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About ShinjiShinji Kim is the Founder & CEO of Select Star, an automated data discovery platform that helps you to understand & manage your data. Previously, she was the Founder & CEO of Concord Systems, a NYC-based data infrastructure startup acquired by Akamai Technologies in 2016. She led the strategy and execution of Akamai IoT Edge Connect, an IoT data platform for real-time communication and data processing of connected devices. Shinji studied Software Engineering at University of Waterloo and General Management at Stanford GSB.Links Referenced: Select Star: https://www.selectstar.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/selectstarhq/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/selectstarhq TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at AWS AppConfig. Engineers love to solve, and occasionally create, problems. But not when it's an on-call fire-drill at 4 in the morning. Software problems should drive innovation and collaboration, NOT stress, and sleeplessness, and threats of violence. That's why so many developers are realizing the value of AWS AppConfig Feature Flags. Feature Flags let developers push code to production, but hide that that feature from customers so that the developers can release their feature when it's ready. This practice allows for safe, fast, and convenient software development. You can seamlessly incorporate AppConfig Feature Flags into your AWS or cloud environment and ship your Features with excitement, not trepidation and fear. To get started, go to snark.cloud/appconfig. That's snark.cloud/appconfig.Corey: I come bearing ill tidings. Developers are responsible for more than ever these days. Not just the code that they write, but also the containers and the cloud infrastructure that their apps run on. Because serverless means it's still somebody's problem. And a big part of that responsibility is app security from code to cloud. And that's where our friend Snyk comes in. Snyk is a frictionless security platform that meets developers where they are - Finding and fixing vulnerabilities right from the CLI, IDEs, Repos, and Pipelines. Snyk integrates seamlessly with AWS offerings like code pipeline, EKS, ECR, and more! As well as things you're actually likely to be using. Deploy on AWS, secure with Snyk. Learn more at Snyk.co/scream That's S-N-Y-K.co/screamCorey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. Every once in a while, I encounter a company that resonates with something that I've been doing on some level. In this particular case, that is what's happened here, but the story is slightly different. My guest today is Shinji Kim, who's the CEO and founder at Select Star.And the joke that I was making a few months ago was that Select Stars should have been the name of the Oracle ACE program instead. Shinji, thank you for joining me and suffering my ridiculous, basically amateurish and sophomore database-level jokes because I am bad at databases. Thanks for taking the time to chat with me.Shinji: Thanks for having me here, Corey. Good to meet you.Corey: So, Select Star despite being the only query pattern that I've ever effectively been able to execute from memory, what you do as a company is described as an automated data discovery platform. So, I'm going to start at the beginning with that baseline definition. I think most folks can wrap their heads around what the idea of automated means, but the rest of the words feel like it might mean different things to different people. What is data discovery from your point of view?Shinji: Sure. The way that we define data discovery is finding and understanding data. In other words, think about how discoverable your data is in your company today. How easy is it for you to find datasets, fields, KPIs of your organization data? And when you are looking at a table, column, dashboard, report, how easy is it for you to understand that data underneath? Encompassing on that is how we define data discovery.Corey: When you talk about data lurking around the company in various places, that can mean a lot of different things to different folks. For the more structured data folks—which I tend to think of as the organized folks who are nothing like me—that tends to mean things that live inside of, for example, traditional relational databases or things that closely resemble that. I come from a grumpy old sysadmin perspective, so I'm thinking, oh, yeah, we have a Jira server in the closet and that thing's logging to its own disk, so that's going to be some information somewhere. Confluence is another source of data in an organization; it's usually where insight and a knowledge of what's going on goes to die. It's one of those write once, read never type of things.And when I start thinking about what data means, it feels like even that is something of a squishy term. From the perspective of where Select Start starts and stops, is it bounded to data that lives within relational databases? Does it go beyond that? Where does it start? Where does it stop?Shinji: So, we started the company with an intention of increasing the discoverability of data and hence providing automated data discovery capability to organizations. And the part where we see this as the most effective is where the data is currently being consumed today. So, this is, like, where the data consumption happens. So, this can be a data warehouse or data lake, but this is where your data analysts, data scientists are querying data, they are building dashboards, reports on top of, and this is where your main data mart lives.So, for us, that is primarily a cloud data warehouse today, usually has a relational data structure. On top of that, we also do a lot of deep integrations with BI tools. So, that includes tools like Tableau, Power BI, Looker, Mode. Wherever these queries from the business stakeholders, BI engineers, data analysts, data scientists run, this is a point of reference where we use to auto-generate documentation, data models, lineage, and usage information, to give it back to the data team and everyone else so that they can learn more about the dataset they're about to use.Corey: So, given that I am seeing an increased number of companies out there talking about data discovery, what is it the Select Star does that differentiates you folks from other folks using similar verbiage in how they describe what they do?Shinji: Yeah, great question. There are many players that popping up, and also, traditional data catalog's definitely starting to offer more features in this area. The main differentiator that we have in the market today, we call it fast time-to-value. Any customer that is starting with Select Star, they get to set up their instance within 24 hours, and they'll be able to get all the analytics and data models, including column-level lineage, popularity, ER diagrams, and how other people are—top users and how other people are utilizing that data, like, literally in few hours, max to, like, 24 hours. And I would say that is the main differentiator.And most of the customers I have pointed out that setup and getting started has been super easy, which is primarily backed by a lot of automation that we've created underneath the platform. On top of that, just making it super easy and simple to use. It becomes very clear to the users that it's not just for the technical data engineers and DBAs to use; this is also designed for business stakeholders, product managers, and ops folks to start using as they are learning more about how to use data.Corey: Mapping this a little bit toward the use cases that I'm the most familiar with, this big source of data that I tend to stumble over is customer AWS bills. And that's not exactly a big data problem, given that it can fit in memory if you have a sufficiently exciting computer, but using Tableau don't wind up slicing and dicing that because at some point, Excel falls down. From my perspective, problem with Excel is that it doesn't tend to work on huge datasets very well, and from the position of Salesforce, the problem with Excel is that it doesn't cost a giant pile of money every month. So, those two things combined, Tableau is the answer for what we do. But that's sort of the end-all for us of, that's where it stops.At that point, we have dashboards that we build and queries that we run that spit out the thing we're looking at, and then that goes back to inform our analysis. We don't inherently feed that back into anything else that would then inform the rest of what we do. Now, for our use case, that probably makes an awful lot of sense because we're here to help our customers with their billing challenges, not take advantage of their data to wind up informing some giant model and mispurposing that data for other things. But if we were generating that data ourselves as a part of our operation, I can absolutely see the value of tying that back into something else. You wind up almost forming a reinforcing cycle that improves the quality of data over time and lets you understand what's going on there. What are some of the outcomes that you find that customers get to by going down this particular path?Shinji: Yeah, so just to double-click on what you just talked about, the way that we see this is how we analyze the metadata and the activity logs—system logs, user logs—of how that data has been used. So, part of our auto-generated documentation for each table, each column, each dashboard, you're going to be able to see the full data lineage: where it came from, how it was transformed in the past, and where it's going to. You will also see what we call popularity score: how many unique users are utilizing this data inside the organization today, how often. And utilizing these two core models and analysis that we create, you can start looking at first mapping out the data flow, and then determining whether or not this dataset is something that you would want to continue keeping or running the data pipelines for. Because once you start mapping these usage models of tables versus dashboards, you may find that there are recurring jobs that creates all these materialized views and tables that are feeding dashboards that are not being looked at anymore.So, with this mechanism by looking initially data lineage as a concept, a lot of companies use data lineage in order to find dependencies: what is going to break if I make this change in the column or table, as well as just debugging any of issues that is currently happening in their pipeline. So, especially when you will have to debug a SQL query or pipeline that you didn't build yourself but you need to find out how to fix it, this is a really easy way to instantly find out, like, where the data is coming from. But on top of that, if you start adding this usage information, you can trace through where the main compute is happening, which largest route table is still being queried, instead of the more summarized tables that should be used, versus which are the tables and datasets that is continuing to get created, feeding the dashboards and is those dashboards actually being used on the business side. So, with that, we have customers that have saved thousands of dollars every month just by being able to deprecate dashboards and pipelines that they were afraid of deprecating in the past because they weren't sure if anyone's actually using this or not. But adopting Select Star was a great way to kind of do a full spring clean of their data warehouse as well as their BI tool. And this is an additional benefit to just having to declutter so many old, duplicated, and outdated dashboards and datasets in their data warehouse.Corey: That is, I guess, a recurring problem that I see in many different pockets of the industry as a whole. You see it in the user visibility space, you see it in the cost control space—I even made a joke about Confluence that alludes to it—this idea that you build a whole bunch of dashboards and use it to inform all kinds of charts and other systems, but then people are busy. It feels like there's no ‘and then.' Like, one of the most depressing things in the universe that you can see after having spent a fair bit of effort to build up those dashboards is the analytics for who internally has looked at any of those dashboards since the demo you gave showing it off to everyone else. It feels like in many cases, we put all these projects and amount of effort into building these things out that then don't get used.People don't want to be informed by data they want to shoot from their gut. Now, sometimes that's helpful when we're talking about observability tools that you use to trace down outages, and, “Well, our site's really stable. We don't have to look at that.” Very awesome, great, awesome use case. The business insight level of dashboard just feels like that's something you should really be checking a lot more than you are. How do you see that?Shinji: Yeah, for sure. I mean, this is why we also update these usage metrics and lineage every 24 hours for all of our customers automatically, so it's just up-to-date. And the part that more customers are asking for where we are heading to—earlier, I mentioned that our main focus has been on analyzing data consumption and understanding the consumption behavior to drive better usage of your data, or making data usage much easier. The part that we are starting to now see is more customers wanting to extend those feature capabilities to their staff of where the data is being generated. So, connecting the similar amount of analysis and metadata collection for production databases, Kafka Queues, and where the data is first being generated is one of our longer-term goals. And then, then you'll really have more of that, up to the source level, of whether the data should be even collected or whether it should even enter the data warehouse phase or not.Corey: One of the challenges I see across the board in the data space is that so many products tend to have a very specific point of the customer lifecycle, where bringing them in makes sense. Too early and it's, “Data? What do you mean data? All I have are these logs, and their purpose is basically to inflate my AWS bill because I'm bad at removing them.” And on the other side, it's, “Great. We pioneered some of these things and have built our own internal enormous system that does exactly what we need to do.” It's like, “Yes, Google, you're very smart. Good job.” And most people are somewhere between those two extremes. Where are customers on that lifecycle or timeline when using Select Star makes sense for them?Shinji: Yeah, I think that's a great question. Also the time, the best place where customers would use Select Star for is that after they have their cloud data warehouse set up. Either they have finished their migration, they're starting to utilize it with their BI tools, and they're starting to notice that it's not just, like, you know, ten to fifty tables that they're starting with; most of them have more than hundreds of tables. And they're feeling that this is starting to go out of control because we have all these data, but we are not a hundred percent sure what exactly is in our database. And this usually just happens more in larger companies, companies at thousand-plus employees, and they usually find a lot of value out of Select Star right away because, like, we will start pointing out many different things.But we also see a lot of, like, forward-thinking, fast-growing startups that are at the size of a few hundred employees, you know, they now have between five to ten-person data team, and they are really creating the right single source of truth of their data knowledge through a Select Star. So, I think you can start anywhere from when your data team size is, like, beyond five and you're continuing to grow because every time you're trying to onboard a data analyst, data scientist, you will have to go through, like, basically the same type of training of your data model, and it might actually look different because the data models and the new features, new apps that you're integrating this changes so quickly. So, I would say it's important to have that base early on and then continue to grow. But we do also see a lot of companies coming to us after having thousands of datasets or tens of thousands of datasets that it's really, like, very hard to operate and onboard anyone. And this is a place where we really shine to help their needs, as well.Corey: Sort of the, “I need a database,” to the, “Help, I have too many databases,” pipeline, where [laugh] at some point people start to—wanting to bring organization to the chaos. One thing I like about your model is that you don't seem to be making the play that every other vendor in the data space tends to, which is, “Oh, we want you to move your data onto our systems. The end.” You operate on data that is in place, which makes an awful lot of sense for the kinds of things that we're talking about. Customers are flat out not going to move their data warehouse over to your environment, just because the data gravity is ludicrous. Just the sheer amount of money it would take to egress that data from a cloud provider, for example, is monstrous.Shinji: Exactly. [laugh]. And security concerns. We don't want to be liable for any of the data—and this is, like, a very specific decision we've made very early on the company—to not access data, to not egress any of the real data, and to provide as much value as possible just utilizing the metadata and logs. And depending on the types of data warehouses, it also can be really efficient because the query history or the metadata systems tables are indexed separately. Usually, it's much lighter load on the compute side. And that definitely has, like, worked well for our advantage, especially being a SaaS tool.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Sysdig. Sysdig secures your cloud from source to run. They believe, as do I, that DevOps and security are inextricably linked. If you wanna learn more about how they view this, check out their blog, it's definitely worth the read. To learn more about how they are absolutely getting it right from where I sit, visit Sysdig.com and tell them that I sent you. That's S Y S D I G.com. And my thanks to them for their continued support of this ridiculous nonsense.Corey: What I like is just how straightforward the integrations are. It's clear you're extraordinarily agnostic as far as where the data itself lives. You integrate with Google's BigQuery, with Amazon Redshift, with Snowflake, and then on the other side of the world with Looker, and Tableau, and other things as well. And one of the example use cases you give is find the upstream table in BigQuery that a Looker dashboard depends on. That's one of those areas where I see something like that, and, oh, I can absolutely see the value of that.I have two or three DynamoDB tables that drive my newsletter publication system that I built—because I have deep-seated emotional problems and I take it out and everyone else via code—but as a small, contained system that I can still fit in my head. Mostly. And I still forget which table is which in some cases. Down the road, especially at scale, “Okay, where is the actual data source that's informing this because it doesn't necessarily match what I'm expecting,” is one of those incredibly valuable bits of insight. It seems like that is something that often gets lost; the provenance of data doesn't seem to work.And ideally, you know, you're staffing a company with reasonably intelligent people who are going to look at the results of something and say, “That does not align with my expectations. I'm going to dig.” As opposed to the, “Oh, yeah, that seems plausible. I'll just go with whatever the computer says.” There's an ocean of nuance between those two, but it's nice to be able to establish the validity of the path that you've gone down in order to set some of these things up.Shinji: Yeah, and this is also super helpful if you're tasked to debug a dashboard or pipeline that you did not build yourself. Maybe the person has left the company, or maybe they're out-of-office, but this dashboard has been broken and you're quote-unquote, “On call,” for data. What are you going to do? You're going to—without a tool that can show you a full lineage, you will have to start digging through somebody else's SQL code and try to map out, like, where the data is coming from, if this is calculating correctly. Usually takes, you know, few hours to just get to the bottom of the issue. And this is one of the main use cases that our customers bring up every single time, as more of, like, this is now the go-to place every time there is any data questions or data issues.Corey: The first and golden rule of cloud economics is step one, turn that shit off.Shinji: [laugh].Corey: When people are using something, you can optimize the hell out of it however you want, but nothing's going to beat turning it off. One challenge is when we're looking at various accounts and we see a Redshift cluster, and it's, “Okay. That thing's costing a few million bucks a year and no one seems to know anything about it.” They keep pointing to other teams, and it turns into this giant, like, finger-pointing exercise where no one seems to have responsibility for it. And very often, our clients will choose not to turn that thing off because on the one hand, if you don't turn it off, you're going to spend a few million bucks a year that you otherwise would not have had to.On the other, if you delete the data warehouse, and it turns out, oh, yeah, that was actually kind of important, now we don't have a company anymore. It's a question of which is the side you want to be wrong on. And in some levels, leaving something as it is and doing something else is always a more defensible answer, just because the first time your cost-saving exercises take out production, you're generally not allowed to save money anymore. This feels like it helps get to that source of truth a heck of a lot more effectively than tracing individual calls and turning into basically data center archaeologists.Shinji: [laugh]. Yeah, for sure. I mean, this is why from the get go, we try to give you all your tables, all of your database, just ordered by popularity. So, you can also see overall, like, from all the tables, whether that's thousands or tens of thousands, you're seeing the most used, has the most number of dependencies on the top, and you can also filter it by all the database tables that hasn't been touched in the last 90 days. And just having this, like, high-level view gives a lot of ideas to the data platform team about how they can optimize usage of their data warehouse.Corey: From where I tend to sit, an awful lot of customers are still relatively early in their data journey. An awful lot of the marketing that I receive from various AWS mailing lists that I found myself on because I've had the temerity to open accounts has been along the lines of oh, data discovery is super important, but first, they presuppose that I've already bought into this idea that oh, every company must be a completely data-driven company. The end. Full stop.And yeah, we're a small bespoke services consultancy. I don't necessarily know that that's the right answer here. But then it takes it one step further and starts to define the idea of data discovery as, ah, you will use it to find a PII or otherwise sensitive or restricted data inside of your datasets so you know exactly where it lives. And sure, okay, that's valuable, but it also feels like a very narrow definition compared to how you view these things.Shinji: Yeah. Basically, the way that we see data discovery is it's starting to become more of an essential capability in order for you to monitor and understand how your data is actually being used internally. It basically gives you the insights around sure, like, what are the duplicated datasets, what are the datasets that have that descriptions or not, what are something that may contain sensitive data, so on and so forth, but that's still around the characteristics of the physical datasets. Whereas I think the part that's really important around data discovery that is not being talked about as much is how the data can actually be used better. So, have it as more of a forward-thinking mechanism and in order for you to actually encourage more people to utilize data or use the data correctly, instead of trying to contain this within just one team is really where I feel like data discovery can help.And in regards to this, the other big part around data discovery is really opening up and having that transparency just within the data team. So, just within the data team, they always feel like they do have that access to the SQL queries and you can just go to GitHub and just look at the database itself, but it's so easy to get lost in the sea of metadata that is just laid out as just the list; there isn't much context around the data itself. And that context and with along with the analytics of the metadata is what we're really trying to provide automatically. So eventually, like, this can be also seen as almost like a way to, like, monitor the datasets, like, how you're currently monitoring your applications through Datadog or your website with your Google Analytics, this is something that can be also used as more of a go-to source of truth around what your state of the data is, how that's defined, and how that's being mapped to different business processes, so that there isn't much confusion around data. Everything can be called the same, but underneath it actually can mean very different things. Does that make sense?Corey: No, it absolutely does. I think that this is part of the challenge in trying to articulate value that is, I guess, specific to this niche across an entire industry. The context that drives data is going to be incredibly important, and it feels like so much of the marketing in the space is aimed at one or two pre-imagined customer profiles. And that has the side effect of making customers for whom that model doesn't align, look and feel like either doing something wrong, or makes it look like the vendor who's pitching this is somewhat out of touch. I know that I work in a relatively bounded problem space, but I still learn new things about AWS billing on virtually every engagement that I go on, just because you always get to learn more about how customers view things and how they view not just their industry, but also the specificities of their own business and their own niche.I think that is one of the challenges historically, with the idea of letting software do everything. Do you find the problems that you're solving tend to be global in nature or are you discovering strange depths of nuance on a customer-by-customer basis at this point?Shinji: Overall, a lot of the problems that we solve and the customers that we work with is very industry agnostic. As long as you are having many different datasets that you need to manage, there are common problems that arises, regardless of the industry that you're in. We do observe some industry-specific issues because your data is either, it's an unstructured data, or your data is primarily events, or you know, depending on how the data looks like, but primarily because of most of the BI solutions and data warehouses are operating as a relational databases, this is a part where we really try to build a lot of best practices, and the common analytics that we can apply to every customer that's using Select Star.Corey: I really want to thank you for taking so much time to go through the ins and outs of what it is you're doing these days. If people want to learn more, where's the best place to find you?Shinji: Yeah, I mean, it's been fun [laugh] talking here. So, we are at selectstar.com. That's our website. You can sign up for a free trial. It's completely self-service, so you don't need to get on a demo but, like, we'll also help you onboard and happy to give a free demo to whoever that is interested.We are also on LinkedIn and Twitter under selectstarhq. Yeah, I mean, we're happy to help for any companies that have these issues around wanting to increase their discoverability of data, and want to help their data team and the rest of the company to be able to utilize data better.Corey: And we will, of course, put links to all of that in the [show notes 00:28:58]. Thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate it.Shinji: Great. Thanks for having me, Corey.Corey: Shinji Kim, CEO and founder at Select Star. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an angry comment that I won't be able to discover because there are far too many podcast platforms out there, and I have no means of discovering where you've said that thing unless you send it to me.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

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Intro Agencies and clients have done a lot of online training in the past two years. During this time of agencies operating from behind their screens, Joel Erway has been helping agencies deploy webinars for their clients, regularly boosting their revenue to six figures and beyond. In this episode, Joel speaks about his expertise in the space, and why he thinks webinars are so effective in the age of online businesses. What you will learn in this episode: How to determine when a webinar is the right fit for your clients. There are two types of webinars: those for marketing-qualified leads, and those for sales-qualified leads. Learn when to deploy one versus the other. What questions an agency needs to be asking its clients to figure out which type of webinar is right for them. How interviews and “infocasts” can be an effective form of webinar, to help your audience stay engaged. Where webinars are headed over the next 1-2 years, and how you should expect them to evolve. Bio Joel is a master at helping Experts break 7-Figures without being expert marketers. People call Joel Erway “The Webinar Guy” but that's a tiny slice of his expertise. Joel's a master at crafting high-converting offers and helping Experts scale their business with High Ticket Courses. He authored the book, "High Ticket Courses" to help show Experts how to create leveraged offers to scale their business with programs valued at $2,000 or more. Between his own personal sales and his clients, he's helped generate $100+ million over the past few years. He's also a long-time podcaster and the host of Sold With Webinars and Experts Unleashed. Resources: Website: https://www.joelerway.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joelerway/

