform, but don't you dare call it JEMP! Designed to make it simple to analyze your engineering organization, Jellyfish ingests signals from your tech stack. Including JIRA, Git, and collaborative tools. Yes, depressing to think of those things as your tech stack but this is 2021. They use that to create a model that accurately reflects just how the breakdown of engineering work aligns with your wider business objectives. In other words, it translates from code into spreadsheet. When you have to explain what you're doing from an engineering perspective to people whose primary IDE is Microsoft Powerpoint, consider Jellyfish. Thats Jellyfish.co and tell them Corey sent you! Watch for the wince, thats my favorite part.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. As you folks are well aware by now, this show is at least ostensibly about the business of cloud. And that's intentionally overbroad. You can fly a boat through it, which means it's at least wider than the Suez Canal.And that's all well and good, but what do all of these cloud services have in common? That's right, we interact with them via typing on keyboards. My guest today is Jesse Vincent, who is the founder of Keyboardio and creator of the Model 01 heirloom-grade keyboard, which is sitting on my desk that sometimes I use, sometimes it haunts me. Jesse, thank you for joining me.Jesse: Hey, thanks so much for having me, Corey.Corey: So, mechanical keyboards are one of those divisive things that, back in the before times when we were all sitting in offices, it was an express form of passive aggression, where, “I don't like the people around me, and I'm going to show it to them with things that can't really complain about. So, what is the loudest keyboard I can get?” Style stuff. And some folks love them, some folks can't stand them. And most folks to be perfectly blunt, do not seem to care.Jesse: So, it's not actually about them being loud, or it doesn't have to be. Mechanical keyboards can be dead silent; they can be as quiet as anything else. There's absolutely a subculture that is into things that are as loud as they possibly can be; you know, sounds like there's a cannon going off on somebody's desk. But you can also get absolutely silent mechanical switches that are more dampened than your average keyboard. For many, many people, it's about comfort, it is about the key feel.A keyboard is supposed to have a certain feeling and these flat rectangles that feel like you're typing on glass, they don't have that feeling and they're not good for your fingers. And it's been fascinating over the past five or six years to watch this explosion in interest in good keyboards again.Corey: I learned to first use a computer back on an old IBM 286 in the '80s. And this obviously had a Model M—or damn close to it—style buckling spring keyboard. It was loud and I'm nostalgic about the whole thing. True story I've never told on this podcast before; I was a difficult child when I was five years old, and I was annoyed because my parents went out of the house and my brother was getting more attention than I was. I poured a bucket of water into the keyboard.And to this day, I'm surprised my father didn't murder me after that. And we wound up after having a completely sealing rubber gasket on top of this thing. Because this was the '80s; keyboards were not one of those, “Oh, I'm going to run down to the store and pick up another one for $20.” This was at least a $200 whoops-a-doozy. And let's just say that it didn't endear me to my parents that week.Jesse: That's funny because that keyboard is one that actually probably would have dried out just fine. Not like the Microsoft Naturals that I used to carry in the mid-'90s. Those white slightly curved ones. That was my introduction to ergonomic keyboards and they had a fatal flaw as many mid-'90s Microsoft products did. In this case, they melted in the rain; the circuit traces inside were literally wiped away by water. If a cup of water got in that keyboard, it was gone.Corey: Everyone has a story involving keyboard and liquids at some point, or they are the most careful people that are absolutely not my people whatsoever because everyone I hang out with is inherently careless. And over time I used other keyboards as I went through my life and never had strong opinions on them, and then I got to play with a mechanical keyboard had brought all that time rushing back to me of, “Oh, yeah.” And my immediate thought is, “Oh, this is great. I wonder if I could pour water into it? No, no.”And I started getting back into playing with them and got what I thought was the peak model keyboard from Das Keyboards which, there was the black keyboard with no writing on it at all. And I learned I don't type nearly as well as I thought I did in those days. And okay. That thing sat around gathering dust and I started getting a couple more and a couple more, and it turns out if you keep acquiring mechanical keyboards, you can turn an interest into a problem but you can also power your way through to the other side and become a collector. And I started building my own for a while and I still have at least a dozen of them in various states of assembly here.It was sort of a fun hobby that I got into, and for me at least it was, why do I want to build a keyboard myself? Is it, do I believe intrinsically that I can build a better keyboard than I can buy? Absolutely not. But everything else I do in my entire career as an engineer until that point had been about making the bytes on the screen go light up in different patterns. That was it.This was something that I had built that I could touch with my hands and was still related to the thing that I did, and was somewhat more forgiving than other things that I could have gotten into, like you know, woodworking with table saws that don't realize my arm it just lopped off.Jesse: Oh, you can burn yourself pretty good with a soldering iron.Corey: Oh, absolutely I can.Jesse: But yeah, no, I got into this in a similar-sounding story. I had bad wrists throughout my career. I was a programmer and a programming manager and CEO. And my wrist hurts all the time, and I'd been through pretty much every ergonomic keyboard out there. If you seen the one where you stick your fingers into little wells, and each finger you can press back forth, left, right, and down, the ones that looked like they were basically a pair of flat capacitive surfaces from a company that later got bought by Apple and turned into the iPads touch technology, Microsoft keyboards, everything. And nothing quite felt right.A cloud startup I had been working on cratered one summer. Long story short, the thing went under for kind of sad reasons and I swore I was going to take a year off to screw around and figure out what the next thing was going to be. And at some point, I noticed there were people on the internet building their own keyboards. This was not anything I had ever done before. When I started soldering, I did figure out that I must have soldered before because it smelled familiar, but this was supposed to be a one-month project to build myself a single keyboard.And I saw that people on the internet were doing it, I figured, eh, how hard could it be? Just one of those things that Perl hackers are apt to say. Little did I know. It's now, I want to say something like eight years later, and my one-month project to build one keyboard has failed thousands and thousands and thousands of times over as we've shipped thousands of keyboards to, oh God, it's like 75 or 78 countries.Corey: And it's great. It's well made. The Model 01 that I got was part of an early Kickstarter batch. My wife signed me up for it—because she knew I was into this sort of thing—as a birthday gift. And then roughly a year later, if memory serves, it showed up and that was fine.Again, it's Kickstarter is one of those, this might just be an aspirational gift. We don't know. And—because, Kickstarter—but it was fun. And I use it. It's great.I like a lot of the programmability aspects of it. There are challenges. I'm not used to using ergonomic keyboards, and the columnar layout is offset to a point where I miss things all the time. And if you're used to typing rapidly, in things like chats, or Twitter or whatnot, were rapid responses valuable, it's frustrating trying to learn how a new keyboard layout works.Jesse: Absolutely. So, we got some advice very early on from one of the research scientists who helped Microsoft with their design for their natural keyboards, and one of the things that he told us was, “You will probably only ever get one chance to make a keyboard; almost every company that makes a keyboard fails, and so you should take one of the sort of accepted designs and make a small improvement to help push the industry forward. You don't want to go do something radical and have nobody like it.”Corey: That's very reasonable advice and also boring. Why bother?Jesse: Well, we walked away from that with a very different take, which was, if we're only going to get one chance of this, we're going to do the thing we want to make.Corey: Yeah.Jesse: And so we did a bunch of stuff that we got told might be difficult to do or impossible. We designed our own keycaps from scratch. We milled the enclosure out of hardwood. When we started, we didn't know where we were manufacturing, but we did specify that the wood was going to be Canadian maple because it grows like a weed, and as you know, not in danger of being made extinct. But when you're manufacturing in southern China and you're manufacturing with Canadian maple, that comes on a boat from North America.Corey: There's something to be said for the globalization supply chain as we see things shipped back and forth and back and forth, and it seems ridiculous but the economics are there it's—Jesse: Oh, my God. Now, this year.Corey: Yeah [laugh], there's that.Jesse: Supply chains are… how obscenity-friendly is this podcast? [laugh].Corey: Oh, we can censor anything that's too far out. Knock yourself out.Jesse: Because what I would ordinarily say is the supply chains are [BLEEP].Corey: Yep, they are.Jesse: Yeah. This time around, we gave customers the—for the Model 100, which is our new keyboard that the Kickstarter just finished up for—we gave customers the choice of that nice Canadian maple or walnut. We got our quotes in advance. You know, our supplier confirmed wood was no problem a few months in advance. And then the night before the campaign launched, our wood supplier got in touch and said, “So, there are no walnut planks that are wide enough to be had in all of southern China. There are some supply chain issues due to the global container shortage. We don't know what we're going to be able to do. Maybe you could accept it if we did butcher block style walnut and glued planks together.”They made samples and then a week later, instead of FedExing us the samples, I got a set of photographs with a whole bunch of sad faces and crying face emojis saying, “Well, we tried. We know there's no way that this would be acceptable to your customers.” We asked, “So, where's this walnut supposed to be coming from that you can't get it?” They're like, “It's been sitting on the docks at the origin since March. It's being forested in Kentucky in the United States.”Corey: The thing that surprised me the most about the original model on Kickstarter campaign was how much went wrong across the board. I kept reading your updates. It was interesting, at some point, it was like, okay, this is clearly a Ponzi scheme. That's the name of the keyboard: ‘The Ponzi', where there's going to be increasingly outlandish excuses.Jesse: I don't think a Ponzi scheme would be the right aspersion to be casting.Corey: There's that more pedestrian scam-style thing. We could go with that.Jesse: We have a lot of friends who've been in industry longer than us, and every time we brought one of the problems that our factory seemed to be having to them, they said, “Oh, yeah, that's the thing that absolutely happens.”Corey: Yeah, it was just you kept hitting every single one of these, and I was increasingly angry on your behalf, reading these things about, “Oh, yeah. Just one of your factory reps just blatantly ripped you off, and this was expected to be normal in some cases, and it's like”—and you didn't even once threatened to burn the factory now, which I thought was impressive.Jesse: No, nobody threatened to burn the factory down, but one of the factories did have a fire.Corey: Which we can neither confirm nor deny—I kid, I kid, I kid.Jesse: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But so what our friends who had been in industry longer that said, it was like, “Jesse, but, you know, nobody has all the problems.” And eventually, we figured out what was going on, and it was that our factory's director of overseas sales was a con artist grifter who had been scamming both sides. She'd been lying to us and lying to the factory, and making up stories to make her the only trusted person to each side, and she'd just been embezzling huge sums of money.Corey: You hear these stories, but you never think it's going to be something that happens to you. Was this your first outing with manufacturing a physical product?Jesse: This was our first physical product.Corey: But I'm curious about it; are you effectively following the trope of a software person who thinks, “Ah, I could do hardware? How hard could it be? I could ship code around the world seconds, so hardware will be just a little bit slower.” How close to that trope are you?Jesse: So, when we went into the manufacturing side, we knew that we knew nothing, and we knew that it was fraught with peril. And we gave ourselves an awful lot of padding on timing, which we then blew through for all sorts of reasons. And we ran through a hardware incubator that helped us vet our plans, we were working with companies on the ground that helped startups work with factories. And honestly, if it hadn't been for this one individual, yes we would have had problems, but it wouldn't have been anything of the same scale. As far as we can tell, almost everything bad that happened had a grain of truth in it, it's just that… you know, a competent grifter can spin a tiny thing into a giant thing.And nobody in China suspected her, and nobody in China believed that this could possibly be happening because the penalties if she got caught were ten years in a Chinese prison for an amount of money that effectively would be a down payment on an apartment instead of the price of a full apartment or fully fleeing the country.Corey: It seems like that would be enough of a deterrent, but apparently not.Jesse: Apparently not. So, we ended up retaining counsel and talking to friends who had been working in southern China for 15 years for about who they might recommend for a lawyer. We ended up retaining a Chinese lawyer. Her name's [Una 00:13:36]; she's fantastic.Corey: Referrals available upon request.Jesse: Oh, yeah. No, absolutely. I'm happy to send her all kinds of business. She looked at the contract we had with the factory, she's like, “This is a Western contract. This isn't going to help you in the Chinese courts. What we need to do is we need to walk into the factory and negotiate a new agreement that is in Chinese, written by a Chinese lawyer, and get them to sign it.”And part of that agreement was getting them to take full joint responsibility for everything. And she walked in with me to the factory. She dressed down: t-shirt and jeans. They initially thought she was my translator, and she made a point of saying, “Look, I'm Jesse's counsel. I'm not your lawyer. I do not represent your interests.”And three-party negotiations with the factory: the factory's then former salesperson, and us. And she negotiated a new agreement. And I had a long list of all the things that we needed to have in our contract, like all the things that we really cared about. Get to the end of the day and she hands it to me and she's like, “What do you think?” And I read it through and my first thought is that none of the ten points that we need in this agreement are there.And then I realized that they are there, they're just very subtle. And everybody signs it. The factory takes full joint responsibility for everything that was done by their now former salesperson. We go outside; we get into the cab, and she turns to me—and she's not a native speaker of English, but she is fluent—and she's like, how do you think that went, Jesse? I'm like, I think that went pretty well. And she's like, “Yes. I get my job satisfaction out of adverse negotiation, and the factory effectively didn't believe in lawyers.”Corey: No, no. I've seen them. They exist. I married one of them.Jesse: Oh, yeah. As it turned out, they also didn't really believe in the court system and they didn't believe in not pissing off judges. Nothing could help us recover the time we lost; we did end up recovering all of our tooling, we ended up recovering all of our product that they were holding, all with the assistance of the Chinese courts. It was astonishing because we went into this whole thing knowing that there was no chance that a Chinese court would find for a small Western startup with no business presence in China against a local factory, and I think our goal was that they would get a black mark on their corporate social credit report so that nobody else would do business with this factory that won't give the customer back their tooling. And… it turns out that, no, the courts just helped us.Corey: It's nice when things work the way they're supposed to, on some level.Jesse: It is.Corey: And then you solve your production problems, you shipped it out. I use it, I take it out periodically.Jesse: We'd shipped every customer order well before this.Corey: Oh, okay. This was after you had already done the initial pre-orders. This was as you were ongoing—Jesse: Yeah, there were keycaps we owed people, which were—Corey: Oh, okay.Jesse: Effectively the free gift we promised aways in for being late on shipping.Corey: That's what that was for. It showed up one day and I wondered what the story behind that was. But yeah, it was—Jesse: Yeah.Corey: They're great.Jesse: Yeah. You know, and then there was a story in The Verge of, this Kickstarter alleges that—da, da, da, da, da. We're like, “I understand that AOL's lawyers make you say ‘alleges,' but no, this really happened, and also, we really had shipped everything that we owed to customers long before all this went down.”Corey: Yeah. This is something doesn't happen in the software world, generally speaking. I don't have to operate under the even remote possibility that my CI/CD system is lying to me about what it's doing. I can generally believe things that show up in computers—you would think—but there are—Jesse: You would think. I mean—Corey: There a lot of [unintelligible 00:17:19] exceptions to that, but generally, you can believe it.Jesse: In software, you sometimes we'll work with contractors or contract agencies who will make commitments and then not follow through on those commitments, or not deliver the thing they promised. It does sometimes happen.Corey: Indeed.Jesse: Yeah, no, the thing I miss the most from software is that if there is a defect, the cost of shipping an update is nil and the speed at which you can ship an update is instantly.Corey: You would think it would be nil, but then we look at AWS data transfer pricing and there's a giant screaming caveat on that. It's you think that moving bytes would cost nothing. Yeah.Jesse: [unintelligible 00:17:53] compared to international shipping costs for physical goods, AWS transfer rates are incredibly competitive.Corey: No, no, to get to that stage, you need to add an [unintelligible 00:18:02] NAT gateway with their data processing fee.Jesse: [laugh].Corey: But yeah, it's a different universe. It's a different problem, a different scale of speed, a different type of customer, too, on some levels. So, after you've gotten the Model 01's issues sorted out, you launched a second keyboard. The ‘a-TREE-us', if I'm pronouncing that correctly. Or ‘A-tree-us'.Jesse: So Phil, who designed it, pronounces is ‘A-tree-us', so we pronounce it A-tree-us. And so, this is a super minimalist keyboard designed to take with you everywhere, and it was something where Phil Hagelberg, who is a software developer of some repute for a bunch of things, he had designed this sort of initially for his own use and then had started selling kits. So, laser-cut plywood enclosures, hand-built circuit boards, you just stick a little development board in the middle of it, spend some time soldering, and you're good to go. And he and I were internet buddies; he had apparently gotten his start from some of my early blog posts. And one day, he sent me a note asking if I would review his updated circuit board design because he was doing a revision.I looked at his updated circuit board design and then offered to just make him a new circuit board design because it was going to be pretty straightforward to do something that's going to be a little more reliable and a lot more cost-effective. We did that and we talked a little more, and I said, “Would you be interested in having us just make this thing in a factory and sell it with a warranty and send you a royalty?” And he said, but it's GPL. You don't have to send me a royalty.Corey: I appreciate that I am not compelled to do it. However—yeah.Jesse: Yeah, exactly. It's like, “No. We would like to support people who create things and work with you on it.”Corey: That's important. We periodically have guest authors writing blog posts on Last Week in AWS. Every single one of them is paid for what they do, sometimes there for various reasons that they can't or won't accept it and we donate it to a charity of their choice, but we do not expect people to volunteer for a profit-bearing entity, in some respects.Jesse: Yeah.Corey: Now, open-source is a whole separate universe that I still maintain that is rapidly becoming a, “Would you like to volunteer for a trillion-dollar company in your weekend hours?” Usually not, but there's always an argument.Jesse: Oh, yeah. We have a bunch of open-source contributors to our open-source firmware and we contribute stuff back upstream to other projects, and it is a related but slightly different thing. So, Phil said yes; we said yes. And then we designed and made this thing. We launched an ultra-portable keyboard designed to take with you everywhere.It came with a travel case that had a belt loop, and basically a spring-loaded holster for your keyboard if you want to nerd out like that. All of the Kickstarter video and all the photography sort of showed how nice it looked in a cafe. And we launched it, like, the week the first lockdowns hit, in the spring of 2019.Corey: I have to say I skipped that one entirely. One of the things that I wound up doing—keyboard-wise—when I started this company four years ago and change, now was, I wound up getting a fairly large desk, and it's 72 inches or something like that. And I want a big keyboard with a numpad—yeah, that's right, big spender here—because I don't need a tiny little keyboard. I find that the layer-shifting on anything that's below a full-size keyboard is a little on the irritating side. And this goes beyond. It is—it requires significant—Jesse: Oh, yeah. It's—Corey: Rewiring of your brain, on some level.Jesse: And there are ergonomic reasons why some people find it to be better and more comfortable. There's less reaching and twisting. But it is a very different typing experience and it's absolutely not for everybody. Nothing we've made so far is intended to be a mass-market product. When we launched the Model 01, we were nervous that we would make something that was too popular because we knew that if we had to fulfill 50,000 of them, we'd just be screwed. We knew how little we knew.But the Atreus, when we launched it on Kickstarter, we didn't know if we were going to have to cancel the campaign because no one was going to want their travel keyboard at the beginning of a pandemic, but it did real well. I don't remember the exact timing and numbers, but we hit the campaign goal, I want to say early on the first day, possibly within minutes, possibly within hours—it's been a while now; I don't remember exactly—ultimately, we sold, like, 2600 of them on Kickstarter and have done additional production runs. We have a distributor in Japan, and a distributor in the US, and a distributor in the UK, now. And we also sell them ourselves directly online, from keyboard.io.So, this is one of the other fascinating logistics things, is that we ship globally through Hong Kong. Which, before the pandemic was actually pretty pleasant. Inexpensive shipping globally has gotten kind of nuts because most discount carriers, the way they operated historically is, they would buy cargo space on commercial flights. Commercial international flights don't happen so much.Corey: Yes, suddenly, that becomes a harder thing to find.Jesse: Early on, we had a couple of shipping providers that were in the super-slow, maybe up to two weeks to get your thing somewhere by air taking, I want to say we had things that didn't get there for three months. They would get from Hong Kong to Singapore in three days; they would enter a warehouse, and then we had to start asking questions about, “Hey, it's been eight weeks. What's going on?” And they're like, “Oh, it's still in queue for a flight to Europe. There just aren't any.”Corey: It seems like that becomes a hard problem.Jesse: It becomes a hard problem. It started to get a little better, and now it's starting to get a little worse again. Carriers that used to be ultra-reliable are now sketchy. We have FedEx losing packages, which is just nuts. USPS shipments, we see things that are transiting from Hong Kong, landing at O'Hare, going through a sorting center in Chicago, and just vanishing for weeks at a time, in Chicago.Corey: I don't pretend to understand how this stuff works. It's magic to me; like, it is magic, on some level, that I can order toilet paper on the internet, it gets delivered to my house for less money than it costs me to go to the store and buy it. It feels like there's some serious negative externalities in there. But we don't want to look too closely at those because we might feel bad about things.Jesse: There's all kinds of fascinating stuff for us. So, shipping stuff, especially by air, there are two different ways that the shipping weight can get calculated. It can either get calculated based on the weight on a scale, or it can get calculated using a formula based on the dimensions. And so bulky things are treated as weighing an awful lot. I'm told that Amazon's logistics teams started doing this fascinating thing where ultra-dense, super-heavy shipments they pushed on to FedEx and UPS, whereas the ultra-light stuff that saved on jet fuel, they shoved onto their own planes.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 https://snark.cloud/oci-free that's https://snark.cloud/oci-free.Corey: I want to follow up because it seems like, okay, pandemic shipping is a challenge; you clearly are doing well. You still have them in stock and are selling them as best I'm aware, correct?Jesse: Yes.Corey: Yeah. I may have to pick one up one of these days just so I can put it on the curiosity keyboard shelf and kick it around and see how it works. And then you recently concluded a third keyboard Kickstarter, in this case. And—Jesse: Yeah.Corey: —this is not your positioning; this is my positioning of what I'm picking up of, “Hey, remember that Model 01 keyboard we sold you that you love and we talked about and it's amazing? Yeah, turns out that's crap. Here's the better version of it.” Correct that misapprehension, please. [laugh].Jesse: Sure. So, it absolutely is not crap, but we've been out of stock in the Model 01 for a couple of years now. And we see them going used for as much or sometimes more than we used to charge for them new. It went out of stock because of the shenanigans with that first factory. And shortly before we launched the Atreus, we'd been planning to bring back an updated version of the Model 01; we've even gotten to the point of, like, designing the circuit boards and starting to update the tooling, the injection molding tooling, and then COVID, Atreus, life, everything.And so it took us a little longer to get there. But there is a larger total addressable market for a keyboard like the Model 01 than the total number that we ever sold. There are certainly people who had Model 01s who want replacements, want extras, want another one on another desk. There are also plenty of people who wanted a Model 01 and never got one.Corey: Here's my question for you, with all three of these keyboards because they're a different layout, let's be clear. Some more so than others, but even the columnar layout is strange here. Once upon a time, I had a week in which I wasn't doing much, and I figured, ah, I'll Dvorak—which is a different keyboard layout—and it's not that it's hard; it's that it's rewiring a whole bunch of muscle memory. The problem I ran into was not that it was impossible to do, by any stretch, but because of what I was doing—in those days help desk and IT support—I was having to do things on other people's computers, so it was a constant context switching back and forth between different layouts.Jesse: Yeah.Corey: Do you see that being a challenge with layouts like this, or is it more natural than that?Jesse: So, what we found is that it is easier to switch between an ergonomic layout and a traditional layout, like a columnar layout, and what's often called a row-stagger layout—which is what your normal keyboard looks like—than it is to switch between Dvorak and Qwerty on a traditional keyboard. Or the absolute bane of my existence is switching between a ThinkPad and a MacBook. They are super close; they are not the same.Corey: Right. You can't get an ergonomic keyboard layout inside of a laptop. I mean, looking at the four years of being gaslit by Apple, it's clear you can barely get a keyboard into a MacBook for a while. It's, “Oh, it's a piece of crap, but you're using it wro”—yeah. I'm not a fan of their entire approach to keyboards and care very than what Apple has to say about anything even slightly keyboard-related, but that's just me being bitter.Jesse: As far as I can tell, large chunks of Apple's engineering organization felt the same way that you did. Their new ones are actually decent again.Corey: Yes, that's what I've heard. And I will get one at some point, but I also have a problem where, “Oh, yeah, you know that $3,000 laptop with a crappy keyboard, you can't use for anything? Great. The solution is to give us 3000 more dollars, and then we'll sell you one that's good.” And it's, I feel like I don't want to reward the behavior.Jesse: I hear you. I ditched Mac OS for a number of years. I live the dream: Linux on the desktop. And it didn't hurt me a lot—printing worked fine, scanning worked fine, projectors were fine—but when I was reaching for things like Photoshop, and Lightroom, and my mechanical CAD software, it was the bad kind of funny.Corey: I have to be careful, now for the first time in my life I'm not updating to new operating systems early on, just because of things like the audio stuff I have plugged into my nonsense and the media nonsense that I do. It used to be that great, my computer only really needs to be a web browser and a terminal and I'm good. And worst case, I can make do with just the web browser because there are embedded a terminal into a web page options out there. Yeah, now it turns out that actually have a production workflow. Who knew?Jesse: Yep. That's the point where I started thinking about having separate machines for different things. [laugh].Corey: Yeah, I'm rapidly hitting that point. Yeah, I do want to get into having fun with keyboards, on some level, but it's the constant changing of what you're using. And then, of course, there's the other side of it where, in normal years, I spent an awful lot of time traveling and as much fun as having a holster-mounted belt keyboard would be, in many cases, it does not align with the meetings that I tend to be in.Jesse: Of course.Corey: It's, “Oh, great. You're the CFO of a Fortune 500. Great, let me pair my mini keyboard that looks like something from the bowels of your engineering department's reject pile.” Like, what is this? It's one of those things that doesn't send the right message in some cases. And let's be honest; I'm good at losing things.Jesse: This is a pretty mini keyboard, but I hear you.Corey: Or I could lose it, along with my keys. It will be great.Jesse: Yeah. There are a bunch of things I've wanted to do around reasonable keyboards for tablets.Corey: Yes, please do.Jesse: Yeah. We actually started looking at one point at a fruit company in Cupertino's requirements around being able to do dock-connector connected keyboards for their tablets, and… it's nuts. You can't actually do ergonomic keyboards that way, it would have to be Bluetooth.Corey: Yeah. When I travel on the road these days, or at least—well, ‘these days' being two years ago—the only computer I'd take is an iPad. And that was great; it works super well for a lot of my use cases. There's still something there, and even going forward, I'm going to be spending a lot more time at home. I have young kids now, and I want to be here to watch them grow up.And my lifestyle and use cases have changed for the last year and a half. I've had an iMac. I've never had one of those before. It's big screen real estate; things are great. And I'm looking to see whether it's time to make a full-on keyboard evolution if I can just force myself over the learning curve, here. But here's the question you might not be prepared to answer yet. What's next? Do you have plans on the backburner for additional keyboards beyond what you've done?Jesse: Oh, yeah. We have, like, three more designs that are effectively in the can. Not quite ready for production, but if this were a video podcast, I'd be pulling out and waving circuit boards at you. One of the things that we've been playing with is what is called in the trade a symmetric staggered keyboard where the right half is absolutely bog-standard normal layout like you'd expect, and the left side is a mirror of that. And so it is a much more gentle introduction to an ergonomic-style keyboard.Corey: Okay, I can almost wrap my head around that.Jesse: Because if you put your hands on your keyboard and you feel the angles that you have to move on your right side, you'll see that your fingers move basically straight back and forth. On the left side, it's very different unless you're holding your hand at a crazy, crazy angle.Corey: Yeah.Jesse: And so it's basically giving you that same comfort on the right side and also making the left side comfy. It's not a weird butterfly-shaped keyboard; it is still a rectangle, but it is just that little bit better. We're not the first people who have done this. Our first prototype of this thing was, like, 2006, something like that. But it was a one-off, like, “I wonder if I would like this.” And we were actually planning to do that one next after the Model 01 when the Atreus popped up, and that was a much faster, simpler, straighter-forward thing to bring to production.Corey: The one thing I want from a keyboard—and I haven't found one yet; maybe it exists, maybe I have to build it myself—but I want to do the standard mechanical keyboard—I don't even particularly care about the layout because it all passes through a microcontroller on the device itself. Great. And those things are programmable as you've demonstrated; you've already done an awful lot of open-source work that winds up being easily used to control keyboards. And I love it, and it's great, but I also want to embed a speaker—a small one—into the keyboard so I can configure it that every time I press a key, it doesn't just make a clack, it also makes a noise. And I want to be able to—ideally—have it be different keys make different noises sometimes. And the reason being is that when we eventually go back to offices, I don't want there to be any question about who is the most obnoxious typist in the office; I will—Jesse: [laugh].Corey: —win that competition. That is what I want from a keyboard. It's called the I-Don't-Want-Anyone-Within-Fifty-Feet-Of-Me keyboard. And I don't quite know how to go about building that yet, but I have some ideas.Jesse: So, there's absolutely stuff out there. There is prior art out there.Corey: Oh, wonderful.Jesse: One of the other options for you is solenoids.Corey: Oh, those are fun.Jesse: So, a solenoid is—there is a steel bar, an electromagnet, and a tube of magnetic material so that you can go kachunk every time you press a key.Corey: It feels functionally like a typewriter to my understanding.Jesse: I mean, it can make it feel like a typewriter. The haptic engine in an iPhone or a Magic Trackpad is not exactly a solenoid but might give you the vaguest idea of what you're talking about.Corey: Yeah, I don't think I'm going to be able to quite afford 104 iPhones to salvage all of their haptic engines so that I can then wind up hooking each one up to a different key but, you know, I am sure someone enterprising come up with it.Jesse: Yeah. So, you only need a couple of solenoids and you trigger them slightly differently depending on which key is getting hit, and you'll get your kachunk-kachunk-kachunk-kachunk-kachunk.Corey: Yeah, like spacebar for example. Great. Or you can always play a game with it, too, like, the mystery key: whenever someone types in the hits the mystery key, the thing shrieks its head off and scares the heck out of them. Especially if you set it to keys that aren't commonly used, but ever so frequently, make everyone in the office jumpy and nervous.Jesse: This will be perfect for Zoom.Corey: Oh, absolutely, it would. In fact, one thing I want to do soon if this pandemic continues much longer, is then to upgrade my audio setup here so I can have a second microphone pointed directly into my keyboard so that people who are listening at a meeting with me can hear me typing as we go. I might be a terrible colleague. One wonders.Jesse: You might be a terrible colleague, but you might be a wonderful colleague. Who knows?Corey: It all depends on the interests we have. I want to thank you for taking the time to walk me through the evolution of Keyboardio. If people want to learn more, or even perhaps buy one of these things, where can they do that?Jesse: They can do that at keyboard.io.Corey: And hence the name. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me about all this. I really appreciate it.Jesse: Cool. Thanks so much for having me. I had fun.Corey: I did, too. Jesse Vincent—obra on Twitter, and of course, the CTO of Keyboardio. I am 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, but before typing it, switch your keyboard to Dvorak.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.

