Podcasts about DevOps

Google Cloud's DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) team operationalize the Accelerate State of DevOps Report, surveying over 32,000 professionals worldwide in the DevOps industry.  Dave Mangot joins the show today to share how he leverages these metrics to improve companies within their technology organizations.   In this episode… DORA metrics Speed and quality  Monoliths vs. microservices Uptime and failure rates Mean time to recover  Deployment frequencies Production monitoring Sponsors Top End Devs Coaching | Top End Devs Links Mangoteque - Get good at delivering software℠ The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, & Security in Technology Organizations DevOps Solutions | Google Cloud Picks Dave- An incomplete list of skills senior engineers need, beyond coding Jillian- Twitter: @PayGapApp Jonathan - Toothpowder is better than toothpaste

I spoke with Todd Little and Joey Spooner at the BAI conference.  We speek about the evolution of Kanban and how Kanban can drive evolutionary change in an organization. We chat about Value Stream Managment, DevOps, transformation, continuous improvement, adaptive govenrnance and the many ways that Kanban can help. I have known Todd and Joey for many years and it was great to speak with them in person. Enjoy

Bret is joined by Rosemary Wang, a developer advocate at Hashi Corp. She recently finished a Manning book, titled Infrastructure as Code: Patterns and Practices. They discuss how infrastructure as code fits into DevOps and Gitops, and how you can get started with IaC and run over some important patterns, such as controlling versioning, IaC testing and managing costs.Rosemary worked at ThoughtWorks previously, and it was interesting to hear her experiences on learning from senior engineering, and how pairing and other types of mentorship can help. Streamed live on YouTube on April 28, 2022.Unedited live recording of this show on YouTube (Ep #168).★Topics★Infrastructure as Code: Patterns and Practices, with examples in Python and Terraform ★Rosemary Wang★Rosemary on Twitter ★Join my Community★Best coupons for my Docker and Kubernetes coursesChat with us on our Discord Server Vital DevOpsHomepage bretfisher.com★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

This week, NetApp Astra Product Manager Tim Doering joins us to talk about how NetApp approaches DevOps and what sort of solutions are available in the NetApp product portfolio.

In this episode, Steven sits down with Amanda Terry to discuss OnChainMonkey's incredible history, its efforts to do well and do good for the world, and its latest collection drop - Karma Monkeys.  Amanda Terry is a Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer for Metagood - a Web3 Business that strives to build a better future for Web3 while doing good along the way. Through its first NFT Project - OnChainMonkey (https://onchainmonkey.com/ (https://onchainmonkey.com/)) - Metagood has simultaneously created value for its community members and made a real world impact (https://www.metagood.com/impact). OnChainMonkey is the first 10K PFP Collection with all images, metadata, and rarity traits to be deployed entirely on-chain in a single transaction. They were a Free Mint launched on September 11, 2021 and have traded over 14,000 ETH in Lifetime Sales. Ownership of an OnChainMonkey allows membership perks in the community, exclusive IRL event access, and votes to fund projects that benefit the community and can change the world. OCM was selected as Fast Company's 2022 "20 Best World Changing Ideas" in Impact Investing and 1 of 8 Finalists in the Coindesk Extreme Tech Challenge Web 3 competition, which was presented on June 11 at Consensus. OnChainMonkey's next collection - Karma Monkeys - launched Wednesday, June 29th and will be revealed Friday, July 1st to expand the OnChainMonkey Community and seed its DAO. Amanda is also Co-Founder with Bill Tai and Managing Partner of ACTAI Ventures, an early stage fund whose thesis is that technology can bring scale and efficiency to industries and improve our society and planet. They have a global network of investors, 80% of whom founded companies. They look globally for teams building high growth companies at good valuations and have invested in Web3, Blockchain, AI, Ed Tech, Food Tech, FinTech, Dev Ops: https://www.actaiventures.com/ Amanda has over 20 years in digital media sales and business development leadership experience from Twitter, NBC, Zagat (acquired by Google), 5min (acquired by AOL), TARGUSinfo (acquired by Neustar,) and Acxiom (acquired by IPG.) She's a frequent speaker at blockchain industry events including NFT NYC, Ethereal Summit, SXSW, and Vee Con. She has a BA from Princeton University and MBA from the Wharton School at University of Pennsylvania. *Disclaimer. Richard Carthon is the Founder of Crypto Current. All opinions expressed by members of the Crypto Current Team, Richard or his guest on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Crypto Current. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Richard as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. ~ Put your Bitcoin and Ethereum to work. Earn up to 12% interest back withhttps://get.tantralabs.io/earn/?utm_source=cryptocurrent&utm_medium=display&utm_campaign=advertising-display-cryptocurrent&utm_content=lp ( Tantra Labs) ~ New to crypto? Check out ourhttps://bit.ly/394YKFw ( Crypto for Beginners) Step-by-Step Guide to Crypto Investing ~ Follow us on https://bit.ly/3CPwepn (Youtube),http://bit.ly/2TRIArp ( Twitter), http://bit.ly/38yfrqo (Instagram),http://bit.ly/39DhpHi ( Facebook),http://bit.ly/38wsXL5 ( LinkedIn), & https://bit.ly/3yQ30Es (Tik Tok) ~ Want to make ~$25+ a month for FREE? Sign up to get a FREEhttps://www.emrit.io/?referral=cryptocurrent ( emrit.io Coolspot) today!  ~ Want to learn more about cryptocurrency? Check out ourhttps://bit.ly/2CbaYzw ( educational videos) today! ~ https://bit.ly/2TF3Gtb (Swan) is the easiest and most affordable way to accumulate Bitcoin with automatic recurring purchases. Start your plan today and get $10 of free Bitcoin dropped into your account. ~ Want access to cool crypto/blockchain projects that you can use immediately? Check out ourhttps://bit.ly/3eZ8J1E (...

This week we discuss the Stack Overflow Dev Survey, Securing the Supply Chain and Slack Huddles. Plus, some thoughts on coffee down under. Runner-up Titles Waiting for my wife to get up and out of the bedroom/office My wife is still asleep I feel a Liberal Arts rant coming on That's not the full stack baby How deep does this chasm go? This was your chance to own the SaaS 10 years ago Rundown Starbucks down under (https://twitter.com/franchisewolf/status/1541032303861739520) Why there are almost no Starbucks in Australia (https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/20/starbucks-australia-coffee-failure.html) Survey Says Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2022 (https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/) The 10th Annual Open Source Jobs Report - Linux Foundation (https://www.linuxfoundation.org/tools/the-10th-annual-open-source-jobs-report/?utm_campaign=OSSUMMIT-2022&utm_content=212390733&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&hss_channel=tw-14706299) Supply Chain Aqua Security and CIS release first formal guidelines for software supply chain (https://flip.it/I3T0Nc) Direct link to CIS Doc (https://workbench.cisecurity.org/benchmarks/7555/sections/942026) Chain Bench (https://github.com/aquasecurity/chain-bench) The 4th S of Software Supply Chain Security (https://www.slim.ai/blog/the-4-s-s-of-software-supply-chain-security.html) Productivity The Future of Slack Looks a Lot Like Zoom (https://www.wired.com/story/the-future-of-slack-looks-a-lot-like-zoom/) Discord Improved My Marriage (https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/blog/discord-improved-my-marriage/) IBM's first cloudy mainframes scheduled to launch June 30 (https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/29/ibm_cloud_mainframe_launch/) Relevant to your Interests Netflix Cuts 300 Employees In New Round of Layoffs (https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/netflix-cuts-300-employees-in-new-round-of-layoffs-1235157991/) Remote Workers Make More Money, Cloud Salary Survey Says (https://thenewstack.io/remote-workers-make-more-money-cloud-salary-survey-says/) Amazon has a plan to make Alexa mimic anyone's voice (https://www.reuters.com/technology/amazon-has-plan-make-alexa-mimic-anyones-voice-2022-06-22/) Twitter to expand into long-form content with upcoming Twitter Notes feature (Update: confirmed) – TechCrunch (https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/21/twitter-to-expand-into-long-form-content-with-upcoming-twitter-notes-feature/) Google is paying the Wikimedia Foundation for better access to information (https://www.theverge.com/2022/6/22/23178245/google-paying-wikimedia-foundation-information) Oracle slashes minimum commitment for on-prem cloud (https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/23/oracle_on_prem_cloud/) Zendesk to Be Acquired by Investor Group Led by Hellman & Friedman and Permira for $10.2 Billion (https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220624005233/en/Zendesk-to-Be-Acquired-by-Investor-Group-Led-by-Hellman-Friedman-and-Permira-for-10.2-Billion?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter_axiosprorata&stream=top) He's the first buyer of the electric F-150. Why he's the future of the car industry (https://www.npr.org/2022/06/20/1104920656/ford-electric-f150-lightning-electric-vehicles-automakers) Here's Google's letter saying employees can relocate to states with abortion rights (https://www.theverge.com/2022/6/24/23182288/google-letter-email-employees-roe-v-wade-decision) Report: Apple is gearing up to launch a ‘flood' of new devices starting this fall (https://www.theverge.com/2022/6/26/23183875/apple-gearing-up-launch-flood-new-devices-this-fall-m2-chip-macbook-iphone-14-watch-series-9) Valorant Is Planning to Monitor Voice Chat, Tests Begin Next Month (https://www.ign.com/articles/valorant-monitor-voice-chat-tests-begin-next-month) Politics trumps business in Truth Social's war on Big Tech (https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-trump-truth-social/) Geofence and keyword warrants (https://thehustle.co/06282022-geofence-warrants/) The GitOps market: driving progressive delivery and experimentation's expansion by The Art of Modern Ops (https://soundcloud.com/user-718131608/the-gitops-market-driving-progressive-delivery-and-experimentations-expansion/s-K1R91NkC4DD?si=067997b06f4e49c6b2ca6ce2fa670e08&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing) Jeffrey Snover retires (https://twitter.com/jsnover/status/1541447375369097217) Pinterest CEO steps down, Google executive to take over in e-commerce push (https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/28/tech/pinterest-ceo/index.html) VMware Unveils vSphere+ and vSAN+ (https://news.vmware.com/releases/vmware-unveils-vsphere-plus-and-vsan-plus) Consentomatic (https://consentomatic.au.dk/) Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable (https://www.smartcompany.com.au/startupsmart/analysis/atlassian-unprofitable-valuation-adam-schwab/) Google Workspace head Javier Soltero is leaving the company (https://www.protocol.com/bulletins/google-workspace-javier-soltero-leaving) DevOps is a failure | lbr. (https://leebriggs.co.uk/blog/2022/06/21/devops-is-a-failure) Developer-Led Landscape: Complexity, Automation & A Future of Autonomous Development (https://tylerjewell.substack.com/p/complexity-automation-autonomous-development?utm_source=email) How Thomas Kurian made Google Cloud into an enterprise-first company (https://www.protocol.com/enterprise/google-cloud-ceo-thomas-kurian) Nonsense New favorite #barcelona #bar #travel #spain #abroad (https://www.tiktok.com/@sarahhands/video/7112453214980607275) SXSW expands to Australia for 2023 (https://www.kxan.com/news/local/austin/sxsw-expands-to-australia-for-2023/) Listener Feedback There are indeed a Smart Sprinkler System: Rachio Smart Sprinkler Controllers (https://rachio.com/) and Rain Bird (https://www.rainbird.com/professionals/products/controllers) Conferences THAT Conference Wisconsin (https://that.us/call-for-counselors/wi/2022/), July 25, 2022 Discount code: SDTFriendsWI50 for $50 off 4-Day everything ticket Discount code:: SDTFriendsWI25 for $25 off 3-Day Camper ticket DevOpsDayLA (https://www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale/19x/devops-day-la) is happening at SCALE19x (https://www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale/19x), July, 29th, 2022 Discount code: DEVOP VMware Explore 2022, August 29 – September 1, 2022 (https://www.vmware.com/explore.html?src=so_623a10693ceb7&cid=7012H000001Kb0hQAC) SpringOne Platform (https://springone.io/?utm_source=cote&utm_medium=podcast&utm_content=sdt), SF, December 6–8, 2022 THAT Conference Texas Call For Counselors (https://that.us/call-for-counselors/tx/2023/) Jan 16-19, 2023, SDT news & hype Join us in Slack (http://www.softwaredefinedtalk.com/slack). Get a SDT Sticker! Send your postal address to stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com (mailto:stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com) and we will send you free laptop stickers! Follow us on Twitch (https://www.twitch.tv/sdtpodcast), Twitter (https://twitter.com/softwaredeftalk), Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/softwaredefinedtalk/), LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/software-defined-talk/) and YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCi3OJPV6h9tp-hbsGBLGsDQ/featured). Use the code SDT to get $20 off Coté's book, (https://leanpub.com/digitalwtf/c/sdt) Digital WTF (https://leanpub.com/digitalwtf/c/sdt), so $5 total. Become a sponsor of Software Defined Talk (https://www.softwaredefinedtalk.com/ads)! Recommendations Brandon: Gmail Top Senders Script (https://ryanfb.github.io/etc/2019/08/26/finding_the_most_frequent_senders_in_your_gmail_account.html), Google Storage Manager (https://one.google.com/storage/management) and Gmail Search Operators (https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7190?hl=en) Brandon's on the Cloudcast this week: A 2022 Mid-Year Cloud Update (https://www.thecloudcast.net/2022/06/a-2022-mid-year-cloud-update.html) Matt: MangoPi MQ-PRO (https://mangopi.cc/mangopi_mqpro) (RISC-V SBC) Photo Credits CoverArt (https://unsplash.com/photos/49uySSA678U) Banner (https://unsplash.com/photos/CHlb47sc_O8)