About ScottWith more than 28 years of successful leadership in building high technology companies and delivering advanced products to market, Scott provides the overall strategic leadership and visionary direction for Azul Systems.Scott has a consistent proven track record of vision, leadership, and success in enterprise, consumer and scientific markets. Prior to co-founding Azul Systems, Scott founded 3dfx Interactive, a graphics processor company that pioneered the 3D graphics market for personal computers and game consoles. Scott served at 3dfx as Vice President of Engineering, CTO and as a member of the board of directors and delivered 7 award-winning products and developed 14 different graphics processors. After a successful initial public offering, 3dfx was later acquired by NVIDIA Corporation.Prior to 3dfx, Scott was a CPU systems architect at Pellucid, later acquired by MediaVision. Before Pellucid, Scott was a member of the technical staff at Silicon Graphics where he designed high-performance workstations.Scott graduated from Princeton University with a bachelor of science, earning magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa honors. Scott has been granted 8 patents in high performance graphics and computing and is a regularly invited keynote speaker at industry conferences.Links Referenced:Azul: https://www.azul.com/ TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: I come bearing ill tidings. Developers are responsible for more than ever these days. Not just the code that they write, but also the containers and the cloud infrastructure that their apps run on. Because serverless means it's still somebody's problem. And a big part of that responsibility is app security from code to cloud. And that's where our friend Snyk comes in. Snyk is a frictionless security platform that meets developers where they are - Finding and fixing vulnerabilities right from the CLI, IDEs, Repos, and Pipelines. Snyk integrates seamlessly with AWS offerings like code pipeline, EKS, ECR, and more! As well as things you're actually likely to be using. Deploy on AWS, secure with Snyk. Learn more at Snyk.co/scream That's S-N-Y-K.co/screamCorey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at AWS AppConfig. Engineers love to solve, and occasionally create, problems. But not when it's an on-call fire-drill at 4 in the morning. Software problems should drive innovation and collaboration, NOT stress, and sleeplessness, and threats of violence. That's why so many developers are realizing the value of AWS AppConfig Feature Flags. Feature Flags let developers push code to production, but hide that that feature from customers so that the developers can release their feature when it's ready. This practice allows for safe, fast, and convenient software development. You can seamlessly incorporate AppConfig Feature Flags into your AWS or cloud environment and ship your Features with excitement, not trepidation and fear. To get started, go to snark.cloud/appconfig. That's snark.cloud/appconfig.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. My guest on this promoted episode today is Scott Sellers, CEO and co-founder of Azul. Scott, thank you for joining me.Scott: Thank you, Corey. I appreciate the opportunity in talking to you today.Corey: So, let's start with what you're doing these days. What is Azul? What do you folks do over there?Scott: Azul is an enterprise software and SaaS company that is focused on delivering more efficient Java solutions for our customers around the globe. We've been around for 20-plus years, and as an entrepreneur, we've really gone through various stages of different growth and different dynamics in the market. But at the end of the day, Azul is all about adding value for Java-based enterprises, Java-based applications, and really endearing ourselves to the Java community.Corey: This feels like the sort of space where there are an awful lot of great business cases to explore. When you look at what's needed in that market, there are a lot of things that pop up. The surprising part to me is that this is the direction that you personally went in. You started your career as a CPU architect, to my understanding. You were then one of the co-founders of 3dfx before it got acquired by Nvidia.You feel like you've spent your career more as a hardware guy than working on the SaaS side of the world. Is that a misunderstanding of your path, or have things changed, or is this just a new direction? Help me understand how you got here from where you were.Scott: I'm not exactly sure what the math would say because I continue to—can't figure out a way to stop time. But you're correct that my academic background, I was an electrical engineer at Princeton and started my career at Silicon Graphics. And that was when I did a lot of fantastic and fascinating work building workstations and high-end graphics systems, you know, back in the day when Silicon Graphics really was the who's who here in Silicon Valley. And so, a lot of my career began in the context of hardware. As you mentioned, I was one of the founders of graphics company called 3dfx that was one of, I think, arguably the pioneer in terms of bringing 3d graphics to the masses, if you will.And we had a great run of that. That was a really fun business to be a part of just because of what was going on in the 3d world. And we took that public and eventually sold that to Nvidia. And at that point, my itch, if you will, was really learning more about the enterprise segment. I'd been involved with professional graphics with SGI, I had been involved with consumer graphics with 3dfx.And I was fascinated just to learn about the enterprise segment. And met a couple people through a mutual friend around the 2001 timeframe, and they started talking about this thing called Java. And you know, I had of course heard about Java, but as a consumer graphics guy, didn't have a lot of knowledge about it or experience with it. And the more I learned about it, recognized that what was going on in the Java world—and credit to Sun for really creating, obviously, not only language, but building a community around Java—and recognized that new evolutions of developer paradigms really only come around once a decade if then, and was convinced and really got excited about the opportunity to ride the wave of Java and build a company around that.Corey: One of the blind spots that I have throughout the entire world of technology—and to be fair, I have many of them, but the one most relevant to this conversation, I suppose, is the Java ecosystem as a whole. I come from a background of being a grumpy Unix sysadmin—because I've never met a happy one of those in my entire career—and as a result, scripting languages is where everything that I worked with started off. And on the rare occasions, I worked in Java shops, it was, “Great. We're going to go—here's a WAR file. Go ahead and deploy this with Tomcat,” or whatever else people are going to use. But basically, “Don't worry your pretty little head about that.”At most, I have to worry about how to configure a heap or whatnot. But it's from the outside looking in, not having to deal with that entire ecosystem as a whole. And what I've seen from that particular perspective is that every time I start as a technologist, or even as a consumer trying to install some random software package in the depths of the internet, and I have to start thinking about Java, it always feels like I'm about to wind up in a confusing world. There are a number of software packages that I installed back in, I want to say the early-2010s or whatnot. “Oh, you need to have a Java runtime installed on your Mac,” for example.And okay, going through Oracle site, do I need the JRE? Do I need the JDK? Oh, there's OpenJDK, which kind of works, kind of doesn't. Amazon got into the space with Corretto, which because that sounds nothing whatsoever, like Java, but strange names coming from Amazon is basically par for the course for those folks. What is the current state of the Java ecosystem, for those of us who have—basically the closest we've ever gotten is JavaScript, which is nothing alike except for the name.Scott: And you know, frankly, given the protection around the name Java—and you know, that is a trademark that's owned by Oracle—it's amazing to me that JavaScript has been allowed to continue to be called JavaScript because as you point out, JavaScript has nothing to do with Java per se.Corey: Well, one thing they do have in common I found out somewhat recently is that Oracle also owns the trademark for JavaScript.Scott: Ah, there you go. Maybe that's why it continues.Corey: They're basically a law firm—three law firms in a trench coat, masquerading as a tech company some days.Scott: Right. But anyway, it is a confusing thing because you know, I think, arguably, JavaScript, by the numbers, probably has more programmers than any other language in the world, just given its popularity as a web language. But to your question about Java specifically, it's had an evolving life, and I think the state where it is today, I think it's in the most exciting place it's ever been. And I'll walk you through kind of why I believe that to be the case.But Java has evolved over time from its inception back in the days when it was called, I think it was Oak when it was originally conceived, and Sun had eventually branded it as Java. And at the time, it truly was owned by Sun, meaning it was proprietary code; it had to be licensed. And even though Sun gave it away, in most cases, it still at the end of the day, it was a commercially licensed product, if you will, and platform. And if you think about today's world, it would not be conceivable to create something that became so popular with programmers that was a commercially licensed product today. It almost would be mandated that it would be open-source to be able to really gain the type of traction that Java has gained.And so, even though Java was really garnering interest, you know, not only within the developer community, but also amongst commercial entities, right, everyone—and the era now I'm talking about is around the 2000 era—all of the major software vendors, whether it was obviously Sun, but then you had Oracle, you had IBM, companies like BEA, were really starting to blossom at that point. It was a—you know, you could almost not find a commercial software entity that was not backing Java. But it was still all controlled by Sun. And all that success ultimately led to a strong outcry from the community saying this has to be open-source; this is too important to be beholden to a single vendor. And that decision was made by Sun prior to the Oracle acquisition, they actually open-sourced the Java runtime code and they created an open-source project called OpenJDK.And to Oracle's credit, when they bought Sun—which I think at the time when you really look back, Oracle really did not have a lot of track record, if you will, of being involved with an open-source community—and I think when Oracle acquired Sun, there was a lot of skepticism as to what's going to happen to Java. Is Oracle going to make this thing, you know, back to the old days, proprietary Oracle, et cetera? And really—Corey: I was too busy being heartbroken over Solaris at that point to pay much attention to the Java stuff, but it felt like it was this—sort of the same pattern, repeated across multiple ecosystems.Scott: Absolutely. And even though Sun had also open-sourced Solaris, with the OpenSolaris project, that was one of the kinds of things that it was still developed very much in a closed environment, and then they would kind of throw some code out into the open world. And no one really ran OpenSolaris because it wasn't fully compatible with Solaris. And so, that was a faint attempt, if you will.But Java was quite different. It was truly all open-sourced, and the big difference that—and again, I give Oracle a lot of credit for this because this was a very important time in the evolution of Java—that Oracle, maintained Sun's commitment to not only continue to open-source Java but most importantly, develop it in the open community. And so, you know, again, back and this is the 2008, ‘09, ‘10 timeframe, the evolution of Java, the decisions, the standards, you know, what goes in the platform, what doesn't, decisions about updates and those types of things, that truly became a community-led world and all done in the open-source. And credit to Oracle for continuing to do that. And that really began the transition away from proprietary implementations of Java to one that, very similar to Linux, has really thrived because of the true open-source nature of what Java is today.And that's enabled more and more companies to get involved with the evolution of Java. If you go to the OpenJDK page, you'll see all of the not only, you know, incredibly talented individuals that are involved with the evolution of Java, but again, a who's who in pretty much every major commercial entities in the enterprise software world is also somehow involved in the OpenJDK community. And so, it really is a very vibrant, evolving standard. And some of the tactical things that have happened along the way in terms of changing how versions of Java are released still also very much in the context of maintaining compatibility and finding that careful balance of evolving the platform, but at the same time, recognizing that there is a lot of Java applications out there, so you can't just take a right-hand turn and forget about the compatibility side of things. But we as a community overall, I think, have addressed that very effectively, and the result has been now I think Java is more popular than ever and continues to—we liken it kind of to the mortar and the brick walls of the enterprise. It's a given that it's going to be used, certainly by most of the enterprises worldwide today.Corey: There's a certain subset of folk who are convinced the Java, “Oh, it's this a legacy programming language, and nothing modern or forward-looking is going to be built in it.” Yeah, those people generally don't know what the internal language stack looks like at places like oh, I don't know, AWS, Google, and a few others, it is very much everywhere. But it also feels, on some level, like, it's a bit below the surface-level of awareness for the modern full-stack developer in some respects, right up until suddenly it's very much not. How is Java evolving in a cloud these days?Scott: Well, what we see happening—you know, this is true for—you know, I'm a techie, so I can talk about other techies. I mean as techies, we all like the new thing, right? I mean, it's not that exciting to talk about a language that's been around for 20-plus years. But that doesn't take away from the fact that we still all use keyboards. I mean, no one really talks about what keyboard they use anymore—unless you're really into keyboards—but at the end of the day, it's still a fundamental tool that you use every single day.And Java is kind of in the same situation. The reason that Java continues to be so fundamental is that it really comes back to kind of reinventing the wheel problem. Are there are other languages that are more efficient to code in? Absolutely. Are there other languages that, you know, have some capabilities that the Java doesn't have? Absolutely.But if you have the ability to reinvent everything from scratch, sure, go for it. And you also don't have to worry about well, can I find enough programmers in this, you know, new hot language, okay, good luck with that. You might be able to find dozens, but when you need to really scale a company into thousands or tens of thousands of developers, good luck finding, you know, everyone that knows, whatever your favorite hot language of the day is.Corey: It requires six years experience in a four-year-old language. Yeah, it's hard to find that, sometimes.Scott: Right. And you know, the reality is, is that really no application ever is developed from scratch, right? Even when an application is, quote, new, immediately, what you're using is frameworks and other things that have written long ago and proven to be very successful.Corey: And disturbing amounts of code copied and pasted from Stack Overflow.Scott: Absolutely.Corey: But that's one of those impolite things we don't say out loud very often.Scott: That's exactly right. So, nothing really is created from scratch anymore. And so, it's all about building blocks. And this is really where this snowball of Java is difficult to stop because there is so much third-party code out there—and by that, I mean, you know, open-source, commercial code, et cetera—that is just so leveraged and so useful to very quickly be able to take advantage of and, you know, allow developers to focus on truly new things, not reinventing the wheel for the hundredth time. And that's what's kind of hard about all these other languages is catching up to Java with all of the things that are immediately available for developers to use freely, right, because most of its open-source. That's a pretty fundamental Catch-22 about when you start talking about the evolution of new languages.Corey: I'm with you so far. The counterpoint though is that so much of what we're talking about in the world of Java is open-source; it is freely available. The OpenJDK, for example, says that right on the tin. You have built a company and you've been in business for 20 years. I have to imagine that this is not one of those stories where, “Oh, all the things we do, we give away for free. But that's okay. We make it up in volume.” Even the venture capitalist mindset tends to run out of patience on those kinds of timescales. What is it you actually do as a business that clearly, obviously delivers value for customers but also results in, you know, being able to meet payroll every week?Scott: Right? Absolutely. And I think what time has shown is that, with one very notable exception and very successful example being Red Hat, there are very, very few pure open-source companies whose business is only selling support services for free software. Most successful businesses that are based on open-source are in one-way shape or form adding value-added elements. And that's our strategy as well.The heart of everything we do is based on free code from OpenJDK, and we have a tremendous amount of business that we are following the Red Hat business model where we are selling support and long-term access and a huge variety of different operating system configurations, older Java versions. Still all free software, though, right, but we're selling support services for that. And that is, in essence, the classic Red Hat business model. And that business for us is incredibly high growth, very fast-moving, a lot of that business is because enterprises are tired of paying the very high price to Oracle for Java support and they're looking for an open-source alternative that is exactly the same thing, but comes in pure open-source form and with a vendor that is as reputable as Oracle. So, a lot of our businesses based on that.However, on top of that, we also have value-added elements. And so, our product that is called Azul Platform Prime is rooted in OpenJDK—it is OpenJDK—but then we've added value-added elements to that. And what those value-added elements create is, in essence, a better Java platform. And better in this context means faster, quicker to warm up, elimination of some of the inconsistencies of the Java runtime in terms of this nasty problem called garbage collection which causes applications to kind of bounce around in terms of performance limitations. And so, creating a better Java is another way that we have monetized our company is value-added elements that are built on top of OpenJDK. And I'd say that part of the business is very typical for the majority of enterprise software companies that are rooted in open-source. They're typically adding value-added components on top of the open-source technology, and that's our similar strategy as well.And then the third evolution for us, which again is very tried-and-true, is evolving the business also to add SaaS offerings. So today, the majority of our customers, even though they deploy in the cloud, they're stuck customer-managed and so they're responsible for where do I want to put my Java runtime on building out my stack and cetera, et cetera. And of course, that could be on-prem, but like I mentioned, the majority are in the cloud. We're evolving our product offerings also to have truly SaaS-based solutions so that customers don't even need to manage those types of stacks on their own anymore.Corey: On some level, it feels like we're talking about two different things when we talk about cloud and when we talk about programming languages, but increasingly, I'm starting to see across almost the entire ecosystem that different languages and different cloud providers are in many ways converging. How do you see Java changing as cloud-native becomes the default rather than the new thing?Scott: Great question. And I think the thing to recognize about, really, most popular programming languages today—I can think of very few exceptions—these languages were created, envisioned, implemented if you will, in a day when cloud was not top-of-mind, and in many cases, certainly in the case of Java, cloud didn't even exist when Java was originally conceived, nor was that the case when you know, other languages, such as Python, or JavaScript, or on and on. So, rethinking how these languages should evolve in very much the context of a cloud-native mentality is a really important initiative that we certainly are doing and I think the Java community is doing overall. And how you architect not only the application, but even the Java runtime itself can be fundamentally different if you know that the application is going to be deployed in the cloud.And I'll give you an example. Specifically, in the world of any type of runtime-based language—and JavaScript is an example of that; Python is an example of that; Java is an example of that—in all of those runtime-based environments, what that basically means is that when the application is run, there's a piece of software that's called the runtime that actually is running that application code. And so, you can think about it as a middleware piece of software that sits between the operating system and the application itself. And so, that runtime layer is common across those languages and those platforms that I mentioned. That runtime layer is evolving, and it's evolving in a way that is becoming more and more cloud-native in it's thinking.The process itself of actually taking the application, compiling it into whatever underlying architecture it may be running on—it could be an x86 instance running on Amazon; it could be, you know, for example, an ARM64, which Amazon has compute instances now that are based on an ARM64 processor that they call Graviton, which is really also kind of altering the price-performance of the compute instances on the AWS platform—that runtime layer magically takes an application that doesn't have to be aware of the underlying hardware and transforms that into a way that can be run. And that's a very expensive process; it's called just-in-time compiling, and that just-in-time compilation, in today's world—which wasn't really based on cloud thinking—every instance, every compute instance that you deploy, that same JIT compilation process is happening over and over again. And even if you deploy 100 instances for scalability, every one of those 100 instances is doing that same work. And so, it's very inefficient and very redundant. Contrast that to a cloud-native thinking: that compilation process should be a service; that service should be done once.The application—you know, one instance of the application is actually run and there are the other ninety-nine should just reuse that compilation process. And that shared compiler service should be scalable and should be able to scale up when applications are launched and you need more compilation resources, and then scaled right back down when you're through the compilation process and the application is more moving into the—you know, to the runtime phase of the application lifecycle. And so, these types of things are areas that we and others are working on in terms of evolving the Java runtime specifically to be more cloud-native.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Sysdig. Sysdig secures your cloud from source to run. They believe, as do I, that DevOps and security are inextricably linked. If you wanna learn more about how they view this, check out their blog, it's definitely worth the read. To learn more about how they are absolutely getting it right from where I sit, visit Sysdig.com and tell them that I sent you. That's S Y S D I G.com. And my thanks to them for their continued support of this ridiculous nonsense.Corey: This feels like it gets even more critical when we're talking about things like serverless functions across basically all the cloud providers these days, where there's the whole setup, everything in the stack, get it running, get it listening, ready to go, to receive a single request and then shut itself down. It feels like there are a lot of operational efficiencies possible once you start optimizing from a starting point of yeah, this is what that environment looks like, rather than us big metal servers sitting in a rack 15 years ago.Scott: Yeah. I think the evolution of serverless appears to be headed more towards serverless containers as opposed to serverless functions. Serverless functions have a bunch of limitations in terms of when you think about it in the context of a complex, you know, microservices-based deployment framework. It's just not very efficient, to spin up and spin down instances of a function if that actually is being—it is any sort of performance or latency-sensitive type of applications. If you're doing something very rarely, sure, it's fine; it's efficient, it's elegant, et cetera.But any sort of thing that has real girth to it—and girth probably means that's what's driving your application infrastructure costs, that's what's driving your Amazon bill every month—those types of things typically are not going to be great for starting and stopping functional instances. And so, serverless is evolving more towards thinking about the container itself not having to worry about the underlying operating system or the instance on Amazon that it's running on. And that's where, you know, we see more and more of the evolution of serverless is thinking about it at a container-level as opposed to a functional level. And that appears to be a really healthy steady state, so it gets the benefits of not having to worry about all the underlying stuff, but at the same time, doesn't have the downside of trying to start and stop functional influences at a given point in time.Corey: It seems to me that there are really two ways of thinking about cloud. The first is what I think a lot of companies do their first outing when they're going into something like AWS. “Okay, we're going to get a bunch of virtual machines that they call instances in AWS, we're going to run things just like it's our data center except now data transfer to the internet is terrifyingly expensive.” The more quote-unquote, “Cloud-native” way of thinking about this is what you're alluding to where there's, “Here's some code that I wrote. I want to throw it to my cloud provider and just don't tell me about any of the infrastructure parts. Execute this code when these conditions are met and leave me alone.”Containers these days seem to be one of our best ways of getting there with a minimum of fuss and friction. What are you seeing in the enterprise space as far as adoption of those patterns go? Or are we seeing cloud repatriation showing up as a real thing and I'm just not in the right place to see it?Scott: Well, I think as a cloud journey evolves, there's no question that—and in fact it's even silly to say that cloud is here to stay because I think that became a reality many, many years ago. So really, the question is, what are the challenges now with cloud deployments? Cloud is absolutely a given. And I think you stated earlier, it's rare that, whether it's a new company or a new application, at least in most businesses that don't have specific regulatory requirements, that application is highly, highly likely to be envisioned to be initially and only deployed in the cloud. That's a great thing because you have so many advantages of not having to purchase infrastructure in advance, being able to tap into all of the various services that are available through the cloud providers. No one builds databases anymore; you're just tapping into the service that's provided by Azure or AWS, or what have you.And, you know, just that specific example is a huge amount of savings in terms of just overhead, and license costs, and those types of stuff, and there's countless examples of that. And so, the services that are available in the cloud are unquestioned. So, there's countless advantages of why you want to be in the cloud. The downside, however, the cloud that is, if at the end of the day, AWS, Microsoft with Azure, Google with GCP, they are making 30% margin on that cloud infrastructure. And in the days of hardware, when companies would actually buy their servers from Dell, or HP, et cetera, those businesses are 5% margin.And so, where's that 25% going? Well, the 25% is being paid for by the users of cloud, and as a result of that, when you look at it purely from an operational cost perspective, it is more expensive to run in the cloud than it is back in the legacy days, right? And that's not to say that the industry has made the wrong choice because there's so many advantages of being in cloud, there's no doubt about it. And there should be—you know, and the cloud providers deserve to take some amount of margin to provide the services that they provide; there's no doubt about that. The question is, how do you do the best of all worlds?And you know, there is a great blog by a couple of the partners in Andreessen Horowitz, they called this the Cloud Paradox. And the Cloud Paradox really talks about the challenges. It's really a Catch-22; how do you get all the benefits of cloud but do that in a way that is not overly taxing from a cost perspective? And a lot of it comes down to good practices and making sure that you have the right monitoring and culture within an enterprise to make sure that cloud cost is a primary thing that is discussed and metric, but then there's also technologies that can help so that you don't have to even think about what you really don't ever want to do: repatriating, which is about the concept of actually moving off the cloud back to the old way of doing things. So certainly, I don't believe repatriation is a practical solution for ongoing and increasing cloud costs. I believe technology is a solution to that.And there are technologies such as our product, Azul Platform Prime, that in essence, allows you to do more with less, right, get all the benefits of cloud, deploy in your Amazon environment, deploy in your Azure environment, et cetera, but imagine if instead of needing a hundred instances to handle your given workload, you could do that with 50 or 60. Tomorrow, that means that you can start savings and being able to do that simply by changing your JVM from a standard OpenJDK or Oracle JVM to something like Platform Prime, you can immediately start to start seeing the benefits from that. And so, a lot of our business now and our growth is coming from companies that are screaming under the ongoing cloud costs and trying to keep them in line, and using technology like Azul Platform Prime to help mitigate those costs.Corey: I think that there is a somewhat foolish approach that I'm seeing taken by a lot of folks where there are some companies that are existentially anti-cloud, if for no other reason than because if the cloud wins, then they don't really have a business anymore. The problem I see with that is that it seems that their solution across the board is to turn back the clock where if I'm going to build a startup, it's time for me to go buy some servers and a rack somewhere and start negotiating with bandwidth providers. I don't see that that is necessarily viable for almost anyone. We aren't living in 1995 anymore, despite how much some people like to pretend we are. It seems like if there are workloads—for which I agree, cloud is not necessarily an economic fit, first, I feel like the market will fix that in the fullness of time, but secondly, on an individual workload belonging in a certain place is radically different than, “Oh, none of our stuff should live on cloud. Everything belongs in a data center.” And I just think that companies lose all credibility when they start pretending that it's any other way.Scott: Right. I'd love to see the reaction of the venture capitalists' face when an entrepreneur walks in and talks about how their strategy for deploying their SaaS service is going to be buying hardware and renting some space in the local data center.Corey: Well, there is a good cost control method, if you think about it. I mean very few engineers are going to accidentally spin up an $8 million cluster in a data center a second time, just because there's no space left for it.Scott: And you're right; it does happen in the cloud as well. It's just, I agree with you completely that as part of the evolution of cloud, in general, is an ever-improving aspect of cost and awareness of cost and building in technologies that help mitigate that cost. So, I think that will continue to evolve. I think, you know, if you really think about the cloud journey, cost, I would say, is still in early phases of really technologies and practices and processes of allowing enterprises to really get their head around cost. I'd still say it's a fairly immature industry that is evolving quickly, just given the importance of it.And so, I think in the coming years, you're going to see a radical improvement in terms of cost awareness and technologies to help with costs, that again allows you to the best of all worlds. Because, you know, if you go back to the Dark Ages and you start thinking about buying servers and infrastructure, then you are really getting back to a mentality of, “I've got to deploy everything. I've got to buy software for my database. I've got to deploy it. What am I going to do about my authentication service? So, I got to buy this vendor's, you know, solution, et cetera.” And so, all that stuff just goes away in the world of cloud, so it's just not practical, in this day and age I think, to think about really building a business that's not cloud-native from the beginning.Corey: I really want to thank you for spending so much time talking to me about how you view the industry, the evolution we've seen in the Java ecosystem, and what you've been up to. If people want to learn more, where's the best place for them to find you?Scott: Well, there's a thing called a website that you may not have heard of, it's really cool.Corey: Can I build it in Java?Scott: W-W-dot—[laugh]. Yeah. Azul website obviously has an awful lot of information about that, Azul is spelled A-Z-U-L, and we sometimes get the question, “How in the world did you name a company—why did you name it Azul?”And it's kind of a funny story because back in the days of Azul when we thought about, hey, we want to be big and successful, and at the time, IBM was the gold standard in terms of success in the enterprise world. And you know, they were Big Blue, so we said, “Hey, we're going to be a little blue. Let's be Azul.” So, that's where we began. So obviously, go check out our site.We're very present, also, in the Java community. We're, you know, many developer conferences and talks. We sponsor and run many of what's called the Java User Groups, which are very popular 10-, 20-person meetups that happen around the globe on a regular basis. And so, you know, come check us out. And I appreciate everyone's time in listening to the podcast today.Corey: No, thank you very much for spending as much time with me as you have. It's appreciated.Scott: Thanks, Corey.Corey: Scott Sellers, CEO and co-founder of Azul. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an entire copy of the terms and conditions from Oracle's version of the JDK.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