______________________________________________  Welcome to  Skyjacks: Courier's Call - Season 2!______________________________________________ANNOUNCEMENTS!Backer Surveys, Address Changes and Voting!Be sure to complete those back surveys, send us your change of address and get that voting done if you backed at that level! We got rewards headed towards you and we need that information to make sure it all gets to you on time and safely! TimeskipThe first part of this season picks up after a bit of a time jump. Its been a little over a month since our heroes left Otterbachs and they've stopped at two other locations (port of call #2 and #3) along the six month route of the Red Audron. There were some adventures, some growing pains, some thrilling heroics and even a run in with the infamous Jolly Jack as well as most of their time in Tesh Urt but all that is behind us as our heroes experience their last night in the city before heading out.  If you've enjoyed the show, liked what we've done or just have feelings about this season, feel free to tell us at skyjackscourierscall@gmail.com or to leave us a review on itunes!______________________________________________MORE FROM THE WORLD OF SPEIRIf you want to join the Patreon to get exclusive behind the scenes content (including all eight episodes of the Jolly Jack Adventure!), please see the link below:https://www.patreon.com/oneshotpodcast If you want to get more info on the World of Speir through the Skyjacks World Zine, please see the link below: https://one-shot-podcast.itch.io/the-skyjacks-zine-vol-1______________________________________________CONTENT WARNINGMain Show:  Stealing, lying to adults, adults plotting to apprehend childrenDear Red Audron: Advice about life______________________________________________CALL TO ACTIONRight Wrongs. Do Mercies. Take Flight! ______________________________________________TALK TO YOUR KIDSCourier's Call  does not condone racism, hate or bigotry of any kind. We stand with Black Lives Matters on these issues and call upon everyone to demand changes to have all people stand on equal footing. No one deserves to be afraid or persecuted for just being who they are. If you wish to talk to your kids about racism and its damaging effects, this is a good resource.  As is this.Courier's Call features non-binary gendered characters. If you are not familiar with non-binary genders or neutral pronouns, this is a good resource for for talking about those concepts with your kids!A section of Season 1 of Courier's Call deals with the kidnapping of a child. While our story may be fictional fantasy, this issue is one that is very real in our world. Talk to your kids about child abduction, what they and you can do to stay safe and be alert. If you need help and/or resources, please check out more information here. ______________________________________________Join Our Mailing List Interact with us online!Twitter: @couriercall  Instagram: @skyjackscourierscallOfficial Art by Jessica Kuczynski  @AngryArtist113 on Twitter* Sound effects for this episode were pulled from freesound.org under a creative commons zero attribution license

They made a 30 for 30 just for Mike and Adam actually "read" a book, with paper and everything: (11:36) They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33947154-they-can-t-kill-us-until-they-kill-us) (18:41) Once upon A Time in Queens (ESPN) (https://www.espn.com/video/clip/_/id/31816478) (30:16) LuLaRich (Amazon Prime) (https://www.amazon.com/LuLaRich-Season-1/dp/B09CFXPNSX) (37:25) Only Murders in the Building (Hulu) (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLLHnS6pKU4GdGEZjysogqQ) Drinks! Adam - Equilibrium Brewery 400x (https://untappd.com/b/equilibrium-brewery-400x/4452651) Mike - The Princeton Followup and Footnotes Music Break: Duke Deuce – “WTF!” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MNq13MM7oQ) Brooklyn 99 (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2467372/) Shang-Chi (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9376612/) The Courier (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8368512/)

The guys spend much of today's episode discussing the struggles of both Clemson and South Carolina as well as overall impressions of week four. Former South Carolina quarterback Perry Orth and Wes Mitchell of Gamecock Central join the show for Gamecocks perspective and Gene Sapakoff of The Post and Courier adds to the discussion on both fronts as well talking some RiverDogs and Braves

Episode #48 – Uncharted Worlds: The chase is on, and nothing seems to go right for our ‘hero'. Music from https://filmmusic.io “Take a Chance” by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com) License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

South Carolina's path to a bowl game is significantly easier if the Gamecocks move to 3-1 with a win over Kentucky Saturday night. The guys chat with David Cloninger of the Post and Courier about the game, fixing the running game and the offensive line, the recruiting weekend, the baseball team and women's basketball. David Shelton follows with some additional recruiting thoughts on the visitors expected to be at Williams-Brice Stadium and a full high school preview. Scott Glaze joins the show to preview the Ryder Cup, the historically strong Team USA and what to expect from the shores of Lake Michigan. Plus: Dabo vs Doeren storyline for Clemson's game, our Post Up Career week four resume and more

About NipunNipun Agarwal is Vice President, MySQL HeatWave and Advanced Development, Oracle. His interests include distributed data processing, machine learning, cloud technologies and security. Nipun was part of the Oracle Database team where he introduced a number of new features. He has been awarded over 170 patents.Links:HeatWave: https://oracle.com/heatwave TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: You could build you go ahead and build your own coding and mapping notification system, but it takes time, and it sucks! Alternately, consider Courier, who is sponsoring this episode. They make it easy. You can call a single send API for all of your notifications and channels. You can control the complexity around routing, retries, and deliverability and simplify your notification sequences with automation rules. Visit courier.com today and get started for free. If you wind up talking to them, tell them I sent you and watch them wince—because everyone does when you bring up my name. Thats the glorious part of being me. Once again, you could build your own notification system but why on god's flat earth would you do that?Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at VMware. Let's be honest—the past year has been far from easy. Due to, well, everything. It caused us to rush cloud migrations and digital transformation, which of course means long hours refactoring your apps, surprises on your cloud bill, misconfigurations and headache for everyone trying manage disparate and fractured cloud environments. VMware has an answer for this. With VMware multi-cloud solutions, organizations have the choice, speed, and control to migrate and optimizeapplications seamlessly without recoding, take the fastest path to modern infrastructure, and operate consistently across the data center, the edge, and any cloud. I urge to take a look at vmware.com/go/multicloud. You know my opinions on multi cloud by now, but there's a lot of stuff in here that works on any cloud. But don't take it from me thats: VMware.com/go/multicloud and my thanks to them again for sponsoring my ridiculous nonsense.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. Today's promoted episode is slightly off the beaten track. Normally in tech, we tend to find folks that have somewhere between an 18 to 36-month average tenure at companies. And that's great, however, let's do the exact opposite of that today. My guest is Nipun Agarwal, who's the VP of MySQL HeatWave and Advanced Development at Oracle, where you've been an employee for 27 years, is it?Nipun: That's absolutely right. 27 years and that was my first job out of school. So, [laugh] yes.Corey: First, thank you for joining me. It is always great to talk to people who have focused on an area that I only make fun of from a distance, in this case, databases which, you know, DNS works well enough for most use cases, but occasionally customers have other constraints. You are clearly at or damn near at the top of your field. In my pre-show research, I was able to unearth that you have—what is it now, 170, 180 filed patents that have been issued?Nipun: That's right. 180 issued patents. [laugh].Corey: You clearly know what you're doing when it comes to databases.Nipun: Thank you for the opportunity. Yes, thank you.Corey: So, being a VP at Oracle, but starting off as your first job as almost a mailroom to the executive suite style story, we don't see those anymore. In most companies, it very much feels like the path to advance is to change jobs to other companies. It's still interesting seeing that that's not always the path forward, for some folks. I think that the folks who have been in companies for a long time need more examples and role models to look at in that sense, just because it is such an uncommon narrative these days. You're not bouncing around between four companies.Nipun: Yeah. I've been lucky enough to have joined Oracle, and although I had been at Oracle, I've been on multiple teams at Oracle and there has been a great opportunity of talent, colleagues, and projects, where even to this day, I feel that I have a lot more to learn. And there are opportunities within the company to learn and to grow. So no, I've had an awesome ride.Corey: Let's dive in a little bit to something that's been making the rounds recently, specifically you've released something called HeatWave, which has been boasting some, frankly, borderline unbelievable performance benchmarks, and of course, everyone loves to take a crack at Oracle for a variety of reasons, so Twitter is very angry. But I've learned at some point, through the course of my career, to disambiguate Twitter's reactions from what's actually happening out there. So, let's start at the beginning. What is HeatWave?Nipun: HeatWave is an in-memory query accelerator for MySQL. It accelerates complex, long-running, analytic queries. The interesting thing about HeatWave is, with HeatWave we now have a single MySQL database which can run all your applications, whether they're OLTP, whether they're mixed workloads, or whether they're analytics, without having to move the data out of MySQL. Because in the past, people would need to move the data from MySQL to some other database running analytics, so people would end up with two different databases. With this single database, no need for moving the data, and all existing tools and applications which worked with MySQL continue to work, except they will be much faster. That's what HeatWave is.Corey: The benchmarks that you are publishing are fairly interesting to me, specifically, the ones that I've seen are, you've classified HeatWave as six-and-a-half times faster than Amazon Redshift, seven times faster than Snowflake, nine times faster than BigQuery, and a number of other things, and fourteen hundred times faster than Amazon Aurora. And what's interesting to me about the things that you're naming is they're not all data-warehouse style stuff. Aurora, for example, is Amazon's interpretation of an in-house developed managed database service named after a Disney Princess. And it tends to be aimed at things that are not necessarily massive scale. What is the sweet spot, I guess, of HeatWaves data sizes when it comes to really being able to shine?Nipun: So, there are two aspects where our customers are going to benefit from HeatWave. One characteristics is the data size, but the other characteristics is the complexity of the queries. So, let's first do the comparison with Aurora—and that's a very good question—the 1400 times comparison we have shown, yes, if you take the TPC-H queries on a four terabyte workload and if you run them, that's what you're going to see. Now, the interesting thing is this: not only is it 1400 times faster it's also at half the price because for most of these systems, if you throw more gear, if you throw more hardware, the performance would vary. So, it's very important to go with how much of performance and at what price.So, for pure analytics—say, for four terabytes—is 1400 times faster at half the price. So, if it provides truly 800 times better price performance compared to Aurora for pure analytics. Now, let's take the other extreme. 100 gigabytes—which is a much smaller, your bread and butter database—and this is for mixed workloads. So, something like a CH-benCHmark, which has a combination of say, some TPC-C transactions, and then some added IPP-CH queries, which—the CH benCHmark.Here we have 42 times advantage price performance over Aurora because we are 42% of the cost, less than half the cost of Aurora and for the complex queries, we are about 18 times faster, and for pure OLTP, we are at par. So, the aggregate comes out to be about 42 times better. So, the mileage varies depending upon the data size and depending upon the complexity of the queries. So, in the case of Aurora, it will be anywhere from 42 times better price performance all the way to 2800.Corey: Does this have an upper bound, for example? Like, if we take a look at something like Redshift or something like Snowflake, where they're targeting petabyte-scale workloads at some point, that becomes a very different story for a lot of companies out there. Is that something that this can scale to, or is there a general reasonable upper bound of, okay, once you're above X number of terabytes, it's probably good to start looking at tiering data out or looking at a different solution?Nipun: We designed HeatWave primarily for those customers who had to move the data out of MySQL database into some other database for running analytics. The upper bound for the data in the MySQL database is 64 terabytes. Based on the demand and such we are seeing, we support 32 terabytes processing in HeatWave at any given point in time. You can still have 64 terabytes in the MySQL database, but the amount of data you can load into the HeatWave cluster at any given point in time is 32 terabytes.Corey: Which is completely reasonable. I would agree with you from not having much database exposure myself in the traditional sense, but from a cloud economics standpoint alone, anytime you have to move data to a different database for a different workload, you're instantly jacking costs through the roof. Even if it's just the raw data volumes, you now have to store it in two different places instead of one. Plus, in many cases, the vaguearities of data transfer pricing in many places wind up meaning that you're paying money to move things out, there's a replication story, there's a sync factor, and then it just becomes a management overhead problem. If there's a capacity to start using the data where it is in more intelligent ways, that alone has a massive economic wind, just from a time it takes your team to not have to focus on changing infrastructure and just going ahead to run the queries. If you want to start getting into the weeds of all the different ways something like this is an economic win, there's a lot of angles to look at it from.Nipun: That's an excellent point and I'm very glad you brought it up. So, now let's take the other set of benchmarks we were talking about: Snowflake. So, HeatWave is seven times faster and one-fifth the cost; it's about 35 times better price performance. Compared to let's say Redshift AQUA, six-and-a-half times faster at half the cost, so 13 times better price performance. And it goes on and on.Now, these numbers I was quoting is for 10 terabytes TPC-H queries. And the point which you said is very, very valid. When we are talking about the cost for these other systems, it's only the cost for analytics without including the cost of the source database or without including the cost of moving the data or managing to different databases. Whereas when you're talking about the cost of HeatWave, this is the cost which includes the cost of both transaction processing as well as the analytics. So, it's a single database; all the cost is included, whereas, for these other vendors, it's only the cost of the analytic database. So, the actual cost to a user is probably going to be much higher with these other databases. So, the price performance advantage with HeatWave will perhaps be even higher.Corey: Tell me a little bit about how it works. I mean, it's easy to sit here and say, “Oh, it's way faster and it's better in a bunch of benchmark stuff,” and we will get into that in a little bit, but it's described primarily as an in-memory query accelerator. Naively, I think, “Oh, it's just faster because instead of having data that lives on disk, it winds up having some of it live in RAM. Well, that seems simple and straightforward.” Like, oh, yeah, I'm going to go on a limb and assume that there aren't 160 patents tied to the idea that RAM is faster than disk. There's clearly a lot more going on. How does this work? What is it foundationally?Nipun: So, the thing to realize is HeatWave has been built from the ground up for the cloud and it is optimized for the Oracle Cloud. So, let's take these things one at a time. When I say designed from the ground up for the cloud, we have actually invented and implemented new algorithms for distributed query processing, which is what gives us such a good advantage in terms of operations like joint processing, window functions, aggregations. So, we have come up—invented, implemented new algorithms for distributed query processing. Secondly, we have designed it for the cloud.And by that what I mean is, A, we have a lot of emphasis on scalability, that it scales to thousands of cores with a very, very good scale factor, which is very important for the cloud. The next angle about the cloud is that not only have we optimized it for the cloud, but we have gone with commodity cloud services, meaning, for instance, when you're looking at the storage, we are looking at the least expensive price. So, for instance, we use object store; you don't use, for instance, locally attached SSDs because that will be expensive. Similarly, for compute: instead of using Intel, we use AMD chips because they are less expensive. Similarly, networking: standard networking.And all of this has been optimized for the specific Oracle Cloud infrastructure shapes we have, for the specific VMs we use, for the specific networking bandwidth we get, for the object store bandwidth and such; so that's the third piece, optimized for OCI. And the last bit is pervasive use of machine learning in the service. So, a combination of these four things: designed for the cloud, using commodity cloud services, optimized for the quality cloud infrastructure, and finally the pervasive use of machine learning is what gives us very good performance, very good scale, at a very inexpensive price.Corey: I want to dig into the idea of the pervasive use of machine learning. In many cases, machine learning is the answer to how do I wind up bilking a bunch of VCs out of money? And Oracle is not a venture-backed company at this stage of its existence, it is a very large, publicly-traded entity; you have no need to do that. And I would also further accept that this is one of those bounded problem spaces where something that looks machine-learning-like could do very well. Is that based upon what it observes and learns from data access patterns? Is it something that it learns based from a specific workload in question? What is the gathering, and is it specific to individual workloads that a given customer has, or is it holistically across all of the database workloads that you see in Oracle Cloud?Nipun: So, there are multiple parts to this question. The first thing is—and I think as you're noting—that with the cloud, we have a lot more opportunity for automation because we know exactly what is the hardware stack, we know the software stack, we know the configuration parameters.Corey: Oh yes, hell is other people's data centers, for sure.Nipun: [laugh]. And the approach we have taken for automation is machine-learning-based automation because one of the big advantages is that we can have a model which is tailored to a specific instance and as you run more queries, as you run more workloads, the system gets more intelligent. And we can talk about that maybe later about, like, specific things which make it very, very compelling. The third thing, I think, which you were alluding to, is that there are two aspects in machine learning: data, and the models or the algorithms. So, the first thing is, we have made a lot of enhancements, both to the MySQL engine as well as HeatWave, to collect new kinds of data.And by new kinds of data, I mean, that not only do we collect statistics of data, but we collect statistics of, say, the queries: what was the compilation time? What was the execution time? And then, based on this data which we're collecting, we have then come up with very advanced algorithms—machine learning algorithms—which are, again, a lot of them, there is, like, you know, patterns or [IP 00:14:13] which we have built on top of the existing state of art. So, for instance, taking these statistics and extrapolating them on larger data sizes. That's completely an innovation which we did in-house.How do we sample a very small percentage of the data and still be accurate? And finally, how do we come up with these machine learning models which are accurate without hiring an army of engineers? That's because we invented our AutoML, which is very efficient. So, that's basically the ecosystem of the machine learning which we have, which has been used to provide this.Corey: It's easy for folks to sit there and have a bunch of problems with Oracle for a variety of reasons, some of which are no longer germane, some of which are, I'm not here to judge. But I think it's undeniable—though it sometimes gets eclipsed by people's knee-jerk reactions—the reason that Oracle is in so many companies that it is in is because it works. You folks have been pioneers in the database space for a very long time and that's undeniable. If it didn't deliver performance that was untouchable for a long time, it would not have gotten to the point where you now are, where it is the database of record for an awful lot of shops. And I know it's somehow trendy, sometimes, for the startup set to think, “Oh, big companies are slow and awful. All innovation comes out of small, scrappy startups here.”But your customers are not fools. They made intelligent decisions based upon constraints that they're working within and problems that they need to solve. And you still have an awful lot of customers that are not getting off of Oracle anytime soon because it works. It's one of those things that I think is nuanced and often missed. But I do feel the need to ask about the lock-in story. Today, HeatWave is available only on the managed MySQL service in Oracle Cloud, correct?Nipun: Correct.Corey: Is there any licensing story tied to that? In other words, “Well, if I'm going to be using this, I need to wind up making a multi-year commitment. I need to get certain support things, as well,” the traditional on-premises Oracle story. Or is this an actual cloud service, in that you pay for what you use while you use it, and when you turn it off, you're done? In theory. In practice, we know in cloud economics, no one ever turns anything off until the company goes out of business.Nipun: So, it's exactly the letter what you said that this is a managed service. It's pay as you go, you pay only for what you consume, and if you decide to move on, there's absolutely no license or anything that is holding you back. The second thing—and I'm glad you brought it up—about the vendor lock-in. One of the very important things to realize about HeatWave is, A, it's just an accelerator for MySQL, but in the process of doing so, we have not introduced any proprietary syntax. So, if customers have the MySQL application running on some other cloud, they can very easily migrate to OCI and try MySQL HeatWave.But for whatever reason, if they don't like it, and they want to move out, there is absolutely nothing which is holding them back. So, the ease of which they can come in with the same ease they can walk out because we don't have any vendor lock-in. There is absolutely no proprietary extensions to HeatWave.Corey: There is the counter-argument as far as lock-in goes, and we see this sometimes with companies we talk to that were considering Google Cloud Spanner, as an example. It's great, and you can use it in a whole bunch of different places and effectively get ACID-compliance-like behavior across multiple regions, and you don't have to change any of the syntax of what it is you're using except the lock-in there is one of a strategic or software architecture lock-in because there's nothing else quite like that in the universe, which means that if you're going to migrate off of the single cloud where that's involved, you have to re-architect a lot, and that leads to a story of lock-in. I'm curious as to whether you're finding that customers are considering that as far as the performance that you're giving for MySQL querying is apparently unparalleled in the rest of the industry; that leads to a sort of lock-in itself when people get used to that kind of responsiveness and build applications that expect that kind of tolerances. At some point, if there's nothing else in the industry like it, does that means that they find themselves de-facto locked in?Nipun: If you were to talk about some functionality which we are offering which no one else is offering, perhaps you could, kind of, make that case. But that's not the case for performance because when we are so much faster—so suppose I said, okay, we are so much faster; we are six-and-a-half times faster than Redshift at half the cost. Well, if someone wanted the same performance, they can absolutely do it Redshift on a much larger cluster, and pay a lot more. So, if they want the best performance at the best price, they can come to Oracle Cloud; if they want the same performance but they will have to pay more, they can go anywhere else. So, I don't think that's a vendor lock-in at all.That's a value which we are bringing in that for the same performance, we are much cheaper. Or you can have that kind of a balance that we are faster and cheaper. So, there is no lock-in. So, it's not to say that, okay, we have made some extensions to MySQL which are only available in our cloud. That is not at all the case.Now, for some other vendors and for some other applications—you brought up Spanner; that's one. But we have had multiple customers of MySQL who, when they were trying Google BigQuery, they mentioned this aspect that, okay, Google BigQuery had these proprietary extensions and they feel locked in. That is not the case at all with HeatWave.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: I do want to call out, just because it seems like there's a lies, damned lies, and database benchmarks story here where, for example, Azure for a while was doing a campaign where they were five times less expensive for database workloads than AWS until you scratched beneath the surface and realize it's because they're playing ridiculous games with licensing, making it very expensive to run a Microsoft SQL Server on anything that wasn't Azure. Customers are not necessarily as credulous as they once were when it comes to benchmarking. And Oracle for a long time hasn't really done benchmarking, and in fact, has actively discouraged it. For HeatWave, you've not only published benchmarks, which okay, vendors can say anything they want, and I'm going to wait until I see independent returns, but you put not just the benchmarks, but data sets, and your entire methodology onto GitHub as well. What led to that change? That seems like the least Oracle-like thing I could possibly imagine.Nipun: I couldn't take credit for the idea. The idea actually was from our Chief Marketing Officer, that was really his idea. But here is the reason why it makes a lot more sense for us to do it for MySQL HeatWave. MySQL is pervasive; pretty much any cloud vendor you can think about has a MySQL-based managed service. And obviously, MySQL runs on premise, like a lot of customers and applications do it.Corey: That's one of the baseline building blocks of any environment. I don't even need to be in the cloud; I can get MySQL working somewhere. Everyone has it, and if not, why don't you? And I can build it in a VM myself in 20 minutes.Nipun: That's right.Corey: It is a de-facto standard.Nipun: That's right. So, given that is the case and many other cloud vendors are innovating on top of it—which is great—how do you compare the innovation or the value proposition of Cloud Vendor A with us? So, for that, what we felt was that it is very important and very fair that we publish our scripts so that people can run those same scripts with a HeatWave, as well as with other cloud offerings, and make a determination for themselves. So, given the popularity of MySQL and given that pretty much all cloud vendors provide an offering of MySQL, and many of them have enhanced it, in order for customers to have an apples-to-apples comparison, it is imperative that we do this.Corey: I haven't run benchmarks myself just yet, just because it turns out, there's a lot of demands on my time and also, as mentioned, I'm not a deep database expert, unless it comes to DNS. And we keep waiting for people to come back with, “Aha. Here's why you're completely comprised of liars.” And I haven't heard any of that. I've heard edges and things here about, “Well, if you add an index over here, it might speed things up a bit,” but nothing that leads me to believe that it is just a marketing story.It is a great marketing story, but things like this fall apart super quickly in the event that it doesn't stand up to engineering scrutiny. And it's been out long enough that I would have fully expected to have heard about it. Lord knows if anyone is listening and has thoughts on this, I will be getting some letters after this episode, I expect. But I've come to expect those; please feel free to reach out. I'm always thrilled to do follow-up episodes and address things like this.When does it make sense from your perspective for someone to choose HeatWave on top of the Oracle Cloud MySQL service instead of using some of the other things we've talked about: Aurora, Redshift, Snowflake, et cetera? When does that become something that a customer should actively consider? Is it for net-new workloads? Should they consider it for migration stories? Should they run their database workloads in Oracle Cloud and keep other stuff elsewhere? What is the adoption path that you see that tends to lead to success?Nipun: All customers of MySQL, or all customers of any open-source database, those would be absolutely people who should consider MySQL HeatWave. For the very simple reason: first, regardless of the workload, whether it is OLTP only, or mixed workloads, or analytics, the cost is going to be significantly lower. I'll say at least it's going to be half the cost. In most of the cases, it's probably going to be less than half the cost. So, right off the bat, customers save half the cost by moving to MySQL HeatWave.And then depending upon the workload you have, as you have more complex queries, the performance advantage starts increasing. So, if you were just running only OLTP, if you only had transactions and you didn't have any complex queries—which is very unlikely for real-world applications, but even if that was the case, you're going to save 60% by going to MySQL HeatWave. But as you have more complex queries you will start finding that the net advantage you're going to get with performance is going to keep increasing and will go anywhere from 10 times aggregate to as much as 1400 times. So, all open-source, MySQL-based applications, they should consider moving. Then you mentioned about Snowflake, Redshift, and such; for all of them, it depends on what the source database is and what is it that they're trying to do.If they are moving data from, say, some open-source databases, if they are ETL-ing from MySQL, not only will MySQL HeatWave be much faster and much cheaper, but there's going to be a tremendous value proposition to the application because they don't need to have two different applications for two different databases. They can come back to MySQL, they can have a single database on which they can run all their applications. And then again, you have many of these cloud-native applications are born in the cloud where people may be looking for a simple database which does the job, and this is a great story—both in terms of cost as well as in terms of performance—and it's a single database for all your applications, significantly reduces the complexity for users.Corey: To turn the question around a little bit, what sort of workloads is MySQL HeatWave not a fit for? What sort of workloads are going to lead to a poor customer experience? Where, yeah, this is not a fit for that workload?Nipun: None, except in terms of the data size. So, if you have data sizes which are more than 64 terabytes, then yes, MySQL HeatWave is not a good fit. But if your data size is under 64 terabytes, you're going to win in all the cases by moving to MySQL HeatWave, given the functionality and capabilities of MySQL.Corey: I'd also like to point out that recently, HeatWave gained the MySQL Autopilot capability, which I believe is a lot of the machine learning technologies that you were speaking about a few minutes ago. Are there plans to continue to expand what HeatWave does and offer additional functionality? And—if you can talk about any of that. I know that roadmap is always something that is difficult to ask about, but it's clear that you're investing in this. Is your area of investment looking more like it's adding additional features? Is it continuing to improve existing performance? Something else entirely? And of course, we also accept you can't tell me any of [laugh] that has a valid answer.Nipun: Well, we just got started, so we just had our first [GF 00:27:03] HeatWave in December, and you saw that earlier this week we had our second major release of HeatWave. We are just getting started, so absolutely we are investing a lot in this area. But we are pretty much going to attempt all the things that you said. We have feedback from existing customers which is very high up on the priority list. And some of these are just one, say, class of enhancements which [unintelligible 00:27:25], can HeatWave handle larger sizes of data? Absolutely, we have done that; we will continue doing that.Second is, can HeatWave accelerate more constructs or more queries? Absolutely, we will do that. And then you have other kinds of capabilities which customers are asking which you can think of are, like you know, bigger features, which for instance, we announced the support for scale-out data storage which improves recovery time. Well, you're going to improve the recovery time or you're going to improve the time it takes to restart the database. And when I say improve, we are talking about not an improvement of 2X or 3X, but it's 100 times improvement for, let's say, a 10 terabyte data size.And then we have a very good roadmap which, I mean, it's a little far out that I can't say too much about it, but we will be adding a lot of very good new capabilities which will differentiate HeatWave even more, compared to the competitive services.Corey: You have very clearly forgotten more about databases than most of us are ever going to know. As you've been talking to folks about HeatWave, what do you find is the most common misunderstanding that folks like me tend to come away with when we're discussing the technology? What is it that is, I guess, a nuance that is often being missed in the industry's perspective as they evaluate the new technology?Nipun: One aspect is that many times, people just think about a service to be here some open-source code or some on-premise code which is being hosted as a managed service. Sure, there's a lot of value to having a managed service, don't get me wrong, but when you have innovations, particularly when you have spent years in years or decades of innovation for something which is optimized for the cloud, you have an architectural advantage which is going to pay dividends to customers for years and years to come. So, there is no substitute for that; if you have designed something for the cloud, it is going to do much better whether it's in terms of performance, whether it's in terms of scalability, whether it's in terms of cost. So, that's what people have to realize that it takes time, it takes investment, but when we start getting the payoff, it's going to be fairly big. And people have to think that okay, how many technologies or services are out there which have made this kind of investment?So, what I'm really excited about is, MySQL is the most popular database amongst developers in the world; we spend a lot of time, a lot of person-years investing over the last, you know, decade, and now we are starting to see the dividends. And from what we have seen so far, the response has been terrific. I mean, it's been really, really good response, and we are very excited about it.Corey: I want to thank you for taking so much time to speak with me today. If people want to learn more, where can they go?Nipun: Thank you very much for the opportunity. If they would like to know more, they can go to oracle.com/heatwavewhere we have a lot of details, including a technical brief, including all the details of the performance numbers we talked about, including a link to the GitHub where they can download the scripts. And we encourage them to download the scripts, see that they're able to reproduce the results we said, and then try their workloads. And they can find information as to how they can get free credits to try the service for free on their own and make up their mind themselves.Corey: [laugh]. Kicking the tires on something is a good way to form an opinion about it, very often. Thank you so much for being so generous with your time. I appreciate it.Nipun: Thank you.Corey: Nipun Agarwal, Vice President of MySQL HeatWave and Advanced Development at Oracle. 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 insulting comment formatted as a valid SQL query.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.

