Podcasts about dc it

WASHINGTON, DC - It's hard to believe but we're a week away from Major League Rugby's 8th opening day. Wow. And the competition looks as even as it's ever been. With that, MLR Weekly welcomes Old Glory DC Head Coach Simon Cross, who is in his sophomore season in the nations' capital. Cross talks about continuity, a rival with high expectations, skipping preseason games, key pieces to the puzzle, and pressures from the wife to succeed. ALSO INCLUDED: -John Fitzpatrick of Rugby Morning -Bryan Ray of Americas Rugby News And don't miss another excellent installment of The Rugby Odds: https://rugbywrapup.com/category/the-rugby-odds/ Watch... Listen/Download the Podcast version. Please share and join our weekly newsletter: http://rugbywrapup.com/weekly-updates/ Find All Here: -Web: www.RugbyWrapUp.com -X/Twitter: @RugbyWrapUp @TheRugbyOdds, @MLR Weekly @Matt_McCarthy00, @CollegeRWU, @JonnyLewisFilms -Face Book: Rugby Wrap Up -Instagram: RugbyWrapUp -YouTube: Rugby Wrap Up -Reddit: RugbyWrapUp -TikTok: RugbyWrapUp -Podcast Platforms: RugbyWrapUp #USARugby #MajorLeagueRugby #RugbyWrapUp #OldGlory #RugbyATL #MLR2020 #SixNations #WorldRugby #SuperRugby #Top14 #PremiershipRugby #Pro14 #URC #UnitedRugbyChampionship #RugbyOdds #RugbyBetting

WASHINGTON, DC - It is hotter than Hades along the eastern seaboard in the United States. And it will only get hotter, when a loaded Scotland team squares off vs Team USA, here in the nation's capital. And while the MLR may be off before resuming with Round 1 of their postseason, their teams are still impacted. One such team is the NOLA Gold, and Head Coach Corey Brown talks about the break vs preparing for the playoffs. Also on this MLR Weekly show is former West Point flanker, turned Old Glory, DC hooker, Koi-Koi Nelligan. ALSO INCLUDED: -John Fitzpatrick of Rugby Morning -Bryan Ray of Americas Rugby News -Picks of the Week from The Rugby Odds -TRN Play of the Week Watch... Listen/Download the Podcast version... Please share and join our weekly newsletter: http://rugbywrapup.com/weekly-updates/ Find All Here: -Web: http://www.RugbyWrapUp.com -Twitter: https://twitter.com/RugbyWrapUp @RugbyWrapUp, @Matt_McCarthy00, @JonnyLewisFilms, @LizardRugby, @LanningZach, @ColbyMarshall2, @Junoir Blaber, @JWB_RWU, @MeetTheMatts, @Declan Yeats. -Face Book: https://www.facebook.com/RugbyWrapUp -Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/RugbyWrapUp -YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/RugbyWrapUp -Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/user/RugbyWrapUp #USARugby #MajorLeagueRugby #RugbyWrapUp #OldGlory #RugbyATL #MLR2020 #SixNations #WorldRugby #SuperRugby #Top14 #PremiershipRugby #Pro14 #URC #UnitedRugbyChampionship #RugbyOdds #RugbyBetting #bets

-Chairman of House Foreign Affairs Committee Michael McCall (R) on China infiltrating the US. [Eric Bolling The Balance] -In other news, the sky is blue: Senate Republicans issue nearly 300 page report linking covid origins to Wuhan lab. Newsmax National correspondent Logan Ratick reports. [John Bachman Now] -Former CIA operative Mike Baker on oversight committee report showing how being related to “The Big Guy” pays off for Biden family members. [John Bachman Now] -Former Georgia congressman Doug Collins on DeSantis visit to DC “It wasn't good.” [American Agenda] Listen to Newsmax LIVE and see our entire podcast lineup at www.Newsmax.com/listen Download the free NEWSMAX app at www.newsmaxtv.com/app or go to www.NewsmaxTV.com to watch the real news!  Looking for NEWSMAX caps, tees, mugs & more? Check out the Newsmax merchandise shop at : http://nws.mx/shop Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

WASHINGTON, DC - It's a rare day indeed when a leader of an organization here in the Nation's Capital says, "trust me." It rings sincere, however, when it comes from the likes of Old Glory GM Marcelo Blanco, USA Rugby legend Thretton Palamo or Rugby New York Owner Guy Bolton. These three impressive individuals grace this week's MLR Weekly - which was on the road - courtesy of Sheehy Auto Stores.

WASHINGTON, DC - It took longer than George Washington's famous march to San Diego, but Old Glory, DC finally found the new Head Coach they were looking for, Josh Syms. But before the recent Head Coach of the Hawke's Bay Magpies could get comfortable, our Matt McCarthy made him uncomfortable with questions that include something about the Boston Red Sox. This fast-moving MLR Weekly show also features Rugby Morning's Coffee Break, where John Fitzpatrick flies through Major League Rugby headlines. Watch... Listen/Download the Podcast version... Please share and join our weekly newsletter: http://rugbywrapup.com/weekly-updates/ Find All Here: -Web: http://www.RugbyWrapUp.com -Twitter: https://twitter.com/RugbyWrapUp @RugbyWrapUp, @Matt_McCarthy00, @JonnyLewisFilms, @LizardRugby, @LanningZach, @ColbyMarshall2, @Junoir Blaber, @JWB_RWU, @MeetTheMatts, @Declan Yeats. -Face Book: https://www.facebook.com/RugbyWrapUp -Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/RugbyWrapUp -YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/RugbyWrapUp -Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/user/RugbyWrapUp #USARugby #MajorLeagueRugby #RugbyWrapUp #OldGlory #RugbyATL #MLR2020 #SixNations #WorldRugby #SuperRugby #Top14 #PremiershipRugby #Pro14 #URC #UnitedRugbyChampionship #RugbyOdds #RugbyBetting #JoshSyms

コンテナ型DCでIT機器を液浸冷却、消費電力を4割減に成功 by bp-Affairs

Dawson and I go deep on meditation and emotion regulation.  He discusses the attention network, empathy network, and the self-centeredness suppression network.  He is a PhD and an award-winning science writer with three best-selling books to his credit. The Genie in Your Genes was the first book to demonstrate that emotions drive gene expression. Mind to Matter, showed that the brain creates much of what we think of as objective reality. And Bliss Brain which we discuss in the interview.  And he has conducted dozens of clinical trials and founded the National Institute for Integrative Healthcare, www.niih.org, to promote groundbreaking new treatments. Its largest program, the Veterans Stress Project, has offered free treatment to over 20,000 veterans with PTSD over the last decade.Administrative: (See episode transcript below)Get Dawson Church's books hereGenie in Your Genes at www.yourgeniusgene.com.Mind to Matter here www.mindtomatter.com.Bliss Brain where www.blissbrain.com,Check out the Tools For A Good Life Summit here: Virtually and FOR FREE https://bit.ly/ToolsForAGoodLifeSummitStart podcasting!  These are the best mobile mic's for IOS and Android phones.  You can literally take them anywhere on the fly.Get the Shure MV88 mobile mic for IOS,  https://amzn.to/3z2NrIJGet the Shure MV88+ for  mobile mic for Android  https://amzn.to/3ly8SNjGet A Course In Miracles Here! https://amzn.to/3hoE7sAAccess my “Insiders Guide to Finding Peace” here: https://belove.media/peaceSee more resources at https://belove.media/resourcesEmail me: contact@belove.mediaFor social Media:      https://www.instagram.com/mrmischaz/https://www.facebook.com/MischaZvegintzovSubscribe and share to help spread the love for a better world!As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.Transcript:0:00:06.8 Mischa Zvegintzov: Welcome back everybody to the Tools For A Good Life Summit. And right now, I would like to introduce to you Dawson Church, PhD. I'm so excited to have you on board. We just had an amazing moment, a big breath of joy, and hope for this for everybody. But a... Quick, I'm gonna read your bio if that's okay.0:00:28.6 Dawson Church: Go for it. And I hope everyone is breathing with us.0:00:32.2 MZ: Yes. Yes.[laughter]0:00:36.3 MZ: So good. All right. Fantastic. Dawson Church, PhD is an award-winning science writer with three best-selling books to your credit. The Genie in Your Genes was the first book to demonstrate that emotions drive gene expression. You can find that book at www.yourgeniusgene.com. We've got, Mind to Matter, showed that the brain creates much of what we think of as objective reality. You can find that at www.mindtomatter.com, and we've got Bliss Brain, which you can find at www.blissbrain.com, which we'll be discussing in a minute. Very excited for that. Which demonstrates that peak mental states rapidly remodel the brain for happiness. You have conducted dozens of clinical trials and founded the National Institute for Integrative Healthcare, niih.org, to promote groundbreaking new treatments. Its largest program, the Veterans Stress Project, has offered free treatment to over 20,000 veterans with PTSD over the last decade. Thank you so much for that. And you share how to apply these health and performance breakthroughs through EFT Universe at eftuniverse.com. One of the largest alternative medicine sites on the web. Welcome, Dawson Church.0:02:09.8 DC: I'm having fun doing it all, Mischa.0:02:12.1 MZ: I'm having fun doing it all.[laughter]0:02:13.8 MZ: I love it. That is so... Yes, so good and so powerful. I just watch... I'm looking over here 'cause I have another screen but watching some of your content and just your joy and your enthusiasm and your passion for life. It is infectious. And I have a note here, "learned." We can learn this, learned happiness.0:02:38.7 DC: Learned happiness. Absolutely. And it's like, use it or lose it and the neural circuits that we use the most, the habits and behaviors through which we send signals through our brain, those things are what grow and circuits we don't use shrink. So absolutely, we can learn these things as we practice them. Our bodies, our brains are literally changing with every thought in our minds and consciousness.0:03:03.9 MZ: Yes. Which I think is so hopeful. If we are willing to just take a little bit of positive action, the results can be massive. Before we get to that, however, I wanted to discuss... I wrote down some notes. You were asked to speak before Congress a couple of times, correct?0:03:25.4 DC: Yes.0:03:26.1 MZ: And did you actually do... Go ahead, tell me.0:03:29.1 DC: Well, it was exciting because I've been to Washington DC several times. And when I began to get reports back from therapists working with veterans coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan, and they said, "We're working with these veterans spending just a few sessions, five, 10 sessions with them. And they're recovering from flashbacks, nightmares, PTSD." I was like... I was pretty skeptical because that's a big claim. And the American Psychiatric Association had just commissioned a survey which showed that basically PTSD just gets worse over time. Maybe you can manage it with drugs. That's the best you can do. So I heard these accounts, then we had to actually put some numbers to them and do some pilot research on the methods these therapists were using. And it was true that veterans really were recovering really quickly using these advanced psychotherapeutic methods. And so we eventually got that work in front of several Senators and Congress members.0:04:25.7 DC: We then were able to advocate for them in Congress. And then, I was invited to testify before the House Armed Services Committee and the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee. And those are powerful moments to sit there in this room full of Members of Congress and share about the potential of these methods and then really see if we can get these to veterans who are suffering. And that was a really profound experience. And what I found is that we have these tools now in our hands, in our toolboxes. And it's true that we really can shift most cases of PTSD. About nine out of 10 is what research shows us most cases of anxiety and depression. And after six, seven, eight sessions, these veterans just leave their therapy sessions, and they're free of flashbacks and nightmares, intrusive thoughts, all of the other things that would have otherwise have bothered them the rest of their lives. So, it's amazing to watch that happen.0:05:21.3 MZ: Yeah, that's incredible, I think. Well, two things, one, the palpable experience of the energy in front of when you're testifying, I guess testifying sounds aggressive, but when you're having an opportunity to speak to the... What did you call it? The joint say it again. The Joint Commissioner, what...0:05:45.8 DC: Yeah, the Veterans Affairs Committee and the Armed Services Committee.0:05:48.7 MZ: Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So did you feel a palpable energy shift of awareness with these Senators and things? I'm looking for some visceral experience there.0:06:01.5 DC: You know, it's really interesting question, Mischa. And one of the things that I found interesting was that what made the most impact on the Members of Congress was the stories of veterans themselves. Like we had one Vietnam veteran, and he said he was due to have six sessions. After the first session, he emailed his therapist and said, "After that very first session with you, I got my first full night's sleep since Vietnam, 35 years earlier." And so, the members of Congress would hear from veterans.0:06:37.2 DC: Another veteran was a young veteran. He'd done four tours in Iraq. And he had this terrible PTSD, nightmares, and flashbacks. Because one of the first things he had to do when he got there... Almost immediately, he arrived in Iraq as a medic, one of his best friends was killed. And one of his jobs is he had to prepare the uniform of his dead friend to send back to the family in the US with all the other personal effects. And so this young man was so traumatized, remembering, having to clean the blood and body fluids off the uniform. And it also smelled really bad because it'd been sitting in the Iraqi sun for a few days. And he literally had to run outside the hut, take a deep breath of air, run back inside, do a little bit of cleaning, run back outside just to breathe. 'Cause, it smelled so bad in there. So here he was. His emotions were 10 out of 10 as he recalled that event. After we worked with him in just one session, he was at a zero. He had no more emotion around it. He had only positive feelings. He said, "You know that, I realize now that was an act of love. And I felt now the love that I was giving his family and him by that act of service."0:07:47.6 DC: And so it shifted in his mind. So when you've seen, as you mentioned, over 20,000 veterans have this experience and a randomized controlled trial shows that these effects are true for most people, it just affects you profoundly. And that's what we thought made the biggest impact on those Senators, and Congress Members was that when they heard stories by real people, it was even more impactful than the research numbers data.0:08:13.3 MZ: Thank you so much for sharing that. I mean, I love that. I... Obviously circumstance to get there, not so excited about. But the result and the service aspect of that too. So for yourself...0:08:26.8 DC: Yeah, we all have stuff leftover from our past Mischa, we all have stuff leftover from our past, like childhood, really experiences that will otherwise stay with us. And so when you see people shed these past burdens of trauma and then claim the lives they can live, it's just powerful.0:08:44.1 MZ: It's amazing. I was gonna ask. I imagined seeing that again and again, and to be a part of that and to be able to be a part of that and help grow that is just gotta be insanely gratifying.0:09:00.2 DC: They call it a job.[laughter]0:09:03.7 MZ: Oh my gosh.[chuckle]0:09:06.2 DC: It's not hard work. It's wonderful.0:09:08.4 MZ: Thank you.0:09:08.4 DC: It also really works for you because when you're helping people heal like that, we call it... There's a term for it. We call it "borrowing benefits." And you literally, as you work with other people, seeing them heal, it heals you as well.0:09:20.0 MZ: That's beautiful. And then I think, I am... As I was digging and looking, and I'm like the amount of hours that you have put into this. And I say that in a good way, just in a massive way. I wrote down, "How many hours do you think you've put into this?"0:09:41.6 DC: No, it's a bad way, Mischa. When I was 15 years old, when I was a teenager, I was so depressed, I was so anxious. I had all the symptoms of PTSD myself; flashbacks, intrusive thoughts, hyper-vigilance. And so, I just fled into a spiritual community when I was 15 to try and get over my own inner demons. And I then spent... What I write about in... There's a section of my book, Bliss Brain. It's called "From 50 Years to 50 Seconds." And it took me 50 years to figure out how the brain works, how the neurochemistry of all this works. How our genes are being affected epigenetically by these positive and negative experiences, how we can use these methods for healing.0:10:26.2 DC: And then what I've been doing for the last few years is hooking people up to EEGs. And so we literally read their brain information processing ability and how their brains are running information, especially when they think about trauma or think about bad events in their lives. And we found that now within four minutes or so, we can bring people from that intense emotionally triggered state back down to deep peace, inner calm. And we had one lady in our seven-day retreat. By the end of the seven days of practicing these methods, she was down to 47 seconds between sitting down, closing her eyes, entering that state. And in 47 seconds, under 50 seconds, she was having a full-blown mystical, elevated what we call the awakened mind, Bliss Brain experience. So we now have figured out, with the aid of neuroscience, how to train people into doing this, not 50 years like me, but 50 seconds. [chuckle] 50 seconds or less.[chuckle]0:11:30.8 MZ: You know what? Thank you for taking the pain, Dawson.[laughter]0:11:35.9 DC: Don't do what I do... Did. Go to an ashram and sit there for 10 years, trying to control your breathing and your thoughts. It won't work.[chuckle]0:11:43.6 MZ: It's so good. I don't wanna give away the ghost here, and we're gonna get to this in a second. But I took a couple of notes, some other notes, and one was, "Remodel your brain in as little as eight weeks," but... Or no buts, but... And then this other part, "It's important to turn those temporary states into long term enduring traits." Turn a state into a trait. And when I came across where you said that, I was like, "That is awesome." And so we can... Let me... Go ahead. You can say something to that if you want. But...0:12:26.0 DC: Yeah, that really is the goal here on meditation, of EFT acupressure tapping, of the various other techniques I advocate in my books. And what you wanna do is not have a temporary state of wellbeing. 'Cause it feels good to feel good, and it feels good to be happy. It feels good to be content and have inner peace. But it's a state, and it'll pass. And then you hear some bad news. You stub your leg on a piece of furniture. You have a financial reverse. And suddenly you lose your state. And so those states are nice, but they're just transient. What you wanna do is fire those neurons repeatedly over and over and over again. And then as your neural bundles get bigger and thicker, and research shows that in just one hour of repeat stimulation, that the number of synaptic connections in a neural bundle can double. So, you can double the number of connections in a neural bundle in an hour. So now you're turning the software of a state into the hardware of a trait. And then you are not just feeling happy, sometimes, you are a happy person. You aren't just feeling creative, sometimes, you are a creative person. So you've now got the trait of creativity, the trait of resilience, the trait of joy, and then no one could take that away from you because it's hard-wired into your brain.0:13:48.6 MZ: Love that. That's a vision of hope. That is so good. Thank you for that. Alright, let's get to the good, good stuff. I'm gonna pose a scenario to you and then ask you a question. Okay? Fantastic. So, given this scenario, think of life as a three-legged stool of relationships, finances, and health. And now think of someone who is or was successful and who has had two of those legs fall out from under them. This could be a combination of divorce, career upheaval, financial stress, kids acting out, or not going the direction that the parents want. It could be physical health challenges for themselves or a loved one. Maybe a death in the family and continued failed relationships. For me, it was divorce. My kids started to veer a little bit, I felt. Like career upheaval. And then both my parents died in rapid succession. It really shook some foundations that I had. And to top it off, my "pull myself up from my bootstraps" mentality, that "fix it or push my way through it," was no longer working. I needed some new tools. And by the grace of God, I was open to some new tools. So, this is my question to you. Thinking of your Bliss Brain work and your book, what are the exact next steps you would offer this person, so they know they are headed in the new right direction, that they will have positive momentum towards getting their life back on track.0:15:38.9 DC: This is gonna sound really counterintuitive and odd. [chuckle] But it starts with self-acceptance. And self-love and accepting yourself just the way you are. And if circumstances; the way they are. And research into healing shows that acceptance is where you have to start. Like... I'm trying to think of a good example to use here. There are a whole bunch of them, they are crowding together in my brain, to mention. But when you have multiple challenges like that, just breathing and remaining centered and accepting and loving yourself is the first thing. In your loss, in your confusion, in your difficulty, and it's hard to be in that state, and yet, if you're trying to get out of it, if you're trying to... Now, you said, "pushing my way through." That works up to a point until it doesn't. [chuckle] So the first thing is just love and compassion. Just self-love, self-compassion.0:16:38.0 DC: The phrase we use in EFT acupressure tapping is, "Even though I have this problem, I deeply and completely love and accept myself." And that's really reassuring to you when you hear that when we're working, say, with a man who is 200 pounds overweight. Now, the last thing he wants to accept is being 200 pounds overweight. And yet, if we can train him to love and accept himself in that state, that unlocks all of the tension in the psyche between the part of yourself that's the inner coach, inner critique, inner CEO saying, "You should lose weight, you should quit smoking, you shouldn't drink so much, you should eat healthy, you should take more vacations, you should just save more money, blah, blah, blah, bloody blah." It's just yelling at us all the time, and that top-dog coercive inner voice is just keeping the energy pattern of what we've got going on, stuck and in place. And the moment you relax and say, "You know, I just accept myself the way I am."0:17:40.5 DC: We did an MRI study, some colleagues made an MRI study of obese women. Women who are overweight. When they put them in the MRI and showed them images of chocolate cake, and strawberry pie, and vanilla ice cream, and all these things, their mid-brains, their limbic system, the emotional part of the brain, was totally lit up. In other words, they weren't seeing food as food or nutrients. They were seeing food as a highly emotional event. After those five or six sessions of these simple therapies, we put them back in the MRI. They were getting exposed to all those emotive images, and they had no response at all. In fact, the guy running the MRI, the neuroscientist, said to my colleague, "What have you done to these women that they just have no emotional response to food anymore?"0:18:31.2 DC: So again, now they don't have that huge emotional response, and they love and accept themselves the way they are. Then all of the energy that's trapped in that top dog-underdog kind of struggle, "You should fix yourself, you should improve, you should be better." And underdog saying, "Oh yes, I will, top dog, I will improve, I will quit smoking, blah, blah, blah." And then underdog runs out behind the shed when top dog's back is turned and smokes the cigarette. And so, all of the tension behind these weird psychological struggles is just removed when you love and accept yourself. So love and acceptance is the first step. So that's number one. Accepting where you are, and admitting it, and acknowledging it just as a fact, and then you look at what you can do to shift and then you practice it.0:19:20.6 MZ: Now I can't over-stress the value of practice. What I try and do in my own work, so I try to get people addicted. So I wanna get them addicted to their own dopamine, serotonin, anandamide, oxytocin, nitric oxide all these wonderful neuro chemicals that happen in your brain spontaneously when you meditate and when you do that, people have a habit of meditating, so if I can get people hooked one time on high serotonin, high dopamine then they'll stay hooked and they'll keep on meditating so I can't over-stress the importance of getting yourself addicted to the right stuff to meditation, and then day after day, you meditate, and within a month, our MRI research shows your brain patterns are already changing. Your brain, the way your brain processes information is already shifting, and then you start to turn those temporary states into traits. And that's the value of practice. It doesn't take long. In one MRI study, it took just 30 days of practice 20 minutes a day, and people's brains were processing information totally differently.0:20:33.1 MZ: That's amazing. Can I ask you, what I wanna ask you and I look at... And I was checking out your Bliss Brain book and such. You say you teach seven simple steps. Is this part of that? Is this literally part of what we're talking about right here?0:20:49.8 DC: Yeah. That technique is called Eco-meditation. E-C-O meditation and is just a seven-step process, we do the acupressure, we do mindful breathing, we do a little bit of self-hypnosis, we do heart coherence, and we do neuro-feedback all in a certain order, and there's seven of these things we practice... And when you do that, suddenly you just, your brain flips into ecstasy with its elevated emotional state, no 10,000 hours, no spiritual master, no special training, no spiritual belief required. You can be an atheist. [laughter] You can be Jewish, you can be episcopalian you can be anything and it's just gonna work, it's a mechanical neurological event you're triggering in your body and you feel great.0:21:35.5 MZ: Okay, fantastic, fantastic. I didn't mean... Alright, I was just curious. So we'll go back to the self-acceptance, what you can do to shift, so that would be like in this particular case, it sounds like meditation would be a specific tool you're talking about, but it could be many different things for somebody.0:21:56.3 DC: In my earlier book, Mind Matter, I list about 30 things you can do, there's grounding, there's time in nature, social support, but two I recommend though that are fundamental and easy, one Mischa is that style meditation that puts you in those elevated emotional states and doing it first thing in the morning. That's a number one, and that's I think should be universal, just the benefits. One of my doctor friends said, "If meditation were a drug, it would be medical malpractice to fail to prescribe it." [laughter] So it's just the foundation as a frame for a good life. So you wanna do it in the morning, doesn't have to be an hour or two hours, half an hour is plenty. And then if you use a guided meditation that'll guide you into that elevated state. And then the second thing I recommend as having everyone should have this in their Personal Growth Tool Kit is EFT acupressure tapping, that's just somebody tapping on a series of 13 acupressure points.0:23:03.4 DC: It regulates the body's energy, that's what helped those women get over their emotional attachment and projection to food. So you wanna get over your high cortisol, you wanna get over your stress and EFT within two minutes, it'll just crash your cortisol, crash your adrenalin, your level of all of these stress neurotransmitters and hormones will go way, way, way down. And then all kinds of beneficial things increase including immunity and cell repair, all kinds of good things go up when those molecules become available to your body for building healthy cells. So those are the two things I think that are great, then layer in time in nature and layer in a spiritual practice, layer in... There's a wonderful medieval term called lectio divina reading inspirational material, fill your mind with this stuff, don't fill your mind with all the crap in the mass media and whatever you do, don't turn on your phone and start looking at it first thing in the morning when you wake up because you're gonna get then stuck in the lateral level of everything going on in the world, which is not in your best interest, instead, orient yourself meditation to what I call in my books, non-local mind and non-local reality in meditation, and then you can deal with the world through the framing of being one with the universe.0:24:20.3 DC: But that's the order to do it in. Hook up to the universe, then deal with the outside world, don't open your eyes and look at your phone and get sucked into the outside world and then try and meditate because you've blown it at that point, and it's hard to get back to that good space.0:24:35.0 MZ: Too little too late.0:24:36.6 DC: Oh, yes.0:24:37.6 MZ: Yes. I love meditation myself. I have had a committed practice for a while, and so I think it's so, so powerful, and I think oftentimes the results are evident later, or I'll notice too, just getting that nice breathing going even with the monkey mind, it's almost like the monkey mind is irrelevant, but...0:25:03.6 DC: It is.0:25:03.7 MZ: Yeah. Just carrying that nice breath, that connection to the universe you're talking about through the day is... Before you look at the phone is so good. Thank you for that.0:25:15.5 DC: And you're right about the monkey mind being irrelevant because we can't still our minds, we can't quiet our minds, our brains were meant to be highly active and highly involved with everything around us, think about... I was just thinking about just the ancestors, and I was going down a path in the forest near me a couple of days ago, and there was a stick lying in the path, and I thought, "You know my ancestors 100,000 years ago, when they see us that long brown skinny thing lying on the path. It might be a snake." So the optimist says, "Oh no, it's a stick. It's fine." And 99 times out of a 100, 100,000 years ago, it was a stick and nothing bad happened. The pessimist is seeing every stick and saying, "It's a snake. It's gonna bite me."0:26:00.2 MZ: Yes.0:26:00.8 DC: And so the pessimist is... The one time it is a snake, the pessimist says, "You see? It was a snake. It didn't bite me because I was so paranoid and suspicious, and now I'm safe." The optimist, unfortunately, at one time in a 100 gets bitten and dies. So he gets weeded from the gene pool, and only the pessimist lives to perpetuate his genes to the next generation. Multiply this by 10,000 generations and you have you, Mischa and me Dawson. And we are capable of the monkey mind like you wouldn't believe. Always looking around for the baddest stuff in our environment. We've just been bred that way for tens and of thousands of generations. And now we sit there and close our eyes and try and be happy? [laughter] Isn't gonna happen. [laughter]0:26:45.7 MZ: Oh, my God. That's amazing. Okay, so then you said... What can we do to shift? You have, in your book, one of your books, which you referenced, you've got 30 great tools, but start with the some sort of meditation and some EFT style of tapping in and then layer in more as time goes by. And then practice, so practice, practice. Find some consistency, yes?0:27:18.9 DC: Build those neural bundles, turn those states to traits, and that's what consistency will do. So then when one or more of the legs of your stool is gone, you're still totally serene, have total inner peace, and you have something that outside tragedy can't take away. You've now built the neural wiring or resilience in your brain, and that's just who you are. So when the pandemic strikes, when the economic crash happens, when you get divorced, when your kids are acting out, you are this highly resilient person. The research that I cover in both Bliss Brain and Mind to Matter shows that not only are you that person during meditation. Research by a wonderful neuro-scientist called Teresa Amabile at Harvard shows you reach that state mentally for that 30 minutes or so in the morning... Meditation, flow states, they then perpetuate themselves for 48 hours of increased productivity, creativity and problem solving ability.0:28:22.9 DC: And in one US government study, they showed that people in those states have five times the ability to solve complex problems. So now, even if you have had two of the three supports, legs knocked off out from under your stool, you have five times the ability to solve complex problems. You are gonna can put your stool back together again far quicker than somebody who doesn't have those. And in fact, there is this whole field, I talk about in Bliss Brain called post-traumatic growth. Not only do you wind up okay, you wind up better. You've actually used disaster as a springboard for personal transformation, so that's the potential of that practice.0:29:05.0 MZ: Yeah, fantastic. I love that. So many cool thoughts just were going through my brain as you were talking about that. And now they've all escaped me, but they will come back to me in a second, I'm sure. So after practice, was there anything else or were you... I don't mean to cut you off with the sort of the steps.0:29:31.5 DC: Yeah. So self-love, practice, at least, meditation and learn tapping, 'cause tapping takes you all of two minutes to learn. Takes you all of 30 seconds to do, and then you quickly are gonna regulate your emotions. And I cover in Bliss Brain, there are four circuits to the brain that start to change. Now, this is the absolute miracle of neuroplasticity. 20 years ago, we had no idea the brain was remodeling itself that way, but I have case studies in Bliss Brain showing that if you practice in this way, the emotion regulation network in your brain, the little hub that governs emotional network, emotional regulation in your brain, grows by, get this, 10% a month. So in three months, that part of the brain can be 30% larger. So now you can regulate your irritation, your annoyance, your resentment, your negative emotion, and that opens the door to a much happier life. So that's why in Bliss Brain I say there are four networks to develop, but develop emotion regulation first.0:30:43.7 DC: The next network is the one that controls the self, and so we have these elaborate stories about who we are. "I was born at such and such a time. This is my biography. This is what my job is like, my life is like, my money is like." That's all the self, and unfortunately, that is the part of the brain that draws us into suffering. That's called the default mode network. Our brain defaults to that suffering network automatically when we aren't engaged in a task. And so we need to dial that part of the brain down. Tibetan monks, with 10,000 hours of meditation practice, they can dial down the default mode network. Literally, they close their eyes, and in a second they shut it down. You and I, maybe five minutes if we are able to practice. So you wanna shut down the self-absorbed chatter.0:31:32.6 MZ: On a good day. Yes...0:31:33.5 DC: About your life that we're all doing, the monkey mind, and the self-critical part of the brain, especially. So that's the next thing you wanna develop. You wanna develop compassion and feel compassion for other people. Not just be thinking about yourself but loving other people, loving everything the way it is, loving every... It will actually guide you to loving every atom in the universe. So we develop developed these networks, the empathy network, and then the attention network. We learn to... It's part of the brain, called the orbital prefrontal cortex. We develop that part of the brain, so it grows, becomes better at firing, and then we can pay attention to what's important and we can screen out irrelevant information. Our work productivity goes through the roof, we're far more productive at work, we're far better at solving problems. Our creativity at least doubles with these methods in a very short order. So the benefits to your regular life are immense.0:32:29.9 MZ: That's amazing. And one of the thoughts that I had, which I love, and you're just verifying with data, with research, is this idea that I don't have time. I don't have time, right? And if we take the time, it will make us that much more efficient, that much more productivity... Or more productive. And it sounds like that... And I would verify this for myself, but maybe you can validate it for me. Time taken for the meditation, the simple practices, the rewards far... The productivity rewards, happiness rewards, time rewards, efficiency rewards far outweigh the limited amount of time we need to put in to achieve those results.0:33:24.3 DC: Some people say, "I don't have time to meditate." My retort is, "You don't have time not to meditate." In one study done by a huge consulting firm called McKinsey, they found that executives who are already high performers and are entering these flow states via meditation, their productivity goes up five-fold. So you get done now in one day what used to take you five. Now, those are the peak performers. And we're now measuring this in ordinary people. We're measuring how much productivity goes up. But even if it goes up 20%, that's like an extra day a week you have available to you. And you won't be using that week to do email and that extra day of the week to work. You'll be using it to go play, be creative and have fun. So it changes your whole life game plan to have that huge increase in productivity.0:34:16.0 MZ: Perfect. Before... I wanna do one thing, if you would, for me really quick. You were talking about in the Bliss Brain book; there's the four neural networks that you're effecting change in, correct?0:34:26.6 DC: Yes.0:34:26.9 MZ: I think that's what you said. And so the first one was...0:34:29.8 DC: Emotion regulation.0:34:31.3 MZ: Say it again?0:34:32.8 DC: Emotion regulation.0:34:33.8 MZ: Emotion regulation. And so that would be, for example, the meditation, the stuff like that, right?0:34:39.0 DC: Yes.0:34:39.2 MZ: And then the second one was...0:34:43.4 DC: There's also the attention network.0:34:47.7 MZ: Intent... So, what would be a...0:34:47.8 DC: The empathy network and the...0:34:48.1 MZ: Oh, go ahead.0:34:48.5 DC: So yeah, the attention network, empathy network, and the self-centeredness suppression network. There's a part... Parts of the brain that take that self-absorbed mental chatter and switch off that project.0:35:02.0 MZ: Perfect. Okay. For the second one, could you give a simple tip or tool to help with that, to give someone a vision, so the... I can't read my own writing. [chuckle]0:35:17.5 DC: For the attention network, for example...0:35:21.2 MZ: Yes.0:35:21.5 DC: That's why a guided meditation is so useful.0:35:24.7 MZ: Okay.0:35:24.9 DC: There's dozens of guided meditations free on the web. Both at ecomeditation.com and also Insight Timer has them. A bunch of websites have my meditations for free. Blissbrain.com has them. Mind to Matter has unique ones for manifestation. And so these guided meditations give your attention network a voice, some music to focus on. That's good for you for maybe six months, maybe two or three years. At that point, you wanna graduate from that, and you'll be doing meditations yourself. You'll be able to focus your attention without the words. But for novices, it's really hard to do. You need something to focus on, like that voice and that music, so that's a second...0:36:06.0 MZ: I love it. Fantastic! And why not take advantage of those tools? Especially, since a ton of them are out there for free. Right?0:36:14.6 DC: Yep. Yep.0:36:14.6 MZ: Okay, so the empathy network, what... Tell me a tip, trick, tool for that. Is that more meditation, or is that... Is that basically... And what I'm hearing you say is that meditation is gonna fire all four of those. [chuckle]0:36:29.3 DC: Yes. It will. So empathy, like the guided meditations, we have you focus on a source of unconditional love. A person or being with whom you feel that some sort of connection. And when you do that, that activates a part of the brain called the insula, which has to do with pro-social emotions. So empathy, altruism, love, gratitude, all of those things are activated. And all of those are part of what the insula runs. And so, when you activate the insula, all of these pro-social emotions kick in, and then you can feel this immense compassion. Your heart rate slows down then, your heart rhythm becomes very regular. All kinds of good things happen in your body. So you deliberately activate the insula during the compassion part of EcoMeditation.0:37:19.1 MZ: Fantastic, thank you. And then the self-centeredness.0:37:24.7 DC: Yeah. And so in Chapter 1 and Chapter 7, beginning at the end of my book, Mind to Matter, I talk about local reality and non-local mind. And we all have to navigate local reality. I have to keep my car tuned up, and I have to keep my mortgage and rent paid, and I have to take care of my children, and I have a whole local reality I have to attend to. And then, what meditation allows you to do is step into non-local reality. And so when I sit there in the morning and meditate, I find myself being drawn up into this whole other world of just pure being. And then you're merging with non-local love, non-local information fields. And when you then end meditation and move back into your work world, you're drawing down all of the information into your local reality. That's what makes it so productive. Like, Albert Einstein said that that's the way all great scientific discoveries are made by people in altered states of consciousness where they're in tune with these global reality fields. And he'd been trying to figure out the theory of relativity for a long time. And then, one night, he fell asleep. He was really depressed and frustrated at the time. He just was... It was like beating his head against the wall. And he just saw the whole theory of relativity in a dream, in his vision. And then woke up in the morning and then spent four years working out of mathematics bit.[chuckle]0:38:52.9 MZ: That is amazing. Dawson, this has been amazing. Everybody who's watching and listening. If this interview with Dawson has been fantastic and you want to get even more content from Dawson, upgrade to the All-Access Pass for the bonus interview, which we're gonna be doing right after this. And I've got great questions there, and Dawson's obviously amazing so you won't wanna miss it. So be sure to upgrade to the All-Access Pass for that. And then any final thoughts to share that we did not get a chance to cover, Dawson?0:39:28.2 DC: Lots. [chuckle] We can't covered them all now. I would encourage you to just fill your life with everything that you can to support yourself. So it's meditation in the morning. Again, first thing in the morning, before you get involved in the outside local reality of your life, tapping to bring you back to that baseline during the day only takes a minute or two to tap, and then you feel better right away. And then nurture yourself with great friendships, people who support and love you. Nurture yourself with great media, just read books, read my books, read other people's books, there's so much information out there. Some free information out there, or even the cost of a book now 10, $20, it's amazing how much you can get. And then you start to fill your mind, inner reality with all of this. And when you filled your inner reality with such good inputs, the good outputs just appear all around you in friendships, in money insights, in well-being, in massive epigenetic shift in your cells.0:40:27.6 DC: So just doing all those things to truly love, nurture yourself and create a good life for yourself. You can create a good life for yourself. Research shows that you can be dramatically happier than you are today. In some of these MRI studies, we've seen these monks and they close their eyes, meditate, and their waves, the brainwaves of happiness go up 700% over baseline. So the bottom line is you can be like seven times as happy as you could even imagine. What neuroscience is doing meditation said to me, "Dawson. I thought it was a 10 out of 10 happiness before, but now I'm like a 15. I'm having like transcended happiness." And that is what anyone can learn to cultivate in their own brains.0:41:11.6 MZ: It's amazing, Dawson. This has been amazing, and anybody can go to blissbrain.com and download that ebook for free, I believe. Correct?0:41:23.9 DC: Yeah.0:41:24.8 MZ: Yeah. So absolutely everybody should go do that. No matter what, you've just reinforced as well in me that the choice is mine. Like more happiness is there for me if I choose to go grab it. And that's outside of the shiny object so thank you for that. And then there was another thought, but it's fleeting and gone, but thank you so much. I'm gonna hit stop here and then we'll come back in a minute for round two.[music]