US President Joe Biden spoke on the American 60 Minutes program overnight and the President's comments are a pretty good indication of how world leaders are feeling right now about the situation in Ukraine. To unpack it all is global futurist and foreign affairs expert Dr Keith Suter.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Joining Nadia on this episode of the ground-breaking Women of FinTech Podcast is Joanne Lockwood, Founder, CEO and Diversity & Inclusion Advisor and Consultant at SEE Change Happen.This episode is a masterclass in authentic inclusion, allyship and action. Joanne walks us through her reasons for founding SEE Change Happen, and the tangible work they are doing across a plethora of industries to ensure firms are truly able to find the why behind their commitment to DE&I.Joanne's thoughts on allyship are particularly revealing, reminding us that being an active ally is often more about the micro-interventions. And central to all of this? In this episode Joanne shares with Nadia the three principles that underly her understanding of being an ally for all...The overarching message of this episode of the Women of FinTech Podcast is we must ensure we are creating positive people experiences. Deploy your privilege to support the marginalised; address your policies; and advocate actively- don't fall into a passive disposition.

About AllenAllen is a cloud architect at Tyler Technologies. He helps modernize government software by creating secure, highly scalable, and fault-tolerant serverless applications.Allen publishes content regularly about serverless concepts and design on his blog - Ready, Set Cloud!Links Referenced: Ready, Set, Cloud blog: https://readysetcloud.io Tyler Technologies: https://www.tylertech.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/allenheltondev Linked: https://www.linkedin.com/in/allenheltondev/ TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at AWS AppConfig. Engineers love to solve, and occasionally create, problems. But not when it's an on-call fire-drill at 4 in the morning. Software problems should drive innovation and collaboration, NOT stress, and sleeplessness, and threats of violence. That's why so many developers are realizing the value of AWS AppConfig Feature Flags. Feature Flags let developers push code to production, but hide that that feature from customers so that the developers can release their feature when it's ready. This practice allows for safe, fast, and convenient software development. You can seamlessly incorporate AppConfig Feature Flags into your AWS or cloud environment and ship your Features with excitement, not trepidation and fear. To get started, go to snark.cloud/appconfig. That's snark.cloud/appconfig.Corey: I come bearing ill tidings. Developers are responsible for more than ever these days. Not just the code that they write, but also the containers and the cloud infrastructure that their apps run on. Because serverless means it's still somebody's problem. And a big part of that responsibility is app security from code to cloud. And that's where our friend Snyk comes in. Snyk is a frictionless security platform that meets developers where they are - Finding and fixing vulnerabilities right from the CLI, IDEs, Repos, and Pipelines. Snyk integrates seamlessly with AWS offerings like code pipeline, EKS, ECR, and more! As well as things you're actually likely to be using. Deploy on AWS, secure with Snyk. Learn more at Snyk.co/scream That's S-N-Y-K.co/screamCorey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. Every once in a while I wind up stumbling into corners of the internet that I previously had not traveled. Somewhat recently, I wound up having that delightful experience again by discovering readysetcloud.io, which has a whole series of, I guess some people might call it thought leadership, I'm going to call it instead how I view it, which is just amazing opinion pieces on the context of serverless, mixed with APIs, mixed with some prognostications about the future.Allen Helton by day is a cloud architect at Tyler Technologies, but that's not how I encountered you. First off, Allen, thank you for joining me.Allen: Thank you, Corey. Happy to be here.Corey: I was originally pointed towards your work by folks in the AWS Community Builder program, of which we both participate from time to time, and it's one of those, “Oh, wow, this is amazing. I really wish I'd discovered some of this sooner.” And every time I look through your back catalog, and I click on a new post, I see things that are either I've really agree with this or I can't stand this opinion, I want to fight about it, but more often than not, it's one of those recurring moments that I love: “Damn, I wish I had written something like this.” So first, you're absolutely killing it on the content front.Allen: Thank you, Corey, I appreciate that. The content that I make is really about the stuff that I'm doing at work. It's stuff that I'm passionate about, stuff that I'd spend a decent amount of time on, and really the most important thing about it for me, is it's stuff that I'm learning and forming opinions on and wants to share with others.Corey: I have to say, when I saw that you were—oh, your Tyler Technologies, which sounds for all the world like, oh, it's a relatively small consultancy run by some guy presumably named Tyler, and you know, it's a petite team of maybe 20, 30 people on the outside. Yeah, then I realized, wait a minute, that's not entirely true. For example, for starters, you're publicly traded. And okay, that does change things a little bit. First off, who are you people? Secondly, what do you do? And third, why have I never heard of you folks, until now?Allen: Tyler is the largest company that focuses completely on the public sector. We have divisions and products for pretty much everything that you can imagine that's in the public sector. We have software for schools, software for tax and appraisal, we have software for police officers, for courts, everything you can think of that runs the government can and a lot of times is run on Tyler software. We've been around for decades building our expertise in the domain, and the reason you probably haven't heard about us is because you might not have ever been in trouble with the law before. If you [laugh] if you have been—Corey: No, no, I learned very early on in the course of my life—which will come as a surprise to absolutely no one who spent more than 30 seconds with me—that I have remarkably little filter and if ten kids were the ones doing something wrong, I'm the one that gets caught. So, I spent a lot of time in the principal's office, so this taught me to keep my nose clean. I'm one of those squeaky-clean types, just because I was always terrified of getting punished because I knew I would get caught. I'm not saying this is the right way to go through life necessarily, but it did have the side benefit of, no, I don't really engage with law enforcement going throughout the course of my life.Allen: That's good. That's good. But one exposure that a lot of people get to Tyler is if you look at the bottom of your next traffic ticket, it'll probably say Tyler Technologies on the bottom there.Corey: Oh, so you're really popular in certain circles, I'd imagine?Allen: Super popular. Yes, yes. And of course, you get all the benefits of writing that code that says ‘if defendant equals Allen Helton then return.'Corey: I like that. You get to have the exception cases built in that no one's ever going to wind up looking into.Allen: That's right. Yes.Corey: The idea of what you're doing makes an awful lot of sense. There's a tremendous need for a wide variety of technical assistance in the public sector. What surprises me, although I guess it probably shouldn't, is how much of your content is aimed at serverless technologies and API design, which to my way of thinking, isn't really something that public sector has done a lot with. Clearly I'm wrong.Allen: Historically, you're not wrong. There's an old saying that government tends to run about ten years behind on technology. Not just technology, but all over the board and runs about ten years behind. And until recently, that's really been true. There was a case last year, a situation last year where one of the state governments—I don't remember which one it was—but they were having a crisis because they couldn't find any COBOL developers to come in and maintain their software that runs the state.And it's COBOL; you're not going to find a whole lot of people that have that skill. A lot of those people are retiring out. And what's happening is that we're getting new people sitting in positions of power and government that want innovation. They know about the cloud and they want to be able to integrate with systems quickly and easily, have little to no onboarding time. You know, there are people in power that have grown up with technology and understand that, well, with everything else, I can be up and running in five or ten minutes. I cannot do this with the software I'm consuming now.Corey: My opinion on it is admittedly conflicted because on the one hand, yeah, I don't think that governments should be running on COBOL software that runs on mainframes that haven't been supported in 25 years. Conversely, I also don't necessarily want them being run like a seed series startup, where, “Well, I wrote this code last night, and it's awesome, so off I go to production with it.” Because I can decide not to do business anymore with Twitter for Pets, and I could go on to something else, like PetFlicks, or whatever it is I choose to use. I can't easily opt out of my government. The decisions that they make stick and that is going to have a meaningful impact on my life and everyone else's life who is subject to their jurisdiction. So, I guess I don't really know where I believe the proper, I guess, pace of technological adoption should be for governments. Curious to get your thoughts on this.Allen: Well, you certainly don't want anything that's bleeding edge. That's one of the things that we kind of draw fine lines around. Because when we're dealing with government software, we're dealing with, usually, critically sensitive information. It's not medical records, but it's your criminal record, and it's things like your social security number, it's things that you can't have leaking out under any circumstances. So, the things that we're building on are things that have proven out to be secure and have best practices around security, uptime, reliability, and in a lot of cases as well, and maintainability. You know, if there are issues, then let's try to get those turned around as quickly as we can because we don't want to have any sort of downtime from the software side versus the software vendor side.Corey: I want to pivot a little bit to some of the content you've put out because an awful lot of it seems to be, I think I'll call it variations on a theme. For example, I just read some recent titles, and to illustrate my point, “Going API First: Your First 30 Days,” “Solutions Architect Tips how to Design Applications for Growth,” “3 Things to Know Before Building A Multi-Tenant Serverless App.” And the common thread that I see running through all of these things are these are things that you tend to have extraordinarily strong and vocal opinions about only after dismissing all of them the first time and slapping something together, and then sort of being forced to live with the consequences of the choices that you've made, in some cases you didn't realize you were making at the time. Are you one of those folks that has the wisdom to see what's coming down the road, or did you do what the rest of us do and basically learn all this stuff by getting it hilariously wrong and having to careen into rebound situations as a result?Allen: [laugh]. I love that question. I would like to say now, I feel like I have the vision to see something like that coming. Historically, no, not at all. Let me talk a little bit about how I got to where I am because that will shed a lot of context on that question.A few years ago, I was put into a position at Tyler that said, “Hey, go figure out this cloud thing.” Let's figure out what we need to do to move into the cloud safely, securely, quickly, all that rigmarole. And so, I did. I got to hand-select team of engineers from people that I worked with at Tyler over the past few years, and we were basically given free rein to learn. We were an R&D team, a hundred percent R&D, for about a year's worth of time, where we were learning about cloud concepts and theory and building little proof of concepts.CI/CD, serverless, APIs, multi-tenancy, a whole bunch of different stuff. NoSQL was another one of the things that we had to learn. And after that year of R&D, we were told, “Okay, now go do something with that. Go build this application.” And we did, building on our theory our cursory theory knowledge. And we get pretty close to go live, and then the business says, “What do you do in this scenario? What do you do in that scenario? What do you do here?”Corey: “I update my resume and go work somewhere else. Where's the hard part here?”Allen: [laugh].Corey: Turns out, that's not a convincing answer.Allen: Right. So, we moved quickly. And then I wouldn't say we backpedaled, but we hardened for a long time before the—prior to the go-live, with the lessons that we've learned with the eyes of Tyler, the mature enterprise company, saying, “These are the things that you have to make sure that you take into consideration in an actual production application.” One of the things that I always pushed—I was a manager for a few years of all these cloud teams—I always push do it; do it right; do it better. Right?It's kind of like crawl, walk, run. And if you follow my writing from the beginning, just looking at the titles and reading them, kind of like what you were doing, Corey, you'll see that very much. You'll see how I talk about CI/CD, you'll see me how I talk about authorization, you'll see me how I talk about multi-tenancy. And I kind of go in waves where maybe a year passes and you see my content revisit some of the topics that I've done in the past. And they're like, “No, no, no, don't do what I said before. It's not right.”Corey: The problem when I'm writing all of these things that I do, for example, my entire newsletter publication pipeline is built on a giant morass of Lambda functions and API Gateways. It's microservices-driven—kind of—and each microservice is built, almost always, with a different framework. Lately, all the new stuff is CDK. I started off with the serverless framework. There are a few other things here and there.And it's like going architecting, back in time as I have to make updates to these things from time to time. And it's the problem with having done all that myself is that I already know the answer to, “What fool designed this?” It's, well, you're basically watching me learn what I was, doing bit by bit. I'm starting to believe that the right answer on some level, is to build an inherent shelf-life into some of these things. Great, in five years, you're going to come back and re-architect it now that you know how this stuff actually works rather than patching together 15 blog posts by different authors, not all of whom are talking about the same thing and hoping for the best.Allen: Yep. That's one of the things that I really like about serverless, I view that as a giant pro of doing Serverless is that when we revisit with the lessons learned, we don't have to refactor everything at once like if it was just a big, you know, MVC controller out there in the sky. We can refactor one Lambda function at a time if now we're using a new version of the AWS SDK, or we've learned about a new best practice that needs to go in place. It's a, “While you're in there, tidy up, please,” kind of deal.Corey: I know that the DynamoDB fanatics will absolutely murder me over this one, but one of the reasons that I have multiple Dynamo tables that contain, effectively, variations on the exact same data, is because I want to have the dependency between the two different microservices be the API, not, “Oh, and under the hood, it's expecting this exact same data structure all the time.” But it just felt like that was the wrong direction to go in. That is the justification I use for myself why I run multiple DynamoDB tables that [laugh] have the same content. Where do you fall on the idea of data store separation?Allen: I'm a big single table design person myself, I really like the idea of being able to store everything in the same table and being able to create queries that can return me multiple different types of entity with one lookup. Now, that being said, one of the issues that we ran into, or one of the ambiguous areas when we were getting started with serverless was, what does single table design mean when you're talking about microservices? We were wondering does single table mean one DynamoDB table for an entire application that's composed of 15 microservices? Or is it one table per microservice? And that was ultimately what we ended up going with is a table per microservice. Even if multiple microservices are pushed into the same AWS account, we're still building that logical construct of a microservice and one table that houses similar entities in the same domain.Corey: So, something I wish that every service team at AWS would do as a part of their design is draw the architecture of an application that you're planning to build. Great, now assume that every single resource on that architecture diagram lives in its own distinct AWS account because somewhere in some customer, there's going to be an account boundary at every interconnection point along the way. And so, many services don't do that where it's, “Oh, that thing and the other thing has to be in the same account.” So, people have to write their own integration shims, and it makes doing the right thing of putting different services into distinct bounded AWS accounts for security or compliance reasons way harder than I feel like it needs to be.Allen: [laugh]. Totally agree with you on that one. That's one of the things that I feel like I'm still learning about is the account-level isolation. I'm still kind of early on, personally, with my opinions in how we're structuring things right now, but I'm very much of a like opinion that deploying multiple things into the same account is going to make it too easy to do something that you shouldn't. And I just try not to inherently trust people, in the sense that, “Oh, this is easy. I'm just going to cross that boundary real quick.”Corey: For me, it's also come down to security risk exposure. Like my lasttweetinaws.com Twitter shitposting thread client lives in a distinct AWS account that is separate from the AWS account that has all of our client billing data that lives within it. The idea being that if you find a way to compromise my public-facing Twitter client, great, the blast radius should be constrained to, “Yay, now you can, I don't know, spin up some cryptocurrency mining in my AWS account and I get to look like a fool when I beg AWS for forgiveness.”But that should be the end of it. It shouldn't be a security incident because I should not have the credit card numbers living right next to the funny internet web thing. That sort of flies in the face of the original guidance that AWS gave at launch. And right around 2008-era, best practices were one customer, one AWS account. And then by 2012, they had changed their perspective, but once you've made a decision to build multiple services in a single account, unwinding and unpacking that becomes an incredibly burdensome thing. It's about the equivalent of doing a cloud migration, in some ways.Allen: We went through that. We started off building one application with the intent that it was going to be a siloed application, a one-off, essentially. And about a year into it, it's one of those moments of, “Oh, no. What we're building is not actually a one-off. It's a piece to a much larger puzzle.”And we had a whole bunch of—unfortunately—tightly coupled things that were in there that we're assuming that resources were going to be in the same AWS account. So, we ended up—how long—I think we took probably two months, which in the grand scheme of things isn't that long, but two months, kind of unwinding the pieces and decoupling what was possible at the time into multiple AWS accounts, kind of, segmented by domain, essentially. But that's hard. AWS puts it, you know, it's those one-way door decisions. I think this one was a two-way door, but it locked and you could kind of jimmy the lock on the way back out.Corey: And you could buzz someone from the lobby to let you back in. Yeah, the biggest problem is not necessarily the one-way door decisions. It's the one-way door decisions that you don't realize you're passing through at the time that you do them. Which, of course, brings us to a topic near and dear to your heart—and I only recently started have opinions on this myself—and that is the proper design of APIs, which I'm sure will incense absolutely no one who's listening to this. Like, my opinions on APIs start with well, probably REST is the right answer in this day and age. I had people, like, “Well, I don't know, GraphQL is pretty awesome.” Like, “Oh, I'm thinking SOAP,” and people look at me like I'm a monster from the Black Lagoon of centuries past in XML-land. So, my particular brand of strangeness side, what do you see that people are doing in the world of API design that is the, I guess, most common or easy to make mistakes that you really wish they would stop doing?Allen: If I could boil it down to one word, fundamentalism. Let me unpack that for you.Corey: Oh, please, absolutely want to get a definition on that one.Allen: [laugh]. I approach API design from a developer experience point of view: how easy is it for both internal and external integrators to consume and satisfy the business processes that they want to accomplish? And a lot of times, REST guidelines, you know, it's all about entity basis, you know, drill into the appropriate entities and name your endpoints with nouns, not verbs. I'm actually very much onto that one.But something that you could easily do, let's say you have a business process that given a fundamentally correct RESTful API design takes ten API calls to satisfy. You could, in theory, boil that down to maybe three well-designed endpoints that aren't, quote-unquote, “RESTful,” that make that developer experience significantly easier. And if you were a fundamentalist, that option is not even on the table, but thinking about it pragmatically from a developer experience point of view, that might be the better call. So, that's one of the things that, I know feels like a hot take. Every time I say it, I get a little bit of flack for it, but don't be a fundamentalist when it comes to your API designs. Do something that makes it easier while staying in the guidelines to do what you want.Corey: For me the problem that I've kept smacking into with API design, and it honestly—let me be very clear on this—my first real exposure to API design rather than API consumer—which of course, I complain about constantly, especially in the context of the AWS inconsistent APIs between services—was when I'm building something out, and I'm reading the documentation for API Gateway, and oh, this is how you wind up having this stage linked to this thing, and here's the endpoint. And okay, great, so I would just populate—build out a structure or a schema that has the positional parameters I want to use as variables in my function. And that's awesome. And then I realized, “Oh, I might want to call this a different way. Aw, crap.” And sometimes it's easy; you just add a different endpoint. Other times, I have to significantly rethink things. And I can't shake the feeling that this is an entire discipline that exists that I just haven't had a whole lot of exposure to previously.Allen: Yeah, I believe that. One of the things that you could tie a metaphor to for what I'm saying and kind of what you're saying, is AWS SAM, the Serverless Application Model, all it does is basically macros CloudFormation resources. It's just a transform from a template into CloudFormation. CDK does same thing. But what the developers of SAM have done is they've recognized these business processes that people do regularly, and they've made these incredibly easy ways to satisfy those business processes and tie them all together, right?If I want to have a Lambda function that is backed behind a endpoint, an API endpoint, I just have to add four or five lines of YAML or JSON that says, “This is the event trigger, here's the route, here's the API.” And then it goes and does four, five, six different things. Now, there's some engineers that don't like that because sometimes that feels like magic. Sometimes a little bit magic is okay.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Sysdig. Sysdig secures your cloud from source to run. They believe, as do I, that DevOps and security are inextricably linked. If you wanna learn more about how they view this, check out their blog, it's definitely worth the read. To learn more about how they are absolutely getting it right from where I sit, visit Sysdig.com and tell them that I sent you. That's S Y S D I G.com. And my thanks to them for their continued support of this ridiculous nonsense.Corey: I feel like one of the benefits I've had with the vast majority of APIs that I've built is that because this is all relatively small-scale stuff for what amounts to basically shitposting for the sake of entertainment, I'm really the only consumer of an awful lot of these things. So, I get frustrated when I have to backtrack and make changes and teach other microservices to talk to this thing that has now changed. And it's frustrating, but I have the capacity to do that. It's just work for a period of time. I feel like that equation completely shifts when you have published this and it is now out in the world, and it's not just users, but in many cases paying customers where you can't really make those changes without significant notice, and every time you do you're creating work for those customers, so you have to be a lot more judicious about it.Allen: Oh, yeah. There is a whole lot of governance and practice that goes into production-level APIs that people integrate with. You know, they say once you push something out the door into production that you're going to support it forever. I don't disagree with that. That seems like something that a lot of people don't understand.And that's one of the reasons why I push API-first development so hard in all the content that I write is because you need to be intentional about what you're letting out the door. You need to go in and work, not just with the developers, but your product people and your analysts to say, what does this absolutely need to do, and what does it need to do in the future? And you take those things, and you work with analysts who want specifics, you work with the engineers to actually build it out. And you're very intentional about what goes out the door that first time because once it goes out with a mistake, you're either going to version it immediately or you're going to make some people very unhappy when you make a breaking change to something that they immediately started consuming.Corey: It absolutely feels like that's one of those things that AWS gets astonishingly right. I mean, I had the privilege of interviewing, at the time, Jeff Barr and then Ariel Kelman, who was their head of marketing, to basically debunk a bunch of old myths. And one thing that they started talking about extensively was the idea that an API is fundamentally a promise to your customers. And when you make a promise, you'd better damn well intend on keeping it. It's why API deprecations from AWS are effectively unique whenever something happens.It's the, this is a singular moment in time when they turn off a service or degrade old functionality in favor of new. They can add to it, they can launch a V2 of something and then start to wean people off by calling the old one classic or whatnot, but if I built something on AWS in 2008 and I wound up sleeping until today, and go and try and do the exact same thing and deploy it now, it will almost certainly work exactly as it did back then. Sure, reliability is going to be a lot better and there's a crap ton of features and whatnot that I'm not taking advantage of, but that fundamental ability to do that is awesome. Conversely, it feels like Google Cloud likes to change around a lot of their API stories almost constantly. And it's unplanned work that frustrates the heck out of me when I'm trying to build something stable and lasting on top of it.Allen: I think it goes to show the maturity of these companies as API companies versus just vendors. It's one of the things that I think AWS does [laugh]—Corey: You see the similar dichotomy with Microsoft and Apple. Microsoft's new versions of Windows generally still have functionalities in them to support stuff that was written in the '90s for a few use cases, whereas Apple's like, “Oh, your computer's more than 18-months old? Have you tried throwing it away and buying a new one? And oh, it's a new version of Mac OS, so yeah, maybe the last one would get security updates for a year and then get with the times.” And I can't shake the feeling that the correct answer is in some way, both of those, depending upon who your customer is and what it is you're trying to achieve.If Microsoft adopted the Apple approach, their customers would mutiny, and rightfully so; the expectation has been set for decades that isn't what happens. Conversely, if Apple decided now we're going to support this version of Mac OS in perpetuity, I don't think a lot of their application developers wouldn't quite know what to make of that.Allen: Yeah. I think it also comes from a standpoint of you better make it worth their while if you're going to move their cheese. I'm not a Mac user myself, but from what I hear for Mac users—and this could be rose-colored glasses—but is that their stuff works phenomenally well. You know, when a new thing comes out—Corey: Until it doesn't, absolutely. It's—whenever I say things like that on this show, I get letters. And it's, “Oh, yeah, really? They'll come up with something that is a colossal pain in the ass on Mac.” Like, yeah, “Try building a system-wide mute key.”It's yeah, that's just a hotkey away on windows and here in Mac land. It's, “But it makes such beautiful sounds. Why would you want them to be quiet?” And it's, yeah, it becomes this back-and-forth dichotomy there. And you can even explain it to iPhones as well and the Android ecosystem where it's, oh, you're going to support the last couple of versions of iOS.Well, as a developer, I don't want to do that. And Apple's position is, “Okay, great.” Almost half of the mobile users on the planet will be upgrading because they're in the ecosystem. Do you want us to be able to sell things those people are not? And they're at a point of scale where they get to dictate those terms.On some level, there are benefits to it and others, it is intensely frustrating. I don't know what the right answer is on the level of permanence on that level of platform. I only have slightly better ideas around the position of APIs. I will say that when AWS deprecates something, they reach out individually to affected customers, on some level, and invariably, when they say, “This is going to be deprecated as of August 31,” or whenever it is, yeah, it is going to slip at least twice in almost every case, just because they're not going to turn off a service that is revenue-bearing or critical-load-bearing for customers without massive amounts of notice and outreach, and in some cases according to rumor, having engineers reach out to help restructure things so it's not as big of a burden on customers. That's a level of customer focus that I don't think most other companies are capable of matching.Allen: I think that comes with the size and the history of Amazon. And one of the things that they're doing right now, we've used Amazon Cloud Cams for years, in my house. We use them as baby monitors. And they—Corey: Yea, I saw this I did something very similar with Nest. They didn't have the Cloud Cam at the right time that I was looking at it. And they just announced that they're going to be deprecating. They're withdrawing them for sale. They're not going to support them anymore. Which, oh at Amazon—we're not offering this anymore. But you tell the story; what are they offering existing customers?Allen: Yeah, so slightly upset about it because I like my Cloud Cams and I don't want to have to take them off the wall or wherever they are to replace them with something else. But what they're doing is, you know, they gave me—or they gave all the customers about eight months head start. I think they're going to be taking them offline around Thanksgiving this year, just mid-November. And what they said is as compensation for you, we're going to send you a Blink Cam—a Blink Mini—for every Cloud Cam that you have in use, and then we are going to gift you a year subscription to the Pro for Blink.Corey: That's very reasonable for things that were bought years ago. Meanwhile, I feel like not to be unkind or uncharitable here, but I use Nest Cams. And that's a Google product. I half expected if they ever get deprecated, I'll find out because Google just turns it off in the middle of the night—Allen: [laugh].Corey: —and I wake up and have to read a blog post somewhere that they put an update on Nest Cams, the same way they killed Google Reader once upon a time. That's slightly unfair, but the fact that joke even lands does say a lot about Google's reputation in this space.Allen: For sure.Corey: One last topic I want to talk with you about before we call it a show is that at the time of this recording, you recently had a blog post titled, “What does the Future Hold for Serverless?” Summarize that for me. Where do you see this serverless movement—if you'll forgive the term—going?Allen: So, I'm going to start at the end. I'm going to work back a little bit on what needs to happen for us to get there. I have a feeling that in the future—I'm going to be vague about how far in the future this is—that we'll finally have a satisfied promise of all you're going to write in the future is business logic. And what does that mean? I think what can end up happening, given the right focus, the right companies, the right feedback, at the right time, is we can write code as developers and have that get pushed up into the cloud.And a phrase that I know Jeremy Daly likes to say ‘infrastructure from code,' where it provisions resources in the cloud for you based on your use case. I've developed an application and it gets pushed up in the cloud at the time of deploying it, optimized resource allocation. Over time, what will happen—with my future vision—is when you get production traffic going through, maybe it's spiky, maybe it's consistently at a scale that outperforms the resources that it originally provisioned. We can have monitoring tools that analyze that and pick that out, find the anomalies, find the standard patterns, and adjust that infrastructure that it deployed for you automatically, where it's based on your production traffic for what it created, optimizes it for you. Which is something that you can't do on an initial deployment right now. You can put what looks best on paper, but once you actually get traffic through your application, you realize that, you know, what was on paper might not be correct.Corey: You ever noticed that whiteboard diagrams never show the reality, and they're always aspirational, and they miss certain parts? And I used to think that this was the symptom I had from working at small, scrappy companies because you know what, those big tech companies, everything they build is amazing and awesome. I know it because I've seen their conference talks. But I've been a consultant long enough now, and for a number of those companies, to realize that nope, everyone's infrastructure is basically a trash fire at any given point in time. And it works almost in spite of itself, rather than because of it.There is no golden path where everything is shiny, new and beautiful. And that, honestly, I got to say, it was really [laugh] depressing when I first discovered it. Like, oh, God, even these really smart people who are so intelligent they have to have extra brain packs bolted to their chests don't have the magic answer to all of this. The rest of us are just screwed, then. But we find ways to make it work.Allen: Yep. There's a quote, I wish I remembered who said it, but it was a military quote where, “No battle plan survives impact with the enemy—first contact with the enemy.” It's kind of that way with infrastructure diagrams. We can draw it out however we want and then you turn it on in production. It's like, “Oh, no. That's not right.”Corey: I want to mix the metaphors there and say, yeah, no architecture survives your first fight with a customer. Like, “Great, I don't think that's quite what they're trying to say.” It's like, “What, you don't attack your customers? Pfft, what's your customer service line look like?” Yeah, it's… I think you're onto something.I think that inherently everything beyond the V1 design of almost anything is an emergent property where this is what we learned about it by running it and putting traffic through it and finding these problems, and here's how it wound up evolving to account for that.Allen: I agree. I don't have anything to add on that.Corey: [laugh]. Fair enough. I really want to thank you for taking so much time out of your day to talk about how you view these things. If people want to learn more, where is the best place to find you?Allen: Twitter is probably the best place to find me: @AllenHeltonDev. I have that username on all the major social platforms, so if you want to find me on LinkedIn, same thing: AllenHeltonDev. My blog is always open as well, if you have any feedback you'd like to give there: readysetcloud.io.Corey: And we will, of course, put links to that in the show notes. Thanks again for spending so much time talking to me. I really appreciate it.Allen: Yeah, this was fun. This was a lot of fun. I love talking shop.Corey: It shows. And it's nice to talk about things I don't spend enough time thinking about. Allen Helton, cloud architect at Tyler Technologies. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an angry comment that I will reject because it was not written in valid XML.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