About KarthikKarthik was one of the original database engineers at Facebook responsible for building distributed databases including Cassandra and HBase. He is an Apache HBase committer, and also an early contributor to Cassandra, before it was open-sourced by Facebook. He is currently the co-founder and CTO of the company behind YugabyteDB, a fully open-source distributed SQL database for building cloud-native and geo-distributed applications.Links: Yugabyte community Slack channel: https://yugabyte-db.slack.com/ Distributed SQL Summit: https://distributedsql.org Twitter: https://twitter.com/YugaByte TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: You could build you go ahead and build your own coding and mapping notification system, but it takes time, and it sucks! Alternately, consider Courier, who is sponsoring this episode. They make it easy. You can call a single send API for all of your notifications and channels. You can control the complexity around routing, retries, and deliverability and simplify your notification sequences with automation rules. Visit courier.com today and get started for free. If you wind up talking to them, tell them I sent you and watch them wince—because everyone does when you bring up my name. Thats the glorious part of being me. Once again, you could build your own notification system but why on god's flat earth would you do that?Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by “you”—gabyte. Distributed technologies like Kubernetes are great, citation very much needed, because they make it easier to have resilient, scalable, systems. SQL databases haven't kept pace though, certainly not like no SQL databases have like Route 53, the world's greatest database. We're still, other than that, using legacy monolithic databases that require ever growing instances of compute. Sometimes we'll try and bolt them together to make them more resilient and scalable, but let's be honest it never works out well. Consider Yugabyte DB, its a distributed SQL database that solves basically all of this. It is 100% open source, and there's not asterisk next to the “open” on that one. And its designed to be resilient and scalable out of the box so you don't have to charge yourself to death. It's compatible with PostgreSQL, or “postgresqueal” as I insist on pronouncing it, so you can use it right away without having to learn a new language and refactor everything. And you can distribute it wherever your applications take you, from across availability zones to other regions or even other cloud providers should one of those happen to exist. Go to yugabyte.com, thats Y-U-G-A-B-Y-T-E dot com and try their free beta of Yugabyte Cloud, where they host and manage it for you. Or see what the open source project looks like—its effortless distributed SQL for global apps. My thanks to Yu—gabyte for sponsoring this episode.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. Today's promoted episode comes from the place where a lot of my episodes do: I loudly and stridently insist that Route 53—or DNS in general—is the world's greatest database, and then what happens is a whole bunch of people who work at database companies get upset with what I've said. Now, please don't misunderstand me; they're wrong, but I'm thrilled to have them come on and demonstrate that, which is what's happening today. My guest is CTO and co-founder of Yugabyte. Karthik Ranganathan, thank you so much for spending the time to speak with me today. How are you?Karthik: I'm doing great. Thanks for having me, Corey. We'll just go for YugabyteDB being the second-best database. Let's just keep the first [crosstalk 00:01:13]—Corey: Okay. We're all fighting for number two, there. And besides, number two tries harder. It's like that whole branding thing from years past. So, you were one of the original database engineers at Facebook, responsible for building a bunch of nonsense, like Cassandra and HBase. You were an HBase committer, early contributor to Cassandra, even before it was open-sourced.And then you look around and said, “All right, I'm going to go start a company”—roughly around 2016, if memory serves—“And I'm going to go and build a database and bring it to the world.” Let's start at the beginning. Why on God's flat earth do we need another database?Karthik: Yeah, that's the question. That's the million-dollar question isn't it, Corey? So, this is one, fortunately, that we've had to answer so many times from 2016, that I guess we've gotten a little good at it. So, here's the learning that a lot of us had from Facebook: we were the original team, like, all three of us founders, we met at Facebook, and we not only build databases, we also ran them. And let me paint a picture.Back in 2007, the public cloud really wasn't very common, and people were just going into multi-region, multi-datacenter deployments, and Facebook was just starting to take off, to really scale. Now, forward to 2013—I was there through the entire journey—a number of things happened in Facebook: we saw the rise of the equivalent of Kubernetes which was internally built; we saw, for example, microservice—Corey: Yeah, the Tupperware equivalent, there.Karthik: Tupperware, exactly. You know the name. Yeah, exactly. And we saw how we went from two data centers to multiple data centers, and nearby and faraway data centers—zones and regions, what do you know as today—and a number of such technologies come up. And I was on the database side, and we saw how existing databases wouldn't work to distribute data across nodes, failover, et cetera, et cetera.So, we had to build a new class of databases, what we now know is NoSQL. Now, back in Facebook, I mean, the typical difference between Facebook and an enterprise at large is Facebook has a few really massive applications. For example, you do a set of interactions, you view profiles, you add friends, you talk with them, et cetera, right? These are supermassive in their usage, but they were very few in their access patterns. At Facebook, we were mostly interested in dealing with scale and availability.Existing databases couldn't do it, so we built NoSQL. Now, forward a number of years, I can't tell you how many times I've had conversations with other people building applications that will say, “Hey, can I get a secondary index on the SQL database?” Or, “How about that transaction? I only need it a couple of times; I don't need it all the time, but could you, for example, do multi-row transactions?” And the answer was always, “Not,” because it was never built for that.So today, what we're seeing is that transactional data and transactional applications are all going cloud-native, and they all need to deal with scale and availability. And so the existing databases don't quite cut it. So, the simple answer to why we need it is we need a relational database that can run in the cloud to satisfy just three properties: it needs to be highly available, failures or no, upgrades or no, it needs to be available; it needs to scale on demand, so simply add or remove nodes and scale up or down; and it needs to be able to replicate data across zones, across regions, and a variety of different topologies. So availability, scale, and geographic distribution, along with retaining most of the RDBMS features, the SQL features. That's really what the gap we're trying to solve.Corey: I don't know that I've ever told this story on the podcast, but I want to say it was back in 2009. I flew up to Palo Alto and interviewed at Facebook, and it was a different time, a different era; it turns out that I'm not as good on the whiteboard as I am at running my mouth, so all right, I did not receive an offer, but I think everyone can agree at this point that was for the best. But I saw one of the most impressive things I've ever seen, during a part of that interview process. My interview is scheduled for a conference room for must have been 11 o'clock or something like that, and at 10:59, they're looking at their watch, like, “Hang on ten seconds.” And then the person I was with reached out to knock on the door to let the person know that their meeting was over and the door opened.So, it's very clear that even in large companies, which Facebook very much was at the time, people had synchronized clocks. This seems to be a thing, as I've learned from reading the parts that I could understand of the Google Spanner paper: when you're doing distributed databases, clocks are super important. At places like Facebook, that is, I'm not going to say it's easy, let's be clear here. Nothing is easy, particularly at scale, but Facebook has advantages in that they can mandate how clocks are going to be handled throughout every piece of their infrastructure. You're building an open-source database and you can't guarantee in what environment and on what hardware that's going to run, and, “You must have an atomic clock hooked up,” is not something you're generally allowed to tell people. How do you get around that?Karthik: That's a great question. Very insightful, cutting right to the chase. So, the reality is, we cannot rely on atomic clocks, we cannot mandate our users to use them, or, you know, we'd not be very popularly used in a variety of different deployments. In fact, we also work in on-prem private clouds and hybrid deployments where you really cannot get these atomic clocks. So, the way we do this is we come up with other algorithms to make sure that we're able to get the clocks as synchronized as we can.So, think about at a higher level; the reason Google uses atomic clocks is to make sure that they can wait to make sure every other machine is synchronized with them, and the wait time is about seven milliseconds. So, the atomic clock service, or the true time service, says no two machines are farther apart than about seven milliseconds. So, you just wait for seven milliseconds, you know everybody else has caught up with you. And the reason you need this is you don't want to write on a machine, you don't want to write some data, and then go to a machine that has a future or an older time and get inconsistent results. So, just by waiting seven milliseconds, they can ensure that no one is going to be older and therefore serve an older version of the data, so every write that was written on the other machine see it.Now, the way we do this is we only have NTP, the Network Time Protocol, which does synchronization of time across machines, except it takes 150 to 200 milliseconds. Now, we wouldn't be a very good database, if we said, “Look, every operation is going to take 150 milliseconds.” So, within these 150 milliseconds, we actually do the synchronization in software. So, we replaced the notion of an atomic clock with what is called a hybrid logical clock. So, one part using NTP and physical time, and another part using counters and logical time and keep exchanging RPCs—which are needed in the course of the database functioning anyway—to make sure we start normalizing time very quickly.This in fact has some advantages—and disadvantages, everything was a trade-offs—but the advantage it has over a true time-style deployment is you don't even have to wait that seven milliseconds in a number of scenarios, you can just instantly respond. So, that means you get even lower latencies in some cases. Of course, the trade-off is there are other cases where you have to do more work, and therefore more latency.Corey: The idea absolutely makes sense. You started this as an open-source project, and it's thriving. Who's using it and for what purposes?Karthik: Okay, so one of the fundamental tenets of building this database—I think back to your question of why does the world need another database—is that the hypothesis is not so much the world needs another database API; that's really what users complain against, right? You create a new API and—even if it's SQL—and you tell people, “Look. Here's a new database. It does everything for you,” it'll take them two years to figure out what the hell it does, and build an app, and then put it in production, and then they'll build a second and a third, and then by the time they hit the tenth app, they find out, “Okay, this database cannot do the following things.” But you're five years in; you're stuck, you can only add another database.That's really the story of how NoSQL evolved. And it wasn't built as a general-purpose database, right? So, in the meanwhile, databases like Postgres, for example, have been around for so long that they absorb and have such a large ecosystem, and usage, and people who know how to use Postgres and so on. So, we made the decision that we're going to keep the database API compatible with known things, so people really know how to use them from the get-go and enhance it at a lower level to make a cloud-native. So, what is YugabyteDB do for people?It is the same as Postgres and Postgres features of the upper half—it reuses the code—but it is built on the lower half to be [shared nothing 00:09:10], scalable, resilient, and geographically distributed. So, we're using the public cloud managed database context, the upper half is built like Amazon Aurora, the lower half is built like Google Spanner. Now, when you think about workloads that can benefit from this, we're a transactional database that can serve user-facing applications and real-time applications that have lower latency. So, the best way to think about it is, people that are building transactional applications on top of, say, a database like Postgres, but the application itself is cloud-native. You'd have to do a lot of work to make this Postgres piece be highly available, and scalable, and replicate data, and so on in the cloud.Well, with YugabyteDB, we've done all that work for you and it's as open-source as Postgres, so if you're building a cloud-native app on Postgres that's user-facing or transactional, YugabyteDB takes care of making the database layer behave like Postgres but become cloud-native.Corey: Do you find that your users are using the same database instance, for lack of a better term? I know that instance is sort of a nebulous term; we're talking about something that's distributed. But are they having database instances that span multiple cloud providers, or is that something that is more talk than you're actually seeing in the wild?Karthik: So, I'd probably replace the word ‘instance' with ‘cluster', just for clarity, right?Corey: Excellent. Okay.Karthik: So, a cluster has a bunch—Corey: I concede the point, absolutely.Karthik: Okay. [laugh]. Okay. So, we'll still keep Route 53 on top, though, so it's good. [laugh].Corey: At that point, the replication strategy is called a zone transfer, but that's neither here nor there. Please, by all means, continue.Karthik: [laugh]. Okay. So, a cluster database like YugabyteDB has a number of instances. Now, I think the question is, is it theoretical or real? What we're seeing is, it is real, and it is real perhaps in slightly different ways than people imagine it to be.So, I'll explain what I mean by that. Now, there's one notion of being multi-cloud where you can imagine there's like, say, the same cluster that spans multiple different clouds, and you have your data being written in one cloud and being read from another. This is not a common pattern, although we have had one or two deployments that are attempting to do this. Now, a second deployment shifted once over from there is where you have your multiple instances in a single public cloud, and a bunch of other instances in a private cloud. So, it stretches the database across public and private—you would call this a hybrid deployment topology—that is more common.So, one of the unique things about YugabyteDB is we support asynchronous replication of data, just like your RDBMSs do, the traditional RDBMSs. In fact, we're the only one that straddles both synchronous replication of data as well as asynchronous replication of data. We do both. So, once shifted over would be a cluster that's deployed in one of the clouds but an asynchronous replica of the data going to another cloud, and so you can keep your reads and writes—even though they're a little stale, you can serve it from a different cloud. And then once again, you can make it an on-prem private cloud, and another public cloud.And we see all of those deployments, those are massively common. And then the last one over would be the same instance of an app, or perhaps even different applications, some of them running on one public cloud and some of them running on a different public cloud, and you want the same database underneath to have characteristics of scale and failover. Like for example, if you built an app on Spanner, what would you do if you went to Amazon and wanted to run it for a different set of users?Corey: That is part of the reason I tend to avoid the idea of picking a database that does not have at least theoretical exit path because reimagining your entire application's data model in order to migrate is not going to happen, so—Karthik: Exactly.Corey: —come hell or high water, you're stuck with something like that where it lives. So, even though I'm a big proponent as a best practice—and again, there are exceptions where this does not make sense, but as a general piece of guidance—I always suggest, pick a provider—I don't care which one—and go all-in. But that also should be shaded with the nuance of, but also, at least have an eye toward theoretically, if you had to leave, consider that if there's a viable alternative. And in some cases in the early days of Spanner, there really wasn't. So, if you needed that functionality, okay, go ahead and use it, but understand the trade-off you're making.Now, this really comes down to, from my perspective, understand the trade-offs. But the reason I'm interested in your perspective on this is because you are providing an open-source database to people who are actually doing things in the wild. There's not much agenda there, in the same way, among a user community of people reporting what they're doing. So, you have in many ways, one of the least biased perspectives on the entire enterprise.Karthik: Oh, yeah, absolutely. And like I said, I started from the least common to the most common; maybe I should have gone the other way. But we absolutely see people that want to run the same application stack in multiple different clouds for a variety of reasons.Corey: Oh, if you're a SaaS vendor, for example, it's, “Oh, we're only in this one cloud,” potential customers who in other clouds say, “Well, if that changes, we'll give you money.” “Oh, money. Did you say ‘other cloud?' I thought you said something completely different. Here you go.” Yeah, you've got to at some point. But the core of what you do, beyond what it takes to get that application present somewhere else, you usually keep in your primary cloud provider.Karthik: Exactly. Yep, exactly. Crazy things sometimes dictate or have to dictate architectural decisions. For example, you're seeing the rise of compliance. Different countries have different regulatory reasons to say, “Keep my data local,” or, “Keep some subset of data are local.”And you simply may not find the right cloud providers present in those countries; you may be a PaaS or an API provider that's helping other people build applications, and the applications that the API provider's customers are running could be across different clouds. And so they would want the data local, otherwise, the transfer costs would be really high. So, a number of reasons dictate—or like a large company may acquire another company that was operating in yet another cloud; everything else is great, but they're in another cloud; they're not going to say, “No because you're operating on another cloud.” It still does what they want, but they still need to be able to have a common base of expertise for their app builders, and so on. So, a number of things dictate why people started looking at cross-cloud databases with common performance and operational characteristics and security characteristics, but don't compromise on the feature set, right?That's starting to become super important, from our perspective. I think what's most important is the ability to run the database with ease while not compromising on your developer agility or the ability to build your application. That's the most important thing.Corey: When you founded the company back in 2016, you are VC-backed, so I imagine your investor pitch meetings must have been something a little bit surreal. They ask hard questions such as, “Why do you think that in 2016, starting a company to go and sell databases to people is a viable business model?” At which point you obviously corrected them and said, “Oh, you misunderstand. We're building an open-source database. We're not charging for it; we're giving it away.”And they apparently said, “Oh, that's more like it.” And then invested, as of the time of this recording, over $100 million in your company. Let me to be the first to say there are aspects of money that I don't fully understand and this is one of those. But what is the plan here? How do you wind up building a business case around effectively giving something away for free?And I want to be clear here, Yugabyte is open-source, and I don't have an asterisk next to that. It is not one of those ‘source available' licenses, or ‘anyone can do anything they want with it except Amazon' or ‘you're not allowed to host it and offer it as a paid service to other people.' So, how do you have a business, I guess is really my question here?Karthik: You're right, Corey. We're 100% open-source under Apache 2.0—I mean the database. So, our theory on day one—I mean, of course, this was a hard question and people did ask us this, and then I'll take you guys back to 2016. It was unclear, even as of 2016, if open-source companies were going to succeed. It was just unclear.And people were like, “Hey, look at Snowflake; it's a completely managed service. They're not open-source; they're doing a great job. Do you really need open-source to succeed?” There were a lot of such questions. And every company, every project, every space has to follow its own path, just applying learnings.Like for example, Red Hat was open-source and that really succeeded, but there's a number of others that may or may not have succeeded. So, our plan back then was to tread the waters carefully in the sense we really had to make sure open-source was the business model we wanted to go for. So, under the advisement from our VCs, we said we'd take it slowly; we want to open-source on day one. We've talked to a number of our users and customers and make sure that is indeed the path we've wanted to go. The conversations pretty clearly told us people wanted an open database that was very easy for them to understand because if they are trusting their crown jewels, their most critical data, their systems of record—this is what the business depends on—into a database, they sure as hell want to have some control over it and some transparency as to what goes on, what's planned, what's on the roadmap. “Look, if you don't have time, I will hire my people to go build for it.” They want it to be able to invest in the database.So, open-source was absolutely non-negotiable for us. We tried the traditional technique for a couple of years of keeping a small portion of the features of the database itself closed, so it's what you'd call ‘open core.' But on day one, we were pretty clear that the world was headed towards DBaaS—Database as a Service—and make it really easy to consume.Corey: At least the bad patterns as well, like, “Oh, if you want security, that's a paid feature.”Karthik: Exactly.Corey: No. That is not optional. And the list then of what you can wind up adding as paid versus not gets murky, and you're effectively fighting your community when they try and merge some of those features in and it just turns into a mess.Karthik: Exactly. So, it did for us for a couple of years, and then we said, “Look, we're not doing this nonsense. We're just going to make everything open and just make it simple.” Because our promise to the users was, we're building everything that looks like Postgres, so it's as valuable as Postgres, and it'll work in the cloud. And people said, “Look, Postgres is completely open and you guys are keeping a few features not open. What gives?”And so after that, we had to concede the point and just do that. But one of the other founding pieces of a company, the business side, was that DBaaS and ability to consume the database is actually far more critical than whether the database itself is open-source or not. I would compare this to, for example, MySQL and Postgres being completely open-source, but you know, Amazon's Aurora being actually a big business, and similarly, it happens all over the place. So, it is really the ability to consume and run business-critical workloads that seem to be more important for our customers and enterprises that paid us. So, the day-one thesis was, look, the world is headed towards DBaaS.We saw that already happen with inside Facebook; everybody was automated operations, simplified operations, and so on. But the reality is, we're a startup, we're a new database, no one's going to trust everything to us: the database, the operations, the data, “Hey, why don't we put it on this tiny company. And oh, it's just my most business-critical data, so what could go wrong?” So, we said we're going to build a version of our DBaaS that is in software. So, we call this Yugabyte Platform, and it actually understands public clouds: it can spin up machines, it can completely orchestrate software installs, rolling upgrades, turnkey encryption, alerting, the whole nine yards.That's a completely different offering from the database. It's not the database, it's just on top of the database and helps you run your own private cloud. So, effectively if you install it on your Amazon account or your Google account, it will convert it into what looks like a DynamoDB, or a Spanner, or what have you with you, with Yugabyte as DB as the database inside. So, that is our commercial product; that's source available and that's what we charge for. The database itself, completely open.Again, the other piece of the thinking is, if we ever charge too much, our customers have the option to say, “Look, I don't want your DBaaS thing; I'm going to the open-source database and we're fine with that.” So, we really want to charge for value. And obviously, we have a completely managed version of our database as well. So, we reuse this platform for our managed version, so you can kind of think of it as portability, not just of the database but also of the control plane, the DBaaS plane.They can run it themselves, we can run it for them, they could take it to a different cloud, so on and so forth.Corey: I like that monetization model a lot better than a couple of others. I mean, let's be clear here, you've spent a lot of time developing some of these concepts for the industry when you were at Facebook. And because at Facebook, the other monetization models are kind of terrifying, like, “Okay. We're going to just monetize the data you store in the open-source database,” is terrifying. Only slightly less would be the Google approach of, “Ah, every time you wind up running a SQL query, we're going to insert ads.”So, I like the model of being able to offer features that only folks who already have expensive problems with money to burn on those problems to solve them will gravitate towards. You're not disadvantaging the community or the small startup who wants it but can't afford it. I like that model.Karthik: Actually, the funny thing is, we are seeing a lot of startups also consume our product a lot. And the reason is because we only charge for the value we bring. Typically the problems that a startup faces are actually much simpler than the complex requirements of an enterprise at scale. They are different. So, the value is also proportional to what they want and how much they want to consume, and that takes care of itself.So, for us, we see that startups, equally so as enterprises, have only limited amount of bandwidth. They don't really want to spend time on operationalizing the database, especially if they have an out to say, “Look, tomorrow, this gets expensive; I can actually put in the time and money to move out and go run this myself. Why don't I just get started because the budget seems fine, and I couldn't have done it better myself anyway because I'd have to put people on it and that's more expensive at this point.” So, it doesn't change the fundamentals of the model; I just want to point out, both sides are actually gravitating to this model.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Jellyfish. So, you're sitting in front of your office chair, bleary eyed, parked in front of a powerpoint and—oh my sweet feathery Jesus its the night before the board meeting, because of course it is! As you slot that crappy screenshot of traffic light colored excel tables into your deck, or sift through endless spreadsheets looking for just the right data set, have you ever wondered, why is it that sales and marketing get all this shiny, awesome analytics and inside tools? Whereas, engineering basically gets left with the dregs. Well, the founders of Jellyfish certainly did. That's why they created the Jellyfish Engineering Management Platform, but don't you dare call it JEMP! Designed to make it simple to analyze your engineering organization, Jellyfish ingests signals from your tech stack. Including JIRA, Git, and collaborative tools. Yes, depressing to think of those things as your tech stack but this is 2021. They use that to create a model that accurately reflects just how the breakdown of engineering work aligns with your wider business objectives. In other words, it translates from code into spreadsheet. When you have to explain what you're doing from an engineering perspective to people whose primary IDE is Microsoft Powerpoint, consider Jellyfish. Thats Jellyfish.co and tell them Corey sent you! Watch for the wince, thats my favorite part.Corey: A number of different surveys have come out that say overwhelmingly companies prefer open-source databases, and this is waved around as a banner of victory by a lot of—well, let's be honest—open-source database companies. I posit that is in fact crap and also bad data because what the open-source purists—of which I admit, I used to be one, and now I solve business problems instead—believe that people are talking about freedom, and choice, and the rest. In practice, in my experience, what people are really distilling that down to is they don't want a commercial database. And it's not even about they're not willing to pay money for it, but they don't want to have a per-core licensing challenge, or even having to track licensing of where it is installed and how, and wind up having to cut checks for folks. For example, I'm going to dunk on someone because why not?Azure for a while has had this campaign that it is five times cheaper to run some Microsoft SQL workloads in Azure than it is on AWS as if this was some magic engineering feat of strength or something. It's absolutely not, it's that it is really expensive licensing-wise to run it on things that aren't Azure. And that doesn't make customers feel good. That's the thing they want to get away from, and what open-source license it is, and in many cases, until the source-available stuff starts trending towards, “Oh, you're going to pay us or you're not going to run it at all,” that scares the living hell out of people, then they don't actually care about it being open. So, at the risk of alienating, I'm sure, some of the more vocal parts of your constituency, where do you fall on that?Karthik: We are completely open, but for a few reasons right? Like, multiple different reasons. The debate of whether it purely is open or is completely permissible, to me, I tend to think a little more where people care about the openness more so than just the ability to consume at will without worrying about the license, but for a few different reasons, and it depends on which segment of the market you look at. If you're talking about small and medium businesses and startups, you're absolutely right; it doesn't matter. But if you're looking at larger companies, they actually care that, like for example, if they want a feature, they are able to control their destiny because you don't want to be half-wedded to a database that cannot solve everything, especially when the time pressure comes or you need to do something.So, you want to be able to control or to influence the roadmap of the project. You want to know how the product is built—the good and the bad—you want a lot of people testing the product and their feedback to come out in the open, so you at least know what's wrong. Many times people often feel like, “Hey, my product doesn't work in these areas,” is actually a bad thing. It's actually a good thing because at least those people won't try it and [laugh] they'll be safe. Customer satisfaction is more important than just the apparent whatever it is that you want to project about the product.At least that's what I've learned in all these years working with databases. But there's a number of reasons why open-source is actually good. There's also a very subtle reason that people may not understand which is that legal teams—engineering teams that want to build products don't want to get caught up in a legal review that takes many months to really make sure, look, this may be a unique version of a license, but it's not a license the legal team as seen before, and there's going to be a back and forth for many months, and it's just going to derail their product and their timelines, not because the database didn't do its job or because the team wasn't ready, but because the company doesn't know what the risk it'll face in the future is. There's a number of these aspects where open-source starts to matter for real. I'm not a purist, I would say.I'm a pragmatist, and I have always been, but I would say that a number of reasons why–you know, I might be sounding like a purist, but a number of reasons why a true open-source is actually useful, right? And at the end of the day, if we have already established, at least at Yugabyte, we're pretty clear about that, the value is in the consumption and is not in the tech if we're pretty clear about that. Because if you want to run a tier-two workload or a hobbyist app at home, would you want to pay for a database? Probably not. I just want to do something for a while and then shut it down and go do my thing. I don't care if the database is commercial or open-source. In that case, being open-source doesn't really take away. But if you're a large company betting, it does take away. So.Corey: Oh, it goes beyond that because it's not even, in the large company story, whether it costs money because regardless, I assure you, open-source is not free; the most expensive thing that we see in all of our customer accounts—again, our consultancy fixes AWS bills, an expensive problem that hits everyone—the environment in AWS is always less expensive than the people who are working on the environment. Payroll is an expense that dwarfs the AWS bill for anyone that is not a tiny startup that is still not paying a market-rate salary to its founders. It doesn't work that way. And the idea, for those folks is, not about the money, it's about the predictability. And if there's a 5x price hike from their database manager that suddenly completely disrupts their unit economic model, and they're in trouble. That's the value of open-source in that it can go anywhere. It's a form of not being locked into any vendor where it's hosted, as well as, now, no one company that has put it out there into the world.Karthik: Yeah, and the source-available license, we considered that also. The reason to vote against that was you can get into scenarios where the company gets competitive with his open-source site where the open-source wants a couple other features to really make it work for their own use case, like you know, case in point is the startup, but the company wants to hold those features for the commercial side, and now the startup has that 5x price jump anyway. So, at this point, it comes to a head-on where the company—the startup—is being charged not for value, but because of the monetization model or the business model. So, we said, “You know what? The best way to do this is to truly compete against open-source. If someone wants to operationalize the database, great. But we've already done it for you.” If you think that you can operationalize it at a lower cost than what we've done, great. That's fine.Corey: I have to ask, there has to have been a question somewhere along the way, during the investment process of, what if AWS moves into your market? And I can already say part of the problem with that line of reasoning is, okay, let's assume that AWS turns Yugabyte into a managed database offering. First, they're not going to be able to articulate for crap why you should use that over anything else because they tend to mumble when it comes time to explain what it is that they do. But it has to be perceived as a competitive threat. How do you think about that?Karthik: Yeah, this absolutely came up quite a bit. And like I said, in 2016, this wasn't news back then; this is something that was happening in the world already. So, I'll give you a couple of different points of view on this. The reason why AWS got so successful in building a cloud is not because they wanted to get into the database space; they simply wanted their cloud to be super successful and required value-added services like these databases. Now, every time a new technology shift happens, it gives some set of people an unfair advantage.In this case, database vendors probably didn't recognize how important the cloud was and how important it was to build a first-class experience on the cloud on day one, as the cloud came up because it wasn't proven, and they had twenty other things to do, and it's rightfully so. Now, AWS comes up, and they're trying to prove a point that the cloud is really useful and absolutely valuable for their customers, and so they start putting value-added services, and now suddenly you're in this open-source battle. At least that's how I would view that it kind of developed. With Yugabyte, obviously, the cloud's already here; we know on day one, so we're kind of putting out our managed service so we'll be as good as AWS or better. The database has its value, but the managed service has its own value, and so we'd want to make sure we provide at least as much value as AWS, but on any cloud, anywhere.So, that's the other part. And we also talked about the mobility of the DBaaS itself, the moving it to your private account and running the same thing, as well as for public. So, these are some of the things that we have built that we believe makes us super valuable.Corey: It's a better approach than a lot of your predecessor companies who decided, “Oh, well, we built the thing; obviously, we're going to be the best at running it. The end.” Because they dramatically sold AWS's operational excellence short. And it turns out, they're very good at running things at scale. So, that's a challenging thing to beat them on.And even if you're able to, it's hard to differentiate among the differences because at that caliber of operational rigor, it's one of those, you can only tell in the very niche cases; it's a hard thing to differentiate on. I like your approach a lot better. Before we go, I have one last question for you, and normally, it's one of those positive uplifting ones of what workloads are best for Yugabyte, but I think that's boring; let's be more cynical and negative. What workloads would run like absolute crap on YugabyteDB?Karthik: [laugh]. Okay, we do have a thing for this because we don't want to take on workloads and, you know, everybody have a bad experience around. So, we're a transactional database built for user-facing applications, real-time, and so on, right? We're not good at warehousing and analytic workloads. So, for example, if you were using a Snowflake or a Redshift, those workloads are not going to work very well on top of Yugabyte.Now, we do work with other external systems like Spark, and Presto, which are real-time analytic systems, but they translate the queries that the end-user have into a more operational type of query pattern. However, if you're using it straight-up for analytics, we're not a good bet. Similarly, there's cases where people want very high number of IOPS by reusing a cache or even a persistent cache. Amazon just came out with a [number of 00:31:04] persistent cache that does very high throughput and low-latency serving. We're not good at that.We can do reasonably low-latency serving and reasonably high IOPS at scale, but we're not the use case where you want to hit that same lookup over and over and over, millions of times in a second; that's not the use case for us. The third thing I'd say is, we're a system of record, so people care about the data they put, and they don't absolutely don't want to lose it and they want to show that it's transactional. So, if there's a workload where there's a lot of data and you're okay if you want to lose, and it's just some sensor data, and your reasoning is like, “Okay, if I lose a few data points, it's fine.” I mean, you could still use us, but at that point you'd really have to be a fanboy or something for Yugabyte. I mean, there's other databases that probably do it better.Corey: Yeah, that's the problem is whenever someone says, “Oh, yeah. Database”—or any tool that they've built—“Like, this is great.” “What workloads is it not a fit for?” And their answer is, “Oh, nothing. It's perfect for everything.”Yeah, I want to believe you, but my inner bullshit sense is tingling on that one because nothing's fit for all purposes; it doesn't work that way. Honestly, this is going to be, I guess, heresy in the engineering world, but even computers aren't always the right answer for things. Who knew?Karthik: As a founder, I struggled with this answer a lot, initially. I think the problem is, when you're thinking about a problem space, that's all you're thinking about, you don't know what other problem spaces exist, and when you are asked the question, “What workloads is it a fit for?” At least I used to say, initially, “Everything,” because I'm only thinking about that problem space as the world, and it's fit for everything in that problem space, except I don't know how to articulate the problem space—Corey: Right—Karthik: —[crosstalk 00:32:33]. [laugh].Corey: —and at some point, too, you get so locked into one particular way of thinking that the world that people ask about other cases like, “Oh, that wouldn't count.” And then your follow-up question is, “Wait, what's a bank?” And it becomes a different story. It's, how do you wind up reasoning about these things? I want to thank you for taking all the time you have today to speak with me. If people want to learn more about Yugabyte—either the company or the DB—how can they do that?Karthik: Yeah, thank you as well for having me. I think to learn about Yugabyte, just come join our community Slack channel. There's a lot of people; there's, like, over 3000 people. They're all talking interesting questions. There's a lot of interesting chatter on there, so that's one way.We have an industry-wide event, it's called the Distributed SQL Summit. It's coming up September 22nd, 23rd, I think a couple of days; it's a two-day event. That would be a great place to actually learn from practitioners, and people building applications, and people in the general space and its adjacencies. And it's not necessarily just about Yugabyte; it's generally about distributed SQL databases, in general, hence it's called the Distributed SQL Summit. And then you can ask us on Twitter or any of the usual social channels as well. So, we love interaction, so we are pretty open and transparent company. We love to talk to you guys.Corey: Well, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. Well, of course, throw links to that into the [show notes 00:33:43]. Thank you again.Karthik: Awesome. Thanks a lot for having me. It was really fun. Thank you.Corey: Likewise. Karthik Ranganathan, CTO, and co-founder of YugabyteDB. 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, halfway through realizing that I'm not charging you anything for this podcast and converting the angry comment into a term sheet for $100 million investment.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.

