Podcasts about linux academy

Structuring your go-to-market (GTM) team is about creating a culture of teamwork. Our guest Anna Talerico, the CEO of Corporate Finance Institute, stresses the need to break down silos between departments and foster an environment where everyone focuses on providing an outstanding customer experience. We're excited to have her back on the podcast to share her valuable insights on organizing your GTM team, offering best practices, and helping you avoid common pitfalls. Listen to "How Sales Works in a Product-Led Organization" with Anna Talerico on the ProductLed Podcast (2021). Key Takeaways:  [00:55] Evolution of Anna's views on PLG [05:05] The importance of a team-oriented culture [16:50] Case Study: Acquiring a product-led company [18:35] Building the Go-to-Market Team [22:00] Avoiding playbooks [29:40] Customer-centric messaging About Anna Talerico: Anna Talerico, CEO of Corporate Finance Institute, is dedicated to helping employees discover career growth opportunities within their organizations through focused learning. As an accomplished operator and former COO of Linux Academy, she excels in building high-performing teams with a strong emphasis on go-to-market strategies, people development, and nurturing a positive company culture. Links: Anna Talerico | LinkedIn

About AntAnt Co-founded A Cloud Guru, ServerlessConf, JeffConf, ServerlessDays and now running Senzo/Homeschool, in between other things. He needs to work on his decision making.Links: A Cloud Guru: https://acloudguru.com homeschool.dev: https://homeschool.dev aws.training: https://aws.training learn.microsoft.com: https://learn.microsoft.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/iamstan TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by Thinkst. This is going to take a minute to explain, so bear with me. I linked against an early version of their tool, canarytokens.org in the very early days of my newsletter, and what it does is relatively simple and straightforward. It winds up embedding credentials, files, that sort of thing in various parts of your environment, wherever you want to; it gives you fake AWS API credentials, for example. And the only thing that these things do is alert you whenever someone attempts to use those things. It's an awesome approach. I've used something similar for years. Check them out. But wait, there's more. They also have an enterprise option that you should be very much aware of canary.tools. You can take a look at this, but what it does is it provides an enterprise approach to drive these things throughout your entire environment. You can get a physical device that hangs out on your network and impersonates whatever you want to. When it gets Nmap scanned, or someone attempts to log into it, or access files on it, you get instant alerts. It's awesome. If you don't do something like this, you're likely to find out that you've gotten breached, the hard way. Take a look at this. It's one of those few things that I look at and say, “Wow, that is an amazing idea. I love it.” That's canarytokens.org and canary.tools. The first one is free. The second one is enterprise-y. Take a look. I'm a big fan of this. More from them in the coming weeks.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part my Cribl Logstream. Cirbl Logstream is an observability pipeline that lets you collect, reduce, transform, and route machine data from anywhere, to anywhere. Simple right? As a nice bonus it not only helps you improve visibility into what the hell is going on, but also helps you save money almost by accident. Kind of like not putting a whole bunch of vowels and other letters that would be easier to spell in a company name. To learn more visit: cribl.ioCorey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. Every once in a while I talk to someone about, “Oh, yeah, remember that time that you appeared on Screaming in the Cloud?” And it turns out that they didn't; it was something of a fever dream. Today is one of those guests that I'm, frankly, astonished I haven't had on before: Ant Stanley. Ant, thank you so much for indulging me and somehow forgiving me for not having you on previously.Ant: Hey, Corey, thanks for that. Yeah, I'm not too sure why I haven't been on previously. You can explain that to me over a beer one day.Corey: Absolutely, and I'm sure I'll be the one that buys it because that is just inexcusable. So, who are you? What do you do? I know that you're a Serverless Hero at AWS, which is probably the most self-aggrandizing thing you can call someone because who in the world in their right mind is going to introduce themselves that way? That's what you have me for. I'll introduce you that way. So, you're an AWS Serverless Hero. What does that mean?Ant: So, the Serverless Hero, effectively I've been recognized for my contribution to the serverless community, what that contribution is potentially dubious. But yeah, I was one of the original co-founders of A Cloud Guru. We were a serverless-first company, way back when. So, from 2015 to 2016, I was with A Cloud Guru with Ryan and Sam, the two other co-founders.I left in 2016 after we'd run ServerlessConf. So, I led and ran the first ServerlessConf. And then for various reasons, I decided, hey, the pressure was too much; I needed a break, and a few other reasons I decided to leave A Cloud Guru. A very amicable split with my former co-founders. And then yeah, I kind of took a break, took some time off, de-stressed, got the serverless user group in London up and running; ran a small conference in London called JeffConf, which was a take on a blog that Paul Johnson, who was one of the folks who ran JeffConf with me, wrote a while ago saying we could have called it serverless—and we might as well have called it Jeff. Could have called it anything; might as well have called it Jeff. So, we had this joke about JeffConf. Not a reference to Mr. Bazos.Corey: No, no. Though they do have an awful lot of Jeffs working over there. But that's neither here nor there. ‘The Land of the Infinite Jeffs' as it were.Ant: Yeah, exactly. There are more Jeffs than women in the exec team if I remember correctly.Corey: I think it's now it's a Dave problem instead.Ant: Yeah, it's a Dave problem. Yeah. [laugh]. It's not a problem either way. Yeah. So, JeffConf morphed into SeverlessDays, which is a group of community events around the world. So, I think AWS said, “Hey, this guy likes running serverless events for some silly reason. Let's make him a Serverless Hero.”Corey: And here we are. Which is interesting because a few directions you can take this in. One of them, most recently, we were having a conversation, and you were opining on your thoughts of the current state of serverless, which can succinctly be distilled down to ‘serverless sucks,' which is not something you'd expect to hear from a Serverless Hero—and I hope you can hear the initial caps when I say ‘Serverless Hero'—or the founder of a serverless conference. So, what's the deal with that? Why does it suck?Ant: So, whole serverless movement started to gather momentum in 2015. The early adopters were all extremely experienced technologists, folks like Ben Kehoe, the chief robotics scientist at iRobot—he's incredibly smart—and folks of that caliber. And those were the kinds of people who spoke at the first serverless conference, spoke at all the first serverless events. And, you know, you'd kind of expect that with a new technology where there's not a lot of body of knowledge, you'd expect these high-level, really advanced folks being the ones putting themselves out there, being the early adopters. The problem is we're in 2021 and that's still the profile of the people who are adopting serverless, you know? It's still not this mass adoption.And part of the reason for me is because of the complexity around it. The user experience for most serverless tools is not great. It's not easy to adopt. The patterns aren't standardized and well known—even though there are a million websites out there saying that there are serverless patterns—and the concepts aren't well explained. I think there's still a fair amount of education that needs to happen.I think folks have focused far too much on the technical aspects of serverless, and what is serverless and not serverless, or how you deploy something, or how you monitor something, observability, instead of going back to basics and first principles of what is this thing? Why should you do it? How do you do it? And how do we make that easy? There's no real focus on user experience and adoption for inexperienced folks.The adoption curve, the learning curve for serverless, no matter what platform you do, if you want to do anything that's beyond a side project it's really difficult because there's no easy path. And I know there's going to be folks that are going to complain about it, but the Serverless Stack just got a million dollars to solve this problem.Corey: I love the Serverless Stack. They had a great way of building things out.Ant: Yeah.Corey: I cribbed a fair bit from what they built when I was building out my own serverless project of the newsletter production pipeline system. And that's awesome. And I built that, and I run it mostly as a technology testbed. But my website, lastweekinaws.com?I pay WP Engine to host it on WordPress and the reason behind that is not that I can't figure out the serverless pieces of it, it's because when I want to hire someone to do something that's a bit off the beaten path on WordPress, I don't have to spend $400 an hour for a consultant to do it because there's more than 20 people in the world who understand how all this stuff fits together and integrates well. There's something to be said for going in the direction the rest of the market is when there's not a lot of reason to differentiate yourselves. Yeah, could I save thousands of dollars a year in infrastructure costs if I'd gone with serverless? Of course, but people's time is worth more than that. It's expensive to have people work on these things.And even on the serverless stuff that I've built, if it's been more than six months since I've touched a component, someone else may have written it; I have to rediscover what the hell I was thinking and what the constraints are, what the constraints I thought existed there in the platform. And every time I deal with Lambda or API Gateway, I come away with a spiraling sense of complexity tied to all of it. And the vision of serverless I believe in, truly, but the execution has lagged from all providers.Ant: Yeah. I agree with that completely. The execution is just not there. I look at the situation—so Datadog had their report, “The State of Serverless Report” that came out about a month or two ago; I think it's the second year they've done it, now, might be the third. And in the report, one of the sections, they talked about tooling.And they said, “What's the most adopted tools?” And they had the Serverless Framework in there, they had SAM in there, they had CloudFormation, I think they had Terraform in there. But basically, Serverless Framework had 70% of the respondents. 70% of folks using Datadog and using serverless tools were using Serverless Framework. But SAM, AWS's preferred solution, was like 12%.It was really tiny and this is the thing that every single AWS demo example uses, that the serverless developer advocates push heavily. And it's the official solution, but the Serverless Application Model is just not being adopted and there are reasons for that, and it's because it's the way they approach the market because it's highly opinionated, and they don't really listen to end-users that much. And their CDK out there. So, that's the other AWS organizational complexity as well, you've got another team within AWS, another product team who've developed this different way—CDK—doing things.Corey: This is all AWS's fault, by the way. For the longest time, I've been complaining about Lambda edge functions because they are not at all transparent; you have to wait for a CloudFront deployment for it to update every time, only to figure out that in my case, I forgot a comma because I've never heard of a linter. And it becomes this awful thing. Only recently did I find out they only run at regional edge caches, not just in all of the CloudFront pop, so I said, “The hell with it,” ripped it out of everything I was using it with, and wound up implementing it in bog-standard Lambda because it was easier. But then rather than fixing that, they've created their—what was it—their CloudFront Workers. Or is it—is it CloudFront Workers, or is it CloudFront Functions?Ant: No, CloudFront Functions.Corey: I don't even remember it because rather than fixing the thing, you just released a different thing that addresses these problems in very different ways that aren't directly compatible. And it's oh, great, awesome. Terrific. As a customer, I want absolutely not this. It's one of these where, honestly, I've left in many cases with the resigned position of, if you're not going to take this seriously, why am I?Ant: Yeah, exactly. And it's bizarre. So, the CloudFront Functions thing, it's based on Nginx's [little 00:08:39] JavaScript engine. So, it's the Nginx team supporting it—the engine—which is really small number of users; it's tiny, there's no foundation behind it. So, you've got these massive companies reliant on some tiny organization to support the runtime of one of their businesses, one of their services.And they expect people to adopt it. And on top of that, that engine supports primary language is JavaScript's ES5 or ES2015, which is the 2015 edition of JavaScript, so it's a six-year-old version of JavaScript. You cannot use one JavaScript with it which also means you can't use any other tools in the JavaScript ecosystem for it. So basically, anything you write for that is going to be vanilla, you're going to write yourself, there's no tooling, no community to really leverage to use that thing. Again, like, why have you even done that? Why if you now gone off and taken an engine no one uses—they will say someone uses it, but basically no one uses—Corey: No one willingly uses or knowingly uses it.Ant: Yeah. No one really uses. And then decided to run that. Why not look at WebAssembly—it's crazy—which