City of Johannesburg Public Safety MMC David Tembe has made a commitment to the people of Eldorado Park in Johannesburg to deploy the necessary resources in the fight against crime. Tembe says he will draft an operational plan to ensure that criminality is dealt with. He visited the area following a number of murders in recent days. This, is as residents camp outside a local police station, demanding that more officials be deployed to combat gun-related crimes. Elvis Presslin spoke to City of Johannesburg Public Safety MMC David Tembe now joins us on the line... 

Grind inside the gym long enough and you soon must consider the role of recovery. Recovery ranges from passive rest periods and passive nutrition to active-passive methods like cryo, hyperbarics and massage to active means like recovery jogging. You safest bet hinges on the stockpile of the handhelds: massage guns, nutritional supplements and recovery ephemera lingering in your gym bag or bouncing in your back seat.    Among these handhelds, the massage guns have become near ubiquitous in the gym. Access to one of these is virtual guarantee despite where you are in your fitness so take advantage.    Your permutation of recovery doesnt have to include everything but should include so nutrition too.    Massage gun basics Heat Hydration

Guest BioDavid Crysler - "My passion for helping business leaders comes from growing up in an entrepreneurial household. Both of my parents have owned and continue to own their own businesses. Growing up in that environment taught me many valuable lessons, including what it meant to work hard in your business. It was an easy lesson to learn because I saw it every day. My parents would regularly leave before my school day started and come home well into the evening. We also spent a lot of weekends “at the shop.” My parents were involved in every aspect of their businesses. It was what got their business to where it was, but it was also what was holding them back. I couldn't see that at the time, though; I just thought that's what everyone does who owns a business."Max Krug - "Work with your organization's management team and staff to improve operational performance that leads to a healthier income statement and balance sheet. Develop an executable Operational Excellence strategy and associated tactics together with your management team that provides your organization with a decisive competitive advantage necessary to achieve sustainable profits into the future. Deploy the latest Operational Excellence methodologies and reduce fire-fighting and chaos that will allow your team to focus on the execution of the strategy necessary to take the business to the next level of performance."How can YOU make a difference?Vlad is back and is asking questions again this week!We are joined by David Crysler and Max Krug, talking all things Operations, Excellence, how small changes can make breakthrough improvements, and more.Our goal is to help tell you what you can do to make a difference in your facility...Plus some things to stay away from.Buckle up for a jam-packed conversation.Manufacturing Hub Episode 76. A special thank you to Phoenix Contact USA for sponsoring this month and for all your support!Connect with Us Max Krug David Crysler Vlad Romanov Dave Griffith Manufacturing Hub Let Us Know What You ThinkIf you enjoyed the show, it would mean the world to us if you could leave us a review: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/manufacturing-hub/id1546805573#automation #manufacturing #operations

Neste episódio, que é o último da 2ª temporada, falamos sobre a posição de DevOps e todas as suas variações, os medos de “deployar”, além dos tipos e ferramentas mais comuns para um deploy. 29:23 – NA PRÁTICA 32:21 – DICA TECH Livro: The DevOps Handbook - por Patrick Debois Continuous Delivery – por Jez Humble e David Farley Filme: Piratas da Informática – 1999 - Drama/Docudrama - 1h37m Site: Guia Foca - https://www.guiafoca.org/ DevMedia - https://www.devmedia.com.br/ Roadmap SH - https://roadmap.sh/ Veja as nossas vagas para Devs e mais: http://engdb.me/VbFv9 Siga nossas redes: LinkedIn: @engineeringbr Instagram: @engineeringbr Youtube: @engineeringbrasil Blog: http://blog.engdb.com.br/

In hour 3 we defy the laws of mathematics as Jerry Jones attempts to convince us that 1+1= 3. Next Tobin reveals what he's looking forward to most this Sunday when the Phins take on the Pats. Spoiler alert: "Deploy the Genius". We close the hour out with our Wednesday tradition "Rats off a Ship!"

How to Deploy a 10-km Interferometric Radio Telescope on the Moon with Just Four Tethered Robots by Patrick McGarey et al. on Tuesday 06 September The Far-side Array for Radio Science Investigations of the Dark ages and Exoplanets (FARSIDE) is a proposed mission concept to the lunar far side that seeks to deploy and operate an array of 128 dual-polarization, dipole antennas over a region of 100 square kilometers. The resulting interferometric radio telescope would provide unprecedented radio images of distant star systems, allowing for the investigation of faint radio signatures of coronal mass ejections and energetic particle events and could also lead to the detection of magnetospheres around exoplanets within their parent star's habitable zone. Simultaneously, FARSIDE would also measure the "Dark Ages" of the early Universe at a global 21-cm signal across a range of red shifts (z approximately 50-100). Each discrete antenna node in the array is connected to a central hub (located at the lander) via a communication and power tether. Nodes are driven by cold=operable electronics that continuously monitor an extremely wide-band of frequencies (200 kHz to 40 MHz), which surpass the capabilities of Earth-based telescopes by two orders of magnitude. Achieving this ground-breaking capability requires a robust deployment strategy on the lunar surface, which is feasible with existing, high TRL technologies (demonstrated or under active development) and is capable of delivery to the surface on next-generation commercial landers, such as Blue Origin's Blue Moon Lander. This paper presents an antenna packaging, placement, and surface deployment trade study that leverages recent advances in tethered mobile robots under development at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which are used to deploy a flat, antenna-embedded, tape tether with optical communication and power transmission capabilities. arXiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/http://arxiv.org/abs/2209.02216v1

Episode 46 is a hasty episode covering the latest US Army IVAS news.  + who can resist an F35B story?

Today's BONUS pod is brought to you by Vroom: With Vroom, you can buy a car entirely online, and have it delivered straight to you, so you never have to go to a dealership again. So, next time you need to buy a car, just grab your phone, go to Vroom.com, and check out thousands of great cars. We hopped on LockedOn Diamondbacks late last week to discuss the Corbin Carroll promotion, how to arrange the young outfielders in Arizona, and ranked the top prospects remaining for the Dbacks. Additionally, has the 2024 ETA for top prospect SS Jordan Lawlar moved up?  Find and follow LockedOn MLB Prospects on your favorite podcast platforms: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/locked-on-mlb-prospects/id1525225214 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2wzJIf26tGgVbB7rsoKyLD Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/show/locked-on-mlb-prospects Follow along with LockedOn MLB Prospects host Lindsay Crosby as we follow 120+ affiliated teams throughout the 2022 season! From prospect call-ups to impactful trades to the ever evolving battle for minor league living and working conditions, Lindsay is covering it all on five days a week. Available exclusively on the Locked On Podcast Network. Follow the show on twitter @LockedOnFarm and email your Mailbag Monday questions to LockedOnMLBProspects@gmail.com Follow Lindsay for up to the minute details on all things Minor League Baseball: On Twitter: https://twitter.com/CrosbyBaseball Support Us By Supporting Our Sponsors! Built Bar Built Bar is a protein bar that tastes like a candy bar. Go to builtbar.com and use promo code “LOCKEDON15,” and you'll get 15% off your next order. BetOnline BetOnline.net has you covered this season with more props, odds and lines than ever before. BetOnline – Where The Game Starts! LinkedIn LinkedIn Jobs helps you find the candidates you want to talk to, faster. Did you know every week, nearly 40 million job seekers visit LinkedIn? Post your job for free at LinkedIn.com/LOCKEDONMLB. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We had an exciting field trip today to tour the new Deloitte Greenhouse facility in Houston. While there, we had the opportunity to visit with Amy Chronis, Vice Chair, US Oil, Gas & Chemicals ("OG&C") Leader, and Houston Managing Partner. Amy has twenty years of experience as a Partner at Deloitte and leads the strategic direction of Deloitte's OG&C practice and Houston office, a group of over 5,000 professionals. The Greenhouse tour was fascinating, and we had a wonderful time with Amy and her team. Our discussion with Amy was very timely given the release of Deloitte's recent report, "Striking the balance: How and where will oil and gas producers deploy their cash?" We kick off the conversation with an overview of the Greenhouse, inspiration for the space, and Deloitte's vision for creating a one-stop experience for organizations to "ideate," engage, build strategies, create prototypes, and address challenges in a collaborative and creative space. We then dug into the key findings and suggestions from "Striking the Balance." We talked with Amy on a wide range of topics covered in Deloitte's analysis, including the original inspiration for the report, the shale industry's remarkable "cash rally" after a negative decade, the four archetypes the Deloitte team sees for strategies going forward, various reactions to the report so far, the great progress oil and gas has made in reducing Scope 1 emissions, investor attitudes, and more. It was a far ranging and thoroughly enjoyable discussion. To kick us off, Mike Bradley talked about another volatile week in the markets. As you will hear, Mike touches on more than a handful of variables weighing on the market, with the Fed being a really large one of course. Mike also gets into some of the proposals coming out of Europe to deal with the energy crisis there. Colin Fenton picked up on the Fed commentary and also the EU power pricing discussion. He noted in both Europe and in the US, too many government officials are talking about heavy-handed and potentially counter-productive government energy intervention.  We want to thank Amy and the Deloitte team for the tour, the discussion, and the hospitality. We hope you all enjoy the conversation as much as we did! 