Similar storylines on vastly different levels. Questions remain for South Carolina after Saturday's blowout loss at Georgia and the same can be said for Clemson after escaping the weekend with a narrow win over Georgia Tech. The guys discuss both in depth, Penn State's win over Auburn, Alabama surviving Florida and the weekend that was in the SEC, ACC and around college football. Featuring: Wes Mitchell of Gamecock Central and former South Carolina quarterback Perry Orth talking Gamecocks and The Post and Courier's Gene Sapakoff on Clemson and the college football landscape.

Episode #47 – Uncharted Worlds: Starrion manages to deliver his package, but not without some adversity… Music from https://filmmusic.io “Take a Chance” by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com) License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

It's been over a year and a half since the first cases of COVID-19 were reported in South Carolina.  And, as much as people would like it to be, this pandemic is far from over.  Earlier this year, there was hope that this fall we would be edging closer to normalcy — that we would have overcome vaccine hesitancy enough that spread would have slowed.  But, that didn't happen, and slow uptake of the vaccine combined with the delta variant brought on South Carolina's third surge in COVID-19 cases.  Today, we're taking a closer look at the state of the pandemic right now, and the strain that it's causing for people tasked with fighting this pandemic every day.On Monday, Sept. 13, we spoke with Dr. Brannon Traxler, director of public health for the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control, or DHEC, about this surge and what makes it different from previous spikes in cases during this pandemic.Post and Courier Columbia reporter Avery Wilks also gave us a behind-the-scenes look at his deep dive into DHEC and the strain and frustration the agency's workers are feeling in the midst of the state's third major surge in COVID-19 cases. READ MORE: Inside DHEC, where workers fight anxiety, frustration, fatigue amid crush of pandemicVisit the Post and Courier's COVID-19 dashboard. 

The guys go inside the Gamecocks prep for Georgia with David Cloninger of The Post and Courier. Matt Zemek, editor of Trojans Wire, joins the program with outstanding insight and information on what led up to Clay Helton's firing, how he got the job in the first place and what's next at Southern Cal. Plus our weekly high school football report with David Shelton of The Post and Courier and a Ryder Cup chat with Scott Glaze, head golf professional at The Links at Stono Ferry

