Podcast appearances and mentions of matt stratton

Guest Bio:Matt Stratton is a Staff Developer Advocate at Pulumi, founder and co-host of the popular Arrested DevOps podcast, and the global chair of the DevOpsDays set of conferences. Matt has over 20 years of experience in IT operations and is a sought-after speaker internationally, presenting at Agile, DevOps, and cloud engineering focused events worldwide. He's passionate about helping organizations use awesome tools to focus on what makes them special and drive relevant cultural change. He truly believe that DevOps can revolutionize IT, or at least make it more fun to go to work.  Matt lives in Chicago and has three awesome kids, whom he loves just a little bit more than he loves Diet Coke. Matt is the keeper of the Thought Leaderboard for the DevOps Party Games online game show and you can find him on Twitter at @mattstratton. Quote“Things that are meant for machines have them be for machines. Json is not supposed to be read by humans or much less written by humans.”-Matt Stratton - Timestamps:0:18 Speaker Introduction1:35 Returning to in person conferences4:59 Friendships during the pandemic6:31 What does Matt's average day looks like?11:40 Conferences: virtual only vs in person20:28 Pulumi approach to IaC24:48 What should developers learn next?27:33 Future of Tech29:52 Favourite Sci-fi Tech and changes31:54 Diversity and inclusion37:26 How to lift others up39:09 Community42:16 Episode Wrap upLearn more about the DevOps Days community at https://devopsdays.org/. Connect with Matt on:https://speaking.mattstratton.com/https://twitter.com/mattstrattonhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/mattstratton/https://github.com/mattstratton Connect with Cloud Gossip on:https://www.cloudgossip.nethttps://www.linkedin.com/company/cloud-gossiphttps://twitter.com/CloudGossipnetConnect with Annie on:https://twitter.com/AnnieTalvastohttps://www.linkedin.com/in/talvasto/Connect with Karl on:https://twitter.com/karlgotshttps://www.linkedin.com/in/karlots/

Hosts: Jeff Cunningham and Ryan Harris Guest: Matt Stratton, Harrison County, MS Director of Emergency Management Description: For our first episode we chatted with Matt Stratton from Harrison County, MS Emergency Management. We had a lively discussion on weather and climate, technology and how that connects with society. We also discussed a 2020 “woods” fire that threatened Harrison county communities. News Article References: 'Huge firefight' to defend New Mexico villages, city from blaze | Reuters Wildfires across the nation (Reuters) Rough Wildfire Year in Boulder (NPR) Bronco Ember (NASA-funded cubesat project) Website References: Harrison County Weather National Wildfire Preparedness Day National Interagency Fire Center UN Environment Programme Report: Spreading Like Wildfire Fire Map - NASA | LANCE | FIRMS fireAlert.App - https://fireAlert.app [Owned and operated by 81 Degrees, LLC] --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/triplepoint/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/triplepoint/support

Rob sits down with Pulumi staff developer advocates, Matt Stratton and Kat Cosgrove to discuss the complexities of systems and team management. Join the discussion on important topics such as, The importance of automating of repeated tasksCultivating a zero blame environmentHow companies should be viewing hiringIf there's something you want us to hear discussed on a future episode, reach out to us on twitter at @circleci!

