Podcast appearances and mentions of joe corey

Matthew Socey announces the winners of The Indiana Film Journalists Association awards plus has a chat with Joe Corey about his holiday film shopping guide.

Joe Karlsson, Data Engineer at Tinybird, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss what it's like working in the world of data right now and how he manages the overlap between his social media presence and career. Corey and Joe chat about the rise of AI and whether or not we're truly seeing advancements in that realm or just trendy marketing plays, and Joe shares why he feels data is getting a lot more attention these days and what it's like to work in data at this time. Joe also shares insights into how his mental health has been impacted by having a career and social media presence that overlaps, and what steps he's taken to mitigate the negative impact. About JoeJoe Karlsson (He/They) is a Software Engineer turned Developer Advocate at Tinybird. He empowers developers to think creatively when building data intensive applications through demos, blogs, videos, or whatever else developers need.Joe's career has taken him from building out database best practices and demos for MongoDB, architecting and building one of the largest eCommerce websites in North America at Best Buy, and teaching at one of the most highly-rated software development boot camps on Earth. Joe is also a TEDx Speaker, film buff, and avid TikToker and Tweeter.Links Referenced: Tinybird: https://www.tinybird.co/ Personal website: https://joekarlsson.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. 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It's the future of connectivity, and it's called Gloo by Solo.io.DevOps and Platform Engineers, your journey to a seamless cloud-native experience starts here. Visit solo.io/screaminginthecloud today and level up your networking game.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn and I am joined today by someone from well, we'll call it the other side of the tracks, if I can—Joe: [laugh].Corey: —be blunt and disrespectful. Joe Karlsson is a data engineer at Tinybird, but I really got to know who he is by consistently seeing his content injected almost against my will over on the TikToks. Joe, how are you?Joe: I'm doing so well and I'm so sorry for anything I've forced down your throat online. Thanks for having me, though.Corey: Oh, it's always a pleasure to talk to you. No, the problem I've got with it is that when I'm in TikTok mode, I don't want to think about computers anymore. I want to find inane content that I can just swipe six hours away without realizing it because that's how I roll.Joe: TikTok is too smart, though. I think it knows that you are doing a lot of stuff with computers and even if you keep swiping away, it's going to keep serving it up to you.Corey: For a long time, it had me pinned as a lesbian, which was interesting. Which I suppose—Joe: [laugh]. It happened to me, too.Corey: Makes sense because I follow a lot of women who are creators in comics and the rest, but I'm not interested in the thirst trap approach. So, it's like, “Mmm, this codes as lesbian.” Then they started showing me ads for ADHD, which I thought was really weird until I'm—oh right. I'm on TikTok. And then they started recommending people that I'm surprised was able to disambiguate until I realized these people have been at my house and using TikTok from my IP address, which probably is going to get someone murdered someday, but it's probably easy to wind up doing an IP address match.Joe: I feel like I have to, like, separate what is me and what is TikTok, like, trying to serve it up because I've been on lesbian TikTok, too, ADHD, autism, like TikTok. And, like, is this who I am? I don't know. [unintelligible 00:02:08] bring it to my therapist.Corey: You're learning so much about yourself based upon an algorithm. Kind of wild, isn't it?Joe: [laugh]. Yeah, I think we may be a little, like, neuro-spicy, but I think it might be a little overblown with what TikTok is trying to diagnose us with. So, it's always good to just keep it in check, you know?Corey: Oh, yes. So, let's see, what's been going on lately? We had Google Next, which I think the industry largely is taking not seriously enough. For years, it felt like a try-hard, me too version of re:Invent. And this year, it really feels like it's coming to its own. It is defining itself as something other than oh, us too.Joe: I totally agree. And that's where you and I ran into recently, too. I feel like post-Covid I'm still, like, running into people I met on the internet in real life, and yeah, I feel like, yeah, re:Invent and Google Next are, like, the big ones.I totally agree. It feels like—I mean, it's definitely, like, heavily inspired by it. And it still feels like it's a little sibling in some ways, but I do feel like it's one of the best conferences I've been to since, like, a pre-Covid 2019 AWS re:Invent, just in terms of, like… who was there. The energy, the vibes, I feel like people were, like, having fun. Yeah, I don't know, it was a great conference this year.Corey: Usually, I would go to Next in previous years because it was a great place to go to hang out with AWS customers. These days, it feels like it's significantly more than that. It's, everyone is using everything at large scale. I think that is something that is not fully understood. You talk to companies that are, like, Netflix, famously all in on AWS. Yeah, they have Google stuff, too.Everyone does. I have Google stuff. I have a few things in Azure, for God's sake. It's one of those areas where everything starts to diffuse throughout a company as soon as you hire employee number two. And that is, I think, the natural order of things. The challenge, of course, is the narrative people try and build around it.Joe: Yep. Oh, totally. Multi-cloud's been huge for you know, like, starting to move up. And it's impossible not to. It was interesting seeing, like, Google trying to differentiate itself from Azure and AWS. And, Corey, I feel like you'd probably agree with this, too, AI was like, definitely the big buzzword that kept trying to, like—Corey: Oh, God. Spare me. And I say that, as someone who likes AI, I think that there's a lot of neat stuff lurking around and value hiding within generative AI, but the sheer amount of hype around it—and frankly—some of the crypto bros have gone crashing into the space, make me want to distance myself from it as far as humanly possible, just because otherwise, I feel like I get lumped in with that set. And I don't want that.Joe: Yeah, I totally agree. I know it feels like it's hard right now to, like, remain ungrifty, but, like, still, like—trying—I mean, everyone's trying to just, like, hammer in an AI perspective into every product they have. And I feel like a lot of companies, like, still don't really have a good use case for it. You're still trying to, like, figure that out. We're seeing some cool stuff.Honestly, the hard part for me was trying to differentiate between people just, like, bragging about OpenAI API addition they added to the core product or, like, an actual thing that's, like, AI is at the center of what it actually does, you know what I mean? Everything felt like it's kind of like tacked on some sort of AI perspective to it.Corey: One of the things that really is getting to me is that you have these big companies—Google and Amazon most notably—talk about how oh, well, we've actually been working with AI for decades. At this point, they keep trying to push out how long it's been. It's like, “Okay, then not for nothing, then why does”—in Amazon's case—“why does Alexa suck? If you've been working on it for this long, why is it so bad at all the rest?” It feels like they're trying to sprint out with a bunch of services that very clearly were not conceptualized until Chat-Gippity's breakthrough.And now it's oh, yeah, we're there, too. Us, too. And they're pivoting all the marketing around something that, frankly, they haven't demonstrated excellence with. And I feel like they're leaving a lot of their existing value proposition completely in the dust. It's, your customers are not using you because of the speculative future, forward-looking AI things; it's because you are able to solve business problems today in ways that are not highly speculative and are well understood. That's not nothing and there needs to be more attention paid to that. And I feel like there's this collective marketing tripping over itself to wrap itself in hype that does them no services.Joe: I totally agree. I feel like honestly, just, like, a marketing perspective, I feel like it's distracting in a lot of ways. And I know it's hot and it's cool, but it's like, I think it's harder right now to, like, stay focused to what you're actually doing well, as opposed to, like, trying to tack on some AI thing. And maybe that's great. I don't know.Maybe that's—honestly, maybe you're seeing some traction there. I don't know. But I totally agree. I feel like everyone right now is, like, selling a future that we don't quite have yet. I don't know. I'm worried that what's going to happen again, is what happened back in the IBM Watson days where everyone starts making bold—over-promising too much with AI until we see another AI winter again.Corey: Oh, the subtext is always, we can't wait to fire our entire customer service department. That one—Joe: Yeah.Corey: Just thrills me.Joe: [laugh].Corey: It's like, no, we're just going to get rid of junior engineers and just have senior engineers. Yeah, where do you think those people come from, by the way? We aren't—they aren't just emerging fully formed from the forehead of some god somewhere. And we're also seeing this wild divergence from reality. Remember, I fix AWS bills for a living. I see very large companies, very large AWS spend.The majority of spend remains on EC2 across the board. So, we don't see a lot of attention paid to that at re:Invent, even though it's the lion's share of everything. When we do contract negotiations, we talk about generative AI plan and strategy, but no one's saying, oh, yeah, we're spending 100 million a year right now on AWS but we should commit 250 because of all this generative AI stuff we're getting into. It's all small-scale experimentation and seeing if there's value there. But that's a far cry from being the clear winner what everyone is doing.I'd further like to point out that I can tell that there's a hype cycle in place and I'm trying to be—and someone's trying to scam me. As soon as there's a sense of you have to get on this new emerging technology now, now, now, now, now. I didn't get heavily into cloud till 2016 or so and I seem to have done all right with that. Whenever someone is pushing you to get into an emerging thing where it hasn't settled down enough to build a curriculum yet, I feel like there's time to be cautious and see what the actual truth is. Someone's selling something; if you can't spot the sucker, chances are, it's you.Joe: [laugh]. Corey, have you thought about making an AI large language model that will help people with their cloud bills? Maybe just feed it, like, your invoices [laugh].Corey: That has been an example, I've used a number of times with a variety of different folks where if AI really is all it's cracked up to be, then the AWS billing system is very much a bounded problem space. There's a lot of nuance and intricacy to it, but it is a finite set of things. Sure, [unintelligible 00:08:56] space is big. So, training something within those constraints and within those confines feels like it would be a terrific proof-of-concept for a lot of these things. Except that when I've experimented a little bit and companies have raised rounds to throw into this, it never quite works out because there's always human context involved. The, oh yeah, we're going to wind up turning off all those idle instances, except they're in idle—by whatever metric you're using—for a reason. And the first time you take production down, you're not allowed to save money anymore.Joe: Nope. That's such a good point. I agree. I don't know about you, Corey. I've been fretting about my job and, like, what I'm doing. I write a lot, I do a lot of videos, I'm programming a lot, and I think… obviously, we've been hearing a lot about, you know, if it's going to replace us or not. I honestly have been feeling a lot better recently about my job stability here. I don't know. I totally agree with you. There's always that, like, human component that needs to get added to it. But who knows, maybe it's going to get better. Maybe there'll be an AI-automated billing management tool, but it'll never be as good as you, Corey. Maybe it will. I don't know. [laugh].Corey: It knows who I am. When I tell it to write in the style of me and give it a blog post topic and some points I want to make, almost everything it says is wrong. But what I'll do is I'll copy that into a text editor, mansplain-correct the robot for ten minutes, and suddenly I've got the bones of a decent rough draft because. And yeah, I'll wind up plagiarizing three or four words in a row at most, but that's okay. I'm plagiarizing the thing that's plagiarizing from me and there's a beautiful symmetry to that. What I don't understand is some of the outreach emails and other nonsensical stuff I'll see where people are letting unsupervised AI just write things under their name and sending it out to people. That is anathema to me.Joe: I totally agree. And it might work today, it might work tomorrow, but, like, it's just a matter of time before something blows up. Corey, I'm curious. Like, personally, how do you feel about being in the ChatGPT, like, brain? I don't know, is that flattering? Does that make you nervous at all?Corey: Not really because it doesn't get it in a bunch of ways. And that's okay. I found the same problem with people. In my time on Twitter, when I started live-tweet shitposting about things—as I tend to do as my first love language—people will often try and do exactly that. The problem that I run into is that, “The failure mode of ‘clever' is ‘asshole,'” as John Scalzi famously said, and as a direct result of that, people wind up being mean and getting it wrong in that direction.It's not that I'm better than they are. It's, I had a small enough following, and no one knew who I was in my mean years, and I realized I didn't feel great making people sad. So okay, you've got to continue to correct the nosedive. But it is perilous and it is difficult to understand the nuance. I think occasionally when I prompt it correctly, it comes up with some amazing connections between things that I wouldn't have seen, but that's not the same thing as letting it write something completely unfettered.Joe: Yeah, I totally agree. The nuance definitely gets lost. It may be able to get, like, the tone, but I think it misses a lot of details. That's interesting.Corey: And other people are defending it when that hallucinates. Like, yeah, I understand there are people that do the same thing, too. Yeah, the difference is, in many cases, lying to me and passing it off otherwise is a firing offense in a lot of places. Because if you're going to be 19 out of 20 times, you're correct, but 5% wrong, you're going to bluff, I can't trust anything you tell me.Joe: Yeah. It definitely, like, brings your, like—the whole model into question.Corey: Also, remember that my medium for artistic creation is often writing. And I think that, on some level, these AI models are doing the same things that we do. There are still turns of phrase that I use that I picked up floating around Usenet in the mid-90s. And I don't remember who said it or the exact context, but these words and phrases have entered my lexicon and I'll use them and I don't necessarily give credit to where the first person who said that joke 30 years ago. But it's a—that is how humans operate. We are influenced by different styles of writing and learn from the rest.Joe: True.Corey: That's a bit different than training something on someone's artistic back catalog from a painting perspective and then emulating it, including their signature in the corner. Okay, that's a bit much.Joe: [laugh]. I totally agree.Corey: So, we wind up looking right now at the rush that is going on for companies trying to internalize their use of enterprise AI, which is kind of terrifying, and it all seems to come back to data.Joe: Yes.Corey: You work in the data space. How are you seeing that unfold?Joe: Yeah, I do. I've been, like, making speculations about the future of AI and data forever. I've had dreams of tools I've wanted forever, and I… don't have them yet. I don't think they're quite ready yet. I don't know, we're seeing things like—tha—I think people are working on a lot of problems.For example, like, I want AI to auto-optimize my database. I want it to, like, make indexes for me. I want it to help me with queries or optimizing queries. We're seeing some of that. I'm not seeing anyone doing particularly well yet. I think it's up in the air.I feel like it could be coming though soon, but that's the thing, though, too, like, I mean, if you mess up a query, or, like, a… large language model hallucinates a really shitty query for you, that could break your whole system really quickly. I feel like there still needs to be, like, a human being in the middle of it to, like, kind of help.Corey: I saw a blog post recently that AWS put out gave an example that just hard-coded a credential into it. And they said, “Don't do this, but for demonstration purposes, this is how it works.” Well, that nuance gets lost when you use that for AI training and that's, I think, in part, where you start seeing a whole bunch of the insecure crap these things spit out.Joe: Yeah, I totally agree. Well, I thought the big thing I've seen, too, is, like, large language models typically don't have a secure option and you're—the answer is, like, help train the model itself later on. I don't know, I'm sure, like, a lot of teams don't want to have their most secret data end up public on a large language model at some point in the future. Which is, like, a huge issue right now.Corey: I think that what we're seeing is that you still need someone with expertise in a given area to review what this thing spits out. It's great at solving a lot of the busy work stuff, but you still need someone who's conversant with the concepts to look at it. And that is, I think, something that turns into a large-scale code review, where everyone else just tends to go, “Oh, okay. We're—do this with code review.” “Oh, how big is the diff?” “50,000 lines.” “Looks good to me.” Whereas, “Three lines.” “I'm going to criticize that thing with four pages of text.” People don't want to do the deep-dive stuff, and—when there's a huge giant project that hits. So, they won't. And it'll be fine, right up until it isn't.Joe: Corey, you and I know people and developers, do you think it's irresponsible to put out there an example of how to do something like that, even with, like, an asterisk? I feel like someone's going to still go out and try to do that and probably push that to production.Corey: Of course they are.Joe: [laugh].Corey: I've seen this with some of my own code. I had something on Docker Hub years ago with a container that was called ‘Terrible Ideas.' And I'm sure being used in, like—it was basically the environment I use for a talk I gave around Git, which makes sense. And because I don't want to reset all the repositories back to the way they came from with a bunch of old commands, I just want a constrained environment that will be the same every time I give the talk. Awesome.I'm sure it's probably being run in production at a bank somewhere because why wouldn't it be? That's people. That's life. You're not supposed to just copy and paste from Chat-Gippity. You're supposed to do that from Stack Overflow like the rest of us. Where do you think your existing code's coming from in a lot of these shops?Joe: Yep. No, I totally agree. Yeah, I don't know. It'll be interesting to see how this shakes out with, like, people going to doing this stuff, or how honest they're going to be about it, too. I'm sure it's happening. I'm sure people are tripping over themselves right now, [adding 00:16:12].Corey: Oh, yeah. But I think, on some level, you're going to see a lot more grift coming out of this stuff. When you start having things that look a little more personalized, you can use it for spam purposes, you can use it for, I'm just going to basically copy and paste what this says and wind up getting a job on Upwork or something that is way more than I could handle myself, but using this thing, I'm going to wind up coasting through. Caveat emptor is always the case on that.Joe: Yeah, I totally agree.Corey: I mean, it's easy for me to sit here and talk about ethics. I believe strongly in doing the right thing. But I'm also not worried about whether I'm able to make rent this