Sept 27-Oct. 3-DC- “It is thy House, a place of Thy Holiness!” “His eyes were as a flame of fire; The hair of his head was white like the pure snow; his countenance shown above the brightness of the sun; and his voice was as the sound of the rushing of great waters, even the voice of Jehovah, saying: I am the first and the last; I am he who liveth , I am he who was slain; I am your advocate with the Father. Behold, your sins are forgiven you; you are clean before me; therefore, lift up your heads and rejoice.“ DC 110:3-5 --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/rosa-o-garcia/support

Thinking is Freedom 03/29/21 Vol.10 #058If America wants to remain a free country, then it needs to return to traditional values and critical thinking skills.*About Friday*The Suez is Shyte *Stuck in Suez*Voting Laws in GA *A Verified Vote is Not Jim Crow*Notice We Aren’t Talking About Boulder *Promoting Gun Agenda*Meanwhile in DC*It’s Not About Race*The Biden-Harris White House Books by host Thomas Purcell are available free on to Amazon Prime and Kindle subscribersThe money pledged thru Patreon will go toward show costs such as advertising, server time, and broadcasting equipment. If we can get enough listeners, we will expand the show to two hours and hire additional staff.To help our show out, please support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/LibertyNeverSleepsAll bumper music and sound clips are not owned by the show, are commentary, and of educational purposes, or de minimus effect, and not for monetary gain.No copyright is claimed in any use of such materials and to the extent that material may appear to be infringed, I assert that such alleged infringement is permissible under fair use principles in U.S. copyright laws. If you believe material has been used in an unauthorized manner, please contact the poster.Show Video on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/49332282

Marco Jacobs is a CEO, startup investor, and mentor in the thriving greater Washington, DC IT market. Born, raised, and educated in Jackson, Mississippi Marco knew at an early age he loved building things. His love for building landed him as a computer science major at Jackson State where he received a full scholarship as a sonic boomer in the well known Jackson State band. After serving multiple internships throughout college, Marco set up shop in DC and in 2016 established CodeIntelX servicing IT clients, as well as CodeIntelX Labs, to help provide training, mentorship, and real world opportunities for future software leaders.

 Driving Change (DC): In many ways, you have built your career by courting controversy and critiquing the system that you're now part of. Can you tell us about that journeyTim Wilson (TW): I've gone from the experience of working in the world of ideas to what it means to be practical and to have to implement [those ideas] in terms of policy. That's been a journey. When you're in the world of ideas, or the think-tank world, you can stick with very ideological worldviews, things that are very sharp in their focus and sometimes that have an abrasive edge. Whereas the journey I went on, particularly when I was Human Rights Commissioner, and as a parliamentarian, is that you're exposed to the full complexity of humanity.What you learn when you keep your mind open is how to translate your big idea into something that's practical and saleable and connects with people in their life. That's a sustainable base to affect change. I think you become more aware, more empathetic and more human in the process of your engagement.DC: What prompted you to seek public office?TW: It came down to frustration, working in the world of ideas, or even what I was, as Human Rights Commissioner, a statutory officer of the Parliament which has the legal standing and authority to raise some really serious issues. What became obvious is that you can raise [these issues] in the public square, you can shape public debate, but in the end the decisions are made by the people in the room at the time. If you can be in that room at that time, standing up for what I would say are classical liberal values or modern liberal values, about the type of country we want to be [you can have a greater impact].I saw that, time and time again, and then ultimately the opportunity came up to represent the amazing community that I do, and I seized on that opportunity. It's been a thoroughly worthwhile journey.DC: Let's talk a little bit about the state of policymaking in Australia, which you're now charged with. People overseas often scratch their heads at Australia. On the one hand, there's this incredible economic record: 29 years of unbroken growth until the pandemic, the longest growth streak of any developed economy in the world. Australia has largely managed to avoid the very bitter partisanship that we're seeing in the US and some other places around the world. Yet Australia had six Prime Ministers in 13 years, a carousel of leaders, suggesting that something's wrong. What are the strengths of Australian policymaking that other countries could learn from, and what needs to be improved?TW: One of the things that makes Australia unique, particularly amongst Western liberal democracies, is that we have a relatively unified culture across the country. In practice, that means that most people are going on a similar journey. Yes, there are regional differences, but they're not as stark as they are in other parts of the world— say, for instance, in the United States. I'm in the Southernmost state [Victoria] which is sometimes referred to as the Massachusetts of the south. In the northern state of Queensland, our lived experiences are different. Our cultures are different, they grew up organically, but there is still a common thread of nationhood which I think binds the common values that have made policymaking more straightforward.The other thing that I think does matter is – and this will be heretical to many international audiences – we have compulsory voting. I realize that's an infringement on liberty, but what it means is everybody has ownership of the government.We don't have a debate about whether the government was legitimately elected or has a legitimate right to implement its reform agenda. Governments are elected, everybody's had their say, and as a consequence people accept the outcome.One of the great tests of democracy is not who wins and who's the victor, it's whether those who were defeated accept their defeat and accept the legitimacy of the victor. I think that's central to it.The other thing, of course, is that 29 years of uninterrupted economic growth has enabled Australia to confront many challenges. It has enabled our country to finance restructuring of the economy or parts of society and to take many people with us on the journey. Now, I'm not saying public policy in Australia is perfect, it's not. But when you can cushion the impact on people, you're able to take more people on a journey.DC: Like most other countries, due to the pandemic Australia is now facing major economic headwinds. Have we been complacent? Have we prepared for this? Do we have the right policy institutions in place?TW: We are going to face some big challenges, where we're going to have to have reforms where we won't have winners and uber-winners, we're just going to have people who benefit or see the benefit of reform.There's going to be a cost, and people are going to have to carry that cost. But not doing anything would impose an even bigger burden. Half of it is about how we get the public discussion right, how we get to a discussion where people understand that there's a cost to inaction. I think that is going to be a problem.The other thing is, we've built in a lot of welfare and support measures to cushion the impact of previous reforms. The trade-off from that now is there's quite a lot of financial fat in our welfare system. We're going to have to become leaner and more agile in the way we operate the country.I'd still rather work from a position of strength and find a way to slim down than already have significant debt burdens and not have many support measures while trying to address the issues of a globally competitive environment.DC: Responding to the pandemic is requiring difficult conversations with constituents and the public about the trade-offs involved. How are you seeing this playing out? What needs to happen? How should policymakers go about communicating these trade-offs and the risks involved?TW: Part of it, unfortunately, is going to require people to experience the consequences of the Covid recession. At the start of the pandemic Australia, because of its relative bounty, was able to cushion the impact— particularly through wage subsidy programs that carried many people through a crisis that's nearly unprecedented in our history.But until people feel the consequences of the economic crisis, I think it'll be hard to make the case for reform. The Economist once wrote of Australia that we're a “country that's not very good at managing prosperity but we're very good in crisis.” When we are confronted with a crisis, when we understand the nature of the problem and that the impact is human, then people will accept that there is a need for change to build a more sustainable future for the country.I think this is a good time to be prosecuting ideas, particularly around how you restructure the economy to make it more liberal and more dynamic and fit for the 21st century. It's going to require that lived human experience of Australians to accept that, but I do believe once they do [experience a recession], they will [accept the case for economic reform].DC: There have been quite a few different policy approaches to managing the pandemic in Australia. As in the US, state governments have responsibility for many aspects of public health and other [policy areas] pertinent to the crisis. What are some of the different approaches that Australian states have taken and what are your views on them?TW: Different states have taken quite radically different approaches based largely on the attitude of the governments they elect. In my state of Victoria, we have a Labor government, which would be seen as a left-wing Democrat-style government in much of the United States or other countries. They've approached [the pandemic] by empowering themselves through the centralization of power, implementing giant lockdowns across the whole of a state, and then deciding which sectors they're prepared to open. They're empowering themselves at the expense of citizens.The state of New South Wales, which is where Sydney is, has a Liberal or Centre-right government, and took a completely different approach. They looked at how to empower citizens to take responsibility but understood that the government's responsibility is to articulate the case about what needs to be restricted and to justify it.You see two very different models of governance. One is [based on] high centralization where the citizen has to justify their behaviour to the government – which is the social democratic tradition – and [the other is based on] the liberal democratic tradition, where the government has to justify why it is restricting people's liberties and the terms on which they're doing it.Consequently, Victoria was in lockdown for about six months continuously, with huge detriment to the economy, to livelihoods and to people's health and welfare. In New South Wales it's been the complete reverse. Their health circumstances aren't identical, but their approach is radically different.DC: As we come out of this emergency phase, how do we ensure that some of the rights and freedoms which most people willingly gave up as part of the public health response are protected in the long term? What does an ongoing response to the crisis look like in terms of balancing rights with the public health response?TW: We don't have a bill of rights. In fact, the state of Victoria, which has had some of the harshest measures, has the most rigid legislative Charter of Rights [among Australia's states]. That was completely discarded once the pandemic started.It says something about the fact that people were prepared to trade [rights] away and weren't prepared to stand up for them when they were under attack.I think that the best approach is to adopt the one that New South Wales has taken, which is to understand that the government has a job to do. We know that the pandemic poses very serious health risks, particularly to the elderly and people with immunosuppressant conditions. But the trade-off should be that the government should then have to justify proportionally why what they're trying to do is necessary to protect people's lives.Things like face masks I have no problem with, and I don't think they're a big deal. You can see the proportional relationship between the imposition, or the denial of people's liberty, and the outcome in terms of public health. Whereas with other measures, like Victoria's curfew, there was no evidence: in fact, the Chief Health Officer said there was no evidence or public health need for it to be implemented.I think it's about getting that sense of balance and proportionality right and understanding that the government has to justify the restrictions and the citizens shouldn't have to defend their freedoms.DC: You talk in your new book about the need for a new social contract. This is a topic which is currently rising up the political agenda around the world. Why? And what do you think is uniquely Australian in the need for a new social contract?TW: I think there's some fundamental generational imbalances in the structures of our society. I wrote The New Social Contract because we're seeing issues around young people feeling dispossessed or not being able to realize their full opportunity.Now, this is not a unique threat to Australia. It's the same in the United States and the United Kingdom— around the cost of education, limited employment opportunities after the global economic crisis, and of course now this is going to be compounded by Covid-19.But we also see it in things like house prices. Loose monetary policy has led to asset price inflation, which has been good for people like me who own their own home or own assets, [but has been] at the expense of young people wanting to get opportunities.We need to have a conversation about what is an intergenerationally just society. For me that is one where older people are able to secure what they have, but don't get preference for their years of effort and labor and won't skewer [young people's] opportunity.You can create a more inclusive society that moves forward together yet can make quite substantial reform to promote home ownership, to level out tax rates, to remove tax complications and to build what is essentially, in the classical sense, a more liberal, democratic society that's open for everybody. And a more dynamic capitalism too.DC: It sounds like you could write a sequel, ‘intergenerational equity after the pandemic.' It is only getting worse at the moment, right?TW: That's right. I wrote the book mostly pre-Covid and warned that Australia's intergenerational tension was ready to pop as soon as we had an economic crisis. [The pandemic] just started when I was concluding the book and it's now quite obvious that this is a problem.We have sacrificed opportunity for younger Australians, as many other countries have for their younger populations, to secure the health and welfare of their older populations. This is only exacerbating an already existing trend. This trend is prevalent in popular culture here, as it is elsewhereIt's particularly a problem when the systems of governance, tax and ownership structurally work against young people being able to get ahead. We need to address it. Covid-19 is only compounding it. The book was written for the 2020s in the expectation that a lot of the problems I was outlining would be revealed in 2030. In fact, I would argue that the clock is now ticking, that they're already present and the sort of political crisis that will follow the health and economic crisis will probably hit closer to 2025DC: If you were going back to the very beginning of your career, what advice would you give yourself?TW: Never be afraid. One of the things about the contest of ideas is that the worst anybody can do is demonize and criticize you – but it actually has no lasting effect. Particularly in the modern age where people seem to throw around verbitude without any sense of restraint or responsibility, it is really important to stand up for what you believe in and do it with a sense of conviction and passion.Ultimately, timidity is in surplus in the world. Courage is rare. The more you stand up, the more you can affect change in whatever position you are in. You also, frankly, encourage other people to stand up.There are other people who will read to scripts or learn off the ideas of others. The people who genuinely have ideas, are genuinely prepared to prosecute them and communicate not just the idea, but their passion and commitment to it with sincerity, ultimately win the day.Note: This conversation has been edited lightly for clarity and context

Bro DR delivered this powerful sermon from the National Mall in Washington, DC- It's time to take back what Satan has stolen--

Bro DR delivered this powerful sermon from the National Mall in Washington, DC- It's time to take back what Satan has stolen--

Jimmy Barrett and Shara Fryer take you through the stories that matter on the morning of 09/17/2020.What if mail-in balloting goes awry? What if states send competing slates of electoral votes to Washington, DC? It's up to Congress to sort this out. The House and the Senate are the ultimate arbiters of the Electoral College results, but if lawmakers can't agree on who won, the Constitution dictates that the House elects the President. This is called a "contingent election." Such elections gave the country Presidents Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams. But this could take a while to sort out. And if nothing is resolved by January 20 at noon ET, the Presidential Succession Act dictates that the Speaker of the House becomes "Acting President." We sort out the details on what could be a wild ride to the presidency not seen in nearly two centuries. Fox News Contributor Elizabeth Ames calls in to break down this madness. The stock market is detached from economic reality. A reckoning is coming. We talk with Michael Smith of Houston’s STA Wealth Management.