Show Notes(01:46) Douwe went over formative experiences catching the programming virus at the age of 9, combining high school with freelance web development, and studying Computer Science at Utrecht University in college.(03:55) Douwe shared the story behind founding a startup called Stinngo, which led him to join GitLab in 2015 as employee number 10.(05:29) Douwe provided insights on attributes of exceptional engineering talent, given his time hiring developers and eventually becoming GitLab's first Development Lead.(08:28) Douwe unpacked the evolution of his engineering career at GitLab.(11:11) Douwe discussed the motivation behind the creation of the Meltano project in August 2018 to help GitLab's internal data team address the gaps that prevent them from understanding the effectiveness of business operations.(14:38) Douwe reflected on his decision in 2019 to leave GitLab's engineering organization and join the then 5-people Meltano team full-time.(20:24) Douwe shared the details about Meltano's product development journey from its Version 1 to its pivot.(26:18) Douwe reflected on the mental aspect of being the sole person whom Meltano depended on for a while.(29:20) Douwe explained the positioning of Meltano as an open-source self-hosted platform for running data integration and transformation pipelines.(34:54) Douwe shared details of Meltano's ideal customer profiles.(37:45) Douwe provided a quick tour of the Meltano project, which represents the single source of truth regarding one's ELT pipelines: how data should be integrated and transformed, how the pipelines should be orchestrated, and how the various plugins that make up the pipelines should be configured.(40:39) Douwe unpacked different components of Meltano's product strategy, including Meltano SDK, Meltano Hub, and Meltano Labs.(45:05) Douwe discussed prioritizing Meltano's product roadmap in order to bring DataOps functionality to every step of the entire data lifecycle.(48:53) Douwe shared the story behind spinning Meltano out of GitLab in June 2021 and raising a $4.2M Seed funding round led by GV to bring the benefits of open source data integration and DataOps to a wider audience.(52:19) Douwe provided his thoughts behind open-source contributors in a way that can generate valuable product feedback for Meltano.(55:43) Douwe shared valuable hiring lessons to attract the right people who align with Meltano's values.(59:04) Douwe shared advice to startup CEOs who are experimenting with the remote work culture in our “new-normal” virtual working environments.(01:04:10) Douwe unpacked Meltano's mission and vision as outlined in this blog post.(01:06:40) Closing segment.Douwe's Contact InfoGitLabLinkedInTwitterGitHubWebsiteMeltano's ResourcesWebsite | Twitter | LinkedIn | GitHub | YouTubeMeltano Documentation | Product | DataOpsMeltano SDK | Meltano Hub | Meltano LabsCompany Handbook | Community | Values | CareersMentioned ContentArticlesHey, data teams - We're working on a tool just for you (Aug 2018)To-do zero, inbox zero, calendar zero: I think that means I'm done (Sep 2019)Meltano graduates to Version 1.0 (Oct 2019)Revisiting the Meltano strategy: a return to our roots (May 2020)Why we are building an open-source platform for ELT pipelines (May 2020)Meltano spins out of GitLab, raises seed funding to bring data integration into the DataOps era (June 2021)Meltano: The strategic foundation of the ideal data stack (Oct 2021)Introducing your DataOps platform infrastructure: Our strategy for the future of data (Nov 2021)Our next step for building the infrastructure for your Modern Data Stack (Dec 2021)PeopleMaxime Beauchemin (Founder and CEO of Preset, Creator of Apache Airflow and Apache Superset, Angel Investor in Meltano)Benn Stancil (Chief Analytics Officer at Mode Analytics, Well-Known Substack Writer)The entire team at dbt LabsNotesMy conversation with Douwe was recorded back in November 2021. Since then, many things have happened at Meltano. I'd recommend:Checking out their updated company valuesReading Douwe's article about the DataOps Operating System on The New StackExamining Douwe's blog post about moving Meltano to GitHubLooking over the announcement of Meltano 2.0 and the additional seed fundingAbout the showDatacast features long-form, in-depth conversations with practitioners and researchers in the data community to walk through their professional journeys and unpack the lessons learned along the way. I invite guests coming from a wide range of career paths — from scientists and analysts to founders and investors — to analyze the case for using data in the real world and extract their mental models (“the WHY and the HOW”) behind their pursuits. Hopefully, these conversations can serve as valuable tools for early-stage data professionals as they navigate their own careers in the exciting data universe.Datacast is produced and edited by James Le. Get in touch with feedback or guest suggestions by emailing khanhle.1013@gmail.com.Subscribe by searching for Datacast wherever you get podcasts or click one of the links below:Listen on SpotifyListen on Apple PodcastsListen on Google PodcastsIf you're new, see the podcast homepage for the most recent episodes to listen to, or browse the full guest list.

...but of course, they can't. And since mere monitoring won't cut it in a cloud first world - the only place to turn is modern application observability. In this episode of Cloud Talk Live, we get to chat with Keith Llorens and Andrew Liu of AppDynamics where we will unpack what observability is and how will transform your approach to customer experience. To get started on your full stack observability journey and add business context throughout the tech stack, take the first step https://www.rackspace.com/lp/ctl-if-these-apps-could-talk Special Guests: Andrew Liu and Keith Llorens.

A deep discussion on that tension between development speed and software quality. What is velocity? How does it differ from speed? How do we measure it? How do we optimize it?

Links:  Azure has another security issue around its Synapse offering; this one was discovered by Tenable. Sysdig has a dive into the real threats to SSH on EC2. Tailscale has announced the ability to support Tailscale SSH. Chris Farris has a treatise on the The Philosphy of Prevention when it comes to cloud security. Google Cloud CISO Phil Venables asks whether security analogies are counterproductive.  A security issue of sorts was discovered around sts:GetSessionToken Role Chaining in AWS The person responsible for the giant Capital One hack that took advantage of a series of small AWS misconfigurations has been convicted. Rogue GitHub apps could have hijacked countless repos for a week or two earlier this year. Wickr for Government achieves FedRAMP Ready designation It takes an open source project like trackiam to collate IAM actions, AWS APIs, and managed policies from all over the place Passwordle lets you guess commonly used passwords.