month or put food on the table. That's a luxury. At some point, like, a lot of that strips away and you do what you have to do to survive. I don't necessarily begrudge people doing these things until it gets to a certain point of okay, now you're not doing this to stay alive anymore. You're doing this to basically seek rent.Joe: Yeah, I agree. Or just, like, capitalize on it. I do think this is less—like, the space is less grifty than the crypto space, but as we've seen over and over and over and over again, in tech, there's a such a fine line between, like, a genuinely great idea, and somebody taking advantage of it—and other people—with that idea.Corey: I think that's one of those sad areas where you're not going to be able to fix human nature, regardless of the technology stack you bring to bear.Joe: Yeah, I totally agree.Corey: So, what else are you seeing these days that interesting? What excites you? What do you see that isn't getting enough attention in the space?Joe: I don't know, I guess I'm in the data space, I'm… the thing I think I do see a lot of is huge interest in data. Data right now is the thing that's come up. Like, I don't—that's the thing that's training these models and everyone trying to figure out what to do with these data, all these massive databases, data lakes, whatever. I feel like everyone's, kind of like, taking a second look at all of this data they've been collecting for years and haven't really known what to do with it and trying to figure out either, like, if you can make a model out of that, if you try to, like… level it up, whatever. Corey, you and I were joking around recently—you've had a lot of data people on here recently, too—I feel like us data folks are just getting extra loud right now. Or maybe there's just the data spaces, that's where the action's at right now.I don't know, the markets are really weird. Who knows? But um, I feel like data right now is super valuable and more so than ever. And even still, like, I mean, we're seeing, like, companies freaking out, like, Twitter and Reddit freaking out about accessing their data and who's using it and how. I don't know, I feel like there's a lot of action going on there right now.Corey: I think that there's a significant push from the data folks where, for a long time data folks were DBAs—Joe: Yeah.Corey: —let's be direct. And that role has continued to evolve in a whole bunch of different ways. It's never been an area I've been particularly strong in. I am not great at algorithmic complexity, it turns out, you can saturate some beefy instances with just a little bit of data if your queries are all terrible. And if you're unlucky—as I tend to be—and have an aura of destroying things, great, you probably don't want to go and make that what you do.Joe: [laugh]. It's a really good point. I mean, I don't know about, like, if you blow up data at a company, you're probably going to be in big trouble. And especially the scale we're talking about with most companies these days, it's super easy to either take down a server or generate an insane bill off of some shitty query.Corey: Oh, when I was at Reach Local years and years ago—my first Linux admin job—when I broke the web server farm, it was amusing; when I broke part of the data warehouse, nobody was laughing.Joe: [laugh]. I wonder why.Corey: It was a good faith mistake and that's fair. It was a convoluted series of things that set up and honestly, the way the company and my boss responded to me at the time set the course of the rest of my career. But it was definitely something that got my attention. It scares me. I'm a big believer in backups as a direct result.Joe: Yeah. Here's the other thing, too. Actually, our company, Tinybird, is working on versioning with your data sources right now and treating your data sources like Git, but I feel like even still today, most companies are just run by some DBA. There's, like, Mike down the hall is the one responsible keeping their SQL servers online, keeping them rebooted, and like, they're manually updating any changes on there.And I feel like, generally speaking across the industry, we're not taking data seriously. Which is funny because I'm with you on there. Like, I get terrified touching production databases because I don't want anything bad to happen to them. But if we could, like, make it easier to rollback or, like, handle that stuff, that would be so much easier for me and make it, like, less scary to deal with it. I feel like databases and, like, treating it as, like, a serious DevOps practice is not really—I'm not seeing enough of it. It's definitely, people are definitely doing it. Just, I want more.Corey: It seems like with data, there's a lack of iterative approaches to it. A line that someone came up with when I was working with them a decade and change ago was that you can talk about agile all you want, but when it comes to payments, everyone's doing waterfall. And it feels like, on some level, data's kind of the same.Joe: Yeah. And I don't know, like, how to fix it. I think everyone's just too scared of it to really touch it. Migrating over to a different version control, trying to make it not as manual, trying to iterate on it better, I think it's just—I don't blame them. It's hard, it really takes a long time, making sure everything, like, doesn't blow up while you're doing a migration is a pain in the ass. But I feel like that would make everyone's lives so much easier if, like, you could, like, treat it—understand your data and be able to rollback easier with it.Corey: When you take a look across the ecosystem now, are you finding that things have improved since the last time I was in the space, where the state of the art was, “Oh, we need some developer data. We either have this sanitized data somewhere or it's a copy of production that we move around, but only a small bit.” Because otherwise, we always found that oh, that's an extra petabyte of storage was going on someone's developer environment they messed up on three years ago, they haven't been here for two, and oops.Joe: I don't. I have not seen it. Again, that's so tricky, too. I think… yeah, the last time I, like, worked doing that was—usually you just have a really crappy version of production data on staging or development environments and it's hard to copy those over. I think databases are getting better for that.I've been working on, like, the real-time data space for a long time now, so copying data over and kind of streaming that over is a lot easier. I do think seeing, like, separating storage and compute can make it easier, too. But it depends on your data stack. Everyone's using everything all the time and it's super complicated to do that. I don't know about you, Corey, too. I'm sure you've seen, like, services people running, but I feel like we've made a switch as an industry from, like, monoliths to microservices.Now, we're kind of back in the monolith era, but I'm not seeing that happen in the database space. We're seeing, like, data meshing and lots of different databases. I see people who, like, see the value of data monoliths, but I don't see any actual progress in moving back to a single source of [truth of the data 00:23:02]. And I feel like the cat's kind of out of the bag on all the data existing everywhere, all the time, and trying to wrangle that up.Corey: This stuff is hard and there's no easy solution here. There just isn't.Joe: Yeah, there's no way. And embracing that chaos, I think, is going to be huge. I think you have to do it right now. Or trying to find some tool that can, like, wrangle up a bunch of things together and help work with them all at once. Products need to meet people where they're at, too. And, like, data is all over the place and I feel like we kind of have to, like, find tooling that can kind of help work with what you have.Corey: It's a constant challenge, but also a joy, so we'll give it that.Joe: [laugh].Corey: So, I have to ask. Your day job has you doing developer advocacy at Tinybird—Joe: Yes.Corey: But I had to dig in to find that out. It wasn't obvious based upon the TikToks and the Twitter nonsense and the rest. How do you draw the line between day job and you as a person shitposting on the internet about technology?Joe: Corey, I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on this, too. I don't know. I feel like I've been in different places where, like, my job is my life. You know what I mean? There's a very thin line there. Personally, I've been trying to take a step back from that, just from a mental health perspective. Having my professional life be so closely tied to, like, my personal value and who I am has been really bad for my brain.And trying to make that clear at my company is, like, what is mine and what I can help with has been really huge. I feel like the boundaries between myself and my job has gotten too thin. And for a while, I thought that was a great idea; it turns out that was not a great idea for my brain. It's so hard. So, I've been a software engineer and I've done full-time developer advocacy, and I felt like I had a lot more freedom to say what I wanted as, like, a full-time software engineer as opposed to being a developer advocate and kind of representing the company.Because the thing is, I'm always representing the company [online 00:24:56], but I'm not always working, which is kind of like—that—it's kind of a hard line. I feel like there's been, like, ways to get around it though with, like, less private shitposting about things that could piss off a CEO or infringe on an NDA or, you know, whatever, you know what I mean? Yeah, trying to, like, find that balance or trying to, like, use tools to try to separate that has been big. But I don't know, I've been—personally, I've been trying to step—like, start trying to make more of a boundary for that.Corey: Yeah. I don't have much of one, but I also own the company, so my approach doesn't necessarily work for other people. I don't advertise in public that I fix AWS bills very often. That's not the undercurrent to most of my jokes and the rest. Because the people who have that painful problem aren't generally in the audience directly and they certainly don't talk about it extensively.It's word of mouth. It's being fun and engaging so people stick around. And when I periodically do mention it that sort of sticks with them. And in the fullness of time, it works as a way of, “Oh, yeah, everyone knows what you're into. And yeah, when we have this problem, reaching out to you is our first thought.” But I don't know that it's possible to measure its effectiveness. I just know that works.Joe: Yeah. For me, it's like, don't be an asshole and teach don't sell are like, the two biggest things that I'm trying to do all the time. And the goal is not to, like, trick people into, like, thinking I'm not working for a company. I think I try to be transparent, or if, like, I happen to be talking about a product that I'm working for, I try to disclose that. But yeah, I don't know. For me, it's just, like, trying to build up a community of people who, like, understand what I'm trying to put out there. You know what I mean?Corey: Yeah, it's about what you want to be known for, on some level. Part of the problem that I've had for a long time is that I've been pulled in so many directions. [They're 00:26:34] like, “Oh, you're great. Where do I go to learn more?” It's like, “Well, I have this podcast, I have the newsletter, I have the other podcast that I do in the AWS Morning Brief. I have the duckbillgroup.com. I have lastweekinaws.com. I have a Twitter account. I had a YouTube thing for a while.”It's like, there's so many different ways to send people. It's like, what is the top-of-funnel? And for me, my answer has been, sign up for the newsletter at lastweekinaws.com. That keeps you apprised of everything else and you can dial it into taste. It's also, frankly, one of those things that doesn't require algorithmic blessing to continue to show up in people's inboxes. So far at least, we haven't seen algorithms have a significant impact on that, except when they spam-bin something. And it turns out when you write content people like, the providers get yelled at by their customers of, “Hey, I'm trying to read this. What's going on?” I had a couple of reach out to me asking what the hell happened. It's kind of fun.Joe: I love that. And, Corey, I think that's so smart, too. It's definitely been a lesson, I think, for me and a lot of people on—that are terminally online that, like, we don't own our social following on other platforms. With, like, the downfall of Twitter, like, I'm still posting on there, but we still have a bunch of stuff on there, but my… that following is locked in. I can't take that home. But, like, you still have your email newsletter. And I even feel it for tech companies who might be listening to this, too. I feel like owning your email list is, like, not the coolest thing, but I feel like it's criminally underrated, as, like, a way of talking to people.Corey: It doesn't matter what platforms change, what my personal situation changes, I am—like, whatever it is that I wind up doing next, whenever next happens, I'll need a platform to tell people about, and that's what I've been building. I value newsletter subscribers in a metric sense far more highly and weight them more heavily than I do Twitter followers. Anyone can click a follow and then never check Twitter again. Easy enough. Newsletters? Well, that winds up requiring a little bit extra work because we do confirmed opt-ins, for obvious reasons.And we never sell the list. We never—you can't transfer permission for, like that, and we obviously respect it when people say I don't want to hear from your nonsense anymore. Great. Cool. I don't want to send this to people that don't care. Get out of here.Joe: [laugh]. No, I think that's so smart.Corey: Podcasts are impossible on the other end, but I also—you know, I control the domain and that's important to me.Joe: Yeah.Corey: Why don't you build this on top of Substack? Because as soon as Substack pivots, I'm screwed.Joe: Yeah, yeah. Which we've—I think we've seen that they've tried to do, even with the Twitter clone that tried to build last couple years. I've been burned by so many other publishing platforms over and over and over again through the years. Like, Medium, yeah, I criminally don't trust any sort of tech publishing platform anymore that I don't own. [laugh]. But I also don't want to maintain it. It's such a fine line. I just want to, like, maintain something without having to, like, maintain all the infrastructure all the time, and I don't think that exists and I don't really trust anything to help me with that.Corey: You can on some level, I mean, I wind up parking in the newsletter stuff over at ConvertKit. But I can—I have moved it twice already. I could move it again if I needed to. It's about controlling the domain. I have something that fires off once or twice a day that backs up the entire subscriber list somewhere.I don't want to build my own system, but I can also get that in an export form wherever I need it to go. Frankly, I view it as the most valuable asset that I have here because I can always find a way to turn relationships and an audience into money. I can't necessarily find a way to go the opposite direction of, well have money. Time to buy an audience. Doesn't work that way.Joe: [laugh]. No, I totally agree. You know what I do like, though, is Threads, which has kind of fallen off, but I do love the idea of their federated following [and be almost 00:30:02] like, unlock that a little bit. I do think that that's probably going to be the future. And I have to say, I just care as someone who, like, makes shit online. I don't think 98% of people don't really care about that future, but I do. Just getting burned so often on social media platforms, it helps to then have a little bit of flexibility there.Corey: Oh, yeah. And I wish it were different. I feel like, at some level, Elon being Elon has definitely caused a bit of a diaspora of social media and I think that's a good thing.Joe: Yeah. Yeah. I hope it settles down a little bit, but it definitely got things moving again.Corey: Oh, yes. I really want to thank you for taking the time to go through how you view these things. Where's the best place for people to go to follow you learn more, et cetera? Just sign up for TikTok and you'll be all over them, apparently.Joe: Go to the website that I own joekarlsson.com. It's got the links to everything on there. Opt in or out of whatever you find you want. Otherwise, I'm just going to quick plug for the company I work for: tinybird.co. If you're trying to make APIs on top of data, definitely want to check out Tinybird. We work with Kafka, BigQuery, S3, all the data sources could pull it in. [unintelligible 00:31:10] on it and publishes it as an API. It's super easy. Or you could just ignore me. That's fine, too. You could—that's highly encouraged as well.Corey: Always a good decision.Joe: [laugh]. Yeah, I agree. I'm biased, but I agree.Corey: Thanks, Joe. I appreciate your taking the time to speak with me and we'll, of course, put links to all that in the [show notes 00:31:26]. And please come back soon and regale us with more stories.Joe: I will. Thanks, Corey.Corey: Joe Karlsson, data engineer at Tinybird. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with an insulting comment that I'll never read because they're going to have a disk problem and they haven't learned the lesson of backups yet.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. Tinybird: https://www.tinybird.co/ Personal website: https://joekarlsson.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: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn and I am joined today by someone from well, we'll call it the other side of the tracks, if I can—Joe: [laugh].Corey: —be blunt and disrespectful. Joe Karlsson is a data engineer at Tinybird, but I really got to know who he is by consistently seeing his content injected almost against my will over on the TikToks. Joe, how are you?Joe: I'm doing so well and I'm so sorry for anything I've forced down your throat online. Thanks for having me, though.Corey: Oh, it's always a pleasure to talk to you. No, the problem I've got with it is that when I'm in TikTok mode, I don't want to think about computers anymore. I want to find inane content that I can just swipe six hours away without realizing it because that's how I roll.Joe: TikTok is too smart, though. I think it knows that you are doing a lot of stuff with computers and even if you keep swiping away, it's going to keep serving it up to you.Corey: For a long time, it had me pinned as a lesbian, which was interesting. Which I suppose—Joe: [laugh]. It happened to me, too.Corey: Makes sense because I follow a lot of women who are creators in comics and the rest, but I'm not interested in the thirst trap approach. So, it's like, “Mmm, this codes as lesbian.” Then they started showing me ads for ADHD, which I thought was really weird until I'm—oh right. I'm on TikTok. And then they started recommending people that I'm surprised was able to disambiguate until I realized these people have been at my house and using TikTok from my IP address, which probably is going to get someone murdered someday, but it's probably easy to wind up doing an IP address match.Joe: I feel like I have to, like, separate what is me and what is TikTok, like, trying to serve it up because I've been on lesbian TikTok, too, ADHD, autism, like TikTok. And, like, is this who I am? I don't know. [unintelligible 00:02:08] bring it to my therapist.Corey: You're learning so much about yourself based upon an algorithm. Kind of wild, isn't it?Joe: [laugh]. Yeah, I think we may be a little, like, neuro-spicy, but I think it might be a little overblown with what TikTok is trying to diagnose us with. So, it's always good to just keep it in check, you know?Corey: Oh, yes. So, let's see, what's been going on lately? We had Google Next, which I think the industry largely is taking not seriously enough. For years, it felt like a try-hard, me too version of re:Invent. And this year, it really feels like it's coming to its own. It is defining itself as something other than oh, us too.Joe: I totally agree. And that's where you and I ran into recently, too. I feel like post-Covid I'm still, like, running into people I met on the internet in real life, and yeah, I feel like, yeah, re:Invent and Google Next are, like, the big ones.I totally agree. It feels like—I mean, it's definitely, like, heavily inspired by it. And it still feels like it's a little sibling in some ways, but I do feel like it's one of the best conferences I've been to since, like, a pre-Covid 2019 AWS re:Invent, just in terms of, like… who was there. The energy, the vibes, I feel like people were, like, having fun. Yeah, I don't know, it was a great conference this year.Corey: Usually, I would go to Next in previous