For over a decade, SEO experts have relied on strategies like on-page optimization, blogging and email outreach for links. But, in 2022, these techniques are losing their effectiveness because they rely on coordination with a web developer, big content budgets, and spammy email outreach. Fortunately, there's a better way to grow organic traffic: purpose-driven SEO! Join 20-year SEO expert Dale Bertrand to get a step-by-step playbook on how to apply this effective new strategy to any B2B or B2C website to generate high-quality organic visitors.Takeaways:How Google's AI is tuned to amplify brands that resonate with online consumersHow to craft a purpose-driven SEO strategy that resonates with search enginesCase studies of leading brands who practice purpose-driven SEOCheck out upcoming DigiMarCon Digital Marketing, Media and Advertising Conferences & Exhibitions Worldwide at https://digimarcon.com/events/

Podcast Episode Re-Deployment **100

"Quiet quitting" may same new and shocking, but it's an age-old concept. It's about setting your terms at work and prioritizing your desired lifestyle. In this episode, we cut through the noise and discuss practical scenarios for implementing this strategy. Develop advanced-level "quiet quitting" skills in our cohort course: Uncaged Academy. Access the newsletter: learn Uncaged Secrets Show website: UncageYourself.FM *** TIMESTAMPS 02:14 Framing 02:29 What Quiet Quitting is 03:41 The argument for it 06:59 The argument against it 09:46 Real-world scenarios 16:10 Healthy person → healthy worker *** TAKEAWAYS 1. Quiet Quitting isn't about actually quitting or being lazy. We're not glamorizing mediocrity here. 2. At the core, it's about establishing boundaries at work, but you need a more comprehensive approach if you're going to create the life you want. 3. Not everyone wants to be an "elite athlete" at work, so we don't need to expect everyone to operate in an elite way. In contrast, choosing to be "average" at work can create capacity for spending time and energy on what excites you. 4. It generally makes sense to "go hard" early in your career to establish a foothold (resume, financial security, etc.). Once you're 10+ years in, you have much more leeway to back off and prioritize lifestyle. 5. Quiet Quitting (or whatever term you use) is another tool in your toolbox. Deploy it wisely as you methodically create more freedom in your life. *** RESOURCES Connect w/ Matt on LinkedIn Follow on Twitter @MatthewRDoan Check the show on YouTube

No episódio de hoje trouxemos novamente a equipe incrível de machine learning e agora para aprofundarmos mais tecnicamente o papo do episódio anterior, onde trouxemos o conceito básico sobre essa tecnologia e como a usamos aqui no Luizalabs e Magalu. Então chega+ e bora ouvir esse episódio, que tá muito massa! E se você não ouviu o episódio anterior, voltá lá e ouve que também tá massa demais! --- Imagem clustering https://scikit-learn.org/stable/_images/sphx_glr_plot_cluster_comparison_001.png Dicas: Lib python para criação de modelos: https://scikit-learn.org/ Lib para processamento de dados: https://pandas.pydata.org/ Frameworks para processamento de dados em larga escala: https://spark.apache.org/ https://www.dask.org/ Deploy de modelos: https://www.seldon.io/ https://www.bentoml.com/ --- Edição completa por Rádiofobia Podcast e Multimídia: https://radiofobia.com.br/ --- Nos siga no Twitter e no Instagram: @luizalabs @cabecadelab Dúvidas, cabeçadas e sugestões, mande e-mail para o cabecadelab@luizalabs.com Participantes: Milene Mancini Vasconcelos | instagram.com/m_mvasconcelos/ André Monteiro | linkedin.com/in/triptofano/ Júlia Schubert | linkedin.com/in/julia-schubert-peixoto/ Leonardo Silva | linkedin.com/in/leonardodepaulaesilva/ Victor Alvarez | linkedin.com/in/vmartinezalvarez/

For over a decade, SEO experts have relied on strategies like on-page optimization, blogging and email outreach for links. But, in 2022, these techniques are losing their effectiveness because they rely on coordination with a web developer, big content budgets, and spammy email outreach. Fortunately, there's a better way to grow organic traffic: purpose-driven SEO! Join 20-year SEO expert Dale Bertrand to get a step-by-step playbook on how to apply this effective new strategy to any B2B or B2C website to generate high-quality organic visitors.Takeaways:How Google's AI is tuned to amplify brands that resonate with online consumersHow to craft a purpose-driven SEO strategy that resonates with search enginesCase studies of leading brands who practice purpose-driven SEOCheck out upcoming DigiMarCon Digital Marketing, Media and Advertising Conferences & Exhibitions Worldwide at https://digimarcon.com/events/

As today's IT leaders, you are living the reality of a changing world every day. To adapt, you must build new ways to work and conduct business. Modernizing your infrastructure is the first step, but true IT agility requires a smarter operational model. Learn how Cisco delivers best-in-class technologies with powerful wireless platforms that are more automated, more intelligent, more secure, more flexible and more sustainable. We'll demonstrate how you can help your IT team efficiently deliver the most resilient high performance network experiences that rapidly adapt to changing business needs. (7:45) Why are there two different code bases? (11:21) What about the MS390? (13:10) Do you see additional models being added to this? Learn more: https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/enterprise-networks/802-11ax-solution/index.html?dtid=opdcsnc001469 https://techhouse570.wordpress.com/2022/06/18/techhouse570-cisco-live-2022-highlights-meraki-catalyst-916x-oh-my/ https://meraki.cisco.com/form/instant-demo/?dtid=opdcsnc001469 https://documentation.meraki.com/Cloud_Monitoring_for_Catalyst?dtid=opdcsnc001469 Follow us: https://twitter.com/ciscochampion Hosts Girard Kavelines (twitter.com/GKavelines) Helient Systems, Managed Services Systems Analyst Sam Clements (twitter.com/Samuel_clements) Presidio, Engineering Director Ben Story (twitter.com/ntwrk80), RedEye Network Solutions, Sr. Network Security Engineer Guests Alex Burger, Cisco, Technical Marketing Leader, Meraki Product Management Nicholas Swiatecki (twitter.com/swiatecki), Cisco, Engineering Product Manager Moderator Amilee San Juan (twitter.com/amileesan1), Cisco, Customer Voices and Cisco Champion Program

The entire infrastructure of our economy depends on a reliable grid. And the work we are doing to decarbonize will only increase demands on the grid moving forward.So, how do we look into the future? What are we doing to upgrade the grid? To make it stronger and more adaptable? And most importantly, how do we get solar and wind energy facilities connected to the grid in a timely manner?Jay Caspary serves as Vice President at Grid Strategies, a power sector consulting firm based in Washington, DC. With 40 years' experience in transmission planning and renewables integration, Jay provides policy makers, grid planners and utilities with the sound engineering analyses they need to transform our grid for the evolving resource mix.On this episode of Clean Power Hour, Jay joins Tim to discuss his top three priorities for building a more robust but clean grid, describing his vision for a national macrogrid that makes use of existing infrastructure and grid-enhancing technologies. Jay explains the benefits of high-voltage direct current systems, exploring why it makes sense to put HVDC infrastructure underground and why we're slow to adopt the technology here in the US.Listen in to understand what's behind the moratorium on solar at PJM and learn what FERC is doing to reform the transmission planning process and accelerate the decarbonization of the grid.Key TakeawaysJay's career in transmission planning and wind integrationJay's top 3 priorities for building a more robust but clean grid1.     Shared vision of national macrogrid2.     Take advantage of aging infrastructure3.     Deploy grid-enhancing technologiesThe goals of the DOE's Building a Better Grid Initiative The benefits of high-voltage direct current systemsWhy we're slow to adopt HVDC here in the USWhat's behind the moratorium on solar at PJMHow FERC is reforming the transmission planning processWhy it makes sense to put HVDC infrastructure undergroundConnect with JayGrid StrategiesEmail jcaspary@gridstrategiesllc.comConnect with Tim  Clean Power Hour  Clean Power Hour on YouTubeTim on TwitterTim on LinkedIn Email tgmontague@gmail.com Review Clean Power Hour on Apple PodcastsResources‘Advanced Conductors on Existing Transmission Corridors to Accelerate Low Cost Decarbonization' by Jay Caspary and Jesse SchneiderPJM Solar MoratoriumFERC Order No. 888FERC NOPR on Transmission Planning & Cost AllocationClean DisruptCorporate sponsors who share our mission to speed the energy transition are invited to check out https://www.cleanpowerhour.com/support/ Twice a week we highlight the tools, technologies and innovators that are making the clean energy transition a reality - on Apple,