About ChrisChris is a robotics engineer turned cloud security practitioner. From building origami robots for NASA, to neuroscience wearables, to enterprise software consulting, he is a passionate builder at heart. Chris is a cofounder of Common Fate, a company with a mission to make cloud access simple and secure.Links: Common Fate: https://commonfate.io/ Granted: https://granted.dev Twitter: https://twitter.com/chr_norm 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: Let's face it, on-call firefighting at 2am is stressful! So there's good news and there's bad news. The bad news is that you probably can't prevent incidents from happening, but the good news is that incident.io makes incidents less stressful and a lot more valuable. incident.io is a Slack-native incident management platform that allows you to automate incident processes, focus on fixing the issues and learn from incident insights to improve site reliability and fix your vulnerabilities. Try incident.io, recover faster and sleep more.Corey: 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: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. It doesn't matter where you are on your journey in cloud—you could never have heard of Amazon the bookstore—and you encounter AWS and you spin up an account. And within 20 minutes, you will come to the realization that everyone in this space does. “Wow, logging in to AWS absolutely blows goats.”Today, my guest, obviously had that reaction, but unlike most people I talked to, decided to get up and do something about it. Chris Norman is the co-founder of Common Fate and most notably to how I know him is one of the original authors of the tool, Granted. Chris, thank you so much for joining me.Chris: Hey, Corey, thank you for having me.Corey: I have done podcasts before; I have done a blog post on it; I evangelize it on Twitter constantly, and even now, it is challenging in a few ways to explain holistically what Granted is. Rather than trying to tell your story for you, when someone says, “Oh, Granted, that seems interesting and impossible to Google for in isolation, so therefore, we know it's going to be good because all the open-source projects with hard to find names are,” what is Granted and what does it do?Chris: Granted is a command-line tool which makes it really easy for you to get access and assume roles when you're working with AWS. For me, when I'm using Granted day-to-day, I wake up, go to my computer—I'm working from home right now—crack open the MacBook and I log in and do some development work. I'm going to go and start working in the cloud.Corey: Oh, when I start first thing in the morning doing development work and logging into the cloud, I know. All right, I'm going to log in to AWS and now I know that my day is going downhill from here.Chris: [laugh]. Exactly, exactly. I think maybe the best days are when you don't need to log in at all. But when you do, I go and I open my terminal and I run this command. Using Granted, I ran this assume command and it authenticates me with single-sign-on into AWS, and then it opens up a console window in a particular account.Now, you might ask, “Well, that's a fairly standard thing.” And in fact, that's probably the way that the console and all of the tools work by default with AWS. Why do you need a third-party tool for this?Corey: Right. I've used a bunch of things that do varying forms of this and unlike Granted, you don't see me gushing about them. I want to be very clear, we have no business relationship. You're not sponsoring anything that I do. I'm not entirely clear on what your day job entails, but I have absolutely fallen in love with the Granted tool, which is why I'm dragging you on to this show, kicking and screaming, mostly to give me an excuse to rave about it some more.Chris: [laugh]. Exactly. And thank you for the kind words. And I'd say really what makes it special or why I've been so excited to be working on it is that it makes this access, particularly when you're working with multiple accounts, really, really easy. So, when I run assume and I open up that console window, you know, that's all fine and that's very similar to how a lot of the other tools and projects that are out there work, but when I want to open that second account and that second console window, maybe because I'm looking at like a development and a staging account at the same time, then Granted allows me to view both of those simultaneously in my browser. And we do that using some platform sort of tricks and building into the way that the browser works.Corey: Honestly, one of the biggest differences in how you describe what Granted is and how I view it is when you describe it as a CLI application because yes, it is that, but one of the distinguishing characteristics is you also have a Firefox extension that winds up leveraging the multi-container functionality extension that Firefox has. So, whenever I wind up running a single command—assume with a-c' flag, then I give it the name of my AWS profile, it opens the web console so I can ClickOps my heart's content inside of a tab that is locked to a container, which means I can have one or two or twenty different AWS accounts and/or regions up running simultaneously side-by-side, which is basically impossible any other way that I've ever looked at it.Chris: Absolutely, yeah. And that's, like, the big differentiating factor right now between Granted and between this sort of default, the native experience, if you're just using the AWS command line by itself. With Granted, you can—with these Firefox containers, all of your cookies, your profile, everything is all localized into that one container. It's actually it's a privacy features that are built into Firefox, which keeps everything really separate between your different profiles. And what we're doing with Granted is that we make it really easy to open a specific profiles that correspond with different AWS profiles that you're using.So, you'd have one which could be your development account, one which could be production or staging. And you can jump between these and navigate between them just as separate tabs in your browser, which is a massive improvement over, you know, what I've previously had to use in the past.Corey: The thing that really just strikes me about this is first, of course, the functionality and the rest, so I saw this—I forget how I even came across it—and immediately I started using it. On my Mac, it was great. I started using it when I was on the road, and it was less great because you built this thing in Go. It can compile and install on almost anything, but there were some assumptions that you had built into this in its early days that did not necessarily encompass all of the use cases that I use. For example, it hadn't really occurred to you that some lunatic would try and only use an iPad when they're on the road, so they have to be able to run this to get federated login links via SSHing into an EC2 instance running somewhere and not have it open locally.You seemed almost taken aback when I brought it up. Like, “What lunatic would do that?” Like, “Hi, I'm such a lunatic. Let's talk about this.” And it does that now, and it's awesome. It does seem to me though, and please correct me if I'm wrong on this assumption slash assessment that this is first and foremost aimed at desktop users, specifically people running Mac on the desktop, is that the genesis of it?Chris: It is indeed. And I think part of the cause behind that is that we originally built a tool for ourselves. And as we were building things and as we were working using the cloud, we were running things—you know, we like to think that we're following best practices when we're using AWS, and so we'd set up multiple accounts, we'd have a special account for development, a separate one for staging, a separate one for production, even internal tools that we would build, we would go and spin up an individual account for those. And then you know, we had lots of accounts. and to go and access those really easily was quite difficult.So, we definitely, we built it for ourselves first and I think that that's part of when we released it, it actually a little bit of cause for some of the initial problems. And some of the feedback that we had was that it's great to build tools for yourself, but when you're working in open-source, there's a lot of different diversity with how people are using things.Corey: We take different approaches. You want to try to align with existing best practices, whereas I am a loudmouth white guy who works in tech. So, what I do definitionally becomes a best practice in the ecosystem. It's easier to just comport with the ones that are already existing that smart people put together rather than just trying to competence your way through it, so you took a better path than I did.But there's been a lot of evolution to Granted as I've been using it for a while. I did a whole write-up on it and that got a whole bunch of eyes onto the project, which I can now admit was a nefarious plan on my part because popping into your community Slack and yelling at you for features I want was all well and good, but let's try and get some people with eyes on this who are smarter than me—which is not that high of a bar when it comes to SSO, and IAM, and federated login, and the rest—and they can start finding other enhancements that I'll probably benefit from. And sure enough, that's exactly what happened. My sneaky plan has come to fruition. Thanks for being a sucker, I guess. I mean—[laugh] it worked. I'm super thrilled by the product.Chris: [laugh]. I guess it's a great thing I think that the feedback and particularly something that's always been really exciting is just seeing new issues come through on GitHub because it really shows the kinds of interesting use cases and the kinds of interesting teams and companies that are using Granted to make their lives a little bit easier.Corey: When I go to the website—which again is impossible to Google—the website for those wondering is granted.dev. It's short, it's concise, I can say it on a podcast and people automatically know how to spell it. But at the top of the website—which is very well done by the way—it mentions that oh, you can, “Govern access to breakglass roles with Common Fate Cloud,” and it also says in the drop shadow nonsense thing in the upper corner, “Brought to you by Common Fate,” which is apparently the name of your company.So, the question I'll get to in a second is what does your company do, but first and foremost, is this going to be one of those rug-pull open-source projects where one day it's, “Oh, you want to log into your AWS accounts? Insert quarter to continue.” I'm mostly being a little over the top with that description, but we've all seen things that we love turn into molten garbage. What is the plan around this? Are you about to ruin this for the rest of us once you wind up raising a round or something? What's the deal?Chris: Yeah, it's a great question, Corey. And I think that to a degree, releasing anything like this that sits in the access workflow and helps you assume roles and helps you day-to-day, you know, we have a responsibility to uphold stability and reliability here and to not change things. And I think part of, like, not changing things includes not [laugh] rug-pulling, as you've alluded to. And I think that for some companies, it ends up that open-source becomes, like, a kind of a lead-generation tool, or you end up with, you know, now finally, let's go on add another login so that you have to log into Common Fate to use Granted. And I think that, to be honest, a tool like this where it's all about improving the speed of access, the incentives for us, like, it doesn't even make sense to try and add another login for to try to get people to, like, to say, login to Common Fate because that would make your signing process for AWS take even longer than it already does.Corey: Yeah, you decided that you know, what's the biggest problem? Oh, you can sleep at night, so let's go ahead and make it even worse, by now I want you to be this custodian of all my credentials to log into all of my accounts. And now you're going to be critical path, so if you're down, I'm not able to log into anything. And oh, by the way, I have to trust you with full access to my bank stuff. I just can't imagine that is a direction that you would be super excited about diving head-first into.Chris: No, no. Yeah, certainly not. And I think that the, you know, building anything in this space, and with what we're doing with Common Fate, you know, we're building a cloud platform to try to make IAM a little bit easier to work with, but it's really sensitive around granting any kind of permission and I think that you really do need that trust. So, trying to build trust, I guess, with our open-source projects is really important for us with Granted and with this project, that it's going to continue to be reliable and continue to work as it currently does.Corey: The way I see it, one of the dangers of doing anything that is particularly open-source—or that leans in the direction of building in Amazon's ecosystem—it leads to the natural question of, well, isn't this just going to be some people say stolen—and I don't think those people understand how open-source works—by AWS themselves? Or aren't they going to build something themselves at AWS that's going to wind up stomping this thing that you've built? And my honest and remarkably cynical answer is that, “You have built a tool that is a joy to use, that makes logging into AWS accounts streamlined and efficient in a variety of different patterns. Does that really sound like something AWS would do?” And followed by, “I wish they would because everyone would benefit from that rising tide.”I have to be very direct and very clear. Your product should not exist. This should be something the provider themselves handles. But nope. Instead, it has to exist. And while I'm glad it does, I also can't shake the feeling that I am incredibly annoyed by the fact that it has to.Chris: Yeah. Certainly, certainly. And it's something that I think about a little bit. I like to wonder whether there's maybe like a single feature flag or some single sort of configuration setting in AWS where they're not allowing different tabs to access different accounts, they're not allowing this kind of concurrent access. And maybe if we make enough noise about Granted, maybe one of the engineers will go and flick that switch and they'll just enable it by default.And then Granted itself will be a lot less relevant, but for everybody who's using AWS, that'll be a massive win because the big draw of using Granted is mainly just around being able to access different accounts at the same time. If AWS let you do that out of the box, hey, that would be great and, you know, I'd have a lot less stuff to maintain.Corey: Originally, I had you here to talk about Granted, but I took a glance at what you're actually building over at Common Fate and I'm about to basically hijack slash derail what probably is going to amount the rest of this conversation because you have a quick example on your site for by developers, for developers. You show a quick Python script that tries to access a S3 bucket object and it's denied. You copy the error message, you paste it into what you're building over a Common Fate, and in return, it's like, “Oh. Yeah, this is the policy that fixes it. Do you want us to apply it for you?”And I just about fell out of my chair because I have been asking for this explicit thing for a very long time. And AWS doesn't do it. Their IAM access analyzer claims to. Like, “Oh, just go look at CloudTrail and see what permissions it uses and we'll build a policy to scope it down.” “Okay. So, it's S3 access. Fair enough. To what object or what bucket?” “Guess,” is what it tells you there.And it's, this is crap. Who thinks this is a good user experience? You have built the thing that I wish AWS had built in natively. Because let's be honest here, I do what an awful lot of people do and overscope permissions massively just because messing around with the bare minimum set of permissions in many cases takes more time than building the damn thing in the first place.Chris: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And in fact, this—was a few years ago when I was consulting—I had a really similar sort of story where one of the clients that we were working with, the CTO of this company, he was needing to grant us access to AWS and we were needing to build a particular service. And he said, “Okay, can you just let me know the permissions that you will need and I'll go and deploy the role for this.” And I came back and I said, “Wait. I don't even know the permissions that I'm going to need because the damn thing isn't even built yet.”So, we went sort of back and forth around this. And the compromise ended up just being you know, way too much access. And that was sort of part of the inspiration for, you know, really this whole project and what we're building with Common Fate, just trying to make that feedback loop around getting to the right level of permissions a lot faster.Corey: Yeah, I am just so overwhelmingly impressed by the fact that you have built—and please don't take this as a criticism—but a set of very simple tools. Not simple in the terms of, “Oh, that's, like, three lines of bash, and a fool could write that on a weekend.” No. Simple in the sense of it solves a problem elegantly and well and it's straightforward—well, straightforward as anything in the world of access control goes—to wrap your head around exactly what it does. You don't tend to build these things by sitting around a table brainstorming with someone you met at co-founder dating pool or something and wind up figuring out, “Oh, we should go and solve that. That sounds like a billion-dollar problem.”This feels very much like the outcome of when you're sitting around talking to someone and let's start by drinking six beers so we become extraordinarily honest, followed immediately by let's talk about what sucks. What pisses you off the most? It feels like this is sort of the low-hanging fruit of things that upset people when it comes to AWS. I mean, if things had gone slightly differently, instead of focusing on AWS bills, IAM was next on my list of things to tackle just because I was tired of smacking my head into it.This is very clearly a problem space that you folks have analyzed deeply, worked within, and have put a lot of thought into. I want to be clear, I've thrown a lot of feature suggestions that you for Granted from start to finish. But all of them have been around interface stuff and usability and expanding use cases. None of them have been, “Well, that seems screamingly insecure.” Because it hasn't been.Chris: [laugh].Corey: It has been effective, start to finish, I think that from a security posture, you make terrific choices, in many cases better than ones I would have made a starting from scratch myself. Everything that I'm looking at in what you have built is from a position of this is absolutely amazing and it is transformative to my own workflows. Now, how can we improve it?Chris: Mmm. Thank you, Corey. And I'll say as well, maybe around the security angle, that one of the goals with Granted was to try and do things a little bit better than the default way that AWS does them when it comes to security. And it's actually been a bit of a source for challenges with some of the users that we've been working with with Granted because one of the things we wanted to do was encrypt the SSO token. And this is the token that when you sign in to AWS, kind of like, it allows you to then get access to all of the rest of the accounts.So, it's like a pretty—it's a short-lived token, but it's a really sensitive one. And you know, by default, it's just stored in plain text on your disk. So, we dump to a file and, you know, anything that can go and read that, they can go and get it. It's also a little bit hard to revoke and to lock people out. There's not really great workflows around that on AWS's side.So, we thought, “Okay, great. One of the goals for Granted can be that we will go and store this in your keychain in your system and we'll work natively with that.” And that's actually been a cause for a little bit of a hassle for some users, though, because by doing that and by storing all of this information in the keychain, it's actually broken some of the integrations with the rest of the tooling, which kind of expects tokens and things to be in certain places. So, we've actually had to, as part of dealing with that with Granted, we've had to give users the ability to opt out for that.Corey: 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: That's why I find this so, I think, just across the board, fantastic. It's you are very clearly engaged with your community. There's a community Slack that you have set up for this. And I know, I know, too many Slacks; everyone has this problem. This is one of those that is worth hanging in, at least from my perspective, just because one of the problems that you have, I suspect, is on my Mac it's great because I wind up automatically updating it to whatever the most recent one is every time I do a brew upgrade.But on the Linux side of the world, you've discovered what many of us have discovered, and that is that packaging things for Linux is a freaking disaster. The current installation is, “Great. Here's basically a curl bash.” Or, “Here, grab this tarball and install it.” And that's fine, but there's no real way of keeping that updated and synced.So, I was checking the other day, oh wow, I'm something like eight versions behind on this box. But it still just works. I upgraded. Oh, wow. There's new functionality here. This is stuff that's actually really handy. I like this quite a bit. Let's see what else we can do.I'm just so impressed, start to finish, by just how receptive you've been to various community feedbacks. And as well—I want to be very clear on this point, too—I've had folks who actually know what they're doing in an InfoSec sense look at what you're up to, and none of them had any issues of note. I'm sure that they have a pile of things like, with that curl bash, they should really be doing a GPG check. Yes, yes, fine. Whatever. If that's your target threat model, okay, great. Here in reality-land for what I do, this is awesome.And they don't seem to have any problems with, “Oh, yeah. By the way, sending analytics back up”—which, okay, fine, whatever. “And it's not disclosing them.” Okay, that's bad. “And it's including the contents of your AWS credentials.”Ahhhh. I did encounter something that was doing that on the back-end once. [cough]—Serverless Framework—sorry, something caught in my throat for a second.Chris: [laugh].Corey: No faster way I can think of to erode trust in that. But everything you're doing just makes sense.Chris: Oh, I do remember that. And that was a little bit of a fiasco, really, around all of that, right? And it's great to hear actually around that InfoSec folks and security people being, you know, not unhappy, I guess, with a tool like this. It's been interesting for me personally. We've really come from a practitioner's background.You know, I wouldn't call myself a security engineer at all. I would call myself as a sometimes a software developer, I guess. I have been hacking my way around Go and definitely learning a lot about how the cloud has worked over the past seven, eight years or so, but I wouldn't call myself a security engineer, so being very cautious around how all of these things work. And we've really tried to defer to things like the system keychain and defer to things that we know are pretty safe and work.Corey: The thing that I also want to call out as well is that your licensing is under the MIT license. This is not one of those, “Oh, you're required to wind up doing a bunch of branding stuff around it.” And, like some people say, “Oh, you have to own the trademark for all of these things.” I mean, I'm not an expert in international trademark law, let's be very clear, but I also feel that trademarking a term that is already used heavily in the space such as the word ‘Granted,' feels like kind of an uphill battle. And let's further be clear that it doesn't matter what you call this thing.In fact, I will call attention to an oddity that I've encountered a fair bit. After installing it, the first thing you do is you run the command ‘granted.' That sets it up, it lets you configure your browser, what browser you want to use, and it now supports standard out for that headless, EC2 use case. Great. Awesome. Love it. But then the other binary that ships with it is Assume. And that's what I use day-to-day. It actually takes me a minute sometimes when it's been long enough to remember that the tool is called Granted and not Assume what's up with that?Chris: So, part of the challenge that we ran into when we were building the Granted project is that we needed to export some environment variables. And these are really important when you're logging into AWS because you have your access key, your secret key, your session token. All of those, when you run the assume command, need to go into the terminal session that you called it. This doesn't matter so much when you're using the console mode, which is what we mentioned earlier where you can open 100 different accounts if you want to view all of those at the same time in your browser. But if you want to use it in your terminal, we wanted to make it look as really smooth and seamless as possible here.And we were really inspired by this approach from—and I have to shout them out and kind of give credit to them—a tool called AWSume—they're spelled A-W-S-U-M-E—Python-based tool that they don't do as much with single-sign-on, but we thought they had a really nice, like, general approach to the way that they did the scripting and aliasing. And we were inspired by that and part of that means that we needed to have a shell script that called this executable, which then will export things back out into the shell script. And we're doing all this wizardry under the hood to make the user experience really smooth and seamless. Part of that meant that we separated the commands into granted and assume and the other part of the naming for everything is that I felt Granted had a far better ring to it than calling the whole project Assume.Corey: True. And when you say assume, is it AWS or not? I've used the AWSume project before; I've used AWS Vault out of 99 Designs for a while. I've used—for three minutes—the native AWS SSO config, and that is just trash. Again, they're so good at the plumbing, so bad at the porcelain, I think is the criticism that I would levy toward a lot of this stuff.Chris: Mmm.Corey: And it's odd to think there's an entire company built around just smoothing over these sharp, obnoxious edges, but I'm saying this as someone who runs a consultancy and have five years that just fixes the bill for this one company. So, there's definitely a series of cottage industries that spring up around these things. I would be thrilled, on some level, if you wound up being completely subsumed by their product advancements, but it's been 15 years for a lot of this stuff and we're still waiting. My big failure mode that I'm worried about is that you never are.Chris: Yeah, exactly, exactly. And it's really interesting when you think about all of these user experience gaps in AWS being opportunities for, I guess, for companies like us, I think, trying to simplify a lot of the complexity for things. I'm interested in sort of waiting for a startup to try and, like, rebuild the actual AWS console itself to make it a little bit faster and easier to use.Corey: It's been done and attempted a bunch of different times. The problem is that the console is a lot of different things to a lot of different people, and as you step through that, you can solve for your use case super easily. “Yeah, what do I care? I use RDS, I use some VPC nonsense, and I use EC2. The end.” “Great. What about IAM?”Because I promise you're using that whether you know it or not. And okay, well, I'm talking to someone else who's DynamoDB, and someone else is full-on serverless, and someone else has more money than sense, so they mostly use SageMaker, and so on and so forth. And it turns out that you're effectively trying to rebuild everything. I don't know if that necessarily works.Chris: Yeah, and I think that's a good point around maybe while we haven't seen anything around that sort of space so far. You go to the console, and you click down, you see that list of 200 different services and all of those have had teams go and actually, like, build the UI and work with those individual APIs. Yeah.Corey: Any ideas as far as what's next for features on Granted?Chris: I think that, for us, it's continuing to work with everybody who's using it, and with a focus of stability and performance. We actually had somebody in the community raise an issue because they have an AWS config file that's over 7000 lines long. And I kind of pity that person, potentially, for their day-to-day. They must deal with so much complexity. Granted is currently quite slow when the config files get very big. And for us, I think, you know, we built it for ourselves; we don't have that many accounts just yet, so working to try to, like, make it really performant and really reliable is something that's really important.Corey: If you don't mind a feature request while we're at it—and I understand that this is more challenging than it looks like—I'm willing to fund this as a feature bounty that makes sense. And this also feels like it might be a good first project for a very particular type of person, I would love to get tab completion working in Zsh. You have it—Chris: Oh.Corey: For Fish because there's a great library that automatically populates that out, but for the Zsh side of it, it's, “Oh, I should just wind up getting Zsh completion working,” and I fell down a rabbit hole, let me tell you. And I come away from this with the perception of yeah, I'm not going to do it. I have not smart enough to check those boxes. But a lot of people are so that is the next thing I would love to see. Because I will change my browser to log into the AWS console for you, but be damned if I'm changing my shell.Chris: [laugh]. I think autocomplete probably should be higher on our roadmap for the tool, to be honest because it's really, like, a key metric and what we're focusing on is how easy is it to log in. And you know, if you're not too sure what commands to use or if we can save you a few keystrokes, I think that would be the, kind of like, reaching our goals.Corey: From where I'm sitting, you definitely have. I really want to thank you for taking the time to not only build this in the first place, but also speak with me about it. If people want to learn more, where's the best place to find you?Chris: So, you can find me on Twitter, I'm @chr_norm, or you can go and visit granted.dev and you'll have a link to join the Slack community. And I'm very active on the Slack.Corey: You certainly are, although I will admit that I fall into the challenge of being in just the perfectly opposed timezone from you and your co-founder, who are in different time zones to my understanding; one of you is on Australia and one of you was in London; you're the London guy as best I'm aware. And as a result, invariably, I wind up putting in feature requests right when no one's around. And, for better or worse, in the middle of the night is not when I'm usually awake trying to log into AWS. That is Azure time.Chris: [laugh]. Yeah, no, we don't have the US time zone properly covered yet for our community support and help. But we do have a fair bit of the world timezone covered. The rest of the team for Common Fate is all based in Australia and I'm out here over in London.Corey: Yeah. I just want to thank you again, for just being so accessible and, like, honestly receptive to feedback. I want to be clear, there's a way to give feedback and I do strive to do it constructively. I didn't come crashing into your Slack one day with a, “You know what your problem is?” I prefer to take the, “This is awesome. Here's what I think would be even better. Does that make sense?” As opposed to the imperious demands and GitHub issues and whatnot? It's, “I'd love it if it did this thing. Doesn't do this thing. Can you please make it do this thing?” Turns out that's the better way to drive change. Who knew?Chris: Yeah. [laugh]. Yeah, definitely. And I think that one of the things that's been the best around our journey with Granted so far has been listening to feedback and hearing from people how they would like to use the tool. And a big thank you to you, Corey, for actually suggesting changes that make it not only better for you, but better for everybody else who's using Granted.Corey: Well, at least as long as we're using my particular byzantine workload patterns in some way, or shape, or form, I'll hear that. But no, it's been an absolute pleasure and I really want to thank you for your time as well.Chris: Yeah, thank you for having me.Corey: Chris Norman, co-founder of Common Fate, as well as one of the two primary developers originally behind the Granted project that logs you into AWS without you having to lose your mind. 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, incensed, raging comment that talks about just how terrible all of this is once you spend four hours logging into your AWS account by hand first.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.