In this special episode, we feature the keynote address that Maggie O'Neill '99 delivered to the audience at the 14th Annual Women in Business Conference in November, 2019. Recorded November 2, 2019 --- Transcript Maggie: I believe that this school, I believe that the education that you receive here allows you to navigate the world in a much different way. You may not realize that right now, but I promise you that if you remember what I'm telling you when those things hit, it's going to start to resonate. And the more you exercise your ability to navigate the interdisciplinary world, the more you will succeed, which is a relative term. It's really the more you're going to impact other people, and you're going to bring people along for the ride. And that's a really important thing to do because that's your legacy. Maura: Welcome to Mission-Driven, where we speak with alumni who are leveraging their Holy Cross education to make a meaningful difference in the world around them. I'm your host Maura Sweeney from the class of 2007, director of alumni career development at Holy Cross. I'm delighted to welcome you to today's show. This episode takes us back to November 2019 when Maggie O'Neill from the class of 1999 delivered the keynote address for the 14th annual Women in Business Conference, artist, designer, mentor, and creative entrepreneur. Maggie believes in art that makes an impact and design that creates an experience. In this talk, she speaks about the twists and turns that formed her career into what it is today. After graduating with a degree in political science, she has found ways to merge her passions for art, politics, social justice, and plain old having a good time into a career that allows her to make an impact on the lives of others. Throughout the talk, she speaks about the lessons that she learned at Holy Cross and how her time on the hill helped her grow into such a successful and inspiring force for good. Maggie: I am Maggie O'Neill, I'm both an artist and I'm a designer, and I'm a Holy Cross grad. I was a political science major, which I'm sure does not make any sense to any of you, how did I end up becoming an interior designer and an artist? What got me there? So that I don't spend the entire time talking about what got me there, I'm going to give you a cliff note version of that and then I'm going to tell you some things that I think are very important and I'm sure other women in this room who have moved on in their careers in different ways would probably agree with some of the things that I want to share. But I'm going to share my experience, how I've dealt with these things, what I think could be extraordinary tools for you moving forward. And I hope that if you have any questions at the end of this, no question is a stupid question, no question is a crazy question. And I have a lot of crazy stories, so I expect that you will have some questions for me.   So upon leaving the hill in 1999, I was a poli sci major, but I also painted and I stayed in the studios here for probably just as much time as I was in class for political science. But I didn't think that there was any career for me in the arts. I didn't know anybody growing up that was an artist, a professional artist anyways. I didn't really have people in the creative world around me that I could've said, "That's a career path I want to take." So I wanted to be a lawyer, and I wanted to be the president of United States, and I still might, we'll wait. We'll wait and see. I occasionally say #artistforpresident. And living in DC right now is really interesting. I try really hard not to get arrested every day.   So I came out of Holy Cross and I actually went back to school through the University of Georgia for a master's program in fine arts, but I ended up studying in Italy. And there's a lot in between that, but in order to make a little money on the side and also to understand the community I was in in Italy, I spent some time working on restoration projects. And I was climbing up scaffolding and mixing my own plasters and all of that. And I quickly realized that there was this reverence in Europe for people who were working with their hands. And the renaissance in general was so eye opening to me about the way in which history, political science, sociology, and culture had been documented particularly in Europe in a visual format. And part of my classwork was that we'd be in the studio for two days and then the other two days we'd have to go to a museum, and you had to be ready.   You had to be ready when they walked up to a piece to say, tell me the history of this particular piece of artwork or this altarpiece or what have you? I got pretty good at memorizing and I got pretty good at compelling arguments and communicating here at Holy Cross. And I didn't realize how strong of a skillset I had developed here that my classmates really were lacking in. And it was this revelation that I was like, "God, I need to be an artist for sure." I knew that this is what I needed to do with my life, but how? And how was anything that was so romantic in the renaissance going to be something that I could take back and actually pursue as a career?   So I came back to DC and I started doing anything I could to make money. I painted dog portraits, I painted baby furniture. I probably had five or six jobs at once. And I have to tell you that when you come out of school, it was a really interesting time because everybody is going to crawl before they can walk. So all of your peers may look like on Instagram and Facebook, like they are crushing it their first or second or third year out of college. Well, they're not, nobody is. And it may not be now, but you have to crawl before you can walk. And I did. And so anything I could do to keep my hands busy and try to keep some money in my pocket was what I was doing. And I started O'Neill Studios not really knowing that I was starting a business. I was 23, I really didn't know what I was doing. I got an LLC set up, I started to learn the nuts and bolts of business and very quickly that business grew to decorative painting and murals.   At that time, I was like, "There's gotta be something more for me." But I knew that if I just kept going, I would give myself these little mile markers, like, well, if in a couple of weeks from now I haven't done this or in a year from now I haven't done this. And I kept meeting my goals, which was great. But nobody in my network had any idea what I was doing. Everybody kept saying, "Are you going to keep up this whole art thing? You really think you're just going to ... This is how you're going to go? You have a poli sci degree from Holy Cross, you're supposed to be a lawyer. What are you doing?" And I think about that time, and I was looking for pictures. It seems like so long ago, but at the same time, it was such a formidable time in my life.   I slowly realized that when I started to work with other artists and when I started to meet clients who had these different backgrounds, there was this enormous realization in my life that we are all made different for a reason. And we know this, right? There's this faith based on understanding that we have here that you are born different for a reason, and you probably have a very specific reason that you're here. But it doesn't necessarily, it's not always that clear to you. I have a whole philosophy that is about color, and it really transcends everything, but it's both religious in some ways and it also will filter into all of my business and my business interactions. And I hope this makes sense to you guys in some ways.   But it was during this time in my life that this idea of color theory and this idea of I am here for a very particular reason, I have to figure out what it is. But I was seeing that the impact of my work, no matter how small, whether I had painted somebody's bathroom or I had given them a portrait of their child or I was able to paint a mural on the side of a building for somebody, there were these little moments where somebody was so happy when I was done. And the joy that I was able to bring somebody was intoxicating. It was like a drug, I wanted to do more of that. And to be in the residential arena or to just paint one painting felt so small. I was like, "How do I get more of this on a larger level?" As my business grew, I started to collaborate with other artists and other experts in their field. I'm jumping ahead a little bit right now.   The ultimate artist statement for me was that I was born to be different as you are, and I was designed to contribute something very, very particular to the universe and my immediate community. And that became very real to me. To be an artist really can take very many forms. You don't just have to be a visual artist to really understand that. So now what, now what? Let me rewind here for a second actually because I want to just throw this out. My parents are here, my dad's a Holy Cross grad. I think he might've been maybe my first mentor in the arts, I don't know. But I just want to thank you guys, I kind of blew past that. And during that time where I was painting baby furniture or dog portraits or painting people's bathrooms, I'm sure they were completely freaked out, scared to death that I wasn't going to be able to make a living, scared to death that this education, this robust education that I had just received at this school was being wasted.   And it really wasn't, it really wasn't being wasted at all. So I just wanted to say thank you to them for that. There's a lot of risk taking that's involved in not actually understanding what your next step is. And I remember having a conversation with my mom one evening where she says, "You just have to put one foot in front of the other. And if it's a mistake, then you just make another step, and you just have to keep moving forward. But to stay paralyzed by fear is the worst thing you can do for yourself." And that made no sense at that particular time in my life, and now it makes perfect sense to me now. So nonetheless, I started this O'Neill Studios. O'Neill Studios then became SWATCHROOM, which is what you just heard about, which is the restaurant, nightclub, hotel, design business.   I'm going to talk about some of the projects that we've done and get into that in a little bit. When I came back to DC, there was also this thing that there's not a lot of creatives in DC or at least that's what I thought, there weren't a lot of creatives in DC. And particularly 20 years ago, there wasn't a wealth of career paths for artists or creatives. And now the creative capital and the creative community in Washington is exceptional. And I encourage you to move there for various reasons, but it's really an exciting place to be as an artist and as a creative professional. I believe that I have a lot to do with that, I think that I've tried very hard to make sure that Washington understands the value of creativity and particularly the interdisciplinary nature of just letting your creative flag fly.   So no matter what lane you decide to go into to enrich that particular part of your brain and to continue to stay inspired is really critical. And I have a couple recipes for that. I'm rolling it back again, I'm kind of giving you a little bit of context because this is where I am right now. I'm 42 years old, and I could not be more proud of the business that I've been able to build, but it didn't just happen overnight. When Provost Freije says you have to work hard, you have to work hard in order to build anything. And you have to work hard to build anything that is really exceptional. And now to be competitive and to stay innovative, you have to try really a lot of different things. And you're going to fail along the way, and that's going to be okay because there's a lot of beauty in failure, which I'm also going to share with you.   So I probably have, I don't know, thousands of pictures of my early days painting people's bathrooms and being on scaffolding in rich people's houses, painting their ceilings, ridiculous stuff. So my practical work was the design work because that's what people could understand, "Oh, we'll pay you to do this." That makes sense. But public artwork was what I wanted to be doing. I wanted to be doing massive murals on the sides of buildings. And I reached out to all of the public artists I could find nationally, I wanted to apprentice. No one would take me because I was poli sci major, no one would take me. I go back to school, I do this restoration work. I come back to DC, and there's a call to artists to the Dc Commission on Arts and Humanities, and we had the pandas, but there was also the elephants and the donkeys, these big fiberglass sculptures that are everywhere that the city said.   Well, these were pandas. And I threw a couple proposals in. Well, Pandela Anderson was one of my proposal. And they said, so how do you propose that you will make Pandela Anderson? Because everybody else who had been selected had pretty reasonable designs. And then this one was a little offensive, it was a little strange. Pamela Anderson was really hot at the time, and how was I going to actually make her nose and her hair and her breasts and all of these things. I mean, I had to explain to them I had never done sculpture before, like zero sculpture. This is all fiberglass. And I fake it till you make it. Don't lie, but fake it till you make it. Well, I'll figure it out. And I did, I figured it out, but my mom ended up helping me with this.   But this was one of the most ridiculous things I've ever done. And she went for the most money in the city by $10,000, it was amazing. We sat in that auction, I couldn't stop laughing. I got paid nothing to do this, it was my entire summer. And then I sat outside of the restaurant where they put her and just watched people interact with her. And it gave me so much joy. I had no money, but I had a lot of joy. But in this particular moment in time, I met probably 75 new artists. That was a huge turning point for me because I met people that were doing things that I couldn't even conceive were possible. And I opened up my network, and I opened up my brain a little bit, and it was a game changer for me.   Maybe not financially, but psychologically. I mean, she ended up on CNN, it was hilarious. Pamela Anderson got like ... It was ridiculous. So back to color theory. So I meet 75 artists, I also meet the mayor. I meet all of these news people. I mean, it was this funny fiberglass sculpture just introduced all these weird people to me. Not just weird, but important people in Washington DC, and the people from DC Commission on Arts and Humanities. And because she was so outstandingly strange, I was outstandingly strange. I am outstandingly strange. And it was a huge networking opportunity for me. So back to the color theory thing. So the idea behind color theory abbreviated is that no two colors next to themselves or next to each other are ever the same.   So the color in the middle here is the exact same. But next to this orange, it looks very different. And next to the blue, it looks very different. Now, color is about chemistry and about light and about a whole host of things. But people are the exact same way. So everybody in this room has a palette. You're not just one color, you're a series of colors. And I think of it like fan deck and paint chips. And when you are next to somebody, you are never the same. They provoke something in you, they inspire something in you. It's positive or negative, but it's never ever the same. And that's a beautiful thing, and that is by design, God is the best artists that exists. There was a real thought to that. And so if you think about how that translates to your professional life, your personal life, there's beauty in that, which means you should take advantage of everybody that's sitting to your right or to your left at all times.   You never know what that person is going to do or how they're going to bring out the best in you or a particular thing that you didn't even know existed in your brain, in your heart, and in your skillset. And so just that whole philosophy for me became very real and is really how I navigate life frankly. It's how I've navigated almost all of my relationships. And when someone provokes something in you, good or bad, pay attention to that because it's something that you can do something with later, but it also should teach you how to deal with them and how to navigate your life. So if it's in a professional setting, I think that what it often does is you can start to understand why they're original, why they're unique, and what their value is not only your value, but their value.   I think what ends up happening is you can go into a situation where you may understand the person a little bit differently. And what then starts to happen is that you can have a lot of empathy. Empathy in business is one of the most important tools you can have. It doesn't mean sympathy, it means empathy. Everyone's coming to the table probably doing the best that they can do. But it's interesting that in business now there's this adversarial nature when you go into negotiation. In construction, I sit down ... By the way, I take people to the atrium of the National Portrait Gallery in DC. It's the most peaceful, beautiful room I can think of in Washington. It's calming, and that's an important place to have a tough conversation for me. You never know where you're going to be for conversations like that in business, but there's the assumption that you have to be aggressive, there's an assumption that you have to be well standoffish. You don't want to show your cards.   And I can tell you that the thing that completely takes the oxygen out of a room is when you're empathetic and you lead a conversation with love. And you lead a conversation where you understand the landscape of the other person and the other person's palette, so to speak. And I think that that philosophically for me has been a really important tool and something that I just wanted to make sure that you guys understand as I take you through all of this. The climate that you can create with forgiveness and empathy and love is like nothing else in business. It seems like an incredibly rare thing to hear in some ways, but color theory for me has taught me that.   These are pictures of my team, which I think are pretty hilarious. And I wanted to share these with you because ... This is a project called Morris, it's a cocktail bar in DC. It's like Wes Anderson and Alison Wonderland had a baby. And it's so charming, but we would do these photo shoots after the projects are over. And this is called Karma. It's an Indian restaurant, a modern Indian restaurant. And this is this really beautiful, it's in the private dining room. We took a rug and deconstructed it, and it comes over and it's this light fixture where the light filters down over you. I'm showing you these pictures because ... And this is a restaurant called Teddy & The Bully Bar, but this was the team of people that helped with that.   I built a business, and I've met people along the way where I was like, "You're different, and you're different, and you're different. And that's how we're actually going to succeed is if we can work together and we can be experts because you are an expert in your particular thing, I'm an expert in my particular thing, and get the ego out of it." Celebrate the fact that the differences that you bring to the table actually makes you stronger, and it makes you much more competitive, especially as a team or as a business. And that again goes back to color theory. So I have compiled a team of people that are brilliant, you guys, but none of us have the same backgrounds, and that's on purpose. So conversations can go longer. But if the giant game of what if.   And in the design industry, particularly right now, how you shock somebody, how you provoke somebody, how you create an environment that can calm somebody down or turn someone on, you name the emotion. But I have to figure out what it is that a client wants you to feel when you leave the room in order to design those things. And that could be done through lighting, it could be done through sound, it could be done through material choices. But in order to figure that out, I can't do that alone. Of course, I have very strong opinions, but I have to do that with a collection of people that have really, really different backgrounds.   To solve the world's problems, you can't have a bunch of people that have the exact same view on things. You really do have to get people together that have this interdisciplinary way of which that they actually creatively problem solve. And I felt like that was a really important thing for you guys to hear because I don't know that I recognized how much that this place taught me that. And when I have met with other designers or I meet with people in construction and I deal with commercial real estate, it is amazing how many people came out of one lane and they have stayed in that lane, and it's not doing them a service. It does not make them a stronger professional.   And I believe that this school, I believe that the education that you receive here allows you to navigate the world in a much different way. And you may not realize that right now, but I promise you that if you remember what I'm telling you when those things hit it, it's going to start to resonate. And the more you exercise your ability to navigate the interdisciplinary world, the more you will succeed, which is a relative term. It's really the more you're going to impact other people, and you're going to bring people along for the ride. And that's a really important thing to do because that's your legacy. Your legacy is bringing other women with you particularly, but also the rest of the world with you. If you have the brain that I know that all of you have in order to be here and you probably have a spirit to match that.   That's just something I want to make sure that you guys know. This is my design business, but this really translates to many, many other businesses. And the people that I see that are at the top of their game, vibrating on the highest level, they surround themselves with people who have completely different viewpoints, completely different backgrounds. And that's a common denominator I've seen across the board. So I think that's something that I hope you take away from at least what I'm sharing with you. Ego is not your amigo. So after I just told you you're so smart and you have so much to offer the world, it doesn't mean that you should ever forget this. I think as an artist and as somebody who is a personal brand to the extent that I have to be very careful about recognizing where I have weaknesses and making sure that I have people around me to support those weaknesses.   So DC is filled with egos, filled. Everybody wants to look over your shoulder, they can't wait to get to the next person, who's going to do what for me? It's really obnoxious. So this became something that as I'm trying to build my business, everyone's like, "Your name, your name, your name." But my name, which was O'Neill Studios, and it still is O'Neill. I was like, "I gotta take my name out of my business because if I didn't show up, they didn't want to talk to the people that were on my team." So that's when we moved into SWATCHROOM. And I have nine people on my team right now, brilliant, brilliant. Also, by the way, almost all women. And when they show up, it's really important that, I've said this to them too, you need to have confidence, but you also need to check your ego at the door when you are entering into some of these conversations with equally brilliant people, equally powerful people.   It's really something careful to keep in mind. And so I put it on the side of our building. So this was the beginning of SWATCHROOM. It was an old hair salon, and then we renovated it. And this is no longer our office, but this was our office for eight years. And 13,000 people I think drive by Ninth Street in DC and actually would see ego is not your amigo on the side of the building. And that gave me so much joy thinking all these people are going ... I mean, I'm blocks from the White House. Now, this is good. And so I want to throw that out there because what happens also as you grow and as you succeed and as you move up, it's really important to keep that in check and to help keep the people around you in check.   That's a gentle dance which we'll get to in a minute. So the dance, the dance of doing your homework and pivoting at the same time. So learning as much as you can, working as hard as you can, trying to find out as much information before you entered the space that you're about to go into. But then also keeping in mind that you most likely don't know it all, and you most likely will need to pivot at some point because the plan that you had, God had another plan or the room had another plan for you. And that has probably been the thing that I have had to learn the most, but also in a way where I enjoy it.   First of all, I love to dance. But if you think of it that way where the pivot is a beautiful thing, if you have to change courses or lanes or you have to figure out a different way to explain something to somebody, really lean into that, enjoy the fact that you're actually exercising your brain in a different way. It is inevitable that you will fail in this process. And I think that you got to remember that opportunity is created through pivots and through failures as well, which I'm sure you guys know and you've heard and you can see it on the Pinterest quote and all this other stuff, but it is true. The minute you are at rock bottom, the minute someone tells you no, the minute your idea fails, you have to bounce back and you have to realize that there's a lot of beauty in that. And the movement through coming up with the next idea or going back to the table to ask again for second and third and fourth time is really a beautiful part of your growth.   And so do not be discouraged. You can be disappointed for a little bit, but get over it and get back in because there's a lot of beauty on the other side, especially when you're able to get to the other side. You're going to learn a lot about the disappointment unfortunately that exists when you realize that the rest of the world is not like Holy Cross. The rest of the world is not going to be so willing to help you. This is my feet on a penny floor. So I did a restaurant called Lincoln. Lincoln is now eight years old, and we put a million million pennies on the floor as well as a lot of other awesome, awesome stuff that I'll get to in a minute. But there was only one other place in the world, anyways, the Standard Hotel in Manhattan has a penny floor, it's 500 square feet.   And when I pitched this design idea, they said, "Well, how are you going to do this?" And again, it's kind of like Pandela. I'm like, "I don't actually know how we're going to do this, but it's going to be amazing." I just kept saying, "It's going to be amazing. I'll figure out how we're ... It's going to be amazing." The general contractor on this project would not take liability, would not take responsibility for the penny floor because no one could figure out what the mastic was that the pennies needed to actually sit in to be on the floor. So I called the design firm that did Standard Hotel. I said, "I'm about to design a restaurant in Washington DC, could somebody please tell me what the material is that binds to copper? How did you get the pennies to stay down?" Click and call back. "Hi, I'm not your competition, I'm just this designer in DC trying to do this scene." Click.   They would not give it to us. Fine, I'll figure it out. I couldn't believe that they would prevent another creative from being able to execute something so glorious just because they didn't want to hand over that information. And in academia, this happens. In business, this happens. People want to hold the information to themselves. Well, you're going to find it if you want to find it by the way, which I found. And we did the floor, and I took responsibility for it, which was the dumbest thing I could've ever done, but I did it. And this got a tremendous amount of press because of that. And it was beautiful. It's no longer there, we had to take it up after five years. But it was absolutely stunning.   But I got a lot of nos during this project because this was probably the most innovative restaurant in Washington at the time as far as design goes. But at the same time, it was done by artists. I had 15 artists who helped me create this. There wasn't anything in there that wasn't made by hand, and you could feel it. You walked in and you could just feel the spirit of that many people touching this project and very proud of that. But it did not come without a lot of ridiculousness and a lot of nos, and a lot of challenges. But this was a very pivotal project for me because I got to hand Obama a portrait in this particular restaurant. And it was probably one of the craziest moments of my life because as a poli sci major, I realized that ...   This is Lincoln by the way, Lincoln who's one of my favorite presidents. And the whole place is covered in narrative, it was just really a special project. I think about this when I'm designing spaces, like what's going to happen in this room? Is somebody going to get proposed to in this room, will an amazing deal go down? What kind of negotiation will happen in this space? And then I think about how I want someone to feel in that moment, right? Never in a million years did I think that I would have the opportunity to give Obama this portrait. And I had this whole thing I was going to say to him, this whole narrative, I was a political science major ...   Now, I had given him a whole tour of the restaurant, and I was pretty composed during that time. And then they're like, "Maggie, go get ... The secret service agent, he goes, "Go get the portrait now." So I go to get the portrait and I just start balling, like uncontrollably balling. And I was like, "Get it together Maggie O'Neill, this is ridiculous. You have to get it together." And all I said was, "I made this for you," and it was awful. I was like, "I can't believe I just said this to him." And he hugs me. The most ridiculous interaction I could've ever had. And I was really a fail, big fail in that moment. I know now that it is in his home in Kalorama, which is awesome. But this was this amazing moment.   I'm bringing up this story because what you have to understand is prior to this project, so here's this beautiful moment that got me on the other side. We have this penny floor, we have all this press, it's fantastic. The first week of the project. So rewind a year or two, first week of the project, I meet with the GC. And it's me and 10 dudes, which by the way is pretty standard for a lot of these projects. And I am eight or nine years younger than I am now. And the GC says to me, actually he says to the whole group, "I don't work with vaginas." And I was like, "What did this man just say to me? Did anybody else catch that? Did anybody else catch that?" And he said it so flippantly, everyone starts laughing. You guys, this was such an important project for me on so many levels. Little did I know this was in my future, I was really upset.   I was appalled by not just what was being said and the laughter that was taking place after, but what do I do now? Because you're then in an arranged marriage basically for another year in construction. So I called my mother, she doesn't remember this conversation, which is really amazing to me. But I was like, "What do I do? This man says he doesn't work with vaginas, I don't even understand. How do I even respond to something so offensive and so disgusting?" And she says, "Well, it's a fact. You have a vagina, so present it as a fact. This isn't about how you feel right now, this isn't about the personal attack essentially or comment that was just made. This is a fact. So bring it up like any other fact that you would have." So I have the entire investor group and the construction team and the ownership in my studio and I print out an agenda.   And agenda item number one is the drywall, and agenda item number two is my vagina, and agenda item number three was all of the FF&E, the furniture and stuff that we had to purchase. And they were blown away. They were like, "Maggie, come on." And I was like, "Well, listen, I didn't say it, be said it. By the way, it's a fact. And if he doesn't work with vaginas, and I have a vagina, how are we going to get through the project?" And I made it their problem and made it their problem to solve. And a couple of them were I think really taken aback. The GC was appalled and really upset that he was called out. And 10 years later, I'm still friends with this GC, by the way. But we got the project back on track, and it was really one of the very first times in my career where I took something that was so upsetting and the biggest no basically that I could have been given in that moment and then tried a different way to approach it.   Because what I would have done was jump up and down, scream and yell and probably make a larger scene than needed. But to put it in an agenda and present it in a way where there's this factual conversation about what he had said to me was the best way I could have handled it. I feel like the pivot there was not only critical for me at that moment, but it also all of a sudden just kicked open this whole door of compelling, I had this compelling need, you guys to just continue down this path. So I was like, "What am I going to do? What are you going to do, Maggie O'Neill?" This is real, and this is everywhere by the way. The amount of ridiculous statements that I've heard over the course of the last 10 years in construction, particularly in commercial real estate, if that's of interest to you, it's very male dominated and it is the wild, wild West.   It has gotten a lot better, but it is a really tricky place to navigate. So the tools I have are art, art and environmental design. So I started to make a lot more artwork about this particular topic, and anywhere I could. Anywhere I could place messaging, anywhere I could place frankly commentary, social commentary. So this is in the bathroom actually of Teddy & The Bully Bar, but it's a flag that says I pledge allegiance to the badass women of America, but it's backwards. So you can only read it when you're standing in the mirror and you see it behind your head. And this was some woman on Instagram. This was right after Trump was elected, and I hadn't been back in the restaurant.   I'm going to read this to you guys because for me it's like this is when you know that you're actually starting to move the needle. And she says, "As a woman, an immigrant, and a Jew, I'm scared. But tonight, while on a business trip to our nation's capital, I found hope and inspiration in a work of art hanging in the ladies' restroom." That part, it's this small little moment, I pledge allegiance to all the badass women of America and to the society of ball busters for which it stands, one gender under no one indivisible with liberty and equality for all. This was on Pantsuit Nation, by the way, in case anybody followed that after the election. That was this aha moment for me that I could actually make a difference even just with one small painting. So there are a number of ways that I started to connect dots both in my immediate community in DC through arts and connecting with other women artists and starting to figure out how our work could actually make a difference.   I also started to travel, this is a charity in Morocco where the goal is to just keep these young girls in school. Unfortunately if they have their period, they usually do not go back to school and end up married at 13. And the cycle sort of starts again. But it's proven if these girls stay in school your GDP is higher as a country. I mean, the endless, endless proof that women staying in school, it's endless, you guys. And this was a product of me going to Morocco to go work on a hotel, literally go work on a hotel and ended up finding this community of women and working with them. And I was on the board for a little while, but I went back three times. And these young women, this is now a physical space that they can come and play and learn. It's a really remarkable organization that I'm very proud of, but it wasn't just that it had to be in my own backyard, there's so many ways that I could actually affect change by just being an artist and being a designer   Connecting dots is something that is really important for me also to make sure that you understand because they're not always so obvious. This again goes back to the interdisciplinary importance of being able to say, "Okay, well what's going on over here in commercial real estate, what's going on over here in our tech industry, and what's going on over here in the arts can all be fused together." It's a very important thing to think about yourself as a dot connector. In the arts, here I am, I'm chugging along as a female artist in DC, chugging along as a female designer and not knowing really anything about the industry of art, which I was a little embarrassed about. And I come to find out this particular time that less than 5%, this is accurate, but it's all major collections in the world. It's not just in the United States.   So less than 5% of all the artwork and major collections around the world is made by women, which is stunning if you think about that, stunning. It would be like taking half of the books out of a library, how is that even possible? Right now, this is still the statistic. And in Washington, we have the National Museum of Women in the Arts. It's the only museum in the world dedicated to women artists or women in the arts, which is also kind of remarkable if you think about it. So here I am, I'm growing in my career. I'm watching some really ridiculous behavior in my professional life as a designer. And then as an artist, I'm realizing that, well, I can get to this place where I'm an emerging artist. I'm sure you all know tons of female artists or see female artists on Instagram and so on and so forth.   But what happens when we get to a certain price point in our work, we drop off, we completely drop off. And there's lots of reasons why that might be the case. But I was like, "If I want to be the next Andy Warhol," which I fully intend to be, "what is happening? What is the barrier to entry here, and why does it seem so challenging for this to be solved?" Similar to the Lincoln story that I just told you about with he general contractor. I had a mentor that I was complaining and saying, "I can't believe, I absolutely cannot believe that this is the case. Well, how is it that less than 5%? This is crazy." I was just pissed about it. I was complaining.   And he looks at me and he goes, "That's an opportunity, it's an opportunity. If there is that big of a disparity, you have an opportunity in front of you. So why don't you go seize it, connect the dots, figure out how to solve it. You may not get it right the first time, but somebody has to try. And if no one's trying, there is no clear path to success." Which by the way translates to absolutely everything you're going to do. If it hasn't been done before, if you don't necessarily know that there's a linear path from A to B, you have to connect the dots yourself and you just have to figure it out and keep asking.   So I started to call female artists across the nation who had made it, who were selling their artwork for over 50, 60, $70,000. These are people who are living artists who have, for all intents and purposes, made it. I was expecting a lot of these women to ... I said I want to create something where if you could pick up the phone, if I could pick up the phone and call the Andy Warhol of our time and say, "How did you do it? How did you get from A to B?"Because the arts is not a linear career path, you guys. And now with Instagram and a way that you can access people, it's like the wild, wild West, and that's a beautiful thing.   It just means it's going to feel a little uncomfortable for you. It means that the person to your left or the person to your right, they may be doing one thing and you're doing it a different way, and it doesn't make it a wrong way. And that actually probably applies across the board. So I don't know if anybody is familiar with the woman in the center here, her name is Ashley Longshore. If you're not familiar with her, you should get familiar with her and follow her because you'll thank me later. She's probably one of the funniest people you'll ever meet, but she is truly the Andy Warhol of our time.   Her work has just completely exploded. She has taken over Bergdorf Goodman, she's been on every late night talk show you can think about. She's a remarkable person. I called, I don't know, two dozen artists, women who had made it. Most of those women told me, "I'm good, thanks. Let me know when you get it off the ground, sounds like a great idea." But if I had to figure it out, they'll figure it out. And I was like, "I can't believe," it's kind of like the penny floor, "I can't believe that somebody would not even just want to participate in helping. If somebody could have helped 22 year old Maggie, why couldn't you help 22 year old version of yourself especially in a career path that is much more challenging?" As an artist, you're on an Island. It is your own work.   It is not like you go to the office every day and you get to commiserate with other people. By the way, the studio environment, while it is a beautiful thing in school, that does not exist when you are out of school. It's an incubated, beautiful thing, but you really are quite alone. So when I called these women and I was shocked when some of them said, "No, I'm okay. I don't have any desire to help in this endeavor," I was incredibly, well, upset. But then the women that I thought would say no to me said yes to me. So we all got together and we started this organization together. And right now we have secured funding to actually be able to take this thing on the road the way we wanted to in a professional, respectable way. I don't want it to be scrappy because artists are professionals just like any other profession.   And that's something that if you can change one person's career, you can change an entire family. You could change an entire community. And there's a lot that we can do together. And I'm incredibly excited about the future of this, but it was by picking up the phone and calling people and asking and seeing whether or not they would get on board and they would help. These are two pieces, you guys. This is my Hillary portrait, and this is a Michelle portrait, but both of them are about six feet tall. And I had created both of these pieces for the first exhibit of SUPERFIERCE. But this is a series of work that I'm working on right now called social currency.   Judy Chicago, is anybody familiar with Judy Chicago? First of all, look up Judy Chicago too when we're done. She's a remarkable living female artist who did something called the dinner party in the late 70's. And it was incredibly shocking for everybody. And now she's got this whole resurgence because she's quite the feminist, but she's also this really tremendous artist. I set my sights upon becoming the kind of artist who would make a contribution to art history. And she speaks to me in many ways. But the minute I really set my sights on trying to do things that would affect my community, it's like the universe picks you up and it moves with you, especially when you're doing what it is that you're supposed to be doing. And this is what I'm supposed to be doing, and it feels right.   So here I am, this is at the National Museum of Women in the Arts. And I did this installation where it looked like paint is dripping on everybody. This is my assistant, she's been with me for seven years. She got in it and allowed me to paint her, and it was great. But that's Judy Chicago sitting in my installation in the chair there. And that was one of those full circle moments where she walked into, I almost fell over. First of all, she had on a rainbow sequence dress. And I was like, "Listen, I was thinking I might borrow your address at some point in time." She sat down, and we had this amazing conversation. And I said, "I'm starting this thing, and I really would love for you to help. Would you help aspiring female artists, emerging female artists?"   "Of course, I would, honey, you just talk to my person and let me know where I need to be." It was just this amazing moment. But it was also, I think God works in really mysterious ways. The fact that she had just sat down in this installation was remarkable. And now I have a direct line to Judy Chicago, which is amazing. This piece, which I'm sure you all are familiar with, fearless girl. So this commission was something that's very special for various reasons. I have 32 prints on my website and 20% of the proceeds of each of those prints goes to a charity. And this particular one goes to an organization called N Street Village in Washington, which is the longest running organization who helps women in crisis. So women come to the door. And when you buy this, you can buy five meals for women who are coming in in their first week, which I have chills just thinking about that right now.   If I had millions of dollars, I would dole it out organizations. But you have time, you have treasure or you have talent, and that is how you can give back. And this is how I'm able to give back. But this is a very important piece to me, and it's just sort of snowballed. So I did this installation in my old studio space where you could stand in front of the bowl and then you became fearless girl. All the little girls that stood there and little boys, it was amazing, but that's me in front of it. But the impact that one can make in just a small way is quite remarkable, and this is how I can make an impact. So I'm just sharing my own way.   This is the Women's March, you guys. There was eight female artists that were commissioned to do these 25 foot parachutes that we walked through. I don't know, did anybody go down to the Women's March in DC? It was wild. This is one of those moments where this says protect your mother, and it's a giant image of the globe. But the opportunity that that was given to me was only because I was completely active and contributing to the community. And I think that that is the other way in which you can actually grow your career. There is the professional way, and then there is the social justice part of what I believe we're put on this planet to do, and I think Holy Cross instills in all of us is that there's always another way that you can give back even if it doesn't seem that obvious to you.   And I'm going to end with this because I think I have gone on longer than I should at this point. I was given an opportunity to do a mural, a 50 foot by 50 foot mural on Pennsylvania Avenue. And the LIFT and Tishman Speyer came to me and said, "We want to do a mural for Women's History Month, and we'd like it to symbolize that women owned businesses in Washington are moving the city forward." And I was like, "That's a mouthful, I'm not entirely sure I know how I'm supposed to illustrate that." But I had lunch on top of my skyscraper in my dorm room at Holy Cross, and it was the men sitting on top of the girders over Rockefeller Center, which I did not know that they were building Rockefeller Center in this image.   Well, Rockefeller Center is where Tishman Speyer is headquartered, I did not know that either. So I did this literally very quickly because they needed this done very quickly, sharpie. And they said, "That's great, how did you know? This is amazing." This is the DC flag, the three stars on top of the two bars. And they said, "That's fantastic. I can't believe you knew that, you're so brilliant. How did you know?" "I don't know what you're talking about." "Oh, well. Tishman Speyer's headquarters are in Rockefeller Center." "Okay, well, I didn't know that. That's the universe throwing me a softball." And I wasn't going to lie about it, but it was just, again, there's this synergy that took place. This is the mural, it is 50 feet by 50 feet. You can see for scale, this is somebody standing underneath it, but it'll be up for the next year.   Now, this piece also has a charitable component to it, which is an organization called DASH. And they basically help people who are in housing crises. But this is one of my favorite projects to date because the amount of people that this has touched and the amount of women who have reached out to me, particularly in the construction design industry has been, well, again, it's intoxicating. And it gives me life, and it feeds me to want to do more work like this. And I'm really proud of it for various reasons.   It may not seem to you guys that a political science major who then went back to art who then designs restaurants, how is this all happening? And it's about saying yes and it's also about finding doors that people haven't necessarily knocked on. It is not that people have handed me these things left and right. It is truly through hard work and communication and figuring out how I can connect dots that I'm able to live in color, but I'm also able to bring other people with me. I'm very proud of that, but I also know that that's why I was put on this planet. But I also was put on this planet to bring joy and color and a good time. No, I don't think it's a coincidence that I ended up in the restaurants, night clubs, and hotels because I love seeing people have a good time. I love it when people are toasting each other. I love it when there's this great energy in the room.   So now if you say, "What's next, Maggie?" We've got three restaurants opening in the next month and a half, and SUPERFIERCE is going to be taking off. But I will be starting to do more environmental exhibitions where it's like an experience. It's not just that the artwork is up, but there's this whole immersive experience that you enter into. And that just by buying a ticket to it, it's like having your own piece of artwork. And I won't be doing those just in DC, I will be traveling and I have talks of doing something in Boston. So I will keep everybody informed. Where just the mere act of showing up is like being in the artwork itself. And I just did this in July, you guys, and this is just by asking a couple of questions, but there's a building in DC called Union Market, it's like Faneuil Hall kind of.   And they put the castles, which is our tennis team. They put a temporary tennis court on top of it, and they spent an obscene amount of money putting this tennis court up. And I asked whether or not I could have an event up there from the CEO, but I was able to paint the tennis court into a massive bingo board. And I had life-size human bingo on the top of this tennis stadium, it was amazing. And I got to have my own game show, which is basically what I've wanted to do for a very long time, which is why this might be ... You get a car, and you get a car, it would be amazing. But this is just built out of joy. I just wanted people to have a good time, and I have a whole body of work that's built off of bingo sheets.   I know that sounds very strange, but this is the direction that I'm moving in, which is exhibitions. All my artwork is in the back there on the stands, but people became part of the game. It was so fun for everyone, but it was also this out of body experience, and we raised money for Children's National. So anytime you buy anything from me that has a bingo, whether it's leggings or a towel, 20% of that goes back to Children's National Hospital. And that is because I went and played bingo with the kids there. They play bingo every Thursday from their beds. It's just a little heartbreaking and also very inspiring.   So I wanted to end with that, you guys, because it is a serious job being a smart person in this world. And you should take it seriously, but it's also a serious job being a joyful person in this world because it is really, really tricky to keep your head above water when you get disappointed and you get disheartened by those of your colleagues or your friends or your partner potentially who may disappoint you in ways or tell you no or tell you that it's an impossible thing to do. And I can promise you that if you just keep that joy and hold onto it as much as possible, it's like gasoline. It's gasoline on the smart part of you.   Your intelligence will only take you so far, but your spirit is going to take you much further. And all I can tell you is you have to take care of your spirit. So do whatever you can to do that. And when you recognize in somebody else their color and what they do to your spirit, keep those people tight. Keep those people around you and make sure that you recognize that you won't know what else you're capable of until you ask, until you introduce yourself, until you get a little bit more vulnerable. Because if you don't reveal who you are, no one's ever going to be able to take advantage of.   And I don't mean it in a bad way, no one's ever going to be able to hand you that opportunity. So reveal yourself to people. I think that's where the human experience is really important. And as an artist, I get to exercise that quite a bit, but I recognize another career path that's not always the case. So I hope that you all live in color and you all remember that you are coming out of this place with such an incredible skillset, an incredible toolbox of genius. But you are also coming out of it with the knowledge that you're put here for a reason, and it's because you're special, and it's because you're able to give back. And you are probably gonna... people... You're going to be the ones that actually change, I think, change the course of things for us. However, I can help, I would love to. I don't know what that is, but don't ever hesitate to reach out and let's make some magic together. Let's have a game show together. Maura: That's our show. I hope you enjoyed hearing about just one of the many ways that Holy Cross alumni have been inspired by the mission to be men and women for and with others. A special thanks to today's guests and everyone at Holy Cross who has contributed to making this podcast a reality. If you or someone you know would like to be featured on this podcast, please send us an email at alumnicareers@holycross.edu. If you like what you hear, then please leave us a review. This podcast is brought to you by the office of alumni relations at the College of the Holy Cross. You can subscribe for future episodes wherever you find your podcasts. I'm your host, Maura Sweeney, and this is Mission-Driven. In the words of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, now go forth and set the world on fire. --- Theme music composed by Scott Holmes, courtesy of freemusicarchive.org.