About AlexAlex holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from UC San Diego, and has spent over a decade building high-performance, robust data management and processing systems. As an early member of a couple fast-growing startups, he's had the opportunity to wear a lot of different hats, serving at various times as an individual contributor, tech lead, manager, and executive. He also had a brief stint as a Cloud Economist with the Duckbill Group, helping AWS customers save money on their AWS bills. He's currently a freelance data engineering consultant, helping his clients build, manage, and maintain their data infrastructure. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.Links Referenced: Company website: https://bitsondisk.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/alexras LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexras/ TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: I come bearing ill tidings. Developers are responsible for more than ever these days. Not just the code that they write, but also the containers and the cloud infrastructure that their apps run on. Because serverless means it's still somebody's problem. And a big part of that responsibility is app security from code to cloud. And that's where our friend Snyk comes in. Snyk is a frictionless security platform that meets developers where they are - Finding and fixing vulnerabilities right from the CLI, IDEs, Repos, and Pipelines. Snyk integrates seamlessly with AWS offerings like code pipeline, EKS, ECR, and more! As well as things you're actually likely to be using. Deploy on AWS, secure with Snyk. Learn more at Snyk.co/scream That's S-N-Y-K.co/screamCorey: DoorDash had a problem. As their cloud-native environment scaled and developers delivered new features, their monitoring system kept breaking down. In an organization where data is used to make better decisions about technology and about the business, losing observability means the entire company loses their competitive edge. With Chronosphere, DoorDash is no longer losing visibility into their applications suite. The key? Chronosphere is an open-source compatible, scalable, and reliable observability solution that gives the observability lead at DoorDash business, confidence, and peace of mind. Read the full success story at snark.cloud/chronosphere. That's snark.cloud slash C-H-R-O-N-O-S-P-H-E-R-E.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. I am joined this week by a returning guest, who… well, it's a little bit complicated and more than a little bittersweet. Alex Rasmussen was a principal cloud economist here at The Duckbill Group until he committed an unforgivable sin. That's right. He gave his notice. Alex, thank you for joining me here, and what have you been up to, traitor?Alex: [laugh]. Thank you for having me back, Corey.Corey: Of course.Alex: At time of recording, I am restarting my freelance data engineering business, which was dormant for the sadly brief time that I worked with you all at The Duckbill Group. And yeah, so that's really what I've been up to for the last few days. [laugh].Corey: I want to be very clear that I am being completely facetious when I say this. When someone is considering, “Well, am I doing what I really want to be doing?” And if the answer is no, too many days in a row, yeah, you should find something that aligns more with what you want to do. And anyone who's like, “Oh, you're leaving? Traitor, how could you do that?” Yeah, those people are trash. You don't want to work with trash.I feel I should clarify that this is entirely in jest and I could not be happier that you are finding things that are more aligned with aspects of what you want to be doing. I am serious when I say that, as a company, we are poorer for your loss. You have been transformative here across a number of different axes that we will be going into over the course of this episode.Alex: Well, thank you very much, I really appreciate that. And I came to a point where I realized, you know, the old saying, “You don't know what you got till it's gone?” I realized, after about six months of working with Duckbill Group that I missed building stuff, I missed building data systems, I missed being a full-time data person. And I'm really excited to get back to that work, even though I'll definitely miss working with everybody on the team. So yeah.Corey: There are a couple of things that I found really notable about your time working with us. One of them was that even when you wound up applying to work here, you were radically different than—well, let's be direct here—than me. We are almost polar opposites in a whole bunch of ways. I have an eighth-grade education; you have a PhD in computer science and engineering from UCSD. And you are super-deep into the world of data, start to finish, whereas I have spent my entire career on things that are stateless because I am accident prone, and when you accidentally have a problem with the database, you might not have a company anymore, but we can all laugh as we reprovision the web server fleet.We just went in very different directions as far as what we found interesting throughout our career, more or less. And we were not quite sure how it was going to manifest in the context of cloud economics. And I can say now that we have concluded the experiment, that from my perspective, it went phenomenally well. Because the exact areas that I am weak at are where you excel. And, on some level, I would say that you're not necessarily as weak in your weak areas as I am in mine, but we want to reinforce it and complementing each other rather than, “Well, we now have a roomful of four people who are all going to yell at you about the exact same thing.” We all went in different directions, which I thought was really neat.Alex: I did too. And honestly, I learned a tremendous, tremendous amount in my time at Duckbill Group. I think the window into just how complex and just how vast the ecosystem of services within AWS is, and kind of how they all ping off of each other in these very complicated ways was really fascinating, fascinating stuff. But also just an insight into just what it takes to get stuff done when you're talking with—you know, so most of my clientele to date have been small to medium-sized businesses, you know, small as two people; as big as a few hundred people. But I wasn't working with Fortune 1000 companies like Duckbill Group regularly does, and an insight into just, number one, what it takes to get things done inside of those organizations, but also what it takes to get things done with AWS when you're talking about, you know, for instance, contracts that are tens, or hundreds of millions of dollars in total contract value. And just what that involves was just completely eye-opening for me.Corey: From my perspective, what I found—I guess, in hindsight, it should have been more predictable than it was—but you talk about having a background and an abiding passion for the world of data, and I'm sitting here thinking, that's great. We have all this data in the form of the Cost and Usage Reports and the bills, and I forgot the old saw that yeah, if it fits in RAM, it's not a big data problem. And yeah, in most cases, what we have tends to fit in RAM. I guess you don't tend to find things interesting until Microsoft Excel gives up and calls uncle.Alex: I don't necessarily know that that's true. I think that there are plenty of problems to be had in the it fits in RAM space, precisely because so much of it fits in RAM. And I think that, you know, particularly now that, you know—I think there's it's a very different world that we live in from the world that we lived in ten years ago, where ten years ago—Corey: And right now I'm talking to you on a computer with 128 gigs of RAM, and it—Alex: Well, yeah.Corey: —that starts to look kind of big data-y.Alex: Well, not only that, but I think on the kind of big data side, right? When you had to provision your own Hadoop cluster, and after six months of weeping tears of blood, you managed to get it going, right, at the end of that process, you went, “Okay, I've got this big, expensive thing and I need this group of specialists to maintain it all. Now, what the hell do I do?” Right? In the intervening decade, largely due to the just crushing dominance of the public clouds, that problem—I wouldn't call that problem solved, but for all practical purposes, at all reasonable scales, there's a solution that you can just plug in a credit card and buy.And so, now the problem, I think, becomes much more high level, right, than it used to be. Used to be talking about how well you know, how do I make this MapReduce job as efficient as it possibly can be made? Nobody really cares about that anymore. You've got a query planner; it executes a query; it'll probably do better than you can. Now, I think the big challenges are starting to be more in the area of, again, “How do I know what I have? How do I know who's touched it recently? How do I fix it when it breaks? How do I even organize an organization that can work effectively with data at petabyte scale and say anything meaningful about it?”And so, you know, I think that the landscape is shifting. One of the reasons why I love this field so much is that the landscape is shifting very rapidly and as soon as we think, “Ah yes. We have solved all of the problems.” Then immediately, there are a hundred new problems to solve.Corey: For me, what I found, I guess, one of the most eye-opening things about having you here is your actual computer science background. Historically, we have biased for folks who have come up from the ops side of the world. And that lends itself to a certain understanding. And, yes, I've worked with developers before; believe it or not, I do understand how folks tend to think in that space. I have not a complete naive fool when it comes to these things.But what I wasn't prepared for was the nature of our internal, relatively casual conversations about a bunch of different things, where we'll be on a Zoom chat or something, and you will just very casually start sharing your screen, fire up a Jupyter Notebook and start writing code as you're talking to explain what it is you're talking about and watching it render in real time. And I'm sitting here going, “Huh, I can't figure out whether we should, like, wind up giving him a raise or try to burn him as a witch.” I could really see it going either way. Because it was magic and transformative from my perspective.Alex: Well, thank you. I mean, I think that part of what I am very grateful for is that I've had an opportunity to spend a considerable period of time in kind of both the academic and industrial spaces. I got a PhD, basically kept going to school until somebody told me that I had to stop, and then spent a lot of time at startups and had to do a lot of different kinds of work just to keep the wheels attached to the bus. And so, you know, when I arrived at Duckbill Group, I kind of looked around and said, “Okay, cool. There's all the stuff that's already here. That's awesome. What can I do to make that better?” And taking my lens so to speak, and applying it to those problems, and trying to figure out, like, “Okay, well as a cloud economist, what do I need to do right now that sucks? And how do I make it not suck?”Corey: It probably involves a Managed NAT Gateway.Alex: Whoa, God. And honestly, like, I spent a lot of time developing a bunch of different tools that were really just there in the service of that. Like, take my job, make it easier. And I'm really glad that you liked what you saw there.Corey: It was interesting watching how we wound up working together on things. Like, there's a blog post that I believe is out by the time this winds up getting published—but if not, congratulations on listening to this, you get a sneak preview—where I was looking at the intelligent tiering changes in pricing, where any object below 128 kilobytes does not have a monitoring charge attached to it, and above it, it does. And it occurred to me on a baseline gut level that, well wait a minute, it feels like there is some object sizes, where regardless of how long it lives in storage and transition to something cheaper, it will never quite offset that fee. So, instead of having intelligent tiering for everything, that there's some cut-off point below which you should not enable intelligent tiering because it will always cost you more than it can possibly save you.And I mentioned that to you and I had to do a lot of articulating with my hands because it's all gut feelings stuff and this stuff is complicated at the best of times. And your response was, “Huh.” Then it felt like ten minutes later you came back with a multi-page blog post written—again—in a Python notebook that has a dynamic interactive graph that shows the breakeven and cut-off points, a deep dive math showing exactly where in certain scenarios it is. And I believe the final takeaway was somewhere between 148 to 161 kilobytes, somewhere in that range is where you want to draw the cut-off. And I'm just looking at this and marveling, on some level.Alex: Oh, thanks. To be fair, it took a little bit more than ten minutes. I think it was something where it kind of went through a couple of stages where at first I was like, “Well, I bet I could model that.” And then I'm like, “Well, wait a minute. There's actually, like—if you can kind of put the compute side of this all the way to the side and just remove all API calls, it's a closed form thing. Like, you can just—this is math. I can just describe this with math.”And cue the, like, Beautiful Mind montage where I'm, like, going onto the whiteboard and writing a bunch of stuff down trying to remember the point intercept form of a line from my high school algebra days. And at the end, we had that blog post. And the reason why I kind of dove into that headfirst was just this, I have this fascination for understanding how all this stuff fits together, right? I think so often, what you see is a bunch of little point things, and somebody says, “You should use this at this point, for this reason.” And there's not a lot in the way of synthesis, relatively speaking, right?Like, nobody's telling you what the kind of underlying thing is that makes it so that this thing is better in these circumstances than this other thing is. And without that, it's a bunch of, kind of, anecdotes and a bunch of kind of finger-in-the-air guesses. And there's a part of that, that just makes me sad, fundamentally, I guess, that humans built all of this stuff; we should know how all of it fits together. And—Corey: You would think, wouldn't you?Alex: Well, but the thing is, it's so enormously complicated and it's been developed over such an enormously long period of time, that—or at least, you know, relatively speaking—it's really, really hard to kind of get that and extract it out. But I think when you do, it's very satisfying when you can actually say like, “Oh no, no, we've actually done—we've done the analysis here. Like, this is exactly what you ought to be doing.” And being able to give that clear answer and backing it up with something substantial is, I think, really valuable from the customer's point of view, right, because they don't have to rely on us kind of just doing the finger-in-the-air guess. But also, like, it's valuable overall. It extends the kind of domain where you don't have to think about whether or not you've got the right answer there. Or at least you don't have to think about it as much.Corey: My philosophy has always been that when I have those hunches, they're useful, and it's an indication that there's something to look into here. Where I think it goes completely off the rails is when people, like, “Well, I have a hunch and I have this belief, and I'm not going to evaluate whether or not that belief is still one that is reasonable to hold, or there has been perhaps some new information that it would behoove me to figure out. Nope, I've just decided that I know—I have a hunch now and that's enough and I've done learning.” That is where people get into trouble.And I see aspects of it all the time when talking to clients, for example. People who believe things about their bill that at one point were absolutely true, but now no longer are. And that's one of those things that, to be clear, I see myself doing this. This is not something—Alex: Oh, everybody does, yeah.Corey: —I'm blaming other people for it all. Every once in a while I have to go on a deep dive into our own AWS bill just to reacquaint myself with an understanding of what's going on over there.Alex: Right.Corey: And I will say that one thing that I was firmly convinced was going to happen during your tenure here was that you're a data person; hiring someone like you is the absolute most expensive thing you can ever do with respect to your AWS bill because hey, you're into the data space. During your tenure here, you cut the bill in half. And that surprises me significantly. I want to further be clear that did not get replaced by, “Oh, yeah. How do you cut your AWS bill by so much?” “We moved everything to Snowflake.” No, we did not wind up—Alex: [laugh].Corey: Just moving the data somewhere else. It's like, at some level, “Great. How do I cut the AWS bill by a hundred percent? We migrate it to GCP.” Technically correct; not what the customer is asking for.Alex: Right? Exactly, exactly. I think part of that, too—and this is something that happens in the data part of the space more than anywhere else—it's easy to succumb to shiny object syndrome, right? “Oh, we need a cloud data warehouse because cloud data warehouse, you know? Snowflake, most expensive IPO in the history of time. We got to get on that train.”And, you know, I think one of the things that I know you and I talked about was, you know, where should all this data that we're amassing go? And what should we be optimizing for? And I think one of the things that, you know, the kind of conclusions that we came to there was, well, we're doing some stuff here, that's kind of designed to accelerate queries that don't really need to be accelerated all that much, right? The difference between a query taking 500 milliseconds and 15 seconds, from our point of view, doesn't really matter all that much, right? And that realization alone, kind of collapsed a lot of technical complexity, and that, I will say we at Duckbill Group still espouse, right, is that cloud cost is an architectural problem, it's not a right-sizing your instances problem. And once we kind of got past that architectural problem, then the cost just sort of cratered. And honestly, that was a great feeling, to see the estimate in the billing console go down 47% from last month, and it's like, “Ah, still got it.” [laugh].Corey: It's neat to watch that happen, first off—Alex: For sure.Corey: But it also happened as well, with increasing amounts of utility. There was a new AWS billing page that came out, and I'm sure it meets someone's needs somewhere, somehow, but the things that I always wanted to look at when I want someone to pull up their last month's bill is great, hit the print button—on the old page—and it spits out an exploded pdf of every type of usage across their entire AWS estate. And I can skim through that thing and figure out what the hell's going on at a high level. And this new thing did not let me do that. And that's a concern, not just for the consulting story because with our clients, we have better access than printing a PDF and reading it by hand, but even talking to randos on the internet who were freaking out about an AWS bill, they shouldn't have to trust me enough to give me access into their account. They should be able to get a PDF and send it to me.Well, I was talking with you about this, and again, in what felt like ten minutes, you wound up with a command line tool, run it on an exported CSV of a monthly bill and it spits it out as an HTML page that automatically collapses in and allocates things based upon different groups and service type and usage. And congratulations, you spent ten minutes to create a better billing experience than AWS did. Which feels like it was probably, in fairness to AWS, about seven-and-a-half minutes more time than they spent on it.Alex: Well, I mean, I think that comes back to what we were saying about, you know, not all the interesting problems in data are in data that doesn't fit in RAM, right? I think, in this case, that came from two places. I looked at those PDFs for a number of clients, and there were a few things that just made my brain hurt. And you and Mike and the rest of the folks at Duckbill could stare at the PDF, like, reading the matrix because you've seen so many of them before and go, ah, yes, “Bill spikes here, here, here.” I'm looking at this and it's just a giant grid of numbers.And what I wanted was I wanted to be able to say, like, don't show me the services in alphabetical order; show me the service is organized in descending order by spend. And within that, don't show me the operations in alphabetical order; show me the operations in decreasing order by spend. And while you're at it, group them into a usage type group so that I know what usage type group is the biggest hitter, right? The second reason, frankly, was I had just learned that DuckDB was a thing that existed, and—Corey: Based on the name alone, I was interested.Alex: Oh, it was an incredible stroke of luck that it was named that. And I went, “This thing lets me run SQL queries against CSV files. I bet I can write something really fast that does this without having to bash my head against the syntactic wall that is Pandas.” And at the end of the day, we had something that I was pretty pleased with. But it's one of those examples of, like, again, just orienting the problem toward, “Well, this is awful.”Because I remember when we first heard about the new billing experience, you kind of had pinged me and went, “We might need something to fix this because this is a problem.” And I went, “Oh, yeah, I can build that.” Which is kind of how a lot of what I've done over the last 15 years has been. It's like, “Oh. Yeah, I bet I could build that.” So, that's kind of how that went.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friend EnterpriseDB. EnterpriseDB has been powering enterprise applications with PostgreSQL for 15 years. And now EnterpriseDB has you covered wherever you deploy PostgreSQL on-premises, private cloud, and they just announced a fully-managed service on AWS and Azure called BigAnimal, all one word. Don't leave managing your database to your cloud vendor because they're too busy launching another half-dozen managed databases to focus on any one of them that they didn't build themselves. Instead, work with the experts over at EnterpriseDB. They can save you time and money, they can even help you migrate legacy applications—including Oracle—to the cloud. To learn more, try BigAnimal for free. Go to biganimal.com/snark, and tell them Corey sent you.Corey: The problem that I keep seeing with all this stuff is I think of it in terms of having to work with the tools I'm given. And yeah, I can spin up infrastructure super easily, but the idea of, I'm going to build something that manipulates data and recombines it in a bunch of different ways, that's not something that I have a lot of experience with, so it's not my instinctive, “Oh, I bet there's an easier way to spit this thing out.” And you think in that mode. You effectively wind up automatically just doing those things, almost casually. Which does make a fair bit of sense, when you understand the context behind it, but for those of us who don't live in that space, it's magic.Alex: I've worked in infrastructure in one form or another my entire career, data infrastructure mostly. And one of the things—I heard this from someone and I can't remember who it was, but they said, “When infrastructure works, it's invisible.” When you walk in the room and flip the light switch, the lights come on. And the fact that the lights come on is a minor miracle. I mean, the electrical grid is one of the most sophisticated, globally-distributed engineering systems ever devised, but we don't think about it that way, right?And the flip side of that, unfortunately, is that people really pay attention to infrastructure most when it breaks. But they are two edges of the same proverbial sword. It's like, I know, when I've done a good job, if the thing got built and it stayed built and it silently runs in the background and people forget it exists. That's how I know that I've done a good job. And that's what I aim to do really, everywhere, including with Duckbill Group, and I'm hoping that the stuff that I built hasn't caught on fire quite yet.Corey: The smoke is just the arising of the piles of money it wound up spinning up.Alex: [laugh].Corey: It's like, “Oh yeah, turns out that maybe we shouldn't have built a database out of pure Managed NAT Gateways. Yeah, who knew?”Alex: Right, right. Maybe I shouldn't have filled my S3 bucket with pure unobtainium. That was a bad idea.Corey: One other thing that we do here that I admit I don't talk about very often because people get the wrong idea, but we do analyst projects for vendors from time to time. And the reason I don't say that is, when people hear about analysts, they think about something radically different, and I do not self-identify as an analyst. It's, “Oh, I'm not an analyst.” “Really? Because we have analyst budget.” “Oh, you said analyst. I thought you said something completely different. Yes, insert coin to continue.”And that was fine, but unlike the vast majority of analysts out there, we don't form our opinions based upon talking to clients and doing deeper dive explorations as our primary focus. We're a team of engineers. All right, you have a product. Let's instrument something with it, or use your product for something and we'll see how it goes along the way. And that is something that's hard for folks to contextualize.What was really fun was bringing you into a few of those engagements just because it was interesting; at the start of those calls. “It was all great, Corey is here and—oh, someone else's here. Is this a security problem?” “It's no, no, Alex is with me.” And you start off those calls doing what everyone should do on those calls is, “How can we help?” And then we shut up and listen. Step one, be a good consultant.And then you ask some probing questions and it goes a little bit deeper and a little bit deeper, and by the end of that call, it's like, “Wow, Alex is amazing. I don't know what that Corey clown is doing here, but yeah, having Alex was amazing.” And every single time, it was phenomenal to watch as you, more or less, got right to the heart of their generally data-oriented problems. It was really fun to be able to think about what customers are trying to achieve through the lens that you see the world through.Alex: Well, that's very flattering, first of all. Thank you. I had a lot of fun on those engagements, honestly because it's really interesting to talk to folks who are building these systems that are targeting mass audiences of very deep-pocketed organizations, right? Because a lot of those organizations, the companies doing the building are themselves massive. And they can talk to their customers, but it's not quite the same as it would be if you or I were talking to the customers because, you know, you don't want to tell someone that their baby is ugly.And note, now, to be fair, we under no circumstances were telling people that their baby was ugly, but I think that the thing that is really fun for me is to kind of be able to wear the academic database nerd hat and the practitioner hat simultaneously, and say, like, “I see why you think this thing is really impressive because of this whiz-bang, technical thing that it does, but I don't know that your customers actually care about that. But what they do care about is this other thing that you've done as an ancillary side effect that actually turns out is a much more compelling thing for someone who has to deal with this stuff every day. So like, you should probably be focusing attention on that.” And the thing that I think was really gratifying was when you know that you're meeting someone on their level and you're giving them honest feedback and you're not just telling them, you know, “The Gartner Magic Quadrant says that in order to move up and to the right, you must do the following five features.” But instead saying, like, “I've built these things before, I've deployed them before, I've managed them before. Here's what sucks that you're solving.” And seeing the kind of gears turn in their head is a very gratifying thing for me.Corey: My favorite part of consulting—and I consider analyst style engagements to be a form of consulting as well—is watching someone get it, watching that light go on, and they suddenly see the answer to a problem that's been vexing them I love that.Alex: Absolutely. I mean, especially when you can tell that this is a thing that has been keeping them up at night and you can say, “Okay. I see your problem. I think I understand it. I think I might know how to help you solve it. Let's go solve it together. I think I have a way out.”And you know, that relief, the sense of like, “Oh, thank God somebody knows what they're doing and can help me with this, and I don't have to think about this anymore.” That's the most gratifying part of the job, in my opinion.Corey: For me, it has always been twofold. One, you've got people figuring out how to solve their problem and you've made their situation better for it. But selfishly, the thing I like the most personally has been the thrill you get from solving a puzzle that you've been toying with and finally it clicks. That is the endorphin hit that keeps me going.Alex: Absolutely.Corey: And I didn't expect when I started this place is that every client engagement is different enough that it isn't boring. It's not the same thing 15 times. Which it would be if it were, “Hi, thanks for having us. You haven't bought some RIs. You should buy some RIs. And I'm off.” It… yeah, software can do that. That's not interesting.Alex: Right. Right. But I think that's the other thing about both cloud economics and data engineering, they kind of both fit into that same mold. You know, what is it? “All happy families are alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” I'm butchering Chekhov, I'm sure. But like—if it's even Chekhov.But the general kind of shape of it is this: everybody's infrastructure is different. Everybody's organization is different. Everybody's optimizing for a different point in the space. And being able to come in and say, “I know that you could just buy a thing that tells you to buy some RIs, but it's not going to know who you are; it's not going to know what your business is; it's not going to know what your challenges are; it's not going to know what your roadmap is. Tell me all those things and then I'll tell you what you shouldn't pay attention to and what you should.”And that's incredibly, incredibly valuable. It's why, you know, it's why they pay us. And that's something that you can never really automate away. I mean, you hear this in data all the time, right? “Oh, well, once all the infrastructure is managed, then we won't need data infrastructure people anymore.”Well, it turns out all the infrastructure is managed now, and we need them more than we ever did. And it's not because this managed stuff is harder to run; it's that the capabilities have increased to the point that they're getting used more. And the more that they're getting used, the more complicated that use becomes, and the more you need somebody who can think at the level of what does the business need, but also, what the heck is this thing doing when I hit the run key? You know? And that I think, is something, particularly in AWS where I mean, my God, the amount and variety and complexity of stuff that can be deployed in service of an organization's use case is—it can't be contained in a single brain.And being able to make sense of that, being able to untangle that and figure out, as you say, the kind of the aha moment, the, “Oh, we can take all of this and just reduce it down to nothing,” is hugely, hugely gratifying and valuable to the customer, I'd like to think.Corey: I think you're right. And again, having been doing this in varying capacities for over five years—almost six now; my God—the one thing has been constant throughout all of that is, our number one source for new business has always been word of mouth. And there have been things that obviously contribute to that, and there are other vectors we have as well, but by and large, when someone winds up asking a colleague or a friend or an acquaintance about the problem of their AWS bill, and the response almost universally, is, “Yeah, you should go talk to The Duckbill Group,” that says something that validates that we aren't going too far wrong with what we're approaching. Now that you're back on the freelance data side, I'm looking forward to continuing to work with you, if through no other means and being your customer, just because you solve very interesting and occasionally very specific problems that we periodically see. There's no reason that we can't bring specialists in—and we do from time to time—to look at very specific aspects of a customer problem or a customer constraint, or, in your case for example, a customer data set, which, “Hmm, I have some thoughts on here, but just optimizing what storage class that three petabytes of data lives within seems like it's maybe step two, after figuring what the heck is in it.” Baseline stuff. You know, the place that you live in that I hand-wave over because I'm scared of the complexity.Alex: I am very much looking forward to continuing to work with you on this. There's a whole bunch of really, really exciting opportunities there. And in terms of word of mouth, right, same here. Most of my inbound clientele came to me through word of mouth, especially in the first couple years. And I feel like that's how you know that you're doing it right.If someone hires you, that's one thing, and if someone refers you, to their friends, that's validation that they feel comfortable enough with you and with the work that you can do that they're not going to—you know, they're not going to pass their friends off to someone who's a chump, right? And that makes me feel good. Every time I go, “Oh, I heard from such and such that you're good at this. You want to help me with this?” Like, “Yes, absolutely.”Corey: I've really appreciated the opportunity to work with you and I'm super glad I got the chance to get to know you, including as a person, not just as the person who knows the data, but there's a human being there, too, believe it or not.Alex: Weird. [laugh].Corey: And that's the important part. If people want to learn more about what you're up to, how you think about these things, potentially have you looked at a gnarly data problem they've got, where's the best place to find you now?Alex: So, my business is called Bits on Disk. The website is bitsondisk.com. I do write occasionally there. I'm also on Twitter at @alexras. That's Alex-R-A-S, and I'm on LinkedIn as well. So, if your lovely listeners would like to reach me through any of those means, please don't hesitate to reach out. I would love to talk to them more about the challenges that they're facing in data and how I might be able to help them solve them.Corey: Wonderful. And we will of course, put links to that in the show notes. Thank you again for taking the time to speak with me, spending as much time working here as you did, and honestly, for a lot of the things that you've taught me along the way.Alex: My absolute pleasure. Thank you very much for having me.Corey: Alex Rasmussen, data engineering consultant at Bits on Disk. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn. This is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an angry comment that is so large it no longer fits in RAM.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

No longer is it dedicated to “upholding the law,” as it boasts on the DOJ website. Under Garland's shady leadership, the once premiere department has devolved into a corrupt political machine that targets adversaries and protects partisan allies. The attorney general's latest political attack is directed squarely at Joe Biden's nemesis, Donald Trump. Biden insists he's running for re-election, despite his chronic incompetence, alarming senility, and abysmal poll numbers. Maybe Joe will run a “Weekend at Bernie's” style campaign… with aides propping him up to present the illusion that he's got a pulse. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Further details emerge surrounding the FBI's raid of Mar-a-Lago. Sean Hannity assures his viewers that Trump can govern from jail. Jim Acosta grills Andrew Yang over his nonexistent policy positions. Marjorie Greene puts her jealousy of AOC on full display. A Delaware man dies after ramming his car into the US Capitol.Co-Host: Francesca Fiorentini (@franifio)Watch Francesca on The Bitchuation Room Sundays at 5/8EST http://www.youtube.com/franifio Follow Francesca: http://www.twitter.com/franifio Become a TDR YouTube Member: http://www.youtube.com/thedamagereport/join Follow The Damage Report on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheDamageReportTYT/Help build the Home of the Progressives http://tyt.com/JOINSubscribe to The Damage Report YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/thedamagereport?sub_confirmation=1Follow The Damage Report on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thedamagereport?lang=enFollow The Damage Report on Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/thedamagereport/ Follow The Damage Report on Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheDamageReport Trump BURIES Himself With Dangerous DOJ Threat - https://youtu.be/W1pO6vSXVQUCapitol Crash Attack Gunman Sends Nation Reeling - https://youtu.be/TFBwB8lPCBcDr. Oz's Election Meltdowns Are Getting CREEPIER - https://youtu.be/h0WMX5byPZILauren Boebert BURNED In Neighbors Humiliating 911 Call - https://youtu.be/T7O6sO3iwWATrump's Unhinged BOMBSHELL On FBI Raid Documents - https://youtu.be/HDLZjnJPMqACop Faces Consequences After Purposely Ignoring Unconscious Victim - https://youtu.be/HiOPc0x6174 Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information.

Continuing our series with other members of the Veterans Service Alliance, a group of non-profit organizations coming together to make a global impact in the fight against veteran suicide, we welcome Vice President of the Roever Foundation John Arroyo (USA, Ret) to the podcast! John, a 20-year Army veteran, joined the military because he needed a change and felt the military would help him find control of his life. He expected to complete three years, gain a skill, and go home, but the Army had different plans for him. John became a Special Forces Green Beret and highly decorated officer after completing three combat deployments (two to Afghanistan and one to Iraq) while serving his country. After returning from his final deployment, he was assigned to a medical unit at Fort Hood in Texas. On April 2, 2014, while he was on duty, a service member went on a rampage shooting 19 service members, including John who was shot in the neck and nearly lost his life.  He hopes to use his scars and story to help anyone in need from taking their life and to be a living testament that there is hope and a future no matter your situation. John and his wife, Angel, currently live in San Antonio, TX where they both work at the Roever Foundation. In January 2020, John published his first book, Attacked at Home: A Green Beret's Survival Story of the Fort Hood Shooting. Founded by renown Vietnam Veteran Dave Roever, the Roever Foundation exists to create pathways for those who feel lost and hopeless to find their way home. More information about the Roever Foundation can be found at https://www.roeverfoundation.org/.  Find more information online at https://www.thewarriorsjourney.org/podcast Follow us on Facebook • Instagram • Twitter

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This shares a simple premise for success and how you can use it to work in your networking endeavors. Looking to achieve greater success through networking? A: Deploy this one simple tactic. For more great insight on professional relationships and business networking visit https://www.amspirit.com/blog/ or contact Frank Agin at frankagin@amspirit.com.