Charles Max Wood is the master architect behind Top End Devs, which includes 11 unique podcast shows for DevOps.  Today on the show, Subrat interviews Charles on how to launch, grow, and monetize a podcast show from scratch.  He shares his process, the strategies to launch, various tools, sites, and apps, how to build an audience, and how to monetize a show. Sponsors Top End Devs Coaching | Top End Devs Links Trusted CDN Provider | Faster Content Delivery | CacheFly Podcast Hosting and Analytics - Welcome to Fireside! Riverside.fm - Record Podcasts And Videos From Anywhere Picks Charles- Lost Ruins of Arnak Charles - Top End Devs Charles - Angular Remote Conf Subrat- Fun Of Heuristic

Charles Max Wood is the master architect behind Top End Devs, which includes 11 unique podcast shows for DevOps.  Today on the show, Subrat interviews Charles on how to launch, grow, and monetize a podcast show from scratch.  He shares his process, the strategies to launch, various tools, sites, and apps, how to build an audience, and how to monetize a show. Sponsors Top End Devs Coaching | Top End Devs Links Trusted CDN Provider | Faster Content Delivery | CacheFly Podcast Hosting and Analytics - Welcome to Fireside! Riverside.fm - Record Podcasts And Videos From Anywhere Picks Charles- Lost Ruins of Arnak Charles - Top End Devs Charles - Angular Remote Conf Subrat- Fun Of Heuristic