About AbbyWith over twenty years in the tech world, Abby Kearns is a true veteran of the technology industry. Her lengthy career has spanned product marketing, product management and consulting across Fortune 500 companies and startups alike. At Puppet, she leads the vision and direction of the current and future enterprise product portfolio. Prior to joining Puppet, Abby was the CEO of the Cloud Foundry Foundation where she focused on driving the vision for the Foundation as well as  growing the open source project and ecosystem. Her background also includes product management at companies such as Pivotal and Verizon, as well as infrastructure operations spanning companies such as Totality, EDS, and Sabre.Links: Cloud Foundry Foundation: https://www.cloudfoundry.org Puppet: https://puppet.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/ab415 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 Liquibase. If you're anything like me, you've screwed up the database part of a deployment so severely that you've been banned from touching every anything that remotely sounds like SQL, at at least three different companies. We've mostly got code deployments solved for, but when it comes to databases we basically rely on desperate hope, with a roll back plan of keeping our resumes up to date. It doesn't have to be that way. Meet Liquibase. It is both an open source project and a commercial offering. Liquibase lets you track, modify, and automate database schema changes across almost any database, with guardrails to ensure you'll still have a company left after you deploy the change. No matter where your database lives, Liquibase can help you solve your database deployment issues. Check them out today at liquibase.com. Offer does not apply to Route 53.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by Honeycomb. When production is running slow, it's hard to know where problems originate: is it your application code, users, or the underlying systems? I've got five bucks on DNS, personally. Why scroll through endless dashboards, while dealing with alert floods, going from tool to tool to tool that you employ, guessing at which puzzle pieces matter? Context switching and tool sprawl are slowly killing both your team and your business. You should care more about one of those than the other, which one is up to you. Drop the separate pillars and enter a world of getting one unified understanding of the one thing driving your business: production. With Honeycomb, you guess less and know more. Try it for free at Honeycomb.io/screaminginthecloud. Observability, it's more than just hipster monitoring.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. Once upon a time, I was deep into the weeds of configuration management, which explains a lot, such as why it seems I don't know happiness in any meaningful sense. Then I wound up progressing into other areas of exploration, like the cloud, and now we know for a fact why happiness isn't a thing for me. My guest today is the former CEO of the Cloud Foundry Foundation and today is the CTO over at a company called Puppet, which we've talked about here from time to time. Abby Kearns, thank you for joining me. I appreciate your taking the time out of your day to suffer my slings and arrows.Abby: Thank you for having me. I have been looking forward to this for weeks.Corey: My stars, it seems like things are slow over there, and I kind of envy you for that. So, help me understand something; you went from this world of cloud-native everything, which is the joy of working with Cloud Foundry, to now working with configuration management. How is that not effectively Benjamin Button-ing your career. It feels like the opposite direction that most quote-unquote, “Digital transformations” like to play with. But I have a sneaking suspicion, there's more to it than I might guess from just looking at the label on the tin.Abby: Beyond I just love enterprise infrastructure? I mean, come on, who doesn't?Corey: Oh, yeah. Everyone loves to talk about digital transformation, reading about books like a Head in the Cloud to my children used to be a fun nightly activity before it was formally classified as child abuse. So yeah, I hear you, but it turns out the rest of the world doesn't necessarily agree with us.Abby: I do not understand it. I have been in enterprise infrastructure my entire career, which has been a really, really long time, back when Unix and Sun machines were still a thing. And I'll be a little biased here; I think that enterprise infrastructure is actually the most fascinating part of technology right now. And why is that? Well, we're in the process of actively rewritten everything that got us here.And we talk about infrastructure and everyone's like, “Yeah, sure, whatever,” but at the end of the day, it's the foundation that everything that you think is cool about technology is built on. And for those of us that really enjoy this space, having a front-row seat at that evolution and the innovation that's happening is really, really exciting and it creates a lot of interesting conversation, debate, evolution of technologies, and innovation. And are they all going to be on the money five, ten years from now? Maybe not, but they're creating an interesting space and discussion and just the work ahead for all of us across the board. And I'm kind of bucketing this pretty broadly, intentionally so because I think at the end of the day, all of us play a role in a bigger piece of pie, and it's so interesting to see how these things start to fit together.Corey: One of the things that I've noticed is that the things that get attention on the keynote stage of, “This is this far future, serverless, machine-learning Kubernetes, dingus nonsense,” great is—Abby: You forgot blockchain. [laugh].Corey: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah blockchain as well. Like, what other things can we wind up putting into the buzzword thing to wind up guaranteeing that your seed round is at least $200 million? Great. There's that.But when you look at the actual AWS bill—my specialty, of course—and seeing where the money is actually going, it doesn't really look that different, as far as percentages go—even though the numbers are higher—than it did ten years ago, at least in the enterprise world. You're still buying a bunch of EC2 instances, you're still potentially modernizing to some of the managed services like RDS—which is Amazon's reimagining of what a database could be if you still had to manage the finicky bits, but had no control over when and how they worked—and of course, data transfer and disk. These are the basic building blocks of everything in cloud. And despite how much we talk about the super neat stuff, what we're doing is not reflected on the conference stage. So, I tend to view the idea of aspirational architecture as its own little world.There are still seasoned companies out there that are migrating from where they are today into this idea of, well, virtualization, we've just finally got our heads around that. Now, let's talk about this cloud thing; seems like a fad—in 2021. And people take longer to get to where they think they're going or where they intend to go than they plan for, and they get stuck somewhere and instead of a cloud migration, they're now hybrid because they can redefine things and declare victory when they plant that flag, and here we are. I'm not here to make fun of these companies because they're doing important work and these are super hard problems. But increasingly, it seems that the technology is not the thing that's holding them back or even responsible for their outcome so much as it is people.The more I work with tech, the more I realized that everything that's hard becomes people issues. Curious to get your take on that, given your somewhat privileged perspective as having a foot standing very deeply in each world.Abby: Yeah, and that's a super great point. And I also realized I didn't fully answer the first question either. So, I'll tie those two things together.Corey: That's okay, we're going to keep circling around until you get there. It's fine.Abby: It's been a long week, and it's only Wednesday.Corey: All day long, as it turns out.Abby: I have a whole soapbox that I drag around behind me about people and process, and how that's your