years because it was a great place to go to hang out with AWS customers. These days, it feels like it's significantly more than that. It's, everyone is using everything at large scale. I think that is something that is not fully understood. You talk to companies that are, like, Netflix, famously all in on AWS. Yeah, they have Google stuff, too.Everyone does. I have Google stuff. I have a few things in Azure, for God's sake. It's one of those areas where everything starts to diffuse throughout a company as soon as you hire employee number two. And that is, I think, the natural order of things. The challenge, of course, is the narrative people try and build around it.Joe: Yep. Oh, totally. Multi-cloud's been huge for you know, like, starting to move up. And it's impossible not to. It was interesting seeing, like, Google trying to differentiate itself from Azure and AWS. And, Corey, I feel like you'd probably agree with this, too, AI was like, definitely the big buzzword that kept trying to, like—Corey: Oh, God. Spare me. And I say that, as someone who likes AI, I think that there's a lot of neat stuff lurking around and value hiding within generative AI, but the sheer amount of hype around it—and frankly—some of the crypto bros have gone crashing into the space, make me want to distance myself from it as far as humanly possible, just because otherwise, I feel like I get lumped in with that set. And I don't want that.Joe: Yeah, I totally agree. I know it feels like it's hard right now to, like, remain ungrifty, but, like, still, like—trying—I mean, everyone's trying to just, like, hammer in an AI perspective into every product they have. And I feel like a lot of companies, like, still don't really have a good use case for it. You're still trying to, like, figure that out. We're seeing some cool stuff.Honestly, the hard part for me was trying to differentiate between people just, like, bragging about OpenAI API addition they added to the core product or, like, an actual thing that's, like, AI is at the center of what it actually does, you know what I mean? Everything felt like it's kind of like tacked on some sort of AI perspective to it.Corey: One of the things that really is getting to me is that you have these big companies—Google and Amazon most notably—talk about how oh, well, we've actually been working with AI for decades. At this point, they keep trying to push out how long it's been. It's like, “Okay, then not for nothing, then why does”—in Amazon's case—“why does Alexa suck? If you've been working on it for this long, why is it so bad at all the rest?” It feels like they're trying to sprint out with a bunch of services that very clearly were not conceptualized until Chat-Gippity's breakthrough.And now it's oh, yeah, we're there, too. Us, too. And they're pivoting all the marketing around something that, frankly, they haven't demonstrated excellence with. And I feel like they're leaving a lot of their existing value proposition completely in the dust. It's, your customers are not using you because of the speculative future, forward-looking AI things; it's because you are able to solve business problems today in ways that are not highly speculative and are well understood. That's not nothing and there needs to be more attention paid to that. And I feel like there's this collective marketing tripping over itself to wrap itself in hype that does them no services.Joe: I totally agree. I feel like honestly, just, like, a marketing perspective, I feel like it's distracting in a lot of ways. And I know it's hot and it's cool, but it's like, I think it's harder right now to, like, stay focused to what you're actually doing well, as opposed to, like, trying to tack on some AI thing. And maybe that's great. I don't know.Maybe that's—honestly, maybe you're seeing some traction there. I don't know. But I totally agree. I feel like everyone right now is, like, selling a future that we don't quite have yet. I don't know. I'm worried that what's going to happen again, is what happened back in the IBM Watson days where everyone starts making bold—over-promising too much with AI until we see another AI winter again.Corey: Oh, the subtext is always, we can't wait to fire our entire customer service department. That one—Joe: Yeah.Corey: Just thrills me.Joe: [laugh].Corey: It's like, no, we're just going to get rid of junior engineers and just have senior engineers. Yeah, where do you think those people come from, by the way? We aren't—they aren't just emerging fully formed from the forehead of some god somewhere. And we're also seeing this wild divergence from reality. Remember, I fix AWS bills for a living. I see very large companies, very large AWS spend.The majority of spend remains on EC2 across the board. So, we don't see a lot of attention paid to that at re:Invent, even though it's the lion's share of everything. When we do contract negotiations, we talk about generative AI plan and strategy, but no one's saying, oh, yeah, we're spending 100 million a year right now on AWS but we should commit 250 because of all this generative AI stuff we're getting into. It's all small-scale experimentation and seeing if there's value there. But that's a far cry from being the clear winner what everyone is doing.I'd further like to point out that I can tell that there's a hype cycle in place and I'm trying to be—and someone's trying to scam me. As soon as there's a sense of you have to get on this new emerging technology now, now, now, now, now. I didn't get heavily into cloud till 2016 or so and I seem to have done all right with that. Whenever someone is pushing you to get into an emerging thing where it hasn't settled down enough to build a curriculum yet, I feel like there's time to be cautious and see what the actual truth is. Someone's selling something; if you can't spot the sucker, chances are, it's you.Joe: [laugh]. Corey, have you thought about making an AI large language model that will help people with their cloud bills? Maybe just feed it, like, your invoices [laugh].Corey: That has been an example, I've used a number of times with a variety of different folks where if AI really is all it's cracked up to be, then the AWS billing system is very much a bounded problem space. There's a lot of nuance and intricacy to it, but it is a finite set of things. Sure, [unintelligible 00:08:56] space is big. So, training something within those constraints and within those confines feels like it would be a terrific proof-of-concept for a lot of these things. Except that when I've experimented a little bit and companies have raised rounds to throw into this, it never quite works out because there's always human context involved. The, oh yeah, we're going to wind up turning off all those idle instances, except they're in idle—by whatever metric you're using—for a reason. And the first time you take production down, you're not allowed to save money anymore.Joe: Nope. That's such a good point. I agree. I don't know about you, Corey. I've been fretting about my job and, like, what I'm doing. I write a lot, I do a lot of videos, I'm programming a lot, and I think… obviously, we've been hearing a lot about, you know, if it's going to replace us or not. I honestly have been feeling a lot better recently about my job stability here. I don't know. I totally agree with you. There's always that, like, human component that needs to get added to it. But who knows, maybe it's going to get better. Maybe there'll be an AI-automated billing management tool, but it'll never be as good as you, Corey. Maybe it will. I don't know. [laugh].Corey: It knows who I am. When I tell it to write in the style of me and give it a blog post topic and some points I want to make, almost everything it says is wrong. But what I'll do is I'll copy that into a text editor, mansplain-correct the robot for ten minutes, and suddenly I've got the bones of a decent rough draft because. And yeah, I'll wind up plagiarizing three or four words in a row at most, but that's okay. I'm plagiarizing the thing that's plagiarizing from me and there's a beautiful symmetry to that. What I don't understand is some of the outreach emails and other nonsensical stuff I'll see where people are letting unsupervised AI just write things under their name and sending it out to people. That is anathema to me.Joe: I totally agree. And it might work today, it might work tomorrow, but, like, it's just a matter of time before something blows up. Corey, I'm curious. Like, personally, how do you feel about being in the ChatGPT, like, brain? I don't know, is that flattering? Does that make you nervous at all?Corey: Not really because it doesn't get it in a bunch of ways. And that's okay. I found the same problem with people. In my time on Twitter, when I started live-tweet shitposting about things—as I tend to do as my first love language—people will often try and do exactly that. The problem that I run into is that, “The failure mode of ‘clever' is ‘asshole,'” as John Scalzi famously said, and as a direct result of that, people wind up being mean and getting it wrong in that direction.It's not that I'm better than they are. It's, I had a small enough following, and no one knew who I was in my mean years, and I realized I didn't feel great making people sad. So okay, you've got to continue to correct the nosedive. But it is perilous and it is difficult to understand the nuance. I think occasionally when I prompt it correctly, it comes up with some amazing connections between things that I wouldn't have seen, but that's not the same thing as letting it write something completely unfettered.Joe: Yeah, I totally agree. The nuance definitely gets lost. It may be able to get, like, the tone, but I think it misses a lot of details. That's interesting.Corey: And other people are defending it when that hallucinates. Like, yeah, I understand there are people that do the same thing, too. Yeah, the difference is, in many cases, lying to me and passing it off otherwise is a firing offense in a lot of places. Because if you're going to be 19 out of 20 times, you're correct, but 5% wrong, you're going to bluff, I can't trust anything you tell me.Joe: Yeah. It definitely, like, brings your, like—the whole model into question.Corey: Also, remember that my medium for artistic creation is often writing. And I think that, on some level, these AI models are doing the same things that we do. There are still turns of phrase that I use that I picked up floating around Usenet in the mid-90s. And I don't remember who said it or the exact context, but these words and phrases have entered my lexicon and I'll use them and I don't necessarily give credit to where the first person who said that joke 30 years ago. But it's a—that is how humans operate. We are influenced by different styles of writing and learn from the rest.Joe: True.Corey: That's a bit different than training something on someone's artistic back catalog from a painting perspective and then emulating it, including their signature in the corner. Okay, that's a bit much.Joe: [laugh]. I totally agree.Corey: So, we wind up looking right now at the rush that is going on for companies trying to internalize their use of enterprise AI, which is kind of terrifying, and it all seems to come back to data.Joe: Yes.Corey: You work in the data space. How are you seeing that unfold?Joe: Yeah, I do. I've been, like, making speculations about the future of AI and data forever. I've had dreams of tools I've wanted forever, and I… don't have them yet. I don't think they're quite ready yet. I don't know, we're seeing things like—tha—I think people are working on a lot of problems.For example, like, I want AI to auto-optimize my database. I want it to, like, make indexes for me. I want it to help me with queries or optimizing queries. We're seeing some of that. I'm not seeing anyone doing particularly well yet. I think it's up in the air.I feel like it could be coming though soon, but that's the thing, though, too, like, I mean, if you mess up a query, or, like, a… large language model hallucinates a really shitty query for you, that could break your whole system really quickly. I feel like there still needs to be, like, a human being in the middle of it to, like, kind of help.Corey: I saw a blog post recently that AWS put out gave an example that just hard-coded a credential into it. And they said, “Don't do this, but for demonstration purposes, this is how it works.” Well, that nuance gets lost when you use that for AI training and that's, I think, in part, where you start seeing a whole bunch of the insecure crap these things spit out.Joe: Yeah, I totally agree. Well, I thought the big thing I've seen, too, is, like, large language models typically don't have a secure option and you're—the answer is, like, help train the model itself later on. I don't know, I'm sure, like, a lot of teams don't want to have their most secret data end up public on a large language model at some point in the future. Which is, like, a huge issue right now.Corey: I think that what we're seeing is that you still need someone with expertise in a given area to review what this thing spits out. It's great at solving a lot of the busy work stuff, but you still need someone who's conversant with the concepts to look at it. And that is, I think, something that turns into a large-scale code review, where everyone else just tends to go, “Oh, okay. We're—do this with code review.” “Oh, how big is the diff?” “50,000 lines.” “Looks good to me.” Whereas, “Three lines.” “I'm going to criticize that thing with four pages of text.” People don't want to do the deep-dive stuff, and—when there's a huge giant project that hits. So, they won't. And it'll be fine, right up until it isn't.Joe: Corey, you and I know people and developers, do you think it's irresponsible to put out there an example of how to do something like that, even with, like, an asterisk? I feel like someone's going to still go out and try to do that and probably push that to production.Corey: Of course they are.Joe: [laugh].Corey: I've seen this with some of my own code. I had something on Docker Hub years ago with a container that was called ‘Terrible Ideas.' And I'm sure being used in, like—it was basically the environment I use for a talk I gave around Git, which makes sense. And because I don't want to reset all the repositories back to the way they came from with a bunch of old commands, I just want a constrained environment that will be the same every time I give the talk. Awesome.I'm sure it's probably being run in production at a bank somewhere because why wouldn't it be? That's people. That's life. You're not supposed to just copy and paste from Chat-Gippity. You're supposed to do that from Stack Overflow like the rest of us. Where do you think your existing code's coming from in a lot of these shops?Joe: Yep. No, I totally agree. Yeah, I don't know. It'll be interesting to see how this shakes out with, like, people going to doing this stuff, or how honest they're going to be about it, too. I'm sure it's happening. I'm sure people are tripping over themselves right now, [adding 00:16:12].Corey: Oh, yeah. But I think, on some level, you're going to see a lot more grift coming out of this stuff. When you start having things that look a little more personalized, you can use it for spam purposes, you can use it for, I'm just going to basically copy and paste what this says and wind up getting a job on Upwork or something that is way more than I could handle myself, but using this thing, I'm going to wind up coasting through. Caveat emptor is always the case on that.Joe: Yeah, I totally agree.Corey: I mean, it's easy for me to sit here and talk about ethics. I believe strongly in doing the right thing. But I'm also not worried about whether I'm able to make rent this month or put food on the table. That's a luxury. At some point, like, a lot of that strips away and you do what you have to do to survive. I don't necessarily begrudge people doing these things until it gets to a certain point of okay, now you're not doing this to stay alive anymore. You're doing this to basically seek rent.Joe: Yeah, I agree. Or just, like, capitalize on it. I do think this is less—like, the space is less grifty than the crypto space, but as we've seen over and over and over and over again, in tech, there's a such a fine line between, like, a genuinely great idea, and somebody taking advantage of it—and other people—with that idea.Corey: I think that's one of those sad areas where you're not going to be able to fix human nature, regardless of the technology stack you bring to bear.Joe: Yeah, I totally agree.[midroll 00:17:30]Corey: So, what else are you seeing these days that interesting? What excites you? What do you see that isn't getting enough attention in the space?Joe: I don't know, I guess I'm in the data space, I'm… the thing I think I do see a lot of is huge interest in data. Data right now is the thing that's come up. Like, I don't—that's the thing that's training these models and everyone trying to figure out what to do with these data, all these massive databases, data lakes, whatever. I feel like everyone's, kind of like, taking a second look at all of this data they've been collecting for years and haven't really known what to do with it and trying to figure out either, like, if you can make a model out of that, if you try to, like… level it up, whatever. Corey, you and I were joking around recently—you've had a lot of data people on here recently, too—I feel like us data folks are just getting extra loud right now. Or maybe there's just the data spaces, that's where the action's at right now.I don't know, the markets are really weird. Who knows? But um, I feel like data right now is super valuable and more so than ever. And even still, like, I mean, we're seeing, like, companies freaking out, like, Twitter and Reddit freaking out about accessing their data and who's using it and how. I don't know, I feel like there's a lot of action going on there right now.Corey: I think that there's a significant push from the data folks where, for a long time data folks were DBAs—Joe: Yeah.Corey: —let's be direct. And that role has continued to evolve in a whole bunch of different ways. It's never been an area I've been particularly strong in. I am not great at algorithmic complexity, it turns out, you can saturate some beefy instances with just a little bit of data if your queries are all terrible. And if you're unlucky—as I tend to be—and have an aura of destroying things, great, you probably don't want to go and make that what you do.Joe: [laugh]. It's a really good point. I mean, I don't know about, like, if you blow up data at a company, you're probably going to be in big trouble. And especially the scale we're talking about with most companies these days, it's super easy to either take down a server or generate an insane bill off of some shitty query.Corey: Oh, when I was at Reach Local years and years ago—my first Linux admin job—when I broke the web server farm, it was amusing; when I broke part of the data warehouse, nobody was laughing.Joe: [laugh]. I wonder why.Corey: It was a good faith mistake and that's fair. It was a convoluted series of things that set up and honestly, the way the company and my boss responded to me at the time set the course of the rest of my career. But it was definitely something that got my attention. It scares me. I'm a big believer in backups as a direct result.Joe: Yeah. Here's the other thing, too. Actually, our company, Tinybird, is working on versioning with your data sources right now and treating your data sources like Git, but I feel like even still today, most companies are just run by some DBA. There's, like, Mike down the hall is the one responsible keeping their SQL servers online, keeping them rebooted, and like, they're manually updating any changes on there.And I feel like, generally speaking across the industry, we're not taking data seriously. Which is funny because I'm with you on there. Like, I get terrified touching production databases because I don't want anything bad to happen to them. But if we could, like, make it easier to rollback or, like, handle that stuff, that would be so much easier for me and make it, like, less scary to deal with it. I feel like databases and, like, treating it as, like, a serious DevOps practice is not really—I'm not seeing enough of it. It's definitely, people are definitely doing it. Just, I want more.Corey: It seems like with data, there's a lack of iterative approaches to it. A line that someone came up with when I was working with them a decade and change ago was that you can talk about agile all you want, but when it comes to payments, everyone's doing waterfall. And it feels like, on some level, data's kind of the same.Joe: Yeah. And I don't know, like, how to fix it. I think everyone's just too scared of it to really touch it. Migrating over to a different version control, tr