Tarush Aggarwal is the Founder and CEO of 5X, the modern data stack as a managed service that enables companies to answer business questions without having to worry about building data infrastructure or bringing in the right data engineering team. Chad talks with Tarush about the modern data stack movement, choosing things that make sense on behalf of their customers, and building a team culture at a company with a fairly large time zone distribution. 5x (https://5x.co/) Follow 5x on Twitter (https://twitter.com/DataWith5x), Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/DataWith5x), Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/datawith5x/), YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyOHdgLesV3FesXXl9-8V_w), or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/datawith5x). Follow Tarush on Twitter (https://twitter.com/tarush) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/tarushaggarwal/). Follow thoughtbot on Twitter (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/). Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of Giant Robots! Transcript: CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel. And with me today is Tarush Aggarwal, the Founder and CEO of 5X, the modern data stack as a managed service that enables companies to answer business questions without having to worry about building data infrastructure or bringing in the right data engineering team. Tarush, thank you for joining me. TARUSH: Chad, thank you so much for having me on the show. Really looking forward to being here and hopefully adding some value for your listeners. CHAD: Yes, I'm sure that they will. I think many companies are either thinking about how they build their data infrastructure or thinking about how they leverage data for their business now. So 5X provides a path for them to do that, and I'd love to dive in. How does 5X, like I said in the intro, enable companies to get started without having to worry about building this infrastructure themselves or this team themselves? TARUSH: Yeah, totally. It's a great question. Just to kind of zoom out for a quick second, the data space has been really hot for a few years now, and there's this area often called the modern data stack, which is really led by a few vendors mainly around this concept of the data warehouse, reporting tools, and modeling, and ingestion. And this is really a new area for the data space, which has really become popular. So you also have, you know, ten years ago, you had Hadoop and Spark, and all of these different data tools, which in general have become less popular, and the modern data stack movement is one of the big movements happening. So at a macro level, we have this new movement. If you zoom in, this movement happens to be one of the most fragmented movements. So what that means is for each different layer, you have different vendors. And so, even if you want to do something today as simple as building dashboards, you have to first ingest this data. In your average company, you've got [inaudible] at different sources. You need to put it in. You need to then store it, you need to model it, and then you can build a dashboard. CHAD: You also need to make all the different choices about which ones you're going to choose at every level. TARUSH: Exactly. At each of these levels, you have multiple billion-dollar companies today competing. So the thing about fragmentation of the space and, you know, I think data along with maybe DevOps and security are probably the most fragmented spaces. The thing about fragmented spaces is that they are great for extremely savvy customers; think of large tech companies who have 100% data teams. But for 90% of businesses, if you want to get value from data, it makes it much harder because you have to sign multiple contracts with these vendors, architecture, set up security. So what 5X very, very fundamentally is doing is we're business-focused. We allow you, you know, in a month or two, you better go to 5x.co and add your credit card, and you will have business analytics out of the box. And we can help you make some of these decisions as to what are the best vendors for your price points, for your use cases and give you an end-to-end platform so that you aren't worrying about signing these bills and sort of setting it up. You're focused on your business outcome and your business use cases. CHAD: Where did...I happen to know, but because I did my research for the episode. [laughs] But you were at WeWork leading data at WeWork, right? TARUSH: Yes. CHAD: So I imagine you faced this problem and saw this problem firsthand, right? TARUSH: You know, I've been fortunate that I've spent my career in the data space. So back in the day at Salesforce and now and most recently at WeWork. And companies like this, in general, are aggressively hiring and aggressively growing these teams. So at WeWork, we had 50 people working on stitching together the platform and finding the best vendors, and being involved in that. So at WeWork, we were really focused on building our own version of the platform. I think what's interesting is ever since I left and especially over the last 24 months, where the sort of startup space has become so active, I'm still getting pinged on LinkedIn like every day or two with companies looking to get started. And over a period of time, you see the trends that everyone is reinventing the wheel. What do I do first? What's the first use case? What infrastructure do I need? How do I set this up? So the idea of this really came less from WeWork, where we had the team and the expertise. It came more from the other 90% of the companies that don't have the resources that WeWork had, at least at that time. CHAD: So what do your customers of 5X typically look like then? Are there particular industries or data needs? Or on the tech side, on the development side, what do their development teams look like interacting with 5X? TARUSH: That's a great question. And again, at a macro level, data is a global phenomenon. It's not industry-specific. Now, different industries have different requirements. So obviously, as a consumer, what you need to collect, the tools and infrastructure you need are quite different from a B2B business. So there is this concept that for each vertical, what stack makes sense, and that's, again, something which we can do. Typically, our customers have found some sort of a product-market fit. They have a business, and now they're looking to go scale the business to get to either entering growth phase, or an optimization phase, or a profitability phase. And in each of these phases, data plays a vital role. So they are at this point where they know that they want to get value from it. They might even have a data team with 4,5,10 people. And they really might have figured out their first use cases and had the basic dashboards. And, inevitably, they come to this question of what now? What do we do now? So that's one large sort of vertical. And then the other one is they want to go do it. They want to go invest in data, but they have no idea how to do it. And in that case, they're looking at us not just the platform, but we also have this concept of on-demand talent. Today, we're interviewing thousands of data engineers a week. We get to hire the top 1%, and we pre-train them on different stacks. And then, companies can integrate these lead engineers at a weekly level or completely on-demand and use that to go build out the dashboards. We have never thought of replacing data teams for companies. But it's really interesting to see that some of the early-stage companies are using our platform and our on-demand talent to literally do end-to-end data as a service. CHAD: So at 5X, you're actually providing those team members, those consulting services? TARUSH: Yeah, so we look at it less from the consultant point of view, you know, a consultant typically you would go, and you have your statement of work, and that's going to be a three-month project, and it might be a fixed price. And sort of inevitably, they're looking to...they don't work with hundreds of thousands of companies, a few of them might, but in general, we work a little bit differently. So we have this concept of on-demand talent. So we have these engineers who we hire, and we pre-train them and essentially build software to basically allow people to add these engineers on top of the platform and sort of use them. So they work in one-week sprint cycles. It's fully on-demand. So you can have a group of engineers for one week and the next week not have that. And typically, consultants don't work in that way. And we don't really do the statements of work, and here's what's going to happen. These engineers are sort of put into these things what we call pods, and pods are three engineers and a product manager. And they operate on these one-week sprints. You can use this end-to-end team or these engineering pods to go build out your use cases, which is similar to what a consultant on the services model does, but we do it in more of a platform-first approach. CHAD: That's really interesting. I've had some guests on before where they talk about doing consulting or doing services on top of the recurring revenue platform that they've built or not doing it because it's not interesting to them or that their investors say like, "Don't get into that TNM business time and materials business. You want to focus on recurring revenue." How have you balanced that in your business? TARUSH: The reality is that it doesn't matter which vendor you are in the modern data stack space. You might be Snowflake, or you might be Tableau, or you might be Fivetran or DBT. These are just some of the popular ones. Each of these vendors is just one small part of the stack. And what that means is that they don't have a services model and [inaudible] investors happy. But in reality, it's because they don't have end-to-end stack exposure; you know, there's no company today which knows what their stack looks like. Snowflake doesn't know what their entire stack looks like. I mean, Snowflake [inaudible] its success in engagement because they just want [inaudible] And what 5X is is, you know, we've had to spin these stacks up from scratch for mid-market companies. You'll be able to map your stack. So you might have a few pieces. We can help you see what's missing. But again, because we have visibility end-to-end, having that services model, if you want to call it, makes a lot of sense because, ultimately, we're focused on adding business value. And no one's doing data for the sake of doing data. And no one is doing it to build a 50-person data team. They're doing it ultimately to enable the business. So given that we have this end-to-end scope, we look at our on-demand talent as a massive value-add of using the 5X platform is that you have this ability to get engineers end-to-end that are pre-trained on the platform. So we like it a lot. And we think it's a competitive advantage for us. CHAD: How opinionated is the 5X stack, the default stack? Can you make a lot of choices within it? Are you using lots of different things? You already mentioned Snowflake, Tableau. So it sounds like you're choosing the things that make sense on behalf of your customers. TARUSH: Yeah, so for launch, we're focused on the core BI stack, which is ingestion, storage, monitoring, reporting, and in this stack, also we have picked the best-in-class vendors so Fivetran, Snowflake, DBT, Preset. In some ways, the usual suspects which you think of as you're looking at the stack. Now our goal and really what we're building is this program called the Certified 5X Program, and that's for vendors. And that program allows us to integrate with different partners and do things like account provisioning, configuration, user management, our billing agreement, workflow setup. And as we integrate with more and more vendors, the idea is to really have a single form for the modern data stack. So, in ingestion, for now, we might be using Fivetran since they're the [inaudible], but the idea is we're also talking to Plausible, and Airbyte, and Stitch, and all of the other vendors. So at some point, we really kind of pick and choose between any of them. So the idea is, again, there could be a set of different stuff for a company, which is extremely budget-conscious, and if you're looking more for enterprise capability to use a different vendor in that same category. So ultimately, we're enabling customer freedom in the next few months. At launch, we'll have a smaller selection. But as we get into Q4 and as we get into the next year, we have the next 10-15 vendors lined up who are going to be part of the certified 5X program, and that allows us to add more and more optionality in terms of existing categories. And then, we also will focus on adding new categories like reverse ETL, or data lineage, or augmented analytics. CHAD: I love the idea of being focused for launch, saying these are the biggest things that we need to hit. How long did it take you to get to launch? When did you start working in earnest on 5X and get to a public launch? TARUSH: We've been working on this since last June. So we're 11 months old now. What we really did initially is go build relationships with these vendors. And the first thing we did is we started off more as a services business where we sort of built this automatic interview process where we were interviewing hundreds of engineers a week and adding these engineers and training them on the platform. We would go set up the platform for the customer in a semi-automatic manner. So we have been operational. We're probably working with 15-20 customers at this point, but we did it in a sort of semi-automated way. And over the last few months, as we understood more and more what their needs are, we are transitioning to a platform-first company instead of a services-first company. CHAD: So that means that you were able to be public and start getting customers fairly early on in your journey. It's only been 11 months since you started. And when did you get your first customer? TARUSH: 11 months ago. CHAD: [laughs] So at what point did you find investors and raise money and start to build a team? TARUSH: We've been fortunate enough that we were producing revenue on day one just looking at the services aspect of the business. So we needed a very tiny fundraise back in October, a very small amount. And now that we're getting closer to the platform launch, we might be announcing something soon. CHAD: What did you take money for if you were revenue-generating? Was there something specific that caused you to take it and that it was for? TARUSH: So if you kind of zoom out again and look at this whole concept of building out, you know, I think if we focused on services and focused on growing that part of the business organically, there's no real need for that. But the idea now is we're having a 20-person platform team, building out these integrations, building up software for even things like board management, hiring. The main task today is sort of engineering. So we raised capital to double down on the platform vision and become a platform first. Mid-Roll Ad: I wanted to tell you all about something I've been working on quietly for the past year or so, and that's AgencyU. AgencyU is a membership-based program where I work one-on-one with a small group of agency founders and leaders toward their business goals. We do one-on-one coaching sessions and also monthly group meetings. We start with goal setting, advice, and problem-solving based on my experiences over the last 18 years of running thoughtbot. As we progress as a group, we all get to know each other more. And many of the AgencyU members are now working on client projects together and even referring work to each other. Whether you're struggling to grow an agency, taking it to the next level and having growing pains, or a solo founder who just needs someone to talk to, in my 18 years of leading and growing thoughtbot, I've seen and learned from a lot of different situations, and I'd be happy to work with you. Learn more and sign up today at thoughtbot.com/agencyu. That's A-G-E-N-C-Y, the letter U. CHAD: So, when it comes to building a team, we're talking today, and you're in Bali. Is that where you spend most of your time now? TARUSH: I wish I could spend more time here. CHAD: [laughs] TARUSH: I'm pretty nomadic, which I really like. And I think we were born in COVID...a fun story; I got stuck in Bali for two years. I came here for vacation, and we were locked up. And it's not the worst place in the world to be stuck, and I felt very lucky that it was not somewhere else. So, in general, we started building the pilot while we were still remote. We have folks in 11 countries now. I spent six months of the year around America. That's where our clients are. About 80% of our business is from American companies today, and then I spend some time in India, where our engineering teams are aggressively growing in the Southeast Asian market. And 5X is a Singapore company. So we spend time in Singapore, and if I have some time, I come back to Bali. But in general, we are pretty nomadic. And I think as part of our culture, and how we attract people, one of our core values is what we call the hammock value where if I can build it or if you can build it while lying on a hammock in some part of the world, we're not interested in going back to an office. CHAD: With a fairly large time zone distribution of the team, how do you build a culture? How do people work together? Are people shifting their hours? Or do you build a culture of working asynchronously? TARUSH: We mostly work asynchronously. In general, the engineering teams are based out of India. So engineers who are working on the platform are in the same time zone. In terms of our pods, what's really cool is today, we hire in South America, we hire in Africa, we hire in Southeast Asia, so three distinct time zones. So you have Europe, you have the Americas, and you have the Asian time zone. And when we assemble these pods, and a pod has got three engineers and a technical project manager, we try and have at least two different time zones in a pod. So at least two of the engineers are in separate time zones, which means that for our customers, they have more around-the-clock support. They have more hours where they can get work done, which is great for productivity. So, what that means on our side is that we're really good at being able to communicate asynchronously. We have all this flexibility, and with that, in terms of accountability, the way we do it is we have daily updates. Again, it's asynchronous, so you can send that here's what you did, you know, [inaudible] by. At the end of the week, we do Loom videos really sharing what you've done. We sort focus a lot on like agenda -- CHAD: And Loom is an asynchronous video sharing. People can record videos and share it with everybody. Is that what Loom is? TARUSH: Yeah, sorry, I should mention. Loom is a great video platform that allows you to screen share, and it's just a really cool screen-sharing tool that we record these asynchronous videos and really ingraining it inside our culture. Everyone at 5X knows the importance of sending these updates and agenda before a call and summaries in a Zoom video. So that's how we are able to do it. CHAD: One of the things that we've not struggled with but dealt with at thoughtbot is we've started hiring all throughout the Americas, all throughout Europe, Middle East, and Africa. And we've got team members all over the place. And we want to treat people as employees and give them full benefits. And a lot of people want to work for a local entity and have employment laws and everything. But it's a challenge to do that. We don't necessarily want to set up entities in every country. So one strategy is contracting, another is to work with an international PEO or employer of record. How have you managed that? TARUSH: We use an international agency which allows us to hire in any country. I'm not sure the name of the platform we're using. Karan, our CFO, would know that. CHAD: [laughs] TARUSH: But it allows us on a macro level to be able to hire in all these countries as employees, you know, ask if you have the stock program. And it's also allowing us to give healthcare benefits and things like that, which we really want to have for everyone. And when it comes to the engineers on our network, at the moment, we're hiring them full-time as contractors, but again, we want to extend benefits to them and really, in some ways, give them that flexibility. Do you want to be inside a local jurisdiction where you can have more healthcare benefits and integrations with local governments, you know, employee programs and things like that? Or do you want to take advantage of our culture and be more nomadic? And these are exciting things which we're sort of figuring out now as we [inaudible] some economies of scale around, you know, having this [inaudible] CHAD: Yeah, that's great. And for what it's worth, that's the route that we've taken as well is to work with an international employer of record who actually employs people locally. And many people don't realize, like, you highlighted health benefits. A lot of countries have national health care. But it's really common, especially in white-collar or tech industry employment there, to augment that with supplemental insurance, which is not very expensive, but it is expected and oftentimes necessary to get the kind of coverage that you want to have. TARUSH: I think the world is changing. We're becoming remote-first as well. And the two areas which I believe it's going to affect the most is number one, employment and number two, education. It's just a no-brainer that more and more companies are going to emerge in this space, making it easier to hire remotely and provide benefits and, in some ways, build that operating system for remote entrepreneurs. So I'm not sure if the tools today are great. I think they solve the problem for now. But I expect there to be a lot of innovation in this space over the next few years. CHAD: Well, and I think that the pandemic has pushed that, accelerated that. There are companies now that existed before, but the scale at which they're able to operate now because so many companies have started to go remote and want to employ people everywhere; it's really driving that growth and investment in that area too. And as a result of that, there's going to be a lot of data [laughs] that these companies generate and need to get a handle on. So maybe they'll become customers of 5X, or maybe they already are. TARUSH: Yeah. If you look in the last ten years, I think the last ten years were all about digital marketing with social and sort of advertising, making it very obvious that if you don't have a web presence, if you don't care about your customers think, and if you don't find ways to attract customers, you're not going to exist. So ten years later and all those companies which didn't set up websites and they didn't figure out customer acquisition online probably don't exist anymore. In the next five years or in the next ten years, a lot of these will get a lot more sophisticated. And certainly, data comes in as a competitive advantage. So if you're not focusing on how a customer is using your product and how you personalize and being able to compare the way of spending money in terms of your lead acquisition and really, really optimize at it, what you'll face is that it will become difficult to compete because your competition is getting more and more sophisticated. So a lot of the investment in this is really predicated on becoming more efficient at these core groups of things like go-to-market strategy, engagement, optimizing internal operations as a way to find efficiencies which is typically what technology has enabled. CHAD: Especially small businesses or businesses that are just getting started, if you don't have experience with that, it can feel really overwhelming. And we talked about how 5X by coming to the table with a stack, with a team that can help do that, that's great. And it helps solve that problem. Say that I'm a founder or a CEO, maybe non-technical, and I really am just getting started, but I have a big need; how do I engage with 5X? What's the best way to think about that? And are there things that I might do as a founder that you would recommend, hey, I recognize you can't do everything, but do this, and you'll avoid some pain later on. TARUSH: We have some customers today who use us pre-product. They don't have a product. They don't have any customers. They have no data. But they use us because when they launch, they want to have the right tracking and visibility and reports and metrics. So I would have never thought someone that [inaudible] 5X. But it kind of makes sense that you want to have the right [inaudible] knowledge. You have pros and cons. I think the pros of it is instilling the data culture from day one. Data acts as a bridge between engineering and the business, Chad. It just connects the products from like the business goals. So there is an upside in bringing this on earlier on and building that and instilling that into your culture. I think the flip side of it is that if you don't have product-market fit, if you're shooting darts and seeing what works. And in general, companies at that point are running more on intuition and trying different things to see what sticks. And having systems in place at that scale, very frankly, could also be unnecessary. And at that point, if you're spending $100, you probably want to spend 80-90 of them on bringing out your product and the design that you've got. And I think they'll want to sign to be able to acquire customers, and that sort of shifts then you see the data spending increase. So again, we're obviously happy to help, and our technical product managers have a lot of experience. They're the ones who have been data leaders that are growing companies and businesses like Uber, WeWork, Alibaba, top tech companies. They've already been data team members, so they've always been part of that growth. So they're good people, the on-demand talent. You have expertise over there from someone who's seen this before. And a few of our early-stage companies leverage these people more and more, but the flipside of it is focusing on actually building a product first. CHAD: I love that. I think that that's great advice. And so I assume that there are people who come and to your team or you start talking with them, and you say, "You're not ready for us yet." TARUSH: Yeah, we sort of have done that. We have told folks, you know, Google this, this, and this, and once you have this in place and you're about to go to market, that's the right time to come engage. But at this point, honestly, it might not be the best time for you to start thinking about [inaudible] CHAD: Focus on improving your user experience, getting new users, making the best product you can. That's really great advice. TARUSH: On the flip side of that, I think the problem, not the problem, I don't know if it's the word. I think the mistake a lot of companies make is that they actually get into it too late. The typical fallacy is that the founders are sitting in this gold mine of data. We're just going to have a data scientist come, and he or she is going to start generating all these insights, and we're going to be a data-driven company. And the reality of everything in life is that things take time. You can have the stack from day one, and you can have amazing engineers. But it takes time for you to really understand what's happening in your business. And initially, your data model that's sort of changing because the understanding of the business is changing. Visibility in your data leads to asking better questions. And with asking better questions, you start changing the mental models of what's happening. It takes three iterations before your data model starts to stabilize. And what that means very, very often is that the founder is expecting in three months that the data is going to have a positive ROI and the output the business is getting from the data team is going to be positive. And that's not really how it works. It takes six to nine months. You'd have reporting in the first month and the first two months. But as you move from reporting to visibility and to actually optimization and using that data as an insight, we think of that as a three-quarter project. So number one, I think companies don't know that, and they expect that it happens much sooner. And number two is also the mindset around I'm looking at data to provide positive ROI within a small duration, which is also, in reality, not how it is. CHAD: Tarush, that's really great advice, and I hope people take it to heart. If folks want to get in touch with you or follow along with you or learn more about 5X, where are all the places that they can do that? TARUSH: So our website is 5x.co. Again, that's 5x.co. You can reach out to me at tarush@5x.co. We're also doing a lot of stuff on YouTube. We're doing a lot of podcasts to educate on the data space. We make weekly videos on different topics on our YouTube channel. I'm sure you can just search for 5X. That's another great way to engage with us. CHAD: Wonderful. You can subscribe to this show and find notes for this episode along with a complete transcript at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. And you can find me on Twitter at @cpytel. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thanks so much for listening and see you next time. ANNOUNCER: This podcast was brought to you by thoughtbot. thoughtbot is your expert design and development partner. Let's make your product and team a success. Special Guest: Tarush Aggarwal.

Ben Johnson, the creator of Litestream, joined Fly.io a few weeks after we migrated changelog.com - episode 50 has all the details. That was pure coincidence. What was not a coincidence, is Gerhard jumping at the opportunity to talk to Ben about Postgres vs SQLite with Litestream. The prospect of running a cluster of our app instances spread across all regions, with local SQLite & Litestream replication, is mind boggling. Let's find out from Ben what will it take to get there. Thanks Kürt for kicking off this dream.

Join our experts Colm Keegan and Luca Galante as they continue their discussion about DevOps. This episode, we discuss how the four key metrics of DevOps and how these changes allow DevOps teams to spend more time on innovation instead of infrastructure care and feeding. Part I of this discussion: https://www.spreaker.com/user/11960889/power2protect-ep070-devops-part-i To learn more about Luca, please visit his twitter https://twitter.com/luca_cloud and his LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/luca-galante/

Want to give your ears a break and read this as an article? You're looking for this link.https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/9-ways-aws-cdk-headdeskWant to watch the full dramatic reenactment of this podcast? Watch the YouTube Video here: https://youtu.be/3Mf3_l6iEtA  Never miss an episode Join the Last Week in AWS newsletter Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts Help the show Leave a review Share your feedback Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts What's Corey up to? Follow Corey on Twitter (@quinnypig) See our recent work at the Duckbill Group Apply to work with Corey and the Duckbill Group to help lower your AWS bill

Machine Learning Operations, or MLOps, is a set of practices that aims to deploy and maintain machine learning models reliably and efficiently. Similar to the DevOps approach, MLOps seeks to increase automation and improve the quality of production models while focusing on business requirements. In the first part of this three-episode series on the ‘Transformational Serverless Acceleration for Analytics', Analyst Christina Stathopoulos speaks to Richard Heyns, Founder and CEO of Brytlyt to cover: Why do two-thirds of models built with the intention to deploy never make it to deployment Databases and the critical role they play Scaling up analytics and ML

Machine Learning Operations, or MLOps, is a set of practices that aims to deploy and maintain machine learning models reliably and efficiently. Similar to the DevOps approach, MLOps seeks to increase automation and improve the quality of production models while focusing on business requirements. In the first part of this three-episode series on the ‘Transformational Serverless Acceleration for Analytics', Analyst Christina Stathopoulos speaks to Richard Heyns, Founder and CEO of Brytlyt to cover: Why do two-thirds of models built with the intention to deploy never make it to deployment Databases and the critical role they play Scaling up analytics and ML

Enchanté. Aurelie Verrot is a developer originally from France who now lives in California. She is Software Engineer at Zendesk, working in the i18n team. She answers all of Brittany's questions about working at Zendesk, translating the beloved Women On Rails newsletter and VirtualCoffee.io. Show Notes & Links: General Assembly (https://generalassemb.ly) Zendesk (https://www.zendesk.com/) Women On Rails Newsletter (https://womenonrails.substack.com/) VirtualCoffee.io (https://virtualcoffee.io/) Hacktoberfest (https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/) Aurelie Verrot (@LiliVerrot) / Twitter (https://twitter.com/liliverrot) Sponsored By: Honeybadger (https://www.honeybadger.io/) Honeybadger makes you a DevOps hero by combining error monitoring, uptime monitoring and check-in monitoring into a single, easy to use platform. Go to Honeybadger.io (https://www.honeybadger.io/) and discover how Starr, Josh, and Ben created a 100% bootstrapped monitoring solution. Scout APM (http://scoutapm.com/rubyonrails) Try their error monitoring and APM free for 14-days, no credit card needed! And as an added bonus for Ruby on Rails listeners: Scout will donate $5 to the open-source project of your choice when you deploy. Learn more at http://scoutapm.com/rubyonrails (http://scoutapm.com/rubyonrails).