The question of diving into Kubernetes is something that faces us all in different ways. Whether you are already on the platform, are considering transitioning, or are thinking about what is best for your team moving forward, the possibilities and the learning-curve make it a somewhat difficult question to answer. In this episode, we discuss the topic and ultimately believe that an individual is the only one who can answer that question well. That being said, the capabilities of Kubernetes can be quite persuasive and if you are tempted then it is most definitely worth considering very seriously, at least. In our discussion, we cover some of the problems that Kubernetes solves, as well as some of the issues that might arise when moving into the Kubernetes space. The panel shares their thoughts on learning a new platform and compare it with other tricky installations and adoption periods. From there, we look at platforms and how Kubernetes fits and does not fit into a traditional definition of what a platform constitutes. The last part of this episode is spent considering the future of Kubernetes and how fast that future just might arrive. So for all this and a bunch more, join us on The Podlets Podcast, today! Follow us: https://twitter.com/thepodlets Website: https://thepodlets.io Feeback: info@thepodlets.io https://github.com/vmware-tanzu/thepodlets/issues Hosts: Carlisia Campos Josh Rosso Duffie Cooley Bryan Liles Key Points From This Episode: The main problems that Kubernetes solves and poses. Why you do not need to understand distributed systems in order to use Kubernetes. How to get around some of the concerns about installing and learning a new platform. The work that goes into readying a Kubernetes production cluster. What constitutes a platform and can we consider Kubernetes to be one? The two ways to approach the apparent value of employing Kubernetes. Making the leap to Kubernetes is a personal question that only you can answer. Looking to the future of Kubernetes and its possible trajectories. The possibility of more visual tools in the UI of Kubernetes. Understanding the concept of conditions in Kubernetes and its objects. Considering appropriate times to introduce a team to Kubernetes. Quotes: “I can use different tools and it might look different and they will have different commands but what I’m actually doing, it doesn’t change and my understanding of what I’m doing doesn’t change.” — @carlisia [0:04:31] “Kubernetes is a distributed system, we need people with expertise across that field, across that whole grouping of technologies.” — @mauilion [0:10:09] “Kubernetes is not just a platform. Kubernetes is a platform for building platforms.” — @bryanl [0:18:12] Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode: Weave — https://www.weave.works/docs/net/latest/overview/ AWS — https://aws.amazon.com/ DigitalOcean — https://www.digitalocean.com/ Heroku — https://www.heroku.com/ Red Hat — https://www.redhat.com/en Debian — https://www.debian.org/ Canonical — https://canonical.com/ Kelsey Hightower — https://github.com/kelseyhightower Joe Beda — https://www.vmware.com/latam/company/leadership/joe-beda.html Azure — https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/ CloudFoundry — https://www.cloudfoundry.org/ JAY Z — https://lifeandtimes.com/ OpenStack — https://www.openstack.org/ OpenShift — https://www.openshift.com/ KubeVirt — https://kubevirt.io/ VMware — https://www.vmware.com/ Chef and Puppet — https://www.chef.io/puppet/ tgik.io — https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7bmigfV0EqQzxcNpmcdTJ9eFRPBe-iZa Matthias Endler: Maybe You Don't Need Kubernetes - https://endler.dev/2019/maybe-you-dont-need-kubernetes Martin Tournoij: You (probably) don’t need Kubernetes - https://www.arp242.net/dont-need-k8s.html Scalar Software: Why most companies don't need Kubernetes - https://scalarsoftware.com/blog/why-most-companies-dont-need-kubernetes GitHub: Kubernetes at GitHub - https://github.blog/2017-08-16-kubernetes-at-github Debugging network stalls on Kubernetes - https://github.blog/2019-11-21-debugging-network-stalls-on-kubernetes/ One year using Kubernetes in production: Lessons learned - https://techbeacon.com/devops/one-year-using-kubernetes-production-lessons-learned Kelsey Hightower Tweet: Kubernetes is a platform for building platforms. It's a better place to start; not the endgame - https://twitter.com/kelseyhightower/status/935252923721793536?s=2 Transcript: EPISODE 18 [INTRODUCTION] [0:00:08.7] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Podlets Podcast, a weekly show that explores Cloud Native one buzzword at a time. Each week, experts in the field will discuss and contrast distributed systems concepts, practices, tradeoffs and lessons learned to help you on your cloud native journey. This space moves fast and we shouldn’t reinvent the wheel. If you’re an engineer, operator or technically minded decision maker, this podcast is for you. [EPISODE] [0:00:41.9] JR: Hello everyone and welcome to The Podlets Podcast where we are going to be talking about should I Kubernetes? My name is Josh Rosso and I am very pleased to be joined by, Carlisia Campos. [0:00:55.3] CC: Hi everybody. [0:00:56.3] JR: Duffy Cooley. [0:00:57.6] DC: Hey folks. [0:00:58.5] JR: And Brian Lyles. [0:01:00.2] BL: Hi. [0:01:03.1] JR: All right everyone. I’m really excited about this episode because I feel like as Kubernetes has been gaining popularity over time, it’s been getting its fair share of promoters and detractors. That’s fair for any piece of software, right? I’ve pulled up some articles and we put them in the show notes about some of the different perspectives on both success and perhaps failures with Kub. But before we dissect some of those, I was thinking we could open it up more generically and think about based on our experience with Kubernetes, what are some of the most important things that we think Kubernetes solves for? [0:01:44.4] DC: All right, my list is very short and what Kubernetes solves for my point of view is that it allows or it actually presents an interface that knows how to run software and the best part about it is that it doesn’t – the standard interface. I can target Kubernetes rather than targeting the underlying hardware. I know certain things are going to be there, I know certain networking’s going to be there. I know how to control memory and actually, that’s the only reason that I really would give, say for Kubernetes, we need that standardization and you don’t want to set up VM’s, I mean, assuming you already have a cluster. This simplifies so much. [0:02:29.7] BL: For my part, I think it’s life cycle stuff that’s really the biggest driver for my use of it and for my particular fascination with it. I’ve been in roles in the past where I was responsible for ensuring that some magical mold of application on a thousand machines would magically work and I would have all the dependencies necessary and they would all agree on what those dependencies were and it would actually just work and that was really hard. I mean, getting to like a known state in that situation, it’s very difficult. Having something where either both the abstractions of containers and the abstraction of container orchestration, the ability to deploy those applications and all those dependencies together and the ability to change that application and its dependencies, using an API. That’s the killer part for me. [0:03:17.9] CC: For me, from a perspective of a developer is very much what Duffy just said but more so the uniformity that comes with all those bells and whistles that we get by having that API and all of the features of Kubernetes. We get such a uniformity across such a really large surface and so if I’m going to deploy apps, if I’m going to allow containers, what I have to do for one application is the same for another application. If I go work for another company, that uses Kubernetes, it is the same and if that Kubernetes is a hosted Kubernetes or if it’s a self-managed, it will be the same. I love that consistency and that uniformity that even so I can – there are many tools that help, they are customized, there’s help if you installing and composing specific things for your needs. But the understanding of what you were doing is it’s the same, right? I can use different tools and it might look different and they will have different commands but what I’m actually doing, it doesn’t change and my understanding of what I’m doing doesn’t change. I love that. Being able to do my work in the same way, I wish, you know, if that alone for me makes it worthwhile. [0:04:56.0] JR: Yeah, I think like my perspective is pretty much the same as what you all said and I think the one way that I kind of look at it too is Kubernetes does a better job of solving the concerns you just listed, then I would probably be able to build myself or my team would be able to solve for ourselves in a lot of cases. I’m not trying to say that specialization around your business case or your teams isn’t appropriate at times, it’s just at least for me, to your point Carlisia, I love that abstraction that’s consistent across environments. It handles a lot of the things, like Brian was saying, about CPU, memory, resources and thinking through all those different pieces. I wanted to take what we just said and maybe turn it a bit at some of the common things that people run in to with Kubernetes and just to maybe hit on a piece of low hanging fruit that I think is oftentimes a really fair perspective is Kubernetes is really hard to operate. Sure, it gives you all the benefits we just talked about but managing a Kubernetes cluster? That is not a trivial task. And I just wanted to kind of open that perspective up to all of us, you know? What are your thoughts on that? [0:06:01.8] DC: Well, the first thought is it doesn’t have to be that way. I think that’s a fallacy that a lot of people fall into, it’s hard. Guess what? That’s fine, we’re in the sixth year of Kubernetes, we’re not in the sixth year of stability of a stable release. It’s hard to get started with Kubernetes and what happens is we use that as an excuse to say well, you know what? It’s hard to get started with so it’s a failure. You know something else that was hard to get started with? Whenever I started with it in the 90s? Linux. You download it and downloading it on 30 floppy disks. There was the download corruption, real things, Z modem, X modem, Y modem. This is real, a lot of people don’t know about this. And then, you had to find 30 working flopping disk and you had to transfer 30, you know, one and a half megabyte — and it still took a long time to floppy disk and then you had to run the installer. And then most likely, you had to build a kernel. Downloading, transferring, installing, building a kernel, there was four places where just before you didn’t have windows, this was just to get you to a log in prompt, that could fail. With Kubernetes, we had this issue. People were installing Kubernetes, there’s cloud vendors who are installing it and then there’s people who were installing it on who knows what hardware. Guess what? That’s hard and it’s not even now, it’s not even they physical servers that’s networking. Well, how are you going to create a network that works across all your servers, well you’re going to need an overlay, which one are you going to use, Calico? Use Weave? You’re going to need something else that you created or something else if it works. Yeah, just we’re still figuring out where we need to be but these problems are getting solved. This will go away. [0:07:43.7] BL: I’m living that life right now, I just got a new laptop and I’m a Linux desktop kind of guy and so I’m doing it right now. What does it take to actually get a recent enough kernel that the hardware that is shipped with this laptop is supported, you know? It’s like, those problems continue, even though Linux has been around and considered stable and it’s the underpinning of much of what we do on the internet today, we still run into these things, it’s still a very much a thing. [0:08:08.1] CC: I think also, there’s a factor of experience, for example. This is not the first time you have to deal with this problem, right Duffy? Been using Linux on a desktop so this is not the first hardware that you had to setup Linux on. So you know where to go to find that information. Yeah, it’s sort of a pain but it’s manageable. I think a lot of us are suffering from gosh, I’ve never seen Kubernetes before, where do I even start and – or, I learned Kubernetes but it’s quite burdensome to keep up with everything as opposed to let’s say, if 10 years from now, we are still doing Kubernetes. You’ll be like yeah, okay, whatever. This is no big deal. So because we have done these things for a few years that we were not possibly say that it’s hard. I don’t’ think we would describe it that way. [0:09:05.7] DC: I think there will still be some difficulty to it but to your point, it’s interesting, if I look back like, five years ago, I was telling all of my friends. Look, if you’re a system’s administrator, go learn how to do other things, go learn how to be, go learn an API centric model, go play with AWS, go play with tools like this, right? If you’re a network administrator, learn to be a system’s administrator but you got to branch out. You got to figure out how to ensure that you’re relevant in the coming time. With all the things that are changing, right? This is true, I was telling my friend this five years ago, 10 years ago, continues, I continue to tell my friends that today. If I look at the Kubernetes platform, the complexity that represents in operating it is almost tailor made to those people though did do that, that decided to actually branch out and to understand why API’s are interesting and to understand, you know, can they have enough of an understanding in a generalist way to become a reasonable systems administrator and a network administrator and you know, start actually understanding the paradigms around distributed systems because those people are what we need to operate this stuff right now, we’re building – I mean, Kubernetes is a distributed system, we need people with expertise across that field, across that whole grouping of technologies. [0:10:17.0] BL: Or, don’t. Don’t do any of that. [0:10:19.8] CC: Brian, let me follow up on that because I think it’s great that you pointed that out Duffy. I was thinking precisely in terms of being a generalist and understanding how Kubernetes works and being able to do most of it but it is so true that some parts of it will always be very complex and it will require expertise. For example, security. Dealing with certificates and making sure that that’s working, if you want to – if you have particular needs for networking, but, understanding the whole idea of this systems, as it sits on top of Kubernetes, grasping that I think is going to – have years of experience under their belt. Become relatively simple, sorry Brian that I cut you off. [0:11:10.3] BL: That’s fine but now you gave me something else to say in addition to what I was going to say before. Here’s the killer. You don’t need to know distributed systems to use Kubernetes. Not at all. You can use a deployment, you can use a [inaudible] set, you can run a job, you can get workloads up on Kubernetes without having to understand that. But, Kubernetes also gives you some good constructs either in the Kubernetes API's itself or in its client libraries where you could build distributed systems in easier way but what I was going to say before that though is I can’t build a cluster. Well don’t. You know what you should do? Use a cloud vendor, use AWS, use Google, use Microsoft or no, I mean, did I say Microsoft? Google and Microsoft. Use Digital Ocean. There’s other people out there that do it as well, they can take care of all the hard things for you and three, four minutes or 10 minutes if you’re on certain clouds, you can have Kubernetes up and running and you don’t even have to think about a lot of these networking concerns to get started. I think that’s a little bit of the thud that we hear, "It’s hard to install." Well, don’t install it, you install it whenever you have to manage your own data centers. Guess what? When you have to manage your own data centers and you’re managing networking and storage, there’s a set of expertise that you already have on staff and maybe they don’t want to learn a new thing, that’s a personal problem, that’s not really a Kubernetes problem. Let’s separate those concerns and not use our lack or not wanting to, to stop us from actually moving forward. [0:12:39.2] DC: Yeah. Maybe even taking that example step forward. I think where this problem compounds or this perspective sometimes compounds about Kubernetes being hard to operate is coming from of some shops who have the perspective of are operational concerns today, aren’t that complex. Why are we introducing this overhead, this thing that we maybe don’t need and you know, to your point Brian, I wonder if we’d all entertain the idea, I’m sure we would that maybe even, speaking to the cloud vendors, maybe even just a Heroku or something. Something that doesn’t even concern itself with Kube but can get your workload up and running and successful as quickly as possible. Especially if you’re like, maybe a small startup type persona, even that’s adequate, right? It could have been not a failure of Kubernetes but more so choosing the wrong tool for the job, does that resonate with you all as well, does that make sense? [0:13:32.9 DC: Yeah, you know, you can’t build a house with a screwdriver. I mean, you probably could, it would hurt and it would take a long time. That’s what we’re running into. What you’re really feeling is that operationally, you cannot bridge the gap between running your application and running your application in Kubernetes and I think that’s fair, that’s actually a great thing, we prove that the foundations are stable enough that now, we can actually do research and figure out the best ways to run things because guess what? RPM’s from Red Hat and then you have devs from the Debian project, different ways of getting things, you have Snap from Canonical, it works and sometimes it doesn’t, we need to actually figure out those constructs in Kubernetes, they’re not free. These things did not exist because someone says, "Hey, I think we should do this." Many years. I was using RPM in the 90s and we need to remember that. [0:14:25.8] JR: On that front, I want to maybe point a question to you Duffy, if you don’t mind. Another big concern that I know you deal with a lot is that Kubernetes is great. Maybe I can get it up no problem. But to make it a viable deployment target at my organization, there’s a lot of work that goes into it to make a Kubernetes cluster production ready, right? That could be involving how you integrate storage and networking and security and on and on. I feel like we end up at this tradeoff of it’s so great that Kubernetes is super extensible and customizable but there is a certain amount of work that that kind of comes with, right? I’m curious Duff, what’s your perspective on that? [0:15:07.3] DC: I want to make a point that bring back to something Brian mentioned earlier, real quick, before I go on to that one. The point is that, I completely agree that yo do not have to actually be a distributed systems person to understand how to use Kubernetes and if that were a bar, we would have set that bar and incredibly, the inappropriate place. But from the operational perspective, that’s what we were referring to. I completely also agree that especially when we think about productionalizing clusters, if you’re just getting into this Kubernetes thing, it may be that you want to actually farm that out to another entity to create and productionalize those clusters, right? You have a choice to make just like you had a choice to make what when AWS came along. Just like you had a choice to make — we’re thinking of virtual machines, right? You have a choice and you continue to have a choice about how far down that rabbit hole as an engineering team of an engineering effort your company wants to go, right? Do you want farm everything out to the cloud and not have to deal with the operations, the day to day operations of those virtual machines and take the constraints that have been defined by that platformer, or do you want to operate that stuff locally, are you required by the law to operate locally? What does production really mean to you and like, what are the constraints that you actually have to satisfy, right? I think that given that choice, when we think about how to production Alize Kubernetes, it comes down to exactly that same set of things, right? Frequently, productionalizing – I’ve seen a number of different takes on this and it’s interesting because I think it’s actually going to move on to our next topic in line here. Frequently I see that productionizing or productionalizing Kubernetes means to provide some set of constraints around the consumption of the platform such that your developers or the focus that are consuming that platform have to operate within those rails, right? They could only define deployments and they can only define deployments that look like this. We’re going to ask them a varied subset of questions and then fill out all the rest of it for them on top of Kubernetes. The entry point might be CICD, it might be a repository, it might be code repository, very similar to a Heroku, right? The entry point could be anywhere along that thing and I’ve seen a number of different enterprises explore different ways to implement that. [0:17:17.8] JR: Cool. Another concept that I wanted to maybe have us define and think about, because I’ve heard the term platform quite a bit, right? I was thinking a little bit about you know, what the term platform means exactly? Then eventually, whether Kubernetes itself should be considered a platform. Backing u, maybe we could just start with a simple question, for all of us, what makes something a platform exactly? [0:17:46.8] BL: Well, a platform is something that provides something. That is a Brian Lyles exclusive. But really, what it is, what is a platform, a platform provides some kind of service that can be used to accomplish some task and Kubernetes is a platform and that thing, it provides constructs through its API to allow you to perform tasks. But, Kubernetes is not just a platform. Kubernetes is a platform for building platforms. The things that Kubernetes provides, the workload API, the networking API, the configuration and storage API’s. What they provide is a facility for you to build higher level constructs that control how you want to run the code and then how you want to connect the applications. Yeah, Kubernetes is actually a platform for platforms. [0:18:42.4] CC: Wait, just to make sure, Brian. You’re saying, because Kelsey Hightower for example is someone who says Kubernetes is a platform of platforms. Now, is Kubernetes both a platform of platforms, at the same time that it’s also a platform to run apps on? [0:18:59.4] BL: It’s both. Kelsey tweeted that there is some controversy on who said that first, it could have been Joe Beda, it could have been Kelsey. I think it was one of those two so I want to give a shout out to both of those for thinking in the same line and really thinking about this problem. But to go back to what you said, Carlisia, is it a platform for providing platforms and a platform? Yes, I will explain how. If you have Kubernetes running and what you can do is you can actually talk to the API, create a deployment. That is platform for running a workload. But, also what you can do is you can create through Kubernetes API mechanisms, ie. CRD’s, custom resource definitions. You can create custom resources that I want to have something called an application. You can basically extend the Kubernetes API. Not only is Kubernetes allowing you to run your workloads, it’s allowing you to specify, extend the API, which then in turn can be run with another controller that’s running on your platform that then gives you this thing when you cleared an application. Now, it creates deployment which creates a replica set, which creates a pod, which creates containers, which downloads images from a container registry. It actually is both. [0:20:17.8] DC: Yeah, I agree with that. Another quote that I remember being fascinated by which I think kind of also helps define what a platform is Kelsey put on out quote that said, Everybody wants platform at a service with the only requirement being that they’ve built it themselves." Which I think is awesome and it also kind of speaks, in my opinion to what I think the definition of a platform is, right? It’s an interface through which we can define services or applications and that interface typically will have some set of constraints or some set of workflows or some defined user experience on top of it. To Brian's point, I think that Kubernetes is a platform because it provides you a bunch of primitive s on the back end that you can use to express what that user experience might be. As we were talking earlier about what does it take to actually – you might move the entry point into this platform from the API, the Kubernetes API server, back down into CICD, right? Perhaps you're not actually defining us and called it a deployment, you’re just saying, I want so many instances off this, I don’t want it to be able to communicate with this other thing, right? It becomes – so my opinion, the definition about of a platform it is that user experience interface. It’s the constraints that we know things that you're going to put on top of that platform. [0:21:33.9] BL: I like that. I want to throw out a disclaimer right here because we’re here, because we’re talking about platforms. Kubernetes is not a platform, it’s as surface. That is actually, that’s different, a platform as a service is – from the way that we look at it, is basically a platform that can run your code, can actually make your code available to external users, can scale it up, can scale it down and manages all the nuances required for that operation to happen. Kubernetes does not do that out of the box but you can build a platform as a surface on Kubernetes. That’s actually, I think, where we’ll be going next is actually people, stepping out of the onesy-twosy, I can deploy a workload, but let’s actually work on thinking about this level. And I’ll tell you what. DEUS who got bought by Azure a few years ago, they actually did that, they built a pass that looks like Heroku. Microsoft and Azure thought that was a good idea so they purchased them and they’re still over there, thinking about great ideas but I think as we move forward, we will definitely see different types of paths on Kubernetes. The best thing is that I don’t think we’ll see them in the conventional sense of what we think now. We have a Heroku, which is like the git-push Heroku master, we share code through git. And then we have CloudFoundry idea of a paths which is, you can run CFPush and that actually is more of an extension of our old school Java applications, where we could just push [inaudible] here but I think at least I am hoping and this is something that I am actually working on not to toot my own horn too much but actually thinking about how do we actually – can we build a platform as a service toolkit? Can I actually just build something that’s tailing to my operation? And that is something that I think we’ll see a lot more in the next 18 months. At least you will see it from me and people that I am influencing. [0:23:24.4] CC: One thing I wanted to mention before we move onto anything else, in answering “Is Kubernetes right for me?” We are so biased. We need to play devil’s advocate at some point. But in answering that question that is the same as in when we need to answer, “Is technology x right for me?” and I think there is at a higher level there are two camps. One camp is very much of the thinking that, "I need to deliver value. I need to allow my software and if the tools I have are solving my problem I don’t need to use something else. I don’t need to use the fancy, shiny thing that’s the hype and the new thing." And that is so right. You definitely shouldn't be doing that. I am divided on this way of thinking because at the same time at that is so right. You do have to be conscious of how much money you’re spending on things and anyway, you have to be efficient with your resources. But at the same time, I think that a lot of people who don’t fully understand what Kubernetes really can do and if you are listening to this, if you maybe could rewind and listen to what Brian and Duffy were just saying in terms of workflows and the Kubernetes primitives. Because those things they are so powerful. They allow you to be so creative with what you can do, right? With your development process, with your roll out process and maybe you don’t need it now. Because you are not using those things but once you understand what it is, what it can do for your used case, you might start having ideas like, “Wow, that could actually make X, Y and Z better or I could create something else that could use these things and therefore add value to my enterprise and I didn’t even think about this before.” So you know two ways of looking at things. [0:25:40.0] BL: Actually, so the topic of this session was, “Should I Kubernetes” and my answer to that is I don’t know. That is something for you to figure out. If you have to ask somebody else I would probably say no. But on the other side, if you are looking for great networking across a lot of servers. If you are looking for service discovery, if you are looking for a system that can restart workloads when they fail, well now you should probably start thinking about Kubernetes. Because Kubernetes provides all of these things out of the box and are they easy to get started with though? Some of these things are harder. Service discovery is really easy but some of these things are a little bit harder but what Kubernetes does is here comes my hip-hop quote, Jay Z said this, basically he’s talking about difficult things and he basically wants difficult things to take a little bit of time and impossible things or things we thought that were impossible to take a week. So basically making difficult things easy and making things that you could not even imagine doing, attainable. And I think that is what Kubernetes brings to the table then I’ll go back and say this one more time. Should you use Kubernetes? I don’t know that is a personal problem that is something you need to answer but if you’re looking for what Kubernetes provides, yes definitely you should use it. [0:26:58.0] DC: Yeah, I agree with that I think it is a good summary there. But I also think you know coming back to whether you should Kubernetes part, from my perspective the reason that I Kubernetes, if you will, I love that as a verb is that when I look around at the different projects in the infrastructure space, as an operations person, one of the first things I look for is that API that pattern around consumption, what's actually out there and what’s developing that API. Is it a the business that is interested in selling me a new thing or is it an API that’s being developed by people who are actually trying to solve real problems, is there a reasonable way to go about this. I mean when I look at open stack, OpenStack was exactly the same sort of model, right? OpenStack existed as an API to help you consume infrastructure and I look at Kubernetes and I realize, “Wow, okay well now we are developing an API that allows us to think about the life cycle and management of applications." Which moves us up the stack, right? So for my part, the reason I am in this community, the reason I am interested in this product, the reason I am totally Kubernetes-ing is because of that. I realized that fundamentally infrastructure has to change to be able to support the kind of load that we are seeing. So whether you should Kubernetes, is the API valuable to you? Do you see the value in that or is there more value in continuing whatever paradigm you’re in currently, right? And judging that equally I think is important. [0:28:21.2] JR: Two schools of thoughts that I run into a lot on the API side of thing is whether overtime Kubernetes will become this implementation detail, where 99% of users aren’t even aware of the API to any extent. And then another one that kind of talks about the API is consistent abstraction with tons of flexibility and I think companies are going in both directions like OpenShift from Red Hat is perhaps a good example. Maybe that is one of those layer two platforms more so Brian that you were talking about, right? Where Kubernetes is the platform that was used to build it but the average person that interacts with it might not actually be aware of some of the Kubernetes primitives and things like that. So if we could all get out of our crystal balls for a second here, what do you all think in the future? Do you see the Kubernetes API becoming just a more prevalent industry standard or do you see it fading away in favor of some other abstraction that makes it easier? [0:29:18.3] BL: Oh wow, well I already see it as I don’t have to look too far in the future, right? I can see the Kubernetes API being used in ways that we could not imagine. The idea that I will think of is like KubeVirt. KubeVirt allows you to boot basically pods on whatever implements that it looks like a Kubelet. So it looks like something that could run pods. But the neat thing is that you can use something like KubeVirt with a virtual Kubelet and now you can boot them on other things. So ideas in that space, I don’t know VMware is actually going on that, “Wow, what if we can make virtual machines look like pods inside of Kubernetes? Pretty neat." Azure has definitely led work on this as now, we can just bring up either bring up containers, we can bring up VM’s and you don’t actually need a Kube server anymore. Now but the crazy part is that you can still use a workloads API’s, storage API’s with Kubernetes and it does not matter what backs it. And I’ll throw out one more suggestion. So there is also projects like AWS operators in [inaudible] point and what they allow you to do is to use the Kubernetes API or actually in cluster API, I'll use all three. But I use the Kubernetes API to boot things that aren’t even in the cluster and this will be AWS services or this could be databases across multiple clouds or guess what? More Kubernetes services. Yeah, so we are on that path but I just can’t wait to see what people are going to do with that. The power of Kubernetes is this API, it is just so amazing. [0:30:50.8] DC: For my part, I think is that I agree that the API itself is being extended in all kinds of amazing ways but I think that as I look around in the crystal ball, I think that the API will continue to be foundational to what is happening. If I look at the level two or level three platforms that are coming, I think those will continue to be a thing for enterprises because they will continue to innovate in that space and then they will continue to consume the underlying API structure and that portability Kubernetes exposes to define what that platform might look like for their own purpose, right? Giving them the ability to effectively have a platform as a service that they define themselves but using and under – you know, using a foundational layer that it’s like consistent and extensible and extensive I think that that’s where things are headed. [0:31:38.2] CC: And also more visual tools, I think is in our future. Better, actual visual UI's that people can use I think that’s definitely going to be in our future. [0:31:54.0] BL: So can I talk about that for a second? [0:31:55.9] CC: Please, Brian. [0:31:56.8] BL: I am wearing my octant hoodie today, which is a visual tool for Kubernetes and I will talk now as someone who has gone down this path to actually figure this problem out. As a prediction for the future, I think we’ll start creating better API’s in Kubernetes to allow for more visual things and the reason that I say that this is going to happen and it can’t really happen now is because for inside of an octant and whenever creating new eye views, pretty much happened now what that optic is. But what is going to happen and I see the rumblings from the community, I see the rumblings from K-native community as well is that we are going to start standardizing on conditions and using conditions as a way that we can actually say what’s going on. So let me back it up for a second so I can explain to people what conditions are. So Kubernetes, we think of Kubernetes as YAML and in a typical object in Kubernetes, you are going to have your type meta data. What is this, you are going to have your object meta data, what’s name this and then you are going to have a spec, how is this thing configured and then you are going to have a status and the status generally will say, “Well what is the status of this object? Is it deployment? How many references out? If it is a pod, am I ready to go?" But there is also this concept and status called conditions, which are a list of things that say how your thing, how your object is working. And right now, Kubernetes uses them in two ways, they use them in the negative way and the positive way. I think we are actually going to figure out which one we want to use and we are going to see more API’s just say conditions. And now from a UI developer, from my point of view, now I can just say, “I don’t really care what your optic is. You are going to give me conditions in a format that I know and I can just basically report on those in the status and I can tell you if the thing is working or not.” That is going to come too. And that will be neat because that means that we get basically, we can start building UI’s for free because we just have to learn the pattern. [0:33:52.2] CC: Can you talk a little bit more about conditions? Because this is not something I hear frequently and that I might know but then not know what you are talking about by this name. [0:34:01.1] BL: Oh yeah, I will give you the most popular one. So everything in Kubernetes is an object and that even means that the nodes that your workloads run on, are objects. If you run KubeControl, KubeCuddle, Kube whatever, git nodes, it will show you all the nodes in your cluster if you have permission to see that and if you do KubeCTL, gitnode, node name and then you actually have the YAML output what you will see in the bottom is an object called 'conditions'. And inside of there it will be something like is there sufficient memory, is the node – I actually don’t remember all of them but really what it is, they’re line items that say how this particular object is working. So do I have enough memory? Do I have enough storage? Am I out of actual pods that can be launched on me and what conditions are? It is basically saying, “Hey Brian, what is the weather outside?” I could say it's nice. Or I could be like, “Well, it’s 75 degrees, the wind is light but variable. It is not humid and these are what the conditions are.” They allow the object to specify things about itself that might be useful to someone who is consuming it. [0:35:11.1] CC: All right that was useful. I am actually trying to bring one up here. I never paid attention to that. [0:35:18.6] BL: Yeah and you will see it. So the two ones that are most common right now, there is some competition going on in Kubernetes architecture, trying to figure out how they are going to standardize on this but with pods and nodes you will see conditions on there and those are just telling you what is going on but the problem is that a condition is a type, a message, a status and something else but the problem is that the status can be true of false — oh and a reason, the status can be true or false but sometimes the type is a negative type where it would be like “node not ready”. And then it will say false because it is. And now whenever you’re inspecting that with automated code, you really want the positive condition to be true and the negative condition to be false and this is something that the K-native community is really working on now. They have the whole facility of this thing called duck typing. Which they can actually now pattern-match inside of optics to find all of these neat things. It is actually pretty intriguing. [0:36:19.5] CC: All right, it is interesting because I very much status is everything for objects and that is very much a part of my work flow. But I never noticed that there was some of the objects had conditions. I never noticed that and just a plug, we are very much going to have the K-native folks here to talk about duck typing. I am really excited about that. [0:36:39.9] BL: Yeah, they’re on my team. They’ll be happy to come. [0:36:42.2] CC: Oh yes, they are awesome. [0:36:44.5] JR: So I was thinking maybe we could wrap this conversation up and I think we have acknowledged that “Should I Kubernetes?” is a ridiculously hard question for us to answer for you and we should clearly not be the ones answering it for you but I was wondering if we could give some thoughts around — for the Podlet listener who is sitting at their desk right now thinking like, “Is now the right time for my organization to bring this in?” And I will start with some thought and then open it all up to you. So one common thing I think that I run into a lot is you know your current state and you know your desired state to steal a Kubernetes concept for a moment. And the desired state might be more decoupled services that are more scalable and so on and I think oftentimes at orgs we get a little bit too obsessed with the desired state that we forget about how far the gap is between the current state and the desired state. So as an example, you know maybe your shop’s biggest issue is the primary revenue generating application is a massive dot-net framework monolith, which isn’t exactly that easy to just port over into Kubernetes, right? So if a lot of your friction right now is teams collaborating on this tool, updating this tool, scaling this tool, maybe before even thinking about Kubernetes, being honest with the fact that a lot of value can be derived right now from some amount of application architecture changes. Or even sorry to use a buzzword but some amount of modernization of aspects of that application before you even get to the part of introducing Kubernetes. So that is one common one that I run into with orgs. What are some other kind of suggestion you have for people who are thinking about, “Is it the right time to introduce Kube?” [0:38:28.0] BL: So here is my thought, if you work for a small startup and you’re working on shipping value and you have no Kubernetes experience and staff and you don’t want to use for some reason you don’t want to use the cloud, you know go figure out your other problems then come back. But if you are an enterprise and especially if you work in a central enterprise group and you are thinking about “modernization”, I actually do suggest that you look at Kubernetes and here is the reason why. My guess is that if you’re a business of a certain size, you run VMware in your data center. I am just guessing that because I haven’t been to a company that doesn’t. Because we learned a long time ago that using virtual machines in many cases is way more efficient than just running hardware because what happens is we can’t use our compute capacity. So if you are working for a big company or even like a medium sized company, I don’t think – I am not telling you to run for it but I am telling you to at least have someone go look at it and investigate if this could ultimately be something that could make your stack easier to run. [0:39:31.7] DC: I think I am going to take the kind of the operations perspective. I think if you are in the business of coming up with a way to deploy applications on the servers and you are looking at trying to handle the lifecycle of that and you’re pretty fed up with the tooling that is out there and things like Puppet and Chef and tooling like that and you are looking to try and understand is there something in Kubernetes for me? Is there some model that could help me improve the way that I actually handle a lifecycle of those applications, be they databases or monoliths or compostable services? Any which way you want to look at it like are there tools there that can be expressed. Is the API expressive enough to help me solve some of those problems? In my opinion the answer is yes. I look at things like DaemonSet and the things like scheduling [inaudible] that are exposed by Kubernetes. And there is actually quite a lot of power there, quite a lot of capability in just the traditional model of how do I get this set of applications onto that set of servers or some subset they’re in. So I think it is worth evaluating if that is the place you’re in as an organization and if you are looking at fleets of equipment and trying to handle that magical recipe of multiple applications and dependencies and stuff. See what is the water is like on this side, it is not so bad. [0:40:43.1] CC: Yes, I don’t think there is a way to answer this question. It is Kubernetes for me without actually trying it, giving it a try yourself like really running something of maybe low risk. We can read blogposts to the end of the world but until you actually do it and explore the boundaries is what I would say, try to learn what else can you do that maybe you don’t even need but maybe might become useful once you know you can use. Yeah and another thing is maybe if you are a shop that has one or two apps and you don’t need full blown, everything that Kubernetes has to offer and there is a much more scaled down tool that will help you deploy and run your apps, that’s fine. But if you have more, a certain number, I don’t know what that number would be but multiple apps and multiple services just think about having that uniformity across everything. Because for example, I’ve worked in shops where the QA machines were taking care by a group of dev ops people and the production machines, oh my god they were taken care by other groups and now the different group of people and the two sides of these groups used were different and I as a developer, I had to know everything, you know? How to deploy here, how to deploy there and I had to have my little notes and recipes because whenever I did it – First of all I wasn’t doing that multiple times a day. I had to read through the notes to know what to do. I mean just imagine if it was one platform that I was deploying to with the CLI comments there, it is very easy to use like Kubernetes has, gives us with Kubes ETL. You know you have to think outside of the box. Think about these other operations that you have that people in your company are going to have to do. How is this going to be taught in the future? Having someone who knows your stack because your stack is the same that people in your industry are also using. I think about all of these things not just – I think people have to take it across the entire set of problems. [0:43:01.3] BL: I wanted to mention one more thing and this is we are producing lots of content here with The Podlets and with our coworkers. So I want to actually give a shout out to the TGIK. We want to know what you can do in Kubernetes and you want to have your imagination expanded a little bit. Every Friday we make a new video and actually funny enough, three fourths of the people on this call have actually done this. Where, on Friday, we pick a topic and we go in and it might be something that would be interesting to you or it might not and we are all over the place. We are not just doing applications but we are applications low level, mapping applications on Kubernetes, new things that just came out. We have been doing this for a 101 episodes now. Wow. So you can go look at that if you need some examples of what things you could do on Kubernetes. [0:43:51.4] CC: I am so glad to tgik.io maybe somebody, an English speaker should repeat that because of my accent but let me just say I am so glad you mentioned that Brian because I was sitting here as we are talking and thinking there should be a catalog of used cases of what Kubernetes can do not just like the rice and beans but a lot of different used cases, maybe things that are unique that people don’t think about to use because they haven’t run into that need yet. But they could use it as a pause, okay that would enable me to do these thing that I didn’t even think about. That is such a great catalog of used cases. It is probably the best resource. Somebody say the website again? Duffy what is it? [0:44:38.0] DC: tgik.io and it is every Friday at 1 PM Pacific. [0:44:43.2] CC: And it is live. It’s live and it’s recorded, so it is uploaded to the VMware Cloud Native YouTube and everything is going to be on the show notes too. [0:44:52.4] DC: It’s neat, you can come ask us questions there is a live chat inside of that and you can use that live chat. You can ask us questions. You can give us ideas, all kinds of crazy things just like you can with The Podlets. If you have an idea for an episode or something that you want us to cover or if you have something that you are interested in, you can go to thepodlets.io that will link you to our GitHub pages where you can actually open an issue about things you’d love to hear more about. [0:45:15.0] JR: Awesome and then maybe on that note, Podlets, is there anything else you all would like to add on “Should I Kubernetes?” or do you think we’ve – [0:45:22.3] BL: As best as our bias will allow it I would say. [0:45:27.5] JR: As best as we can. [0:45:27.9] CC: We could go another hour. [0:45:29.9] JR: It’s true. [0:45:30.8] CC: Maybe we’ll have “Should I Kubernetes?” Part 2. [0:45:34.9] JR: All right everyone, well that wraps it up for at least Part 1 of “Should I Kubernetes?” and we appreciate you listening. Thanks so much. Be sure to check out the show notes as Duffy mentioned for some of the articles we read preparing for this episode and TGIK links and all that good stuff. So again, I am Josh Russo signing out, with us also Carlisia Campos. [0:45:55.8] CC: Bye everybody, it was great to be here. [0:45:57.7] JR: Duffy Coolie. [0:45:58.5] DC: Thanks you all. [0:45:59.5] JR: And Brian Lyles. [0:46:00.6] BL: Until next time. [0:46:02.1] JR: Bye. [END OF EPISODE] [0:46:03.5] ANNOUNCER: Thank you for listening to The Podlets Cloud Native Podcast. Find us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/ThePodlets and on the http://thepodlets.io/ website, where you'll find transcripts and show notes. We'll be back next week. Stay tuned by subscribing. [END]See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