biggest problem, not technology, and if you don't solve for the people in the process, I don't care what technology you choose to use, isn't going to fix your problem. On the other hand, if you get your people and process right, you can borderline use crayons and paper and get [laugh] really close to what you need to solve for.Corey: I have it on good authority that's known as IBM Cloud. Please continue.Abby: [laugh]. And so I think people and process are at the heart of everything. They're our biggest accelerators with technology and they're our biggest limitation. And you can cloud-native serverless your way into it, but if you do not actually do continuous delivery, if you did not actually automate your responses, if you do not actually set up the cross-functional teams—or sometimes fondly referred to as two-pizza teams—if you don't have those things set up, there isn't any technology that's going to make you deliver software better, faster, cheaper. And so I think I care a lot about the focus on that because I do think it is so important, but it's also—the reason a lot of people don't like to talk about it and deal with it because it's also the hardest.People, culture change, digital transformation, whatever you want to call it, is hard work. There's a reason so many books are written around DevOps. And you mentioned Gene Kim earlier, there's a reason he wrote The Phoenix Project; it's the people-process part is the hardest. And I do think technology should be an enabler and an accelerator, but it really has to pair up nicely with the people part. And you asked your earlier question about my move to Puppet.One of the things that I've learned a lot in running the Cloud Foundry Foundation, running an open-source software foundation, is you could a real good crash course in how teams can collaborate effectively, how teams work together, how decisions get made, the need for that process and that practice. And there was a lot of great context because I had access to so much interesting information. I got to see what all of these large enterprises were doing across the board. And I got to have a literal seat at the table for how a lot of the decisions are getting made around not only the open-source technologies that are going into building the future of our enterprise infrastructure but how a lot of these companies are using and leveraging those technologies. And having that visibility was amazing and transformational for myself.It gave me so much richness and context, which is why I have firmly believed that the people and process part were so crucial for many years. And I decided to go to a company that sold products. [laugh]. You're like, “What? What is she talking about now? Where is this going?”And I say that because running an open-source software foundation is great and it gives you so much information and so much context, but you have no access to customers and no access to products. You have no influence over that. And so when I thought about what I wanted to do next, it's like, I really want to be close to customers, I really want to be close to product, and I really want to be part of something that's solving what I look at over the next five to ten years, our biggest problem area, which is that tweener phase that we're going to be in for many years, which we were just talking about, which is, “I have some stuff on-prem and I have some stuff in a cloud—usually more than one cloud—and I got to figure out how to manage all of that.” And that is a really, really, really hard problem. And so when I looked at what Puppet was trying to do, and the opportunity that existed with a lot of the fantastic work that Puppet has done over the last 12 years around Desired State Configuration management, I'm like, “Okay, there's something here.”Because clearly, that problem doesn't go away because I'm running some stuff in the cloud. So, how do we start to think about this more broadly and expansively across the hybrid estate that is all of these different environments? And who is the most well-positioned to actually drive an innovative product that addresses that? So, that's my long way of addressing both of those things.Corey: No, it's a fair question. Friend of the show, Matt Stratton, is famous for saying that, “You cannot buy DevOps, but I sure would like to sell it to you,” and if you're looking at it from that perspective, Puppet is not far from what that product store look like in some ways. My first encounter with Puppet was back around 2009, 2010 or so, and I was using it in an environment I was working within and thought, “Okay, this is terrible, and it's crap, and obviously, I know what I'm doing far better than this, and the problem is the Puppet's a bad product.” So, I was one of the early developers behind SaltStack, which was a terrific, great way of approaching the problem from a novel perspective, and it wasn't crap; it was awesome. Right up until I saw the first time a customer deployed it and looked at their environment, and it wasn't crap, it was worse because it turns out that you can build a super finely crafted precision instrument that makes a fairly bad hammer, but that's how customers are going to use it anyway.Abby: Well, I mean, [sigh] look, you actually hit something that I think we don't actually talk about, which is how hard all of this shit really is. Automation is hard. Automation for distributed systems at scale is super duper hard. There isn't an easy way to solve that problem. And I feel like I learned a lot working with Cloud Foundry.Cloud Foundry is a Platform as a Service and it sits a layer up, but it had the same challenges in that solving the ability to run cloud-native applications and cloud-native workloads at scale and have that ephemerality to it and that resilience to it, and the things everyone wants but don't recognize how difficult it is, actually, to do that well. And I think the same—you know, that really set me up for the way that I think about the problem, even the layer down which is, running and managing desired state, which at the end of the day is a really fancy way of saying, “Does your environment look like the way you think it should? And if it doesn't, what are you going to do about it?” And it seems like, in this year of—what year are we again? 2021, maybe? I don't know. It feels like the last two years of, sort of, munged together?Corey: Yeah, the passing of time is something it's very hard for me to wrap my head around.Abby: But it feels like, I know some people, particularly those of us that have been in tech a long time are probably like, “Why are we still talking about that? Why is that a thing?” But that is still an incredibly hard problem for most organizations, large and small. So, I tend to spend a lot of time thinking about large enterprises, but in the day, you've got more than 20 servers, you're probably sitting around thinking, “Does my environment actually look the way I think it does? There's a new CVE that just came out. Am I able to address that?”And I think at the end of the day, figuring out how you can solve for that on-prem has been one of the things that Puppet has worked for, and done really, really well the last 12 years. Now, I think the next challenge is okay, how do you extend that out across your now bananas complex estate that is—I got a huge data estate, maybe one or two data centers, I got some stuff in AWS, I got some stuff in GCP, oh yeah, got a little thing over here and Azure, and oh, some guy spun up something on OCI. So, we got a little bit of everything. And oh, my God, the SolarWinds breach happened. Are we impacted? I don't know. What does that mean? [laugh].And I think you start to unravel the little pieces of that and it gets more and more complex. And so I think the problems that I was solving in the early aughts with servers seems trite now because you're like, I can see all of my servers; there's eight of them. Things seem fine. To now, you've got hundreds of thousands of applications and workloads, and some of them are serverless, and they're all over the place. And who has what, and where does it sit?And does it look like the way that I think it needs to so that I can run my business effectively? And I think that's really the power of it, but it's also one of those things that I don't feel like a lot of people