has a foundation behind it and they're doing great things, and other providers are using WebAssembly on the edge. I just don't understand the thought process—well, I say I don't understand, but I do understand the thought processes behind Amazon. Every single GM in Amazon is effectively incentivized to release stuff, and build stuff, and to get stuff out the door. That's how they make money. You hear the stories—Corey: Oh, it's been clear for years. They only recently stopped—in their keynotes every year—talking about the number of feature releases that they've had over the past 12 months. And I think they finally had it clued into them by someone snarky on Twitter—ahem—that the only people that feel good about that are people internal to AWS because customers see that and get horrified of, “I haven't kept up with most of those things. How many of those are important? How many of them are nonsense?”And I'm sure somewhere you have released a serverless that will solve my business problem perfectly so I don't have to build it together myself out of Lambda functions, and string, and popsicle sticks, but I'll never hear about it because you're too busy talking about nonsense. And that problem still exists and it's writ large. There's a philosophy around not breaking existing workloads—which I get; that's a hard problem to solve for—but their solution is, rather than fixing existing services will launch a new one that doesn't have those constraints and takes a different approach to it. And it's horrible.Ant: Yeah, exactly. If you compare Amazon to Apple, Apple releases a net-new product once a year, once every two years.Corey: You're talking about new generations of products, that comes out on an annualized basis, but when you're talking about actual new product, not that frequently. The last one—Ant: Yeah.Corey: —I can really think of is probably going to be AirPods, at least of any significance.Ant: AirTags is the new one.Corey: Oh, AirTags. AirTags is recent, which is a neat—but it's an accessory to the rest of those things. It is—Ant: And then there's AirPods. But yeah, it's once—because they—everything works. If you're in that Apple ecosystem, everything works. And everything's back-ported and supported. My four-year-old phone still works and had a five-year-old MacBook before this current one, still worked, you know, not a problem.And those two philosophies—and the Amazon folk are heavily incentivized to release products and to grow the usage of those products. And they're all incentivized within their bubbles. So, that's why you get competing products. That's why Proton exists when CodeBuild and CodePipeline, and all of those things exist, and you have all these competing products. I'm waiting for the container team to fully recreate AWS on top of containers. They're not far away.Corey: They're already in the process of recreating AWS on top of Lightsail. It's more or less the, “Oh, we're making this the simpler version.” Which is great. You know who likes simplicity? Freaking everyone.So, it's the vision of a cloud, we could have had but didn't. “Oh, you want a virtual machine. Spin up a Lightsail instance; you're going to get a fixed amount of compute, disk, RAM, and CPU that you can adjust, and it's going to cost you a flat fee per month until you exceed some fairly high limits.” Why can't everything be like that, on some level? Because in many cases, I don't care about wanting to know exactly to the penny shave things off.I want to spin up a fleet of 20 virtual machines, and if they cost me 20 bucks a pop each a month, I can forecast that, I can budget for that, I can do a lot and I don't actually care in any business context about the money there, but dialing it in and having the variable charges and the rest, and, “Oh, you went through a managed NAT gateway. That's going to double your bandwidth price and it's going to be expensive. Surprise, you should have looked more closely at it,” is sort of the lesson of the original AWS services. At some level, they've deviated away from anything resembling simplicity and increasingly we're seeing a world where in order to do something effectively with cloud, you have to spend 12 weeks going to cloud school first.Ant: Oh, yeah. Completely. See, that's one of the major barriers with serverless. You can't use serverless for any of the major cloud providers until you understand that cloud provider. So yeah, do your 12 weeks of cloud school. And there's more than enough providers.Corey: Whoa, whoa, whoa. Before you spin up a function that runs code, you have to understand the identity and security model, and how the network works, and a bunch of other ancillary nonsense that isn't directly tied to business value.Ant: And all these fun things. How are you're going to test this, and how are you're going to do all that?Corey: How do you write the entry point? Where is it going to enter? What is it expecting? What objects are getting passed in, if any? What format is it going to take?I've spent days, previously, trying to figure out the exact invocation for working with a JSON object in Python, what that's going to show up as, and how specifically to refer to it. And once you've done that a couple of times, great, fine, it's easy. Copy and paste it from the last time you did it. But figuring it out from first principles, particularly in a time when there isn't a lot of good public demonstrations of this—especially early days—it's hard to do.Ant: Yeah. And they just love complexity. Have you looked at the second edition—so the third version of the AWS SDK for JavaScript?Corey: I don't touch JavaScript with my hands most days, just because I'm bad at it and I don't understand the asynchronous model and computers are really not my thing most.Ant: So, unfortunately for my sins, I do use JavaScript a lot. So, version two of the SDK is effectively the single most popular Cloud SDK of any language, anything out there; 20 million downloads a week. It's crazy. It's huge—version two. And JavaScript's a very fast-evolving language, though.Basically, it's a bit like the English language in that it adopts things from other languages through osmosis, and co-opts various other features of other languages. So, JavaScript has—if there's a feature you love in your language, it's going to end up in JavaScript at some point. So, it becomes a very broad Swiss Army knife that can do almost anything. And there's always better ways to do things. So, the problem is, the version two was written in old JavaScript from years twenty fifteen years five years six kind of level.So, from 2015, 2016, I—you know, 2020, 2021, JavaScript has changed. So, they said, “Oh, we're going to rewrite this.” Which good; you should do. But they absolutely broke all compatibility with version two. So, there is no path from version two to version three without rewriting what you've got.So, if you want to take anything you've written—not even serverless—anything in JavaScript you've written and you want to upgrade it to get some of the new features of JavaScript in the SDK, you have to rewrite your code to do that. And some instances, if you're using hexagonal architecture and you're doing all the right things, that's a really small thing to do. But most people aren't doing that.Corey: But let's face it, a lot of things grow organically.Ant: Yeah.Corey: And again, I can sit here and tell you how to build things appropriately and then I look at my own environment and… yeah, pay no attention to that burning dumpster fire behind the camera. And it's awful. You want to make sure that you're doing things the right way but it's hard to do and taking on additional toil because the provider decides the time to focus on this is a problem.Ant: But it's completely not a user-centric way of thinking. You know, they've got all their 14—is it 16 principles now? Did they add two principles, didn't they?Corey: They added two to get up to 16; one less than the numbers of ways to run containers in AWS.Ant: Yeah. They could barely contain themselves. [laugh]. It's just not customer-centric. They've moved themselves away from that customer-centric view of the world because the reality is, they are centered on the goals of the team, the goals of the GM, and the goals of that particular product.That famous drawing of all the different organizational charts, they got the Facebook chart, and the Google Chart, and the Amazon chart has all these little circles, everyone pointing guns at each other. And the more Amazon grows, the more you feel like that's reality. And it's hurting users, it's massively hurting users. And we feel the pain every day, absolutely every day, which is not great. And it's going to hurt Amazon in the long run, but short-term, they're not going to see that pain quarterly, they're not going to see that pain, probably within 12 months.But they will see the pain long run. And if they want to fix it, they probably should have started fixing it two years ago. But it's going to take years to fix because that's a massive cultural shift to say, “Okay, how do we get back to being more customer-focused? How do we stop that organizational targets and goals from getting in the way of delivering value to the customer?”Corey: It's a good question. The hard part is getting customers to understand enough of what you put out there to be able to disambiguate what you've built, and what parts to trust, what parts not the trust, what parts are going to be hard, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The concern that I've got across the board here is, how do you learn? How do you get started with this? And the way that I came into this was I started off, in the early days of AWS, there were a dozen services, and okay, I could sort of stumble my way through it.And the UI was rough, but it got better with time. So, the answer for a lot of folks these days is training, which makes sense. In the beginning, we learned through things like podcasts. Like there was a company called Jupiter Broadcasting which did a bunch of Linux-oriented podcasts and learned how this stuff works. And then they were acquired by Linux Academy which really focused on training.And then A Cloud Guru acquired Linux Academy. And then Pluralsight acquired A Cloud Guru and is now in the process of itself being acquired by Vista Equity Partners. There's always a bigger fish eating something somewhere. It feels like a tremendous, tremendous consolidation in the training market. Given that you were one of the founders of A Cloud Guru, where do you stand on that?Ant: So, in terms of that actual transaction, I don't know the details because I'm a long time out of A Cloud Guru, but I've stayed within the whole training sphere, and so effectively, the bigger fish scenario, it's making the market smaller in terms of providers are there. You really don't have many providers doing cloud-specific training anymore. On one level you don't, but then another level, you've got lots of independent folks doing tons of stuff. So, you've got this explosion at the bottom end. If you go to Udemy—which is where A Cloud Guru started, on Udemy—you will see tons of folks offering courses at ten bucks a pop.And then there's what I'm doing now on homeschool.dev; there's serverless-focused training on there. But that's really focused on a really small niche. So, there's this explosion at the bottom end of lots of small people doing lots of things, and then you've got this consolidation at the top end, all the big providers buying each other, which leaves a massive gap in the middle.And on top of that, you've got AWS themselves, and all the other cloud providers, offering a lot of their own free training, whether it's on their own platforms—there's aws.training now, and Microsoft have similar as well—I think it's learn.microsoft.com is theirs. And you've got all these different providers doing their own training, so there's lots out there.There's actually probably more training for lower costs than ever before. The problem is, it's like the complexity of too many services, it's the 17 container problem. Which training do you use because the actual cost of the training is your time? It's not the cost of the course. Your time is always going to be more expensive.Corey: Yeah, the course is never going to be anywhere comparable to the time you spend on it. And I've never understood, frankly, why these large companies charge money for training on their own platform and also charge money for certifications because I don't care what you're going to pay for those things, once you know a platform well enough to hit a certification, you're going to use the thing you know, in most cases; it's a great bottom-up adoption story.Ant: Yeah, completely. That was actually one of Amazon's first early problems with their trainings, why A Cloud Guru even exists, and Linux Academy, and Cloud Academy all actually came into being is because Amazon hired a bunch of folks from VMware to set up their training program. And VMware's training, back in the day, was a profit center. So, you'd have a one-and-a-half thousand, two thousand dollar training course you'd go on for three to five days, and then you'd have a couple hundred dollars to do the certification. It was a profit center because VMware didn't really have that much competition. Zen and Microsoft's Hyper V were so late to the market, they basically own the market at the time. So—Corey: Oh, yeah. They still do in some corners.Ant: Yeah. They're still massively doing in this place as they still exist. And so they Amazon hired a bunch of ex-VMware folk, and they said, “We're just going to do what we did at VMware and do it at Amazon,” not realizing Amazon didn't own the market at the time, was still growing, and they tried to make it a profit center, which basically left a huge gap for folks who just did something at a reasonable price, which was basically everyone else. [laugh].This episode is sponsored by our friends at Oracle Cloud. Counting the pennies, but still dreaming of deploying apps instead of "Hello, World" demos? Allow me to introduce you to Oracle's Always Free tier. It provides over 20 free services and infrastructure, networking databases, observability, management, and security.And - let me be clear here - it's actually