If you work in Kubernetes, cloud native, or any other fast-moving ecosystem, you might have found that keeping up to date with new developments can be incredibly challenging. We think this as well, and so we decided to make today’s episode a tribute to that challenge, as well as a space for sharing the best resources and practices we can think of to help manage it. Of course, there are audiences in this space who require information at various levels of depth, and fortunately the resources to suit each one exist. We get into the many different places we go in order to receive information at each part of the spectrum, such as SIG meetings on YouTube, our favorite Twitter authorities, the KubeWeekly blog, and the most helpful books out there. Another big talking point is the idea of habits or practices that can be helpful in consuming all this information, whether it be waiting for the release notes of a new version, tapping into different TLDR summaries of a topic, streaming videos, or actively writing posts as a way of clarifying and integrating newly learned concepts. In the end, there is no easy way, and passionate as you may be about staying in tune, burnout is a real possibility. So whether you’re just scratching the cloud native surface or up to your eyeballs in base code, join us for today’s conversation because you’re bound to find some use in the resources we share. Follow us: https://twitter.com/thepodlets Website: https://thepodlets.io Feeback: info@thepodlets.io https://github.com/vmware-tanzu/thepodlets/issues Hosts: Carlisia Campos Josh Rosso Duffie Cooley Olive Power Michael Gasch Key Points From This Episode: Audiences and different levels of depth that our guests/hosts follow Kubernetes at. What ‘keeping up’ means: merely following news, or actually grasping every new concept? The impossibility of truly keeping up with Kubernetes as it becomes ever more complex. Patterns used to keep up with new developments: the TWKD website, release notes, etc. Twitter’s helpful provision of information, from opinions to tech content, all in one place. How helpful Cindy Sridharan is on Twitter in her orientation toward distributed systems. The active side of keeping up such as writing posts and helping newcomers. More helpful Twitter accounts such as InfoSec. How books provide one source of deep information as opposed to the noise on Twitter. Books: Programming Kubernetes; Managing Kubernetes; Kubernetes Best Practices. Another great resource for seeing Kubernetes in action: the KubeWeeky blog. A call to watch the SIG playlists on the Kubernetes YouTube channel. Tooling: tab management and Michael’s self-built Twitter searcher. Live streaming and CTF live code demonstrations as another resource. How to keep a team updated using platforms like Slack and Zoom. The importance of organizing shared content on Slack. Challenges around not knowing the most important thing to focus on. Cognitive divergence and the temptation of escaping the isolation of coding by socializing. The idea that not seeing keeping up to date as being a personal sacrifice is dangerous. Using multiple different TLDR summaries to cement a concept in one’s brain. Incentives for users rather than developers of projects to share their experiences. The importance of showing appreciation for free resources in keeping motivation up. Quotes: “An audience I haven’t mentioned is the audience that basically just throws up their hands and walks away because there’s just too much to keep track of, right?” — @mauilion [0:05:15] “Maybe it’s because I’m lazy, I don’t know? But I wait until 1.17 drops, then I go to the release notes and really kind of ingest it because I’ve just struggled so much to kind of keep up with the day to day, ‘We merged this, we didn’t merge this,’ and so on.” — @joshrosso [0:10:18] “If you find value in being up to date with these things, just figure out – there are so many resources out there that address these different audiences and figure out what the right measure for you is. You don’t have to go deep on the code on everything.” — @mauilion [0:27:57] “Actually putting the right content in the right channel, at least from a higher level, helps me decide whether I want to like look at that channel today, and stuff that should be in the channel is not kind of in a conversation channel.” — @opowero [0:32:21] “When I see something that is going to give me the fundamentals, like I have other priorities now, I sort of always want to consume that to learn the fundamentals, because I think in the long term phase of, but then I neglect physically what I need to know to do in the moment.” — @carlisia [0:33:39] “Just do nothing, because our brain needs that. We need to not be listening, not be reading, just nothing. Just sit and look at the ceiling. Our brain needs that. Ideally, look at nature, like look outside, look at the air, go for a walk. We need that, because that recharges the brain.” — @carlisia [0:42:38] “Just consuming and keeping up, that doesn’t necessarily mean you don’t give back.” — @embano1 [0:49:32] Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode: Chris Short — https://chrisshort.net/ Last Week in Kubernetes Development — http://lwkd.info/ 1.17 Release Notes — https://kubernetes.io/docs/setup/release/notes/ Release Notes Filter Page — https://relnotes.k8s.io/ Cindy Sridharan on Twitter — https://twitter.com/copyconstruct InfoSec on Twitter — https://twitter.com/infosec?lang=en Programming Kubernetes on Amazon —https://www.amazon.com/Programming-Kubernetes-Developing-Cloud-Native-Applications/dp/1492047104 Managing Kubernetes on Amazon — https://www.amazon.com/Managing-Kubernetes-Operating-Clusters-World/dp/149203391X Brendan Burns on Twitter — https://twitter.com/brendandburns Kubernetes Best Practices on Amazon — https://www.amazon.com/Kubernetes-Best-Practices-Blueprints-Applications-ebook/dp/B081J62KLW/ KubeWeekly — https://kubeweekly.io/ Kubernetes SIG playlists on YouTube — https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZ2bu0qutTOM0tHYa_jkIwg/playlists Twitch — https://www.twitch.tv/ Honeycomb — https://www.honeycomb.io/ KubeKon EU 2019 — https://events19.linuxfoundation.org/events/kubecon-cloudnativecon-europe-2019/ Aaron Crickenberger on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/spiffxp/ Stephen Augustus on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephenaugustus Office Hours — https://github.com/kubernetes/community/blob/master/events/office-hours.md Transcript: EPISODE 17[INTRODUCTION][0:00:08.7] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Podlets Podcast, a weekly show that explores Cloud Native one buzzword at a time. Each week, experts in the field will discuss and contrast distributed systems concepts, practices, tradeoffs and lessons learned to help you on your cloud native journey. This space moves fast and we shouldn’t reinvent the wheel. If you’re an engineer, operator or technically minded decision maker, this podcast is for you.[EPISODE][0:00:41.5] DC: Good afternoon everybody and welcome to The Podlets. In this episode, we’re going to talk about, you know, one of the more challenging things that we all have to do, just kind of keep up with cloud native and how we each approach that and what we do. Today, I have a number of cohosts with me, I have Olive Power.[0:00:56.6] OP: Hi.[0:00:57.4] DC: Carlisia Campos.[0:00:58.6] CC: Hi everybody.[0:00:59.9] DC: Josh Rosso.[0:01:01.3] JR: Hey all.[0:01:02.8] DC: And Michael.[0:01:01.1] MICHAEL: Hey, hello.[0:01:04.8] DC: This episode, we’re going to do something a little different than we normally do. In most of our episodes, we try to remain somewhat objective around the problem and the potential solutions for it, rather than prescribing a particular solution. In this episode, however, since we’re talking about how we keep up with all of the crazy things that happen in such a fast ecosystem, we’re going to probably provide quite a number of examples or resources that you yourself could use to drive and to try and keep up to date with what’s happening out there.Be sure to check out the notes after the episode is over at thepodlets.io and you will find a link to the episodes up at the top part, click down to this episode, and check out the notes. There will be tons of resources. Let’s get started.One of the things I think about that’s interesting about keeping up with something like, you know, a Kubernetes or a fast-moving project, regardless of what that project is, whether it’s Kubernetes or, you know, for a while, it was the Mesos that I was following or OpenStack or a number have been big infrastructure projects that have been very fast moving over time and I think what’s interesting is I find that there’s multiple audiences that we kind of address when we think about what it means to ‘keep up,’ right?Keeping up with something like a project is interesting because I feel like there’s an audience that it’s actually very interested in what’s happening with the design goals or the code base of the project, and there’s an audience that is very specific to wanting to understand at a high level – like, “Give me the State of the World report like every month or so just so I can understand generally what’s happening with the project, like is it thriving? Is it starting to kind of wane? Are there big projects that it’s taking on?”And then there’s like, then I feel like there’s an audience somewhere in the middle there where they really want to see people using the project and understand, and know how to learn from those people who are using it so that they can elevate their own use of that project. They’re not particularly interested in the codebase per se but they do want to understand, are they exploring this project at a depth that makes sense for themselves? What do you all think about that?[0:03:02.0] CC: I think one thing that I want to mention is that this episode, it’s not so much about on-boarding people onto Kubernetes and the Kubernetes ecosystem. We are going to have an episode soon to talk specifically about that. How you get going, like get started. I think Duffy mentioned this so we’re going to be talking about how we all keep up with things. Definitely, there are different audiences, even when we’re talking about keeping up.[0:03:32.6] JR: Yeah, I think what’s funny about your audience descriptions, Duffy, is I feel like I’ve actually slid between those audiences a bit, right? It’s funny, back in the day, Kubernetes like one-four, one-five days, I feel like I was much more like, “What’s going on in the code?” Like trying to keep track of like how things are progressing.Now my role is a lot more focused with working with customers and standing up cube and like making a production ready. I feel like I’m a lot more, kind of reactive and more interested to see like, what features have become stable and impact me, you know what I mean? I’m far less in the weeds than I used to be. It’s a super interesting thing.[0:04:08.3] OP: Yeah, I tend to – for my role, I tend to definitely fall into the number three first which is the kind of general keeping an eye on things. Like when you see like interesting articles pop up that maybe have been linked internally because somebody said, “Oh, check out this article. It’s really interesting.”Then you find that you kind of click through five or six articles similar but then you can kind of flip to that kind of like, “Oh, I’m kind of learning lots of good stuff generally about things that folks are doing.” To actually kind of having to figure out some particular solution for one of my customers and so having to go quite deep into that particular feature.You kind of go – I kind of found myself going right in and then back out, right in, going back out depending on kind of where I am on a particular day of the week. It’s kind of a bit tricky. My brain sometimes doesn’t kind of deal with that sort of deep concentration into one particular topic and then back out again. It’s not easy.I find it quite tough actually some of the time.[0:05:05.0] DC: Yeah, I think we can all agree on that. Keeping track of everything is – it’s why the episode, right? How do we even approach it? It seems – I feel like, an audience I haven’t mentioned is the audience that basically just throws up their hands and walks away because there’s just too much to keep track of, right? I feel like we are all that at some point, you know?I get that.[0:05:26.4] OP: That’s why we have Christmas holidays, right? To kind of refresh the brain.[0:05:31.4] CC: Yeah, I maybe purposefully or maybe not even – not trying to keep up because it is too much, it is a lot, and what I’m trying to do is, go deeper on the things that I already, like sort of know. And things that I am working with on a day to day basis. I only really need to know, I feel like, I really only need to know – because I’m not working directly with customers.My scope is very well defined and I feel that I really only need to know whenever there’s a new Kubernetes release. I need to know what the release is. We usually – every once in a while, we update our project to the – we bump up the Kubernetes release that we are working against and in general, yeah, it’s like if things come my way, if it’s interesting, I’ll take a look, but mostly, I feel like I work in a spiral.If I’m doing codes related to controllers and there’s a conference talk about controllers then okay, let me take a look at this to maybe learn how to design this thing better, implement in a better way if I know more about it. If I’m doing, looking at CRDs, same thing. I really like conference talks for education but that’s not so much keeping up with what’s new. Are we talking about educating ourselves with things that we don’t know about?Things that we don’t know about. Or are we talking about just news?[0:07:15.6] JR: I think it’s everything. That’s a great question. One of my other questions when we were starting to talk about this was like, what is keeping up even mean, right? I mean, does it mean, where do you find resources that are interesting that keep you interested in the project or are you looking for resources that just kind of keep you up to date with what’s changing? It’s a great question.[0:07:36.2] MICHAEL: Actually, there was some problem that I faced when I edit the links that I wanted to share in the show. I started writing the links and then I realized, “Well, most of the stuff is not keeping up with news, it’s actually understanding the technology,” because I cannot keep up.What does help me in understanding specific areas, when I need to dig into them and I think back five or four years into early days of Kubernetes, it was easy to catch up by the time because it was just about Kubernetes. Later right, it became this platform. We realized that it actually this platform thing. Then we extended Kubernetes and then we realized there are CICD-related stuff and operations and monitoring and so the whole ecosystem grew. The landscape grew so much that today, it’s impossible to keep up, right?I think I’m interested in all those patterns that you have developed over the years that help you to manage this, let’s say complexity or stream of information.[0:08:33.9] DC: Yeah, I agree. This year, I was thinking about putting up a talk with Chris Short, it was actually last year. That was about kind of on the same topic of keeping up with it. In that, I kind of did a little research into how that happens and I feel like some of the interesting stuff that came out of that was that there are certain patterns that a project might take on that make it easier or more approachable to, you know, stay in contact with what’s happening.If we take Kubernetes as an example, there are a number of websites I think that pretty much everybody here kind of follows to some degree, that helps, sort of, kind of, address those different audiences that we were talking about.One of the ones that I’ve actually been really impressed with is LWKD which stands for Last Week in Kubernetes Development, and as you can imagine, this is really kind of focused on, kind of – I wouldn’t say it’s like super deep on the development but it is watching for things that are changing, that are interesting to the people who are curating that particular blog post, right?They’ll have things in there like, you know, code freezes coming up on this date, IPV6, IPV4, duel stack is merging, they’ll have like some of the big mile markers that are happening in a particular release and where they are in time as it relates to that release. I think if that’s a great pattern and I think that – it’s a very narrow audience, right? It would really only be interesting to people who are interested in, or who are caught up in the code base, or just trying to understand like, maybe I want a preview of what the release notes might look like, so I might just like look for like a weekly kind of thing.[0:10:03.4] JR: Yeah, speaking of the release notes, right? It’s funny. I do get to look at Last Week in Kubernetes development every now and then. It’s an awesome resource but I’ve gotten to the point where the release notes are probably my most important thing for staying up to date.Maybe it’s because I’m lazy, I don’t know, but I wait till 1.17 drops, then I go to the release notes and really kind of ingest it because I’ve just struggled so much to kind of keep up with the day to day, “We merged this, we didn’t merge this,” and so on. That has been a huge help for me, you know, day to day, week to week, month to month.[0:10:37.0] MICHAEL: Well, what was also helpful just on the release notes that the new filter webpage that they put out in 1.15, starting 1.15. Have you all seen that?[0:10:44.4] JR: I’ve never heard of it.[0:10:45.4] DC: Rel dot, whatever it is. Rel dot –[0:10:47.7] MICHAEL: Yeah, if you can share it Duffy, that’s super useful. Especially like if you want to compare releases and features added and –[0:10:55.2] DC: I’ll have to dig it up as well. I don’t remember exactly what –[0:10:56.7] CC: I’m sorry, say? Which one is that again?[0:10:59.1] MICHAEL: The real notes. I’ll put it in the hackMD.[0:11:02.8] DC: Yeah relnotes.k8s.io which is an interesting one because it’s sort of like a comparison engine that allows you to kind of compare what it would have featured like how to feature relates to different versions of stuff.[0:11:14.4] CC: That’s great. I cannot encourage enough for the listeners to look at the show notes because we have a little document here that we – can I? The resources are amazing. There are so many things that I have never even heard about and sound great – is – I want to go to this whole entire list. Definitely check it out. We might not have time to mention every single thing. I don’t want people to miss on all the goodness that’s been put together.[0:11:48.7] DC: Agreed, and again, if you’re looking for those notes, you just go to the podlets.io. Click on ‘episodes’ at the right? And then look for this episode and you’ll find that it’s there.[0:11:58.0] CC: I can see that a lot of the content in those notes are like Twitter feeds. Speaking personally, I’m not sure I’m at the stage yet where I learn a lot about Twitter feeds in terms of technical content. Do you guys find that it’s more around people’s thoughts around certain things so thought-provoking things around Kubernetes and the ecosystem rather than actual technical content. I mean, that’s my experience so far.But looking at those Twitter feeds, maybe I guess I might need to follow some of those feeds. What do you all think?[0:12:30.0] MICHAEL: Do you mean the tweets are from those like learn [inaudible 0:12:32] or the person to be tweets?[0:12:35.3] OP: You’ve listed some of there, Michael, and some sort of.[0:12:37.6] MICHAEL: I just wanted to get some clarity. The reason I listed so many Twitter accounts there is because Twitter is my only kind of newsfeed if you will. I used Feedly and RSS and others before and emails and threads. But then I just got overwhelmed and I had this feeling of missing out on all of those times.That’s why I said, “Okay, let’s just use Twitter.” To your question, most of these accounts are people who have been in the Kubernetes space for very long, either running Kubernetes, developing on Kubernetes, having opinions about Kubernetes.Opinions in general on topics related to cloud native because we didn’t want to make the search just about Kubernetes. Most of these people, I really appreciate their thoughts and some of them also just a retweet things that they see which I missed somewhere else and not necessarily just opinions. I think It’s a good mix of these accounts, providing options, some guidance, and also just news that I miss out on because not being on the other channels.[0:13:35.6] OP: Yeah, I agree because sometimes you can kind of read – I tend to require a lot of sort of blog posts and sort of web posts which, you know, without realizing it can be kind of opinionated and then, you know, it’s nice to then see some Twitter feeds that kind of actually just kind of give like a couple of words, a kind of a different view which sometimes makes me think “Okay, I understand that topic from a certain article that I’ve read, it’s just really nice to hear a kind of a different take on it through Twitter.”[0:14:03.0] CC: I think some of the accounts, like fewer of the accounts – and there are a bunch of things that – there are listed accounts here that I didn’t know before so I’ll check them out. I think fewer of the accounts are providing technical content, for example, Cindy Sridharan, not pronouncing it correctly but Cindy is great, she puts out a lot of technical content and a lot of technical opinion and observations that is really good to consume. I wish I had time to just read her blog posts and Twitter alone.She’s very oriented towards distributed systems in general, so she’s not even specific just Kubernetes. Most of the accounts are very opinionated and the benefit for me is that sometimes I catch people talking about something that I didn’t even know was a thing. It’s like, “Oh, this is a thing I should know about for the work that I do,” and like Michael was saying, you know, sometimes I catch retweets that I didn’t catch before and I just – I’m not checking out places, I’m not checking – hash tagging Reddit.I rely on Twitter and the people who I follow to – if there is a blog post that sounds important, I just trust that somebody would, that I’m going to see it multiple times until like, “Okay, this is content that is related to something and I’m working on, that I want to get better at.” Then I’ll go and look at it. My sources are mainly Twitter and YouTube and it’s funny because I love blog posts but it’s like I haven’t been reading them because it takes a long time to read a blogpost.I give preference to video because I can just listen while I’m doing stuff. I sort of stopped reading blog post which is sad. I also want to start writing posts because it’s so helpful for me to engrain the things that I’m learning and hopefully it will be helpful to other people too. But in any case, go Duffy.[0:16:02.8] DC: A number of people that I follow – I have been cultivating my feed pretty carefully, trying to get a broad perspective of technical stuff that’s happening. But also I’ve been trying to develop my persona on Twitter a bit more, right? I’m actually trying to build my audience there. What’s interesting there is I’ve been trying to – to that end, what I’ve been doing is like trying to amplify voices that I think aren’t heard enough out there, right?If I see an article by somebody who is just coming into Kubernetes. or just coming into distributed systems and they’ve taken an effort to really lay out something that they found really interesting about pretty much anything, right? I’m like, “Okay, that’s pretty awesome,” and I’ll try to amplify that, right? Sometimes I even get involved or I’ll, not directly in public on Twitter but I’ll offer to help edit or help provide whatever our guidance I can provide around that sort of stuff.If I see people like having a difficult time with a particular project or something like that, I’ll reach out privately and say, “Hey, can I help you with it so you can go out there and do a great job,” you know? That is something I love to do. I think your point about like not necessarily going at Twitter for the deep knowledge stuff but more just like making sure that you have a broad enough awareness of what’s happening in different ecosystems that you’re not surprised by the things when the things change, right?A couple of other people that I follow are Akira Asuta, I can’t say enough about that person. They are amazing, they have been doing like, incredibly deep security stuff as it relates to containerization and stuff like that for quite a while. I’m always like, learning brand new things to me when following folks like that. I’ve been kind of getting more interested in InfoSec Twitter lately, learning how people kind of approach that problem.Also some of the bias arounds that which has been pretty interesting. Both the bias against people who are in InfoSec which seems weird to me. Also, how InfoSec approaches a problem, like do they put it like a learning experience or they approach it like an attack experience.It’s been kind of fascinating to get in there.[0:18:08.1] OP: You know, I kind of use Twitter as well for some of this stuff but you know, books are kind of a resource as well but in my head, kind of like at the opposite scale. You know, I obviously don’t read as many books as I read twitter feeds, right? It’s just kind of like, with Twitter, you can kind of digest the whole of the stuff and with books, it’s kind of like – I tend to be trying – because I know, I’m only going to read – like I’m only going to read maybe one/two books a year.I’ve kind of like – as I said before, blog posts seem to take up my reading time and books kind of tend to be for like on airplanes and stuff. So if – they’re just kind of two opposite resources for me but I find actually, the content of books are probably stuff that I digest a bit more because you know, it’s kind of like, I don’t know, back to the old days. It’s kind of a physical thing on hand and I can kind of read it and digest it a bit more than the kind of throwaway stuff that kind of keeps on Twitter.Because to be honest, I don’t know what’s on Twitter. Who is kind of a person to listen to or who is not or who is – I just try and form my own opinions and then, again, it kind of gets a bit overwhelming, because it’s a lot of content just streaming through continuously, whereas a book, it’s kind of like just one source of information that is kind of like a bit more personal that I can digest a bit more.[0:19:18.1] JR: Any particular book recommendation in 2019, Olive, that you found particularly interesting?[0:19:23.5] OP: I’m still reading, and it’s on the list for the episode notes actually, Programming Kubernetes. I just want to kind of get into that sort of CRD sort of mindset a bit. I think that’s kind of an area that’s interesting and an area that a lot of people will want to use in their organizations, right, because it’s going to do some of the extensibility to Kubernetes that’s just not there out of the box and everybody wants something that’s not out of the box or always in my experience.[0:19:47.4] MICHAEL: I found the Managing Kubernetes, I think was it, by – from Brendan Burns and some other folks which was just released I think in the end of last year. Super deep and that is kind of the opposite to the Programming Kubernetes, because I like that as well. That is more geared towards understanding architecture and operations.Operational concepts –[0:20:05.0] OP: They’re probably the two books I’ve read.[0:20:08.4] MICHAEL: Okay.[0:20:08.9] OP: One a year, remember?[0:20:11.4] MICHAEL: Yeah.[0:20:14.6] OP: Prolific reading.[0:20:19.6] CC: I think if you know what you need to learn about cloud native or Kubernetes, there’s amazing books out there, and if you are still exploring Kubernetes and trying to learn, I cannot recommend this book enough. If you are watching this on YouTube, you’ll see the cover. It’s called Kubernetes Best Practices because it’s about Kubernetes best practices but what they did simultaneously and maybe they didn’t even realize is just they gave a map for the entire thing.You go, “Oh, these are all the elements in Kubernetes.” Of course, it’s saying, “Okay, this is the best way to go about setting the stuff up,” and this is relatively thin but I just think that going through this book, you get really fast overview of the elements in Kubernetes. Then you can go to other books like Managing Kubernetes to go deep and understand all of the knobs and switches.[0:21:24.6] DC: I want to bring it back to the patterns that we see successful projects. Projects that you think are approachable but, you know, projects that are out there that make it easy for you to kind of stay – or easier at least to stay up to date with them, what some of those patterns are that you think are useful for projects.We’re talking about like having a couple of different entry points from kind of a weekly report mechanism, we’ve talked about the one that LWKD is, I don’t think we got to talk about KubeWeekly which is actually a weekly blog that is actually curated by a lot of the CNCF ambassadors. KubeWeekly is also broken up in different sections, so like sometimes they’ll just talk about – but they’re actually going out actively and trying to find articles of people using Kubernetes and then trying to post those.If you’re interested in understanding how people are actually out there using it, then that’s a great place to go find articles that are kind of related to that. What are some other patterns that we see that are out there that are useful for books?[0:22:27.6] DC: One that I really like. Kubernetes, for everyone listening has this notion of special interest groups, SIGs oftentimes. They’re focused on certain areas of the project. There’s some for networking and storage and life cycles of clusters and what’s amazing, I try to watch them somewhat weekly, I don’t always succeed.They’re all on YouTube and if you go to the Kubernetes project YouTube, there’s playlists for every SIG. A lot of times I’m doing work relating to life cycles of clusters. I’ll open up the cluster life cycle playlist and I’ll just watch the weekly meetings. While it doesn’t always pertain to completely to me, it lets me understand kind of where the developers and contributor’s heads are at and where they’re kind of headed with a lot of different things.There’s a link to that as well if anyone wants to check it out.[0:23:15.9] MICHAEL: Exactly, to add to that. If you don’t have the time to watch the videos, the meeting notes that these gentlemen and women put together are amazing. Usually, I just scroll through and if it’s something to triggers, I go into the episode and watch it.[0:23:28.7] OP: I almost feel like we should talk about tooling to handle all of this stuff, for example, right now, I think I have 200 tabs opened. I just started learning about some chrome extensions to manage tabs. I haven’t started really using them but I need. I don’t have a good system. My system is open a video that I’m pretty sure I want to watch and just get to that tab eventually until something happens in my chrome goes bust and I lose everything.I wanted to mention that when we say watch YouTube, some things you don’t need to sit there and actually watch, you can just listen to it and if you pay for the five bucks for YouTube premium – I don’t get a commission you people, but I’m just saying, for me, it’s so helpful. I can just turn off you know, put my phone on my pocket and keep listening to it without having to have the phone open and on the whole time. It’s very handy.It’s just like listening to a podcast. I also listen to podcasts lots of days.[0:24:35.1] MICHAEL: For tooling, since I’m just mostly on Twitter and by the time I was using or starting to use Twitter, they didn’t have this bookmark function, so I was basically abusing likes or favorites at the time, I think, to bookmark. What I realized later, my bookmarks grew, well, my likes grew.I wanted to go back and find something but that through the Twitter search was just impossible. I blew the tiny little go tool, kind of my first exercise there to just parse my likes and then use JQ because it’s all JSON to query and manipulate the stuff. I almost use it every day because I was like, that was a talk or blog post about scheduling and just correct for scheduling and the likes.I’m sure there’s a better tool or way of doing that but for me, that’s mine too. Because that’s my workflow.[0:25:27.6] DC: Both of the two blogs that you mentioned both KubeWeekly and LWKD, they both have the ability to take – you can submit stories to them. If you come across things that are interesting and you’d like to put that up on an aggregator somewhere, this is one of the ways to kind of solve that problem because at least if it gets cleared up on an aggregator, you know that you go back to the aggregator to see it, so that helps.Some other ones I’ve seen out there, I’ve seen people, I’ve seen a number of interesting startups now, starting to kind of like put out a podcast or – and I have started to see a number of people like you know, engaging with Twitch and also doing things like what we do with TJK.io which is like have sort of some kind of a weekly thing where you are just hacking on stuff live and just exploring it whether that is related to – if you think of about TJK is we’re going to do without being related necessarily to anything that we are doing at VMware just anything to do with the community but obviously if you are working for one of the small companies like Honeycomb or some other company.A smaller kind of startup, you can really just get people more aware of that because for some reason people love to watch others code. They love to understand how people go through that, what are their thought process is and I find it awesome as well. I think it is amazing to me how big a draw that is, you know?[0:26:41.1] OP: And is there lots of them out there Duffy? Is that kind of an easy searchable thing or is it like how do you know those things are going on?[0:26:48.4] DC: Oddly enough Twitter, most of the time, yeah. I mean, most of the time I see that kind of stuff happening on Twitter, like somebody will like – I will scope with this or a number of other people will say, “Hey, I am going to do a live stream during this period of time on this,” and I have actually seen a number of people doing live streams on CTFs, which are capture the flags. That one’s really been fascinating to me because it has been how do people think about approaching the security of an application.Like where do they look for weak spots and how do you determine, how do you approach that kind of a problem, which is fascinating. So yeah, I think it is important to remember that like you know, you are not the only one trying to keep up to date with all of this stuff, right? The one thing we all have said pretty consistently here is that it is a lot, and it is not just Kubernetes, right? Like any fast moving project. It could be your favorite Ruby module that has 200 contributors, right?It doesn’t matter what it is, it is a lot to keep a track of, and it represents some of that cognitive overheads that you have to think about. That is a lot to take on. Even if it is overwhelming, if you find value in being up to date with these things, just figure out – there are so many resources out there that address these different audiences and figure out what the right measure for you is. You don’t have to go deep on the code on everything.Sometimes it might be better to just try and find a source of information that gives you a high enough of a view. Maybe you are looking at the blog posts that come out on Kubernetes.io every release and you are just looking at the release notes and if you just read the release notes every release, that is already miles ahead of what I have seen a lot of folks out there when they are starting to ask me questions about how do you keep up to date.[0:28:35.9] JR: I’m curious, we have been talking a lot about keeping up as an individual. Do you all have strategies for how you help, let’s say your overall team, keep up with all the things that are going on? To give an example, Duffy, Olive and myself, at least at one point, were on the same team and we’d go out to disparate customers and see all of these different new things that they are trying to do or new projects that they are using.So we’d have to think about how do we get together and share that internally to make sure we are bringing the whole team along with what is going on in the ecosystem especially from a customer perspective. I know one of the ways that we do that is having demos and things of that nature that we share weekly. Are there other strategies that you all use with your teams to kind of share interesting information and news?[0:29:25.5] M: So what we do is mostly the way we share in our team, and we are a small team. We use Slack. We pre-filter in terms of like if there is stuff that I think is valuable for me and probably not for the whole team – obviously we are not going to share, but I think if it is related to something that the team has or to come grant and then I will share on Slack but we don’t have any formal way. I know people use some reports, weekly reports, or other platforms to distribute but we just use Slack.[0:29:53.0] DC: I think one of the things – one of the patters that we had at [inaudible 0:29:54] that I thought was actually super helpful was that we would engage a conversation. “I learned a cool new thing about whatever today,” and so we would say, “I am going to – ” and then we would start a Zoom call around that and then people could join if they wanted to, to be a part of the live discussion or not, and if they didn’t, they would still be able to see a recorded Zoom pop up in the channel later on.So even if your time zones don’t line up, like I know it is 2 AM or 3 AM or something like that for Olive right now, you can still go back to those recorded sessions and you’ll just see it on your daily Slack stuff. You would be able to see, “Oh there was a conversation about whether you should deploy Kubernetes crossed availibility zones or not. I would like to go see that,” and see what the inputs were, and so that can be helpful.[0:30:42.5] JR: Yeah, that is a super interesting observation. It is almost like remote-first teams that are used to these processes of recording everything and putting it in a Google doc. They are more equipped for that information sharing perhaps than like the water cooler conversations you’d have in the office.[0:30:58.5] OP: And on the Slack or any of the communication tool, we have different channels because we are all in lots of channels and to have channels dedicated to a particular subject is absolutely the way to go because otherwise in my previous company that seem to be kind of one main channel that all the architect used to discussed everything on and you know sometimes you join and you’re like, “What is everybody talking about?”There would be literally about a hundred messages on some sort of theme that I have never heard of. So you come away from that thinking that, “That is the main channel. Where is the bit – is there messages in the middle that I missed that were just normal discussions as opposed to in around the technical stuff,” and so it made me a bit sad, right? I would be like, “I haven’t understood something and there is a whole load of stuff on this channel that I don’t understand.”But it is the kind of central channel for everyone. So I think you end up then start looking up things that they are discussing and then realizing actually that is not really anything related to what I need to know about today or next week. It might be something for the future but I’ve got other stuff to focus on. So my point is that those communication channels for me sometimes can make me feel a little bit behind the curve or very much sort of reactive in trying to jump on things that are actually not really anything to do with me for me now and wasting my time slightly and kind of messing with my head a little bit in that like, “I really need to try and focus out stuff,” and actually putting the right content in the right channel, at least from a higher level, helps me decide whether I want to like look at that channel today, and stuff that should be in the channel is not kind of in a conversation channel. So organization of where that content is, is important to me.[0:32:37.6] CC: I am so in the same page with you Olive. That is the way my brain works as well. I want to have multiple channels, like if we are talking about Slack or any chat tool, but some people have such aversion to multiple channels. They really have a hard time dealing with too many – like testing their threshold of what they think is too many channels. So I am always mindful too, like it has to work for everybody but if it was up to me, there will be one channel per topic. So I know where to focus on.But you said something that is so interesting. How do we even just – like you were saying in the context of channel, multiple channels, and I go, if I need to pay attention to this this week as oppose to like, I don’t need to look at this until some time in the future. How do we even decide what we focus on that is useful for us in the moment versus it would be good for me to know but I don’t need to know right now.I am super bad at this. When I see something that is going to give me the fundamentals, like I have other priorities now, I sort of always want to consume that to learn the fundamentals because I think in the long term phase of, but then I neglect physically what I need to know to do in the moment and I am trying to sort of fish there and get focused on in the moment things. Anybody else have a hard time?[0:34:04.5] DC: You are not alone on that, yeah.[0:34:06.7] CC: It is terrible.[0:34:08.3] MICHAEL: Something that I wish I would do more often as like being a good citizen is like when you read a lot, probably 90% of my time is not writing but reading, maybe even more and then I share and then on Twitter, the tweet for them the most successful ones in terms of retweets or likes are the ones where I do like TLDR’s or some screen captures like too long to read. Where people don’t have the time, they might want to read the article but they don’t have the time.But if you put in like a TLDR like either a tweet or a thread on it, a lot of people would jump onto it because they can just easily capture it and they can still read the full article if they want but that is something that I learned and it is pretty – what is the right word? Helpful to my followers and the community but I just don’t do it that often unfortunately. If I am writing, summarizing, writing, I kind of remember. That is how the brain works. It is a nice side effect.[0:35:04.9] DC: I was saying, this is definitely one of those things where you can be the change you want to see if you, you know?[0:35:08.6] M: Yeah, I know.[0:35:10.0] DC: This is awesome. I would also say that what you just raised Carlisia is like a super valid point. I mean like not everybody’s brain works the same way, right? There are people who are neuro-divergent. There are people who think very linearly and they are very comfortable with that and there are people who don’t. So it is a struggle I think regardless of how your brain is wired to understand to how to prioritize the attention you will give any given subject.In some cases, your brain is not wired – your brain is almost wired against that whole idea, like you are just not set up for success when it comes to figuring out how to prioritize your attention.[0:35:49.0] CC: You hit the nail on the head. We are so set up for failure in that department because there are so many interesting conversations and you want to hop in and you want to be a part of the conversation and part of the group and socialize. Our work is so isolating to really put our heads down and just work, it can be so isolating. So it is great to participate in conversations out there even if it is for only via Twitter. I mean, obviously we are very biased towards Twitter here in this group.But I am not even this on Twitter so just keep that in mind that we are cognizant of that but in any case, I don’t know what the answer is but what I am trying always to cut down on that, those social activities that seem so appealing. I don’t know how to do that from working out.[0:36:43.9] JR: I am in the same boat. 2020, I am hoping to let more of that go and to your point, it is not that there is no value in it. It is just, I don’t know, I am not deriving the same amount of quality out of it because I am so just multiplexed all over the place, right? So we’ll see how it goes.[0:36:59.9] CC: Oh if any listener has opinions and obviously it seems that all of us are helpless in that department. Share with us, please.[0:37:12.5] DC: It is a tricky one. I think it is also interesting because I find that when we talk about things like work-life balance, we think of the idea of maybe work-life balance is that when you come at the end of the day and you go home and you don’t think about work, right? Sometimes we think that work-life balance means that you have a certain amount of time off that you can actually spend with your family and your friends or your community, what have you, and not be engaging on multiple fronts.Just be that – have that be your focus, but when it comes to things like keeping up, when it comes to things like learning or elevating your education and stuff, it seems like, for the most part, and this is just my own assumption, I am curious how you all feel about this, that we don’t – that that doesn’t enter into it, right? Your personal time is totally on the table when it comes to how do you keep up with these things. We don’t even think about it that way, right?I know I personally don’t. I definitely have to do more and cut back on the amount of time that I spend reading. I am right there with Michael on 90% of my time when my eyes are open, they are either reading or staring up on the sky while I try to think about what I am going to write next. You know one way or the other it is like that is what I am doing.[0:38:24.0] CC: Yeah.[0:38:25.1] MICHAEL: I noticed last year on my Twitter feed, more people than the years before will complain about like personal burn out. I saw a pattern, like reading those people’s tweets, I saw a pattern there. It wasn’t really like a spiral and then they realized and they shot down like deleted Twitter from their phones or any messaging and other stuff, and I think I am at the point where I also need to do that when it comes to vacation PDO, or whatever.Because I am just like, as you said Duffy, my free time is on the table when it comes to Twitter and catching up and keeping up because work-life balance in my mind is not work but what is not work for like – Kubernetes is exciting, adding in all the space, like what is not work there? I need to really get better at that because I think I might end in the same spiral of just soaking in more until I just –[0:39:17.7] CC: Yeah and like Josh said, it is not that there isn’t a value. Obviously we derive a huge value, that is why we’re on it, but you have to weigh things and what are your goals and is that the best way to your goals from where you are right now, and maybe you know, Twitter you use for a while, ramp up your knowledge, ramp up the connections because it is great for making connections, and then you step back and focus on something else, then to go on a cycle.This is how I am thinking now. It is just like what Olive was saying, you know, books are great, blog posts are great, and I absolutely agree with that. It is just that I don’t have even the time and when I have the time, I would be reading code and I would be reading things all day long, it is just really tiring for me at the end of the day to sit down and read more. I want to invest in learning how to speed read to solve that problem because I read a lot of books and blog posts. So something on my list.[0:40:22.8] DC: One of the biggest tips on speed reading I ever learned is that frequently when you read you think of saying the word and if you can get out of that habit, if you get out of the habit of saying the word even with your mouth or you just get out of that habit that will already increase the quickness of what you read.[0:40:39.5] CC: That is so interesting.[0:40:41.4] DC: Yeah, that is a trippy one.[0:40:43.1] CC: Because I think being bilingual, I totally like – that really helps me understand things, by saying the words.[0:40:52.9] DC: I think the point that we are all working around here is, there is a great panel that came out at KubeCon EU in 2019 was put on by Aaron Crickenberger, Esther McNaMara, Steven Augustus, these folks are all very high output people. I mean, they do a lot of stuff especially with regard to community and so they put on a panel that was talking about burn out and self-care and I think that it is definitely worth checking that one out.And actually also thinking about what keeping up means to you and making sure that you are measuring that against your ability to sustain, is incredibly important, right? I feel like keeping up is one of those subjects where we end up – it is almost insidious in its way to – it is a thing that we can just do all the time. We can just spend all of our time, any free moment that you have, you are sitting on the bus, you are trying to keep up with things.And because that happens so much, I feel like that is sort of one of the ways that we can feel burnt out as you are seeing today. We can feel like we did a lot of things but there was no real result to it and keep in mind that that’s part of it, right? Like when you are thinking about how we are keeping up with it, make sure that the value to your time is still something that you have some cognizance about, that you have some thought about, like is it worth it to me to just spend this six hours reading everything, right?Or would it be better for me to spend some amount of time just not reading, you know? Like doing something else, you know? Like bake a cake for crying out loud, you know?[0:42:29.5] CC: Something that a lot of times we don’t allow ourselves to do and I decided to speak for everybody I am sorry, I just do nothing, because our brain needs that. We need to not be listening, not be reading, just nothing. Just sit and look at the ceiling, our brain needs that. Ideally, look at nature, like look outside, look at the air, go for a walk. We need that, because that recharges the brain. Anyway, one thing also that I want to bring up, maybe we can mention real quick because we are coming up at the top of the hour.How do people, projects, how do we really help the users of those projects to be up to date with what they are doing?[0:43:18.4] DC: Well yeah I mean this is the different patterns that we are talking about. So I think the blog posts help. I like the idea of having blogs that are targeted towards different audiences. I like the idea of having an aggregate here for putting up a big project. I mean obviously Kubernetes is such a huge ecosystem that if you have things like KubeWeekly and I know that there are actually quite a number of things out there that try and do this.But if we can kind of agree on one like KubeWeekly I think is a pretty good one because it is actually run by the CNCF. So it kind of falls within that sort of governance as a model but having an aggregator where you can actually produce content or curate content as it relates to your project that’s helpful, and then office-hours I think is also helpful to Josh’s point. I mean office-hours and SIG hours are very similar things. I mean like office-hours there like how to developers think about what’s happening with the space.This is an opportunity for you as an end user to show up and ask questions, those sorts of patterns I think all are incredibly helpful as a project to figure out there to those things.[0:44:17.8] OP: Yeah, I know summary articles or the sort of TLDRs that Michael mentioned earlier, I think I need more of those things in my life because I do a lot of reading, because I think my brain is a bit weird in that I need to read something about five or six different times from five or six different articles for it to sort of frame in my head.So what I am trying to – like for 2020, I have almost tried to do this, is like if I think somebody knows all about this and it would save me reading those five, six, seven articles and if that person has the time, I try and sort of reach out to them and say, “Listen, have you got 20 minutes or so to explain this topic to me? Can I ask you questions about it?” It just saves me, saves my eyes reading the screen, and it just saves me time. I just need a TLDR summary of a project or a feature or something just so I can know what it is all about in my head and talk fairly sort of confidently about it.If I need to get in front and down under the weeds then there is more reading to kind of do for me maybe the coding on the technical side, but sometimes I can’t figure out what this feature sort of means and what is its use case in the real world and I have to read through lots of articles and sometimes kind of vendor specific ones and they’ve got a different slant than maybe an independent one and trying to marry those bits up my head is a bit hard for me and there is sort of wealth of information.So if you are interested in a topic and there is hundreds of articles and you start reading four or five and they are all slightly different, eventually you figure out that – you are confident and I understand what that product is about but it has taken a long time to get there and it is taken a lot of reading time. So TLDRs is like really work and I think as Josh mentioned before, we have this thing internally where we do bench demos.And that is like a TLDR and a show and tell really quickly, like, “This is what this does and this is why we need to know about it and this is why our customers needs to know about it, the end,” you know? And that’s really, really useful because that just saves a whole bunch of people a whole bunch of time figuring out A, whether they need to know about it and B, actually now understanding that product or feature at the end of the five, 10 minutes which is what they typically are. So they are very useful short snippets of information. Maybe we are back to Twitter.[0:46:37.8] JR: Similar to the idea of giving a demo Olive, you made me think of something and that is that I think one of the ways that I keep up with the space is actually through writing along with reading and I think the notion of like – and this admittedly takes up time and the whole quality of life conversation comes in but using writing to help develop your thoughts and kind of aggregate all of these crazy inputs and try to be somewhat concise, which I know I struggle with, around something I’ve learned.It’s helped me a ton and then that asset kind of becomes reusable to share with other people the thing that you wrote. So for people listening to this I guess maybe a call to action for 2020 if that is your style as well, consider starting to write yourself and becoming a resource, right? Because even if you are new to this space, you’d be amazed at just how writing from your perspective can help other people.[0:47:26.3] DC: I think another one that I actually have been impressed with lately is that a number of consumer companies like people out there like Lyft and companies like that have actually started to surface engineering blogs around how they are using technology and how they are using technology to solve things, which I think, as a service provider, as somebody who is involved in the community of Kubernetes, I find those to be incredibly valuable because I get to actually see how those things are doing.I mean at the same time, I see things like – we talked about KubeCon, which is a convention that they have every year. Obviously the project is large enough to support it but there is actually an incentive if you are a consumer of that project to go and talk about how you are using it, right? It is incentivized in that it is more likely your talk will be accepted if you are a consumer of the product than somebody building it, right? We hear from people building it all the time.I love that idea of incentivizing people who are using this thing get out there and talk about it or share their ideas about it or how they are using it, what problems did it solve for them. That is critical I think.[0:48:31.0] CC: Can I also make a suggestion – is to not so much following on the thread that we are talking about just now but kind of on the general thread of this episode. If you have resources that you do use to keep up with things, stop this recording right now and go and give them a like, give them a follow, give them a thumbs up, show somehow appreciation because what Duffy said just now, he was saying, “Oh it is so helpful when I read a blog post.”But people who are writing, they want to know that. So give them some indication, it counts a lot. It takes a lot of effort to sit down and write something or produce a podcast and if you take any, derive any benefit from it, show appreciation. It motivates people to keep doing it.[0:49:26.4] DC: Yeah, agreed.[0:49:27.9] M: I think that is a great bind maybe to close off this episode because it reiterates that just consuming and keeping up that doesn’t necessarily mean you don’t give back, right? So this is a way of giving back, which is really important to keep that flow and creativeness.[0:49:41.8] CC: I go through a lot of YouTube videos and sometimes I just play one after the other but sometimes, you know, I have been making a point of going back and liking it. Liking the ones that I like – obviously I don’t like everything. I mean things that I don’t like I don’t listen in but you know what I mean? It takes no effort but just so people know, “OK, you did a good job here.” By the way, go to iTunes and rate us. So we will know that you liked it and it will help people find our show, our podcast, and if you are watching us on YouTube, give us a like.[0:50:16.1] DC: All right, well unless anybody has any final thoughts, that is what we wanted to cover this session. So thank you all very, very much and I look forward to seeing you next week.[0:50:25.3] M: Bye-bye.[0:50:26.3] CC: Thank you so much.[0:50:27.4] OP: Bye.[0:50:28.1] JR: Bye.[END OF EPISODE][0:50:28.7] ANNOUNCER: Thank you for listening to The Podlets Cloud Native Podcast. Find us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/ThePodlets and on the http://thepodlets.io/ website, where you'll find transcripts and show notes. We'll be back next week. Stay tuned by subscribing.[END]See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this episode of The Podlets Podcast, we welcome Michael Gasch from VMware to join our discussion on the necessity (or not) of formal education in working in the realm of distributed systems. There is a common belief that studying computer science is a must if you want to enter this field, but today we talk about the various ways in which individuals can teach themselves everything they need to know. What we establish, however, is that you need a good dose of curiosity and craziness to find your feet in this world, and we discuss the many different pathways you can take to fully equip yourself. Long gone are the days when you needed a degree from a prestigious school: we give you our hit-list of top resources that will go a long way in helping you succeed in this industry. Whether you are someone who prefers learning by reading, attending Meetups or listening to podcasts, this episode will provide you with lots of new perspectives on learning about distributed systems. Follow us: https://twitter.com/thepodlets Website: https://thepodlets.io Feeback: info@thepodlets.io https://github.com/vmware-tanzu/thepodlets/issues Hosts: Carlisia Campos Duffie Cooley Michael Gasch Key Points From This Episode: • Introducing our new host, Michael Gasch, and a brief overview of his role at VMware. • Duffie and Carlisia’s educational backgrounds and the value of hands-on work experience. • How they first got introduced to distributed systems and the confusion around what it involves. • Why distributed systems are about more than simply streamlining communication and making things work. • The importance and benefit of educating oneself on the fundamentals of this topic. • Our top recommended resources for learning about distributed systems and their concepts. • The practical downside of not having a formal education in software development. • The different ways in which people learn, index and approach problem-solving. • Ensuring that you balance reading with implementation and practical experience. • Why it’s important to expose yourself to discussions on the topic you want to learn about. • The value of getting different perspectives around ideas that you think you understand. • How systems thinking is applicable to things outside of computer science.• The various factors that influence how we build systems. Quotes: “When people are interacting with distributed systems today, or if I were to ask like 50 people what a distributed system is, I would probably get 50 different answers.” — @mauilion [0:14:43] “Try to expose yourself to the words, because our brains are amazing. Once you get exposure, it’s like your brain works in the background. All of a sudden, you go, ‘Oh, yeah! I know this word.’” — @carlisia [0:14:43] “If you’re just curious a little bit and maybe a little bit crazy, you can totally get down the rabbit hole in distributed systems and get totally excited about it. There’s no need for having formal education and the degree to enter this world.” — @embano1 [0:44:08] Learning resources suggested by the hosts: Book, Designing Data-Intensive Applications, M. Kleppmann Book, Distributed Systems, M. van Steen and A.S. Tanenbaum (free with registration) Book, Thesis on Raft, D. Ongaro. - Consensus - Bridging Theory and Practice (free PDF) Book, Enterprise Integration Patterns, B.Woolf, G. Hohpe Book, Designing Distributed Systems, B. Burns (free with registration) Video, Distributed Systems Video, Architecting Distributed Cloud Applications Video, Distributed Algorithms Video, Operating System - IIT Lectures Video, Intro to Database Systems (Fall 2018) Video, Advanced Database Systems (Spring 2018) Paper, Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System Post, Notes on Distributed Systems for Young Bloods Post, Distributed Systems for Fun and Profit Post, On Time Post, Distributed Systems @The Morning Paper Post, Distributed Systems @Brave New Geek Post, Aphyr’s Class materials for a distributed systems lecture series Post, The Log - What every software engineer should know about real-time data’s unifying abstraction Post, Github - awesome-distributed-systems Post, Your Coffee Shop Doesn’t Use Two-Phase Commit Podcast, Distributed Systems Engineering with Apache Kafka ft. Jason Gustafson Podcast, The Systems Bible - The Beginner’s Guide to Systems Large and Small - John Gall Podcast, Systems Programming - Designing and Developing Distributed Applications - Richard Anthony Podcast, Distributed Systems - Design Concepts - Sunil Kumar Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode: The Podlets on Twitter — https://twitter.com/thepodlets Michael Gasch on LinkedIn — https://de.linkedin.com/in/michael-gasch-10603298 Michael Gasch on Twitter — https://twitter.com/embano1 Carlisia Campos on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/carlisia Duffie Cooley on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/mauilion VMware — https://www.vmware.com/ Kubernetes — https://kubernetes.io/ Linux — https://www.linux.org Brian Grant on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/bgrant0607 Kafka — https://kafka.apache.org/ Lamport Article — https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/time-clocks.pdf Designing Date-Intensive Applications — https://www.amazon.com/Designing-Data-Intensive-Applications-Reliable-Maintainable-ebook/dp/B06XPJML5D Designing Distributed Systems — https://www.amazon.com/Designing-Distributed-Systems-Patterns-Paradigms/dp/1491983647 Papers We Love Meetup — https://www.meetup.com/papers-we-love/ The Systems Bible — https://www.amazon.com/Systems-Bible-Beginners-Guide-Large/dp/0961825170 Enterprise Integration Patterns — https://www.amazon.com/Enterprise-Integration-Patterns-Designing-Deploying/dp/0321200683 Transcript: EPISODE 12 [INTRODUCTION] [0:00:08.7] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Podlets Podcast, a weekly show that explores Cloud Native one buzzword at a time. Each week, experts in the field will discuss and contrast distributed systems concepts, practices, tradeoffs and lessons learned to help you on your cloud native journey. This space moves fast and we shouldn’t reinvent the wheel. If you’re an engineer, operator or technically minded decision maker, this podcast is for you. [EPISODE] [00:00:41] CC: Hi, everybody. Welcome back. This is Episode 12, and we are going to talk about distributed systems without a degree or even with a degree, because who knows how much we learn in university. I am Carlisia Campos, one of your hosts. Today, I also have Duffie Cooley. Say hi, Duffie. [00:01:02] DC: Hey, everybody. [00:01:03] CC: And a new host for you, and this is such a treat. Michael Gasch, please tell us a little bit of your background. [00:01:11] MG: Hey! Hey, everyone! Thanks, Carlisia. Yes. So I’m new to the show. I just want to keep it brief because I think over the show we’ll discuss our backgrounds a little bit further. So right now, I’m with VMware. So I’ve been with VMware almost for five years. Currently, I'm in the office of the CTO. I’m a platform architect in the office of the CTO and I mainly use Kubernetes on a daily basis from an engineering perspective. So we build a lot of prototypes based on customer input or ideas that we have, and we work with different engineering teams. Kurbernetes has become kind of my bread and butter but lately more from a consumer perspective like developing with Kurbenetes or against Kubernetes, instead of the formal ware of mostly being around implementing and architecting Kubernetes. [00:01:55] CC: Nice. Very impressive. Duffie? [00:01:58] MG: Thank you. [00:01:59] DC: Yeah. [00:02:00] CC: Let’s give the audience a little bit of your backgrounds. We’ve done this before but just to frame the episodes, so people will know how we come in as distributed systems. [00:02:13] DC: Sure. In my experience, I spent – I don’t have a formal education history. I spent most of my time kind of like in a high school time. Then from there, basically worked into different systems administration, network administration, network architect, and up into virtualization and now containerization. So I’ve got a pretty hands-on kind of bootstrap experience around managing infrastructure, both at small-scale, inside of offices, and the way up to very large scale, working for some of the larger companies here in the Silicon Valley. [00:02:46] CC: All right. My turn I guess. So I do have a computer science degree but I don’t feel that I really went deep at all in distributed systems. My degree is also from a long time ago. So mainly, what I do know now is almost entirely from hands-on work experience. Even so, I think I'm very much lacking and I’m very interested in this episode, because we are going to go through some great resources that I am also going to check out later. So let’s get this party started. [00:03:22] DC: Awesome. So you want to just talk about kind of the general ideas behind distributed systems and like how you became introduced to them or like where you started in that journey? [00:03:32] CC: Yeah. Let’s do that. [00:03:35] DC: My first experience with the idea of distributed systems was in using them before I knew that they were distributed systems, right? One of the very first distributed systems as I look back on it that I ever actually spent any real time with was DNS, which I consider to be something of a distributed system. If you think about it, they have name servers, they have a bunch of caching servers. They solve many of the same sorts of problems. In a previous episode, we talked about how networking, just the general idea of networking and handling large-scale architecting networks. It’s also in a way very – has a lot of analogues into distributed systems. For me, I think working with and helping solve the problems that are associated with them over time gave me a good foundational understanding for when we were doing distributed systems as a thing later on in my career. [00:04:25] CC: You said something that caught my interest, and it’s very interesting, because obviously for people who have been writing algorithms, writing papers about distributed systems, they’re going to go yawning right now, because I’m going to say the obvious. As you start your journey programming, you read job requirements. You read or you must – should know distributed systems. Then I go, “What is distributed system? What do they really mean?” Because, yes, we understand apps stuck to apps and then there is API, but there’s always for me at least a question at the back of my head. Is that all there is to it? It sounds like it should be a lot more involved and complex and complicated than just having an app stuck on another app. In fact, it is because there are so many concepts and problems involved in distributed systems, right? From timing, clock, and sequence, and networking, and failures, how do you recover. There is a whole world in how do you log this properly, how do you monitor. There’s a whole world that revolves around this concept of systems residing in different places and [inaudible 00:05:34] each other. [00:05:37] DC: I think you made a very good point. I think this is sort of like there’s an analog to this in containers, oddly enough. When people say, “I want a container within and then the orchestration systems,” they think that that's just a thing that you can ask for. That you get a container and inside of that is going to be your file system and it’s going to do all those things. In a way, I feel like that same confusion is definitely related to distributed systems. When people are interacting with distributed systems today or if I were to ask like 50 people what a distributed system is, I would probably get 50 different answers. I think that you got a pretty concise definition there in that it is a set of systems that intercommunicate to perform some function. It’s like found at its base line. I feel like that's a pretty reasonable definition of what distributed systems are, and then we can figure out from there like what functions are they trying to achieve and what are some of the problems that we’re trying to solve with them. [00:06:29] CC: Yeah. That’s what it’s all about in my head is solving the problems because at the beginning, I was thinking, “Well, it must be just about communicating and making things work.” It’s the opposite of that. It’s like that’s a given. When a job says you need to understand about distributed systems, what they are really saying is you need to know how to deal with failures, not just to make it work. Make it work is sort of the easy part, but the whole world of where the failures can happen, how do you handle it, and that, to me is what needing to know distributed system comes in handy. In a couple different things, like at the top layer or 5% is knowing how to make things work, and 95% is knowing how to handle things when they don’t work, because it’s inevitable. [00:07:19] DC: Yeah, I agree. What do you think, Michael? How would you describe the context around distributed systems? What was the first one that you worked with? [00:07:27] MG: Exactly. It’s kind of similar to your background, Duffie, which is no formal degree or education on computer science right after high school and jumping into kind of my first job, working with computers, computer administration. I must say that from the age of I think seven or so, I was interested in computers and all that stuff but more from a hardware perspective, less from a software development perspective. So my take always was on disassembling the pieces and building my own computers than writing programs. In the early days, that just was me. So I completely almost missed the whole education and principles and fundamentals of how you would write a program for a single computer and then obviously also for how to write programs that run across a network of computers. So over time, as I progress on my career, especially kind of in the first job, which was like seven years of different Linux systems, Linux administrations, I kind of – Like you, Duffie, I dealt with distributed systems without necessarily knowing that I'm dealing with distributed systems. I knew that it was mostly storage systems, Linux file servers, but distributed file servers. Samba, if some of you recall that project. So I knew that things could fail. I know it could fail, for example, or I know it could not be writable, and so a client must be stuck but not necessarily I think directly related to fundamentals of how distributed systems work or don’t work. Over time, and this is really why I appreciate the Kubernetes project in community, I got more questions, especially when this whole container movement came up. I got so many questions around how does that thing work. How does scheduling work? Because scheduling kind of was close to my interest in the hardware design and low-level details. But I was looking at Kubernetes like, “Okay. There is the scheduler.” In the beginning, the documentation was pretty scarce around the implementation and all the control as for what’s going on. So I had to – I listen to a lot of podcasts and Brian Grant’s great talks and different shows that he gave from the Kubernetes space and other people there as well. In the end, I had more questions than answers. So I had to dig deeper. Eventually, that led me to a path of wanting to understand more formal theory behind distributed systems by reading the papers, reading books, taking some online classes just to get a basic understanding of those issues. So I got interested in results scheduling in distributed systems and consensus. So those were two areas that kind of caught my eyes like, “What is it? How do machines agree in a distributed system if so many things can go wrong?” Maybe we can explore this later on. So I’m going to park this for a bit. But back to your question, which was kind of a long-winded answer or a road to answering your question, Duffie. For me, a distributed system is like this kind of coherent network of computer machines that from the outside to an end-user or to another client looks like one gigantic big machine that is [inaudible 00:10:31] to run as fast. That is performing also efficient. It constitutes a lot of characteristics and properties that we want from our systems that a single machine usually can’t handle. But it looks like it's a big single machine to a client. [00:10:46] DC: I think that – I mean, it is interesting like, I don’t want to get into – I guess this is probably not just a distributed systems talk. But obviously, one of the questions that falls out for me when I hear that answer is then what is the difference between a micro service architecture and distributed systems, because I think it's – I mean, to your point, the way that a lot of people work with the app to learn to develop software, it’s like we’re going to develop a monolithic application just by nature. We’re going to solve a software problem using code. Then later on, when we decide to actually scale this thing or understand how to better operate it under a significant load, then we started thinking about, “Okay. Well, how do we have to architect this differently in such a way that it can support that load?” That’s where I feel like the beams cut across, right? We’re suddenly in a world where you’re not only just talking about microservices. You’re also talking about distributed systems because you’re going to start thinking about how to understand transactionality throughout that system, how to understand all of those consensus things that you're referring to. How do they affect it when I add mister network in there? That’s cool. [00:11:55] MG: Just one comment on this, Duffie, which took me a very long time to realize, which is coming – From my definition of what a distributed system is like this group of machines that they perform work in a certain sense or maybe even more abstracted like at a bunch of computers network together. What I kind of missed most of the time, and this goes back to the DNS example that you gave in the beginning, was the client or the clients are also part of this distributed system, because they might have caches, especially in DNS. So you always deal with this kind of state that is distributed everywhere. Maybe you don't even know where it kind of is distributed, and the client kind of works with a local stale data. So that is also part of a distributed system, and something I want to give credit to the Kafka community and some of the engineers on Kafka, because there was a great talk lately that I heard. It’s like, “Right. The client is also part of your distributed system, even though usually we think it's just the server. That those many server machines, all those microservices.” At least I missed that a long time. [00:12:58] DC: You should put a link to that talk in our [inaudible 00:13:00]. That would be awesome. It sounds great. So what do you think, Carlisia? [00:13:08] CC: Well, one thing that I wanted to mention is that Michael was saying how he’s been self-teaching distributed systems, and I think if we want to be competent in the area, we have to do that. I’m saying this to myself even. It’s very refreshing when you read a book or you read a paper and you really understand the fundamentals of an aspect of distributed system. A lot of things fall into place in your hands. I’m saying this because even prioritizing reading about and learning about the fundamentals is really hard for me, because you have your life. You have things to do. You have the minutiae in things to get done. But so many times, I struggle. In the rare occasions where I go, “Okay. Let me just learn this stuff trial and error,” it makes such a difference. Then once you learn, it stays with you forever. So it’s really good. It’s so refreshing to read a paper and understand things at a different level, and that is what this episode is. I don’t know if this is the time to jump in into, “So there are our recommendations.” I don't know how deep, Michael, you’re going to go. You have a ton of things listed. Everything we mention on the show is going to be on our website, on the show notes. So nobody needs to be necessarily taking notes. Anything thing I wanted to say is it would be lovely if people would get back to us once you listened to this. Let us know if you want to add anything to this list. It would be awesome. We can even add it to this list later and give a shout out to you. So it’d be great. [00:14:53] MG: Right. I don’t want to cover this whole list. I just wanted to be as complete as possible about a stuff that I kind of read or watched. So I just put it in and I just picked some highlights there if you want. [00:15:05] CC: Yeah. Go for it. [00:15:06] MG: Yeah. Okay. Perfect. Honestly, even though not the first in the list, but the first thing that I read, so maybe from kind of my history of how I approach things, was searching for how do computers work and what are some of the issues and how do computers and machines agree. Obviously, the classic paper that I read was the Lamport paper on “Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System”. I want to be honest. First time I read it, I didn’t really get the full essence of the paper, because it doesn't prove in there. The mathematic proof for me didn't click immediately, and there were so many things and concepts and physics and time that were thrown at me where I was looking for answers and I had more questions than answers. But this is not to Leslie. This is more like by the time I just wasn't prepared for how deep the rabbit hole goes. So I thought, if someone asked me for – I only have time to read one book out of this huge list that I have there and all the other resources. Which one would it be? Which one would I recommend? I would recommend Designing Data-Intensive Apps by Martin Kleppmann, which I’ve been following his blog posts and some partial releases that he's done before fully releasing that book, which took him more than four years to release that book. It’s kind of almost the Bible, state-of-the-art Bible when it comes to all concepts in distributed systems. Obviously, consensus, network failures, and all