About LaurieLaurie is a Senior Software Engineer at Netflix. You can also find her creating content and educating the technology industry as an egghead instructor, member of the TC39 Educators committee, and technical blogger.Links: Twitter: https://twitter.com/laurieontech Netflix: https://www.netflix.com Egghead: https://egghead.io The Art of the Subtle Subtweet: https://laurieontech.com/book-launch/ TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: You could build you go ahead and build your own coding and mapping notification system, but it takes time, and it sucks! Alternately, consider Courier, who is sponsoring this episode. They make it easy. You can call a single send API for all of your notifications and channels. You can control the complexity around routing, retries, and deliverability and simplify your notification sequences with automation rules. Visit courier.com today and get started for free. If you wind up talking to them, tell them I sent you and watch them wince—because everyone does when you bring up my name. Thats the glorious part of being me. Once again, you could build your own notification system but why on god's flat earth would you do that?Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at VMware. Let's be honest—the past year has been far from easy. Due to, well, everything. It caused us to rush cloud migrations and digital transformation, which of course means long hours refactoring your apps, surprises on your cloud bill, misconfigurations and headache for everyone trying manage disparate and fractured cloud environments. VMware has an answer for this. With VMware multi-cloud solutions, organizations have the choice, speed, and control to migrate and optimizeapplications seamlessly without recoding, take the fastest path to modern infrastructure, and operate consistently across the data center, the edge, and any cloud. I urge to take a look at vmware.com/go/multicloud. You know my opinions on multi cloud by now, but there's a lot of stuff in here that works on any cloud. But don't take it from me thats: VMware.com/go/multicloud and my thanks to them again for sponsoring my ridiculous nonsense.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. I'm joined this week by Laurie Barth, but no one really knows that's her last name. In fact, @laurieontech is how most people think of her. She's a senior software engineer at a company called Netflix, which primarily streams movies and gives conference talks—in the before times—about how you're doing it wrong.She also creates a lot of content and educates the technology industry as an instructor at Egghead. She's a member of the TC39 Educator's Committee, and of course, is a technical blogger. Laurie, thank you for suffering the slings and arrows I'm no doubt going to be hurtling your way.Laurie: This is the most fun I've had all week. [laugh].Corey: Well, it's a pandemic on, so presumably that isn't that high of a bar for the pony to stumble over.Laurie: Yeah, unfortunately not. I think that's maybe the problem.Corey: So, you're someone that I have been aware of for an awfully long time. You're always sort of omnipresent in conversations. You are someone who has a lot of great opinions that present well; you talk about an awful lot of things that are germane to my interests, educating the next generation of engineers, for example. And of course, you recently started at Netflix, at which point, well, if you're not familiar with what Netflix is doing in the cloud, have you ever even talked to an AWS employee for more than 35 seconds because they'll go reference Netflix for a variety of wonderful reasons, both based on technical excellence, as well as because AWS is so bad at telling the story of what you can build out of their popsicle stick service collection that they just punt to companies like Netflix to demonstrate what you could do. So, you're sort of this omnipresent force on Twitter, but we've never really had a conversation before, so it was long past time to rectify this.Laurie: I mean, you sent me two cents. So… I think that was pretty—[laugh].Corey: That's what the Tip Jar is for. You just wind up hurling very small amounts of money at people along with insulting comments, and it's a new form of social media. That is the micro-transaction way.Laurie: I quite enjoyed that. So, for context, I was one of the first people to be part of the A/B testing for Tip Jar on Twitter and Corey was the first person to send me money with, of course, a very on-brand Corey message, which there's a screenshot of on Twitter somewhere. And a couple of people followed, but it was great fun. And I think that's the first time we had ever directly interacted in a message or something, other than obviously, in threads and that sort of thing.Corey: Yeah, that's an interesting point to lead into here because I'm also in the A/B test for Tip Jar and I've largely turned it off, except for when I'm doing something very small and very focused, usually aimed at some sort of charitable benefit or whatnot, and even then, it's not the right way to do it. And it's weird, there was a time I absolutely would have turned it on, but it doesn't seem right for me to do it now and that's partially due to the fact that—first, I don't need tips from the audience in order to sustain myself. I'm not that kind of creator. I have a company that solves very expensive problems for large companies and that works out really well for, you know, keeping the lights on here.I'm not trying to disparage creators in any way, folks who are in a position of needing that to cover their lifestyle a variety of different ways. And even if they're well beyond that, I don't begrudge that to them at all. I mean, from a very selfish capitalist perspective, I don't want you to feel that you've paid your debt to me for entertaining you by sending me $5. I want you to repay that debt by signing a five-figure consulting agreement.Laurie: Yeah, those aren't really the same thing, are they?Corey: No, no. Turns out signing authority caps out at different places for different folks.Laurie: [laugh].Corey: Who knew? But it was a fun experiment. I'm glad that they're doing it. I'm glad to see Twitter coming out of its stasis for a long time and trying new things, even if we don't like some of them.Laurie: Well, they have this whole Super Follows thing now, and I got waitlisted for it the other day because they said they accepted too many people, whatever that means. I think—Corey: Same here.Laurie: Yeah, I think a bunch of us got that. And I'm interested, my sense is it's sort of like a Patreon hosted in Twitter sort of thing. And I've never had a Patreon; I have a mailing list that I made based on an April Fool's joke this past year where I made an entire signup workflow for the pre-order of my new book, The Art of the Subtle Subtweet. I was very pleased with this joke.This was, like, very elaborate: I had a whole website, I had a signup flow, and I now have a mailing list which I've done nothing with. So, I have all of these things, but that's not really been my—there's too many things to do as a content creator, and so I've sort of not explored most of those other avenues. And so, Super Follows, I was like, “This could be interesting. I could try doing it,” but, you know, alas, they don't want me to. So, [laugh] I don't know that it matters.Corey: It's an interesting problem, too, because at the start of the pandemic, I had a third of the Twitter followers that I do as of the time of this recording, which is something like 63,000. When I started what I do, five years ago, and I had just left a company which was highly regulated, so, “Don't tweet,” was basically their social media policy, it was a, okay, I had something like 2000 followers at the time. I was—it had taken me seven years to get there, let's be very clear here. And since then, my following has exploded, and yours has as well. You have, I think the last time we checked, was it something like 30,000 and change?Laurie: Yeah, something like that.Corey: And it changes the way that people interact with you. This is one of those things that there aren't that many people that we can have this kind of honest conversation with because let's be very clear here, for folks who have not established an audience like that it sounds absolutely like it's either a humblebrag—which I'm not intending that to come across that way—or it's one of those, “Wish I had those problems.” And in some ways, yeah, it's a weird problem to have, and it's also not a sympathetic problem to have, but something that has been very clear to me has been that the way that people perceive me and the way that they interact with me has shifted significantly as my Twitter notoriety has increased.Laurie: Yeah.Corey: I'm curious about how you have experienced that?Laurie: Yeah, so I'm half your size and especially in the front-end universe, there's plenty of people with between 100,000 to, you know, I think Dan Abramov is at, like, 400,000 at this point. Like—Corey: Oh yeah, my Twitter following would explode if I either knew JavaScript or was funny. Either one would just absolutely kick me into the stratosphere, but we work with what we've got.Laurie: I either don't know JavaScript or I'm not funny or maybe both because apparently not. But yeah, there's these huge, huge, huge, huge scales, and I'm sure by many people's judgment, pretty, pretty large. But comparing to other people in my ecosystem, maybe not so much. And I didn't understand it until I was living it. I actually had the opportunity to meet Emily Freeman at a conference in DC, probably… three years ago now, when I had less than a thousand followers. And I thought getting my first hundred was a big deal; I thought getting my first 500—and it is. Don't get me wrong. Those things are very cool milestones. And I [crosstalk 00:07:18]—Corey: I still celebrate the milestones, but I do it less publicly now.Laurie: Yeah, exactly. And I had a whole conversation with her and she gave me some really, really helpful advice: sort of, don't look at your follower count as it goes back and forth, five people, six people you'll think people are unfollowing you; they're probably not. It doesn't matter. And recognize that the larger you get, the more careful you have to be, and try to keep me sane before I was ever there. And it's all sort of come true.There's two things that have stuck out to me, I think, during the pandemic, especially. One is I can write the most nonsensical, silly tweet and people will like it because they think it says something insightful whether it does or it doesn't. They're projecting onto the tweet something funnier, or more relevant than the reason I wrote it in the first place. Which, okay, that's cool. I'm not as smart as you're giving me credit for, but sure.The other thing which is the downside to that is, everyone assumes that if they're having a conversation with me, they're having a conversation with me. So one-on-one, back and forth. That's not untrue, but I'm having a similar conversation in parallel with—if it's a popular tweet—a hundred other people at the same time. And what that means is, if you're being a little bit of a jerk, and a little bit troll-y, you're not being a little bit troll-y, you're being a little bit troll-y times the a hundred other little bit troll-y people. And so my reaction to you is not going to be necessarily equivalent to what you say, and that can get me in trouble. But there's no mental, emotional spectrum that was designed to work with the scale of social media.Corey: Oh, absolutely not. In fact, let's do an experiment now, while we're having this conversation. I am making a tweet as we speak. “Some mornings, it's just not worth chewing through the leather straps.” It's not particularly insightful.It's not particularly deep, and before the end of this episode, we will check and see what that does in terms of engagement just because you can say anything, and there's some folks who will wind up automatically engaging. And again, that's fine; everyone engages with Twitter in a bunch of different ways. For me, what's been very odd is I have talked to a couple of very large companies who I talk about on Twitter from time to time, and it turns out that they are reluctant to engage with me directly on Twitter or promote anything that I do or do retweets of me, not because of me, but because of an element of the audience, in some cases, of what people will chime in and say because it doesn't align with corporate brands and a bunch of different perspectives. Which, again, I have some sympathy for this; it's hard to deal with folks who are now suddenly given a soapbox and a platform that rewards clever insults better than it does meaningful heartfelt content, and that is something that I think everyone is still struggling with. Let's also be very clear here. I'm a white dude in tech; my failure mode is a board seat and a book deal.Laurie: [laugh].Corey: When I post something about Git, for example—which I did a few days ago—and someone responds explaining the joke back to me, my response to them was, “Thank you for explaining Git to me.” And that was all I said, and it's led to a mini-pile-on of this person because it's like—Laurie: Oh, yeah.Corey: “Don't you know who Corey is?” Yet I have seen the same dynamic happen with women tweeting about these things and it's not just one response that explains Git; it's all of them. And when people say—like, Abby Fuller, for example—Laurie: Yep.Corey: —will tweet about password manager challenges and how annoying some of them are, and it leads to a cavalcade of people suggesting password managers to her. That is not why she's tweeting it, and she explicitly says, “I do not want you to recommend password managers to me.” And people continue to do it. And I don't for the life of me understand what goes on in some people's heads.Laurie: Yeah. I mean, I've watched that happen countless times. I think the frustration—there's a point at which no matter how big of a following you have, you just want to be yourself. I think most people who get to that amount of interaction have been theirself most of the way, along the way. Or they're just being totally fake for the sense of growth hacking, in which case, okay, you do you.But most people, I think, are being themselves because it's exhausting to spend that much time on a platform and pretend to be someone else or be fake the whole time. So, I'm pretty much myself. And that means that sometimes when someone's being a total jerk, I really want to treat them and be like, “Yeah, you suck.” But the problem is when I say that, I'm siccing 30,000 other people on them to defend me. And I can't do that.So instead, I've become sort of famous for subtweeting. And I will wait a couple of days to do it, or I will totally change the framing of the situation so I can get out my same sort of frustration, and annoyance, and just needing to blow off steam, or venting, or whatever it is and not point at the person. Because if I point at the person, I discovered very, very quickly that there's a whole crowd of people willing to take them down. If they're being blatantly terrible, I will do it. There is a line here.Someone recommending that I use a different tool because I decided to bitch about TypeScript, for example, or telling me I don't understand TypeScript, okay, fine. Someone's saying, “You only have followers because you're a pretty girl.” Yeah, you're an asshole. No, I'm not protecting you. Also, by the way, I tweeted two minutes ago, do all tweets deserve a ‘like,' question mark, and we'll see how much that—Corey: Yeah.Laurie: —interaction gets. [laugh].Corey: I'm looking forward to seeing how that plays out. It's a responsibility, which sounds odd, but if I complain about a company, what I'm fundamentally doing is I have the potential to be calling out an airstrike on top of them. And not every customer service failure deserves that. I deleted all of my tweets prior to 2015 a while back. And the reason most people delete tweets, or the reason we hear about most people deleting tweets, there was nothing especially problematic in my tweets other than jokes that were mean in different ways and punching down in ways that I didn't realize were at the time.It was not full of slurs; it was just things that weren't particularly great. But that wasn't the real reason I did it. The honest reason was is that I looked at my early tweets and they were cringy beyond belief. I was shilling for the company I worked for in many respects, and there were swaths which I didn't engage with Twitter, and the only time I really did is I was out there complaining about various customer service failures, so it's just this neverending stream of complaints about different companies that had wronged me in trivial ways.Laurie: [laugh].Corey: And, I don't know at some point if somebody is going to build something where it's easy to explore early tweets of a particular account. I don't want them to do that and then figure out that this is how you get started being me. It's like, I succeeded in spite of that nonsense, not because of it. And it's not something good that I want to put out into the world.Laurie: Yeah. So, I have, I think, only once added a company when I was having a customer service issue on a weekend, and we were in really dire straits. And I was just like, “Okay, it's a weekend. I'm going to at.” And I've never gotten a response so fast.And my husband looked at me and he was like, “Wait, what?” And I'd done this with an ol—I have this really ancient Twitter account that I got rid of because I was mostly just screaming about politics [laugh] and I didn't want—I think I got @laurieontech in like, 2016, 2017—and I'd done that before. I'd been like, “Hey, you know”—I'm making something up—“At Spirit Airlines”—they seem like an easy one to—I've never flown Spirit, so—but I mean, I never got a response. And so there—realizing that you have power from a brand perspective is really weird.But I almost want to go back to your point when you were talking about when you worked for a company and you had your account and, you know, they don't want you to tweet, basically. Or companies are not going to tweet at you now, in your current state. I think it's really hard to be a company on the internet in tech because you're either going to make a joke that lands well, or everyone's going to think that you're shilling for yourself. There's no in-between and so—this is a hot take and I might get in trouble for that—companies have realized that the best way to get around that is to hire people who have their own personal names and get your company name associated with them. And all of a sudden, it looks less disingenuous.Corey: And even that's a problem because I've talked to companies who are hiring folks with large followings for DevRel style jobs, and—I've interviewed for a few of those, once upon a time, about midway through when I was debating do I shut this consulting thing down and get a real job again because that's always how I sort of assumed it would be for the first couple years. And then, “No, I'm going to get serious about it.” And I took on a business partner and got very serious, and here we are. But talking to folks, my question was, in the interview process, I would talk to my prospective manager and ask questions of the form, “So, what is your plan for when we eventually part ways? How are you structuring that?”And they looked at me like that was a bizarre question. It's, understand that, done right, my personal brand will, in some areas and some corners, eclipse that of the company, so as soon as I leave for whatever reason, the question is going to be, “Were you mistreated? Did someone wrong you there? We'll drag them just preemptively on the off chance.” And you need to have a plan in place to mitigate some of that and have a structured exit for what that is going to look like. And they looked at me like I was coming from a different planet. But I still think I'm right.Laurie: You are right. And, oh goodness, I've seen this in a lot of different places. I mean, I have left companies in the past and I have had to decide how I was going to position that publicly. And how much I was going to say or not say, how complimentary I was going to be or not because the thing is, when you leave a place, you're not just leaving the company, you're also leaving your colleagues. And what does that mean for their experience?You're gone. You don't want to be saying, “Hey, this place is horrible, while your really close friends you were working with on Friday are still there.” At the same time, companies don't think about this from the DevRel perspective and, I want to be very clear, I have friends who work in DevRel who are themselves brands. They are all fantastic people; they work incredibly hard; this is not a knock on them in any way—Corey: It looks easy from the outside. I want to be very clear on that.Laurie: [laugh]. It's not easy. All this stuff is great, but part of the reason I decided to go to a place like Netflix is because I knew my brand had no bearing on them and so I could be myself and just do my own thing and they weren't going to try and leverage me, or there was no hit to them based on who I was. Granted, did I go after someone the other day, sort of, in deep in a thread for being a jerk and did they try and at Netflix engineering and say, “Is this the kind of person you want representing your brand?” And at egghead.io, “Is this the kind of person wanting your brand?” Yeah, they did.So, that part's still a problem, but that's a problem for me rather than being a problem for my company, if I decide that, you know, I don't always want to—like, no one cares if I talk about the new Marvel show. No one cares. I like Marvel; I'm allowed to like Marvel. I also love the stuff on Netflix, right, but when you're at a company that isn't like that, honestly, when I was at Gatsby, I couldn't be tweeting about Next or Nuxt, or even Vue for that matter, because it just doesn't look right. Because my brand had more of an impact in that smaller pond than it does now.Corey: People have said, “Oh, well, what if AWS acquires you so you can work on their behalf?” Or, “What if Google acquires you?” Or something like that, and it's—what people don't get is that my persona—again, to be clear, I am genuine on Twitter. I emphasize aspects of my personality, but I don't get up there and say things I don't necessarily believe. We'll get back to that in a minute.But what I do as a small company, making fun of trillion-dollar publicly traded entities is funny and it works, but if suddenly I work at a different publicly-traded company, it just looks like I work for my employer, bagging on a competitor. And even if I'm speaking in ‘an opinions my own' sense, which is apparently Amazon's corporate motto, based on how often I see it in their employee's Twitter bios—Laurie: Oh, yeah. [laugh].Corey: —is going to be perceived as me smacking at a competitor regardless. Further, I will not be the person that craps on my own employer on Twitter because that sends terrible signal in many respects. I won't even crap on previous employers who frankly kind of deserve it because when you do that, it does not look good to people who are not familiar with the situation, and no one's as familiar with it as you are. It just looks like sour grapes, regardless of how legitimate your grievance was. To be very clear, I'm not saying don't call out abuse when you encounter it—Laurie: Yeah.Corey: —that's fine. I'm not going down that path—Laurie: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.Corey: —let's clear here. But, “Yeah, they have a terrible management culture, and they don't promote internally, and I hate those people,” it just makes you look bad, and it doesn't help anything.Laurie: Yeah. I had always made a commitment to never talk about a former employer in any way that was easily identifiable. I've changed that policy a little bit. There's a story I shared a couple of times where my CEO didn't want to give me a pay raise because he thought it was my parents' and boyfriend at the time's job to take care of me financially. Like, that kind of stuff, I will say publicly.No one's going to know who it is; you'd have to go back and figure it out and, like, you don't have enough context so how would you know? But it's stuff like that, that I'm like, okay. I don't want to hide stories like that because that's not protecting anybody.Corey: No, I'm not talking about covering up for misbehavior. I'm talking run-of-the-mill just bad management, poor company culture, terrible technical decisions, et cetera. Yeah, if it's like, yeah, they sexually harassed every woman on the team, out. Yeah, tell that story. I—thank you, I should absolutely clarify my stance. Heaven forbid I get letters.Laurie: But yeah, it's the problem is that you can't—and everyone has a slightly different experience with this, but from what I've seen, it doesn't matter if you say their management is shitty and they didn't promote versus there was a ton of sexual harassment. If you're one person saying it—if it's the Blizzard situation where there's tons of receipts and it's made it into national media, then that's a little bit different. But if you're one person saying it about one company, people are going to think it's sour grapes. And unfortunately, it doesn't reflect on the company; it reflects on you. So, unless there's a sort of like, where there's smoke, there's fire situation where a bunch of people are doing it at once, you have to weigh stuff really carefully.Especially because your next employer doesn't want you out there talking about your previous employer because then their fear is what are you going to say about them when you leave? There's lots of nuance and it gets—if you are screaming into the void—we're screaming into the cloud here—Corey: Ahhhh. Yes.Laurie: Ahhhh. [laugh]. If you're screaming into the void, it doesn't matter if you're you. And I mean… [sigh] I hate saying, “If you're me,” right? That's such an obnoxious statement to make, but at 30,000, they probably care.Corey: There are inflection points. I started seeing—around 40,000 is when I started seeing a couple of brands reaching out to me to, “Hey, you want to promote some nonsense.” And I've never sold any social media promotion for anything. I sell sponsorships for newsletters, this podcast, I do webinars stuff, I do paid speaking engagements. My Twitter account is mine.It is not the company's and that is by design. It's me; that's what it comes down to. That does lead to challenges in some arenas because I talk to companies about their AWS bill and these companies do not have much of a sense of humor about spending tens of millions of dollars, in some cases a month, on a cloud provider. These are serious problems and they're a little worried, in some cases, the first time we have conversations that they're dealing with some kind of internet clown.Laurie: [laugh].Corey: And often with talking to folks to convince them to come on this podcast, it's, “Look, this is not me dragging you and making you look awful because if I do that, I'll never get another guest again.” And if I do it in the context of a consulting project it's, “That was a hilarious entertaining intro here. Get out and never come back.” It is not useful. People have generally taken a risk personally on bringing the Duckbill Group in.If we can't deliver and cannot present professionally, then they have some serious damage control to do, for a variety of excellent reasons. And we've never put someone in that position and we won't. I talked to brands who sponsor all of these things, and the ones that are the best sponsors intrinsically understand it, that [unintelligible 00:23:56] once I start getting after some serious maleficence style stuff—no one is going to not do business with you because I make fun of your company on Twitter—Laurie: Yeah.Corey: —but an awful lot of people are going to hear about you for the first time and advertising in the newsletter and having fun with that, or I talk about you in the podcast ads, it winds up being engaging in many cases depending how far I can stretch it. And it works. I did a tour at re:Invent last year—virtual re:Invent—where I led a Twitch tour for an hour around the virtual expo hall into a bunch of different sponsored virtual booths and made fun of them all, and I got thank you notes from the sponsors because that led to a bunch of leads because people cared about the—oh, people paying attention because Amazon did a crap job of advertising the Sponsor Expo. And it was something that people could grasp, and have fun with, and get attention for. It's top-of-funnel work and that's fine, but I just don't do it with the boring stodgy stuff. I like to have fun with it. Bring a personality or don't bother.Laurie: Yeah. And you can't take yourself too seriously. I'm not the stand-up comedian that you are. I like to fashion myself as a little bit funny but not that funny. I'm not a stand-up comedian and I don't have a consultancy to represent anymore.There was a time where I did; I was not the owner of it but I worked there. So, now it's sort of, I represent me, which is good in the way that you say it. Like, it's clearly you. It's not Duckbill Group; it's your account. But at the same time, it freaks me out when in real life people know that it's me.So, in my brain, Twitter is the internet and I have my actual real day-to-day life, and never the two shall cross. [laugh]. And my—one of my—I had this popular tweet where I talked about all the companies I'd been rejected from, and it turned into a bit of a retweet situation with everyone sharing all these companies that they'd been rejected from. And the screenshots made it onto LinkedIn and made it into my cousin's feed, and she sent me a text message with a screenshot. And she's like, “You're on my LinkedIn.”And I was like, “No, no, this is not okay. This is not”—I have my little circle of the world and it should not expand beyond that. I go to a conference, even a tech conference, and someone's like, “Oh, you're blue shirt, crossed arms.” I'm like, “No, this is not okay.” Like, [laugh] I only exist on the internet.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: My business partner was, a week or so ago, at a cafe and someone came by and saw his Last Week in AWS sticker on his laptop. It's like, “Oh, you read that, too? I love Corey's work.” Turns out the guy works at IBM Cloud. And yes, you should hear the air quotes around the word, ‘cloud' in there. But still.Laurie: [laugh].Corey: It's—I haven't been out in the world since I really started focusing on this, and now it's—like, I wear a mask so it's fine, but I'm starting to wonder, am I going to get stopped on the street when I go back into the universe out there? And it's weird because you can't really unring that bell?Laurie: No.Corey: It's a weird transition, and on some level, it's constraining in some ways. Like, at some point of celebrity—I don't know if I'm there yet or not—there's going to become a day where I can't just unload on a waiter for crappy service at a restaurant—not that that's how I—Laurie: I mean, you shouldn't do that anyway. [laugh].Corey: —operate anyway—without it potentially going viral, and, “Oh, he's a jerk when you actually get to know him.” And everyone has this idea of you and this impression of who you are, based upon the curated selection of what it is you put out into the world. I've tried to be as true to life as I can on this. In conversations, I generally don't drop nothing but one-liners, but I think I'm pretty true to life as far as how I present on the internet versus how I present in person.Laurie: More than I expected, to be honest.Corey: Yeah. That also does surprise people. Like, they think there's some sort of writing team behind me. And it's, if you look at the timing of some of my tweets where I will respond with a witty, snarky thing in less than a minute, it's, I wish I had a writing team with that kind of latency. I think that'd be terrific.Laurie: I always assumed it was you, but I figured there was like a persona that you turn on and turn off and I realize now that it's an always on sort of thing. [laugh].Corey: One thing I did experiment with for a little bit was having my team write tweets for my approval to promote episodes of this podcast, for example, because I am not the sort of person going to sit there and build the thing out correctly and schedule at the right time. And I have people who can do things like that, but it's the sort of thing that led to a situation of never getting much engagement and those tweets never did very well, so why even bother? We have a dedicated Twitter feed for that stuff and everyone's happier. Especially since I don't have to share access to this thing through anyone. Speaking of, let's see her tweets did.Laurie: Oh, yeah. Okay, hold on. How'd we do? All right. So, I have, “Do all tweets deserve a like?” Was posted 19 minutes ago. It has 12 comments, 1 retweet, and 22 likes.Corey: My, “Some mornings, it's just not worth chewing through the leather straps.” Was posted at a similar timeframe has 10 likes and 3 replies. Someone said that, “Organic, eh? Probably better than nylon.” Someone said, “Is this an NDA subtweet?” And someone said—with a GIF of Leonardo DiCaprio, saying, “You had my curiosity. Now, you have my attention.” That's it. So yeah, not exactly a smash-it-out-of-the-park success.Laurie: Yeah, but I got to say, “Do all tweets deserve a like?” Is pretty mundane. For that amount of response.Corey: You included a question mark, which is an open invitation—Laurie: Oh, right.Corey: —to the internet randos to engage, so there is—Laurie: Oh, yeah.Corey: —a potential there.Laurie: I going to have to retweet this and say that I'm not grifting and it was done for this podcast [laugh] and they should all listen to it. [laugh].Corey: Oh, of course. By all means. I am thrilled in any point to wind up helping people learn more things about the environment.Laurie: [laugh].Corey: I want to thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. I have to honestly say that I wasn't quite sure what was coming, but of all the things you could have asked me to predict about this episode, not talking about how Netflix works in cloud was absolutely not one of them. So wow, are you sure you work at Netflix? That's one of those odd moment things.Laurie: Yeah, I got to say I'm pretty abstracted from the cloud these days, so that—maybe that means that I don't know enough to talk about it intelligently.Corey: I would argue that extends to lots of folks. To be clear, Netflix has a lot of really neat thing.Laurie: That never stopped anyone before? Bu-dum-shh.Corey: Oh, yeah. It's like, I like to get up there, sometimes I'll talk about how we do things at Netflix, periodically, on conference stages even though I've never worked there, but people don't correct me because why not? I'm a white man in tech. And I say something, of course, it's right. It's just—if you don't want them to get right, you just don't have enough context. That's the rule.Laurie: Corey, I'm going to need you to take the last minute or so of this episode, and please explain your feelings on how to optimize your use of JavaScript on the front-end, please.Corey: Oh, wonderful; you pay smart people who know what they're doing to look deep into the JavaScript side of it—Laurie: [laugh].Corey: —because honestly, every time I've tried to get into JavaScript, I go back at it and I feel even more foolish than when I started. Async stuff just completely blows my mind, especially by default. How in God's flat earth is that supposed to work? And—Laurie: You work in cloud. [laugh].Corey: It doesn't make sense to me, in a clear sense. At least with Python, which is the—I would say it's the language I know best, but it's not. Crappy Python is. And I can at least do things top to bottom and it works about like I would expect unless explicitly instructed otherwise. But the JavaScript world is just a big question mark and doesn't work the way that I would expect to. To be clear, the failure here is entirely mine.Laurie: ‘JavaScript is a big question mark and doesn't work the way I would expect it to' should be JavaScript's tagline.Corey: That's fair because I have this ridiculous belief from the Dark Ages—because I spent 20 years as a systems admin—that computer behavior should be deterministic and if there's one thing that we learned about the internet, it's not.Laurie: Yeah, no. There's that whole user thing, and then that whole browser thing, and then that whole device thing. It's a whole bunch of non-deterministic behaviors. Just stick to the cloud, and there's one consumer and one producer, and you're good.Corey: One thing I will say—in the moment of pure seriousness here—is that if I were looking at getting into tech today, the first language I would learn would be JavaScript. It is clearly the way of the future. It is a first-class citizen on every platform out there. It is the lingua franca of, effectively, everyone coming out of a boot camp. And it is going to be the way that computers are built.I say this not from a position of being an advocate for JavaScript. I don't know it; I can't stand it personally, but it is clear as day to me that is the direction the world is moving in, so if you're debating what language to pick up, you'd be hard-pressed to convince me not to recommend JavaScript as the first one.Laurie: And do you want me to be my serious self, and you're going to laugh at what I'm about to say?Corey: Hit me with it.Laurie: If you're looking to get into technology because of boot camps and some other things, we have an oversaturation of newbie front-end developers and they're all way more talented than I was at that point in my career, and yet there aren't nearly the front-door opportunities for being a—I hate the term junior, but newbie. And where there is the opportunity, it's cloud. And security.Corey: I will absolutely point out further that I understand this runs the risk of being ‘boomer gives career advice'—Laurie: Yeah, right? [laugh].Corey: —but let's be clear here. I think that if you are going to enter the front-end space—and this does speak to cloud and it speaks to security as well—distinguish slash differentiate yourself by having another discipline or area of intense interest that you can bring into it as well because when you have a company that's looking to hire from a sea of new boot camp grads that generally tend to look more or less identical from a resume perspective, the one that will stand out is the one that can bring in another discipline and especially if that niche winds up aligning with a company's business, or at least an intense interest in something that is directly germane to the company, that will distinguish you. And everyone has something like that; no one is one-dimensional. So, find the thing that is the in-between space, and focus on finding jobs in companies that do those things. And if you're a mid-career switcher, let me be very clear here.It is not a go back to entry-level roles-style story. I've never understood that philosophy. I do have steps from thing I'm doing now toward thing I want to go to. Well, is there a job I can find to do next that blends the two of them together in different ways, and then once I'm there, then make a further transition. And of course, find someone who's—in any career, in any path you're on, find someone who is five years ahead of you, and ask them for their advice.“What would you do in my shoes?” If the answer is, “Go to a boot camp,” okay. Talk to a few people who've done this and make sure it validates it. If it's, “Get a degree,” okay, but make sure you're not doing it because you think that's what you're supposed to do. You'll very rarely find me recommending six figures of debt in order to advance your career, but there are occasions.By and large, they'll find someone who's been there before who knows what's going on, you can have a conversation with and give them context appropriate to your situation and then see what's right. We turned this into last-minute career advice and I'm not even—I don't even [unintelligible 00:34:45] have a problem with that.Laurie: Well, I was about to say that it's 2020. 21 2020—wow, I—you knew what I meant—it's 2021, and I guess I need to start taking my half-steps towards becoming a Lego master before I retire. [laugh].Corey: Oh, yes, the Lego world is vast and deep, and they have gotten no worse since I was a child at separating parents from money to buy LEGO sets. My daughter's four and his way into them already. So, it's great. It's something that we can bond over.Laurie: If I ever have kids, we're going to need separate sets because they're not touching mine. [laugh].Corey: Yeah, I'm looking at stuff like, oh, well, I'd love to buy that awesome big Star Destroyer—wait, it's how much money? And it turns into this—yeah. It's wow, on some level, I never ever thought I would find a hobby that was more expensive than my mechanical keyboards hobby, but here we are.Laurie: Oh, yeah, I blame Cassidy Williams for getting me into that one, too. I have a shiny one beneath me. And that's my first.Corey: She is a treasure and a delight.Laurie: She's a treasure, a delight, and dangerous if you want to save money because she will draw you into the mechanical keyboards, and there's just, there's no resisting. I tried for a very long time. I failed, ultimately.Corey: One of these days, she and I are going to have a keyboard-off at some point, once it's no longer a deadly risk to do so. It'll be fun.Laurie: Do it.Corey: I'm looking forward to it. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. I really appreciate it.Laurie: Absolutely. Thanks for having me.Corey: Of course. Laurie Barth, senior software engineer at Netflix, also instructor at Egghead, also a member of the TC39 Educator Committee, and prolific blogger. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with a horrifying comment explaining anything we just talked about, back to us.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.