like to acknowledge the complexity and the hardness of that because it's not just the technology problem—going back to your other question, how do we work? How do we communicate? What are our processes around dealing with this? And I think there's so much wrapped up in that it becomes almost like, how do you eat an elephant story, right? Yes, one bite at a time, but when you first look at the elephant, you're like, “Holy shit. This is big. What do I need to do?” And that I think is not something we all collectively spend enough time talking about is how hard this stuff is.Corey: One of the biggest challenges I see across the board is this idea of conference-ware style architecture; the greatest lie you ever see is someone talking about their infrastructure in public because peel it back a little bit and everything's messy, everything's disastrous, and everything's a tire fire. And we have this cult in tech—Abby: [laugh].Corey: —it's almost a cult where we have this idea that anything that isn't rewritten completely within the last six months based upon whatever is the hot framework now that is designed to run only in Google Chrome running on the latest generation MacBook Pro on a gigabit internet connection is somehow less than. It's like, “So, what does that piece of crap do?” And the answer is, “Well, a few $100 million a quarter in revenue, so how about you watch your mouth?” Moving those things is delicate; moving those things is fraught, and there are a lot of different stakeholders to the point where one of the lessons I keep learning is, people love to ask me, “What is Amazon's opinion of you?” Turns out that there's no Ted Amazon who works over there who forms a single entity's opinion. It's a bunch of small teams. Some of them like me, some of them can't stand me, far and away the majority don't know who I am. And that is okay. In theory; in practice, I find it completely unforgivable because how dare you? But I understand it's—Abby: You write a memo, right now. [laugh].Corey: Exactly. Companies are people and people are messy, and for better or worse, it is impossible to patch them. So, you have to almost route around them. And that was something that I found that Puppet did very well, coming from the olden days of sysadmin work where we spend time doing management [bump 00:15:53] the systems by hand. Like, oh, I'm going to do a for loop. Once I learned how to script. Before that, I use Cluster SSH and inadvertently blew away a University's entire config file what starts up on boot across their entire FreeBSD server fleet.Abby: You only did it once, so it's fine.Corey: Oh, yeah. I'm never going to screw up again. Well, not like that. In other ways. Absolutely, but at least my errors will be novel.Abby: Yeah. It's learning. We all learn. If you haven't taken something down in production in real-time, you have not lived. And also you [laugh] haven't done tech. [laugh].Corey: Oh, yeah, you either haven't been allowed close enough to anything that's important enough to be able to take down, you're lying to me, or thirdly—and this is possible, too—you're not yet at a point in your career where you're allowed to have access to the breaky parts. And that's fine. I mean, my argument has always been about why I'd be a terrible employee at Google, for example, is if I went in maliciously on day one, I would be hard-pressed to take down google.com for one hour. If I can't have that much impact intentionally going in as a bad actor, it feels like there'd be how much possible upside, positive impact can I have what everyone's ostensibly aligned around the same thing?It's the challenge of big companies. It's gaining buy-in, it's gaining investment in the idea and the direction you're going in. Things always take longer, you have to wind up getting multiple stakeholders on board. My consulting practice is entirely around helping save money on the AWS bill. You'd think it would be the easiest thing in the world to sell, but talking to big companies means a series of different sales conversations with different folks, getting them all on the same page. What we do functionally isn't so much look at the computer parts as it is marriage counseling between engineering and finance. Different languages, different ways of thinking about things, ostensibly the same goals.Abby: I mean, I don't think that's a big company problem. I think that's an every company problem if you have more than, like, five people in your company.Corey: The first few years here, it was just me and I had none of those problems. I had very different problems, but you know—and then we started bringing other people in, it's like, “Oh, yeah, things were great until we hired people. Ugh, mistake. Never do that.” And yeah, it turns out that's not particularly sustainable.Abby: Stakeholder management is hard. And you mentioned something about routing around. Well, you can't actually route around people, unfortunately. You have to get people to buy in, you have to bring people along on the journey. And not everybody is at the same place in the way they think about the work you're doing.And that's true at any company, big or small. I think it just gets harder and more complex as the company gets bigger because it's harder to make the changes you need to make fast enough, but I'd say even at a company the size of Puppet, we have the exact same challenges. You know, are the teams aligned? Are we aligned on the right things? Are we focusing on the right things?Or, do we have the right priorities in our backlog? How are we doing the work that we do? And if you're trying to drive innovation, how fast are we innovating? Are we innovating fast enough? How tight are our feedback loops?It's one of those things where the conversations that you and I have had externally with customers are the same conversations I have internally all the time, too. Let's talk about innovators' dilemma. [laugh]. Let's talk about feedback loop. Let's talk about what does it mean to get tighter feedback loops from customers and the field?And how do you align those things to the priorities in your backlog? And it's one of those never-ending challenges that's messy and complicated. And technology can enable it, but the technology is also messy and hard. And I do love going to conferences and seeing how pretty and easy things could look, and it's definitely a great aspiration for us to all shoot for, but at the end of the day, I think we all have to recognize there's a ton of messiness that goes on behind to make that a reality and to make that really a product and a technology that we can sell and get behind, but also one that we buy in, too, and are able to use. So, I think we as a technology industry, and particularly those of us in the Bay Area, we do a disservice by talking about how easy things are and why—you know, I remember a conversation I had in 2014 where someone asked me if Docker was already passe because everybody was doing containerized applications, and I was like, “Are they? Really? Is that an everyone thing? Or is that just an ‘us' thing?” [laugh].Corey: Well, they talk about it on the conference stages an awful lot, but yeah. New problems that continue to arise. I mean, I look back at my early formative years as someone who could theoretically be brought out in public and it was through a consulting project, where I was a traveling trainer for Puppet back in 2014, 2015, and teaching people who hadn't had exposure before what Puppet was about. And there was a definite experience in some of the people attending class where they were very opposed to the idea. And dig down a little bit, it's not that they had a problem with the software, it's not that they had a problem with any of the technical bits.It's that they made the mistake that so many technologists made—I know I have, repeatedly—of identifying themselves with the technology that they work on. And well, in some cases, yeah, the answer was that they ran a particular script a bunch of times and if you can automate that through something like Puppet or something else, well, what does that mean for them? We see it much larger-scale now with people who are, okay, I'm in the data center working on the storage arrays. When that becomes just an API call or—let's be serious, despite what we see in conference stages—when it