The Inflation Reduction Act passes the Senate and heads for the House. President Biden will sign the measure which would print more money, thus slash the value of the dollar, jack up costly regulation, and field 87,000 new IRS agents on a mission to catch un-reported income from the likes of Etsy sellers and other small business people. Stephen Green, Bill Whittle, and Scott Ott create five new episodes of Right Angle each week, including a backstage episode for Members-only. For more information about Membership, tap the big green button at https://BillWhittle.com

About AlexAlex Su is a lawyer who's currently the Head of Community Development at Ironclad, the #1 contract lifecycle management technology company that's backed by Accel, Sequoia, Y Combinator, and other leading investors. Prior to joining Ironclad, Alex sold cloud software to legal departments and law firms on behalf of early stage startups. Alex maintains an active presence on social media, with over 180,000 followers across Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and TikTok. Links Referenced: Ironclad: https://ironcladapp.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexander-su/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/heyitsalexsu Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/heyitsalexsu/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@legaltechbro TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by Honeycomb. When production is running slow, it's hard to know where problems originate. Is it your application code, users, or the underlying systems? I've got five bucks on DNS, personally. Why scroll through endless dashboards while dealing with alert floods, going from tool to tool to tool that you employ, guessing at which puzzle pieces matter? Context switching and tool sprawl are slowly killing both your team and your business. You should care more about one of those than the other; which one is up to you. Drop the separate pillars and enter a world of getting one unified understanding of the one thing driving your business: production. With Honeycomb, you guess less and know more. Try it for free at honeycomb.io/screaminginthecloud. Observability: it's more than just hipster monitoring.Corey: I come bearing ill tidings. Developers are responsible for more than ever these days. Not just the code that they write, but also the containers and the cloud infrastructure that their apps run on. Because serverless means it's still somebody's problem. And a big part of that responsibility is app security from code to cloud. And that's where our friend Snyk comes in. Snyk is a frictionless security platform that meets developers where they are - Finding and fixing vulnerabilities right from the CLI, IDEs, Repos, and Pipelines. Snyk integrates seamlessly with AWS offerings like code pipeline, EKS, ECR, and more! As well as things you're actually likely to be using. Deploy on AWS, secure with Snyk. Learn more at Snyk.co/scream That's S-N-Y-K.co/screamCorey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. I've been off the beaten path from the traditional people building things in cloud by the sweat of their brow and the snark on their Twitters. I'm joined today by Alex Su, who's the Head of Community Development at Ironclad, and also relatively well-renowned on the TikToks, as the kids say. Alex, thank you for joining me.Alex: Thank you so much for having me on the show.Corey: It's always been an interesting experience because I joined TikTok about six months or so ago, due to an escalatingly poor series of life choices that continue to fail me, and I have never felt older in my life. But your videos consistently tend to show up there. You are @legaltechbro, which sounds like wow, I hate all of those things, and yet your content is on fire.How long have you been doing the public dance thing, for lack of a better term? I don't even know what they call it. I know how to talk about Twitter. I know how to talk about LinkedIn—sad. LinkedIn is sad—but TikTok is still something I'm trying to wrap my ancient brain around.Alex: Yeah, I felt out of place when I first made my first TikTok. And by the way, I'm known for making funny skits. I have actually never danced. I've always wanted to, but I don't think I have that… that talent. I started posting TikToks in, I will call it—let's call it the fall of 2020. So, after the pandemic.Before that, I had been posting consistently on LinkedIn for, gosh, ever since 2016, when I got into legal tech. And during the pandemic, I tried a bunch of different things including making funny skits. I'd seen something somewhere online if somebody's making fun of the doctor life. And so, I thought, hey, I could do that for legal too. And so, I made one with iMovie. You know, I recorded it on Zoom.And then people started telling me, “Hey, you should get on this thing called TikTok.” And so, I resisted it for a while because I was like, “This is not for me.” But at some point, I said, “I'll try this out. The editing seems pretty easy.” So, I made a couple of videos poking fun at the life of a law firm lawyer or a lawyer working for a corporate legal department.And on my fourth video, I went massively viral. Like, unexpected went viral, like, millions of—I think two million or so views. And I found myself with a following. So, I thought, “Hey, I guess this is what I'm doing now.” And so, it's been, I don't know, a year-and-a-half since then, and I've been continuously posting these skits.Corey: It's like they say the worst thing can happen when you go into a casino and play for the first time is you win.Alex: [laugh].Corey: You get that dopamine hit, and suddenly, well now, guess what you're doing for the rest of your life? There you go. It sounds like it worked out for you in a lot of fun ways. Your skits about big law of life definitely track. My wife used to work in that space, and we didn't meet till she was leaving that job because who has time to date in those environments?But I distinctly remember one of our early dates, we went out to meet a bunch of her soon-to-be-former coworkers at something like eight or nine o'clock in Los Angeles on a Friday night. And at the end of it, we went back to one of our places, and they went back to work. Because that is the lifestyle, apparently, of being in big law. I don't have the baseline prerequisites to get into law school, to let alone get the JD and then go to work in big law, and looking at that lifestyle, it's, “Yeah, you know, I don't think that's for me.” Of course, I say that, and then three days later, I was doing a middle of the night wake up because the pager went off.Like, “Oh, are you a doctor?” And the pager is like, “Holy shit. This SSL certificate expires in 30 days.” It's, yeah. Again, life has been fun, but it's always been one of those things that was sort of, I guess, held in awe. And you're putting a very human face on it.Alex: Yeah. You know, I never expected to be in big law either, Corey. Like, I was never good at school, but as I got older, I found a way to talk my way into, like, a good school. I hustled my way into a job at a firm that I never imagined I could get a job at. But once I got in, that's when I was like, “Okay, I don't feel like I fit in.”And so, I struggled but I still you know grinded it out. I stayed at the job for a couple of years. And I left because I was like, “This is not right for me.” But I never imagined that all of those experiences in big law ended up being the source material for my content, like, eight years after I'd left. So, I'm very thankful that I had that experience even if it wasn't a good fit for me. [laugh].Corey: And on some level, it feels like, “Where do you get your material from?” It's, “Oh, the terrible things that happened to me. Why do you ask?”Alex: That's basically it. And people ask me, they say, you know, “You haven't worked in that environment for eight years. It's probably different now, right?” Well, no. You know, the legal industry is not like the tech industry. Like, things move very slowly there.The jokes that made people laugh back then, you know, 10 years ago, even 20 years ago, people still laugh at today because it's the same way things have always worked. So, again, I'm very thankful that that's been the case. And, you know, I feel like, the reason why my content is popular is because a lot of people can resonate with it. Things that a lot of people don't really talk about publicly, about the lifestyle, the culture, how things work in a large firm, but I make jokes about it, so people feel comfortable laughing about it, or commenting and sharing.Corey: I want to get into that a little bit because when you start seeing someone pop up again and again and again on TikTok, you're one of those, “Okay, I should stalk this person and figure out what the hell their story is.” And I didn't have to look very far in your case because you're very transparent about it. You're the head of community development at a company called Ironclad, and that one threw me for a little bit of a loop. So, let's start with the easy question, I suppose. What is Ironclad?Alex: We're a digital contracting technology that helps accelerate business contracts. Companies deal with contracts of all types; a lot of times it gets bogged down in legal review. We just help with that process to make that process move faster. And I never expected I'd be in this space. You know, I always thought I was going to be a trial lawyer.But I left that world, you know, maybe six years ago to go into the legal technology space, and I quickly saw that contracts was kind of a growing challenge, contracting, whether it's for sales or for procurement. So, I found myself as a salesperson in legal tech selling, first e-discovery software, and then contracting software. And then I found my way to Ironclad as part of the community team, really to talk about how we can help, but also speaking up about the challenges of the legal profession, of working at a law firm or at a legal department. So, I feel like it's all been the culmination of all my experiences, both in law and technology.Corey: In the world in which I've worked, half of my consulting work has been helping our clients negotiate their large-scale AWS contracts and the other half is architectural nonsense of, “Hey, if you make these small changes, that cuts your bill in half. Maybe consider doing them.” But something that I've learned that is almost an industry-wide and universal truism, is that you want to keep the salespeople and the lawyers relatively separate just due to the absolute polar opposites of incentives. Salespeople are incentivized to sell anything that holds still long enough or they can outrun, whereas lawyers are incentivized to protect the company from risk. No, is the easy answer and everything else is risk that has to be managed. You are one of those very rare folks who has operated successfully and well by blending the two. How the hell did that happen?Alex: I'm not sure to this day how it happened. But I think part of the reason why I left law in the first place was because I don't think I fit in. I think there's a lot of good about having a law degree and being part of the legal profession, but I just wanted to be around people, I wanted to work with people, I didn't want to always worry about things. And so, that led me to technology sales, which took me to the other extreme. And so, you know, I carried a sales quota for five years and that was such an interesting experience to see where—to both sell technology, but also to see where legal fit into that process.And so, I think by having the legal training, but also having been part of a sales team, that's given me appreciation for what both teams do. And I think they're often at tension with one another, but they're both there to serve the greater goals of the company, whether it's to generate revenue or protect against risk.Corey: I think that there's also a certain affinity that you may have—I'm just spitballing wildly—one of the things that sales folks and attorneys tend to have in common is that in the public imagination, as those roles are not, shall we call it, universally beloved. There tend to be a fair number of well, jokes, in which case, both sides of that tend to be on the receiving end. I mean, at some level, all you have to do is become an IRS auditor and you've got the holy trifecta working for you.Alex: [laugh]. I don't know why I gravitated to these professions, but I do think that it's partly because both of these roles hold a significant amount of power. And if you look at just contracting in general, a salesperson at a company, they're really the driver of the sales process. Like, if there's no sale to be made, there's no contract. On the flip side, the law person, the lawyer, knows everything about what's inside of the contract.They understand the legal terms, the jargon, and so they hold an immense amount of power over advising people on what's going to happen. And so, I think sometimes, salespeople and legal people take it too far and either spend too much time reviewing a contract and lording it over the business folks, or maybe the salesperson is too blase about getting a deal done and maybe bypasses legal and doesn't go through the right processes. By the way, Corey, these are jokes that I make in my TikToks all the time and they always go viral because it's so relatable to people. But yeah, that's probably why people always make jokes about lawyers and salespeople. There's probably some element of ridiculing people with a significant amount of power within a company to determine these transactions.Corey: Do you find that you have a better affinity for the folks doing contract work on the seller side or the buyer side? Something they don't tell you when you run companies is, yeah, you're going to spend a lot of time working on contracts, not just when selling things, but also when buying things and going back and forth. Aspects of what you're talking about so far in this conversation have resonated, I guess, with both sides of that for me. What do you have the affinity for?Alex: I think on the sales side, just because of my experience, you know, I think when you go through a transaction and you're trying to convince someone to doing something, and this is probably why I wanted to go to law school in the first place. Like I watched those movies, right? I watched A Few Good Men and I thought I'd be standing up in court convincing a jury of something. Little did I know that that sort of interest [crosstalk 00:10:55]—Corey: Like, Perry Mason breakthrough moment.Alex: That moment where—the gotcha moment, right? I found that in sales. And so, it was really a thrill to be able to, like, talk to someone, listen to them, and then kind of convince them that, based on what challenges they're facing, for them to buy some technology. I love that. And I think that was again, tied to why I went to law school in the first place.I didn't even know sales was a possible profession because I grew up in an immigrant community that was like, you just go to school, and that'll lead to your career. But there's a lot of different careers that are super interesting that don't require formal schooling, or at least the seven years of schooling you need for law. So, I always identify with the sales side. And maybe that's just how I am, but obviously, the folks who deal with the buy side, it's a pretty important job, too.Corey: There's a lot of surprise when I start talking to folks in the engineering world. First, they're in for a rough awakening at times when they learn exactly how much qualified enterprise salespeople can make. But also because being a lawyer without, you know, the appropriate credentials to tie into that, you're going to have a bad time. There are regulatory requirements imposed on lawyers, whereas to be a salesperson, forget the law degree, forget the bachelor's, forget the high school diploma, all you really need to be able to do from an academic credential standpoint is show up.The rest of it is, can you actually sell? Can you have the conversations that convince people to see the outcome that benefits everyone? And I don't know what that it's possible, or advised necessarily, to be able to find a way to teach that in some formalized way. It almost feels like folks either have that spark or they don't. Do you think it's one of those things that can be taught? Do you think it's something that people have to have a pre-existing affinity for?Alex: It's both, right, because part of it is some people will just—they don't have the personality to really sell. It's also like their interest; they don't want to do that. But what I found that's interesting is that what I thought would make a good salesperson didn't end up being true when I looked at the most effective sellers. Like, in my head, I thought, “Oh, this is somebody who's very boisterous, very extroverted,” but I found that in my experience in B2B SaaS that the most effective sellers are very, very much active listeners. They're not the people showing up and talking at you. They are asking you about your day-to-day asking about processes, understanding the context of your situation, before making a small suggestion about what you might want to do.I was very impressed the first time I saw one of these enterprise sellers who was just so good at that. Like, I saw him, and he looked nothing like what I imagined an effective sales guy to look like. And he was really kind and he just, kind of, just talked to me, like, I was a human being, and listened to my answers. So, I do think that there is some element of nature, your talent when it comes to that, but it can also be trained because I think a lot of folks who have sales talent, they don't realize that they could be good at it. They think that they've got to be this extroverted, happy hour, partying, storyteller, where —Corey: The Type A personality that interrupts people as they're having the conversation.Alex: Yeah, yeah.Corey: Yeah.Alex: So anyways, I think that's why it's a mix of both.Corey: The conversations that I've learned the most from when I'm talking to prospects and clients have been when I asked the quote-unquote, dumb question that I already know the answer to, and then I shut up and I listen. And wow, I did not expect that answer. And when you dig a little further, you realize there's nuance that—at least in my case—that I've completely missed to the entire problem space. I think that is really one of the key differentiators to my mind, that separate people who are good at this role from folks who just misunderstand what the role is based upon mass media, or in other cases—same problem with lawyers—the worst examples, in some cases, of the profession. The pushy used car salesperson or the lawyer they see advertising on the back of a bus for personal injury cases. The world is far more nuanced than that.Alex: Absolutely. And I think you hit the nail on the head when you said, you know, you ask those questions and let them talk. Because that's an entire process within the sales process. It's called discovery, and you're really asking questions to understand the person's situation. More broadly, though, I think pitching at people doesn't seem to work as well as understanding the situation.And you know, I've kind of done that with my content, my TikToks because, you know, if you look at LinkedIn, a lot of people in our space, they're always prescribing solutions, giving advice, posting content about teaching people things. I don't do that. As a marketer, what I do is I talk about the problems and create discussions. So, I'll create a funny video—Corey: I think you're teaching a whole generation that maybe law school isn't what they want to be doing, after all there is that.Alex: There is that. There is that. It's a mix of things. But one of the things I think I focus on is talking about the challenges of working with a sales team if you're an in-house lawyer. And I don't prescribe technology, I don't prescribe Ironclad, I don't say this is what you need to do, but by having people talk about it, they realize, right—and I think this is why the videos are popular—as opposed to me coming out and saying, “I think you need technology because of XYZ.” I think, like, facilitating the conversation of the problem space, that leads people to naturally say, “Hey, I might need something. What do you guys do, by the way?”Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friend EnterpriseDB. EnterpriseDB has been powering enterprise applications with PostgreSQL for 15 years. And now EnterpriseDB has you covered wherever you deploy PostgreSQL on-premises, private cloud, and they just announced a fully-managed service on AWS and Azure called BigAnimal, all one word. Don't leave managing your database to your cloud vendor because they're too busy launching another half-dozen managed databases to focus on any one of them that they didn't build themselves. Instead, work with the experts over at EnterpriseDB. They can save you time and money, they can even help you migrate legacy applications—including Oracle—to the cloud. To learn more, try BigAnimal for free. Go to biganimal.com/snark, and tell them Corey sent you.Corey: It sounds ridiculous for me to say that, “Oh, here's my entire business strategy: step one, I shitpost on the internet about cloud computing; step two, magic happens here; and step three people reach out to talk about their AWS bills.” But it's also true. Is that the pattern that you go through: step one, shitpost on TikTok; step two, magic happens here; and step three people reach out asking to learn more about what your company does? Or is there more nuance to do it?Alex: I'm still figuring out this whole thing myself, but I will say shitposting is incredibly effective. Because I'm active on Twitter. Twitter is where I start my shitposts. TikTok, I also shitpost, but in video format, I think the number one thing to do is figure out what resonates with people, whether it's the whole contracting thing or if it's frustrations about law school. Once you create something that's compelling, the conversation gets going and you start learning about what people are thinking.And I think that what I'm trying to figure out is how that can lead to a deeper conversation that can lead to a business transaction or lead to a sale. I haven't figured it out, right, but I didn't know that when I started creating content that spoke to people when I was a quota-carrying salesperson, people reached out to me for demo requests, for sales conversations. There is something that is happening in this quote-unquote, “Dark funnel,” that I'm sure you're very familiar with. There's something that's happening that I'm trying to understand, and I'm starting to see.Corey: This is probably a good thing to the zero in on a bit because to most people's understanding of the sales process, it would seem that you going out and making something of a sensation out of yourself on the internet, well what are you doing that for? That's not sales work? How is that sales? That's just basically getting distracted and going to do something fun. Shouldn't you be picking up the phone and cold calling people or mass-emailing folks who don't want to hear from you because you trick them into having a badge scanned somewhere? I don't necessarily think that is accurate. How do you see the interplay of what you do and sales?Alex: When you're selling something like makeup or clothing, it's a pretty transactional process. You create a video; people will buy, right? That's B2C. In B2B, it's a much more complex processes. There's so many touchpoints. The start of a sales conversation and when they actually buy may take six months, 12 months, years. And so, there's got to be a lot of touch points in between.I remember when I was starting out in my content journey, I had this veteran enterprise sales leader, like, your classic, like, CRO. He said to me, “Hey, Alex, your content's very funny, but shouldn't you be making cold calls and emails? Like, why are you spending your time doing this?” And I said, “Hey, listen, do you notice that I'm actually sourcing more outbound sales calls than any other sales rep? Like, have you noticed that?”And he's like, “Actually, yeah, I did notice that. You know, how are you doing it?” And I was like, “Do you not see that these two are tied? These are not people I just started calling. They are people who have seen my content over time. And this is how it works.”And so, I think that the B2B world is starting to wise up to this. I think, for example, Ironclad is leading the way on creating a community team to create those conversations, but plenty of B2B companies are doing the same thing. And so, I think by inserting themselves in a conversation—a two-way conversation—during that process, that's become incredibly effective, far more so than, like, cold-calling a lawyer or a developer who doesn't want to be bothered by some pushy salesperson.Corey: Busy, expensive professionals generally don't want to spend all their time doing that. The cold outreach emails that drive me nuts are, “Hey, can we talk for half an hour?” Yeah, I don't tend to think in terms of billable hours because that's not how I do anything that I do, but there is an internal rate that I used to benchmark and it's what you want me just reach into my pocket and give you how much money for a random opportunity to pitch me on something that you haven't even qualified whether I need or not? It's like, asking people for time is worse, in some ways, than asking for money because they can always make more money, but no one can make more time.Alex: Right, right. That's absolutely right.Corey: It's the lack of awareness of understanding the needs and motivations of your target market. One thing that I found that really aided me back when I was working for other folks was trying to find a company or a management structure that understood and appreciated this. Easy example, when I was setting out as an independent consultant after a few months I'd been doing this and people started to hear about me. But you know, it turns out that there are challenges to running a business that are not recommended for most people. And I debated, do I take a job somewhere else?So, I interviewed at a few places, and I was talking to one company that's active in the cloud costing space at the time and they wanted me to come aboard. But discussions broke down because they thought I was, quote, “More interested in thought leadership than I was and actually fixing the bills themselves.” And looking at this now, four years later or so, yeah, they were right. And amazing how that whole thing played out, but that the lack of vision around, there's an opportunity here, if we can chase it, at least in the places I was at, was relatively hard to come by. Did you luck out in finding a role that works for you in this way or did you basically have to forge it for yourself from the sweat of your brow and the strength of your TikTok account?Alex: It was uphill at first, but eventually, I got lucky. And you know, part of it was engineered luck. And I'll explain what I mean. When I first started out doing this, I didn't expect this to lead to any jobs. I just thought it would support my sales career.Over time, as the content got more popular, I never wanted to do anything else because I was like, I don't want to be a marketer. I'm not a—I don't know anything about demand gen. All I know is how to make funny videos that get people talking. The interesting that happened was that these videos created this awareness, this energy in our space, in the legal space. And it wasn't long before Ironclad found me.And you know, Ironclad has always been big on community, has always done things like—like, our CEO, our founder, he said that he used to host these dinners, never talking about Ironclad, but just kind of talking about law school and law with potential clients. And it would lead to business. Like, it's almost the same concept of, like, not pushing sales on people. And so, Ironclad has always had that in its DNA. And one of our investors, our board members, Jessica Lee from Sequoia, she is a huge believer in community.I mean, she was the CEO of another company that leveraged community, and so there's this community element all throughout the DNA of Ironclad. Now, had I not put myself out there with this content, I may not have been discovered by Ironclad. But they saw me, they found me, and they said, “We don't think about these things like many other companies. We really want to invest in this function.” And so, it's almost like when you put yourself out there, yes, sometimes some people will say, “What are you doing? Like, this makes no sense. Like, stop doing that.” But there's going to be some true believers who come out and seek you out and find you.And that's been my experience here, like, at Ironclad. Like, people were like, “When you go there, are they going to censor you? Is your content going to be less edgy?” No. Like, they pulled me aside multiple times and said, “Keep being yourself. This is what we want.” And I think that is so special and unique. And part of it is very much lucky, but it's also when you put yourself out there kind of in a big way, like-minded people will seek you out as well.Corey: I take the position that part of marketing, part of the core of marketing, is you've got to have an opinion. But as soon as you have an opinion, people are going to disagree with you. They're going to, effectively, forget the human on the other side of it and start taking you for a drag on social media and whatnot. So, the default reaction a lot of people have is oh, I shouldn't venture opinions forward.No. People are always going to dislike you for something and you may as well have it be for who you are and what you want to be doing rather than who you're pretending to be. That's always been my approach. For me, the failure mode was not someone on Twitter is going to get mad about what I wrote. No one's going to read it. That's the failure mode. And the way to avoid that is make it interesting.Alex: That is a hundred percent relatable to me because I think when I was younger, I was scared. I did worry that I would get in trouble for what I posted. But I realized these people I was worried about, they weren't going to help me anyways. These are not people who are going to seek me out and help me but then say, “Oh, I saw your content, so now I can't help you.” They were not going to help me anyways.But by being authentic to myself and putting things out there, I attracted my own tribe of people who have helped me, right? A lot of my early results from content came not because I reached my target customers; it was because somebody resonated with what I put out there and they carried my message and said, “Hey, you should talk to Alex.” Something special happens when you kind of put yourself out there and say an opinion or share a perspective that not everyone agrees with because that tribe you build ends up helping you a lot. And meanwhile, these other people that might not like it, they probably weren't going to help you either.Corey: I maintain that one of the most valuable commodities in the universe is attention. And so, often there's so much information overload that's competing for our attention every minute of every day that trying to blend in with the rest of it feels like the exact wrong approach. I'm not a large company here. I don't have a full marketing department to wind up doing ad buys, and complicated campaigns, and train a team of attacking interns to wind up tackling people to scan their badges at conferences. I've got to work with what I've got.So, the goal I've always had is trigger the Rolodex moment where someone hears about a problem in the AWS billing space—ideally—and, “Oh, my God, you need to talk to Corey about that.” And it worked, for better or worse. And a lot of it was getting lucky, let's be very clear here, and people doing me favors that they had no reason to do and I'll never be able to repay. But being able to be in that space really is what made the difference. Now, the downside, of course, when you start doing that is, how do you go back to what happened before?If you decide okay, well, it's been a fun run for you and Ironclad. And yeah, TikTok. Turns out that is, in fact, for kids; time to go somewhere else. Like, I don't know that you would fit into your old type of job.Alex: Yeah. No, I wouldn't. But very early on, I realized, I said, “If I'm going to find meaningful work, it's okay to be wrong.” And when I went to big law, I realized this is not right for me. That's okay. I'm just not going to get another big law job.And so, when people ask me, “Hey, now that you've put yourself out there, you probably can't get a job at a big firm anymore.” And that's okay to me because I wasn't going to go back anyways. But what I have found, Corey, is that there's this other universe of people, whether it's a entrepreneur, smaller businesses, technology companies, they would be interested in working with me. And so, by being myself, I may have blocked out a certain level of opportunities or a safety net, but now I'm kind of in this other world where I feel very confident that I won't have trouble finding a job. So, I feel very lucky to have that, but that's why I also don't worry about the possibility of not going back.Corey: Yeah, I've never had to think about the idea of, well, what if I go have to get a job again? Because at that point, it means well, it's time to let every one at the company who is depending on the go, and that's the bigger obstacle because, let's be honest, I'm a white guy in tech, and I look like it. My failure mode is basically a board seat and a book deal because of inherent bias in the system.Alex: [laugh]. Oh, my god.Corey: That's the outcome that, for me personally, I will be just fine. It's the other people took a chance on me. I'm terrified of letting them down. So far, knock on wood, I haven't said anything too offensive in public is going to wind up there. That's also not generally my style.But it is the… it is something that has weighed on me that has kept me from I guess, thinking about what would my next job be? I'm convinced this is the last job I'll ever have, if for no other reason that I've made myself utterly unemployable.Alex: [laugh]. Well, I think many of us aspire to find that perfect intersection of what you love doing and what pays the bills. Sounds like you've found it, I really do feel like I found it, too. I never imagined I'd be doing what I do now. Which is also sometimes hard to describe.I'm not making TikToks for a living; I'm just on the community team, doing events—I'm getting to work with people. I'm basically doing the things that I wanted to do that led me to quit that job many years ago, that big law job many years ago. So, I feel very blessed and for anybody who's, like, looking for that type of path, I do think that at some point, you do need to kind of shed the safety nets because if you always hang on to the safety nets, whether it's a big tech job or a big law job, there's going to be elements of that that don't fit in with your personality, and you're never going to be able to find that if you kind of stay there. But if you venture out—and, you know, I admire you for what you've done; it sounds like you're very successful at what you do and get to do what you love every day—I think great things can happen.Corey: Yeah, I get to insult Amazon for a living. It's what I love. It's what I would do if I weren't being paid. So, here we are. Yeah—Alex: [laugh].Corey: I have no sense of self-preservation. It's kind of awesome.Alex: I love it.Corey: But you're right. It's… there's something to be said for finding the thing that winds up resonating with you and what you want to be doing.Alex: It really does. And you know, I think when I first made the move to technology, to sales, there was no career path. I thought I would—maybe I thought I might be a VP of Sales. But the thing is, when you put yourself out there, the opportunities that show up might not be the ones that you had always seen from the beginning. Like if you ask a lawyer, like, “What can I do if I don't practice law?” They're going to give you these generic answers. “Work here. Work there. Work for that company. I've seen a lot of people do this.”But once you put yourself out there in the wilderness, these opportunities arise. And I've been very lucky. I mean, I never imagined I'd be a TikTokker. And by the way, I also make memes on Twitter. Couldn't imagine I'd be doing that either. I learned, like, Mematic, these tools. Like, you know, like, I'm immersed in this internet culture now.Corey: It is bizarre to me and I never saw it coming either. For better or worse, though, here we are, stuck at it.Alex: [laugh].Corey: I really want to thank you for taking so much time to speak with me today. If people want to learn more about what you're up to and follow along for the laughs, if nothing else, where's the best place for them to find you?Alex: The best way to find me is on LinkedIn; just look up Alex Su. But I'm around and on lots of social media platforms. You can find me on Twitter, on Instagram, and on TikTok, although I might be a little bit embarrassed of what I put on TikTok. I put some crazy gnarly stuff out there. But yeah, LinkedIn is probably the best place to find me.Corey: And we will put links to all of it in the show notes, and let people wind up making their own decisions. Thanks so much for your time, Alex. I really appreciate it.Alex: Corey, thank you so much for having me. This was so much fun.Corey: Alex Su, Head of Community Development at Ironclad. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with an angry insipid comment talking about how unprofessional everything we talked about is that you will not be able to post for the next six months because it'll be hung up in legal review.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