free. There's no surprise billing until you intentionally and proactively upgrade your account. This means you can provision a virtual machine instance or spin up an autonomous database that manages itself all while gaining the networking load, balancing and storage resources that somehow never quite make it into most free tiers needed to support the application that you want to build.With Always Free you can do things like run small scale applications, or do proof of concept testing without spending a dime. You know that I always like to put asterisks next to the word free. This is actually free. No asterisk. Start now. Visit https://snark.cloud/oci-free that's https://snark.cloud/oci-free.Corey: The challenge I found with a few of these courses as well, is that they teach you the certification, and the certifications are, in some ways, crap when it comes to things you actually need to know to intelligently use a platform. So, many of them distill down not to the things you need to know, but to the things that are easy to test in a multiple-choice format. So, it devolves inherently into trivia such as, “Which is the right syntax for this thing?” Or, “Which one of these CloudFormations stanzas or functions isn't real?” Things like that where it's, no one in the real world needs to know any of those things.I don't know anyone these days—sensible—who can write CloudFormation from scratch without pulling up some reference somewhere because most people don't have that stuff in their head. And if you do, I'd suggest forgetting it so you can use that space to remember something that's more valuable. It doesn't make sense for how people interact with these things. But I do see the value as well in large companies trying to upskill thousands and thousands of people. You have 5000 people that are trying to come up to speed because you're migrating into cloud. How do you judge people's progress? Well, certifications are an easy answer.Ant: Yeah, massively. Probably the most successful blog post ever written—I don't think it's up anymore, but it was when I was at A Cloud Gurus—like, what's the value of a certification? And ultimately, it came down to, it's a way for companies that are hiring to filter people easily. That's it. That's really it. It's if you've got to hire ten people and you get 1000 CVs or resumes for those ten roles, first thing you do is you filter by who's certified for that role. And then you go through anything else. Does the certification mean you can actually do the job? Not really. There are hundreds of people who are not cer—thousands, millions of people who are not certified to do jobs that they do. But when you're getting hired and there's lots of people applying for the same role, it's literally the first thing they will filter on. And it's—so you want to get certified, it's hard to get through that filter. That's what the certification does, it's how you get through that first filter of whatever the talent tracking system they're using is. That's it. And how to get into the dev lounge at re:Invent.Corey: Oh yeah, that's my reason for getting a certification, originally. And again, for folks who learn effectively that way, I have no problem with people getting certifications. If you're trying to advance in your career, especially early stage, and you need a piece of paper that says you know what you're talking about, a certification is a decent approach. In time, with seniority, that gets replaced by a piece of paper, it's called your resume or your CV, but that is a longer-term more senior-focused approach. I don't begrudge people getting certifications and I don't think that they're foolish for doing it.But in time, it feels like the market for training is simultaneously contracting into only a few players left, and also, I'm curious as to whether or not the large companies out there are increasing their spend with the training providers or not. On the community side, the direct-to-consumer approach, that is exploding, but at the same time, you're then also dealing—forgive me, listeners—with the general public and there is nothing worse than a customer, from a customer service perspective, who was only paying a little money to you. I used to work in a web hosting company that $3,000 a month customers were great to work with. The $2999 a month customers were hell on earth who expected that they were entitled to 80 hours a month of systems engineering time. And you see something similar in the training space. It's always the small individual customers who are spending personal money instead of corporate money that are more difficult to serve. You've been in the space for a while. What do you see around that?Ant: Yeah, I definitely see that. So, the smaller customers, there's a correlation between the amount of money you spend and the amount of hand-holding that someone needs. The more money someone spends, the less hand-holding they need, generally. But the other side of it, what training businesses—particularly for subscription-based business—it's the same model as most gyms. You pay for it and you never use it.And it's not just subscription; like, Udemy is a perfect example of that, you know, people who have hundreds of Udemy courses they've never done, but they spend ten bucks on each. So, there's a lot of that at the lower end, which is why people offer courses at that level. So, there's people who actually do the course who are going to give you a lot of a headache, but then you're going to have a bunch of folk who never do the course and you're just taking their money. Which is also not great, either, but those folks don't feel bad because I only spent 10, 20 bucks on it. It's like, oh, it's their fault for not doing it, and you've made the money.So, that's kind of how a lot of the training works. So, the other problem with training as well is you get the quality is so variable at the bottom end. It's so, so variable. You really struggle to find—there's a lot of people just copying, like, you see instances where folks upload videos to Udemy that are literally they've downloaded someone's, video resized it, cut out a logo or something like that, and re-uploaded it and it's taken a few weeks for them to get caught. But they made money in the meantime.That's how blatant it does get to some level, but there are levels where people will copy someone else's content and just basically make it their own slides, own words, that kind of thing; that happens a lot. At the low end, it's a bit all over the place, but you still have quality, as well, at the low end, where you have these cheapest smaller courses. And how do you find that quality, as well? That's the other side of it. And also people will just trade in their name.That's the other problem you see. Someone has a name for doing X whatever, and they'll go out and bring a course on whatever that is. Doesn't mean they're a good teacher; it means they're good at building a brand.Corey: Oh, teaching is very much its own skill set.Ant: Oh, yeah.Corey: I learned to speak publicly by being a corporate trainer for Puppet and it teaches you an awful lot. But I had the benefit, in that case, of a team of people who spent their entire careers building curricula, so it wasn't just me throwing together some slides; I would teach a well-structured curriculum that was built by someone who knew exactly what they're doing. And yeah, I needed to understand failure modes, and how to get things to work when they weren't working properly, and how to explain it in different ways for folks who learn in different ways—and that is the skill of teaching right there—but curriculum development is usually not the same thing. And when you're bootstrapping, learning—I'm going to build my own training course, you have to do all of those things, and more. And it lends itself to, in many cases, what can come across as relatively low-quality offerings.Ant: Yeah, completely. And it's hard. But one thing you will often see is sometimes you'll see a course that's really high production quality, but actually, the content isn't great because folks have focused on making it look good. That's another common, common problem I see. If you're going to do training out there, just get referrals, get references, find people who've done it.Don't believe the references you see on a website; there's a good chance they might be fake or exaggerated. Put something out on Twitter, put out something on Reddit, whatever communities—and Slack or Discord, whatever groups you're in, ask questions. And folks will recommend. In the world of Google where you could search for anything, [laugh], the only way to really find out if something is any good is to find out if someone else has done it first and get their opinion on it.Corey: That's really the right answer. And frankly, I think that is sort of the network effect that makes a lot of software work for folks. Because you don't want to wind up being the first person on your provider trying to do a certain thing. The right answer is making sure that you are basically 8,000th person to try and do this thing so you can just Google it and there's a bunch of results and you can borrow code on GitHub—which is how we call ‘thought leadership' because plagiarism just doesn't work the same way—and effectively realizing this has been solved before. If you find a brand new cloud that has no customers, you are trailblazing every time you do anything with the platform. And that's personally never where I wanted to spend my innovation points.Ant: We did that at Cloud Guru. I think when we were—in 2015 and we had problems with Lambda and you go to Stack Overflow, and there was no Lambda tag on Stack Overflow, no serverless tag on Stack Overflow, but you asked a question and Tim Wagner would probably be the one answering. And he was the former head of product on Lambda. But it was painful, and in general you don't want to do it. Like [sigh] whenever AWS comes out with a new product, I've done it a few times, I'll go, “I think I might want to use this thing.”AWS Proton is a really good example. It's like, “Hey, this looks awesome. It looks better than CodeBuild and CodePipeline,” the headlines or what I thought it would be. I basically went while the keynote was on, I logged in to our console, had a look at it, and realized it was awful. And then I started tweeting about it as well and then got a lot of feedback [laugh] on my tweets on that.And in general, my attitude from whatever the new shiny thing is if I'm going to try it, it needs to work perfectly and it needs to live up to its billing on day one. Otherwise, I'm not going to touch it. And in general with AWS products now, you announce something, I'm not going to look at it for a year.Corey: And it's to their benefit that you don't look at it for a year because the answer is going to be, ah, if you're going to see that it's terrible, that's going to form your opinion and you won't go back later when it's actually decent and reevaluate your opinion because no one ever does. We're all busy.Ant: Yeah, exactly.Corey: And there's nothing wrong with doing that, but it is obnoxious they're not doing themselves favors here.Ant: Yeah, completely. And I think that's actually a failure of marketing and communication more than anything else. I don't blame the product teams too much there. Don't bill something as a finished glossy product when it's not. Pitch it at where it is.Say, “Hey, we are building”—like, I don't think at the re:Invent stage they should announce anything that's not GA and anything that it does not live up to the billing, the hype they're going to give it to. And they're getting more and more guilty of that the last few re:Invents, of announcing products that do not live up to the hype that they promote it at and that are not GA. Literally, they should just have a straight-up rule, they can announce products, but don't put it on the keynote stage if it's not GA. That's it.Corey: The whole re:Invent release is a whole separate series of arguments.Ant: [laugh]. Yeah, yeah.Corey: There are very few substantial releases throughout the year and then they drop a whole bunch of them at re:Invent, and it doesn't matter what you're talking about, whose problem it solves, how great it is, it gets drowned out in the flood. The only thing more foolish that I see than that is companies that are not AWS releasing things during re:Invent that are not on the re:Invent keynote stage, which in turn means that no one pays attention. The only thing you should be releasing is news about your data breach.Ant: [laugh]. Yeah. That's exactly it.Corey: What do I want to bury? Whenever Adam Selipsky gets on stage and starts talking, great, then it's time to push the button on the, “We regret to inform you,k” dance.Ant: Yeah, exactly. Microsoft will announce yet another print spooler bug malware.Corey: Ugh, don't get me started on that. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. If people want to hear more about your thoughts and how you view these nonsenses, and of course to send angry emails because they are serverless fans, where can they find you?Ant: Twitter is probably the easiest place to find me, @iamstan—Corey: It is a place for outrage. Yes. Your Twitter user account is?Ant: [laugh], my Twitter user account's all over the place. It's probably about 20% serverless. So, yeah @iamstan. Tweet me; I will probably respond to you… unless you're rude, then I probably won't. If you're rude about something else, I probably will. But if you're rude about me, I won't.And I expect a few DMs from Amazon after this. I'm waiting for you, [unintelligible 00:32:02], as I always do. So yeah, that's probably the easiest place to get hold of me. I check my email once a month. And I'm actually not joking about that; I really do check my email once a month.Corey: Yeah, people really need me then they'll find me. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. I appreciate it.Ant: Yes, Corey. Thank you.Corey: Ant Stanley, AWS Serverless Hero, and oh so much more. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an angry comment defending serverless's good name just as soon as you string together the 85 components necessary to submit that comment.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.