becomes clicking buttons in the AWS console, then what does that mean for the future of their career? The tide is rising.And I can't blame them too much for this; you've been doing this for 25 years, you don't necessarily want to throw all that away and start over with a whole new set of concepts and the rest because unlike what Twitter believes, there are a bunch of legitimate paths in this industry that do treat it as a job rather than an all-consuming passion. And I have no negative judgment toward folks who walk down that direction.Abby: Most people do. And I think we have to be realistic. It's not just some. A lot of people do. A lot of people, “This is my nine-to-five job, Monday through Friday, and I'm going to go home and I'm going to spend time with my family.”Or I'm going to dare I say—quietly—have a life outside of technology. You know, but this is my job. And I think we have done a disservice to a lot of those individuals who for better or for worse, they just want to go in and do a job. They want to get their job done to the best of their abilities, and don't necessarily have the time—or if you're a single parent, have the flexibility in your day to go home and spend another five, six hours learning the latest technology, the latest programming language, set up your own demo environment at home, play around with AWS, all of these things that you may not have the opportunity to do. And I think we as an industry have done a disservice to both those individuals, as well in putting up really imaginary gates on who can actually be a technologist, too.Corey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Oracle Cloud. Counting the pennies, but still dreaming of deploying apps instead of "Hello, World" demos? Allow me to introduce you to Oracle's Always Free tier. It provides over 20 free services and infrastructure, networking databases, observability, management, and security.And - let me be clear here - it's actually free. There's no surprise billing until you intentionally and proactively upgrade your account. This means you can provision a virtual machine instance or spin up an autonomous database that manages itself all while gaining the networking load, balancing and storage resources that somehow never quite make it into most free tiers needed to support the application that you want to build.With Always Free you can do things like run small scale applications, or do proof of concept testing without spending a dime. You know that I always like to put asterisks next to the word free. This is actually free. No asterisk. Start now. Visit https://snark.cloud/oci-free that's https://snark.cloud/oci-free.Corey: Gatekeeping, on some level, is just—it's a horrible thing. Something I found relatively early on is that I didn't enjoy communities where that was a thing in a big way. In minor ways, sure, absolutely. I wound up gravitating toward Ubuntu rather than Debian because it turned out that being actively insulted when I asked how to do something wasn't exactly the most welcoming, constructive experience, where they, “Read the manual.” “Yeah, I did that and it was incomplete and contradictory, and that's why I'm here asking you that question, but please continue to be a condescending jackwagon. I appreciate that. It really just reminds me that I'm making good choices with my life.”Abby: Hashtag-RTFM. [laugh].Corey: Exactly. In my case, fine, its water off a duck's back. I can certainly take it given the way that I dish it out, but by the same token, not everyone has a quote-unquote, thick skin, and I further posit that not everyone should have to have one. You should not get used to personal attacks as a prerequisite for working in this space. And I'm very sensitive to the idea that people who are just now exploring the cloud somehow feel that they've missed out on their career, and that so there's somehow not appropriate for this field, or that it's not for them.And no, are you kidding me? You know that overwhelming sense of confusion you get when you look at the AWS console and try and understand what all those services do? Yeah, I had the same impression the first time I saw it and there were 12 services; there's over 200 now. Guess what? I've still got it.And if I am overwhelmed by it, I promise there's no shame in anyone else being overwhelmed by it, too. We're long since past the point where I can talk incredibly convincingly about AWS services that don't exist to AWS employees and not get called out on it because who in the world has that entire Rolodex of services shoved into their heads who isn't me?Abby: I'd say you should put out… a call for anyone that does because I certainly do not memorize the services that are available. I don't know that anyone does. And I think even more broadly, is, remember when the landscape diagram came out from the CNCF a couple of years ago, which it's now, like… it's like a NASCAR logo of every logo known to man—Corey: Oh today, there's over 400 icons on it the last time I saw—I saw that thing come out and I realized, “Wow, I thought I was going to shit-posting,” but no, this thing is incredible. It's, “This is great.” My personal favorite was zooming all the way in finding a couple of logos on in the same box three times, which is just… spot on. I was told later, it's like, “Oh, those represent different projects.” I'm like, “Oh, yeah, must have missed that in the legend somewhere.” [laugh]. It's this monstrous, overdone thing.Abby: But the whole point of it was just, if I am running an IT department, and I'm like, “Here you go. Here's a menu of things to choose,” you're just like, “What do I do with this information? Do I choose one of each? All the above? Where do I go? And then, frankly, how do I make them all work together in my environment?” Because they all serve very different problems and they're tackling different aspects of that problem.And I think I get really annoyed with myself as an industry—like, ourselves as an industry because it's like, “What are we doing here?” We're trying to make it harder for people, not only to use the technology, to be part of it. And I think any efforts we can make to make it easier and more simple or clear, we owe it to ourselves to be able to tell that story. Which now the flip side of that is describing cloud-native in the cloud, and infrastructure and automation is really, really hard to do [laugh] in a way that doesn't use any of those words. And I'm just as guilty of this, of describing things we do and using the same language, and all of a sudden you're looking at it this says the same thing is 7500 other websites. [laugh]. So.Corey: Yep. I joke at RSA's Expo Hall is basically about twelve companies selling different things. Sure, each one has a whole bunch of booths with different logos and different marketing copy, but it's the same fundamental product. Same challenge here. And this is, to me, the future of cloud, this is where it's going, where I want something that will—in my case, I built a custom URL shortener out of DynamoDB, API Gateway, Lambda, et cetera, and I built this thing largely as a proof of concept because I wanted to have experience playing with these tools.And that was great, not but if I'm doing something like that in production, I'm going with Bitly or one of the other services that provide this where someone is going to maintain it full time. Unless it is the core of what I'm doing, I don't want to build it myself from popsicle sticks. And moving up the stack to a world of folks who are trying to solve a business problem and they don't want to deal with the ten prerequisite services to understand the cloud, and then a whole bunch of other things tied together, and the billing, and the flow becomes incredibly problematic to understand—not to mention insecure: because we don't understand it, you don't know what your risk exposure is—people don't want that. They—Abby: Or to manage it.Corey: Yeah.Abby: Just the day-to-day management. Care and feeding, beyond security. [laugh].Corey: People's time is free. So, yeah. For example, do I write my own payroll system? Absolutely not. I have the good sense to pay a turnkey company to handle that for me because mistakes will show.I started my career running email systems. I pay for Google workspaces—or GSuite, or Gmail, or whatever the hell they're