The Citadel Athletics Hall of Fame member Everette Sands ('93), one of the cogs of the Bulldogs' 1990s ground game, talks about the 1990 win over South Carolina and the 1992 Southern Conference championship season. The Conway, S.C., native also discusses his lengthy coaching career and his desire to one day be a head coach. Jeff Hartsell, of The Post and Courier, looks back on Brent Thompson's team getting embarrassed with a 17-point loss at home to Charleston Southern. Now, the surging Crusaders of Division II North Greenville invade Johnson Hagood Stadium.

On this episode I chat with food critic Hanna Raskin. Hanna Raskin is the editor and publisher of The Food Section, a newsletter covering food and drink in the American South. She previously served as food editor and chief critic for The Post and Courier in Charleston, S.C. Her work has been recognized multiple times by The James Beard Foundation, which in 2017 awarded her its first Local Impact Journalism prize. In the episode we talk about the process of reviewing restaurants, rating restaurants during the pandemic and the need for more food journalism. She also shares how it's important to review a restaurant not to give bad reviews, but rather honest reviews. The Food Section Link: https://thefoodsection.substack.com/p/coming-soon Link to the WCK Fundraiser: https://donate.wck.org/fundraiser/3395142 If you are on Apple leave a review! Check out the blog: linecookthoughts.com --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/raymond-delucci/message

About EvEv Kontsevoy is Co-Founder and CEO of Teleport. An engineer by training, Kontsevoy launched Teleport in 2015 to provide other engineers solutions that allow them to quickly access and run any computing resource anywhere on the planet without having to worry about security and compliance issues. A serial entrepreneur, Ev was CEO and co-founder of Mailgun, which he successfully sold to Rackspace. Prior to Mailgun, Ev has had a variety of engineering roles. He holds a BS degree in Mathematics from Siberian Federal University, and has a passion for trains and vintage-film cameras.Links: Teleport: https://goteleport.com Teleport GitHub: https://github.com/gravitational/teleport Teleport Slack: https://goteleport.slack.com/join/shared_invite/zt-midnn9bn-AQKcq5NNDs9ojELKlgwJUA Previous episode with Ev Kontsevoy: https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/the-gravitational-pull-of-simplicity-with-ev-kontsevoy/ TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at VMware. Let's be honest—the past year has been far from easy. Due to, well, everything. It caused us to rush cloud migrations and digital transformation, which of course means long hours refactoring your apps, surprises on your cloud bill, misconfigurations and headache for everyone trying manage disparate and fractured cloud environments. VMware has an answer for this. With VMware multi-cloud solutions, organizations have the choice, speed, and control to migrate and optimizeapplications seamlessly without recoding, take the fastest path to modern infrastructure, and operate consistently across the data center, the edge, and any cloud. I urge to take a look at vmware.com/go/multicloud. You know my opinions on multi cloud by now, but there's a lot of stuff in here that works on any cloud. But don't take it from me thats: vmware.com/go/multicloud and my thanks to them again for sponsoring my ridiculous nonsense.Corey: You could build you go ahead and build your own coding and mapping notification system, but it takes time, and it sucks! Alternately, consider Courier, who is sponsoring this episode. They make it easy. You can call a single send API for all of your notifications and channels. You can control the complexity around routing, retries, and deliverability and simplify your notification sequences with automation rules. Visit courier.com today and get started for free. If you wind up talking to them, tell them I sent you and watch them wince—because everyone does when you bring up my name. Thats the glorious part of being me. Once again, you could build your own notification system but why on god's flat earth would you do that?Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. Roughly a year ago, I had a promoted guest episode featuring Ev Kontsevoy, the co-founder and CEO of Teleport.A year has passed and what a year it's been. Ev is back to tell us more about what they've been up to for the past year and, ideally, how things may have changed over in the security space. Ev, thank you for coming back to suffer the slings and arrows I will no doubt be hurling your way almost immediately.Ev: Thanks for having me back, Corey.Corey: So, it's been a heck of a year. We were basically settling into the pandemic when last we recorded, and people's security requirements when everyone is remote were dramatically changing. A year later, what's changed? It seems like the frantic, grab a bucket and start bailing philosophy has largely been accepted with something that feels almost like a new normal, ish. What are you seeing?Ev: Yes, we're seeing exact same thing, that it's really hard to tell what is normal. So, at the beginning of the pandemic, our company, Teleport was, so we were about 25 people. And then once we got the vaccines, and the government restrictions started to, kind of, disappear, people started to ask, “So, when are we going to go back to normal?” But the thing is, we're 100 employees now, which means that three-quarters of the company, they joined us during the pandemic, so we have no normal to go back to. So, now we have to redefine—not redefined, we just basically need to get comfortable with this new, fully remote culture with fully remote identity that we have, and become comfortable with it. And that's what we're doing.Corey: Beyond what, I guess, you're seeing, as far as the culture goes, internally as well, it feels like there's been a distinct shift in the past year or so, the entire security industry. I mean, I can sit here and talk about what I've seen, but again, I'm all over the place and I deal with a very select series of conversations. And I try not to confuse anecdotes with data. Anecdata is not the most reliable thing. You're working in this space. That is the entire industry you're in. How has the conversation in the industry around security shifted? What's new? What trends are emerging?Ev: So, there are several things actually happening. So, first of all, I wouldn't call ourselves, like, we do all of security. So, we're experts in access; like, how do you act this everything that you have in your cloud or in your data centers? And that space has been going through one transformation after another. It's been basically under the same scaling stress as the rest of cloud computing industry.And we can talk about historical changes that have been happening, and then we can talk a little bit about, kind of, latest and greatest. And in terms of what challenges companies have with secure access, maybe it helps if I just quickly describe what ‘access' actually means.Corey: Please, by all means. It's one of those words that everyone knows, but if you ask three people to define it, you'll get five definitions—Ev: [laugh]. Exactly.Corey: —and they don't really align. So please, you're the expert on this; I am here to listen because I guarantee you I am guilty of misusing the term at least once so far, today.Ev: Can't blame you. Can't blame you. We are—I was same way until I got into this space. So, access basically means four things. So, if you want to have access done properly into your cloud resources, you need to think about four things.First is connectivity. That's basically a physical ability to deliver an encrypted packet from a client to destination, to a resource whatever that is, could be database, could be, like, SSH machine, or whatever it is you're connecting to. So, connectivity is number one. So, then you need to authenticate. Authentication, that's when the resource decides if you should have access or not, based on who you are, hopefully.So, then authorization, that's the third component. Authorization, the difference—like, sometimes people confuse the two—the difference between authentication and authorization is that authorization is when you already authenticated, but the resource decides what actions you are allowed to perform. The typical example is, like, is it read-only or read-write access? So, that's authorization, deciding on which actions you're allowed to perform. And the final component of having access properly is having audit or visibility which is, again, it could be real-time and historical.So ideally, you need to have both. So, once you have those two solved, then you solved your access problem. And historically, if you look at how access has been done—so we had these giant machines, then we had microcomputers, then we had PCs, and they all have these things. So, you login into your Mac, and then if you try to delete certain file, you might get access denied. So, you see there is connectivity—in this case, it's physical, a keyboard is physically connected to the [laugh] actual machine; so then you have authentication that you log in in the beginning; then authorization, if you can or cannot do certain things in your machine; and finally, your Mac keeps an audit log.But then once the industry, we got the internet, we got all these clouds, so amount of these components that we're now operating on, we have hundreds of thousands of servers, and load-balancers, and databases, and Kubernetes clusters, and dashboards, all of these things, all of them implement these four things: connectivity, authentication, authorization, audit.Corey: Let me drive into that for a minute first, to make sure I'm clear on something. Connectivity makes sense. The network is the computer, et cetera. When you don't have a network to something, it may as well not exist. I get that.And the last one you mentioned, audit of a trail of who done it and who did what, when, that makes sense to me. But authentication and authorization are the two slippery ones in my mind that tend to converge a fair bit. Can you dive a little bit in delineate what the difference is between those two, please?Ev: So authentication, if you try to authenticate into a database, database needs to check if you are on the list of people who should be allowed to access. That's authentication, you need to prove that you are who you claim you are.Corey: Do you have an account and credentials to get into that account?Ev: Correct. And they're good ways to do authentication and bad ways to do authentication. So, bad way to do authentication—and a lot of companies actually guilty of that—if you're using shared credentials. Let's say you have a user called ‘admin' and that user has a password, and those are stored in some kind of stored—in, like 1Password, or something like Vault, some kind of encrypted Vault, and then when someone needs to access a database, they go and borrow this credentials and they go and do that. So, that is an awful way to do authentication.Corey: Now, another way I've seen that's terrible as been also, “Oh, if you're connecting from this network, you must be allowed in,” which is just… yeee.Ev: Oh, yeah. That's a different sin. And that's a perimeter security sin. But a much better way to do authentication is what is called identity-based authentication. Identity means that you always use your identity of who you are within the company.So, you would go in through corporate SSO, something like Okta, or Active Directory, or even Google, or GitHub, and then based on that information, you're given access. So, the resource in this case database, [unintelligible 00:07:39] say, “Oh, it's Corey. And Corey is a member of this group, and also a member of that group.” And based on that it allows you to get in, but that's where authentication ends. And now, if you want to do something, like let's say you want to delete some data, now a database needs to check, ah, can you actually perform that action? That is the authorization process.And to do that, usually, we use some mechanism like role-based access control. It will look into which group are you in. Oh, you are an admin, so admins have more privileges than regular people. So, then that's the process of authorization.And the importance of separating the two, and important to use identity because remember, audit is another important component of implementing access properly. So, if you're sharing credentials, for example, you will see in your audit log, “Admin did this. Admin did that.” It's exact same admin, but you don't know who actually was behind that action. So, by sharing credentials, you're also obscuring your own audit which is why it's not really a good thing.And going back to this industry trends is that because the amount of these resources, like databases and servers and so on, in the cloud has gotten so huge, so we now have this hardware pain, we just have too many things that need access. And all of these things, the software itself is getting more complicated, so now we have a software pain as well, that you have so many different layers in your stack that they need to access. That's another dimension for introducing access pain. And also, we just have more developers, and the development teams are getting bigger and bigger, the software is eating the world, so there is a people-ware pain. So, on the one hand, you have these four problems you need to solve—connectivity, authentication, authorization, access—and on the other hand, you have more hardware, more software, more people, these pain points.And so you need to consolidate, and that's really what we do is that we allow you to have a single place where you can do connectivity, authentication, authorization, and audit, for everything that you have in the cloud. We basically believe that the future is going to be like metaverse, like in those books. So, all of these cloud resources are slowly converging into this one giant planetary-scale computer.Corey: Suddenly, “I live on Twitter,” is no longer going to be quite as much of a metaphor as it is today.Ev: [laugh]. No, no. Yeah, I think we're getting better. If you look into what is actually happening on our computing devices that we buy, the answer is not the lot, so everything is running in data centers, the paradigm of thin client seems to be winning. Let's just embrace that.Corey: Yeah. You're never going to be able to shove data centers worth compute into a phone. By the time you can get there, data centers will have gotten better. It's the constant question of where do you want things to live? How do you want that to interact?I talk periodically about multi-cloud, I talk about lock-in, everyone is concerned about vendor lock-in, but the thing that people tend to mostly ignore is that you're already locked in throught a variety of different ways. And one way is both the networking side of it as well as the identity management piece because every cloud handles that differently and equating those same things between different providers that work different ways is monstrous. Is that the story of what you're approaching from a Teleport perspective? Is that the primary use case, is that an ancillary use case, or are we thinking about this in too small a term?Ev: So, you're absolutely right, being locked in, in and—like, by itself is not a bad thing. It's a trade-off. So, if you lack expertise in something and you outsourcing certain capability to a provider, then you're developing that dependency, you may call it lock-in or not, but that needs to be a conscious decision. Like, well, you didn't know how to do it, then someone else was doing it for you, so you should be okay with the lock-in. However, there is a danger, that, kind of, industry-wide danger about everyone relying on one single provider.So, that is really what we all try to avoid. And with identity specifically, I feel like we're in a really good spot that fairly early, I don't see a single provider emerging as owning everyone's identity. You know, some people use Okta; others totally happy tying everything to Google Apps. So, then you have people that rely on Amazon AWS native credentials, then plenty of smaller companies, they totally happy having all of their engineers authenticate through GitHub, so they use GitHub as a source of identity. And the fact that all of these providers are more or less compatible with each other—so we have protocols like OpenID Connect and SAML, so I'm not that concerned that identity itself is getting captured by a single player.And Teleport is not even playing in that space; we don't keep your identity. We integrate with everybody because, at the end of the day, we want to be the solution of choice for a company, regardless of which identity platform they're using. And some of them using several, like all of the developers might be authenticating via GitHub, but everyone else goes through Google Apps, for example.Corey: And the different product problem. Oh, my stars, I was at a relatively small startup going through an acquisition at one point in my career, and, “All right. Let's list all of the SaaS vendors that we use.” And the answer was something on an average of five per employee by the time you did the numbers out, and—there were hundreds of them—and most of them because it started off small, and great, everyone has their own individual account, we set it up there. I mean, my identity management system here for what most of what I do is LastPass.I have individual accounts there, two-factor auth enabled for anything that supports it, and that is it. Some vendors don't support that: we have to use shared accounts, which is just terrifying. We make sure that we don't use those for anything that's important. But it comes down to, from our perspective, that everyone has their own ridiculous series of approaches, and even if we were to, “All right, it's time to grow up and be a responsible business, and go for a single-sign-on approach.” Which is inevitable as companies scale, and there's nothing wrong with that—but there's still so many of these edge cases and corner case stories that don't integrate.So, it makes the problem smaller, but it's still there rather persistently. And that doesn't even get into the fact that for a lot of these tools, “Oh, you want SAML integration? Smells like enterprise to us.” And suddenly they wind up having an additional surcharge on top of that for accessing it via a federated source of identity, which means there are active incentives early on to not do that. So it's—Ev: It's absolutely insane. Yeah, you're right. You're right. It's almost like you get penalized for being small, like, in the early days. It's not that easy if you have a small project you're working on. Say it's a company of three people and they're just cranking in the garage, and it's just so easy to default to using shared credentials and storing them in LastPass or 1Password. And then the interesting way—like, the longer you wait, the harder it is to go back to use a proper SSO for everything. Yeah.Corey: I do want to call out that Teleport has a free and open-source community edition that supports GitHub SSO, and in order to support enterprise SSO, you have to go to your paid offering. I have no problem with this, to be clear, that you have to at least be our customer before we'll integrate with your SSO solution makes perfect sense, but you don't have a tiering system where, “Oh, you want to add that other SSO thing? And well, then it's going to go from X dollars per employee to Y dollars.” Which is the path that I don't like. I think it's very reasonable to say that their features flat-out you don't get as a free user. And even then you do offer SSO just not the one that some people will want to pick.Ev: Correct. So, the open-source version of Teleport supports SSO that smaller companies use, versus our enterprise offering, we shaped it to be more appealing for companies at certain scale.Corey: Yeah. And you've absolutely nailed it. There are a number of companies in the security space who enraged people about how they wind up doing their differentiation around things like SSO or, God forbid, two-factor auth, or once upon a time, SSL. This is not that problem. I just want to be explicitly clear on that, that is not what I'm talking about. But please, continue.Ev: Look, we see it the same way. We sometimes say that we do not charge for security, like, top-level security you get, is available even in the open-source. And look, it's a common problem for most startups who, when you have an open-source offering, where do you draw the line? And sometimes you can find answers in very unexpected places. For example, let's look into security space.One common reason that companies get compromised is, unfortunately, human factor. You could use the best tool in the world, but if you just by mistake, like, just put a comma in the wrong place and one of your config files just suddenly is out of shape, right, so—Corey: People make mistakes and you can't say, “Never make a mistake.” If you can get your entire company compromised by someone in your office clicking on the wrong link, the solution is not to teach people not to click on links; it's to mitigate the damage and blast radius of someone clicking on a link that they shouldn't. That is resilience that understand their human factors at play.Ev: Yep, exactly. And here's an enterprise feature that was basically given to us by customer requests. So, they would say we want to have FedRAMP compliance because we want to work with federal government, or maybe because we want to work with financial institutions who require us to have that level of compliance. And we tell them, “Yeah, sure. You can configure Teleport to be compliant. Look, here's all the different things that you need to tweak in the config file.”And the answer is, “Well, what if we make a mistake? It's just too costly. Can we have Teleport just automatically works in that mode?” In other words, if you feed it the config file with an error, it will just refuse to work. So basically, you take your product, and you chop off things that are not compliant, which means that it's impossible to feed an incorrect config file into it, and here you got an enterprise edition.It's a version that we call its FIPS mode. So, when it runs FIPS mode, it has different runtime inside, it basically doesn't even have a crypto that is not approved, which you can turn on by mistake. It will just not work.Corey: By the time we're talking about different levels of regulatory compliance, yeah, we are long past the point where I'm going to have any comments in the slightest is about differentiation of pricing tiers and the rest. Yeah, your free tier doesn't support FedRAMP is one of those ludicrous things that—who would say that [laugh] actually be sincere [insane 00:18:28]?Ev: [laugh].Corey: That's just mind-boggling to me.Ev: Hold on a second. I don't want anyone to be misinformed. You can be FedRAMP compliant with the free tier; you just need to configure it properly. Like the enterprise feature, in this case, we give you a thing that only works in this mode; it is impossible to misconfigure it.Corey: It's an attestation and it's a control that you need—Ev: Yep. Yep.Corey: —in order to demonstrate compliance because half the joy of regulatory compliance is not doing the thing, it's proving you do the thing. That is a joy, and those of you who've worked in regulated environments know exactly what I'm talking about. And those of you who have not, are happy but please—Ev: Frankly, I think anyone can do it using some other open-source tools. You can even take, like, OpenSSH, sshd, and then you can probably build a different makefile for just the build pipeline that changes the linking, that it doesn't even have the crypto that is not on the approved list. So, then if someone feeds a config file into it that has, like, a hashing function that is not approved, it will simply refuse to work. So, maybe you can even turn it into something that you could say here's a hardened version of sshd, or whatever. So, same thing.Corey: I see now you're talking about the four aspects of this, the connectivity, the authentication, the authorization, and the audit components of access. How does that map to a software product, if that makes sense? Because it sounds like a series of principles, great, it's good to understand and hold those in your head both, separately and distinct, but also combining to mean access both [technical 00:19:51] and the common parlance. How do you express that in Teleport?Ev: So, Teleport doesn't really add authorization, for example, to something that doesn't have it natively. The problem that we have is just the overall increasing complexity of computing environments. So, when you're deploying something into, let's say, AWS East region, so what is it that you have there? You have some virtual machines, then you have something like Kubernetes on top, then you have Docker registry, so you have these containers running inside, then you have maybe MongoDB, then you might have some web UI to manage MongoDB and Grafana dashboard. So, all of that is software; we're only consuming more and more of it so that our own code that we're deploying, it's icing on a really, really tall cake.And every layer in that layer cake is listening on a socket; it needs encryption; it has a login, so it has authentication; it has its own idea of role-based access control; it has its own config file. So, if you want to do cloud computing properly, so you got to have this expertise on your team, how to configure those four pillars of access for every layer in your stack. That is really the pain. And the Teleport value is that we're letting you do it in one place. We're saying, consolidate all of this four-axis pillars in one location.That's really what we do. It's not like we invented a better way to authorize, or authenticate; no, we natively integrate with the cake, with all of these different layers. But consolidation, that is the key value of Teleport because we simply remove so much pain associated with configuring all of these things. Like, think of someone like—I'm trying not to disclose any names or customers, but let's pick, uh, I don't know, something like Tesla. So, Tesla has compute all over the world.So, how can you implement authentication, authorization, audit log, and connectivity, too, for every vehicle that's on the road? Because all of these things need software updates, they're all components of a giant machine—Corey: They're all intermittent. You can't say, “Oh, at this time of the day, we should absolutely make sure everything in the world is connected to the internet and ready to grab the update.” It doesn't work that way; you've got to be… understand that connectivity is fickle.Ev: So, most—and because computers growing generally, you could expect most companies in the future to be more like Tesla, so companies like that will probably want to look into Teleport technology.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by “you”—gabyte. Distributed technologies like Kubernetes are great, citation very much needed, because they make it easier to have resilient, scalable, systems. SQL databases haven't kept pace though, certainly not like no SQL databases have like Route 53, the world's greatest database. We're still, other than that, using legacy monolithic databases that require ever growing instances of compute. Sometimes we'll try and bolt them together to make them more resilient and scalable, but let's be honest it never works out well. Consider Yugabyte DB, its a distributed SQL database that solves basically all of this. It is 100% open source, and there's not asterisk next to the “open” on that one. And its designed to be resilient and scalable out of the box so you don't have to charge yourself to death. It's compatible with PostgreSQL, or “postgresqueal” as I insist on pronouncing it, so you can use it right away without having to learn a new language and refactor everything. And you can distribute it wherever your applications take you, from across availability zones to other regions or even other cloud providers should one of those happen to exist. Go to yugabyte.com, thats Y-U-G-A-B-Y-T-E dot com and try their free beta of Yugabyte Cloud, where they host and manage it for you. Or see what the open source project looks like—its effortless distributed SQL for global apps. My thanks to Yu—gabyte for sponsoring this episode.Corey: If we take a look at the four tenets that you've identified—connectivity, authentication, authorization, and audit—it makes perfect sense. It is something that goes back to the days when computers were basically glorified pocket calculators as opposed to my pocket calculator now being basically a supercomputer. Does that change as you hit cloud-scale where we have companies that are doing what seem to be relatively pedestrian things, but also having 100,000 EC2 instances hanging out in AWS? Does this add additional levels of complexity on top of those four things?Ev: Yes. So, there is one that I should have mentioned earlier. So, in addition to software, hardware, and people-ware—so those are three things that are exploding, more compute, more software, more engineers needing access—there is one more dimension that is kind of unique, now, at the scale that we're in today, and that's time. So, let's just say that you are a member of really privileged group like you're a DBA, or maybe you are a chief security officer, so you should have access to a certain privileged database. But do you really use that access 24/7, all the time? No, but you have it.So, your laptop has an ability, if you type certain things into it, to actually receive credentials, like, certificates to go and talk to this database all the time. It's an anti-pattern that is now getting noticed. So, the new approach to access is to make a tie to an intent. So, by default, no one in an organization has access to anything. So, if you want to access a database, or a server, or Kubernetes cluster, you need to issue what's called ‘access request.'It's similar to pull request if you're trying to commit code into Git. So, you send an access request—using Teleport for example; you could probably do it some other way—and it will go into something like Slack or PagerDuty, so your team members will see that, “Oh, Corey is trying to access that database, and he listed a ticket number, like, some issue he is trying to troubleshoot with that particular database instance. Yeah, we'll approve access for 30 minutes.” So, then you go and do that, and the access is revoked automatically after 30 minutes. So, that is this new trend that's happening in our space, and it makes you feel nice, too, it means that if someone hacks into your laptop at this very second, right after you finished authenticating and authorization, you're still okay because there is no access; access will be created for you if you request it based on the intent, so it dramatically reduces the attack surface, using time as additional dimension.Corey: The minimum viable permission to do a thing. In principle, least-access is important in these areas. It's like, “Oh, yeah, my user account, you mean root?” “Yeah, I guess that works in a developer environment,” looks like a Docker container that will be done as soon as you're finished, but for most use cases—and probably even that one—that's not the direction to go in. Having things scoped down and—Ev: Exactly.Corey: —not just by what the permission is, but by time.Ev: Exactly.Corey: Yeah.Ev: This system basically allows you to move away from root-type accounts completely, for everything. So, which means that there is no root to attack anymore.Corey: What really strikes me is how, I guess, different aspects of technology that this winds up getting to. And to illustrate that in the form of question, let me go back to my own history because, you know, let's make it about me here. I've mentioned it before on the show, but I started off my technical career as someone who specialized in large-scale email systems. That was a niche I found really interesting, and I got into it. So did you.I worked on running email servers, and you were the CEO and co-founder of Mailgun, which later you sold the Rackspace. You're a slightly bigger scale than I am, but it was clear to me that even then, in the 2006 era when I was doing this, that there was not going to be the same need going forward for an email admin at every company; the cloudification of email had begun, and I realized I could either dig my heels in and fight the tide, or I could find other things to specialize in. And I've told that part of the story, but what I haven't told is that it was challenging at first as I tried to do that because all the jobs I talked to looked at my resume and said, “Ah, you're the email admin. Great. We don't need one of those.”It was a matter of almost being pigeonholed or boxed into the idea of being the email person. I would argue that Teleport is not synonymous with email in any meaningful sense as far as how it is perceived in the industry; you are very clearly no longer the email guy. Does the idea being boxed in, I guess—Ev: [laugh].Corey: —[unintelligible 00:27:05] resonate at all with you? And if so, how did you get past it?Ev: Absolutely. The interesting thing is, before starting the Mailgun, I was not an email person. I would just say that I was just general-purpose technologist, and I always enjoyed building infrastructure frameworks. Basically, I always enjoyed building tools for other engineers. But then gotten into this email space, and even though Mailgun was a software product, which actually had surprisingly huge, kind of, scalability requirements early on because email is much heavier than HTTP traffic; people just send a lot of data via emails.So, we were solving interesting technical challenges, but when I would meet other engineers, I would experience the exact same thing you did. They would put me into this box of, “That's an email guy. He knows email technology, but seemingly doesn't know much about scaling web apps.” Which was totally not true. And it bothered me a little bit.Frankly, it was one of the reasons we decided to get acquired by Rackspace because they effectively said, “Why don't you come join us and we'll continue to operate as independent company, but you can join our cloud team and help us reinvent cloud computing.” It was really appealing. So, I actually moved to Texas after acquisition; I worked on the Rackspace cloud team for a while. So, that's how my transition from this being in the email box happened. So, I went from an email expert to just generally cloud computing expert. And cloud computing expert sounds awesome, and it allows me to work—Corey: I promise, it's not awesome—Ev: [laugh].Corey: —for people listening to this. Also, it's one of those, are you a cloud expert? Everyone says no to that because who in the world would claim that? It's so broad in so many different expressions of it. Because you know the follow-up question to anyone who says, “Yeah,” is going to be some esoteric thing about a system you've never heard of before because there's so many ridiculous services across totally different providers, of course, it's probably a thing. Maybe it's actually a Pokemon, we don't know. But it's hard to consider yourself an expert in this. It's like, “Well, I have some damage from [laugh] getting smacked around by clouds and, yeah, we'll call that expertise; why not?”Ev: Exactly. And also how frequently people mispronounce, like, cloud with clown. And it's like, “Oh, I'm clown computing expert.” [laugh].Corey: People mostly call me a loud computing expert. But that's a separate problem.Ev: But the point is that if you work on a product that's called cloud, so you definitely get to claim expertise of that. And the interesting thing that Mailgun being, effectively, an infrastructure-level product—so it's part of the platform—every company builds their own cloud platform and runs it, and so Teleport is part of that. So, that allowed us to get out of the box. So, if you working on, right now we're in the access space, so we're working closely with Kubernetes community, with Linux kernel community, with databases, so by extension, we have expertise in all of these different areas, and it actually feels much nicer. So, if you are computing security access company, people tend to look at you, it's like, “Yeah, you know, a little bit of everything.” So, that feels pretty nice.Corey: It's of those cross-functional things—Ev: Yeah, yeah.Corey: —whereas on some level, you just assume, well, email isn't either, but let's face it: email is the default API that everything, there's very little that you cannot configure to send email. The hard part is how to get them to stop emailing you. But it started off as far—from my world at least—the idea that all roads lead to email. In fact, we want to talk security, a long time ago the internet collectively decided one day that our email inbox was the entire cornerstone of our online identity. Give me access to your email, I, for all intents and purposes, can become you on the internet without some serious controls around this.So, those conversations, I feel like they were heading in that direction by the time I left email world, but it's very clear to me that what you're doing now at Teleport is a much clearer ability to cross boundaries into other areas where you have to touch an awful lot of different things because security touches everything, and I still maintain it has to be baked-in and an intentional thing, rather than, “Oh yeah, we're going to bolt security on after the fact.” It's, yeah, you hear about companies that do that, usually in headlines about data breaches, or worse. It's a hard problem.Ev: Actually, it's an interesting dilemma you're talking about. Is security built-in into everything or is it an add-on? And logically—talk to anyone, and most people say, “Yeah, it needs to be a core component of whatever it is you're building; making security as an add-on is not possible.” But then reality hits in, and the reality is that we're running on—we're standing on the shoulder of giants.There is so much legacy technologies that we built this cloud monster on top of… no, nothing was built in, so we actually need to be very crafty at adding security on top of what we already have, if we want to take advantage of all this pre-existing things that we've built for decades. So, that's really what's happening, I think, with security and access. So, if you ask me if Teleport is a bolt-on security, I say, “Yes, we are, but it works really well.” And it's extremely pragmatic and reasonable, and it gives you security compliance, but most of all, very, very good user experience out of the box.Corey: It's amazing to me how few security products focus on user experience out of the box, but they have to. You cannot launch or maintain a security product successfully—to my mind—without making it non-adversarial to the user. The [days of security is no 00:32:26] are gone.Ev: Because of that human element insecurity. If you make something complicated, if you make something that's hard to reason about, then it will never be secure.Corey: Yeah.Ev: Don't copy-paste IP table rules without understanding what they do. [laugh].Corey: Yeah, I think we all have been around long enough in data center universes remember those middle of the night drives to the data center for exactly that sort of thing. Yeah, it's one of those hindsight things of, set a cron job to reset the IP table rules for, you know, ten minutes from now in case you get this hilariously wrong. It's the sort of thing that you learn right after you really could have used that knowledge. Same story. But those are the easy, safe examples of I screwed up on a security thing. The worst ones can be company-ending.Ev: Exactly, yeah. So, in this sense, when it comes to security, and access specifically, so this old Python rule that there is only one way to do something, it's the most important thing you can do. So, when it comes to security and access, we basically—it's one of the things that Teleport is designed around, that for all protocols, for all different resources, from SSH to Kubernetes to web apps to databases; we never support passwords. It's not even in the codebase. No, you cannot configure Teleport to use passwords.We never support things like public keys, for example, because it's just another form of a password. It's just extremely long password. So, we have this approach that certificates, it's the best method because it supports both authentication and authorization, and then you have to do it for everything, just one way of doing everything. And then you apply this to connectivity: so there is a single proxy that speaks all protocols and everyone goes to that proxy. Then you apply the same principle to audit: there is one audit where everything goes into.So, that's how this consolidation, that's where the simplicity comes down to. So, one way of doing something; one way of configuring everything. So, that's where you get both ease of use and security at the same time.Corey: One last question that I want to ask you before we wind up calling this an episode is that I've been using Teleport as a reference for a while when I talk to companies, generally in the security space, as an example of what you can do to tell a story about a product that isn't built on fear, uncertainty, and doubt. And for those who are listening who don't know what I'm referring specifically, I'm talking about pick any random security company and pull up their website and see what it is that they talk about and how they talk about themselves. Very often, you'll see stories where, “Data breaches will cost you extraordinary piles of money,” or they'll play into the shame of what will happen to your career if you're named in the New York Times for being the CSO when the data gets breached, and whatnot. But everything that I've seen from Teleport to date has instead not even gone slightly in that direction; it talks again and again, in what I see on your site, about how quickly it is to access things, access that doesn't get in the way, easily implement security and compliance, visibility into access and behavior. It's all about user experience and smoothing the way and not explaining to people what the dire problems that they're going to face are if they don't care about security in general and buy your product specifically. It is such a refreshing way of viewing storytelling around a security product. How did you get there? And how do I make other people do it, too?Ev: I think it just happened organically. Teleport originally—the interesting story of Teleport, it was not built to be sold. Teleport was built as a side project that we started for another system that we were working on at the time. So, there was a autonomous Kubernetes platform called Grá—it doesn't really matter in this context, but we had this problem that we had a lot of remote sites with a lot of infrastructure on them, with extremely strict security and compliance requirements, and we needed to access those sites or build tools to access those sites. So, Teleport was built like, okay, it's way better than just stitching a bunch of open-source components together because it's faster and easier to use, so we're optimizing for that.And as a side effect of that simplification, consolidation, and better user experience is a security compliance. And then the interesting thing that happened is that people who we're trying to sell the big platform to, they started to notice about, “Oh, this access thing you have is actually pretty awesome. Can we just use that separately?” And that's how it turned into a product. So, we built an amazing secure access solution almost by accident because there was only one customer in mind, and that was us, in the early days. So yeah, that's how you do it, [laugh] basically. But it's surprisingly similar to Slack, right? Why is Slack awesome? Because the team behind it was a gaming company in the beginning.Corey: They were trying to build a game. Yeah.Ev: Yeah, they built for themselves. They—[laugh] I guess that's the trick: make yourself happy.Corey: I think the team founded Flickr before that, and they were trying to build a game. And like, the joke I heard is, like, “All right, the year is 2040. Stuart and his team have now raised $8 billion trying to build a game, and yet again it fails upward into another productivity tool company, or something else entirely that”—but it's a recurring pattern. Someday they'll get their game made; I have faith in them. But yeah, building a tool that scratches your own itch is either a great path or a terrible mistake, depending entirely upon whether you first check and see if there's an existing solution that solves the problem for you. The failure mode of this is, “Ah, we're going to build our own database engine,” in almost every case.Ev: Yeah. So just, kind of like, interesting story about the two, people will [unintelligible 00:38:07] surprised that Teleport is a single binary. It's basically a drop-in replacement that you put on a box, and it runs instead of sshd. But it wasn't initially this way. Initially, it was [unintelligible 00:38:16], like, few files in different parts of a file system. But because internally, I really wanted to run it on a bunch of Raspberry Pi's at home, and it would have been a lot easier if it was just a single file because then I just could quickly update them all. So, it just took a little bit of effort to compress it down to a single binary that can run in different modes depending on the key. And now look at that; it's a major benefit that a lot of people who deploy Teleport on hundreds of thousands of pieces of infrastructure, they definitely taking advantage of the fact that it's that simple.Corey: Simplicity is the only thing that scales. As soon as it gets complex, it's more things to break. Ev, thank you so much for taking the time to sit with me, yet again, to talk about Teleport and how you're approaching things. If people want to learn more about you, about the company, about the product in all likelihood, where can they go?Ev: The easiest place to go would be goteleport.com where you can find everything, but we're also on GitHub. If you search for Teleport in GitHub, you'll find this there. So, join our Slack channel, join our community mailing list and most importantly, download Teleport, put it on your Raspberry Pi, play with it and see how awesome it is to have the best industry, best security practice, that don't get in the way.Corey: I love the tagline. Thank you so much, once again. Ev Kontsevoy, co-founder and CEO of Teleport. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with a comment that goes into a deranged rant about how I'm completely wrong, and the only way to sell security products—specifically yours—is by threatening me with the New York Times data breach story.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.