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Thrill ME! - Join your host Chris D With special guest Joe Corey. - Check out his books available on Amazon.◇ Download Newsly today and use our promo code CULTF1LM for a FREE month of their premium service! Www.newsly.me♧ Title Cards by paolinoContact him at paolinoArtworks@gmail.com☆ Visit all the fine creators at www.blindknowledge.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Joe is a bit of an enigma in that it is difficult to quickly summarize or classify him... but that is what this show is ALL about! Meet the man who went to school with Danny McBride & had a halloween movie character based off him due to long time frienimies. Enjoy!Connect with Joe: Twitter, website, books, & VR.  . If you liked this, and want to hear more, give us a follow and let us know! Or maybe you just want to tell us how awful we are? Comments help the algorithm, and we love to see ‘em! And as always, don't kill the messenger. ~Beloved Sponsors~Exotic Fridge Join our DISCORD server!! Whiskey Fund (help support our podcast habit!):PayPal - hermesauslander@gmail.com  Our Patreon & YouTube Connect with Hermes: Instagram & Twitter Connect with Morpheus: Instagram Support the show

Matthew Socey reviews the film No Bears and Waking Karma. Plus an interview with author Joe Corey ('80s Teen Flick Festival Reunion).

Joe Corey returns with tales of West Germany https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0536038/?ref_=tt_ch