Mike just signed up for a year of GitHub Copilot and Chris tries to understand why. Then we catch each other up on some recent surprises.

Today we have the power to define business context throughout the entire technology stack. But how do you correlate application performance and end-user experience to business KPI's? You need a partner offering full stack observability to optimize performance, resource allocation and uptime. From infrastructure to network to end users, observability not only finds the problem but the specific line of code that needs attention. Pick an application and get it monitored with AppDynamics for free here https://www.rackspace.com/lp/ctl-if-these-apps-could-talk Special Guest: Keith Llorens.

Jake and Michael discuss all the latest Laravel releases, tutorials, and happenings in the community.This episode is sponsored by Honeybadger - combining error monitoring, uptime monitoring and check-in monitoring into a single, easy to use platform and making you a DevOps hero. Show links Laravel 9.18 released Laravel Pint Skip Webpack when testing Validate your app on the frontend with Laravel Dry Run Requests ORM caching package for Laravel A collection of ISO standards as PHP enums Supercharged pipelines for Laravel API integrations using Saloon in Laravel Getting started with Laravel Scout and Meilisearch Running PHPStan on max with Laravel Running SingleStore on Apple Silicon A masteclass in using SingleStore to supercharge your Laravel applications SingleStore driver for Laravel

Full Description / Show Notes Corey and Linda talk about Tiktok and the online developer community (1:18) Linda talks about what prompted her to want to work at AWS (5:29) Linda discusses navigating the change from just being part of the developer community to being an employee of AWS (10:37) Linda talks about moving AWS more in the direction of short form content, and Corey and Linda talk about the Tiktok algorithm (15:56) Linda talks about the potential struggle of going from short form to long form content (25:21) About LindaLinda Vivah is a Site Reliability Engineer for a major media organization in NYC, a tech content creator, an AWS community builder member, a part-time wedding singer, and the founder of a STEM jewelry shop called Coding Crystals. At the time of this recording she was about to join AWS in her current position as a Developer Advocate.Linda had an untraditional journey into tech. She was a Philosophy major in college and began her career in journalism. In 2015, she quit her tv job to attend The Flatiron School, a full stack web development immersive program in NYC. She worked as a full-stack developer building web applications for 5 years before shifting into SRE to work on the cloud end internally.Throughout the years, she's created tech content on platforms like TikTok & Instagram and believes that sometimes the best way to learn is to teach.Links Referenced:lindavivah.com: https://lindavivah.com TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored 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: Let's face it, on-call firefighting at 2am is stressful! So there's good news and there's bad news. The bad news is that you probably can't prevent incidents from happening, but the good news is that incident.io makes incidents less stressful and a lot more valuable. incident.io is a Slack-native incident management platform that allows you to automate incident processes, focus on fixing the issues and learn from incident insights to improve site reliability and fix your vulnerabilities. Try incident.io, recover faster and sleep more.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. We talk a lot about how people go about getting into this ridiculous industry of ours, and I've talked a little bit about how I go about finding interesting and varied guests to show up and help me indulge my ongoing love affair on this show with the sound of my own voice. Today, we're going to be able to address both of those because today I'm speaking to Linda Haviv, who, as of this recording, has accepted a job as a Developer Advocate at AWS, but has not started. Linda, welcome to the show.Linda: Thank you so much for having me, Corey. Happy to be here.Corey: So, you and I have been talking for a while and there's been a lot of interesting things I learned along the way. You were one of the first people I encountered when I joined the TikToks, as all the kids do these days, and was trying to figure out is there a community of folks who use AWS. Which really boils down to, “So, where are these people that are sad all the time?” Well, it turns out, they're on TikTok, so there we go. We found my people.And that was great. And we started talking, and it turns out that we were both in the AWS community builder program. And we've developed a bit of a rapport. We talk about different things. And then, I guess, weird stuff started happening, in the context of you were—you're doing very well at building an audience for yourself on TikTok.I tried it, and it was—my sense of humor sometimes works, sometimes doesn't. I've had challenges in finding any reasonable way to monetize it because a 30-second video doesn't really give nuance for a full ad read, for example. And you've been looking at it from the perspective of a content creator looking to build the audience slash platform is step one, and then, eh, step two, you'll sort of figure out aspects of monetization later. Which, honestly, is a way easier way to do it in hindsight, but, yeah, the things that we learn. Now, that you're going to AWS, first, you planning to still be on the TikToks and whatnot?Linda: Absolutely. So, I really look at TikTok as a funnel. I don't think it's the main place, you're going to get that deep-dive content but I think it's a great way, especially for things that excite you or get you into understanding it, especially beginner-type audience, I think there's a lot of untapped market of people looking to into tech, or technologists that aren't in the cloud. I mean, even when I worked—I worked as a web developer and then kind of learned more about the cloud, and I started out as a front-end developer and shifted into, like, SRE and infrastructure, so even for people within tech, you can have a huge tech community which there is on TikTok, with a younger community—but not all of them really understand the cloud necessarily, depending on their job function. So, I think it's a great way to kind of expose people to that.For me, my exposure came from community. I met somebody at a meetup who was working in cloud, and it wasn't even on the job that I really started getting into cloud because many times in corporations, you might be working on a specific team and you're not really encountering other ends, and it seems kind of like a mystery. Although it shouldn't seem like magic, many times when you're doing certain job functions—especially the DevOps—could end up feeling like magic. So, [laugh] for the good and the bad. So sometimes, if you're not working on that end, you really sometimes take it for granted.And so, for me, I actually—meetups were the way I got exposed to that end. And then I brought it back into my work and shifted internally and did certifications and started, even, lunch-and-learns where I work to get more people in their learning journey together within the company, and you know, help us as we're migrating to the cloud, as we're building on the cloud. Which, of course, we have many more roles down the road. I did it for a few years and saw the shift. But I worked at a media company for many years and now shifting to AWS, and so I've seen that happen on different ends.Not—oh, I wasn't the one doing the migration because I was on the other end of that time, but now for the last two years, I was working on [laugh] the infrastructure end, and so it's really fascinating. And many people actually—until now I feel like—that will work on maybe the web and mobile and don't always know as much about the cloud. I think it's a great way to funnel things in a quick manner. I think also society is getting used to short videos, and our attention span is very low, and I think for—Corey: No argument here.Linda: —[crosstalk 00:04:39] spending so mu—yeah, and we're spending so much time on these platforms, we might as well, you know, learn something. And I think it depends what content. Some things work well, some things doesn't. As with anything content creation, you kind of have to do trial and error, but I do find the audience to be a bit different on TikTok versus Twitter versus Instagram versus YouTube. Which is interesting how it's going to play out on YouTube, too, which is a whole ‘nother topic conversation.Corey: Well, it's odd to me watching your path. It's almost the exact opposite of mine where I started off on the back-end, grumpy sysadmin world and, “Oh, why would I ever need to learn JavaScript?” “Well, genius, because as the world progresses, guess what? That's right. The entire world becomes JavaScript. Welcome.”And it took me a long time to come around to that. You started with the front-end world and then basically approached from the exact opposite end. Let's be clear, back in my day, mine was the common path. These days, yours is very much the common path.Linda: Yeah.Corey: I also want to highlight that all of those transitions and careers that you spoke about, you were at the same company for nine years, which in tech is closer to 30. So, I have to ask, what was it that inspired you, after nine years, to decide, “I'm going to go work somewhere else. But not just anywhere; I'm going to AWS.” Because normally people don't almost institutionalized lifers past a certain point.Linda: [laugh].Corey: Like, “Oh, you'll be there till you retire or die.” Whereas seeing significant career change after that long in one place, even if you've moved around internally and experienced a lot of different roles, is not common at all what sparked that?Linda: Yeah. Yeah, no, it's such a good question. I always think about that, too, especially as I was reflecting because I'm, you know, in the midst of this transition, and I've gotten a lot of reflecting over the last two weeks [laugh], or more. But I think the main thing for me is, I always, wherever I was—and this kind of something that—I'm very proactive when it comes to trying to transition. I think, even when I was—right, I held many roles in the same company; I used to work in TV production and actually left for three months to go to a coding boot camp and then came back on the other end, but I understood the product in a different way.So, for that time period, it was really interesting to work on the other end. But, you know, as I kind of—every time I wanted to progress further, I always made a move that was actually new and put me in an uncomfortable place, even within the same company. And I'm at the point now that I'm in my career, I felt like this next step really needs to be, you know, at AWS. It's not, like, the natural progression for me. I worked alongside—on the client end—with AWS and have seen so many projects come through and how much our own workloads have changed.And it's just been an incredible journey, also dealing with accounts team. On that end, I've worked alongside them, so for me, it was kind of a natural progression. I was very passionate about cloud computing at AWS and I kind of wanted to take it to that next place, and I felt like—also, dealing with the community as part of my job is a dream part to me because I was always doing that on the side on social media. So, it wasn't part of my day-to-day job. I was working as an SRE and an infrastructure engineer, so I didn't get to do that as part of my day-to-day.I was making videos at 2 a.m. and, you know, kind of trying to, like, do—you know, interact with the community like that. And I think—I come from a performing background, the people background, I was singing since I was four years old. I always go to—I was a wedding singer, so I go into a room and I love making people happy or giving value. And I think, like, education has a huge part of that. And in a way, like making that content and—Corey: You got to get people's attention—Linda: Yeah.Corey: —you can't teach them a damn thing.Linda: Right. Exactly. So, it's kind of a mix of everything. It's like that performance, the love of learning. You know, between you and I, like, I wanted to be a lawyer before I thought I was going to—before I went to tech.I thought I was going to be a lawyer purely because I loved the concept of going to law school. I never took time to think about the law part, like, being the lawyer part. I always thought, “Oh, school.” I'm a student at heart. I always call myself a professional student. I really think that's part of what you need to be in this world, in this tech industry, and I think for me, that's what keeps my fire going.I love to experiment, to learn, to build. And there's something very fulfilling about building products. If you take a step back, like, you're kind of—you know, for me that part, every time I look back at that, that always is what kind of keeps me going. When I was doing front-end, it felt a lot more like I was doing smaller things than when I was doing infrastructure, so I felt like that was another reason why I shifted. I love doing the front-end, but I felt like I was spending two days on an Internet Explorer bug and it just drove me—[laugh] it just made it feel unfulfilling versus spending two days on, you know, trying to understand why, you know, something doesn't run the infrastructure or, like, there's—you know, it's failing blindly, you know? Stuff like that. Like, I don't know, for me that felt more fulfilling because the problem was more macro. But I think I needed both. I have a love for both, but I definitely prefer being back-end. So. [laugh]. Well, I'm saying that now but—[laugh].Corey: This might be a weakness on my part where I'm basically projecting onto others, and this is—I might be completely wrong on this, but I tend to take a bit of a bifurcated view of community. I mean, community is part of the reason that I know the things I know and how I got to this place that I am, so use that as a cautionary tale if you want. But when I talk to someone like you at this moment, where you're in the community, I'm in the community, and I'm talking to you about a problem I'm having and we're working on ways to potentially solve that or how to think about that. I view us as basically commiserating on these things, whereas as soon as you start on day one—and yes, it's always day one—at AWS and this becomes your day job and you work there, on some level, for me, there's a bit shift that happens and a switch gets flipped in my head where, oh, you actually work at this company. That means you're the problem.And I'm not saying that in a way of being antagonistic. Please, if you're watching or listening to this, do not antagonize the developer advocates. They have a very hard job understanding all this so they can explain that to the rest of us. But how do you wind up planning to navigate, or I guess your views on, I guess, handling the shift between, “One of the customers like the rest of us,” to, as I say, “Part of the problem,” for lack of a better term.Linda: Or, like, work because you kind of get the—you know. I love this question and it's something I've been pondering a lot on because I think the messaging will need to be a little different [coming from me 00:10:44] in the sense of, there needs to be—just in anything, you have to kind of create trust. And to create trust, you have to be vulnerable and authentic. And I think I, for example, utilize a lot of things outside of just the AWS cloud topic to do that now, even, when I—you know, kind of building it without saying where I work or anything like that, going into this role and it being my job, it's going to be different kind of challenge as far as the messaging, but I think it still holds true that part, that just developing trust and authenticity, I might have to do more of that, you know? I might have to really share more of that part, share other things to really—because it's more like people come, it doesn't matter how much somet—how many times you explain it, many times, they will see your title and they will judge you for it, and they don't know what happened before. Every TikTok, for example, you have to act like it's a new person watching. There is no series, you know? Like, yes, there's a series but, like, sometimes you can make that but it's not really the way TikTok functions or a short-form video functions. So, you kind of have to think this is my first time—Corey: It works really terribly when you're trying to break it out that way on TikTok.Linda: [laugh]. Yeah.Corey: Right. Here's part 17 of my 80-TikTok-video saga. And it's, “Could you just turn this into a blog post or put this on YouTube or something? I don't have four hours to spend learning how all this stuff works in your world.”Linda: Yeah. And you know, I think repeating certain things, too, is really important. So, they say you have to repeat something eight times for people to see it or [laugh] something like that. I learned that in media [crosstalk 00:12:13]—Corey: In a row, or—yeah. [laugh].Linda: I mean, the truth is that when you, kind of like, do a TikTok maybe, like, there's something you could also say or clarify because I think there's going to be—and I'm going to have to—there's going to be a lot of trial and error for me; I don't know if I have answers—but my plan is going into it very much testing that kind of introduction, or, like, clarifying what that role is. Because the truth is, the role is advocating on behalf of the community and really helping that community, so making sure that—you don't have to say it as far as a definition maybe, but, like, making sure that comes across when you create a video. And I think that's going to be really important for me, and more important than the prior even creating content going forward. So, I think that's one thing that I definitely feel like is key.As well as creating more raw interaction. So, it depends on the platform, too. Instagram, for example, is much more community—how do I put this? Instagram is much more easy to navigate as far as reaching the same community because you have something, like, called Instagram Stories, right? So, on Instagram Stories, you're bringing those stories, mostly the same people that follow you. You're able to build that trust through those stories.On TikTok, they just released Stories. I haven't really tried them much and I don't play with it a lot, but I think that's something I will utilize because those are the people that are already follow you, meaning they have seen a piece of content. So, I think addressing it differently and knowing who's watching what and trying to kind of put yourself in their shoes when you're trying to, you know, teach something, it's important for you to have that trust with them. And I think—key to everything—being raw and authentic. I think people see through that. I would hope they do.And I think, uh, [laugh] that's what I'm going to be trying to do. I'm just going to be really myself and real, and try to help people and I hope that comes through because that's—I'm passionate about getting more people into the cloud and getting them educated. And I feel like it's something that could also allow you to build anything, just from anywhere on your