that stuff but then also leading into modern data streaming, data platform architectures inspired by, for example, LinkedIn and other communities. So that would be the book that I would recommend to someone if – Who does have time to read one book. [00:16:52] DC: That’s a neat approach. I like the idea of like if you had one thing, if you have one way to help somebody ramp on distributed systems and stuff, what would it be? For me, it’s actually I don't think I would recommend a book, oddly enough. I feel like I would actually – I’d probably drive them toward the kind of project, like the kind [inaudible 00:17:09] project and say, “This is a distributed system all but itself.” Start tearing it apart to pieces and seeing how they work and breaking them and then exploring and kind of just playing with the parts. You can do a lot of really interesting things. This is actually another book in your list that was written by Brendan Burns about Designing Distributed Systems I think it’s called. That book, I think he actually uses Kubernetes as a model for how to go about achieving these things, which I think is incredibly valuable, because it really gets into some of the more stable distributed systems patterns that are around. I feel like that's a great entry point. So if I had one thing, if I had to pick one way to help somebody or to push somebody in the direction of trying to learn distributed systems, I would say identify those distributed systems that maybe you’re already aware of and really explore how they work and what the problems with them are and how they went about solving those problems. Really dig into the idea of it. It’s something you could put your hands on and play with. I mean, Kubernetes is a great example of this, and this is actually why I referred to it. [00:18:19] CC: The way that works for me when I’m learning something like that is to really think about where the boundaries are, where the limitations are, where the tradeoffs are. If you can take a smaller system, maybe something like The Kind Project and identify what those things are. If you can’t, then ask around. Ask someone. Google it. I don’t know. Maybe it will be a good episode topic for us to do that. This part is doing this to map things out. So maybe we can understand better and help people understand things better. So mainly like yeah. They try to do the distributed system thesis are. But for people who don’t even know what they could be, it’s harder to identify it. I don’t know what a good strategy for that would be, because you can read about distributed systems and then you can go and look at a project. How do you map the concept to learning to what you’re seeing in the code base? For me, that’s the hardest thing. [00:19:26] MG: Exactly. Something that kind of I had related experience was like when I went into software development, without having formal education on algorithms and data structures, sometimes in your head, you have the problem statement and you're like, “Okay. I would do it like that.” But you don't know the word that describes, for example, a heap structure or queue because you’ve never – Someone told you that is heap, that is a queue, and/or that is a stick. So, for me, reading the book was a bit easier. Even though I have done distributed systems, if you will, administration for many years, many years ago, I didn't realize that it was a distributed system because I never had this definition or I never had those failure scenarios in mind and it never had a word for consensus. So how would I search for something like how do machines agree? I mean, if you put that on Google, then likely they will come – Have a lot of stuff. But if you put it in consensus algorithm, likely you get a good hit on what the answer should be. [00:20:29] CC: It is really problematic when we don't know the names of things because – What you said is so right, because we are probably doing a lot of distributed systems without even knowing that that’s what it is. Then we go in the job interview, and people are, “Oh! Have you done a distributed system?” No. You have but you just don’t know how to name things. But that’s one – [00:20:51] DC: Yeah, exactly. [00:20:52] CC: Yeah. Right? That’s one issue. Another issue, which is a bigger issue though is at least that’s how it is for me. I don’t want to speak for anybody else but for me definitely. If I can’t name things and I face a problem and I solve it, every time I face that problem it’s a one-off thing because I can’t map to a higher concept. So every time I face that problem, it’s like, “Oh!” It’s not like, “Oh, yeah!” If this is this kind of problem, I have a pattern. I’m going to use that to this problem. So that’s what I’m saying. Once you learn the concept, you need to be able to name it. Then you can map that concept to problems you have. All of a sudden, if you have like three things [inaudible 00:21:35] use to solve this problem, because as you work with computers, coding, it’s like you see the same thing over and over again. But when you don’t understand the fundamentals, things are just like – It’s a bunch of different one-offs. It’s like when you have an argument with your spouse or girlfriend or boyfriend. Sometimes, it’s like you’re arguing 10 times in a month and you thought, “Oh! I had 10 arguments.” But if you’d stop and think about it, no. We had one argument 10 times. It’s very different than having 10 problems versus having 1 problem 10 times, if that makes sense. [00:22:12] MG: It does. [00:22:11] DC: I think it does, right? [00:22:12] MG: I just want to agree. [00:22:16] DC: I think it does make sense. I think it’s interesting. You’ve highlighted kind of an interesting pattern around the way that people learn, which I think is really interesting. That is like some people are able to read about patterns or software patterns or algorithms or architectures and have that suddenly be an index of their heads. They can actually then later on correlate what they've read with the experience that they’re having around the things they're working on. For some, it needs to be hands-on. They need to actually be able to explore that idea and understand and manipulate it and be able to describe how it works or functions in person, in reality. They need to have that hands-on like, “I need to touch it to understand it,” kind of experience. Those people also, as they go through those experiences, start building this index of patterns or algorithms in their head. They have this thing that they can correlate to, right, like, “Oh! This is a time problem,” or, “This is a consensus problem,” or what have you, right? [00:23:19] CC: Exactly. [00:23:19] DC: You may not know the word for that saying but you're still going to develop a pattern in your mind like the ability to correlate this particular problem with some pattern that you’ve seen before. What's interesting is I feel like people have taken different approaches to building that index, right? For me, it’s been troubleshooting. Somebody gives me a hard problem, and I dig into it and I figure out what the problem is, regardless of whether it's to do with distributed systems or cooking. It could be anything, but I always want to get right in there and figure out what that problem and start building a map in my mind of all of the players that are involved. For others, I feel like with an educational background, if you have an education background, I think that sometimes you end up coming to this with a set of patterns already instilled that you understand and you're just trying to apply those patterns to the experience you’re having instead. It’s just very – It’s like horse before the cart or cart before the horse. It’s very interesting when you think about it. [00:24:21] CC: Yes. [00:24:22] MG: The recommendation that I just want to give to people that are like me who like reading is that I went overboard a bit in the beginnings because I was so fascinated by all the stuff, and it went down the rabbit hole deeper, deeper, deeper, deeper. Reading and reading and reading. At some point, even coming to weird YouTube channels that talk about like, “Is time real and where does time emerge from?” It became philosophical even like the past where I went to. Now, the thing is, and this is why I like Duffie’s approach with like breaking things and then undergo like trying to break things and understanding how they work and how they can fail is that immediately you practice. You’re hands-on. So that would be my advice to people who are more like me who are fascinated by reading and all the theory that your brain and your mind is not really capable of kind of absorbing all the stuff and then remembering without practicing. Practicing can be breaking things or installing things or administrating things or even writing software. But for me, that was also a late realization that I should have maybe started doing things earlier than the time I spent reading. [00:25:32] CC: By doing, you mean, hands-on? [00:25:35] MG: Yeah. [00:25:35] CC: Anything specific that you would have started with? [00:25:38] MG: Yes. On Kubernetes – So going back those 15 years to my early days of Linux and Samba, which is a project. By the time, I think it was written in C or C++. But the problem was I wasn’t able to read the code. So the only thing that I had by then was some mailing lists and asking questions and not even knowing which questions to ask because of lack of words of understanding. Now, fast-forward into Kubernetes’ time, which got me deeper in distributed systems, I still couldn't read the code because I didn't know [inaudible 00:26:10]. But I forced myself to read the code, which helped a little bit for myself to understand what was going on because the documentation by then was lacking. These days, it’s easier, because you can just install [inaudible 00:26:20] way easier today. The hands-on piece, I mean. [00:26:23] CC: You said something interesting, Michael, and I have given this advice before because I use this practice all the time. It's so important to have a vocabulary. Like you just said, I didn't know what to ask because I didn’t know the words. I practice this all the time. To people who are in this position of distributed systems or whatever it is or something more specific that you are trying to learn, try to expose yourself to the words, because our brains are amazing. Once you get exposure, it’s like your brain works in the background. All of a sudden, you go, “Oh, yeah! I know this word.” So podcasts are great for me. If I don't know something, I will look for a podcast on the subject and I start listening to it. As the words get repeated, just contextually. I don’t have to go and get a degree or anything. Just by listening to the words being spoken in context, absorb the meaning of it. So podcasting is great or YouTube or anything that you can listen. Just in reading too, of course. The best thing is talking to people. But, again, it’s really – Sometimes, it’s not trivial to put yourself in positions where people are discussing these things. [00:27:38] DC: There are actually a number of Meetups here in the Bay Area, and there’s a number of Meetups – That whole Meetup thing is sort of nationwide across the entire US and around the world it seems like now lately. Those Meetups I feel like there are a number of Meetups in different subject areas. There’s one here in the Bay Area called Papers We Love, where they actually do explore interesting technical papers, which are obviously a great place to learn the words for things, right? This is actually where those words are being defined, right? When you get into the consensus stuff, they really get into – One even is Raft. There are many papers on Raft and many papers on multiple things that get into consensus. So definitely, whether you explore a meetup on a distributed system or in a particular application or in a particular theme like Kubernetes, those things are great places just to kind of get more exposure to what people are thinking about in these problems. [00:28:31] CC: That is such a great tip. [00:28:34] MG: Yeah. The podcast is twice as good as well, because for people, non-natives – English speaker, I mean. Oh, people. Not speakers. People. The thing is that the word you’re looking for might be totally different than the English word. For example, consensus in Germany has this totally different meaning. So if I would look that up in German, likely I would find nothing or not really related at all. So you have to go through translation and then finding the stuff. So what you said, Duffie, with PWL, Papers We Love, or podcasts, those words, often they are in English, those podcasts and they are natural consensus or charting or partitioning. Those are the words that you can at least look up like what does it mean. That’s what I did as well thus far. [00:29:16] CC: Yes. I also wanted to do a plus one for Papers We Love. It’s – They are everywhere and they also have an online. They have an online version of the Papers We Love Meetup, and a lot of the local ones film their meetups. So you can go through the history and see if they talked about any paper that you are interested in. Probably, I’m sure multiple locations talk about the same paper, so you can get different takes too. It’s really, really cool. Sometimes, it’s completely obscure like, “I didn’t get a word of what they were saying. Not one. What am I doing here?” But sometimes, they talk about things. You at least know what the thing is and you get like 10% of it. But some paper you don’t. People who deal with papers day in and day out, it’s very much – I don’t know. [00:30:07] DC: It’s super easy when going through a paper like that to have the imposter syndrome wash over you, right, because you’re like – [00:30:13] CC: Yes. Thank you. That’s what I wanted to say. [00:30:15] DC: I feel like I’ve been in this for 20 years. I probably know a few things, right. But in talking about reading this consensus paper going, “Can I buy a vowel? What is happening?” [00:30:24] CC: Yeah. Can I buy a vowel? That’s awesome, Duffie. [00:30:28] DC: But the other piece I want to call out to your point, which I think is important is that some people don't want to go out and be there in person. They don’t feel comfortable or safe exploring those things in person. So there are tons of resources like you have just pointed out like the online version of Papers We Love. You can also sign into Slack and just interact with people via text messaging, right? There’s a lot of really great resources out there for people of all types, including the amount of time that you have. [00:30:53] CC: For Papers We Love, it’s like going to language class. If you go and take a class in Italian, your first day, even though that is going to be super basic, you’re going to be like, “What?” You’ll go back in your third week. You start, “Oh! I’m getting this.” Then a month, three months, “Oh! I’m starting to be competent.” So you go once. You’re going to feel lost and experience imposter syndrome. But you keep going, because that is a format. First, you start absorbing what the format is, and that helps you understand the content. So once your mind absorbs the format, you’re like, “Okay. Now, I have – I know how to navigate this. I know what’s coming next.” So you don’t have to focus on that. You start focusing in the content. Then little but little, you become more proficient in understanding. Very soon, you’re going to be willing to write a paper. I’m not there yet. [00:31:51] DC: That’s awesome. [00:31:52] CC: At least that’s how I think it goes. I don’t know. [00:31:54] MG: I agree. [00:31:55] DC: It’s also changed over time. It’s fascinating. If you read papers from like 20 years ago and you read papers that are written more recently, it's interesting. The papers have changed their language when considering competition. When you're introducing a new idea with a paper, frequently that you are introducing it into a market full of competition. You're being very careful about the language, almost in a way to complicate the idea rather than to make it clear, which is challenging. There are definitely some papers that I’ve read where I was like, “Why are you using so many words to describe this simple idea?” It makes no sense, but yeah. [00:32:37] CC: I don’t want to make this episode all about Papers We Love. It was so good that you mentioned that, Duffie. It’s really good to be in a room where we’ll be watching something online where you see people asking questions and people go, “Oh! Why is this thing like this? Why is X like this,” or, “Why is Y doing like this?” Then you go, “Oh! I didn’t even think that X was important. I didn’t even know that Y was important.” So you stop picking up what the important things are, and that’s what makes it click is now you’ve – Hooking into the important concepts because people who know more than you are pointing out and asking questions. So you start paying attention to learning what the main things it should be paying attention to, which is different from reading the paper by yourself. It’s just a ton of content that you need to sort through. [00:33:34] DC: Yeah. I frequently self-describe it as a perspective junkie, because I feel like for any of us really to learn more about a subject that we feel we understand, we need the perspective of others to really engage, to expand our understanding of that thing. I feel like and I know how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I’ve done it a million times. It’s a solid thing. But then I watch my kid do it and I’m like, “I hadn’t thought of that problem.” [inaudible 00:33:59], right? This is a great example of that. Those communities like Papers We Love are great opportunity to understand the perspective of others around these hard ideas. When we’re trying to understand complex things like distributed systems, this is where it’s at. This is actually how we go about achieving this. There is a lot that you can do on your own but there is always going to be more that you can do together, right? You can always do more. You can always understand this idea faster. You can understand the complexity of a system and how to break it down into these things by exploiting it with other people. That's I feel like – [00:34:40] CC: That is so well said, so well said, and it’s the reason for this show to exist, right? We come on a show and we give our perspectives, and people get to learn from people with different backgrounds, what their takes are on distributed systems, cloud native. So this was such a major plug for the show. Keep coming back. You’re going to learn a ton. Also, it was funny that you – It was the second time you mentioned cooking, made a cooking reference, Duffie, which brings me to something I want to make sure I say on this episode. I added a few things for reference, three books. But the one that I definitely would recommend starting with is The Systems Bible by John Gall. This book is so cool, because it helps you see everything through systems. Everything is a system. A conversation can be a system. An interaction between two people can be a system. I’m not saying this book says that. It’s just like my translation and that you can look – Cooking is a system. There is a process. There is a sequence. It’s really, really cool and it really helps to have things framed in this way and then go out and read the other books on systems. I think it helps a lot. This is definitely what I am starting with and what I would recommend people start with, The Systems Bible. Did you two know this book? [00:36:15] MG: I did not. I don’t. [00:36:17] DC: I’m not aware of it either but I really appreciate the idea. I do think that that's true. If you develop a skill for understanding systems as they are, you’ll basically develop – Frequently, what you’re developing is the ability to recognize patterns, right? [00:36:32] CC: Exactly. [00:36:32] DC: You could recognize those patterns on anything. [00:36:37] MG: Yeah. That's a good segue for just something that came to my mind. Recently, I gave a talk on event-driven architectures. For someone who's not a software developer or architect, it can be really hard to grab all those concepts on asynchrony and eventual consistency and idempotency. There are so many words of like, “What is this all – It sounds weird, way too complex.” But I was reading a book some years ago by Gregor Hohpe. He’s the guy behind Enterprise Integration Patterns. That’s also a book that I have on my list here. He said, “Your barista doesn't use two-phase commit.” So he was basically making this analogy of he was in a coffee shop and he was just looking at the process of how the barista makes the coffee. You pay for it and all the things that can go wrong while your coffee is brewed and served to you. So he was making this relation between the real world and the life and human society to computer systems. There it clicked to me where I was like, “So many problems we solve every day, for example, agreeing on a time where we should meet for dinner or cooking, is a consensus problem, and we solve it.” We even solve it in the case of failure. I might not be able to call Duffie, because he is not available right now. So somehow, we figure out. I always thought that those problems just exist in computer science and distributed systems. But I realized actually that's just a subset of the real world as is. Looking at those problems through the lens of your daily life and you get up and all the stuff, there are so many things that are related to computer systems. [00:38:13] CC: Michael, I missed it. Was it an article you read? [00:38:16] MG: Yes. I need to put that in there as well. Yeah. It’s a plug. [00:38:19] CC: Please put that in there. Absolutely. So far from being any kind of expert in distributed systems, but I have noticed. I have caught myself using systems thinking for even complicated conversations. Even in my personal life, I started approaching things in the systems oriented and just the – just a high-level example. When I am working with systems, I can approach from the beginning, the end. It’s like a puzzle, putting the puzzle together, right? Sometimes, it starts from the middle. Sometimes, it starts from the edges. When I‘m having conversations that I need to be very strategic like I have one shot. Let’s say maybe I’m in a school meeting and I have to reach a consensus or have a solution or have a plan of action. I have to ask the right questions. My private self would do things linearly. Historically like, “Let’s go from the beginning and work out through the end.” Now, I don’t do that anymore. Not necessarily. Sometimes, I like, “Let me maybe ask the last question I would ask and see where it leads and just approach things from a different way.” I don’t know if this is making sense. [00:39:31] MG: It does. It does. [00:39:32] CC: But my thinking has changed. The way I see the possibilities is not a linear thing anymore. I see how you can truly switch things. I use this in programming a lot and also writing. Sometimes, when you’re a beginner writer, you start at the top and you go down to the conclusion. Sometimes, I start I the middle and go up, right? So you can start anywhere. It’s beautiful or it just gives you so many more options. Or maybe I’m just crazy. Don’t listen to me. [00:40:03] DC: I don’t think you’re crazy. I was going to say, one of the funny things about Michael’s point and your point both, it’s like in a way that they have kind of referred to Conway's law, the idea that people will build systems in the way that they communicate. So this is actually – It totally brings it back to that same point of thing, right? We by nature will build systems that we can understand, because that is the constraint in which we have to work, right? So it’s very interesting. [00:40:29] CC: Yeah. But it’s an interesting thing, because we are [inaudible 00:40:32] by the way we are forced to work. For example, I work with constraints and what I'm saying is that that has been influencing my way of thinking. So, yes, I built systems in the way I think but also because of the constraints that I’m dealing with that I have to be – the tradeoffs I need to make, that also turns around and influences the way I think, the way I see the world and the rest of the systems and all the rest of the world. Of course, as I change my thinking, possibly you can theorize that you go back and apply that. Apply things that you learn outside of your work back to your work. It’s a beautiful back-and-forth I think. [00:41:17] MG: I had the same experience with some – When I had to design kind of my first API and think of, “Okay. What would the consumer contract be and what would a consumer expect me to deliver in response and so on?” I was forcing myself and being explicit in communicating and not throwing everything at the client back to confusing but being very explicit and precise. Also on communication every day when you talk to people, being explicit and precise really helps to avoid a lot of problems and trouble. Be it partnership or amongst friends or at work. This is what I took from computer science actually back into my real world in order to taking all those perceptions, perceiving things from a different perspective, and being more precise and explicit in how I respond or communicated. [00:42:07] CC: My take on what you just said, Michael, is we design systems thinking how is this going to fail. We know this is going to fail. We’re going to design for that. We’re going to implement for that. In real life, for example, if I need to get an agreement from someone, I try to understand the person's thinking and just go, “I just had this huge thing this week. This is in my mind.” I’m not constantly thinking about this, I’m not crazy like that. Just a little bit crazy. It’s like, “How does this person think? What do they need to know? How far can I push?” Right? We need to make a decision quickly, so the approach is everything, and sometimes you only get one shot, so yeah. I mean, correct me if I’m wrong. That's how I heard or I interpreted what you just said. [00:42:52] MG: Yeah, absolutely. Spot on. Spot on. So I’m not crazy as well. [00:42:55] CC: Basically, I think we ended up turning this episode into a little bit of like, “Here are great references,” and also a huge endorsement for really going deep into distributed systems, because it’s going to be good for your jobs. It’s going to be good for your life. It’s going to be good for your health. We are crazy. [00:43:17] DC: I’m definitely crazy. You guys might be. I’m not. All right. So we started this episode with the idea of coming to learning distributed systems perhaps without a degree or without a formal education in it. We talked about a ride of different ideas on that subject. Like different approaches that each of us took, how each of us see the problem. Is there any important point that either of you want to throw back into the mix here or bring up in relation to that? [00:43:48] MG: Well, what I take from this episode, being my first episode and getting to know your background, Duffie and Carlisia, is that whoever is going to listen to this episode, whatever background you have, even though you might not be in computer systems or industry at all, I think we three all had approved that whatever background you have, if you’re just curious a little bit and maybe a little bit crazy, you can totally get down the rabbit hole in distributed systems and get totally excited about it. There’s no need for having formal education and the degree to enter this world. It might help but it’s kind of not a high bar that I was perceiving it to be 10 years ago, for example. [00:44:28] CC: Yeah. That’s a good point. My takeaway is it always puzzled me how some people are so good and experienced and such experts in distributed systems. I always look at myself. It’s like, “How am I lacking?” It’s like, “What memo did I miss? What class did I miss? What project did I not work on to get the experience?” What I’m seeing is you just need to put yourself in that place. You need to do the work. But the good news is achieving competency in distributed systems is doable. [00:45:02] DC: My takeaway is as we discussed before, I think that there is no one thing that comprises a distributed system. It is a number of things, right, and basically a number of behaviors or patterns that we see that comprise what a distributed system is. So when I hear people say, “I’m not an expert in distributed systems,” I think, “Well, perhaps you are and maybe you don’t know it already.” Maybe there's some particular set of patterns with which you are incredibly familiar. Like you understand DNS better than the other 20 people in the room. That exposes you to a set of patterns that certainly give you the capability of saying that you are an expert in that particular set of patterns. So I think that to both of your points, it’s like you can enter this stage where you want to learn about distributed systems from pretty much any direction. You can learn it from a CIS background. You can come it with no computer experience whatsoever, and it will obviously take a bit more work. But this is really just about developing and understanding around how these things communicate and the patterns with which they accomplish that communication. I think that’s the important part. [00:46:19] CC: All right, everybody. Thank you, Michael Gasch, for being with us now. I hope to – [00:46:25] MG: Thank you. [00:46:25] CC: To see you in more episodes [inaudible 00:46:27]. Thank you, Duffie. [00:46:30] DC: My pleasure. [00:46:31] CC: Again, I’m Carlisia Campos. With us was Duffie Cooley and Michael Gesh. This was episode 12, and I hope to see you next time. Bye. [00:46:41] DC: Bye. [00:46:41] MG: Goodbye. [END OF EPISODE] [00:46:43] ANNOUNCER: Thank you for listening to The Podlets Cloud Native Podcast. Find us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/ThePodlets and on the http://thepodlets.io/ website, where you'll find transcripts and show notes. We'll be back next week. Stay tuned by subscribing. [END]See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to the fourth episode of The Podlets podcast! Today we speak to the topic of observability: what the term means, how it relates to the process of software development, and the importance of investing in a culture of observability. Each of us has a slightly different take on what exactly observability is, but roughly we agree that it is a set of tools that you can use to observe the interactions and behavior of distributed systems. Kris gives some handy analogies to help understand the growing need for observability due to rising scale and complexity. We then look at the three pillars of observability, and what each of these pillars look like in the process of testing and running a program. We also think more about how observability applies to the external problems that might arise in a system. Next up, we cover how implementing observability in teams is a cultural process, and how it is important to have a culture that accepts the necessity of failure and extensive time spend problem-solving in coding. Finally, the conversation shifts to how having a higher culture of observability can do away with the old problem of calling the dinosaur in a team who knows the code backward every time an error crops up. Note: our show changed name to The Podlets. Follow us: https://twitter.com/thepodlets Website: https://thepodlets.io Feeback: info@thepodlets.io https://github.com/vmware-tanzu/thepodlets/issues Hosts: Carlisia Campos Kris Nóva Duffie Cooley Key Points from This Episode: • Duffy and Kris’s different interpretations of observability.• Why we should bake observability into applications before a catastrophic failure.• Observability is becoming more necessary due to scale and complexity.• New infrastructures require new security systems.• Observability is a term for new ways of observing code to catch failures as they happen.• The three pillars of observability: events, metrics, and traceability.• How events, metrics, and traceability play out in an example of a WordPress blog.• Why metrics and events are necessary for observing patterns in problems.• Measuring time series data and how it is managed in a similar way to git deltas.• Why the ephemerality of events in cloud-native architectures urges a new way of thinking.• Countering exterior application issues such as a hard drive getting bumped.• The role of tracing in correlating internal and external issues with a system.• Tracing is about understanding all the bits that are being touched in a problem.• Kubernetes can be broken down into three things: compute, network and storage.• How human experience is a major factor in good observability.• The fact that embracing observability and chaos engineering is a cultural practice.• Understanding observability and chaos testing through the laser metaphor.• The more valuable the application, the higher the need for observability.• The necessity for a cultural turn toward seeing the importance of observability.• Seeming bad at debugging vs convincing teams to implement observability.• The value of having empathy for how the difficulty of software engineering.• Developing more intuition by spending time debugging.• The way automated observability tools can possibly help with developing intuition.• How observability and having common tools removes or normalizes the problem of ‘the guy’ Quotes: “Building software is very hard and complex, so if you are not making mistakes, you either are not human or you are not making enough changes.” — @carlisia [0:33:37] “Observability is just a fancy word for all of the tools to help us solve a problem.” — @krisnova [0:23:09] “You’ll be a better engineer for distributed systems if you are in a culture that is blameless, that gives you tools to experiment, and gives you tools to validate those experiments and come up with new ones.” – @mauilion [0:36:08] Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode: Velero — https://www.velero.ioCloud Native Infrastructure — https://www.amazon.com/Cloud-Native-Infrastructure-Applications-Environment/dp/1491984309 Distributed Systems Observability — https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40182805-distributed-systems-observability Transcript: EPISODE 04 [INTRODUCTION] [0:00:08.7] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Podlets Podcast, a weekly show that explores Cloud Native one buzzword at a time. Each week, experts in the field will discuss and contrast distributed systems concepts, practices, tradeoffs and lessons learned to help you on your cloud native journey. This space moves fast and we shouldn’t reinvent the wheel. If you’re an engineer, operator or technically minded decision maker, this podcast is for you. [EPISODE] [0:00:40.5] CC: Hi everyone, welcome back to episode four. Today we’re going to talk about observability. I am Carlisia Campos. Today here on the show with me are Duffy Coolie. [0:00:52.7] DC: How are you doing folks? I’m Duffy Coolie, I’m staff field engineer here at VMware and looking forward to this topic. [0:00:58.9] CC: Also with us is Kris Nova. [0:01:03.2] CN: Hey everyone, I’m Kris Nova. I’m a developer advocate. I code a lot. I hang out in Kubernetes. [0:01:09.7] CC: I don’t want to be left out. I’m an engineer in the open source project called Valero that does backup and recovery for your Kubernetes applications. So, observability, why do we care? [0:01:25.6] KN: That’s the million-dollar question right there honestly. [0:01:28.0] DC: It sure is. [0:01:30.3] KN: I don’t know, I have a lot of thoughts on observability. I feel like it’s one of those words that it’s kind of like dev ops. It depends which day of the week you ask a specific person, what observability means that you’ll get a different answer. [0:01:43.3] DC: Yeah, I agree with that. It seems like it’s one of those very hot topics. I mean, it feels like people often conflate the idea of monitoring and logging of an application with the idea of observability and what that means. I’m looking forward to kind of digging into the details of that. [0:01:59.9] KN: What does observability mean to you Duffy? [0:02:04.0] DC: In my take, observability is a set of tools that can be applied to describe the way that data moves through a distributed system. Whether that data is a particular request or a particular transaction, in this way, you can actually understand the way all of these distributed parts of this system that we’re building are actually interacting. As you can imagine, things like monitoring and metrics are a part of it, right? Like being able to actually understand how the code is operating for this particular piece of the system, it’s definitely a key part of understanding how that system is operating but when we think of it as a big distributed system with terrible network demons in between and lots of other kind of stuff in between. I feel like we need kind of a higher level of context for what’s actually happening between all those things and that’s where I feel like the term observability fits. [0:02:55.5] KN: Year, I think I generally agree with that. I’ve got a few nuances that I like to pick out but I have high opinions but yeah, I mean, I hear a lot about it. I have my own ideas on what it means but like, why do we need it? [0:03:06.2] DC: I want to hear your idea to what it is, how would you define it? [0:03:08.8] KN: I mean, we have an hour to listen to me rant about observability. I mean, basically, okay, I’m an infrastructure engineer. I wrote this book Cloud Native Infrastructure, everything to me is some layer of software running on top of it, infrastructure, and observability to me is, it solves this problem of how do I gain visibility into something that I want to learn more about. I think my favorite analogy for observability, have you all ever been to like you know, like a gas station or a convenience store? On the front door, it’s like a height scale chart, it will say like four feet, five feet, six feet, seven feet. I always wondered what that was for and I remember I went home one day and I googled it and it turns out, that’s actually for, if the place ever gets robbed as the person runs out the front door, you get a free height measurement of how tall they are so you can help identify them later. To me, that’s like the perfect description of observability. It’s like cleverly sneaking and things into your system that can help you with a problem later downstream. [0:04:10.0] DC: I like that. [0:04:11.0] KN: Yeah. [0:04:12.5] CC: Observability is sort of a new term because it’s not necessarily something that I, as a developer would jump in and say, “Gee, my project doesn’t do observability. I need it.” I understand metrics and I understand logging, monitoring. Now I hear observability. Of course I read about it to talk about it on the show and I have been running into this word everywhere but why are people talking about observability? That’s my question. [0:04:45.8] KN: Yeah. Well, I think this kind of goes back to the gas station analogy again, right? What do you do when your metaphorical application gets robbed? What happens in the case of a catastrophic problem and how do you go about preparing yourself the best way possible to have an upper hand at solving that problem? [0:05:04.6] DC: Leah. [0:05:05.2] KN: Right? You know, some guy robbed a store and ran out the front door and we realized, “We have no idea how tall he is, he could be four feet tall or he could be six feet tall.” You know, we learn the hard way that maybe we should start putting markers on the door. I feel like observability is the same thing but I feel like people just kind of wake up and say like, “I need observability. I’m going to go and you know, I need all of these bells and whistles because my application of course is going to break,” and I feel like in a weird way that’s almost a cop out. We should be working on application before we work on preparing for catastrophic failure. [0:05:37.6] CC: Why didn’t I hear the word observability 10 years ago or even five years ago? I think it’s about two years ago. [0:05:45.9] DC: I’ll argue that the term observability is coming up more frequently and it’s certainly a hot topic today because of effectively context, still comes back down to context. When you’re in a situation where your application, you built like a cloud native architecture of your application, you got a bunch of different services that are intercommunicating or maybe all communicating to some put together shared resource. And things are misbehaving, you’re going to need to have the context to be able to understand how it’s breaking or at what point it’s breaking or where in the tangled web that we move is the problem actually occurring and can we measure that at that point? Traditionally like in a monolithic architecture, you're not really looking at that, maybe break over the monolith, you set up a couple of set points, you’re looking for the way particular clip pads work or if you’re on top of the game, you might like instrument your code in such a way that will emit events when particular transactions happen or particular things happen. You’re going to be looking at those events and logs and looking at metrics to figure out how this one application is performing or behaving. With observability, we have to solve that problem across many systems. [0:06:54.2] CC: That is why I put on the shownotes that it has to do something with the idea of cattle versus [inaud]. Because, I’m saying this because Duffy was asking me before we started recording why was that on the show notes. Because correct me if I’m wrong, I think you are going the direction of saying you don’t see, you don’t see the relation but the relation that I was thinking about was exactly what you just said. If I have a monolith, I’m looking at one thing, we’re both looking at one log. I can treat that as my little pad as supposed to when I have many micro services interacting. I can’t even treat anything, if I treated them as badly without that, right? Because I can’t. This is too much. The idea of the reason why observability is necessary sounds to me like that is a problem of scale and complexity. [0:07:46.2] KN: Yeah, I think that explains why we’re just now hearing it too, right? I’m trying to think of another metaphor here. I guess today’s going to be a metaphor day for me. Got it, okay. I just got back from London last week. I had gotten of the tube and I remember I came up to the surface and blinding light is in my eyes and all of a sudden it’s all sign for Scotland Yard and I was like “Wow, I remember this from all the detective sleuth stories of my childhood.” It dawned on me that the entire point of this part of London was there to help people recover from disasters. I thought about why we don’t have Scotland Yard type places anymore and it’s because we have security systems and we have like different things in place that we had to kind of learn the hard way we needed and we had to develop technology to help make that easier for us and I feel like we’re just kind of at that cusp of like our first wave of security cameras. Metaphorical security cameras with observability. We’re at that first wave of, we can instrument our code and we can start building our systems out with this idea of, “I want to be able to view it or observe it over time in the case of trying to learn more about it or debugging a problem.” [0:08:52.1] DC: Yeah. [0:08:52.9] CC: How do people handle – I’m asking this question because truly, I have yet to have this problem for my project that I need to do observability in my project. I need to make sure my project is observable. I mean, other than the bread and butter metrics and logging, that’s what we do at Valero. We don’t do anything further than that. But, I don’t know if those are the things are constitute observability but what Nova just said, my question is, when we want to look at this stuff later but we’re also talking about cattle and this things. Supposedly, your servers are ephemeral. They can go away and go back. How do we look at, how do we observe things if they have gone away? [0:09:41.1] KN: Year. That’s where we get into like, this exciting world of like, how long do we persist our data and which data do we track? And there’s, you know, a lot of schools of thought and a lot of different opinions around what the right solution here is but I think it kind of just boils down to every application and set of concerns is going to be unique and you’re just going to have to give it some thought. [0:10:01.9] CC: Should we talk more about that because that sounds very interesting. [0:10:04.4] KN: Yeah. I mean, I guess we should probably just start off with like, given a simple application, concretely, what does it mean to build out ‘observability’ for that application? [0:10:18.3] DC: There’s this idea of in a book called Distributed Systems Observability by Cindy Sridharan. I’m probably slaughtering her name but she wrote that there’s like these three pillars and the three pillars are events, metrics and traceability or tracing. Events, metrics and tracing. These are the three pillars of observability. If we were going to lay out the way that those things might apply to just any old application like a monolith then we might look at how – [0:10:45.3] KN: Can we just use like a WordPress blog, just like for an example. It’s got a data score, it’s got a thin layer of software and an API. [0:10:53.0] DC: Sure, like a WordPress app. The first thing we try to do is actually figure out what events we would like to get from the application and figure out how the instrument our application such that we’re getting useful data back as far as like the event stream. Frequently I think that – or in my experience, the things that you want to instrument in your application or it calls that your application is going to make that might represent a period of time, right? If it’s going to make a call to an external system, that’s something that you would definitely want to emit an event for if you’re trying to understand you know, where the problems are going sideways, like how long it took to actually make a query against the database in the back of a WordPress blog. It’s a great example, right? [0:11:33.5] KN: Question, you said the word instrumentation. My understanding of instrumentation is there’s kind of a bit of an art to it and you’re actually going in and you're adding like lines of code to your application that on line 13, we say ‘starting transaction’, on line 14, we make an https transaction and on the next line, we have, ‘the event is now over’ and we can sort of see that and discover that we made this https transaction and see where it broke, if it broke at all. Am I thinking about that right? [0:12:05.2] DC: I think you are but what’s interesting about that, the reporting on line 14, right? Where you're actually saying the event is over, right? I think that we end up actually measuring this in both in event stream and also in a metric, right? So that we can actually understand, of the last hundred transactions to the database, you know, are we seeing any increase in the amount of time and the process takes, like are we actually, you know, is this something that we can measure with metrics and understand, like, is this value changing over time? And then from the event perspective, that’s where we start tying in things like, contextually, in this transaction, what happened, right? In this particular event, is there some way that we can correlate the event with perhaps a trace and we’ll talk a little bit more about tracing too but like – so that we can understand, “okay, well, we have” – at 2:00 we see that there is like an incredible amount of latency being introduced when my WordPress blog tries to write to the database and it happens, every day at 2:00. I need to figure out what’s happening there. That’s a great – to even get to the point where I understand it’s happening at 2:00, I need things like metrics and need things like the events, specifically to give me that time correlation to understand, it’s at two. [0:13:18.7] KN: This is where we get into what Carlisia just asked about which was how do we solve this problem of what do we do when it goes away? In the case of our 2 PM database latency. For a lack of a better term, let’s just call it the heartbeat, the 2 PM heartbeat. What happens when the server that we’re experiencing, that latency, mysteriously goes away? Where does that data go and then you look at tools like I know Prometheus does this in elastic search, has capability to do this, but you look at how do we start managing time series data and how do we start tracking that and recording it. It’s a fascinating problem because you don’t actually record 2 PM. To this second and this degree of a second, this thing happened. You record how long it’s been since the previous event. You’re just constantly measuring deltas. It’s the same way that git works. Every time you do a get commit, you don’t’ actually write all 1,000 lines of software, you just write the one line that changed. [0:14:15.6] DC: Yeah. I think you highlight a really – I mean, both of the two of you highlighted a really good point around like this little cattle versus pets thing. This actually is something that I spent a little time with in a previous life and the challenge is that especially in systems like Kubernetes and other systems where you have – perhaps your application is running or being scaled out dynamically or scaled down dynamically based on load. You have all of these ephemeral events. You have all of this events that are from pods or from particular instances of your application that are ephemeral, they’re not going to be long lived. This highlights a kind of a new problem that we have to solve, I think, when we start thinking about cloud native architectures in that we have to be able to correlate that particular application with information that gives us the context to understand, like perhaps, this was this version of this application and these events are related to that particular version of the app. When we made a change, we saw a great reduction in the amount of time it takes to make that database call and we can correlate those new metrics based on the new version of the app and because we don’t have this like, as a long term entity that we can measure, like this isn’t like a single IP and a single piece of software that is not changing. This is any number of instances of our application deployed – like it makes you have to think about this problem fundamentally differently and how you store that data. This is where that cardinality problem that you’re highlighting comes in. [0:15:45.2] KN: Yeah. Okay, I have a question. Open question for the group. What is the scope here? I guess, to like kind of like build on our WordPress analogy. Let’s say that every day at 2 PM we notice there’s this latency and we’ve spent the last two weeks just endlessly digging through our logs and trying to come up with some sort of hypothesis of what’s going on here and we just can’t find anything. Everything we’ve talked about so far has been at the application layer of the stack. Instrumenting our application, debugging our application, making it https request. What should we do, or does observability even care if one of our hard drives is failing every day at 2 PM when the cleaning service comes by and accidentally bumps into it or something? How are we going to start learning about these deeper problems that might exist outside of our application layer which in my experience, those are the problems that really stick with you and really cause a lot of trouble. [0:16:40.0] DC: Yeah, agreed. Or somebody has like scheduled a backup of your database every day at two is what locks the database for a period of time of the backup and you're like “Wait, when did that happen? Why did that happen?” [0:16:51.4] KN: Somebody like commented out a line in the chron tab and then the server got reset and there’s like some magical bash grip somewhere on the server that goes and rewrites the chron tab. Who knows? [0:17:00.9] DC: Yeah, these are the needles in the haystack that we’ve all stumbled upon one way or another. [0:17:05.1] KN: Yeah, does observability, like, are we responsible for instrumenting like the operating system layer, the hardware layer? [0:17:14.0] CC: Isn’t that what monitoring is, like, some sort of testing from the outside, like an external testing that – of course, you only – it gives us the information after the fact, right? The server already died. My application’s already not available so now I know. [0:17:31.8] KN: Yeah. [0:17:32.4] CC: But isn’t monitoring what would address a problem like that? [0:17:36.1] DC: I think it definitely helps. I think what you're digging at Kris is correlation. Being able to actually identify at a particular period of time, what’s happening across our infrastructure, not just to our application. Being able to – and the important part is like how you even got to that time of day? Like, how do you know that this is happening, like, when you're looking for those patterns, how did you get to the point where you knew that it was happening at 2:00. If you know that it’s happening at 2:00 because of the event stream per se, right? That actually gives you a time correlation. Now you can look at, “Okay, well now I have a time and now I need to like, scoot back to like a macro level and see” – [0:18:10.7] KN: Crank it up at 2 PM. [0:18:12.9] DC: Yeah. Globally at 2:00, what’s going on in my world, right? Is there, you know – I know that these are the two entities that are responsible. I know that I have a bunch of pods that are running on this cluster, I know that I have a database that may be external to my cluster or maybe on the cluster. I need to really understand what’s happening in the world around those two entities as it correlates to that period of time to give me enough context to even troubleshoot. [0:18:39.7] CC: How do you do it though? Because I’m still going to go back to the monitoring, I mean, if I’m using external service to ping my service and my service is down, yeah, I’m going to get the timing – right, I can go back and look at the information, the log stream. Would I know that it was because of the server? No. But should I be pinging the server too? Should I ping every layer of the infrastructure? How do people do that? [0:19:05.4] KN: Yeah, that’s kind of what I was eluding to is like, where does observability at the application level stop and systems observability across the entire stack start and what tools do we have and where are the boundaries there? [0:19:20.3] DC: I think this is actually where we start talking about the third pillar that we were referring to earlier which was tracing and the ability to understand from the perspective of a particular transaction across the system. What entities that particular transaction will touch and where it spends its time across that entire transaction so my query – what I was trying to do was actually like, you know, submit a comment on a WordPress blog. If I had a way of implementing tracing through that WordPress blog, I might be able to leave myself little breadcrumbs throughout the entire set of systems and understand, “Well, at what point did I – I mean, where in this particular web transaction am I spending time?” I might see that you know, from the load balancer, I begin my trace ID and that load balancer terminates to this pod and inside of that pod, I can see where I’m spending my time. A little bit of time to kind of load the assets and stuff, a little bit of time for pushing my comments to the database and identifying what that database is, is the important part of that trace. If I understand – I need to know where that traffic is going to go next and how much time I spent in that transaction. You know, again, this is like down to that code layer. We should have some way of actually like leaving us – producing an event that may be related to a particular trace ID so that we can correlate the entire life cycle of that transaction. That unique trace ID across the entire process. [0:20:45.2] KN: Interesting. [0:20:45.7] DC: It helps us narrow the field to understand what all the bits are that are actually being touched that are part of the problem. Otherwise, we’re looking at the whole world and like obviously, that’s a much bigger haystack, right? [0:21:00.4] KN: One of the things that I’ve kind of learned about Kubernetes is as I’ve been like working with Kubernetes and explaining it to people and going down the road and talking and doing public speaking. I found that it’s very easy for users to understand Kubernetes if you break it down into three things. Compute, network and storage. What I’m kind of getting that here is like the application layer is probably going to be more relevant to the compute layer. Storage is going to be where – that’s observability. Storage is going to be more monitoring. That’s going to be what is my system doing, where am I storing my data, and then network is kind of related to tracing, what you’re looking at here, and these aren’t like necessarily one to one but it just kind of have – distribution of concerns here. Am I thinking about that? Kind of the same way you are Duffy? [0:21:42.8] DC: I think you are. I think what I’m trying to get to is like, I’m trying to identify the tools that I need to be able to understand what’s happening at 2:00 and all of the players involved in that, right? For that, I’m actually relying on tools that are pretty normal like the ability to actually monitor all the systems and understand and have like real time stamps and stuff that describes you know, that nodule server or what have you that says that you know, my backup for my SQL database started at 2:00 and ends at 2:30. I’m relying on things like an event stream to say you know, get to give me some context of time like when my problem is happening and I’m relying on things like tracing perhaps just should narrow the field so that I can actually understand what’s happening with this particular transaction and what are the systems that I should be looking at, whether that is – there’s a bunch of time being spent on the network, so what’s going on with the network at 2:00. There’s a bunch of times being spent on persisting data to a database, what’s going on with the database? You know, like, this kinda gives me I think enough context to actually get into troubleshooting mode, right? [0:22:50.2] KN: Yeah and I don’t want to take away from this lovely definition you just dropped on us but I want to take a stab at trying to summarize this. So observability, expands the whole stack. So I mean it is like if you look at the OSI reference model it is going to cover every one of those layers and all it really is just a fancy word for all of the tools to help us solve a problem. Yeah, sorry I am not trying to take away from your definition, right? I want to just simplify it so that like I can grapple it a little bit better. [0:23:22.2] CC: How about people? Does culture factor into it or it is just tools? [0:23:26.8] KN: I think culture is a huge part of it. Pesky humans. [0:23:28.0] DC: Yeah it is. [0:23:29.8] CC: Would this culture be tremendously different from what we get now usually at least with modern companies that doing modern software? [0:23:40.5] KN: I mean I definitely think like – [0:23:41.7] CC: Would it look different? [0:23:42.8] KN: Yeah, I definitely think there’s like – you can always tell. Like somebody once asked, “What is the difference between an SRE and a senior SRE?” And they were like, “patience,” And it is like you can always tell folks who have been burned because they take this stuff extremely seriously and I think that culture, like there is commodity there, like people are willing to pay for it if you can actually do a good job at going from chaotic problem, “I have no idea what is going on.” And making sense of that noise and coming up with a concrete tangible output that humans can take action on, I mean that is huge. [0:24:16.8] DC: Yeah it is. I was recently discussing the ability – in another medium. We were having a conversation around doing chaos testing and I think that this relates. And the interesting thing that came out of that for me was the idea that you know – I spent a pretty good portion of my career teaching people to troubleshoot, which is kind of weird. You know like teaching somebody to have an intuition about the way that a system works and giving them a place to even begin to troubleshoot a particularly complex problem, especially as we start building more and more complex systems, is really a weird thing to try and do. And I think that culturally, when you have embraced technologies like observability and embrace technologies like chaos engineering, I think that culturally you are actually not only enabling your developers, your operators, your SRE’s to experiment and understand how the system breaks at any point, but you are also enabling them to better understand how to troubleshoot and characterize these distributed systems that they are building. So I think that – and if that is a part, if that is a cultural norm within your company, I mean think about how many miles ahead you are of like the other people in your industry, right? You have made it through adopting these technologies. You have enabled your engineering teams, whether they’d be the people who are writing the code, whether they’d be the people who are operating the code, or the people who are just trying to keep the whole system up or provide you feedback to experiment and to develop hypothesis around how the system might break at a particular scale and to test that, right? And giving them the tools with which to actually observe this is critical, you know? Like it is amazing. [0:26:03.5] KN: Yeah, in my mind, again on my metaphor kick again, I think of the bank robber movies where they take dust and blow it into the air then all of a sudden you can see the lasers. Yeah, I’m feeling like that is what is happening here, is we’re kind of purpose – like chaos testing would just be the practice of intentionally breaking the lasers to make sure the security system works and observability is the practice of actually doing something to make those lasers visible so we can see what is going on. [0:26:31.0] CC: So because the two of you spend time with customers, or maybe Duffy more so than Nova, but definitely, I spent zero time. I spent zero. I am curious to know if someone, let’s say an SRE, wants to implement a set of practices that comprise what we are talking about and saying it is observability but they need to get a buy out from other people. How do you suggest they go about doing that? Because they might know how to do it or be willing to learn but they might need to get approval or they need to get a buy out – I am sorry, a buy in from their managers, from their colleagues, you know, there is a benefit and there is a cost. How will somebody present that? I mean we just talked about – I am sorry Nova, definitely just give us a laundry list of benefits but how do you articulate that in a way you prove those benefits are worth the cost and what are the costs? What are the tradeoffs? [0:27:36.4] KN: Yeah, I mean I think this is such a great question because in my career, I have worked the world’s most paranoid software as a service shop where I mean everything we did, we baked like emergency disaster recovery into it, every layer of everything we did, and I have also worked at shops that are like, “No, we ain’t got time for that, like hurry up and get your code moved and pushed to production,” and I mean I think there is pros and cons to each. But I think, you know, as you look at the value you have in your application, you are going to come up with some sort of way of concretely measuring that, of saying like, “This is an application that brings in 500 bucks a month,” or whatever, and depending on that cost or how much your application is worth to you is going to depend on I think how seriously you take it. For instance, a WordPress blog is going to probably not have the same level of observability with concerns than like maybe a bank routing system have. So I think as your application gets more and more valuable your need for observability and your need for these tools is going to go up more. [0:28:37.6] DC: I agree. I think from the perspective of like, how do you convince, maybe an existing engineering culture to make this jump, to introduce these ideas? I think that that is a tricky question because effectively what you are trying to do is kind of enable that cultural shift that we were talking about before, about like, what tools would set up the culture to succeed as they build out these applications and distributed systems that are going to make up or that are going to comprise the basis of what your product is, right? What tool? And getting to that, coming at that from a SRE perspective that needs air cover to be able to actually have those tough conversations with your developers and say, “Look, this is why we do it that way and this is something I can help you do but fundamentally, we need to instrument this code in a way that we can actually observe it and to understand how it is actually operating when we start before we can actually open the front door and let some of that crazy – and let the Internet in,” right? We need to be able to understand how and when the doors fall off and if we are not working with our developers who are more focused on understanding, does this function do what it says on the box? Rather than, is this function implemented in a way that might admit events or metrics, right? This is a completely different set of problems from the developer’s perspective. I have seen a couple of different implementations of how to implement this within an organization and one of them is Facebook’s idea of product engineering or I think it is called product engineering or production engineering, one of the two, and so this idea is that you might have somebody who’s similar in some ways to an SRE. Somebody who understands the infrastructure and understands how to build applications that will reside upon it and is actually embedded with your developer team to say, “You know, before we can legit sign off on this thing, here are the things that this application must have to be able to wire into to enable us to operate this app so that we can observe it and monitor it. Do all the things that we need to do.”And the great part about that is that it means that you are teaming with the developer team, you have some engineering piece that is teaming with the developer team and enabling them to understand why these tools are there and what they’re for and really – and promoting that engagement. [0:30:59.9] CC: And getting to that place is an interesting proposition isn’t it? Because, as a developer, even as a developer, I see the world moving more and more towards developer taking on the ship of the apps and knowing more, more layers of this stack, and if I am a developer and I want to implement, incorporate these practices then I need to convince some one, either a developer, or whoever is in charge of monitoring it and making sure the system is up and running right? [0:31:33.0] KN: Yeah. [0:31:34.3] CC: So one way to go about quantifying the need for that is to say, “Well over the last month we spent X amount of hours trying to find a bug in production,” and that X is a huge number. So you can bring that number and say, “This is how much the number costs in engineering hours,” but on the other hand, you don’t want to be the one to say that it takes you a 100 hours to find one little bug in production, do you? [0:32:06.2] KN: Yeah, I mean I feel like this is why agile teams are so successful because baked into how you do your work is sort of this implicit way of tracking your time and your progress. So at the end of the day, if you do spend a 100 hours of work trying to find a bug, it is sort of like, that is the team’s hours that is not your hours and you sort of get this data for free at the end of every sprint. [0:32:28.1] CC: Yeah. [0:32:28.5] DC: What you brought up is actually another cultural piece of that that I think is a problem. It has to be – I think that frequently we assume there are many – let me put this differently. I have seen companies where in the culture is somewhat damming for people who spend a lot of time trying to troubleshoot something that they wrote and that is a terrible pattern because it means that the people who are out there writing the code, who are just trying to get across the finish line with the thing that needs to be in production, right, have now this incredible pressure on them to not make a mistake and that is not okay. We are all here to make mistakes. That is what we do professionally, is make mistakes and the rest is just the gravy, you know what I mean? And so yeah, it makes me nuts that there are organizations that are like that. I feel like we really just in it and what is awesome about this is I see that narrative raising up within the ecosystem that I, you know, around cloud native architectures and other things like that, is that like, you know, you are hired to do a hard job and if we come down on you for thinking that that is a hard job then we are messing up. You are not messing up. [0:33:37.2] CC: Yeah absolutely. Building software is very hard and complex. So if you are not making mistakes, you either are not human or you are not making enough changes and in today’s world, we still have humans making software instead of robots. We are not there yet but it is a very risky proposition not to be making continuous changes because you will be left behind. [0:34:04.7] KN: Yeah, I feel like there is definitely something to be said about empathy for software engineers. It is very easy to be like, “Oh my gosh you spent a 100 hours looking at this one bug to save 20 dollars, how dare you?” but it is also a lot harder to be like, “Oh you poor thing, you had to dig through a 100 million lines of somebody else’s code in order to find this bug and it took you a 100 hours and you did all of that just to fix this one little bug, how awesome are you?” And I feel like that is where we get into the team dynamic of are we a blame-centric team? Do we try to assign blame to a certain person or do we look at this as a team’s responsibility, like this is our code and poor Carlisia over here had to go dig through this code that hasn’t been touched in 10 years,” or whatever. [0:34:54.6] CC: Another layer to that is that in my experience, I have never done anything in software or looked at any codes or brought up any system that as trivial as the end result was and especially in relation with the time spent, it has never happened that it wasn’t a huge amount of education that I got to reuse in future work. So does that make sense? [0:35:20.2] DC: Yeah and that is what I was referring to is around being able to build up the intuition around how these systems operate like if the longer, the more time you spend in the trenches working on those things, right? If you are enabled leveraging technologies like observability and chaos into the grain to troubleshoot, to come up with a hypothesis about how this would break when this happens, and test it and view the result and come up with a new hypothesis and continue down that path, you will automatically, I mean like, by your nature, build a better intuition yourself around how all of these system operate. It doesn’t matter whether it is the application you are working on or some other application, you are going to be able to build up their intuition for how to understand and characterize systems in general. You’ll be a better engineer for distributed systems if you are in a culture that is blameless that gives you tools to experiment and gives you tools to validate those experiments and come up with new ones, you know? [0:36:21.3] CC: I am going to challenge you and then I am going to agree with you so hang on, okay? So I am going to challenge you, so we are saying that observability, which actually boils down to using automated tools to do all of this work for us that we don’t have to dig in manually on a case by case basis, no that’s wrong? [0:36:43.4] DC: No, I am saying observability is a set of tools that you can use to observe the interactions and behavior of distributed systems. [0:36:53.4] CC: Okay but with automated tools right? [0:36:55.2] DC: The automation piece isn’t really I mean do you want to take this one Kris? [0:36:59.5] KN: Yeah, I mean I think like they certainly can be automated. I just don’t think that there is a hard bit of criteria that says every one needs to be automated. Like there ain’t nothing wrong with SSH-ing into a server and running a debug script or something if you are having a really bad day. [0:37:12.3] CC: Okay but let me go with my theory, just pretend it is because it will sound better. All right, so let us say, not to exclude the option to do it manually too if you want, but let’s say we have these wonderful tools that can automate a bunch of this work for us and we get to look at it from a high level. So what I am thinking is whereas before, if we didn’t have or use those tools or we are not using those tools, we have to do a lot of that work manually. We have to look at a lot more different places and I will challenge you that we develop even more intuition that way. So we are decreasing the level of intuition that we develop potentially by using the tools. Now, I am going to agree with you. It was just a rationale that I had to follow. I agree with you, it definitely helps to develop intuition but it is a better quality of intuition because now you can hold these different pieces in your hand because you are looking at it at this higher level. Because when you look at the details, you look at thing at this view – at least I am like that. It is like, “Okay, can I hold this one thing, it is big already in my head,” and then for me when I switch context and go look at something else, you know what I looked at over there, and it is hard to, really hard to keep track and really wasteful for – it is impossible to keep all of it in your mind, right? And let’s say you have to go through the whole debugging process all over again. If I don’t have notes, it will be like just the first time because I can’t possibly remember. I mean I have been in situations of having to debug different systems and okay, now third time around I am taking notes because the fourth time is just going to be so painful. So having tools that lets us look at things at a higher level I think has the additional benefit of helping us understand the system and hold it together in our heads because okay, we definitely don’t know the little details of how these are happening behind the scene. But how useful is that anyway? I’d much rather know how the whole system works together, points of failure like I can visualize, right? [0:39:30.1] DC: Yeah. [0:39:30.7] KN: I have a question for everyone. Following up on Carlisia’s how she challenged you and then agreed with you, I really want to ask this question because I think Carlisia’s answer is going to be different than Duffy’s and I think that is going to say a lot about the different ways that we are thinking about observability here and it is really fascinating if you think about it. So have either of you worked in a shop before where you had ‘the guy’? You know, that one person who just knew the code base inside and out, he had been around for forever, he was a dinosaur and whatever something went wrong you’re like, “We got to get this guy on the phone,” and he would come in and be like, “Oh it is this one line and this one thing that it would take you six months to figure out but let me just fix this really quick,” bam-bam-bam-bam and production is back online. [0:40:14.1] CC: Oh code base guy, the system admins guy, like something that is not my app but the system broke, you get that person who knew every like could take one second to figure out what the problem was. [0:40:28.9] KN: Have you seen that before though? Like that one person who just have so much tribal knowledge. [0:40:33.3] CC: Yeah, absolutely. [0:40:34.3] KN: Yeah, Duffy what about you? [0:40:36.0] DC: Absolutely. I have both been that guy and seen that guy. [0:40:38.8] CC: I have never been that person. [0:40:40.2] DC: In lots of shops. [0:40:42.4] KN: Well what I am kind of digging at here is I think observability, and I mean this in the nicest way possible to all of our folks at home who are actively playing the role of ‘the guy’, I think observability kind of makes that problem go away, right? [0:40:56.8] DC: I think it normalizes it to your point. I think that it basically gives you – I think you’re onto it. I think that I agree with you but I think that fundamentally what happens is through tooling like chaos engineering, through tooling like observability, you are normalizing what it looks like to teach anybody to be like that person, right? But that is the key takeaway is like, to Carlisia’s point she might – actually, you know Kris and I, I promise that we will approach some complex distributed systems problem fundamentally differently, right? If somebody has a broken Kubernetes cluster, Kris and I are both going to approach that same problem and we will likely both be able to solve that problem but we are going to approach it in different ways and I think that the benefit of having common tooling with which to experiment and understand and observe the behavior of these distributed systems means that, you know, we can normalize what it looks like to be a developer and have a theory about how the system is breaking or would break, and having some way of actually validating that through the use of observability and perhaps chaos engineering depending, and that means that we are turning keys over, turning the keys to the castle over. There is no more bust test. You don’t have to worry about what happens to me at the end of the day. We all have this common receptacle. [0:42:16.7] CC: You could go on vacation. [0:42:18.1] DC: Yeah. [0:42:19.0] CC: No but this is the most excellent point, I am glad you brought it up Nova because what both of you said is absolutely true. I mean, give me a better documentation and I don’t need you anymore because I can be self-sufficient. [0:42:33.2] DC: Exactly. [0:42:34.9] KN: Yeah so when we’re – [0:42:35.5] CC: If you told me to observe where things went wrong and again I go back to that what I said, more and more developers are having to take being asked, I mean some developers are proactively taking on the shift and in other cases they’d been asked to take more ownership of the whole stack and then say from the application level down the stack and, but you gave me tools to observe where things went wrong beyond my code as a developer, I am not going to call the guy. [0:43:07.3] KN: Yeah. [0:43:08.4] CC: So the level of self-sufficient – [0:43:10.3] KN: The guy doesn’t want you to call him. [0:43:12.5] CC: So it provides – and then the decision – benefit, we could say, is provide the engineer an additional level of self-sufficiency. [0:43:22.0] KN: Yeah, I mean teach someone to fish, give someone a fish. [0:43:25.1] CC: Yeah. [0:43:25.6] KN: Yeah. [0:43:26.4] DC: Exactly. All right, well that was a great conversation on observability and we talked about a bunch of different topics. This is Duffy and I had a great time in this session and thanks. [0:43:38.1] CC: Yeah, we are super glad to be here today. Thanks for listening. Come back next week. [0:43:43.4] KN: Thanks for joining everyone and I apologize again to all of our ‘guys’ at home listening. Hopefully we can help you with observability along the way to get everybody’s job a little bit easier. [0:43:53.8] CC: And I want to say you know for the girls, we know that you are all there too. That is just a joke. [0:43:59.9] KN: Oh yeah, I was totally at it for a while. Good show everyone. [0:44:05.3] DC: All right, cheers. [0:44:06.8] KN: Cheers. [END OF INTERVIEW] [0:44:08.7] ANNOUNCER: Thank you for listening to The Podlets Cloud Native Podcast. Find us on Twitter https://twitter.com/ThePodlets and on the https://thepodlets.io, where you will find transcripts and show notes. We’ll be back next week. Stay tuned by subscribing. [END]See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week Nycci is joined by Crystal Bowyer, the president and CEO of the new National Children's Museum in D.C, and Dr. Ashley Rose Young who is Historian of the American Food History Project at The Smithsonian. Ashley catches up with Nycci about all the exciting upcoming Smithsonian Food History Weekend festivities. And, what happened to the National Children's Museum in DC? It disappeared for a bit but it's coming back this holiday season. As the president of the new rendition of the museum, Crystal tells us all about all the "dreamy" exhibits and STEM learning experiences available to children of all ages (adults included). Powered and distributed by Simplecast