Following quickly on the acquisition by Vista Equity Partners, Pluralsight (now flush with investor capital) has made the move to acquire A Cloud Guru for an undisclosed sum. ACG itself had acquired Linux Academy in late 2019 and is still working through the integration process. Reddit is displeased, but I think it's necessary consolidation in the marketplace. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/nedinthecloud Website: https://nedinthecloud.com Pluralsight: https://app.pluralsight.com/profile/author/edward-bellavance GitHub: https://github.com/ned1313

Christophe Limpalair (@christophelimp) presents "Getting Started in Cybersecurity" Christophe has worked on several online training platforms including Linux Academy. Recently he founded Cybr.com, a learning platform for cybersecurity. Here he talks about his recommendations for learning about and getting into the various different fields within the realm of cybersecurity. Resources: https://cybr.com https://cybr.com/blog/ https://www.beautiful.ai/player/-MUUEEAeaLVT55LRYDbH https://hackthebox.eu

In this TCP Talks episode, Justin Brodley and Jonathan Baker talk with Forrest Brazeal, a Senior Manager at A Cloud Guru, a cloud education platform that has attracted more than two million students. A Cloud Guru offers full certification training and technical deep dives for Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and more. Forrest talks about why companies need to invest in training to reap the benefits of “cloud fluency,” and how A Cloud Guru is contributing to cloud adoption success at Fortune 500 companies.  While discussing knowledge gaps, Forrest highlights how important it is to clearly identify which cloud services and knowledge areas you're going to become certified in to avoid missing important high level areas.  “Going through the certification training and prep really helps you to avoid those blind spots that will keep you from speaking effectively to the other teams that you work with,” says Forrest.  Featured Guest

In the quickly growing digital landscape of cloud-based systems, Linux Academy was training coders and developers through self-paced courses to stay on the cutting edge of digital technology. Meet Hunter Ferrell, former CFO of Linux Academy, a tech startup all about “putting students and learning above everything else”. They approached teaching students by “learning through doing”, and eventually had 1.5 million users of expert cloud engineers and trailblazing tech skills.

Listen for an announcement regarding Linux Headlines.

Jon Myer is a partner solutions architect for cloud management tools at AWS. Prior to joining AWS, Jon worked as a senior cloud solutions architect at NetEnrich AWS, an AWS consultant for DevOps and Solutions at MetroStar Systems, and an AWS course author at Linux Academy. A self-described evangelist for all things AWS, Jon holds a host of AWS certifications and blogs at TheAWSBlogger.com. Join Corey and Jon as they discuss what a partner solutions architect for cloud management tools does at AWS, the company’s top partners for cloud management, what it’s like to be part of the AWS team, what it’s like to work from home during the COVID-19 pandemic and how it compares to working from home during “normal times,” how working from home will become the new normal in the near future, why you can’t measure work-from-home productivity effectively during COVID-19, two new features Jon just realized Chime has and what he hopes to see added to the video meeting tool in the near future, why Jon launched his own AWS-focused blog, what AWS’ response to his blog has been, and more.

Katie Bullard is the president of A Cloud Guru, a cloud education platform. She’s also a board member at Conservice, ChildCareCRM, and Journyx, Inc. Katie previously served as president and chief growth officer at ZoomInfo (formerly DiscoverOrg), VP of marketing, product and corporate development at Mitratech, director of marketing at Accruent, and chief of staff and leader of corporate strategy at Dun & Bradstreet, among other positions. Join Corey and Katie as they discuss Katie’s tenure at A Cloud Guru, how three months feels like both three weeks and three years at the same time, how everyone has a different learning style and what A Cloud Guru is doing to accommodate all of them, how not knowing something makes us vulnerable whether or not we want to admit, what it was like for Katie to accept a new position only to find out six days later A Cloud Guru was acquiring Linux Academy, how A Cloud Guru has both B2B and B2C products, what it’s like to run a company founded by other people, and more.