calling it this week—because it's not core and central to my business. I want a thing that winds up solving a business problem, and I will pay commensurately to the value that thing delivers, not the individual constituent costs of the components that build it together. Because until you're significantly scaled out and it is the core of what you do, you're spending more on people to run the monstrous thing than you are for the thing itself. That's always the way it works.So, put your innovation where it matters for your business. I posit the for an awful lot of the things we're building, in order to achieve those outcomes, this isn't it.Abby: Agreed. And I am a big believer in if I can use off-the-shelf software, I will because I don't believe in reinventing everything. Now, having said that, and coming off my soapbox for just a hot minute, I will say that a lot of what's happening, and going back to where I started around the enterprise infrastructure, we're reinventing so many things that there is a lot of new things coming up. We've talked about containers, we've talked about Kubernetes, around container scheduling, container orchestration, we haven't even mentioned service mesh, and sidecars, and all of the new ways we're approaching solving some of these older problems. So, there is the need for a broad proliferation of technology until the contraction phase, where it all starts to fundamentally clicks together.And that's really where the interesting parts happen, but it's also where the confusion happens because, “Okay, what do I use? How do I use it? How do these pieces fit together? What happens when this changes? What does this mean?”And by the way, if I'm an enterprise company, I'm a payroll company, what's the one thing I care about? My payroll software. [laugh]. And that's the problem I'm solving for. So, I take a little umbrage sometimes with the frame that every company is a software company because every company is not a software company.Every company can use technology in ways to further their business and more and more frequently, that is delivering their business value through software, but if I'm a payroll company, I care about delivering that payroll capabilities to my customer, and I want to do it as quickly as possible, and I want to leverage technology to help me do that. But my endgame is not that technology; my endgame is delivering value to my customers in real and meaningful ways. And I worry, sometimes, that those two things get conflated together. And one is an enabler of the other; the technology is not the outcome.Corey: And that is borderline heresy for an awful lot of folks out there in the space, I wish that people would wake up a little bit more and realize that you have to build a thing that solves customer pain, ideally, an expensive customer pain, and then they will basically rush to hurl money at you. Now, there are challenges and inflections as you go, and there's a whole bunch of nuances that can span entire fields of endeavor that I am hand-waving over here, and that's fine, but this is the direction I think we're going and this is the dawning awareness that I hope and trust we'll see start to take root in this industry.Abby: I mean, I hope so. I do take comfort in the fact that a lot of the industry leaders I'm starting to see, kind of, equate those two things more closely in the top [track 00:31:20]. Because it's a good forcing function for those of us that are technologists. At the end of the day, what am I doing? I am a product company, I am selling software to someone.So clearly, obviously, I have a vested interest in building the best software out there, but at the end of the day, for me, it's, “Okay, how do I make that truly impactful for customers, and how do I help them solve a problem?” And for me, I'm hyper-focused on automation because I honestly feel like that is the biggest challenge for most companies; it's the hardest thing to solve. It's like getting into your auto-driving car for the first time and letting go the steering wheel and praying to the software gods that that software is actually going to work. But it's the same thing with automation; it's like, “Okay, I have to trust that this is going to manage my environment and manage my infrastructure in a factual way and not put me on CNN because I just shut down entire customer environment,” or if I'm an airline and I've just had a really bad week because I've had technology problems. [laugh]. And so I think we have to really take into consideration that there are real customer problems on the other end of that we have to help solve for.Corey: My biggest problem is the failure mode of this is not when people watch the conference-ware presentations is that they're not going to sit there and think, “Oh, yeah, they're just talking about a nuanced thing that doesn't apply to our constraints, and they're hand-waving over a lot of stuff,” it's that, “Wow, we suck.” And that's not the takeaway anyone should ever have. Even Netflix doesn't operate the way that Netflix says that they do in their conference talks. It's always fun sitting next to someone from the company that's currently presenting and saying something to them, like, “Wow, I wish we did things that way.” And they said, “Yeah, I wish we did, too.”And it's always the case because it's very hard to get on stage and talk for 45 minutes about here's what we completely screwed up on, especially at the large publicly traded companies where it's, “Wait, why did our stock price just dive five perce—oh, my God, what did you say on stage?” People care [laugh] about those things, and I get it; there's a risk factor that I don't have to deal with here.Abby: I wish people would though. It would be so refreshing to hear someone like, “You know what? Ohh, we really messed this up, and let me walk you through what we did.” [laugh]. I think that would be nice.Corey: On some level, giving that talk in enough detail becomes indistinguishable from rage-quitting in public.Abby: [laugh].Corey: I mean, I'm there for it. Don't get me wrong. But I would love to see it.Abby: I don't think it has to be rage-quitting. One of the things that I talk to my team a lot about is the safety to fail. You can't take risk if you're too afraid to fail, right? And I think you can frame failure in a way of, “Hey, this didn't work, but let me walk you through all the amazing things we learned from this. And here's how we used that to take this and make this thing better.”And I think there's a positive way to frame it that's not rage-quitting, but I do think we as an industry gloss over those learnings that you absolutely have to do. You fail; everything does not work the first time perfectly. It is not brilliant out the gate. If you've done an MVP and it's perfect and every customer loves it, well then, you sat on that for way too long. [laugh]. And I think it's just really getting comfortable with this didn't work the first time or the fourth, but look, at time seven, this is where we got and this is what we've learned.Corey: I want to thank you for taking so much time out of your day to wind up speaking to me about things that in many cases are challenging to talk about because it's the things people don't talk about in the real world. If people want to learn more about what you're up to, who you are, et cetera, where can they find you?Abby: They can find me on the Twitters at @ab415. I think that's the best way to start, although I will say that I am not as prolific as you are on Twitter.Corey: That's a good thing.Abby: I'm a half-assed Tweeter. [laugh]. I will own it.Corey: Oh, I put my full ass into it every time, in every way.Abby: [laugh]. I do skim it a lot. I get a lot of my tech news from there. Like, “What are people mad about today?” And—Corey: The daily outrage. Oh, yeah.Abby: The daily outrage. “What's Corey ranting about today? Let's see.” [laugh].Corey: We will, of course, put a link to your Twitter profile in the [show notes 00:35:39]. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. I appreciate it.Abby: Hey, it was my pleasure.Corey: Abby Kearns, CTO at Puppet. 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 a comment telling me about the amazing podcast content you create, start to finish, at Netflix.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.