About JoeJoe Onisick is a polarizing technologist with nearly 25 years' experience architecting, building, operating complex IT systems and advising customers on the same. Onisick's passion is marrying technology to a customer's real-time business challenges and leading them through the entirety of the adoption curve. Onisick is a Principal and co-founder of Transformation Continuum (transformationcontinuum.com), and founder of Define the Cloud (definethecloud.net). Links: transformation CONTINUUM: https://transformationcontinuum.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/JoeOnisick 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 by our friends at Revelo. Revelo is the Spanish word of the day, and its spelled R E V E L O. It means; I reveal. Now, have you tried to hire an engineer lately? I assure you it is significantly harder than it sounds. One of the things that Revelo has recognized as something I've been talking about for a while, specifically that while talent is evenly distributed opportunity is absolutely not. They're exposing a new talent pool to, basically, those of us without a presence in Latin America via their platform. It's the largest tech talent marketplace in Latin America with over a million engineers in their network, which includes, but isn't limited to, talent in Mexico, Costa Rica, Brazil, and Argentina. Now, not only do they wind up spreading all of their talent on English ability, as well as , you know, their engineering skills, but they go significantly beyond that. Some of the folks on their platform are hands down the most talented engineers that I've ever spoken to. Let's also not forget that Latin America has high time zone overlap with what we have here in the United States. So, you can hire full-time remote engineers who share most of the workday as your team. It's an end-to-end talent service. So, you can find and hire engineers in Central and South America without having to worry about, frankly, the colossal pain of cross border payroll and benefits and compliance because Revelo handles all of it. If you're hiring engineers, check out revelo.io/screaming to get 20% off your first three months. That's R E V E L O.io/screaming.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Vultr. Spelled V-U-L-T-R because they're all about helping save money, including on things like, you know, vowels. So, what they do is they are a cloud provider that provides surprisingly high performance cloud compute at a price that—while sure they claim its better than AWS pricing—and when they say that they mean it is less money. Sure, I don't dispute that but what I find interesting is that it's predictable. They tell you in advance on a monthly basis what it's going to going to cost. They have a bunch of advanced networking features. They have nineteen global locations and scale things elastically. Not to be confused with openly, because apparently elastic and open can mean the same thing sometimes. They have had over a million users. Deployments take less that sixty seconds across twelve pre-selected operating systems. Or, if you're one of those nutters like me, you can bring your own ISO and install basically any operating system you want. Starting with pricing as low as $2.50 a month for Vultr cloud compute they have plans for developers and businesses of all sizes, except maybe Amazon, who stubbornly insists on having something to scale all on their own. Try Vultr today for free by visiting: vultr.com/screaming, and you'll receive a $100 in credit. Thats V-U-L-T-R.com slash screaming.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud, I'm Corey Quinn. My guest today is someone I've really admired from afar for a while just because he's a study in contrast. By day, he is a transformation—effectively—expert. He's a principal at his own consultancy that focuses on helping companies achieve their digital transformation. Very forward-looking, very high-level modern technology. But he also wound up effectively leaving Silicon Valley to go live in the middle of the woods. It's not usually a common combination. Joe Onisick is the principal at transformation CONTINUUM. Joe, thank you for joining me and suffering my fairly ignorant questions.Joe: Corey, thanks a lot for having me and the brilliant intro there.Corey: [laugh]. So, I stumbled across you on Twitter of all places, which is where I spend my work time, my free time, my spare time, et cetera. When people say, “Where are you dialing in from?” I say, “Oh, Twitter.” And that usually gets a laugh, but it's also a little unfortunately true.And your pinned tweet thread talks about how you weren't particularly happy with your life, where things weren't serving you and you decided it was time to make a change. It's the kind of thing that I think an awful lot of people flirt with the idea of, but you actually went ahead and did it. What happened.?Joe: So, I did a whole series of things. I think the big thing I tried to do was not bite off everything at once. So, the first thing I did was quit drinking. I was a—you know, which it says in the tweet and I'm pretty public about I was an extremely heavy alcoholic. So, I cut that out because I wasn't happy with it.And you know, the whole idea was I thought it was keeping me happy and it wasn't. So, got rid of that to see how things were and then just started a series of changes, which has, I think, gotten more extreme over time.Corey: Well, one of the early tweets in the thread was one of your coworkers at the time was planning to climb I think it was Kilimanjaro, and your position was, well, that's not something I would normally do. May I join you? If that's how it starts, it seems like well, that seems pretty far on most people's extreme scale.Joe: Yeah, that was an interesting one. The idea of starting in a rainforest and ending on a glacier up 20,000 feet was not of any interest to me at all, but it seemed like a life experience I wanted to put under my belt.Corey: I'm assuming that you're probably glad you did it because you don't meet too many people who are like, “Oh, yeah. I climbed a mountain. It sucked. I never wish I hadn't done it.” It feels almost like it's writing a book, on some level where no one wants to write a book; they want to have written a book. Is climbing a mountain similar to that, or does it go in a bit of a different direction?Joe: I think it was very similar to that. We did a ten-day track, but you can do it much shorter. So, we spent about seven days acclimatizing around the mountain and hiking around the mountain. So, it was more a little up and down, but more level. So, the first 15,000 feet was actually pretty enjoyable. It's the summit day where you go from 15,000 to 20,000, that is—it's just sheer misery, especially if it's not something you do every day.Corey: I thought I had a rough time whenever I visit my in-laws who live in Colorado Springs, and it's great hanging out in their house and whatnot, and I run up the stairs and I get winded and it's “Wow, what a tubby piece of crap I am. How did this happen?” It's like, “Oh right, we're at 9000 feet; the air is a lot thinner here.” So, I basically spend the entire trip out there, trying to move as little as possible as opposed to at home where I sit in front of my computer attempting to move as little as possible. But it hits in a different way.You quit your job in Silicon Valley as a part of this journey of—was it a journey of discovery? Was it just a series of changes? How do you contextualize it? How do you describe it?Joe: I'm trying to learn how to be whoever I am would be the way I'd describe it. I've spent my entire life being someone I thought I was supposed to be, and I never stopped to think who I am. So, a lot of this is just trying everything to see what fits.Corey: And then you make one of the classic blunders as you do this; you decide, “You know, I'm not going to work a traditional job anymore. I'm going to start a consultancy.” That is truly the path of fools, speaking as someone who did exactly that. And looking back at it, it was one of the best things I've ever done for sure, but if I had known how much work it was going to be and all of the ins and outs and ups and downs in the managing of my own psychology, I'm not sure I would have the courage to get started.Joe: Yeah, that's a great way to say it. I look back—my favorite example is one of my mentors started a couple of companies. His wife has had several exits. I mean, he's just a wealth of knowledge of tech: Tech the industry, and starting companies, and when I brought the idea to him, he asked, “So, you're thinking of starting a consultancy?” And I said, “Yes.” He goes, “I have one word of advice.” And I waited for him to reply, “Don't.”Corey: When you said that to people in my experience, they think, “Oh, they're trying to hoard all the wealth and happiness for themselves.” It's yes, that is what I'm trying to do. I view consulting as a zero sum game. There's only enough room for one of us. Yeah, it never works that way.It's just such an up and down thing and when I talk to folks who work at big tech companies and they are asking, “Oh, you know, I want to become an independent consultant because I'm tired of my job and my company and the rest,” don't do that. It's going to be a few lean years and it's going to take an awful lot of trying. And honestly, the hardest part of all of it, at least in tech—this is, to be clear, not a sympathetic problem—is at any point, you can walk away and say, “The hell with this,” and within a week, wind up getting a salaried job somewhere very comfortable, where you don't have to deal with all the hard parts of running a business and it pays three times your first year's revenue. And it's so much easier to go down that path. Fortunately for me, that wasn't really on the table because I'm an insufferable jackass who, my personality shines through and it turns out, this is not a desirable component in most workplaces.Joe: I think we share that. I think I've made myself fully unemployable now, so I don't have that parachute, which makes the consulting a little easier.Corey: You also have an additional challenge that, for better or worse, I don't, which is I fix the horrifying AWS bill, which means that I could demonstrate ROI with, more or less, basic arithmetic when people say, “So, why should I bring you in?” It is one of the easiest enterprise sales—not that there's an easy enterprise sale—that's possible because it's, “What are you selling?” “Money.” The end. You advise on digital transformation, which is inherently a sticky concept itself. What is it that you do for companies?Joe: So, I'd say we started out with probably the stupidest business model you could ever come up with. We decided we were going to address Fortune 100 technology companies at the same time as addressing the largest value-added resellers in the world, and at the same time, driving adoption services on behalf of them for their customers. So, we have three customer bases: The end-user of technology, the reseller of technology, and the vendor of technology, and we're helping them all adapt to the transformations happening in the industry. So, off the bat, we were already crazy because everyone would tell you pick a segment and focus, right? Not just technology vendors, but a specific hardware or software.But to create the value chain we do of getting their products to market and making sure they fit that market, we have to have visibility into all ends of the spectrum. So, we tackled the hard challenge to be able to be successful with what we wanted to do.Corey: It sounds an awful lot like you are taking a more… I'll use the term ‘honest'—I think honesty is the right word here—a more honest approach to getting companies to their desired outcomes. There are a lot of folks who specialize in, “Digital transformation,” quote-unquote, and that's very much a thin veneer over, “So, what do you really do?” It's, “Oh, we do cloud migration, specifically into this one cloud vendor.” And that journey of their digital transformation generally involves writing a very large and very specific check to a third-party company. And that's the end of it, and it's rinse, repeat, go all-in. You have an established track record of very much not doing that. Was that something that you did originally, or was that how the practice wound up evolving?Joe: So, I've kind of worked in all components of it. I've built giant channel practices within some of the world's largest VARs; I've worked on the—or started my career on the end-user side and then I got kind of drafted into the vendor side for a while. So, I've got exposure to all of it. I think the honesty piece has been—to a fault, integrity is a thing that for me, right? It's a trigger. I always tell people, I'm opinionated; you're going to get my opinions, but you'll never get anyone else's opinions. So, they might be subject to change, but they're always mine.Corey: There's an idea of you could buy my attention, but not my opinion, and that has been something of a guiding star for what I do just because people look at it and say, “Oh, that's this bold moral stance, and that's just inspirational,” and no. Absolutely not. It's that I suck at biting my tongue. When I look at something and I find it ridiculous, I can only go so long without, more or less, asking why the emperor is prancing around naked in front of everyone. And contrary to popular opinion, in corporate life, this is not a particularly valuable skill, in fact, just the opposite.But it does lend itself to a certain perspective on the larger industry. When you talk to companies who are looking for digital transformation, how does that conversation go? It seems like, for better or worse, it is a nebulous problem, and companies are generally not the looking for things via Google ads, for example? “Yes, hello. I'd like to buy one digital transformation, please.”Joe: Yeah, so it starts in several different ways. A lot of our business starts with a vendor with a new product that they know fits the market and fits where things are going, but they can't get it to move, right? They can't get it to sell, they can't get customers to adopt it, they can't get sales teams to understand it. And so we come in and try and fit it into the bigger picture while tying it to what people already understand and know.You can call it, like, chunking learning, right? I'm not going to be able to learn astrophysics if I don't have a baseline in math. So, we try and tie the future to today so that people can grasp and understand it. And the same ends up at the opposite end of the spectrum: You can't go in and talk to a laggard customer about how machine learning and AI is going to transform their business operations if they're still wondering how to manage what they've got today.Corey: There's an underappreciated skill in meeting customers where they are, and very often that can express itself as a perception of being condescending in some cases, and I think that's where a lot of people get it wrong. The hallmark of a terrible junior consultant is to walk in and say, “Oh, what moron built this?” Invariably to said, quote-unquote, “Moron.” People don't show up at work hoping to do a crappy job today. There's a reason that things exist the way that they do.Yeah, maybe it's because they just didn't know any better, but maybe there's a constraint or context you don't have. And generally in my experience, failing to respect that context is just the kiss of death because, think, it's the only thing that separates software from being able to do your entire job.Joe: Yeah, and it's a lost art, right? It's one of the things I do and love doing is training engineers how to be consultants, or salespeople how to be consultants, and it tends to be a lost art. We have these products or solutions that we're positioning or that are our favorites and we try to shoehorn them in every hole. One of my favorite examples was, I was asked to go into a California government agency and buy them and sell them SDN, they wanted to know why they needed to adopt SDN. And instead of coming in and preaching SDN, which was what I was theoretically getting paid to do, I started asking some questions and immediately realized these people don't want Software-Defined Networking at all.They want, you know, to be on the command line whenever they can, and not have to touch the gear other than that. So, I started to dig a little more and eventually find out, they hired a new CTO, and that CTO had SDN-ified their last network, and so they thought it was going to get shoved down their throat. And they were trying to figure out how to get around that. And so instead of selling an SDN, I gave them the 15 reasons why their operation wouldn't benefit from it and found another problem to solve for them.Corey: There's really something to be said for having the courage to deviate from the engagement plan. I find that there's a certain type of consultancy that as soon as they realize the facts on the ground are not as described or things have changed, they keep trying to get back on track for the thing that they believe they're there to do. But I've always viewed it as being there to help customers, and sometimes that means that it's a bit different than what you expected. There are times I have actively advised customers to spend more on AWS. It's, yeah, you could not have backups for those incredibly important things over there, but I [wouldn't 00:13:12] generally recommend that. And I always get these strange looks. And it evolved my business practice a bit away from, for example, guaranteeing that I'd achieved a certain level of savings just because that it got people focused on the wrong outcome.Joe: Absolutely. I draw some analogies, I do some woodworking as a hobby, and occasionally I'll go out and buy a tool like a router or a bandsaw because I want that tool, and then I design projects around that tool. That's great for a hobby when you have some spare income to blow. That's a terrible way to run an IT operation.Corey: That's a lot of fun as a hobby, but if you're a professional carpenter, that's probably the wrong [laugh] direction to take things in. It's a different approach to things. Your background is fascinating, and I would argue makes you incredibly well-suited for the role you're in. You've been a principal engineer, you've been a CTO, you've been a VP of Sales and Marketing, you've sort of done, more or less, every major business function out there. The one I don't see on your background listed is accounting and finance, but yeah, turns out you run a business, you learn real quick how at least the important moving parts there are.What was it that made you decide to take that background, that eclectic group of skills and say, yep, consultancy, first off, and then it's going to be aimed at solving these expensive existential questions that companies are wrestling with? Because it turns out the world increasingly runs on computers and that's not something a lot of our customers are great at out of the gate.Joe: So, some of it happened just by opportunity and chance. My first sales engineering role pulled me out of the customer side, and when the hiring manager called me to interview me and explain a sales engineer role, I told him, you know, “This isn't for me. I don't want to sell.” And then he ended up calling back the next day and explaining this training certification knowledge and growth path he put me on, and I changed my mind real quick because he was going to invest in me. So, some of it started by accident, then I realized the value in the diversity of knowledge.I mean the human brain is a pattern-matching machine. The more data sets it has to match patterns on, the more powerful it gets, so the more diverse my job roles and the more diverse my education, my reading, my study become, the more I can help any given job I have by finding parallels to other things I've experienced.Corey: You started your consultancy right around the time of the pandemic if memory serves, and that the running gag has been for a while now—it's one of those haha, only serious type of jokes—is the global pandemic has done more to accelerate your company's digital transformation than your last ten CIOs