This episode is brought to you by me. If you like this show and want to support it, please visit my courses on Pluralsight and buy my new book "200 Things Developers Should Know", which is about Programming, Career, Troubleshooting, Dealing with Managers, Health, and much more. You can find my Pluralsight courses and the book at www.developerweeklypodcast.com/About Tim is a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) in Cloud and Datacenter Management who is based in Nashville, TN in the United States. His professional specialties include Microsoft Azure, cross-platform PowerShell, and all things Windows Server-related. You can reach Tim via Twitter (@TechTrainerTim), LinkedIn or his website, TechTrainerTim.comShow resources:Twitter @TechTrainerTimLinkedInwww.TechTrainerTim.comTim's YouTube channelTim's Pluralsight coursesAzure FridayAzure LearnLinux AcademyAzure Status UpdatesPluralsight course: Microsoft Azure - What to Use When?Microsoft Azure certificationsFull transcript:Welcome to another episode of developer weekly. This week I'm talking with Tim Warner about keeping up with Azure. Tim is a Microsoft most valuable professional MVP in cloud and data center management based in Nashville, Tennessee in the United States. His professional speciality includes Microsoft Azure cross platform PowerShell, and all things Windows Server related. You can reach them via Twitter, at Tech tamer at Tech trainer, Tim, LinkedIn or his website, tech trainer tim.com. Thanks for being on the show Tim. Tim Warner  1:37  You're very welcome. Very, thanks for having me. It's a pleasure. Barry Luijbregts  1:40  So you are very active with Microsoft Azure. And amongst other things, you create videos about Azure and Azure certifications and even released a new Pluralsight Azure course on Pluralsight today. Tim Warner  1:53  Yeah, that's right. I've been an IT generalist since 1998. And I've always because I'm excited In so many different aspects of it, I've kind of intentionally avoided specialization. But it just happened over the last five or six years that I got involved in Azure. And it's been a perfect fit for me professionally, because I guess, well, more than I guess I know that as your is my professional specialization, but within Azure, given that the ecosystem is so broad, I can be a generalist within Azure. And to your point, the course that we released today is actually a complete redo of a course that I recorded Originally, I think, last summer summer of 2019. It's called something along the lines of developing batch processing solutions in Azure. And originally, I centered it around as your SQL Data Warehouse. But of course, in ignite 2019 as your synapse analytics was introduced, and as your Data Explorer is now in the forefront, so I just decided to scrap the old course and redo it from scratch. Barry Luijbregts  2:58  So you came from From an infrastructure, specialty, right? Tim Warner  3:03  That's correct. As far as the DevOps continuum, I skew more towards the operations side. However, I've always, I consider myself a hobbyist programmer. I guess I'm a professional scripter. I'm proficient with PowerShell. And to an extent Python, but more in an infrastructure scenario, like you said, Barry, but I mean, I remember my first exposure to computer programming this when my dad bought one of those tiny Timex Sinclair t 1000s. It was the $99 computer and Europe. It was called the ZX Spectrum, I think. Right. And basic programming is how I originally got into the field. Barry Luijbregts  3:45  Oh, that's, that's incredible. And now it's all into clouds. You know? Tim Warner  3:48  Isn't that something? It's funny how things turn around. I remember also, just before when I was in college, before I got into it as a career I had a summer position feed These, they look like old fashioned eight track tapes into these IBM tape drives because the company was a mainframe shop. And it's funny how things are circular now with the cloud in some ways, that's almost like a return to mainframe computing, isn't it? Barry Luijbregts  4:16  Yeah, definitely. So you've then been working with the cloud for quite a long time. And you say that you're a generalist and in the cloud, but still because Microsoft Azure is so extremely broad, as in there are developer services, but there is also infrastructure services and everything in between, right? And what do you focus on within Azure? And how do you choose what to focus on? Tim Warner  4:38  Well, in my job at Pluralsight, I'm a full time author. So I have I used to have more flexibility in the subjects that I chose, but I'm more I consider my biggest benefit to the company is that as a generalist, I can kind of pitch in and help if there's a course that maybe nobody wants to cover because it's so knew, I'm happy to jump on those subject. Those subjects. That's kind of how batch processing came onto my workbench. And I've taught a course on messaging services. And those are products that tend to skew out of my infrastructure home. So it was a good opportunity to stretch. I think in general, regardless of whether you're an author or a trainer, if you're looking at Azure as a career, you really have to be committed to always learning. I can't imagine somebody who wants to go into it primarily for financial reasons. And for job security reasons. I would really warn them against unless they really enjoy what they're doing. Because with Azure, you're going to fall behind too quickly. If you're not always actively learning new stuff. Barry Luijbregts  5:47  Yeah, it goes extremely quickly. new services are added all the time and existing services change and new features are added or they get deprecated. So So how do you do that? How do you precisely keep up to date with all those changes. Tim Warner  6:02  You and I have both shared with the community on that subject of staying current with Microsoft Azure. So the first thing I'd recommend your listeners to do is to do a good old Google or Bing search for how to stay current. And they'll find your piece I've presented at some user groups over the last year on that subject. And I'm looking at my browser right now in the Azure architecture center in the cloud adoption framework section. Microsoft itself has a nice article on staying current. Some go to like most important sites that I would recommend that people have bookmarks, or the Azure updates site, which is where I don't know if I guess all the product teams are supposed to post there. I don't know if they all actually do I'd say most. The Azure updates is where you're going to see features that are in private development and then as they come into private preview, public preview in general availability and if you're all dog like myself, In your RSS, you can subscribe to the Azure updates as a feed. There's the Azure service health dashboard within the portal. If anything on Microsoft side is going to affect your services, you can see a personalized view directly on the portal by looking up service health. Let's see I think as your has a top level blog, yeah, Azure dot Microsoft comm forward slash blog. And again, it's up to each product team, how often they post there, but you can keep up to date. And honestly, lastly, as you're working, especially in the Azure portal, pay attention when you're looking through the different blades when you see preview after something Oh, that wasn't here before. I mean, I'm surprised every day and I've, I've talked to enough Microsoft employees and team members that they get surprised too, so don't feel bad as an Azure customer. If sometimes you feel blindsided because I can attest to that I've talked to plenty of full time as your engineer And team members who are also surprised. It's just that fast moving of an ecosystem. Barry Luijbregts  8:06  Right. Yeah, it's, it's crazy. And then you can also use the preview portal right? So preview? Yes. portal.azure.com. Tim Warner  8:14  Very good. Yep, definitely, of course, there's the provision or previz or warning, whatever you want to say that, depending as a general rule, features that are in public preview don't have a support service level agreement attached to them. Sometimes Microsoft will make an exception for that. But generally speaking,  when you see preview after a service, consider that to be dev test and not prod. Barry Luijbregts  8:41  Yeah, right. So when do you consider a service for learning a deeper as in, they might be in private preview or in public preview and generally available? Do you only dive in when they are generally available or already when they might be in preview? Tim Warner  8:57  When I work with customers, I really am pretty concerned. About that, because of the first of all, I'll dig with them to make sure that a team is not offering a service level agreement or any kind of support when a feature is in public preview. An exception to that is Azure migrate, they were doing production support even when the server migration pieces were in public preview, as a plural site, and author, as a policy Pluralsight. And our agreement with Microsoft, we do not cover public preview features simply due to their volatility. I mean, we're already on a six month review cycle, we revisit our training courses every six months and make any changes as appropriate. It would just be too much management overhead if we included public preview features. So I tend to get into public preview features just personally as a professional development thing more than anything else. So I have a leg up to be helpful when the feature gets closer to general available. Barry Luijbregts  10:01  Yeah, yeah, the same same for me as well. Plus, I, after a couple of years of doing this, then you get kind of a sense of where things are going and if a public preview feature is going to stick, or that it might just be something fun to, to experiment with. Tim Warner  10:18  Isn't that something? Yeah, I mean, Asher blueprints is a service that I like quite a bit. It's been in preview public preview, seemingly forever. It's been in preview so long that Microsoft worldwide learning actually includes blueprints on many of the Azure certification exams so that we were joking about that just yesterday when I was chatting with them about that. Supposedly blueprints is gone is gonna go generally available someday. And then other features like as your Bastion and this is just my own personal opinion, I think they went ga on that too quickly. They announced it as a generally available service at Ignite last year. And it still is nice as Bastion, as it has some very significant limitations that I know for a fact are preventing many businesses from adopting it. Barry Luijbregts  11:05  Yeah, I guess many of these things are dependent on marketing efforts, whatever, internal goals and targets to companies. Sure. Tim Warner  11:15  Yeah. I mean, it's human, you know, human, these companies are run by fallible human beings. And when you've got a company as enormous as Microsoft, like you said, You've got all these different groups, it's a wonder that they can ship any software. Barry Luijbregts  11:32  Yeah, absolutely. So when you then go through the lists of updates and new services and things that changed, how do you do that? Do you do that once a day or every week? Or do you do you develop healthy habits around that? Tim Warner  11:50  I don't have a habit of for instance, looking in the Azure updates, but I do have a habit of reading the tech news each day. I just use Google News is my news reader and I have alerts on Azure and Microsoft and this kind of thing. And I have my Twitter feed I checked that several times a day and because I'm connected to a lot of Azure people yourself absolutely included I'm able to get a heads up on on things probably that way more directly than anything else. And once I get a heads up on on a feature service, then I'm inspired to check the documentation and see if there's anything in there look up on the Azure updates page see like you said, the preview portal dot Azure calm if it's surfaced in there, etc, etc. Barry Luijbregts  12:39  Yeah, I do. I do the same thing as well. I create my little internet bubble of like minded people that talk about Azure, for instance, in Twitter and put them on a list and then I can can just keep up to date. Yeah. So once you've selected something like you know about a new surface that you might need to make a course for Pluralsight about how do you go about learning something new like that?  Tim Warner  13:04  That's a fun question. Because I'm really I consider myself a born learner, which means that I'm extra happy and Azure. And also the fact that I am one of those folks who has multiple learning preferences. I mean, some people are more visual, some people are more listening and conversational. I'm grateful that I can adapt to all of it pretty much. If it's a brand new thing for me. Then I'm going to start by just drinking from the fire hose in as many different ways as I can. I'm going to use computer based training, and listen and pay attention to what the instructors are saying. I'm going to see if Scott hanselman talk to any engineering team members on Azure Friday. I'm going to look for blog posts. I'm going to just try to like I said drink from the fire hose to get over That initial hump, that initial learning curve, that's the toughest to get over. I'm also going to be reaching out to colleagues, professional colleagues and friends who are already expert in that technology. And I know I've reached a good point when I'm able to talk intelligently and discuss the subject with people who do it for a living, then I know I've reached that point where I'm over that initial hump, and I'm ready to go to the next level. It's Um, okay, I hope that was helpful. Barry Luijbregts  14:32  Yeah, definitely. And then, do you then also use it in a real world scenario? Tim Warner  14:39  Not everything. But mostly, what's cool about Azure is that it kind of reminds me of a magnet that's picking up metal shavings. It starts collect door a snowball rolling downhill, as my skill set with Azure expands and expands then yes, in my consulting real world life that I Have, I'm able to add those in matter of fact, I've picked up some AI some Azure AI skills over the last year. So I'm going to finally have a chance to flex my muscles on that and a consulting engagement pretty soon. So yeah, definitely as, as I pick up these skills, it's important that I actually apply them in the real world. I don't have a lot of time for consulting. But it's crucial. Like you said, Barry, because there's theory. And there's practice. And the real world practice is quite a bit messier than what you see in a typical Pluralsight lesson. Barry Luijbregts  15:38  Yeah, absolutely. You know, I also create PluralSight courses and they get the chance to edit everything out and things look a bit smoother than they are in the real world. And also, when you actually start working with something, then you get to find out what all the bugs and hurdles and little things are that you don't read about in the documentation. Tim Warner  16:01  Yeah, exactly. There's nothing like feedback expand, it doesn't have to even be me working necessarily. A large part of my professional development is talking shop with people who do this work full time in the field. And by I can capitalize and really leverage their experience and add it to my own. I'm grateful for this as your thing because I remember I've struggled over the entire time I've been in the industry, between the practical hands on experience and then being a credible instructor. And it used to be a lot harder before the cloud to the point where literally, I would work full time as an instructor for a few years, then I'd go out into the industry for a few years, then I'd go back and forth. It's kind of jarring. Now with the cloud, I'm actually able to do both I'm able to do what I love teaching and writing and transferring now But I still from the comfort of the same office that I teach from, I can do real Azure work with customers. It's a beautiful thing to be able to do both of those things simultaneously. Barry Luijbregts  17:13  I have to say my same experience. Absolutely. Yeah. And, you know, there are people that are, let's say, full time authors, they create books and PluralSight courses and other things online. But I do think that you, you need to keep consulting and working in the real world. Otherwise, you don't know if what you're teaching actually works in the real world and how we write and how it affects real customers and real solutions. Tim Warner  17:38  Oh, it's invaluable to the point where, and I think this conversation is really spring, a lot of gratitude in me that I have that because I'm thinking about when I'm teaching and how I'm always thinking of use cases and real practical scenarios and I'm grateful that I can rattle those off because I do have that side. To my skill set. Barry Luijbregts  18:02  So you also have a YouTube channel with a lot of videos on there and also a lot of videos about Azure certifications on there. What do you think of as your certification? And should people take those? Tim Warner  18:18  So long story short, I'd say is Yeah, yes. And some reasons for Azure certifications are number