It's another DevOps Speakeasy! In this episode, Kat flies solo without her co-host Baruch, but she's joined by Matt Stratton for a discussion about tech twitter drama, old technology, and practicing under stress.   Click Here for Transcript

This week we recap all of the excitement that took place at Augusta National and the crowning of Masters champion Hideki Matsuyama. We talk about what Hideki did right in order to pull off the big win as well as discuss some other standout performances including those from Will Zalatoris, Xander Shchauffele and Corey Conners. Ready Golf is also thrilled to announce the winner of our inaugural Masters Pool - congratulations to Matt Stratton, winner of the Signature Wedge from Haywood Golf. Thanks to all for participating! As always, keep up with all things Ready Golf and give us a follow at any of the below: Instagram - @readygolfpod Twitter - @readygolfpod Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/readygolfpod/ YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdRQUuPahG9lFq9DpdNqyDg Or drop us a line at info@readygolf.ca

Today we have guests! Joining us on the show today is Matt Stratton, Senior Vice President of Marketing at Tinker Federal Credit Union, and Chris Weigl, Marketing Manager at Community Federal Credit Union. We’re getting their perspectives on marketing challenges, opportunities, and strategies within the credit union industry.  We’re asking Matt and Chris how they advocate for growing the role and importance of marketing and branding in their credit unions. We discuss how marketing drives results (even when you can’t always measure them) and how to balance trying new things to grow the credit union while still preserving their reputation and remaining loyal to current members. Learn more about Braid Creative at www.braidcreative.com and follow us on Instagram @braidcreative 1:20 meet our guests, Chris Weigl and Matt Stratton3:15 wearing an executive hat and a marketing hat8:35 try out a new idea through a pilot program10:38 measuring "branding results"13:37 measuring interaction, engagement and participation14:35 sharing results when they aren't great19:35 the benefits of honesty within your marketing team21:56 how to decide when to update creative or stay the course27:35 the expansion of credit union membership has made credit union branding more important31:30 what has stayed consistent in the credit union industry the past 30 years?35:21 camaraderie among credit unions39:55 Matt's best advice for credit union marketers 42:43 Chris' best advice for credit union marketers 44:15 let's talk Netflix shows! what’s everyone watching?