combined. And there's something to be said for necessity forcing the issue in some cases. How have you seen it evolving?Joe: So yeah, the pandemic definitely accelerated digital transformation and in fact, it was part of our first-year revenue success was that. There were some challenges that came with it. Large companies didn't know what the financial market would look like, so they locked down spending and budgets quite a bit, so you got some good and bad there. But I think it accelerated a lot of things.I think the maybe the disappointing part to me is that a lot of the things that the pandemic accelerated, were things that should have been happening anyway: Expanding remote work, building out better hybrid models to be able to secure SaaS, Infrastructure as a Service, and on-premises properties together, those types of things. They were things that we should have been doing, but nobody was forced to until the ‘oh, crap' happened.Corey: It's one of those areas that is always felt like companies approach strangely. I've worked for a number of large companies over the course of my career who effectively decided to one day wake up, plant a flag in the ground and declare it we're not a finance company—or whatever it is that they did—we're a tech company. And in practice, I find that the execution of that vision doesn't tend to extend much further beyond just putting a sign on the wall. Is that something you've seen and is a common trope, or do I just have really interesting luck in picking employers?Joe: No, I think we see that a lot. I think we see a lot of large, intelligent organizations see a shift happening in the world and they decide they have to address that or do that, right? You saw a lot of this in the early days of cloud. They didn't figure out a business problem or financial problem to move to cloud; they just saw all their peers doing it, so they put a stake in the sand and said, “We're going to cloud.” And I think that's a bad way to design the business operations. If your core isn't a tech company, then, “What do you mean by that?” would be the first question I ask.Corey: One thing I want to talk about because I don't get to see it very often. I am almost always brought in to companies when they're already running in the cloud—specifically, AWS since that is where I start and stop professionally these days—and they're already there, and surprise, it costs money. You're there earlier than I am; you are helping them get there in the first place. I've viewed for a while the idea that moving to cloud to save money is a losing proposition. If you ask me in good faith to say, “All right, in five years, will we make money or lose money on this journey?”It really comes down to what answer do you want because I can make an extremely strong good-faith argument in either direction, but my honest opinion is that it's a capability story, not a cost savings play. That is how I've come to view it, but given that I'm viewing it after the fact, and I'm only seeing a very specific example of it, I'm curious to know how you see it.Joe: I would not recommend to a client to move to the cloud for the purpose of saving cost. If there's something else leading it, scalability, elasticity, operational flexibility, whatever you're looking at, that should be the primary goal. If you can also build it to save some costs, that's fantastic. And there's really two reasons I look at that. One is, IT should be a business enabler if you're doing it right, and if you have something enabling your business driving revenue, why would you want to starve it of funding? Why would cost be your primary goal—cost savings?And the second piece is, in my life, I always find that the success of a decision is 20% making the right decision and 80% making it the right decision after it's made, right? It's the effort afterwards to make it work that's going to show you whether you're getting the cost savings or not. It's not easy to jump to cloud and create the new operational model that's going to be the cheaper operational model, so if you're not willing to do that work, once you're in cloud, you're not going to save money on it.Corey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Oracle Cloud. Counting the pennies, but still dreaming of deploying apps instead of “Hello, World” demos? Allow me to introduce you to Oracle's Always Free tier. It provides over 20 free services and infrastructure, networking, databases, observability, management, and security. And—let me be clear here—it's actually free. There's no surprise billing until you intentionally and proactively upgrade your account. This means you can provision a virtual machine instance or spin up an autonomous database that manages itself, all while gaining the networking, load balancing, and storage resources that somehow never quite make it into most free tiers needed to support the application that you want to build. With Always Free, you can do things like run small-scale applications or do proof-of-concept testing without spending a dime. You know that I always like to put asterisks next to the word free? This is actually free, no asterisk. Start now. Visit snark.cloud/oci-free that's snark.cloud/oci-free.Corey: You have a, I would say, unpopular opinion on taking multi-cloud as an action item in the direction to go in. The reason I don't call it that unpopular is because it echoes a lot of my own thinking on these things, and Lord knows, I have suffered the slings and arrows over the years for advocating such a thing, but what is your position on adopting multiple clouds?Joe: So, if I was going to put it in the least objective possible terms, it would be, I want to be single architecture—single cloud in this case—unless. Right? I should be architecting for the simplest environment, I can build given my requirements. And so when I see clients try and jump into multi-cloud because it's the buzzword or it's something that a vendor is trying to sell them, multi-cloud is not a solution, it's a necessity, in some cases.Corey: My perspective has been to pick a provider—I don't care which one—go all in until you have a reason to do something different. Multi-cloud is, in my experience, something that happens to you rather than something that is an intentional choice. But where your data winds up living is fundamentally where everything else is going to wind up centering around as well. The old-school procurement story of not wanting to be tied to one particular vendor because they're going to soak you is a good piece of advice and I apply it in almost every IT decision, except when it comes to cloud. Because the pattern is different, the model is different, the way the discounting works is radically different.And maybe that's just because I haven't done a lot of this work in traditional IT, but is this also the wrong approach, going back to the world of data centers and networking vendors and server vendors and the like, or is it really a different world?Joe: No, I think it's very much the same world. I'm religious about standardization wherever possible because it reduces the operational friction across the board that gets ignored in a lot of these costs. And that operational friction can end up in headcount and salary and cost that you see, but it also ends up in frustration for those teams, complexity of what you do, and another form of lock-in that prevents you from modernizing that infrastructure. So, anywhere you can find a standard single vendor that works—and it's going to have some caveats, like everything—I would. And that's not to say you should always standardize on everything; it's standardize in less.Corey: One of the things that I tend to see as far as a multi-cloud pattern that just doesn't work is in no small part, very much an intentional choice—I believe—on the part of the cloud providers, where inbound data transfer is free; outbound costs an awful lot of money. And that, if for nothing other than basic economics has acted as a brake on the adoption of those patterns, in many cases. Is that something that you experience as these companies are moving to cloud is something that they need to become accustomed to? Is that something they know going in and they just intrinsically accept it? How does that awareness play out?Joe: So, I think you're hitting on the biggest problem of multi-cloud is how do I get access to the data sitting in one cloud? Every cloud provider wants to give you cheap storage because once your data is there, you're going to use their compute, their bandwidth, everything else. And so when I am working with a client that is looking at multi-cloud, the first thing we want to solve for is, where's the demilitarized zone we can put your data that can serve it effectively to any cloud you're using? Because most of the time, your apps aren't going to work in isolation. And that tends to be a solvable problem, but one of the harder problems to solve, and one of the things I don't see a lot of people thinking of first when they start to put apps in different clouds.Corey: For me, when I was advising—lightly—on Cloud migrations and digital transformations as such, the problem wasn't the technology or even the budget or the rest, it was the growing awareness that people were going to have to think about things in a different context. Tying it back to economics, for example, when you ask someone who's in a data center and looking to move to cloud, “Okay, great. How much data per month are your app servers sending and receiving to the database servers?” And the answer? “Why on earth would I have to know that? Why would I care?”And it's oh, you're very much about to care. There's a reason I'm asking this. It's a cultural transformation, much more than it is a technical one, in my experience. Do you find that that comes as a surprise to folks or by the time that they get serious enough about digital transformation to bring someone like you in that they've already checked the basic boxes?Joe: I think we've improved a lot over time. I mean, I think there were great horror stories of they're ready to flip the switch on a cloud migration, and then they talked to the CFO who has no desire to deal with an OpEx model, or something to that effect, right? So, I think we've moved a lot past that. But I think people are still very naive about the overall dependencies, the data transfer. I used to say you can ask any given customer how many applications they have, and if they can give you a ballpark, that's amazing. So, to know what the dependencies are, what the data transfer rates [crosstalk 00:24:49]—Corey: [crosstalk 00:24:49] start counting on it, and it's like it's one of those, “Yeah, don't bother giving me specific count; just give me breadbox sizing. Are we talking dozens, hundreds, thousands, millions? At least give me an order of magnitude here.”Joe: Right. And if you don't know how many apps you have, how do you know how they communicate and how much data they transfer, and the rest? And oh, by the way, figuring that all out is an expensive exercise.Corey: Very often, I tend to view hybrid as something that no one intends to do, but they get there almost by accident where they start migrating some workloads, and it goes super well, then they realize, “Huh, I have a mainframe over there and there is no AWS/400 I can migrate it to, so we're going to give up, call it hybrid, plant the flag, declare victory, and the end; we're a hybrid now.” I feel like that is in many cases, what a multi-cloud… pattern might evolve to be. I think we're still early enough in the cycle that moving from all-in on Cloud Provider A to all-in on Cloud Provider B isn't an exercise most companies have undertaken. But it feels like that might be something that gives rise to a multi-cloud world, just because that is the pattern that people fall into turns out to be more of a trap than anything.Joe: Yeah, I think we're always more willing to spend $10 a month for eternity than $100 right now on a problem. So, we get this idea of we're not going to take that legacy, monolithic app and re-architect it for the cloud; we're going to leave it and run in a hybrid model. Over time you're over-engineering; over time, you're spending more money; over time, you're not solving the problem. One of the things that, you know, here on my ranch I try and do is never do band-aid fixes because as soon as I go put a bandaid on something, it's going to stay there until it breaks on me again. If you're not going to fix it right the first time, you're going to have challenges with it all the time.Corey: It's the idea of buying the best tool that you can find on this, when you buy the most expensive–or best tool—which is often the most expensive—it's one of those you cry once, whereas if you've buy the crappy tool, every time you use it, it irritates you, but you can't justify replacing it. It's the same model. One thing that I keep smacking into, it on some level, makes me feel like a bit of a fraud because I'm here talking to companies about their AWS bill, where it starts where it stops, but regardless of how big or how small that bill is, it is always dwarfed by payroll expenses. And the hard part of cloud migrations and modernization is not, “Well, how do we move all the applications from the data center into the cloud?” Compared to, “We have 5000 employees who are working in the on-prem environment and know how that works, and cloud is something they find in the sky when they go outside once in a while. How do we get those people upskilled?” That seems to be the challenge of the age, right now. I am bounded to only the computery bits, as far as what I tend to explore. You're not. How does staff upskilling and staff expertise point of impacting your work?Joe: That's a huge point, right? Your operational costs around your staff, staff tooling, and operations are always far exceeding any of your infrastructure costs, cloud or not. And I think one of the biggest hindrances I see to that is companies have this fear that if they train people and upskill them that they're going to lose them. And, you know, I take a pretty hard stance on that, if you're that worried about losing your people because you're training them a little bit that, maybe you should fix your culture or your paychecks, or both. That's a huge hindrance to it.You have to train your people because they're costing you more not knowing what you need to know. If they do leave, that happens, that's business, that's how things work. It's more expensive to you over time to not be investing in the knowledge they need. And wherever you can carry your existing staff forward, you're going to save a lot money over hiring that new staff, especially in this current market.Corey: There is a reality as well—and I want to challenge you on this one a little bit—that if you have a team of people who are working in your data centers on various things, and let's say their market rate is $60,000 a year—to pick a number arbitrarily—upskilling them to cloud-first is hard. And I want to be clear, not everyone either has the capacity or the desire to, “All right, I'm going to basically become a cloud developer now.” But for the folks who do and are able to make that transition, they're making $60,000 a year but they've just learned a new skill that has a going market rate of perhaps $120,000 in that market. On some level it's a well, I could go work somewhere else and double my pay. It's you'd have to convince me that there was a strong compelling reason for them not to do it. If they were asking me for advice, like, why wouldn't you? That's one of those obvious type of answers in most scenarios. How do you square that circle?Joe: There's going to be some risk involved either way, so I'm not trying to shy away from that. But I think if you have people that generally like their job and what they do, people tend to not want to switch jobs as much. We all experience inertia and complacency, right, at some level. I think the second piece is, using the numbers you're using as an example, if I'm making 60 today, and you train me for a $120,000 job, and somewhere along that line, when I showed the aptitude and have the skillset, you bump me from 60 to 80 or 90 without me asking, you just bought a level of loyalty for $30,000 a year cheaper than you would have bought my replacement. And that doesn't mean I'm going to stay forever, but I'm really going to like where I'm at when I get a giant bump without coming into your office and demanding it.Corey: I think that there's a misunderstanding across a lot of sectors of the economy that employment is not strictly about the numbers. And I know that because in my 20s, I was in crippling credit card debt, and every career decision I made was around what had the biggest number on the paycheck. And there's nothing inherently wrong with that approach, but it also didn't serve me super well, in some scenarios. If I'm chasing—even now—the thing that pays me the absolute most money, yeah, it turns out that running a boutique consultancy is not the answer to that question. I could do a lot of things that are considerable more ethically dubious; I'd be miserable, but it would make more money in some respects.Employees are in a very much a similar boat. It's yeah, I could go make 10% more somewhere else, but I like what I'm working on. I like the people. I like the culture, I like the baseline level of respect the company has for me, and I like the fact that it's not just empty words when they say that they invest in their people. And I think that is one of those things that really hits and convinces people that, yeah, is this place perfect? No, no place is, but that's why I stay. And that counts for an awful lot and I think that gets overlooked.Joe: I agree completely. And I think, you know, I want to be careful because there's a level of money that shifts at, right? At some point, you got to pay the bills, you got to pay off the loans, you got to pay the mortgage. And so the more money to get to that level is extremely important. And probably the most important thing in your career choice. Once you hit comfort and normalcy—Corey: Oh, yeah. Going from between 30,000 and 40,000 is very different than debating between 170 and 180. It's a percentage thing, and there are certain steps at which point it is a dramatic lifestyle improvement. At other points, that same amount of money is more or less, it looks suspiciously like a rounding error. And it also depends on people's individual situations, too. I want to be very clear, this is not in defense of underpaying people in any respect. I'm a huge fan of charge market rate and get more money if you possibly can.Joe: Absolutely. And I think it's a combination of those things. And you have to remember, it's going to be different to different individuals, right? A single person with no intent on a family might be one hundred percent okay, with 80 hour weeks for the right money because they don't have a whole lot of other commitments, right? Whereas it's somebody else in a different set of boats is going to care more about a four-day work week or the rest.So, I think two things would help companies maintain the talent, especially in a market like this, and that's having a rounded out package that includes great salaries along with benefits, and probably providing some choice so that the individual can get what they're really looking for within the big picture of the benefits package.Corey: I really appreciate your spending the time to talk with me about all this today. If people want to learn more about what you're up to and how you think about these and many other things, where's the best place to find you?Joe: I'd say so transformationcontinuum.com is probably the best place. I'm on Twitter, but I'll warn you I'm a bit of a porcupine, so I'm not for everybody's tastes.Corey: A lot of that going around on this [laugh] conversation today. Thank you again for your time. I really do appreciate it.Joe: This was fantastic. Thank you, Corey.Corey: Joe Onisick, principal at transformation CONTINUUM. 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, insulting comment that I will only accept if you send it from 20,000 feet above sea level.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.