one, it's going to be a differentiator for you in the job market. I've heard some people make the counter argument app. certs are a waste of time all they're good for us to get you past the first step of an interview process the human resources. And I'm like, yeah, that's legitimate. Right? And if you have the cert, you may get past that first step, whereas several other people who don't have the cert don't get past that first step. Another thing is, especially nowadays, the way that these badges work, they're validated very much like SSL TLS certificate. Tickets are. So instead of just claiming that you have this certification, you can actually share it in a way that's validated directly by Microsoft. And third, if nothing else, studying for these certs is a great excuse for making sure that you're current with modern Azure practices because all of these role based certifications, the skills in there are the fruit of job task analysis, or JTA. Is that Microsoft conducted with practitioners. So it's not just speaks to what we were talking about earlier, Barry, how is Asher actually used in the world not just some ivory tower theoretical thing? Barry Luijbregts  19:42  And what would you say to the argument that there might be a lot of people that cheat on these certifications as they download the answers from from the internet or pirate sites and just cheat and then they have the certification and can get into jobs relatively easily? Tim Warner  19:59  Yeah. The brain dump problem has been a problem since the very beginning. The words of the great William Shakespeare come to mind to thine own self be true, really, by using these short circuits. Ultimately you have to do the job, you'd either know how to do the job or you're not. And again, I think of Shakespeare, the truth will out, in my experience, people who rely upon the brain dumps as a way to short circuit certification and get into a job. Eventually, if they're out if they are actually weak in the skills, it's evident. And you know, what typically happens in that scenario? Not always, but I would say most of the time. Above all else, what I find most concerning about the brain dump situation is how normalized they seem to be to the point where many people I've observed. I don't I think that they genuinely don't understand that using these is a breach of the non disclosure agreement. You sign with Microsoft, there are people that believe that they're just these brain dumps, which are thefts of the actual intellectual property of the exams are just as legitimate as, say, a measure up practice tests. So I want to Yeah, educate to the point that no these brain dumps are actually stolen exam content. And by using them, you are in fact, violating your NDA with Microsoft and I have seen people permanently decertified from the program, if Microsoft learns that you've used them. So I would suggest strongly go with legitimate practice exam exam software. Barry Luijbregts  21:39  Oh, that's great. Actually, that that happens. I didn't know that Microsoft penalize people that found that out. Oh, yeah. That's great. Yeah. Because, you know, I know that a lot of people use these brain dumps and then that negates the value of the certifications. Tim Warner  21:57  Yeah, you know, I mean, I understand Your point because if somebody cheats to get in a position, and I don't get the position because of that person, I mean, there's I understand that grievance for sure. I just need to make sure that I'm doing the right thing, because the only person I have control over is myself. And I want to make sure I have a clean conscience as I go forward. Barry Luijbregts  22:20  So what is a good certification to get started with? Like, if you're going to get started in Azure as an infrastructure person or a developer? What would you start with? Tim Warner  22:31  Yeah, I get asked that question a lot. In fact, somebody sent me a DM on Twitter just last night saying, I'm a dotnet developer. And for whatever reason, he or she didn't say why, but they need to get certified. And my answer was, well, I don't know you. But top of my head, if you're a full time developer, the most closely aligned certification would be the Azure. So as your developer role, the library of these certifications is aligned to job roles. It used to be that there was just one One certification for all of Asher, which now is kind of laughable when you think about it. But now we've got this entire portfolio of certifications that aligned to roles. So if you are an infrastructure professional, there's the Azure administrator. There's one, there's a associate cert for security engineer. There's AI data platform, Microsoft 365. There's the introduction as your fundamentals, which is, I think, a great skill set. The what's neat about the Azure fundamentals or the az 900, is that it's not intended wholly for protect people. It's intended for even non technical people like sales or marketing people who may work for a company that's in the cloud, and they need to know the vocabulary, so don't discount as your fundamentals. Barry Luijbregts  23:53  Oh, right. I didn't know that. That was also a target audience. That's good to know. So how are we And prepare for one of these things. It's been ages since I've taken an exam. And when I did it, I used these very big Microsoft press books, exam prep things. I don't know, 500 pages or something. Yeah, I just crammed that way. How do people do it nowadays? Tim Warner  24:17  Those books, Microsoft press still makes the exam rafts, and those are good because they are aligned exactly to the exam objectives. But the the issue with any print book seems to me is that it's almost impossible to keep pace because as your changes so often, and Microsoft worldwide learning revisits the exams every two months, and revisits each certification program every year. So, in terms of prep, you're going to have to go with a more agile approach. Microsoft learn is an excellent place especially for Azure fundamentals. They have a learning path, it's totally free. That covers all of the objectives of course, At Pluralsight what's cool about the Pluralsight Microsoft partnership is that you don't even have to be a Pluralsight subscriber, a paying subscriber to take advantage of a whole bunch of courses Barry or any of your Azure courses in the free partnership. Do you know? Barry Luijbregts  25:16  Yes, a couple of them. I'm not sure which one I think the as your what to use when is one? Oh, yeah. Tim Warner  25:24  Yeah, I mean, a lot of this, like we were talking about earlier depends upon what your preferred learning style is. If you're more of a book reader, instead of looking for a print book, I would suggest you go certainly to the Azure docs but also Microsoft learn, because there you're going to get the most current readable material on Azure computer based training. Obviously, there's Pluralsight. And there's other computer based vendors that I personally like a lot. I like Linux Academy and cloud Academy behind that. Let me see experientially hands on is definitely important. What's Cool about Microsoft learn as well as that they have a whole bunch of hands on labs that give you free access to the Azure portal and Microsoft subscription. So you can do development administrator data, work, whatever, all without using any of your own money or subscription credits. Pluralsight also eventually will have cloud labs for both Azure and AWS. They're currently under development now. Oh, sorry, beget Barry. Last part. There's the theory. There's the hands on but then don't forget about practice exams. Like you said, Barry, especially people who have never taken a Microsoft exam before it's been years. I've seen students get blindsided because they're coming in with lots of knowledge, lots of practical experience, but because they're not accustomed to going through case studies, and different types of interactive items where you're using your mouse. This is the real value of the practice exam to give you confidence and how many Microsoft will evaluate your knowledge. Barry Luijbregts  27:03   So are these Practice Exams exactly what the exam are like?. Tim Warner  27:11  In the case of measure up, it's pretty close measure up is Microsoft's official practice test provider. And those Practice Exams are very similar in length, content and format to the live exam. Of course, you can't use Word for word, but it's pretty close. Then up besides measure up the other company I personally recommend is called whiz labs. And their practice exams are close in content, but not really for format. They don't have all of the different item types that measure up does. And that's kind of a weakness maybe with labs will evolve that over time, but either of those companies in my experience will do a good job of getting you into the frame of mind to clear the live exam when you're ready to take it. Barry Luijbregts  27:57  Alright, that's good. So Becca I took the exams and by the way, I don't take any of these exams currently because it just doesn't fit with my business model anymore as I don't need them at the moment. Yeah, but back when I did it, I needed to go physically to an office of fingers Pearson VUE and then sit behind a computer which was monitored and with cameras and everything should it could make sure that I didn't cheat and then take the exam. Is that still the case? Or can people do it differently especially in these times? Tim Warner  28:33  Pearson VUE is still Microsoft's exam provider. Until the COVID pandemic. Yes, the Pearson VUE testing centers were the way to go. I'm not sure. I guess it depends where you are in on Earth, whether Pearson VUE have begun opening their doors, but I'm really grateful to report that the online testing has evolved to be a really great solution over the last few months since this pandemic Started, I've taken probably a dozen Azure exams using the Pearson VUE online testing format. And it's so good and so reliable and so resilient that I don't plan ever again to go to a testing center. It's so convenient to be able to take these exams from your home or office. Barry Luijbregts  29:19  And then how do they check the cheating, Tim Warner  29:21  the Pearson VUE testing software runs on Windows and Mac, it's called on view. And it's a secure application that has to be the only foreground app running on your system. So the app itself is really resilient and has a lot of security built into it directly. For example, I've used the Pearson VUE software to test on both Mac OS and Windows and it on my Mac, it wouldn't let me go into the exam until I stopped a background process I was using a keyboard shortcut utility. So it does this system this check of all the processes that are running On your system to make sure that only it and the bare OS processes are alive, really impressive. The other aspects of exam security are that you have to be on a computer that's equipped with a webcam I find and I suggest you use a laptop. And a microphone has to be enabled on the webcam as well because that's how you interact with a live Proctor. The live Proctor comes over your speakers. And one time the proctor asked me to swivel my laptop 360 degrees so he could see my room. You do take as part of the preliminary check. You use your cell phone to take pictures of your work environment. You take four pictures, one facing your computer one away, one to the left and one to the right. You have to take a picture of yourself. You take a picture of your ID front and back. So it's pretty nice. It doesn't take that long. To do the check period, I would estimate takes about five minutes total. And if you're in a room that's already pretty distraction free that is, I like to do it almost in a closet, take my laptop into a small closet. You can do it on your office desk, but you want to turn off any additional monitors besides your primary, and you'll want to make sure that your desk is cleared of everything except your keyboard and your mouse. Like I said, the proctor will come online and ask for clarification if there's any situation. So, and then lastly, I'll say that the exam experience is really resilient. I haven't had any crashes this year. A few years ago, when I used the Pearson VUE, I did have a crash during the exam session. But I was able to restart the application I got connected to another Proctor and they were able to bring back my session just like it was before so I don't know exactly what kind of checkpointing they put in but it's pretty good. Good. I've never heard of anybody losing an exam session yet. Fingers crossed. Barry Luijbregts  32:05  Wow. That's very impressive. That's that's come a long way since I've used it. Tim Warner  32:08  They really have. I give Pearson VUE, lots of props. They obviously put a lot of engineering effort into that on view client. It's great. Barry Luijbregts  32:19  All right, that's great. So we've discussed a lot of things that you can use to keep up with Azure and to learn as in there is blogs, there is Twitter, there is videos, there are also certifications that you can take that help you to keep up because then requires you to learn. And then you can also show that you actually know what you're talking about. And then as a final point, I sometimes also go to conferences and local meetups to keep up. And I believe that you're also a user group organizer, is that right? Tim Warner  32:52  That's right. I'm an organizer of the Nashville Microsoft Azure Users Group here in Nashville, Tennessee. Barry Luijbregts  33:00  So people can come to your user group as well to learn and keep up to date. Tim Warner  33:05  Yeah, exactly. It's I admire every single person who participates in a user group, because by definition, they're willing to learn. And that's always near and dear to me. I'm glad that we're closing on this human factor because it is crucial. I mean, as much as these online resources can be helpful, there's nothing like hearing about something from another human being, like you say, conference, a user group. And I would say to your listeners, if they're not already plugged into meetup calm that's, in my experience, the central place to look for Microsoft Azure user groups. And one nice thing I guess about this pandemic is that most user groups have converted to an online format, which means that you're not limited by geographic area. You can present or just participate at an Azure user group anywhere on Earth. Those are great opportunities for learning new stuff, not just from the presenter, but from other people who pipe in with their own experience. And these user groups are a great place to get hooked up with technical recruiters. Obviously, technical recruiters are going to be swarming around user groups to look for job candidates. It's really a win win situation. Barry Luijbregts  34:25  Yeah, absolutely. And I think the same now goes for conferences, as well as most conferences have moved online. Some are even free now. So you can just log on to them and just learn. Tim Warner  34:38  Isn't that something? It's amazing how the world is shifting as a result of the pandemic technical conferences. Look what Microsoft did with build recently. Barry Luijbregts  34:47  Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Tim Warner  34:50  And my wife told me last night that AMC which is a major movie, movie theater chain here in the states is going To a rental model, where instead of going to a physical movie theater, you can stream movies from their website or from their app. I'm like, good for them for shifting. Barry Luijbregts  35:11  Really? That is amazing. Tim Warner  35:13  Isn't that something? Barry Luijbregts  35:15  Yeah, you know, some good came out of this. Yeah. So horrible thing, obviously. But, you know, some good came out of this as in companies need to transform their business models and set and they're doing it is incredible. Tim Warner  35:28  Yeah. And look at you in this podcast, you're transforming as well. Congratulations. Barry Luijbregts  35:35  Isn't it funny, you know, you just record something, put it out there and people can listen wherever they are. Tim Warner  35:40  Yeah, it is. It's wonderful. Barry Luijbregts  35:42  All right. So what are you working on currently and what can we expect from you next? Tim Warner  35:49  Okay, um, let me see. I've got four courses in the Azure Pluralsight partnership right now that I'm updating. Yeah, we're on the it seems like once we finish a six month review cycle, it's time for the next one. But you know, it's a good thing. I'm happy. So I've finished patching a bunch of courses. I don't even remember what they were on. It's kind of a blur. But that that's been my full time stuff. And I've been enjoying posting to my YouTube channel. You mentioned my YouTube channel, I've been posting these little nugget videos about 10 minutes each covering each objective from the Azure fundamentals, az 900 blueprint that's been a lot of fun. That skill sets a lot of fun to talk about and to teach. And it's gotten good reception from people Barry Luijbregts  36:34  That is great content. We will link to that in the show notes. Great, and to all the other things as well that we talked about today. Thank you very much, Tim, for being on, and we'll see you next week.