______________________________________________  Welcome to  Skyjacks: Courier's Call - Season 2!______________________________________________ANNOUNCEMENTS! Backer Surveys, Address Changes and Voting!Be sure to complete those back surveys, send us your change of address and get that voting done if you backed at that level! We got rewards headed towards you and we need that information to make sure it all gets to you on time and safely! TimeskipThe first part of this season picks up after a bit of a time jump. Its been a little over a month since our heroes left Otterbachs and they've stopped at two other locations (port of call #2 and #3) along the six month route of the Red Audron. There were some adventures, some growing pains, some thrilling heroics and even a run in with the infamous Jolly Jack as well as most of their time in Tesh Urt but all that is behind us as our heroes experience their last night in the city before heading out.  If you've enjoyed the show, liked what we've done or just have feelings about this season, feel free to tell us at skyjackscourierscall@gmail.com or to leave us a review on itunes!______________________________________________MORE FROM THE WORLD OF SPEIRIf you want to join the Patreon to get exclusive behind the scenes content (including all eight episodes of the Jolly Jack Adventure!), please see the link below:https://www.patreon.com/oneshotpodcast If you want to get more info on the World of Speir through the Skyjacks World Zine, please see the link below: https://one-shot-podcast.itch.io/the-skyjacks-zine-vol-1______________________________________________CONTENT WARNINGMain Show:  lying to adults, sneaking into parties, tense situations______________________________________________CALL TO ACTIONRight Wrongs. Do Mercies. Take Flight! ______________________________________________TALK TO YOUR KIDSCourier's Call  does not condone racism, hate or bigotry of any kind. We stand with Black Lives Matters on these issues and call upon everyone to demand changes to have all people stand on equal footing. No one deserves to be afraid or persecuted for just being who they are. If you wish to talk to your kids about racism and its damaging effects, this is a good resource.  As is this.Courier's Call features non-binary gendered characters. If you are not familiar with non-binary genders or neutral pronouns, this is a good resource for for talking about those concepts with your kids!A section of Season 1 of Courier's Call deals with the kidnapping of a child. While our story may be fictional fantasy, this issue is one that is very real in our world. Talk to your kids about child abduction, what they and you can do to stay safe and be alert. If you need help and/or resources, please check out more information here. ______________________________________________Join Our Mailing List Interact with us online!Twitter: @couriercall  Instagram: @skyjackscourierscallOfficial Art by Jessica Kuczynski  @AngryArtist113 on Twitter* Sound effects for this episode were pulled from freesound.org under a creative commons zero attribution license 

It wasn't pretty, but the Gamecocks survive and move to 2-0 with Georgia on deck. Extensive coverage of Carolina's game with ECU with Wes Mitchell of Gamecock Central, former South Carolina quarterback Perry Orth and Gene Sapakoff of The Post and Courier. Plus, around the SEC and college football world...what we learned and our primary takeaways from week two.

Episode #46 – Uncharted Worlds: Our ‘hero' Starrion Riku starts an unusual job for a moderately-powerful crime boss, and finds that he is not alone on this mission. Music from https://filmmusic.io “Take a Chance” by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com) License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

The guys talk about their favorite movie trilogy, tailgating, and Coercive Cinema featuring Risky Business and The Courier! YouTube - www.youtube.com/channel/UCuEgNqvW…JPRHxHrA/featured Facebook - www.facebook.com/foryourdistraction Twitter - twitter.com/podcastFYD http://feeds.feedburner.com/foryourdistraction For Your Distraction is a member of the Electronic Media Collective! To listen to us and more great shows head to electronicmediacollective.com/distraction/

Posing as a Pastor, Teacher, Coach, and Mentor, Louis "Skip" Reville constructed his life to become one of the most prolific child molesters in American History.Get your Carolina Crimes gear at: www.carolinacrimes.comVisit us on Social Media:Facebook: Carolina Crimes PodcastTwitter: @SCcrimespodSources:Charleston City PaperPost and Courier

Reviews of Free Guy, Reminiscence, Snake Eyes, Only Murders in the Building, An Inspector Calls, The Courier, King Lear, Tales from the Loop, and more!

Reviews of Free Guy, Reminiscence, Snake Eyes, Only Murders in the Building, An Inspector Calls, The Courier, King Lear, Tales from the Loop, and more!

HIO Ep. 92 - Interstate Commerce & Cannabis Courier Delivery Services with Tim Conder of Blackbird   Today, we'll be speaking with Tim Conder of Blackbird about how the federal cannabis policy reform bill recently unveiled by U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer would affect cannabis, interstate commerce and taxes will also discuss the variations in approaches when it comes to incremental versus comprehensive policy change and more. Without further ado, let's hash it out. ---- https://myblackbird.com/ https://www.linkedin.com/company/blackbird-logistics-corporation/ https://www.facebook.com/blackbirdgo/ https://twitter.com/blackbirdgo   Hash it Out features conversations about trending cannabis topics. We also bring in industry insiders and influencers to discuss their point of view. To reach the show: hashitout@trichomes.com  

Mike Carmin of The Journal and Courier joins the podcast to preview UConn's match up against Purdue. Mike breaks down the Purdue roster and calls out players to watch for, discusses what UConn will need to do to beat the Boilermakers, and more.