In this episode, Carissa Chipman interviews Joe Corey, President of Day's Jewelers. They discuss the company's rich history; how they've created an employee-centric work environment; what they view as their responsibility to the community.  

Join Trivial Theater and Movie Emporium as we journey through the world of Rod Serlings influential The Twilight Zone. This week we are joined by special guest Robert Dodrill to discuss Season 1 Episode 5 episode Walking Distance. The Episode is Directed By: Robert Stevens and Stars: Gig Young, Frank Overton, Irene Tedrow, Michael Montgomery, Byron Foulger, Sheridan Comerate, Joe Corey and Ron Howard. You can find Robert Dodrill's content at: Youtube Channel: www.youtube.com/RobertDodrill You can find Trivial Theaters content at: Youtube Channel: www.youtube.com/TrivialTheater Twitter: @trivia_chic You can find Movie Emporium's content at: Youtube Channel: www.youtube.com/MovieEmporium Twitter: @Movie Emporium Intro Created by Trivial Theater Music Designed By: Dan Jensen #TheTwilightZone #MovieEmporium #TrivialTheater --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/5thdimension/support

A story that could be a decent episode in the original Twilight Zone run gets a lot of lover here. However, this is an episode with a lot of theory crafting and talk of sheepskin condoms. Lawd help us and thanks for sending Joe Corey to be our guide!

Getting behind the scenes info on DW2 from a world class guest.

Joe on Corey Davis Trade

The meeting with Madam Swallow proved very enlightening, but their next appointment may be more revealing still... if they survive it. Tune in as we continue Masks of Nyarlathotep, a Call of Cthulhu campaign. Starring: Jazz as Ian Robertson Schroeder as Eustice Weatherton Lucas as Professor Reginald Grahm Flynn as Joe Corey   Want to leave a comment? -Email therancorsbrothel@gmail.com.  -Follow us on Twitter @Rancors_Brothel.   -Check us out online at rancorsbrothel.com

Who is the Pale Viper? That is the question on the investigators' minds, as it seems the troubles they left behind in the "Western" world may not be as far away as they thought. Tune in as we continue Masks of Nyarlathotep, a Call of Cthulhu campaign. Starring: Jazz as Ian Robertson Schroeder as Eustice Weatherton Lucas as Professor Reginald Grahm Flynn as Joe Corey   Want to leave a comment? -Email therancorsbrothel@gmail.com.  -Follow us on Twitter @Rancors_Brothel.   -Check us out online at rancorsbrothel.com

It seems the antics of the investigators have not gone unnoticed by the mysterious Madam Swallow. But an out of game issue threatens the whole session. How will the players cope? Find out as we continue Masks of Nyarlathotep, a Call of Cthulhu campaign. Starring: Jazz as Ian Robertson Schroeder as Eustice Weatherton Lucas as Professor Reginald Grahm Flynn as Joe Corey   Want to leave a comment? -Email therancorsbrothel@gmail.com.  -Follow us on Twitter @Rancors_Brothel.   -Check us out online at rancorsbrothel.com

Several months after first seeing the photo in NYC, it seems the players may have found the mysterious ship that interested Jackson Elias. But who owns the ship, and what is its importance? Find out as we continue Masks of Nyarlathotep, a Call of Cthulhu campaign. Starring: Jazz as Ian Robertson Schroeder as Eustice Weatherton Lucas as Professor Reginald Grahm Flynn as Joe Corey   Want to leave a comment? -Email therancorsbrothel@gmail.com.  -Follow us on Twitter @Rancors_Brothel.   -Check us out online at rancorsbrothel.com

Having exhausted all current leads, the investigators find themselves back at the Stumbling Tiger bar. Little do they know, however, that a major break is just a short walk away. We continue Masks of Nyarlathotep, a Call of Cthulhu campaign. Starring: Jazz as Ian Robertson Schroeder as Eustice Weatherton Lucas as Professor Reginald Grahm Flynn as Joe Corey   Want to leave a comment? -Email therancorsbrothel@gmail.com.  -Follow us on Twitter @Rancors_Brothel.   -Check us out online at rancorsbrothel.com

It seems the party is attracting more unwanted attention in Shanghai (much like everywhere else they've been). Will they find signs of Jack Brady, or will their enemies be revealed first? Find out as we continue Masks of Nyarlathotep, a Call of Cthulhu campaign. Starring: Jazz as Ian Robertson Schroeder as Eustice Weatherton Lucas as Professor Reginald Grahm Flynn as Joe Corey

With the clues sprawling and one of the investigators losing her mind, the party finds themselves drawn in different directions. What will they investigate next? Two words: Bat Fight! Find out more as we continue Masks of Nyarlathotep, a Call of Cthulhu campaign. Starring: Jazz as Sybil Ripley Schroeder as Eustice Weatherton Lucas as Professor Reginald Grahm Flynn as Joe Corey   Want to leave a comment? -Email therancorsbrothel@gmail.com.  -Follow us on Twitter @Rancors_Brothel.   -Check us out online at rancorsbrothel.com

The search continues for Jack Brady and any other signs of the Carlyle Expedition. But Shanghai seems to be a tough city to crack. Can the party make any investigative headway? Find out as we continue Masks of Nyarlathotep, a Call of Cthulhu campaign. Starring: Jazz as Sybil Ripley Schroeder as Eustice Weatherton Lucas as Professor Reginald Grahm Flynn as Joe Corey   Want to leave a comment? -Email therancorsbrothel@gmail.com.  -Follow us on Twitter @Rancors_Brothel.   -Check us out online at rancorsbrothel.com

The near death experience in the fortune teller's home has shaken up the party, and they come away from the experience with more questions then answers. Will all of Shanghai be this deadly? Find out as we continue Masks of Nyarlathotep, a Call of Cthulhu campaign. Starring: Jazz as Sybil Ripley Schroeder as Eustice Weatherton Lucas as Professor Reginald Grahm Flynn as Joe Corey   Want to leave a comment? -Email therancorsbrothel@gmail.com.  -Follow us on Twitter @Rancors_Brothel.   -Check us out online at rancorsbrothel.com

After several strange tests, the bizarre Mr. Lung springs into action. What are the astrologist's motivations towards the investigators, and can they escape this strange trap the man has sprung? Find out as we continue Masks of Nyarlathotep, a Call of Cthulhu campaign. Starring: Jazz as Sybil Ripley Schroeder as Eustice Weatherton Lucas as Professor Reginald Grahm Flynn as Joe Corey   Want to leave a comment? -Email therancorsbrothel@gmail.com.  -Follow us on Twitter @Rancors_Brothel.   -Check us out online at rancorsbrothel.com