The Linux Mint 20 beta is available for testing, RiskSense warns of an increasing number of open source security vulnerabilities, and Pine announces that the next Community Edition of its phone will ship with postmarketOS.

The first-ever Blender LTS is out with support for VR, the CNCF debuts a training program to convey students from novice to cloud professional in six months, the Matrix project previews peer-to-peer messaging, and Canonical introduces two developer tools.

Lenovo doubles down on Linux support, Firefox 77 arrives with better extension permission handling, the Tor Browser's latest release focuses on exposing features to users, Nextcloud Hub 19 includes security and collaboration improvements, and the Linux Professional Institute launches a new webzine.

The Linux kernel packs version 5.7 with exciting additions, version 2.2 of the Foliate eBook reader is out with support for many more formats, and members of the Association of American Publishers sue the Internet Archive over their library lending practices.

An 8 gigabyte version of the Raspberry Pi 4 is available for purchase, Apache's Subversion celebrates 20 years of version control with its 1.14 release, Genymobile improves its ability to control unrooted Android devices over ADB, Google's Android Studio 4.0 launches with some major changes, and the Godot project previews a browser-based version of its game editor.

Ardour 6 is out with major changes under the hood, CoreOS Container Linux is officially unmaintained, TeleIRC version 2.0.0 lands with a complete rewrite, the FIDO Alliance launches an instructional campaign, and PeerTube outlines its newest fundraising goals.

GNOME and Rothschild Patent Imaging resolve their legal dispute, massive layoffs loom at IBM, WordPress invests millions into the Matrix project, and two companies unexpectedly re-release code under open source licenses.

Microsoft's Build conference showcases a slew of Linux-related tech, Slackware adds PAM support, Red Hat's Skopeo hits 1.0, The Tor Project unveils a new community portal, and Canonical is developing a progressive release feature for Snapcraft.

openSUSE board elections are still causing friction in its community, Audacity rolls back its 2.4 update, the curl project seeks participation in its annual survey, the bootiso Bash script hits version 4.0, and Sunflower lands its first release in four years.