NO COPYRIGHT INTENDED OR EXPRESSED WITH ANY IMAGES OR MUSIC.   Show Notes What’s the latest in gaming & entertainment? My Take Radio has you covered on both fronts this week we march towards our 400th episode. Gaming/Tech 00:05:04– Audio New heroes and villains join Injustice 2. Nintendo gives details on The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild season pass. Pokemon Go gets additional Pokemon this week. Xbox Project Scorpio details on deck for Microsoft’s E3 showing. Rich shares his thoughts on the PewDiePie controversy.   Entertainment 00:35:10– Audio Lego Batman takes the box office this past weekend. Five Minute Movie Review: John Wick: Chapter 2 Lucifer gets a third season. Cloak & Dagger casting updates. The Raid “remake” gets a leading man. Mel Gibson and DC? It could happen. Deadpool 2 casting updates.   Tech Minute No tech minute this episode.   Announcements RAGE Works is always looking for new writers for all our coverage.  We have openings in all categories and have a minimum requirement of four articles a month and some good writing skills. WordPress and Windows Live Writer experience are a plus. Writers get access to comics, hardware, and software when available. Guest Links No guest this week Sponsor Links Use WWESAVE10 to save $10 on orders over $70     Listener Info Support My Take Radio on Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/MyTakeRadio Please take a moment and rate the show and/or app on iTunes. Guest inquiries can be forwarded to MTRHost@MyTakeRadio.com Show your support by picking up an MTR T-Shirt or by shopping from our Amazon store.   Subscribe to MTR on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/my-take-radio/id188188487?mt=2 Subscribe on Stitcher: http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/my-take-radio Subscribe on Tune-In Radio: http://tunein.com/radio/My-Take-Radio-p428621/ Subscribe to the My Take Radio RSS feed (Use for dedicated MTR shows)   Keep up with RAGE Works & My Take Radio Become a fan on Facebook: http://facebook.com/officialrageworks Join the RAGE Works Facebook Group: http://facebook.com/groups/rageworks Follow RAGE Works on Twitter: https://twitter.com/rage_works Follow My Take Radio on https://twitter.com/mytakeradio Follow RAGEWorks on Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/rageworks Follow RAGE Works on Snapchat: http://www.snapchat.com/add/rageworks Subscribe to RAGE Works on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/OfficialRAGEWorks Add My Take Radio to your circle on Google Plus: https://plus.google.com/110364030660279078854 Follow our boards on Pinterest:  http://pinterest.com/mytakeradio/       Check Out Some of Our Other Shows Black is the New Black: http://rageworks.net/podcasts/bitnb/ Call Me When It’s Over: http://rageworks.net/podcasts/cmwio/ The Regular Season Sportscast: http://rageworks.net/podcasts/trss/ The Variant Issue: http://rageworks.net/podcasts/tvi/  