About EricEric Dynowski, Managing Partner and Chief Solutions Officer at Deft, has been developing software, designing global infrastructures, and managing large technology installations for over 20 years. His background in complex infrastructure design and integration has helped him reduce customer budgets by millions.Links: Deft: https://www.deft.com TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: You could build you go ahead and build your own coding and mapping notification system, but it takes time, and it sucks! Alternately, consider Courier, who is sponsoring this episode. They make it easy. You can call a single send API for all of your notifications and channels. You can control the complexity around routing, retries, and deliverability and simplify your notification sequences with automation rules. Visit courier.com today and get started for free. If you wind up talking to them, tell them I sent you and watch them wince—because everyone does when you bring up my name. Thats the glorious part of being me. Once again, you could build your own notification system but why on god's flat earth would you do that? Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by Thinkst. This is going to take a minute to explain, so bear with me. I linked against an early version of their tool, canarytokens.org in the very early days of my newsletter, and what it does is relatively simple and straightforward. It winds up embedding credentials, files, that sort of thing in various parts of your environment, wherever you want to; it gives you fake AWS API credentials, for example. And the only thing that these things do is alert you whenever someone attempts to use those things. It's an awesome approach. I've used something similar for years. Check them out. But wait, there's more. They also have an enterprise option that you should be very much aware of canary.tools. You can take a look at this, but what it does is it provides an enterprise approach to drive these things throughout your entire environment. You can get a physical device that hangs out on your network and impersonates whatever you want to. When it gets Nmap scanned, or someone attempts to log into it, or access files on it, you get instant alerts. It's awesome. If you don't do something like this, you're likely to find out that you've gotten breached, the hard way. Take a look at this. It's one of those few things that I look at and say, “Wow, that is an amazing idea. I love it.” That's canarytokens.org and canary.tools. The first one is free. The second one is enterprise-y. Take a look. I'm a big fan of this. More from them in the coming weeks.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. For a while I've been talking about how I started The Duckbill Group as a highly niche, highly focused consultancy aimed at one very expensive problem—the AWS bill—and that's all we do. We don't do implementation; we simply do the thing that it says on the tin. And it turns out that you can get fairly good at the problem like that in not a tremendous amount of time.And today's promoted episode of Screaming in the Cloud. My guest is Eric Dynowski, Chief Solutions Officer and Partner at Deft, which is a consulting company that is almost inverted, in the sense that they do an awful lot of stuff. And we're going to argue about it now. Eric, thank you for taking the time to speak with me today.Eric: Great to be here, Corey. Can't wait to dig in. [laugh].Corey: So, when I started this place back almost five years ago now, I was coming out of an engineering career that I found deeply unsatisfying. I had a bunch of working with computers skill sets, and I wanted to apply them to something that I could use as an independent consultant—because who would ever build a team or a company out of this?—that I could wind up doing repeatedly, so I could, you know, make money, not have a boss, and ideally work less than 80 hours a week. And fixing the AWS bill was the first one I tried; it turned out that, yeah, there is, in fact, an awful lot of expensive business problem hidden in there. And that's what I've been focusing on ever since. I get the distinct impression that your story doesn't quite sound like that one.Eric: Well, it's a little bit like that one, in the sense that I was once an engineer and a technician doing things, and had the crazy idea to go off and start a company that consulted and helped people with their technology needs. And maybe we're a little bit alike in the sense that we also have a very singular focused offering—I'm going to tease you a little bit here, Corey—is that we do one thing: we provide technology solutions for our customers. But probably what you are getting at is, “Well, that's a really broad statement, Eric, what is a technology solution?”Corey: It is. And the reason I did this is because my marketing budget was 50 bucks. So, I wanted something that the Rolodex effect is what I was after, where when someone says at a party to someone else, “Well, I have a problem: my AWS bill.” I want the answer to be, “Hey, I have someone for you to talk to.” You don't generally tend to see that with more broad statements around positioning most of the time.Eric: Sure. Sure.Corey: I also felt like if I was going to be, all right, I'm the best cloud architect advisor ever. Great, now I'm competing against folks like you and the giant consultancies that are in every country. And honestly, those folks have better airport ads than I'm going to be able to put up, at least at the time. Now, I have a platypus for a mascot. So, one wonders whether that would still hold true. You took a very different approach and have done fantastically—Eric: Yeah.Corey: —well with it.Eric: Yeah, I mean, maybe a little bit of history here is helpful. When I started my company, which was Turing Group back in 2013, we did actually focus pretty tightly just on AWS, and that's all we did. We wanted to help customers get in AWS, fix their problems in AWS, scale in AWS, manage their costs, all these sorts of things. And along the way, we had customers coming back to us saying, “We love you guys. You're doing great in [laugh] AWS, but I have other needs too.”And I started saying, “Well, I know a guy over there that does that.” And, “I've got a good friend over here at this company that does it.” And, you know, we're referring back and forth. And kind of parallel to that, one of my business partners who is running a company called Server Central was having the exact inverse problem. And, you know, they were providing managed services within the data center, managed networking capability, things of that nature, you know, helping customers build out an infrastructure to operate at scale, where it's like, “Oh, we need 1000 servers, and we need them really inexpensive, and we have to be able to manage them at scale.”And they were crushing it, doing a great job except his customer start getting back to him saying, “Love what you guys are doing. We're also using AWS, and we want some help with that.” And so, he would pick up the phone and call me and say, “Eric, can you guys help here?” And in some sense, we were competitors. I wanted to move everybody out of the data center into the cloud.And he wanted to move everyone out of the cloud back into the data center or keep them in the data center. And it was like, “Okay, this is weird, but we both have the same problem.” And so we went out to lunch and started this conversation of like, “Well, what if we weren't competitors?” [laugh].Corey: “Maybe there's alignment here.” Yeah. I think Ben Franklin once said that three moves is as good as a fire when it comes to cleaning out old cruft. And migrations are like that. I do want to call out that since I make a frequent practice of saying that multi-cloud as a best practice is foolish, I want to be clear that is in the absence of other constraints.If you're building something new, you probably should pick a provider and go all-in. I don't care which one you do—you might; I don't—but beyond that, at a significant point of scale, when a company says, “All right, we're in one provider—or a data center—and we're going to move to a cloud or other clouds.” Generally, they're correct. They have context that I don't when I'm speaking in the general case. I am not anti-multi-cloud; I am anti-multi-cloud when it is foolish and when it's badly done. Just to set my bias out there and, ideally, avoid getting some letters.Eric: You know, I tend not to disagree with that in the right context as well. When we were doing just AWS only, I think I would have argued that multi-cloud, yeah, there's no place for it. If you're going multi-cloud, you're giving up on all of the greatness that a single public cloud has to offer. You know, and by the greatness, I mean, the proprietary services they offer, and the APIs, and things like SNS and SQS and Route 53, all of those things that you could build into your application and just start using them without having to build all the infrastructure to run it. And so I would agree with you, I think, in that sense.But I wish the world were that simple and I wish the companies that we worked with operated in a nice, clean, unambiguous context. But the more you dig in, I think you realize that when you start dealing with a company, maybe, that has 20,000 employees and offices all across the country, and 25 years of legacy applications—or maybe a vision for the future that just is so massive that it requires a different point of view—and this is really where we engage. And it's interesting that you mentioned about the context, and usually, if a customer approaches us and says, “We want to go multi-cloud,” the first thing we do is put the brakes on and get away from the discussion around multi-cloud and move straight into, “What are you trying to accomplish here?” And navigate that conversation before it turns into—you know, let's not start with the solution type of discussion.Corey: Part of the problem, it seems, that when you start talking to folks about these things, especially in some vendor corners, an awful lot of self-interest that winds up informing the answers that immediately come from it, where it's, “Oh, yeah, you want to go multi-cloud.” And you scratch underneath the surface and the reason is that if you go all-in on one provider, they have nothing left to sell you, in some cases. Other times, it's by a cloud provider themselves pushing multi-cloud strongly because they know that if you go all-in on one provider, it will absolutely not be them. So, the hard part is finding someone who can serve as a trusted advisor. And I mean that in the actual sense of a person, not the crappy AWS service that tells you everything's fine when it isn't. That's ‘Plausible Advisor' at best. Let's be clear here.Eric: Well, come on. If it wasn't for Trusted Advisor, we wouldn't have a market for all the third-party analysis tools [laugh] and people like you to help us manage our costs.Corey: Believe me, if I thought a tool could solve the problem, I would have built it years ago. Tried, turned out it didn't, and well, here we are. You position what you do at Deft as starting from an advisory perspective. You're not pushing a particular product, you're not pushing any particular vendors that I'm aware of, you have a partner list that is not a single vendor, what a concept. So, it's clear that you're doing something that goes one of two ways.Either it is, yeah, we'll take money from anyone who will pay us, or alternately you're approaching it from a thoughtful perspective of trying to figure out what's going on with the customer. Based upon our conversations, I'm going to go ahead and guess it's that one.Eric: It definitely is the latter, Corey. We've certainly had many customers approach us over the years and ask for things that are a bad fit. And a bad fit might be, they're asking for technology experience we don't have. If someone came to us and said, “We want you guys to be Oracle DBAs because you do technology,” our answer is very likely going to be no. Could we learn to be Oracle DBAs? Yeah, we probably could. Do we want to probably not? Maybe?Corey: There are some very qualified Oracle DBAs out in the world, and it's—Eric: There's—Corey: —great.Eric: —there's places for people to specialize. And I think one of our virtues is to know and recognize where we belong and where we don't belong. And the good thing is, not only have we sort of built up our own partner list in terms of technology partners, strategic partners, but we also have our own internal list of referral partners where we know that something's out of our wheelhouse, and I got another company and another team here that I know can crush it and help them out. There's other areas of work that we just don't get into. If you want to outsource your IT and have a company that's going to help you figure out why your printer is not working, definitely not us.You're going to be wasting your money with a firm like us. Or maybe you want to partner in a way that isn't going to take the best advantage of the capabilities that we have, meaning you just want to take advantage of us in a halfway manner, and you want to keep an internal team and the two teams are up against one another and fighting about stuff constantly. We need to have good strong trust between our two companies and our partnerships. And so if we feel like there isn't an opportunity for that, we might walk away from it as well.So, it's not a case of everything that walks in front of us, here's a proposal. [laugh]. We definitely do some opportunity vetting and analysis. We ask a lot of questions upfront about how our customers work, what their internal teams are like, what their expectations of us are, what they want in that relationship. Is it transactional or is it strategic? We're interested in the strategic partnerships with our customers.Corey: I think this is something that is not well understood by a lot of the fly-by-night folks, for lack of a better term. I don't mean to sound disparaging, but the folks who don't seem to understand that long-term reputation is important. I mean, both of our consulting companies, although radically different in focus, have pages on our site where we list reference customers. In fact, there's some overlap between our customers. And as we look at this, you aren't allowed to put a customer logo up if they're going to take umbrage to you doing it, first off. And secondly, you don't want to put a customer logo up if people are going to ask them about their experience with you, and the response is, “Oh, they were crap.” At some point, no, let's not do that.Eric: [laugh]. That's right.Corey: The only way to get there is to deliver on an engagement in such a way that the response is, “That was great. Would you do it again?” “Can I?” And the idea of excitement of delivering an outcome where people who you've worked with become some of your biggest advocates, that's how I always viewed the proper way of building a business.Eric: Yeah. Now, I'd ask you, in terms of when you guys are providing advice to your customers about AWS spend, or someone approaches you, obviously, you're probably first thinking, “Okay, well, how much AWS spend do you have in a month and is this worth my time?” But there's probably another element of evaluation that you must do in terms of is this a good customer for us, and can we do the right thing for them? What are pieces that you guys think about?Corey: Oh, absolutely. As a general rule, we do a lot of AWS contract negotiation. And that is, if you have an AWS offer in front of you for committing to something, come talk to us; it's fun. That's half of our engagements today. The other half are cost optimization projects, and generally speaking, we aren't going to be able to effectively deliver return on investment for much less than about a million bucks a month in spend.So, I do at some point want to explore how to help people who are not already paying a king's ransom to AWS every month, but that is down the road. The next step is a conversation. It's a, “So great, you want to optimize your AWS bill.” And then my favorite is the—I get the quote-unquote, “Dumb question.” “Why? Why do you care? Why is this an actual problem other than it looks like a phone number and your CFO has some questions, what is the actual concern?”Very often, we'll find that it's not that you're spending too much on cloud, in many cases, it's that it's not understood what it's doing. “Okay, the bill is 20% higher this month. Is that new normal? Is that something that's going to inform our planning and we do adjust our expectations for what this is going to cost to run this? Is it just a mistake that someone left up?” The same questions would have arisen if the bill were 20% lower, except somehow it never is.Eric: Right, right. You know what's interesting about that, Corey is, too, also I think that you tend to tease AWS from time to time. And also I think the work you do would not be in Amazon's interest, right? They want customers to spend more money on their infrastructure and their services and their capabilities, and you're helping customers spend less. But what's interesting about that is that we're one of the few managed service partners in the country.And I don't know how much you know about that program, and what it takes to get into that program and to maintain the certification in that program. It's like a three-day audit; there's 500 control items that we have to go through. In fact, it was that program that took our business to the next level. It was that program and its rigor that took what we were doing and actually matured it and turned it into what I would consider a respectable world-class operation. But one of the interesting aspects of that audit is that there's several control items in there that ask us to show Amazon that we are taking steps to manage our customers' costs on AWS and reduce spend. And it's interesting that Amazon is the one pushing that on us and instilling that requirement as we support our customers in Amazon.Corey: It's counterintuitive, but this is one of those areas where there's no one on the other side of this issue. Of course, Amazon wants customers to spend more money with Amazon—I swear the company spends half its time lying awake at night worrying someone who isn't them is making money somewhere, at least that's how it feels some days. But they want that spend to be intelligent. They don't want the narrative to be that the cloud is just as expensive a bunch of nonsense. If there's a bunch of instances that are sitting there idle, they will advise you—if they're on top of the game—to turn them off because that is the goal. They want it to be—Eric: That's how they deliver on their promise. Right.Corey: Well, yeah. Pandemic aside, with most of our customers, what we notice a year after an engagement is that they're in fact spending more than they were when we started. But it's more efficient; it's growth that's tying into this. It becomes a component of cost of goods sold where, “Yeah, we're doing more business, so it costs us more to fulfill that business; we're perfectly happy,” is generally the response to that. And I think that everyone with a vision that extends beyond this quarter's numbers is likely to start to get into that, on some level.Eric: Right.Corey: One thing I do want to ask you is—relevant to what you just said—one thing that we do at The Duckbill Group explicitly is we have no partners, full stop. And the reason behind that is because with what we're doing around billing, and money, and contract negotiation, and the rest, as soon as we have a partner, it suddenly gives rise to a bunch of real or perceived conflicts of interest. And in this particular niche, it makes an awful lot of sense not to do that. Now, if you're in any other arena, where you're in—“Oh, you're in security, for example. Oh, we have no partners with any vendors,” the answer question becomes, “Well, what's wrong with you? What, there's no one willing to trust you? Do you think somehow you're better than all these other people?” It's the wrong answer. So, my question for you is, how do you evaluate whether you should partner with a particular company or not?Eric: Sure. Great question. Deft's reason for existence—when we think about ourselves, we reframe it as our purpose—is to deliver on the promise of technology. And if you unpack that statement a little bit is like, “Well, what the heck is the promise of technology? What does that even mean?”And what we get down to is that technology itself doesn't make any kind of promises. That router you just bought, it doesn't promise really anything; that EC2 instance you just booted in AWS doesn't really ultimately, at the end of the day, promise anything. It's incapable of making promises, but people are. And what we promise is that we can wrangle that technology, we can configure it, we can set it up in a particular kind of way, we can bring in the right components into the solution, and deliver on a promise of, “Yes, you can scale to 100 million users,” or, “Yes, you can reduce latency and improve the customer experience for your customers.” It's all about the people, and that's what we have the most of.And that's the best thing that we have in our house.s we have an inventory of highly qualified, talented, empathetic, compassionate, excited people. So, when we start thinking about our partners and who we want to partner with, what we take into consideration is what technology, tools, and capabilities do our people need to have in their toolbox, such that when we start working with our customers crafting that promise and that solution, we've got the right things at hand and at the right time. And then the second piece of it is, does the partner align well with us in terms of our vision? And in some sense, keeping us relatively technology-neutral, in the same sense that you're trying to stay neutral from that billing perspective and making sure that you're looking out and advocating for your customers first.So, when we're thinking about our partners as well, it's not that, oh, well, we want to build our whole business on top of AWS, or Azure, or in our data center. And those are the on—you know, we try to remove dogma from the picture in that sense, and try to probably be dogmatic mostly about the customer and what it is that they're trying to achieve, and being honest with them. So, it's more of a, “Hey, let's scan the horizon. Let's listen to our customers, let's understand what problems they're trying to solve, what challenges they have today. Let's evaluate the technology options on the table across the world.” Our partner might be [unintelligible 00:18:36], it might be VM, or it might be Amazon, it might be a small little company somewhere that does a niche service. But our job is to come together with all of those things and present a cohesive solution.Corey: And it's clearly working. You were the Turing Group and you wound up partnering with—you said your business partner—who was over at Server Central, which I'm just guessing from the name and assuming I hadn't paid attention to the industry for a while, sounds like it might not be fully cloud-focused, on some level, given the name. What did they do? And why was merging the right answer?Eric: Yeah. I mean, it's funny that you bring that up. Server Central. Wow, a server; who's talking about servers anymore, right? It's containers and virtualization and—Corey: But they've got to run somewhere.Eric: That's right. Serverless applications. Like, hmm, is this the right name? And I think it speaks to the 20-year heritage that Server Central has had and how they built their business. And they do and did, and we do have a cloud focus that's not related to the public cloud.We have a significant number of customers that operate on private clouds that we've built for them and manage for them, for various reasons. Some are legit and some maybe not so legit and mostly about how they feel about something. And some of them are technically driven. And after we brought the companies together, we realized that hey, you know what, we have a lot of brand equity and history and Server Central and we have to respect that. Turing Group had its own set of brand equity in the market that we had established and promoted a certain kind of ideology and thinking.And so for a short period of time, we were a little bit unsure of how are we going to bring this together in any kind of cohesive fashion? And it actually went out into the world for about a year as Server Central Turing Group. And I think my tongue twisted as I said it, [laugh]. It's a lot of words and it mostly just confuses people and makes them scratch their head. And so we went off on a journey to figure out what our reimagined new company is going to look like with all the combined services and capabilities that we have.And that's how we arrived at Deft and the idea that's how we want to engage with our customers; that's what we want our solutions to be like; that's what we want the experience in working with us to be. And we want to remove the friction and anxiety that technology can bring. It reminds me of when I was starting my first company. I spent a lot of time sort of navel-gazing, saying, “What do I like about this, and why am I doing this?” And went back to my early days as an engineer, and at the core of it was a really simple idea and it was the idea that when I helped somebody with a technology problem, they were elated. They thought it was magic. They thought it was black magic.They didn't understand how I took this goofy, strange, cryptic thing and made it do what they wanted, and I did it quickly and I did it deftly. And there was joy and they were happy and I loved that; I loved that response. I loved knowing that I helped fix this mysterious problem for somebody that just didn't even know where to begin. And I did it time and time again and it helped me grow my career. And when we started the first company, it was sort of like, I want to continue that feeling.I want to create that feeling for our customers where they feel like maybe they're stuck with some crazy complex technology problem, and because I happen to have the innate skill for understanding these things and figuring these things out and I have a team that can do it, we can create that same feeling for our customers. And we want to continue doing that today.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: I do want to point out that, at least in my mind, there's always a little bit of, I guess, we call it technical elitism, on some level, where, “Oh, someone is working through a partner. They must be a company that's stuck in the past.” But a glance at companies that you're working with, make it very clear that's not the case. I mean, Ars Technica, New Relic, Wildbit. You've got some companies that are very forward-looking, and by no definition are these companies that don't understand cloud or understand how the internet works. It's something that I think is not fully understood among a subset of the industry that, in many cases, having a third-party partner, in many cases winds up helping you go faster, further.Eric: Yeah. It might be cliche to say—oftentimes, in cliches, there's a little bit of truth—which is, focus on what you're good at, and focus on what you're best at, and focus on your core products. And with a lot of these technology companies where you might read on the surface that, “Oh, yeah, they're a smart bunch over there. Why do they need a partner?” Technology is complicated. The stack is deep.Whether you're talking about deployment pipelines, or should I use a fiber connection on this or should I use copper? Or should we have jumbo frames enabled? Or should we be using API Gateway and Lambda functions for this? I just listed a broad range of technologies and things that solve different problems. And these customers have their own products that they have to put out into the world; those products need to be meaningful and thoughtful and aligned with their customers.And because that technology stack is complex and deep, it creates an opportunity for companies like ours—for partners—to step in, and grab a piece of that complexity, and manage it, and handle it, and help a customer with it to create the space for them to create the most excellent product. And so even though they are technology companies because you're managing this big wrangling layered technologies, abstractions, and—well, even when we talk about containerization, right, and running a small application, there's seven layers before you get to the CPU. [laugh]. And within that seven layers, there's I don't know how many lines of code, and there's how many hidden assumptions and configuration files, and you name it. And there's areas of that entire stack that we're really good at and customers derive value from that.Corey: One area that you've been relatively active within is the hybrid universe. My talking point on that has generally looked a lot like the snarky take of, “Well, you have a company in a data center today, and they're going to go all-in on the cloud. And it turns out halfway through that it's hard to move some workloads. There is no AWS/400 and they have a mainframe.” So, what are they going to do? They give up halfway, plant a flag, declare victory, and now we're hybrid as a best practice. That is not entirely accurate, but there's an element of accuracy in some cases to it.Eric: Yeah.Corey: But I don't get the sense that's how you see it. I'm left with a strong impression that it's a very intentional choice for some of your customers, that in some cases, workloads that are live in data centers, were at one point living in a cloud provider. Talk to me about that.Eric: Yeah, I like to think of it not as, like, a binary situation. And something that exists on degrees, and often times has a lot to do with the lifecycle of a product or company and the scale of a company. And we touched on this earlier in our conversation, which is that if someone approached us—maybe a startup or a smaller company—trying to migrate off of half-dozen servers and move into the public cloud, and they approached us and said, “Yeah, we need to be hybrid for this thing,” I would probably question that and I would question it really hard, and say, “Really, what are you going after here? You're going to give up a lot if you choose to go hybrid, and you won't really take advantage of some of the amazing opportunities that a full-on single cloud solution has to offer.” On the flip side, we've seen companies that started like that, were a hundred percent in public cloud on a single provider, everything's working fine.There was no issues whatsoever, except the bill, or maybe a fear of what the bill could be. And this is something that happens at scale. There's just a point where the public cloud just doesn't make sense anymore, even despite those benefits. And for the bottom line and in terms of the margins and your cost of revenue, giving up some of those additional benefits that allow you to grow and scale is worth it. And if you look at the technology landscape, there's a reason Facebook's not in AWS. [laugh].There's a reason a lot of these larger technology companies where we have hundreds of millions of users or bazillions of petabytes of data, that move out and get out of there. I mean, look at Dropbox right? [laugh]. Is Dropbox storing all their data in the public cloud? Not really, and they are a public cloud in a sense on their own, right?Corey: Yeah, they did just launch a 34-petabyte data warehouse for analytics on AWS, and they've made a bunch of big—Eric: Yeah, yeah. I mean—Corey: —deals out of that, but the core storage workload, yeah, that does not economically make sense, given their access patterns and how they have built that offering. So yeah, that is a very well understood, very specific, very niche workload. Yeah, that does not belong in AWS.Eric: We've even gone as far as launching our own multi-petabyte managed object storage solution, it's totally S3 compatible. It works identically to the way S3 works, but we have customers that actually can do better on our platform, either because we can provide lower latency, we can provide custom contracts that aren't just purely pay as you go; there's all kinds of different options that we can give our customers that are more custom and tailored to their needs that you're going to get from, “Here's your API keys have fun.” [laugh]. And so there's still a market for that stuff and there's still a need for that stuff.Corey: There really is.Eric: So, the answer is it depends, Corey. [laugh].Corey: It seems to be the answer to any nuanced question. So, if people want to learn more about what you're doing at Deft, and potentially whether it might help them with some of the challenges they're facing, where can they find you?Eric: Easy. deft.com, D-E-F-T dot com. Great, short four-letter domain name that you wouldn't believe what we had to go through to get. [laugh].Corey: I can only imagine. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. I really appreciate it.Eric: You're welcome, Corey.Corey: Eric Dynowski, Chief Solutions Officer and Partner at Deft. 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 hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with a comment telling me that no, customers should in fact go all-in on your third-rate cloud.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.

A transcript of this episode is available here: https://thedanceedit.com/transcript-episode-80Subscribe to The Dance Edit Extra: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-dance-edit-extra/id1579075769Links referenced in/relevant to episode 80:-New York Times interview with Joan Myers Brown: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/02/arts/dance/Joan-Myers-Brown-Retiring-Philadanco.html-Variety's coverage of the Trans March on Broadway: https://variety.com/2021/theater/news/transgender-march-on-broadway-cameron-mackintosh-1235057686/-Boston Ballet's new roster, including Michaela DePrince: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/09/07/arts/boston-ballet-announces-its-roster-2021-22/-Complete "Dancing with the Stars" cast list: https://www.goodmorningamerica.com/culture/story/dancing-stars-2021-meet-season-30-celebrity-cast-79752719-Crystal Waters' "100% Pure Love" video, choreographed by and featuring Michael K. Williams: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQX2q6WCrbE-New York Times piece on reworking "Nutcracker" to protect children: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/02/arts/dance/nutcracker-rules-children-covid.html-Vanity Fair feature on Doug and Ashley Benefield and American National Ballet: https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2021/09/when-doug-and-ashley-benefield-started-a-ballet-company-it-wasnt-supposed-to-end-in-death-October 2017 Pointe story on the company's unraveling: https://pointemagazine.com/american-national-ballet/-April 2018 Pointe story on ballet company red flags: https://pointemagazine.com/red-flags-ballet-companies/-November 2020 Post & Courier story on Doug's murder and Ashley's arrest: https://www.postandcourier.com/news/local_state_news/ballet-dancer-who-founded-charleston-company-arrested-in-shooting-death-of-husband/article_d27d5002-22ad-11eb-a94e-1fb42b55ce36.html-Dance Magazine profile of Colleen Werner: https://www.dancemagazine.com/plus-size-ballet-dancer-2654850189.html-Werner's Instagram account: https://www.instagram.com/colleenmwerner/

Welcome back to the latest episode of BETWEEN THE NOTES...Your hosts, Tony Black & Sean Wilson, return to discuss the scores of August 2021, plus a couple of their retro favourites.They discuss films & TV including JUNGLE CRUISE, MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE, THE COURIER and THE SUICIDE SQUAD, and composers including Mica Levi, Danny Elfman, Ramin Djawadi and Daniel Hart...00:11:03 - Jungle Cruise (James Newton Howard)00:16:57 - Stillwater (Mychael Danna)00:23:05 - The Last Letter From Your Lover (Daniel Hart)00:27:23 - Free Guy (Christophe Beck)00:34:11 - Midnight Run (Danny Elfman)00:38:47 - Zola (Mica Levi)00:47:21 - The Courier (Abel Korniezowski)00:54:29 - Masters of the Universe: Revelation (Bear McCreary)01:02:07 - Reminiscence (Ramin Djawadi)01:07:57 - Murder on the Orient Express (Richard Rodney Bennett)01:13:44 - The Suicide Squad (John Murphy)Check out our specially curated Spotify playlist of all of the above scores: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0vJqMbw8okrVRf6EzAXsmx?si=892c8aa2db38474fHost / EditorTony BlackCo-HostSean WilsonSupport the We Made This podcast network on Patreon:Patreon.com/wemadethisTwitter: @btw_notesWe Made This on Twitter: @wmt_network / www.wemadethisnetworkTitle music 'Milky Way' (c) Peter Sandberg/Epidemic SoundMusic from The Suicide Squad courtesy of WaterTower Music & music from Stillwater courtesy of Back Lot Music.

Our Patrons join us this month to discus who they'd cast in key roles in a New Vegas movie, including Characters like Mr. House, Benny, Cass, Lily, ED-E, Rex, and even their own interpretation of the Courier. Subscribe for more Fallout Lorecast Podcast episodes! Sponsors: Storyblocks.com: Storyblocks.com/robotsradio Patreon: Become a patron! https://patreon.com/falloutlorecast Audiobooks.com- Get 3 FREE Audiobooks! https://www.dpbolvw.net/click-100173810-11099382?sid=flore Gamefly - Want 2 months of rentals for the price of 1 at Gamefly? https://www.dpbolvw.net/click-100173810-10495782?sid=flore Loot Crate- 15% off Loot Crate. Click the link and use coupon code: ROBOTSRADIO https://www.dpbolvw.net/click-100173810-13902093?sid=flore GreenMan Gaming- Get awesome discounts on games. https://www.dpbolvw.net/click-100173810-13764551?sid=flore NordVPN- Stay Safe on the Internet and get 68% off. https://www.dpbolvw.net/click-100173810-12814552?sid=flore Buy cool stuff and support the show! Fallout 76: https://amzn.to/3h99B3U Fallout Cookbook: https://amzn.to/3aGjeod Fallout Boardgame: https://amzn.to/2EgmBq3 The Art of Fallout 4: https://amzn.to/3gfQST3 Get a REAL Nuca-Cola Quantum! https://amzn.to/322O3zG Fallout Funco Pop Figures: https://amzn.to/3gcYsOc Links: Live Shows every Monday Night and game streams: twitch.tv/robotsradio Fallout Hub Podcast w/ Tom & others: https://anchor.fm/the-fallout-hub Talk Fallout and join the Robots Radio fam: Discord: discord.gg/JXKfVhM Stay plugged in on Twitter: twitter.com/falloutlorecast Robots Radio Youtube: youtube.com/c/r0b0ts Send me a note! Email: falloutlorecast@gmail.com www.robotsradio.net Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this week's episode we talk with CEO, Kassy Alia Ray and Community Outreach Coordinator, Jenny Wooten McGill of Serve and Connect. We learn how Kassy turned an immense personal loss into a mission to combat divisiveness through compassion and community partnerships.  Resources/Links/Websites:https://serveandconnect.net/Guest Bio: Kassy Alia Ray is the founder and CEO of Serve & Connect. Under her leadership, the organization has grown from a simple hashtag campaign to a valiant movement dedicated to creating positive change.A clinical-community psychologist by training and graduate of the University of South Carolina, Kassy has been the recipient of numerous awards and recognitions, including the Midlands Fatherhood Coalition's Hero of the Year; Columbia Business Monthly's Top 35 under 35; The State Newspaper's Top 20 Under 40; the Post and Courier's Golden Pen Award; the Central Carolina Community Foundation's Individual Philanthropist of the Year; Columbia's Best Local Hero Award; and the South Carolina Law Enforcement Citizen of the Year. She speaks regularly to service providers, law enforcement agencies, organizations, and corporations across the U.S. on topics related to collaboration, grief, empathy, and reimagining police and community relationships.Kassy married Mitch Ray in 2018. They welcomed a son, and Sal welcomed a little brother, Silas in Dec. 2020.Jenny Wooten McGill has more than 15 years of experience working with nonprofit organizations, public agencies and private companies. She is thrilled to work with Serve & Connect to manage community outreach opportunities and excited to be a part of an organization that does so much good work in the community. Jenny has a great love for all people and a passion for helping and connecting with others.Jenny has extensive experience in program development, project management, leadership, grant writing, governance and communications. She graduated from the University of South Carolina with a bachelor's degree in political science.In her career, Jenny has worked directly with several state and federal agencies including the State Treasurer's Office, the South Carolina Attorney General's Office and the South Carolina Lieutenant Governor's Office and USDA Rural Development.

Purdue beat reporter MIke Carmin of the Lafayette Journal & Courier joins the show to preview the season opener between the Boilermakers and Oregon State

Gamecocks make the call, former GA Zeb Noland will start at quarterback this Saturday.  The guys discuss the announcement plus other notable points about the week one depth charts for Carolina and Clemson, the wild "high school" football story unfolding surrounding Bishop Sycamore, deep dives into the UCLA-LSU and Clemson-Georgia games and much more. Plus, college football conversations with ESPN play by play announcer Mike Morgan and The Post and Courier's Gene Sapakoff   

______________________________________________  Welcome to  Skyjacks: Courier's Call - Season 2!______________________________________________ANNOUNCEMENTS!TimeskipThe first part of this season picks up after a bit of a time jump. Its been a little over a month since our heroes left Otterbachs and they've stopped at two other locations (port of call #2 and #3) along the six month route of the Red Audron. There were some adventures, some growing pains, some thrilling heroics and even a run in with the infamous Jolly Jack as well as most of their time in Tesh Urt but all that is behind us as our heroes experience their last night in the city before heading out.  If you've enjoyed the show, liked what we've done or just have feelings about this season, feel free to tell us at skyjackscourierscall@gmail.com or to leave us a review on itunes!______________________________________________MORE FROM THE WORLD OF SPEIRIf you want to join the Patreon to get exclusive behind the scenes content (including all eight episodes of the Jolly Jack Adventure!), please see the link below:https://www.patreon.com/oneshotpodcast If you want to get more info on the World of Speir through the Skyjacks World Zine, please see the link below: https://one-shot-podcast.itch.io/the-skyjacks-zine-vol-1______________________________________________CONTENT WARNINGMain Show:  cheating at a game, ______________________________________________CALL TO ACTIONRight Wrongs. Do Mercies. Take Flight! ______________________________________________TALK TO YOUR KIDSCourier's Call  does not condone racism, hate or bigotry of any kind. We stand with Black Lives Matters on these issues and call upon everyone to demand changes to have all people stand on equal footing. No one deserves to be afraid or persecuted for just being who they are. If you wish to talk to your kids about racism and its damaging effects, this is a good resource.  As is this.Courier's Call features non-binary gendered characters. If you are not familiar with non-binary genders or neutral pronouns, this is a good resource for for talking about those concepts with your kids!A section of Season 1 of Courier's Call deals with the kidnapping of a child. While our story may be fictional fantasy, this issue is one that is very real in our world. Talk to your kids about child abduction, what they and you can do to stay safe and be alert. If you need help and/or resources, please check out more information here. ______________________________________________Join Our Mailing List Interact with us online!Twitter: @couriercall  Instagram: @skyjackscourierscallOfficial Art by Jessica Kuczynski  @AngryArtist113 on Twitter* Sound effects for this episode were pulled from freesound.org under a creative commons zero attribution license