En esta ocasión tuvimos como invitado al educador en línea y desarrollador Julián Duque, que tiene muchos años trabajando con JavaScript y ha impartido múltiples cursos de programación en línea. Esta conversación giró en torno al rol de Julián como líder de comunidades en Colombia principalmente enfocadas a JavaScript con charlas y eventos exclusivos (NodeConf Colombia, JSConf Colombia y MedellínJS) y a su trabajo actual como Developer Advocate para Heroku, una de las plataformas como servicio (PaaS) más utilizadas en la actualidad para el despliegue de una aplicación en múltiples lenguajes. También hablamos sobre el concepto de “aprender haciendo”, los cambios en las dinámicas de comunidades y eventos de desarrollo, PaaS vs. Serverless, lenguajes soportados por Heroku y bases de datos que ofrece para poder tener una aplicación corriendo en producción evitándote invertir tantos recursos en operaciones. En el último bloque nos adentramos en las recomendaciones puntuales de Julián para invertirle en AWS frente a Heroku y para lograr ayudar al equipo a empujar el producto todos los días y no bloquear la agenda de To-Dos.Nos vemos en el próximo episodio!Julián Duque en internet:Canal de YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCf_ymsPEZLmSM7_OvLF87KQShow de NodeJS en Twitch (MANTID): https://www.twitch.tv/julianduque/videos?filter=archives&sort=timeGitHub: https://github.com/julianduqueLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/juliandavidduque/Twitter: https://twitter.com/julian_duqueDEV: https://dev.to/julianduqueEstos son los enlaces a los temas de los que hemos hablado:Salesforce: https://www.salesforce.com/es/Heroku: https://www.heroku.comHeroku Products: https://www.heroku.com/productsHeroku Dev Center: https://devcenter.heroku.comAprender Haciendo: https://medium.com/aerolab-stories/aprenderhaciendo-5a8e27c709eeStack Overflow: https://stackoverflow.comElasticsearch: https://www.elastic.co/es/elasticsearch/Librería de Linux Academy: https://linuxacademy.com/library/Eventloop: https://www.meetup.com/es/eventloop/MedellinJS: https://medellinjs.orgDiscord: https://discord.comClubhouse: https://clubhouse.ioDreamforce: https://www.salesforce.com/dreamforce/TrailheaDX: https://www.salesforce.com/trailheadx/AWS: https://aws.amazon.com/es/Julián en MaestriaJS hablando sobre Serverless: https://anchor.fm/maestriajs/episodes/Hangout--32-Serverless-para-Devs-en-JavaScript-ecci44Síguenos en Twitter:Danny Prol: https://twitter.com/DannyProl/Claudio Cossio: https://twitter.com/ccossioEstamos en todas estas plataformas:Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/saas-product-chat/id1435000409ListenNotes: https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/saas-product-chat-daniel-prol-y-claudio-CABZRIjGVdP/Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/36KIhM0DM7nwRLuZ1fVQy3Google Podcasts: https://podcasts.google.com/?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5zaW1wbGVjYXN0LmNvbS8zN3N0Mzg2dg%3D%3D&hl=esBreaker: https://www.breaker.audio/saas-product-chatWeb: https://saasproductchat.com/

WireGuard officially lands in Linux. We cover a bunch of new features in Linux 5.6 and discuss the recent challenges facing LineageOS. Plus the PinePhone UBports edition goes up for pre-order, and our reaction to Huawei joining the Open Invention Network.

Mozilla puts your money where your mouse is and partners with Scroll to launch Firefox for a Better Web. We'll explain the details, and why it might just have a shot. Plus we try out Plasma Bigscreen, cover Telegram's really bad news, and much more.

Why Debian is facing one of its most critical moments yet, Microsoft and GitHub buy npm, and our thoughts on Linux Mint Debian Edition 4 "Debbie." Plus, why "Works with Chromebook" might be great for Linux, and using your GPU to fight the Coronavirus.

Solid releases from GNOME and Firefox, bad news for custom Android ROM users, and a new container distro from Amazon. Plus Mozilla and KaiOS team up to bring the modern web to feature phones, and the surprising way Microsoft is shipping a Linux kernel.

Let's Encrypt is forced to revoke customer certificates, the big change coming to FreeNAS, and the trick to running Android on an iPhone. Plus our concerns about Debian's future, and the unfixable Intel flaw announced this week.

Bruce Schneier puts his name behind Solid, Firefox starts to roll out DNS over HTTPS as default, and Microsoft's Linux first device ships to customers. Plus a birthday gift to Raspberry Pi users, Collabora comes to mobile, and more.

Microsoft Defender for Linux is in preview, Mozilla's VPN has a secret advantage, and why the community is calling out NPM Inc. Plus a new report about open source security, and more.

The week was packed with major project releases, we go through each of them and tell you what stands out. Plus an update from Essential, and NetBSD's first big ask in ten years.

Why we're disappointed in the CoreOS Container Linux transition, Mycroft goes troll hunting and the complicated story brewing at the GNU Project. Plus, a few community fundraisers.

The upcoming Linux kernels are packed full of goodies, Qt changes its licensing terms, and Thunderbird gets a new home. Plus our thoughts on IBM's CEO stepping down, and Google's new open-source security key project.

The real reason Rocket League is dropping support for Linux, Wine has a massive release, and the potential for Canonical's new Android in the cloud service. Plus, our take on the FSF's Upcycle Windows 7 campaign, and the clever Chrome OS strategy upgrade for education in 2020.

Nextcloud's new release is so big it gets a rebrand, why Mozilla had a round of lay-offs, and the real possibility of Steam coming to Chrome OS. Plus, the sad loss of a community member, and more.

It's our annual predictions episode. We review how we did in 2019, and then set out to predict what we think will happen in 2020.

We review the major moments of the year's news, and discuss how they impacted our world.

Canonical releases a "mini-cloud" on your workstation, the KDE ecosystem has some big news, and the smart home might have just become more open. Plus Firefox's new DoH partner, and signs of life from the Atari VCS.

Ubuntu Pro is a click away, and their kernel goes rolling on AWS. We process the range of announcements, while Mozilla cranks up the security and impresses us with DeepSpeech. Plus why Ubuntu is taking the Windows Subsystem for Linux so seriously.

We share Mozilla's concerns over Contract for the Web, and try out Kali Linux's new tricks. Also, our thoughts on the new Alexa Voice service coming to low-end IoT devices, and much more.

Google, Mozilla, and GitLab make serious upgrades to their bug bounty programs, insights into Debian's renewed systemd debate, and how Microsoft and IBM are working together to fight patent trolls. Plus our thoughts on LVFS for Chromebooks, and the recent Monero hack.

Docker's surprising news, new nasty Intel vulnerabilities, and why Brave 1.0 changes the game. Plus, our thoughts on the PinePhone BraveHeart limited edition, and Stadia's potentially rocky launch.

Google steps up support for older Chromebooks, Microsoft Edge is coming to Linux, and the App Defense Alliance teams up to fight Android malware. Plus Google Cardboard goes open source, and a neat machine-learning tool to pull songs apart. Special Guest: Wes Payne.

Fedora arrives from the future, the big players line up behind KernelCI, and researchers claim significant vulnerabilities in Horde. Plus, Google's new dashboard for WordPress and ProtonMail's apps go open source.

GNOME decides to fight, Ubuntu's desktop director steps down, GitLab backs off its telemetry plans, and we've got the data on Google's Project Treble. Plus, the latest Firefox has a new dashboard, and it looks like Disney+ won't work on Linux.

A new Ubuntu has promise, Linux on Dex is dead, and our strong reaction to Google pulling two open-source apps from the Play Store. Plus a big boost for ARM on Linux, and our thoughts on recent Red Hat news.

Richard Stallman's GNU leadership is challenged by an influential group of maintainers, SUSE drops OpenStack "for the customer," and Google claims Stadia will be faster than a gaming PC. Plus OpenLibra aims to save us from Facebook but already has a miss, lousy news for Telegram, and enormous changes for AMP.

Microsoft's CEO says Windows doesn't matter anymore, but do we buy it? Nextcloud 17 goes enterprise-grade and the Internet's horrifying new method for installing Google apps on Huawei phones. Plus, Google finds an Android zero-day in the wild, and the Document Collective's new approach to earn revenue for LibreOffice.

CentOS Stream and 8 have quite a bit for us to talk about, Docker's struggles go public, and the GNOME Foundation is facing a patent fight. Plus the best bit of Android 10 Go, Microsoft gives serious thought to bringing Edge to Linux, and Stallman's role at GNU comes into question.

Richard Stallman resigns, we share our thoughts and discuss the future for RMS and the FSF. Plus what systemd-homed is, why Debian is reconsidering init diversity, and some good news for CentOS.

Sometimes the road home is a little bumpy, and sometimes you just want them to cook the bloody eggs. Special Guests: Brent Gervais, Hadea Fisher, and Tyler Brown.

The party before the party, it's Friday! A full crew getting ready for LinuxFest Northwest join us from all over the world to share stories, meet new friends, and give each other a hard time.

What is serverless computing? What types of applications can we build with serverless computing? Manisha Sule, Director of Big Data Analytics at Linux Academy answers these questions. We also talked about big data pipelines, and how the Linux Academy is using them.