For over a decade, SEO experts have relied on strategies like on-page optimization, blogging and email outreach for links. But, in 2022, these techniques are losing their effectiveness because they rely on coordination with a web developer, big content budgets, and spammy email outreach. Fortunately, there's a better way to grow organic traffic: purpose-driven SEO! Join 20-year SEO expert Dale Bertrand to get a step-by-step playbook on how to apply this effective new strategy to any B2B or B2C website to generate high-quality organic visitors.Takeaways:How Google's AI is tuned to amplify brands that resonate with online consumersHow to craft a purpose-driven SEO strategy that resonates with search enginesCase studies of leading brands who practice purpose-driven SEOCheck out upcoming DigiMarCon Digital Marketing, Media and Advertising Conferences & Exhibitions Worldwide at https://digimarcon.com/events/

Every one of your employees must clearly see how his actions and decisions impact execution of the business strategy. This is accomplished through a line-of-sight deployment process. It is not enough to describe the strategy at an all-hands meeting, or even add to that the down-one-level strategy. Stopping the formal deployment process at that points leaves entirely too much to false assumptions and bad guesses. You are familiar with the 5-Why problem solving process in which we keep asking why until we identify the root cause of the problem we've defined. Strategy is similar. We have a strategy defined at the high level, but must roll it down level by level to understand what its implementation requires. You know you have accomplished that when every employee can reverse that thinking process by describing their priorities and actions "so that." An example: "I am reorganizing the warehouse and receiving area so that we can flawlessly add new materials and components to our storage so that we can begin producing samples of our innovative new products for market test so that we can expand sales of those new products to the most receptive markets so that we can grow our sales and profits so that we can deliver on our owners' mission of providing reliable employment as we serve the evolving needs of the automotive aftermarkets." By using a line-of-sight deployment process surprises are reduced and prioritization and decision making are improved.

In this episode of the STRONGSIDE Podcast, Coach Bri and amazing STRONGSIDE Member, Amber Christoferson, dive into the MINDSET around the beginning, middle, and end of challenges like 75 HARD. Amber speaks on how the new habits she was challenged in creating (and kicking) opened her mind and perspective up to sustainable lifestyle habits, goals, and PURPOSE she never saw coming... It's about choosing YOU, even when it's inconvenient, and even when the whole world may be pulling you elsewhere. STRONGSIDE'S 60STRONG begins August 22nd, where you get 4 opportunities (buckets), every day for 60 days, to dedicated time towards YOU and YOUR health, wellness, and self development. And rather than it being viewed as a challenge, we encourage you to view it as a privilege. Because you GET to take action towards your own health - you don't HAVE to. Let's get after it, TEAM! Let's put that mental bully in a corner, carve out dedicated time to our own health, and take action towards what all that life has to offer us.

Ever wanted to deploy a PR to a temporary server for show-and-tell, QA testing, or to get feedback on it? Jason Axelson joins us to share how he did that on Render.com. We explore how it can be done on other platforms like Fly.io as well. We talk about how this ability benefits teams and companies. We dig into how setting up a seeded DB for the code isolates data changes but also makes it easier for people to test the code with multiple data scenarios. Turns out doing this may be easier than I thought! Show Notes online - http://podcast.thinkingelixir.com/111 (http://podcast.thinkingelixir.com/111) Elixir Community News - https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/tree/v1.14.0-rc.0 (https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/tree/v1.14.0-rc.0) – Elixir 1.14.0-rc.0 was tagged. This begins the sequence of Release Candidates leading up to the final 1.14 release. - https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/blob/v1.14.0-rc.0/CHANGELOG.md (https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/blob/v1.14.0-rc.0/CHANGELOG.md) – Elixir 1.14.0-rc.0 Changelog - https://twitter.com/michalmuskala/status/1554455230846119937 (https://twitter.com/michalmuskala/status/1554455230846119937) - https://github.com/WhatsApp/eqwalizer (https://github.com/WhatsApp/eqwalizer) – WhatsApp's newly open sourced type-checker for Erlang - https://engineering.fb.com/2022/07/27/developer-tools/programming-languages-endorsed-for-server-side-use-at-meta/ (https://engineering.fb.com/2022/07/27/developer-tools/programming-languages-endorsed-for-server-side-use-at-meta/) – Outlines which languages are approved for use in Facebook/Meta. - https://twitter.com/polvalente/status/1552176607045029889 (https://twitter.com/polvalente/status/1552176607045029889) – Elixir gRPC project released v0.5.0. Includes all commits since v0.5.0-beta.1 in mid 2020. - https://github.com/elixir-grpc/grpc/releases/tag/v0.5.0 (https://github.com/elixir-grpc/grpc/releases/tag/v0.5.0) - https://dockyard.com/blog/2022/07/26/what-to-expect-from-the-dockyard-academy-q-a-with-instructor-brooklin-myers (https://dockyard.com/blog/2022/07/26/what-to-expect-from-the-dockyard-academy-q-a-with-instructor-brooklin-myers) – Update on the DockYard Academy - a 90-day, online Elixir bootcamp - https://github.com/DockYard-Academy/beta_curriculum (https://github.com/DockYard-Academy/beta_curriculum) – DockYard Academy's beta curriculum - https://elixirstatus.com/p/GpNe2-intellij-elixir-v1320 (https://elixirstatus.com/p/GpNe2-intellij-elixir-v1320) – IntelliJ Elixir v13.2.0 - https://github.com/superfly/litefs (https://github.com/superfly/litefs) – LiteFS is a FUSE-based file system for replicating SQLite databases across a cluster of machines - https://podcast.thinkingelixir.com/101 (https://podcast.thinkingelixir.com/101) – Our interview with Ben Johnson about SQLite and Litestream Do you have some Elixir news to share? Tell us at @ThinkingElixir (https://twitter.com/ThinkingElixir) or email at show@thinkingelixir.com (mailto:show@thinkingelixir.com) Discussion Resources - https://felt.com/ (https://felt.com/) - https://felt.com/careers (https://felt.com/careers) - https://elixirforum.com/ (https://elixirforum.com/) - https://github.com/elixir-lsp/elixir-ls (https://github.com/elixir-lsp/elixir-ls) - https://github.com/boydm/scenic (https://github.com/boydm/scenic) - https://twitter.com/bostonvaulter/status/1531757674236243968 (https://twitter.com/bostonvaulter/status/1531757674236243968) – Button to deploy a PR branch for easy review. - https://render.com/docs/preview-environments#automatic-expiration (https://render.com/docs/preview-environments#automatic-expiration) – Render documentation about Preview Environment and Automatic Expiration - https://github.com/superfly/fly-pr-review-apps (https://github.com/superfly/fly-pr-review-apps) – Ability to do PR reviews on Fly.io using Github Actions - https://render.com/docs/infrastructure-as-code (https://render.com/docs/infrastructure-as-code) – Render docs for Infrastructure as Code (IaC) - https://render.com/docs/preview-environments (https://render.com/docs/preview-environments) – Render docs for Preview Environments Guest Information - https://twitter.com/bostonvaulter (https://twitter.com/bostonvaulter) – on Twitter - https://github.com/axelson/ (https://github.com/axelson/) – on Github - https://jasonaxelson.com/ (https://jasonaxelson.com/) – Blog Find us online - Message the show - @ThinkingElixir (https://twitter.com/ThinkingElixir) - Email the show - show@thinkingelixir.com (mailto:show@thinkingelixir.com) - Mark Ericksen - @brainlid (https://twitter.com/brainlid) - David Bernheisel - @bernheisel (https://twitter.com/bernheisel) - Cade Ward - @cadebward (https://twitter.com/cadebward)

Joel Harris, CEO from Genvax joins us to discuss what this means. Genvax Technologies, a startup dedicated to bringing advances in self-amplifying mRNA (saRNA) vaccine production to animal health, announced today it has secured $6.5 million in series seed funding. This funding moves the company toward USDA and international regulatory approval of its vaccines in anticipation of any foreign animal disease outbreak in order to increase health and profitability in livestock production. https://www.swineweb.com/genvax-technologies-secures-6-5-million-to-advance-sarna-platform-to-deploy-candidate-vaccines-against-new-and-emerging-livestock-diseases-rapidly/

About TimTim's tech career spans over 20 years through various sectors. Tim's initial journey into tech started as a US Marine. Later, he left government contracting for the private sector, working both in large corporate environments and in small startups. While working in the private sector, he honed his skills in systems administration and operations for large Unix-based datastores.Today, Tim leverages his years in operations, DevOps, and Site Reliability Engineering to advise and consult with clients in his current role. Tim is also a father of five children, as well as a competitive Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu practitioner. Currently, he is the reigning American National and 3-time Pan American Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu champion in his division.Links Referenced:Twitter: https://twitter.com/elchefe TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by Honeycomb. When production is running slow, it's hard to know where problems originate. Is it your application code, users, or the underlying systems? I've got five bucks on DNS, personally. Why scroll through endless dashboards while dealing with alert floods, going from tool to tool to tool that you employ, guessing at which puzzle pieces matter? Context switching and tool sprawl are slowly killing both your team and your business. You should care more about one of those than the other; which one is up to you. Drop the separate pillars and enter a world of getting one unified understanding of the one thing driving your business: production. With Honeycomb, you guess less and know more. Try it for free at honeycomb.io/screaminginthecloud. Observability: it's more than just hipster monitoring.Corey: I come bearing ill tidings. Developers are responsible for more than ever these days. Not just the code that they write, but also the containers and the cloud infrastructure that their apps run on. Because serverless means it's still somebody's problem. And a big part of that responsibility is app security from code to cloud. And that's where our friend Snyk comes in. Snyk is a frictionless security platform that meets developers where they are - Finding and fixing vulnerabilities right from the CLI, IDEs, Repos, and Pipelines. Snyk integrates seamlessly with AWS offerings like code pipeline, EKS, ECR, and more! As well as things you're actually likely to be using. Deploy on AWS, secure with Snyk. Learn more at Snyk.co/scream That's S-N-Y-K.co/screamCorey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. A bit of a sad episode Today. I am joined by Duckbill Group principal cloud economist, Tim Banks, but by the time this publishes, he will have left the Duckbill nest, as it were. Tim, thank you for joining me, and can I just start by saying, this is sad?Tim: It is. I have really enjoyed being with Duckbill and I will never forget that message you sent me. It's like, “Hey, would you like to do this?” And I was like, “Boy would I.” It's been a fantastic ride and I have enjoyed working with a friend. And I'm glad that we remain friends to this day and always will be, so far as I can tell.Corey: Yes, yes. What you can't see while recording this, I'm actually sitting in the same room as Tim with a weapon pointed at him to make sure that he stays exactly on message. Yeah, I kid. There's been a lot that's happened over the last year. We only got to spend time together in person once at re:Invent. I think because re:Invent is such a blur for me, I don't remember who the hell I talk to.Someone can walk up and say, “Oh yeah, we met at re:Invent,” and I'll nod and say, “Oh yeah,” and I will have no recollection of that whatsoever. But you don't argue with people. But I do distinctly remember hanging out with you there. But since then, it's been a purely distributed company, purely distributed work.Tim: Yeah, that's the only time I've seen you since I've worked here. It's the only time I met Mike. But it's weird because it's like, someone you work with you see every day virtually and talk to, and then you actually get to, like, IRL them and like, “Oh, wow. I had all these, kind of, conceptions of, you know, what you are or who you are as a person, and then you get to, like, check yourself. Was I right? Was I wrong?” I was like, “Oh, you're taller than I thought; you're shorter than I thought,” you know, whatever it was.But I think the fun part about it was we all end up being so close by the nature of how we work that it was just like going back and seeing family after a while; you already know who they are and how they are and about them. So, it felt good, but it felt familiar. That's a great feeling to have. To me, that's a sign of a very successful distributed culture.Corey: Yeah, it's weird the kinds of friendships we've built during the pandemic. When I was in New York for the summit, I got to meet Linda Haviv at AWS for the first time, despite spending the past year or so talking to her repeatedly. As I referred to her the entire time I was in New York, this is Linda, my new old friend because that is exactly how it felt. It's the idea of meeting someone in person that you've had a long-term ongoing friendship with. It's just a really—it's a strange way Everything's new but it's not, all at the same time.It reminds me of the early days of the internet culture where I had more friends online than off, which in my case was not hard. And finally meeting them, some people were exactly like they were described and others were nothing at all like they presented. Now that we have Zoom and this constant level of Slack chatter and whatnot, it's become a lot easier to get a read on what someone is like, I think.Tim: I think so too, you know, we've gotten away—and I think largely because of the pandemic—of just talking about work at work, right? The idea of embracing, you know, almost a cliche of the whole person. But it's become a very necessary thing as people have dealt with pandemic, social upheaval, political climates, and whatever, while they're working from home. You can't compartmentalize that safely in perpetuity, right? So, you do end up getting to know people very well, especially in what their concerns are, what their anxieties are, what makes them happy, what makes them sad, things that go on in their lives.You bring all that to your distributed culture because it's not like you leave it at the door, when you walk out. You're not walking out anymore; you're walking to another room, and it's hard to walk away from those things in this day and age. And we shouldn't have to, right? I feel like for a successful and nurturing culture—whatever it is, whether it's tech culture, whether it's whatever kind of work culture—you can't say, “I only want your productivity and nothing else about you,” and expect people to sustain that. So, you see these companies are, like, you know, “We don't have political discussions. We don't have personal discussions. We're just about the work.” I'm like, “All right, well, that's not going to last.” A person cannot just be an automaton in perpetuity and expect them to grow and thrive.Corey: And this is why you're leaving. And I want to give that a little context because without, sounds absolutely freaking horrifying. You've been a strong advocate for an awful lot of bringing the human to work, on your philosophy around leadership, around management. And you've often been acting in that capacity throughout, I would say, the majority of your career. But here at The Duckbill Group, we don't have a scale of team where you being the director of the team or leader of the team is going to happen in anything approaching the near or mid-term.And so, much of your philosophy is great and all because it's easy to sit here at a small company and start talking about, “Oh, this is how you should be doing it.” You have the opportunity to wind up making a much deeper impact on a lot more people from a management perspective, but you do in fact, need a team to manage as opposed to sitting around there, “Oh, yeah. Who do you manage?” “This one person and I'm doing all of these things to make their life and job awesome.” It's like, “Yeah, how many hours a week are you spending in one-on-ones?” “20 to 25.”Okay, maybe you need a slightly larger team so you can diffuse that out a little bit. And we are definitely sad to be losing you; super excited to see where you wind up going next. This has been a long time coming where there are things that you have absolutely knocked out of the park here at The Duckbill Group, but you also have that growing—from what I picked up on anyway—need to set a good management example. And lord knows this industry needs more of those. So first, sad to lose you. Secondly, very excited for where you wind up next and what they're in for, even though it has a strong likelihood that they don't know the half of it yet.Tim: One of the things that I like about The Duckbill Group and how my time here has been is the first thing that I was asked in the interview was very sincere, like, “Well, what's your next job?” And I was very clear. It's like, “After this, I want to be a director or VP of engineering because I would like to be a force multiplier, right?” I would like to make engineering orgs better. I would like to make engineering practices better. I want to make the engineers better, right?And not by driving KPIs and not by management, right, not administrative functions. I want to do it via leadership. I want to do it by setting examples, making safe places for people, making people feel like they're important and invested in, nurturing them, right? I've said this before I—this analogy was getting me somewhere else and I love, it's like, if I plant a tree and I want it to grow apples, right, I'm not going to sit there and put a number down of apples it's expected to produce, and then put it on a performance plan if it doesn't get that number of apples, right? I need to nurture the tree, I need to fertilize it, I need to protect it, I need to keep it safe, I need to keep it safe from the elements, I need to make sure that it doesn't have parasites, I need to take care of that tree.And if that tree grows and it's healthy and it's thriving, it will produce, right? But I'm not—I can't just expect apples if I'm not taking care of the tree. Now, people are not trees, but you still have to take care of the people if you want them to do things. And if you can't take care of the people, if you can't manage the environment that they're in to make it safe, if you can't give them the things they need to be successful, then you're just going to be holding numbers over someone and expecting to hit them.And that doesn't work. That's not something that's sustainable. And it doesn't really—it's not even about how much you pay them. You must pay them well, right, but it has to be more than just that if you want people to succeed. And that doesn't necessarily mean—like, one thing is at the Duckbill Group I love, succeeding doesn't necessarily mean that I'm going to stay at—or your engineer is going to stay at one place in perpetuity. If you mentor and train and coach and give an engineer opportunity to grow and thrive and what they do is they go to another job for a title increase and a pay increase or something like that, you did your job.Corey: A lot of companies love to tell that lie and they almost convince themselves of it where I look at your resume, and great you have not generally crossed the two-year mark at companies for the last decade. I never did until I started at this place. But we magically always liked to pretend in job interviews that, “Oh yeah, this is my forever job—” like you're a rescue dog getting adopted or something, “—and I'm going to work here for 25 years and get a gold watch and a pension at the end of it.” It's lunacy. I have never seen the value in lying to ourselves like that, which is why we start our interviews with, “What's the job after this and how do we help you get there?”It's important that we ask those questions and acknowledge that reality. And the