WASHINGTON, DC – It didn't take Congressman Kevin Brady (TX-8) long to get up and running as Chairman of the Ways & Means Committee. A little more than six months after taking the reins of the powerful committee, the veteran legislator unveiled a blueprint that would make the most sweeping reform of the U.S. tax system in 30 years. Released as part of Speaker Paul Ryan's ambitious agenda to provide the American people with “A Better Way” this election year, Brady's reform blueprint would cut rates, simplify the tax system, and break up the Internal Revenue Service. The Texas Republican talked about the plan in remarks before a breakfast meeting of The Ripon Society, where he not only explained why reform is needed, but why a tax code that's “built for growth” is long overdue.

Downton Abbey, 5:1Season 5 is here! And the first episode did not disappoint! Here is a breakdown of the podcast episode we go over for episode 1.Secret MamaEdith visits her baby, MarigoldTim Drewe was asked to be chief fireman. Tim’s wife doesn’t know Marigold is Edith’s.Hughes found one of Gregson’s old booksEdith agrees to meet Mr. Drewe. He wants to propose something because his wife is getting suspicious of Edith having a crush on him. Margarie, Drewe’s wife - thinks Edith has a crush on Drewe. Drewe: We need a way for you to live the truth without telling the truth. Stop the World1924The king has to deal with a labor government - Mr. McDonald - the servants are glad he’s worked before - the prime minister is the son of a crofter.Robert: Government is committed to the destruction of people like us and everything we stand for. Mary: We should wait and see what happens.34th wedding anniversary  - tidbit - Robert’s working hard to keep his marriage together.Mr. Carson is asked to be chairman of the board by the village and want Robert to give them land for the site of the memorialCarson to Hughes: The nature of life is not permanence but fluxRobert tells Mary, they don’t want him for the school or the memorial. Would they have asked his grandfather’s butler to head something…?Robert okays Carson being the chair.Robert tells the girls to invite some young girls over.Slow LearnerDaisy’s upset because they didn’t replace Ivy.Daisy ordered books to learn math so she can run the farm. Has a hard time following.Match Making - or Breaking?Lord Diffy Murton asked DC to give another luncheon party so he can see Isobel.DC asks Dr. Clarkson about Murton. Tells him Murton and Isobel are friendly. She invites him to luncheon. Wants to matchmake him with Lady Shackleton. Cora tells Robert that DC would be jealous.Isobel is jealous of Lady Shackelton with Murton.MismatchedJimmy has a letter from Lady Anstrather… He sent her Valentines. Thomas: It’s pathetic for a lady to be pining over a footman. Jimmy: Excuse me. I think it’s in very good taste.Lady Anstrather invited herself over for tea. She is staying over because of car problems, but Tom couldn’t find anything wrong with it.Another ScandalTony Gillingham - coming to visit. Robert: That’s okay. I want to see him. In private to Cora: I want to inspire him with thoughts of marriage.Mary tells Anna she hasn’t made up her mind yet. We do these things so weirdly. You have to decide without having spent in real time with them much less the other thing.Mary: Do you dread the future?Gillingham: Only if I have to live it without you.Mary: I do love you in my cold and unfeeling way. I don’t want to get it wrong. I intend to be as happy with my next husband as I was with my first.Gillingham tells Mary he wants them to be lovers.Another prisonerThomas asks Baxter what she knows about Anna and Bates. Bullies her. Molesly is putting on fake hair paint.Baxter tells Molesly about a journey Bates took and something he did that he wouldn’t want known. He would deny the journey. Mosely tells her to report him. Baxter: I can’t. Molesly is tilting his head trying to get her to see his hair. How old do you think I am? Baxter: 52. Molesly: I’m 51.Baxter says to Molesly it’s ironic for Mr. Bates to dress Gillingham because she knows about the scandal. Thomas overhears.Thomas tells Baxter he’ll tell Lady Grantham her story if she doesn’t tell him the connection between Bates and Gillingham’s dead valet.Molesly tells Baxter to tell Cora her story. It will be worse if Mr. Barrow tells her first. (Would be the most nerdy (and uncomfortable) hookup on TV.)Baxter was a friend of his sister’s growing up. She stole from a previous employer. Went to prison for three years.Thomas goes to tell Cora about Baxter and it backfires. She asks why he let a convicted felon in her house, in her bedroom when he knew every detail of her past. If you’ve been using your knowledge against her, I’ll have to consider your future here, Mr. Barrow, whether indeed you have one at all.Baxter is a Bates - won’t give Cora all the details to exonerate herself.Carson to Molesly: I don’t know why you have treated your hair, but the effects are not what you wanted. Take steps, Mr. Molesly. Take steps. You will remain downstairs until you do.DC LinesDC: There’s nothing simpler than avoiding people you don’t like. Avoiding one’s friends - that’s the real test.DC: He just wants what all men want. Isobel: Don’t be ridiculous. DC: I was referring to companionship. As I hope you were.DC: You should write a book: Daughters in Law and How to Survive Them.DC: It’s time he decided whether he’s fish, flesh, fowl, or good red herring.Edith: Aren’t you being quite snobbish?DC: We’re being realistic. Something your generation has such trouble with.DC: Principles are like prayers: noble, of course - but awkward at a party.