computer, brings people together, the world is getting smaller, really. And just being able to meet people through that and there's just a way to also change your life. And people really could change their life.I changed my life, I think, going into tech and I'm in the United States and I, you know—I'm in New York, you know, but I feel like so many people in the States and outside of the States, you know, all over the world, you know, have access to this, and it's powerful to be able to build something and contribute and be a part of the future of technology, which AWS is.Corey: I feel like, in three years or whatever it is that you leave AWS in the far future, we're going to basically pull this video up and MST3k came together. It's like, “Remember how naive you were talking about these things?” And I'm mostly kidding, but let's be serious. You are presumably going to be focusing on the idea of short-form content. That is—Linda: Yeah.Corey: What your bread-and-butter of audience-building has been around, and that is something that is new for AWS.Linda: Yeah.Corey: And I'm always curious as to how companies and their cultures continue to evolve. I can only imagine there's a lot of support structure in place for that. I personally remember giving a talk at an AWS event and I had my slides reviewed by their legal team, as they always do, and I had a slide that they were looking at very closely where I was listing out the top five AWS services that are bullshit. And they don't really have a framework for that, so instead, they did their typical thing of, “Okay, we need to make sure that each of those services starts with the appropriate AWS or Amazon naming convention and are they capitalized properly?” Because they have a framework for working on those things.I'm really curious as to how the AWS culture and way of bringing messaging to where people are is going to be forced to evolve now that they, like it or not, are going to be having significantly increased presence on TikTok and other short-form platforms.Linda: I mean, it's really going to be interesting to see how this plays out. There's so much content that's put out, but sometimes it's just not reaching the right audience, so making sure that funnel exists to the right people is important and reaching those audiences. So, I think even YouTube Shorts, for example. Many people in tech use YouTube to search a question.They do not care about the intro, sometimes. It depends what kind of following, it depends if [in gaming 00:16:30], but if you're coming and you're building something, it's like a Stack Overflow sometimes. You want to know the answer to your question. Now, YouTube Shorts is a great solution to that because many times people want the shortest possible answer. Now, of course, if it's a tutorial on how to build something, and it warrants ten minutes, that's great.Even ten minutes is considered, now, Shorts because TikTok now has ten-minute videos, but I think TikTok is now searchable in the way YouTube is, and I think let's say YouTube Shorts is short-form, but very different type of short-form than TikTok is. TikTok, hooks matter. YouTube answers to your questions, especially in chat. I wouldn't say everything in YouTube is like that; depends on the niche. But I think even within short-form, there's going to be a different strategy regarding that.So, kind of like having that mix. I guess, depending on platform and audience, that's there. Again, trial and error, but we'll see how this plays out and how this will evolve. Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Vultr. 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My thanks to them for sponsoring this ridiculous podcast.Corey: I feel like there are two possible outcomes here. One is that AWS—Linda: Yeah.Corey: Nails this pivot into short-form content, and the other is that all your TikTok videos start becoming ten minutes long, which they now support, welcome to my TED Talk. It's awful, and then you wind up basically being video equivalent for all of your content, of recipes when you search them on the internet where first they circle the point to death 18 times with, “Back when I was a small child growing up in the hinterlands, we wound—my grandmother would always make the following stew after she killed the bison with here bare hands. Why did grandma kill a bison? We don't know.” And it just leads down this path so they can get, like, long enough content or they can have longer and longer articles to display more ads.And then finally at the end, it's like ingredient one: butter. Ingredient two, there is no ingredient two. Okay. That explains why it's delicious. Awesome. But I don't like having people prolong it. It's just, give me the answer I'm looking for.Linda: Yeah.Corey: Get to the point. Tell me the story. And—Linda: And this is—Corey: —I'm really hoping that is not the direction your content goes in. Which I don't think it would, but that is the horrifying thing and if for some chance I'm right, I will look like Nostradamus when we do that MST3k episode.Linda: No, no. I mean, I really am—I always personally—even when I was creating content these last few years and testing different things, I'm really a fan of the shortest way possible because I don't have the patience to watch long videos. And maybe it's because I'm a New Yorker that can't sit down from the life of me—apart from when I code of course—but, you know, I don't like wasting time, I'm always on the go, I'm with my coffee, I'm like—that's the kind of style I prefer to bring in videos in the sense of, like, people have no time. [laugh]. You know?The amount of content we're consuming is just, uh, bonkers. So, I don't think our mind is really a built for consuming [laugh] this much content every time you open your phone, or every time you look, you know, online. It's definitely something that is challenging in a whole different way. But I think where my content—if it's ten minutes, it better be because I can't shorten it. That's my thing. So, you can hold me accountable to that because—Corey: Yeah, I want ten minutes of—Linda: I'm not a—Corey: Content, not three minutes of content in a ten-minute bag.Linda: Exactly. Exactly. So, if it's a ten-minute video, it would have been in one hour that I cut down, like, meaning a tutorial, a very much technical types of content. I think things that are that long, especially in tech, would be something like, on that end—unless, of course, you know, I'm not talking about, like, longer videos on YouTube which are panels or that kind of thing. I'm talking more like if I'm doing something on TikTok specifically.TikTok also cares about your watch time, so if people aren't interested in it, it's not going to do well, it doesn't matter how many followers you have. Which is what I do like about the way TikTok functions as opposed to, let's say, Instagram. Instagram is more like it gives it to your following—and this is the current state, I don't know if it always evolves—but the current state is, Instagram Reels kind of functions in a way where it goes first to the people that follow you, but, like, in a way that's more amplified than TikTok. TikTox tests people that follows you, but if it's not a good video, it won't do well. And honestly, they're many good videos videos that don't go viral. I'm not talking about that.Sometimes it's also the topic and the niche and the sound and the title. I mean, there's so many people who take a topic and do it in three different ways and one of them goes viral. I mean, there's so many factors that play into it and it's hard to really, like, always, you know, kind of reverse engineer but I do think that with TikTok, things won't do well, more likely if it's not a good piece of content as opposed to—or, like, too long, right? Not—I shouldn't say not good a good piece of content—it's too long.Corey: The TikTok algorithm is inscrutable to me. TikTok is firmly convinced, based upon what it shows me, that I am apparently a lesbian. Which okay, fine. Awesome. Whatever. I'm also—it keeps showing me ads for ADHD stuff, and it was like, “Wow, like, how did it know that?” Followed by, “Oh, right. I'm on TikTok. Nevermind.”And I will say at one point, it recommended someone to me who, looking at the profile picture, she's my nanny. And it's, I have a strong policy of not, you know, stalking my household employees on social media. We are not Facebook friends, we are not—in a bunch of different areas. Like, how on earth would they have figured this out? I'm filling the corkboard with conspiracy and twine followed by, “Wait a minute. We probably both connect from the same WiFi network, which looks like the same IP address and it probably doesn't require a giant data science team to put two and two together on those things.” So, it was great. I was all set to do the tinfoil hat conspiracy, but no, no, that's just very basic correlation 101.Linda: And also, this is why I don't enable contacts on TikTok. You know, how it says, “Oh, connect your contacts?”Corey: Oh, I never do that. Like, “Can we look at your contacts?”Linda: Never.Corey: “No.” “Can we look at all of your photos?” “Absolutely not.” “Can we track you across apps?” “Why would anyone say yes to this? You're going to do it anyway, but I'll say no.” Yeah.Linda: Got to give the least privilege. [laugh]. Definitely not—Corey: Oh absolutely.Linda: Yeah. I think they also help [crosstalk 00:22:40]—Corey: But when I'm looking at—the monetization problem is always a challenge on things like this, too, because when I'm—my guilty TikTok scrolling pleasures hit, it's basically late at night, I just want to see—I want something to want to wind down and decompress. And I'm not about ready to watch, “Hey, would you like to migrate your enterprise database to this other thing?” It's, I… no. There's a reason that the ads that seem to be everywhere and doing well are aimed at the mass market, they're generally impulse buys, like, “Hey, do you want to set that thing over there on fire, but you're not close enough to get the job done? But this flame thrower today. Done.”And great, like, that is something everyone can enjoy, but these nuanced database products and anything else is B2B SaaS style stuff, it feels like it's a very tough sell and no one has quite cracked that nut, yet.Linda: Yeah, and I think the key there—this is, I'm guessing based on, like, what I want to try out a lot—is the hook and the way you're presenting it has to be very product-focused in the sense that it needs to be very relatable. Even if you don't know anything about tech, you need to be—like, for example, in the architecture page on AWS, there's a video about the Emirates going to Mars mission. Space is a very interesting topic, right? I think, a hook, like, “Do want to see how, like, how this is bu—” like, it's all, like, freely available to see exactly [laugh] how this was built. Like, it might—in the right wording, of course—it might be interesting to someone who's looking for fun-fact-style content.Now, is it really addressing the people that are building everyday? Not really always, depends who's on there and the mass market there. But I feel like going on the product and the things that are mass-market, and then working backwards to the tech part of it, even if they learn something and then want to learn more, that's really where I see TikTok. I don't think every platform would be, maybe, like this, but that's where I see getting people: kind of inviting them in to learn more, but making it cool and fun. It's very important, but it feels cool and fun. [laugh]. So.Because you're right, you're scrolling at 2 a.m. who wants to start seeing that. Like, it's all about how you teach. The content is there, the content has—you know, that's my thing. It's like, the content is there. You don't need to—it's yes, there's the part where things are always evolving and you need to keep track of that; that's whole ‘nother type thing which you do very well, right?And then there's a part where, like, the content that already exists, which part is evergreen? Meaning, which part is, like, something that could be re—also is not timely as far as update, for example, well-architected framework. Yes, it evolves all the time, you always have new pillars, but the guide, the story, that is an evergreen in some sense because that guide doesn't, you know, that whole concept isn't going anywhere. So, you know, why should someone care about that?Corey: Right. How to turn on two-factor authentication for your AWS account.Linda: Right.Corey: That's evergreen. That's the sort of thing that—and this is the problem, I think, AWS has had for a long time where they're talking about new features, new enhancements, new releases. But you look what people are actually doing and so much of it is just the same stuff again and again because yeah, that is how most of the cloud works. It turns out that three-quarters of company's production infrastructures tends to run on EC2 more frequently than it tends to run on IoT Greengrass. Imagine that.So, there's this idea of continuing to focus on these things. Now, one of my predictions is that you're going to have a lot of fun with this and on some level, it's going to really work for you. In others, it's going to be hilariously—well, its shortcomings might be predictable. I can just picture now you're at re:Invent; you have a breakout talk and terrific. And you've successfully gotten your talk down to one minute and then you're sitting there with—Linda: [laugh].Corey: —the remainder of maybe 59. Like, oh, right. Yeah. Turns out not everything is short-form. Are you predicting any—Linda: Yep.Corey: Problems going from short-form to long-form in those instances?Linda: I think it needs to go hand-in-hand, to be honest. I think when you're creating any short-form content, you have—you know, maybe something short is actually sometimes in some ways, right, harder because you really have to make sure, especially in a technical standpoint, leaving things out is sometimes—leaves, like, a blind spot. And so, making sure you're kind of—whatever you're educating, you kind of, to be clear, “Here's where you learn more. Here's how I'm going to answer this next question for you: go here.” Now, in a longer-form content, you would cover all that.So, there's always that longevity. I think even when I write a script, and there's many scripts I'm still [laugh] I've had many ideas until now I've been doing this still at 2 a.m. so of course, there's many that didn't, you know, get released, but those are the things that are more time consuming to create because you're taking something that's an hour-long, and trying to make sure you're pulling out the things that are most—that are hook-style, that invite people in, that are accurate, okay, that really give you—explain to you clearly where are the blind spots that I'm not explaining on this video are. So, “XYZ here is, like, the high level, but by the way, there's, like, this and this.” And in a long-form, you kind of have to know the long-form version of it to make the short-form, in some ways, depending on what—you're doing because you're funneling them to somewhere. That's my thing. Because I don't think there should be [crosstalk 00:27:36]—Corey: This is the curse of Twitter, on some level. It's, “Well, you forgot about this corner case.” “Yeah, I had 280 characters to get into.” Like, the whole point of short-form content—which I do consider Twitter to be—is a glimpse and a hook, and get people interested enough to go somewhere and learn more.For something like AWS, this makes a lot of sense. When you highlight a capability or something interesting, it's something relevant, whereas on the other side of it, where it's this, “Oh, great. Now, here's an 8000-word blog post on how I did this thing.” Yeah, I'm going to get relatively fewer amounts of traffic through that giant thing, but the people who are they're going to be frickin' invested because that's going to be a slog.Linda: Exactly.Corey: “And now my eight-hour video on how exactly I built this thing with TypeScript.” Badly—Linda: Exactly.Corey: —as it turns out because I'm a bad programmer.Linda: [laugh]. No, you're not. I love your shit-posting. It's great.Corey: Challenge accepted.Linda: [laugh]. I love what you just mentioned because I think you're hitting the nail on the head when it comes to the quality content that's niche focus, like, there needs to be a good healthy mix. I think always doing that, like, mass-market type video, it doesn't give you, also, the credibility you need. So, doing those more niche things that might not be relevant to everybody, but here and there, are part of that is really key for your own knowledge and for, like, the com—you know, as far as, like, helping someone specific. Because it's almost like—right, when you're selling a service and you're using social media, right, not everybody's going to buy your service. It doesn't matter what business you're in right? The deep-divers are going to be the people that pay up. It's just a numbers game, right? The more people you, kind of, address from there, you'll find—Corey: It's called a funnel for a reason.Linda: Right. Exactly.Corey: Free content, paid content. Almost anyone will follow me on Twitter; fewer than will sign up for a newsletter; fewer will listen to a podcast; fewer will watch a video, and almost none of them will buy a consulting engagement. But ‘almost' and ‘actually none of them,' it turns out is a very different world.Linda: Exactly. [laugh]. So FYI, I think there's—Corey: And that's fine. That's the way it works.Linda: That's the way it works. And I think there needs to be that niche content that might not be, like, the most viral thing, but viral doesn't mean quality, you know? It doesn't. There's many things that play into what viral is, but it's important to have the quality content for the people that need that content, and finding those people, you know, it's easier when you have that kind of mass engagement. Like, who knows? I'm a student. I told you; I'm a professional student. I'm still [laugh] learning every day.Corey: Working with AWS almost makes it a requirement. I wish you luck—Linda: Yeah.Corey: —in the new gig and I also want to thank you for taking time out of your day to speak with me about how you got to this point. And we're all very eager to see where you go from here.Linda: Thank you so much, Corey, for having me. I'm a huge fan, I love your content, I'm an avid reader of your newsletter and I am looking forward to very much being in touch and on the Twitterverse and beyond. So. [laugh].Corey: If people want to learn more about what you're up to, and other assorted nonsense, where's the best place they can go to find you?Linda: So, the best place they could go is lindavivah.com. I have all my different social handles listed on there as well a little bit about me, and I hope to connect with you. So, definitely go to lindavivah.com.Corey: And that link will, of course, be in the [show notes 00:30:39]. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. I really appreciate it.Linda: Thank you, Corey. Have a wonderful rest of the day.Corey: Linda Haviv, AWS Developer Advocate, very soon now anyway. 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, smash the like and subscribe buttons, and of course, leave an angry comment that you have broken down into 40 serialized TikTok videos.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.