Following the bizarre advertisement in the Shanghai newspaper, the investigators find themselves at the doorstep of the mysterious Mr. Lung. Could the astrologer have insights into their future? Find out as we continue Masks of Nyarlathotep, a Call of Cthulhu campaign. Starring: Jazz as Sybil Ripley Schroeder as Eustice Weatherton Lucas as Professor Reginald Grahm Flynn as Joe Corey   Want to leave a comment? -Email therancorsbrothel@gmail.com.  -Follow us on Twitter @Rancors_Brothel.   -Check us out online at rancorsbrothel.com

Arriving in Shanghai, the party begins looking for signs of Jack Brady, as well as why Jackson Elias would have visited the city. What better place to start than a museum? We continue Masks of Nyarlathotep, a Call of Cthulhu campaign. Starring: Jazz as Sybil Ripley Schroeder as Eustice Weatherton Lucas as Professor Reginald Grahm Flynn as Joe Corey   Want to leave a comment? -Email therancorsbrothel@gmail.com.  -Follow us on Twitter @Rancors_Brothel.   -Check us out online at rancorsbrothel.com

With half the party exploring Hong Kong, the other two decide to more closely examine some of the artifacts they collected in England. What they discover may change their understanding of reality forever. We continue Masks of Nyarlathotep, a Call of Cthulhu campaign. Starring: Jazz as Sybil Ripley Schroeder as Eustice Weatherton Lucas as Professor Reginald Grahm Flynn as Joe Corey   Want to leave a comment? -Email therancorsbrothel@gmail.com.  -Follow us on Twitter @Rancors_Brothel.   -Check us out online at rancorsbrothel.com

Running like mad from the bloodshed in England, the stalwart investigators head for the Far East. But what is driving them to China, a match book and a secondhand story? We continue Masks of Nyarlathotep, a Call of Cthulhu campaign. Starring: Jazz as Sybil Ripley Schroeder as Eustice Weatherton Lucas as Professor Reginald Grahm Flynn as Joe Corey   Want to leave a comment? -Email therancorsbrothel@gmail.com.  -Follow us on Twitter @Rancors_Brothel.   -Check us out online at rancorsbrothel.com

Behind the suit of armor, the investigators peer into the dark depths of the Misr House. What will they find beneath the ancient mansion? Find out as we continue Masks of Nyarlathotep, a Call of Cthulhu campaign. Starring: Jazz as Sybil Ripley Schroeder as Eustice Weatherton Lucas as Professor Reginald Grahm Flynn as Joe Corey   Want to leave a comment? -Email therancorsbrothel@gmail.com.  -Follow us on Twitter @Rancors_Brothel.   -Check us out online at rancorsbrothel.com

After the violent firefight, the investigators discover the body of their fallen comrade. Yet there is little time to mourn, as more secrets and horrors await within the Misr House. We continue Masks of Nyarlathotep, a Call of Cthulhu campaign. Starring: Jazz as Sybil Ripley Schroeder as Eustice Weatherton Lucas as Professor Reginald Grahm Flynn as Joe Corey   Want to leave a comment? -Email therancorsbrothel@gmail.com.  -Follow us on Twitter @Rancors_Brothel.   -Check us out online at rancorsbrothel.com

Combat continues in the Misr House, as the investigators fight to save each other's lives. Before it is over, someone will pay the price for their actions. Who will it be? Find out as we continue Masks of Nyarlathotep, a Call of Cthulhu campaign. Starring: Jazz as Sybil Ripley Schroeder as Eustice Weatherton Lucas as Professor Reginald Grahm Jeff as Inspector Barrington Flynn as Joe Corey   Want to leave a comment? -Email therancorsbrothel@gmail.com.  -Follow us on Twitter @Rancors_Brothel.   -Check us out online at rancorsbrothel.com

It seems as though the remote location of the Misr House may not be as secluded as the party believes. Who has discovered Sybil and Grahm? And what does this mean for the others sneaking about the grounds? Find out as we continue Masks of Nyarlathotep, a Call of Cthulhu campaign. Starring: Jazz as Sybil Ripley Schroeder as Eustice Weatherton Lucas as Professor Reginald Grahm Jeff as Inspector Barrington Flynn as Joe Corey   Want to leave a comment? -Email therancorsbrothel@gmail.com.  -Follow us on Twitter @Rancors_Brothel.   -Check us out online at rancorsbrothel.com  

The appearance of Mr. Corey adds some muscle to the group, which may be needed as they approach the Misr House. A critical decision to split the party, however, may prove disastrous. We continue Masks of Nyarlathotep, a Call of Cthulhu campaign. Starring: Jazz as Sybil Ripley Schroeder as Eustice Weatherton Lucas as Professor Reginald Grahm Jeff as Inspector Barrington Flynn as Joe Corey   Want to leave a comment? -Email therancorsbrothel@gmail.com.  -Follow us on Twitter @Rancors_Brothel.   -Check us out online at rancorsbrothel.com  

My creator, domestic goddess, dancing queen: Marcia Nelson. I sit down with my mother to explore her story, our relationship, and the passage of cancer in her own life. Thanks to Joe Corey for audio production: http://www.instagram.com/joe_corey/ Thanks to Aulicino for music: http://aulicino.it/

A Taoist martial artist, dance movement therapist, developmental psychologist, and traumatologist: Dr. Robert Macy. We explore his own wandering life journey that's led to helping people heal from emotional fall out of trauma with the International Trauma Center and at the Hanna Institute. Let's Go. Thanks to Joe Corey for audio production: http://www.instagram.com/joe_corey/ Thanks to Aulicino for music: http://www.aulicino.it/

Entrepreneur, Philanthropist, My Father: Gary Nelson. I sit down to question the man from whence I cometh to understand who I modeled and what I may have unknowingly inherited. We discuss finding your passion, the phases of life, and abuse of power. At the end we say, I love you. Gary Nelson is not on social media. Contact me if you hope to reach him. Thanks to Joe Corey for audio production: https://www.instagram.com/joe_corey/ Thanks to Aulicino for music: http://aulicino.it/

Thru-hiker, jiu jitsu practitioner, podcaster Joe Corey. We sit down to explore the ideas of what it means to become a man, a good man. We discuss how discomfort is a tool, hiking is a rite of passage, and how commitment to a craft keeps you humble. Connect with Joe: Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/joe_corey/ Podcast | https://www.instagram.com/jammed_up_podcast/ Podcast Website | https://www.jammeduppodcast.com/

Hosted by David and Nycci Nellis. Myron Mixon, host of Discovery Channel's "BBQ Pitmasters" and winner of more than 200 grilling competitions, has opened Myron Mixon's Pitmaster in Arlington, Virginia, along with veteran BBQ judge Joe Corey. Listen in as we grill Joe about the finer points of BBQ, while also talking with Sally Cowal and Robert Muse, founders of Virginia's Muse Vineyard which, after only six years in business, walked away from more than 400 competitors to win the 2015 Virginia Governor's Cup for the state's top wine. Other guests: Jonathan Langel, Bobby Van's Steakhouse; Chris Houk, Moet Hennessey; Jenn Hall, Champagne Bureau USA and Dave Delaplaine, from RAMMY-nominated, Roofer's Union (for Bets Beer Program).

Hosted by David and Nycci Nellis. Myron Mixon, host of Discovery Channel's "BBQ Pitmasters" and winner of more than 200 grilling competitions, has opened Myron Mixon's Pitmaster in Arlington, Virginia, along with veteran BBQ judge Joe Corey. Listen in as we grill Joe about the finer points of BBQ, while also talking with Sally Cowal and Robert Muse, founders of Virginia's Muse Vineyard which, after only six years in business, walked away from more than 400 competitors to win the 2015 Virginia Governor's Cup for the state's top wine. Other guests: Jonathan Langel, Bobby Van's Steakhouse; Chris Houk, Moet Hennessey; Jenn Hall, Champagne Bureau USA and Dave Delaplaine, from RAMMY-nominated, Roofer's Union (for Bets Beer Program).

Pete joins the mile high club. Megan can't find her fondue pot. Harry becomes a partner? Bob Benson is back with an interesting proposal for Joan. And Don & Peggy scrap the Burger Chef pitch and do it "My Way." Joe & Corey welcome back eclectik to the show to discuss all of this and more.

This week, Ginsberg had a special surprise for Peggy, while Megan had a very special surprise for Don. Joe & Corey welcome back Tank to discuss The Algonquin Hotel, The Sharon Tate Theories (again), and severed nipples. It will be a great show, Scout's Honor!

Its the beginning of the end of Mad Men. Joe & Corey are joined by Chris Tanski as they discuss the premiere episode of the show's final season. They take an in depth look at each of the major characters as well as speculate on their trajectory. The discussion also includes "Its How Much?!?" the new website, and our AMC Treasure Trove. Make sure you follow the show on Twitter @madmenpod

New website! New Twitter account! Prize giveaways! Joe & Corey preview Season 7 of Mad Men and discuss the show's final season format, special guest hosts, and even make predictions!

This week, Joe & Corey welcome blogger and pop culture maven William Bruce West to the show to discuss Don, Roger, and Harry's LA experience, Joan's aggressive office behavior, the attempted 'Cutler Coup' and everything else that happened on this weeks show. They also discuss the popular Reddit theory about Megan Draper & Sharon Tate.

In this weeks drug fueled episode, Joe & Corey take their vitamin shot, participate in the Rizzo Races, and discuss everything from Kenny's dance moves to Cutler's creepiness. It was a weird episode of Mad Men, and it was a weird episode of Mad Cast!

In this weeks episode, Joe & Corey discuss the merger, what a Teddy-Don sitcom would be like, Bob Benson making moves, and ask where the hell was Dawn???

The long delayed double episode is finally here! It took nearly 2 weeks to get both Joe & Corey on the Cast together and it was well worth it! The guys break down both "The Flood" and "For Immediate Release" in this expanded episode.

In this weeks episode, Joe & Corey discuss Harry Crane's testicular fortitude, Joan's night out with an old friend, Burt's socks, Project K, and what it might be like to swing with Jefferson D'Arcy. We play "Its How Much?!?!" and discuss two Don Draper Death theories. So squirt some Heinz ketchup on your hot dog (or fries) and enjoy the latest MadCast!

In this weeks episode, Joe & Corey discuss growing up in a brothel, Heinz Beans vs Ketchup, the musical 'Hair', and putting a flyer in the paper to help sell Jaguars.

Mad Men returns! And that means Joe & Corey are back to breakdown the season 6 premiere, "The Doorway". In this episode, the guys talk about all the character changes, the theme of the show, and facial hair. Its great to be back!

In this week's episode, Joe & Corey welcome back Tank to break down the season finale, "The Phantom." They discuss Don's rotten tooth, Beth's s"shocking" news for Pete, an independent Peggy, and Roger's latest trip. The Season 4 Blu Ray winner is announced, and one final round of "It's How Much?!" is played.

Its "every man for himself" this week, as Joe & Corey break down Betty's trials and tribulations with Weight Watchers, Don & Ginsberg's Sno Ball Wars, and everything else that happened around Thanksgiving 1966. Another round of "Its Worth How Much?" is played, and the casts appearance on Inside The Actors Studio is discussed.

In this weeks episode, Joe & Corey are joined by fellow blogger and podcaster eclectik (eclectikrelaxation.com) to discuss S5 E8 "Lady Lazarus" The discussion includes Megan's decision to leave SCDP, Pete's new obsession, and the Cool Whip Pitch. The gentleman also discuss their Top 3 characters of the week, Mr. Belding, the Beatles, and PIZZA HOUSE!

In this episode, Joe & Corey welcome back Tank to break down the latest episode of Mad Men, Season 5, Episode 3, "Tea Leaves". Although they touch upon all aspects of the show, they focus in on Betty Francis, her health scare as well as her significant weight gain. They also talk about Harry & Don's bonding time at a Rolling Stone concert, Pete landing Mohawk Airlines and how Roger feels like the agency is moving ahead without his help. The boys laugh about the twitter account known as @FatBettyFrancis and discuss "drapering" #bettysbandaid #babyherman #jerkyboys #pulpfiction #petefox #whitecastle #bugles #drapering #bananarepublic #canadian

In this week's episode of the UnderScoopFire.com Mad Men podcast, Joe & Corey welcome a NEW co-host to the show, our very own Harry Crane….Mr. Nate Vitale. After exchanging some pleasantries, the gentlemen get down to business and discuss Season 1 Episode 5, “5G”.

Joe Corey, vice president of Hartford's Marine and Technology and Life Science Practices, and Beth Bronger-Jones, director of marine underwriting for Hartford, discuss the growing logistics industry and the ensuing coverage issues.