Watch the live stream: Watch on YouTube About the show Sponsored by us! Support our work through: Our courses at Talk Python Training Test & Code Podcast Patreon Supporters Special guest: Nick Muoh Brian #1: picologging From a tweet by Anthony Shaw From README.md “early-alpha” stage project with some incomplete features. (cool to be so up front about that) “Picologging is a high-performance logging library for Python. picologging is 4-10x faster than the logging module in the standard library.” “Picologging is designed to be used as a drop-in replacement for applications which already use logging, and supports the same API as the logging module.” Now you've definitely got my attention. For many common use cases, it's just way faster. Sounds great, why not use it? A few limitations listed: process and thread name not captured. Some logging globals not observed: logging.logThreads, logging.logMultiprocessing, logging.logProcesses Logger will always default to the Sys.stderr and not observe (emittedNoHandlerWarning). Michael #2: CheekyKeys via Prayson Daniel What if you could silently talk to your computer? CheekyKeys uses OpenCV and MediaPipe's Face Mesh to perform real-time detection of facial landmarks from video input. The primary input is to "type" letters, digits, and symbols via Morse code by opening and closing your mouth quickly for . and slightly longer for -. Most of the rest of the keyboard and other helpful actions are included as modifier gestures, such as: shift: close right eye command: close left eye arrow up/down: raise left/right eyebrow … Watch the video where he does a coding interview for a big tech company using no keyboard. Nick #3: Is Google's LaMDA Model Sentient? authored by Richard Luscombe (The Guardian) The Google engineer who thinks the company's AI has come to life Transcript of conversation Brian #4: richbench Also from Anthony “A little Python benchmarking tool.” Give it a list of (first_func, second_func, “label”), and it times them and prints out a comparison. Simple and awesome. def sort_seven(): """Sort a list of seven items""" for _ in range(10_000): sorted([3,2,4,5,1,5,3]) def sort_three(): """Sort a list of three items""" for _ in range(10_000): sorted([3,2,4]) __benchmarks__ = [ (sort_seven, sort_three, "Sorting 3 items instead of 7") ] Michael #5: typeguard A run-time type checker for Python Three principal ways to do type checking are provided, each with its pros and cons: Manually with function calls @typechecked decorator import hook (typeguard.importhook.install_import_hook()) Example: @typechecked def some_function(a: int, b: float, c: str, *args: str) -> bool: ... return retval Nick #6: CustomTkinter A modern and customizable python UI-library based on Tkinter. Extras Michael: OpenSSF Funds Python and Eclipse Foundations - OpenSSF's Alpha-Omega Project has committed $400K to the Python Software Foundation (PSF), in order to create a new role which will provide security expertise for Python, the Python Package Index (PyPI), and the rest of the Python ecosystem, as well as funding a security audit. (via Python Weekly) Nick: Terms of Service Didn't Read - Terms of Service; Didn't Read” (short: ToS;DR) is a young project started in June 2012 to help fix the “biggest lie on the web”: almost no one really reads the terms of service we agree to all the time. Joke: Serverless A DevOps approach to COVID-19

Prologue As some of you know, I've been either in the AppSec space, or adjacent, since the fairly early days. I built a program at GE a million years ago, and worked selling dynamic web app testing software for many years. If you've been in the space, you can feel a little bit hopeless with all the different options, tools, and advice only to look at the stale OWASP Top 10 and wonder ...why aren't things improving? Matt Rose joins me in a post-RSA conversation about ASPM (Application Security Posture Management), and before you dismiss it as another analyst buzzword, let's talk about why this may actually (and finally) start to solve some of the complex issues around developing, releasing, and maintaining reasonably secure software. This is a space I've been passionate about for a long time, and I feel like everyone should listen to this. Guest Matt Rose LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattarose/ 

Want to know how to get started with Appium 2.0. Does it matter if you call it monitoring or observability? You're also going to want to stay to the very end to see the five CI/CD breaches analyzed and how they impact your security testing. So stay tuned to these and other and full pipeline DevOps automation testing, performance testing, and security testing in 10 minutes or less in this episode of the TestGuild news show. For the week of June 27. So grab a cup of coffee or tea and let's do this. Time News Title News Link 0:24 Create a FREE Applitools Account https://rcl.ink/xroZw 0:57 CodeWhisperer, https://links.testguild.com/Jiean 2:46 Can we trust AI https://links.testguild.com/AmJVa 3:18 BitBar https://links.testguild.com/c03Dv 3:51 Appium 2.0 https://links.testguild.com/BV83I 4:43 AI CyFast https://links.testguild.com/xgNav 5:33 Monitoring Or Observability? https://links.testguild.com/48siR 7:07 Classification of severity levels https://links.testguild.com/FxLub 7:48 PyPi unsecured sites https://links.testguild.com/apsEn 8:49 5 CI/CD breaches https://links.testguild.com/yf6vM

In this episode, Dave and Emily chat with Matty Stratton. Matt is a Staff Developer Advocate at Pulumi, founder and co-host of the popular Arrested DevOps podcast, and the global chair of the DevOpsDays set of conferences. He is a well-known international speaker and brings over 20 years of IT Operations experience. Matt walk through his journey to the cloud, the early days of DevOps, the creation of DevOps days, and thought stuff on the current state of DevOps. Matt on Twitter: https://twitter.com/mattstratton Emily on Twitter: https://twitter.com/editingemily Dave on Twitter: https://twitter.com/thedavedev Matt's Website: https://matty.wtf/ Matt's Podcast – Arrested DevOps: https://www.arresteddevops.com Matt on Twitch – DevOps Party Games: https://www.twitch.tv/devopspartygames Matt on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattstratton/ Matt's Upcoming Speaking Events: https://speaking.mattstratton.com/ Subscribe: Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/f8bf7630-2521-4b40-be90-c46a9222c159/aws-developers-podcast Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/aws-developers-podcast/id1574162669 Google Podcasts: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5zb3VuZGNsb3VkLmNvbS91c2Vycy9zb3VuZGNsb3VkOnVzZXJzOjk5NDM2MzU0OS9zb3VuZHMucnNz Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7rQjgnBvuyr18K03tnEHBI TuneIn: https://tunein.com/podcasts/Technology-Podcasts/AWS-Developers-Podcast-p1461814/ RSS Feed: https://feeds.soundcloud

On this episode of the Humans of DevOps, Jason Baum is joined by Matt K. Parker, author of A Radical Enterprise: Pioneering the Future of High-Performing Organizations. Matt and Jason discuss successful and truly radical business models, what leads folks to try and make change at the organizational level, and how those corporate successes create working models that positively impact and fundamentally change the day-to-day working environment for employees.  Matt is a writer, speaker, researcher, and third-generation programmer. Over the last two decades, he's played a variety of roles in the software industry, including developer, manager, director, and global head of engineering. He has specialized in hyper-iterative software practices for the last decade and is currently researching the experience of radically collaborative software makers.  He lives in a small village in Connecticut with his wife and three children. You can contact him by visiting mattkparker.com. The Humans of DevOps Podcast was Voted one of the Best 25 DevOps Podcasts by Feedspot.  Want access to more content like this? Gain the tools, resources and knowledge to help your organization adapt and respond to challenges by joining the DevOps Institute Community. Engage in DevOps In The Wild, one of the fastest-growing DevOps communities today! Get started now! https://www.devopsinstitute.com/membership/ Have questions, feedback or just want to chat? Send us an email at podcast@devopsinstitute.com

Expleo, a global technology, engineering and consulting service provider, have announced 200 jobs and the opening of its first regional hub in Mahon, Co. Cork. The company is investing €10M in the expansion of its workforce, along with the establishment of a network of regional hubs as part of the investment. Expleo has been operating in Ireland for over 20 years. Working with enterprise clients to fast-track value-driving innovation, futureproof their businesses and innovate consistently at scale, the company has seen a 25% growth in Irish revenues over the last two years, spurred by widespread digitalisation across all industries. To facilitate this, and further growth, the company will grow from 800 to 1,000 employees in Ireland over the next two years. The majority of the 200 jobs will be highly skilled IT roles in disciplines including software development, DevOps, software engineering and technical engineering. The new hires will work on transformative technologies and projects such as hyperautomation, robotic process automation (RPA) and agile transformation in industries including life sciences, financial services and aviation. To support the recruitment process, and to ensure that it attracts the best talent from across Ireland, Expleo will establish a series of regional hubs that will be complementary to the company's Irish HQ in Dublin and its base in Belfast. The first office in Mahon, Co. Cork, is now open, with subsequent hubs planned for Galway and Limerick. Team members based in the hubs will be offered the same flexible working arrangements as those in the Dublin and Belfast offices, allowing them to split their time between working from home and working from Expleo's hub offices or client sites. Regular team collaboration days, meanwhile, will ensure that all new hires will feel included and part of the core Expleo team. Phil Codd, Managing Director, Expleo Ireland, said: “We're thrilled to announce our expansion plans as Expleo continues to go from strength to strength on the island of Ireland. Following extensive research of available resources and skills throughout the country, it was evident that regional hubs would provide Expleo with the additional talent and impetus we need to deliver on our ambitious growth plans. “Our new hires in Cork will have access to all the benefits our current employee base enjoys including competitive salaries, flexible working, world-class training programmes and a highly supportive working culture. We're also looking forward to expanding our national footprint further with new hubs in Galway and Limerick also expected to open this year.” See more stories here.

AWS Morning Brief for the week of June 27, 2022 with Corey Quinn.

While this episode started out with a recap of April Edwards (@TheAprilEdwards) keynote called “Putting the Ops into DevOps” we quickly got April talk about what measures Microsoft has set to embrace the cultural change needed for their DevOps transformation: Every service has a public health dashboard, putting the customer in the center, make products open source, eat your own dog food, align your objectives with the team, …Besides this great conversation that finally gave some great input on what cultural change really looks like we learned from her background in Ops, moving to Dev, getting into the cloud and now inspiring Ops teams to have it easier in their job using automation. Tune in, learn and get inspired. We also talked about the late Abel Wang and how Microsoft UK is supporting Girls Who Code.Show Links:April on Linkedinhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/azureapril/April on Twitterhttps://twitter.com/TheAprilEdwardsPutting the Ops into DevOps keynotehttps://globalazure.at/sessions/#323994Supporting Girls Who Code in memory of Abel Wanthttps://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/msbuild2022/?WT.mc_id=modinfra-67727-apedward

When I watched Star Trek as a kid, I was amazed by the technology. Talking to the computer, the touch screens, the handheld communicators. We have most of those devices now, without the space travel. Hopefully that will start to change with all the efforts being made by various organizations.   One of the things that always bothered me was the chance for mistakes. A mis-spoken (or mis-heard) command to a computer that didn't verify things as a human might. The chance to hit the wrong part of the screen as the starship moved. It seemed as though soft buttons would have allowed more mistakes than hard ones. Certainly humans make mistakes with physical switches, but I think I make more mistakes trying to hit a part of the screen in my Tesla than using one of the (few) buttons or wheels to change something. Interestingly enough, my 23 year old decided on a slightly older car because it had more physical buttons and fewer soft ones. Read the rest of Accounting for Typos

IT departments are often very siloed, with 75% of DevOps initiatives failing due to difficulties working across teams. Creating a community can break down these silos. Additionally, having a community forum can give IT departments support. When IT pros need support, they want it at all hours and prefer self-service that can come from online community forums. During the pandemic, every business was forced to go remote almost overnight and now explore the world of hybrid work. But behind all of this is the need for more tech. But where do you get that equipment at scale and how do you manage that at scale, improving the experience while keeping support calls low? David Sholkovitz from StarTech, joins me on Tech Talk Daily to explore this topic with me.

The year is 2053. The tabs-vs-spaces wars are long over. Ron Evans is the only Go programmer still alive on Earth. All he does is maintain old Go code. It's terrible! He must find a way to warn his fellow gophers before it's too late. Good thing he finally got that PDQ transmission system working…