Reminding you why the Mississippi Gulf Coast is such a great place to live, work and play

Matt Stratton is a transformation specialist at Red Hat, where he helps public sector organizations succeed in their digital transformation initiatives. Previously, he worked as a DevOps advocate at PagerDuty, a customer architect at Chef Software, a managing consultant at 10th Magnitude, and an engineer lead at JPMorgan Chase, among other positions. He’s also the host of the Arrested DevOps podcast and the global co-chair of DevOpsDays. Join Corey and Matt as they talk about Matt’s decision to brand himself as Matt then Matty and now Matt again, how COVID-19 has changed DevRel and conferences in general, what it was like to run DevOpsDays Chicago online this year, why folks can’t just decide to move in-person events to the virtual world and expect great results, why a webinar with a Slack channel isn’t a virtual event, how virtual events are harder for sponsors, why Corey is happy he hasn’t gone to Las Vegas this year, how DevRel done right is a super effective sales strategy, how podcasts are the new medium for conversations with people who otherwise wouldn’t speak to you, the pros and cons of live talks and pre-recorded talks at virtual events, and more.

In this episode, Matt Stratton, Transformation Specialist at Red Hat’s NAPS Transformation Office, talks about his career in DevOps, developer advocacy and relations, why monitoring matters, discoverability, resilience engineering, and systems thinking.Should you find a burning need to share your thoughts or rants about the show please spray them at devrel@newrelic.com. While you’re going to all the trouble of shipping us some bytes, please consider taking a moment to let us know what you’d like to hear on the show in the future. Despite the all-caps flaming you will receive in response, please know that we are sincerely interested in your feedback; we aim to appease. Follow us on the Twitters: @ObservyMcObserv.

You can find Matt Stratton at @mattstratton!Links:https://devopspartygames.com/--We're on iTunes, Spotify, and Google Podcasts - if you like what we're doing, subscribe! If you don't, well, you should also subscribe so you can have receipts for when you cancel us.Follow the pod @fsckdpod!Jay is @jaydestro, Kat is @dixie3flatline, and Austin is @austinlparker.If you want to email us, info at fsckdpod.com.

Dr. Matt Stratton, Mike Jackson, and Tyler Edrington discuss “Songs for the Planet Earth”, with a stellar Mark Thurston drumline, a demanding visual package, and a hornline that matches up to the percussion to great effect.

Paul's dev.to homework - Broberg's a Dev.to noob. Broberg buys a grill Matty's wacky wheels devop gameshow (https://irreverentdevops.com) Favorite website from the late 1900's Homestarrunner The one the the metallica napster video (Camp Chaos) Ytmnd E/N blogs … the original microblogging ? Ebaumsworld the original viral video copiers Todo-ist and other things that will fail to cure our procrastination top 30 origami blogs of 2020 (https://blog.feedspot.com/origami_blogs/). link to tabletop simulator matty's github stars (https://github.com/mattstratton?tab=stars) (where projects go that he never looks at again) gmailctl (https://github.com/mbrt/gmailctl)

Salt stack bug, what is it, wait what is zeroMQ? https://www.zdnet.com/article/saltstack-salt-critical-bugs-allow-data-center-cloud-server-hijacking-as-root/ https://github.com/saltstack/salt/issues/57057 https://labs.f-secure.com/advisories/saltstack-authorization-bypass Didn't they write their own secure transport library? Who got hacked? Ghost, LineageOS, https://saltexploit.com It's also a simple index.html file with a gist. It's actually really clever to deploy something so simple. https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-work-with-the-zeromq-messaging-library Dev.to (https://dev.to) for life of tech nerds Daniel J Lewis (The Audacity to Podcast (https://theaudacitytopodcast.com/)/SEO for Podcasters (https://theaudacitytopodcast.com/store/seo-for-podcasters/)) Podcasters Roundtable (https://podcastersroundtable.com/) podcast

Lists are cool, TweetDeck is pretty powerful, how to wrangle that crazy firehose of information. The fine art of shitposting.

Managing configuration, watching people eat, app launcher, animal crossing, and vim jokes.

We're learning more about doing conferences and events online, instead of in-person. Basically, how do you make webinars better and re-create the "hallway track." Also, we talk about the mess in the US and ICQ. ICQ? Wait, what it's back (https://icq.com/desktop/en#mac)? Lessons learned about ATX DevOps has a virtual meetup. Lessons learned: - Compresses 90 minutes back to back. - Hunting and hiring. Frequent travel status furloughed (https://twitter.com/AmericanAir/status/1249765252943826946?s=20).

Big issue confronted this week: how many screens is too many screens? Also: JJ doesn't know his USB cables and green screen redecorating.

Strong focus on bread. Stretch and fold. Bread life style. Sweet and cakey. Pulling on Paul. Something you'd like to stop or start doing. Dog walking.

Chris Ferdinandi on Greater Than Code, Ben Orenstein on Maintainable, Susan Rice on Coaching For Leaders, Courtland Allen on Software Engineering Unlocked, and Matt Stratton on Hired Thought. I’d love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email podcast@thekguy.com. And, if you haven’t done it already, don’t forget to hit the subscribe button, and if you like the show, please tell a friend or co-worker who might be interested. This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting March 16, 2020. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the fortnight when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers. CHRIS FERDINANDI ON GREATER THAN CODE The Greater Than Code podcast featured Chris Ferdinandi with hosts Rein Henrichs and Jacob Stoebel. Chris is a proponent of plain vanilla JavaScript. He says that modern web development has grown so much in scope and complexity that it makes it difficult for beginners to get started and it can negatively impact the performance of the web for users in ways that developers with fast machines don’t always feel. One of the reasons things are the way they are today, Chris says, is because a lot of backend developers migrated to the front end because that was where the exciting stuff was happening and they brought with them their approaches and best practices. The front end, however, is a very different medium. In the back end, you have control over how fast the server is, when things run, the operating system, etc. On the front end, you have none of this. People are accessing what we build on a variety of devices that may or may not be able to handle the data we’re sending and may have unpredictable internet connections. If a file fails to download or the user goes through a train tunnel and we’ve built things in a modern JavaScript-heavy way, the whole house of cards falls apart on these users. Chris would like people not to abandon JavaScript altogether, but to be a little more thoughtful about how we use it. Modern web development involves a few things: frameworks, package managers, and doing more and more things (such as CSS) in JavaScript. All of this JavaScript has the effect of slowing down performance because 100KB of JavaScript is not the same as 100KB of CSS, a JPEG, or HTML because the browser needs to parse and interpret it. Because of these performance problems, single page apps have become more popular. But now you’re recreating in JavaScript all the things the browser gave you out of the box like routing, shifting focus, and handling forward and back buttons. You’re solving performance problems created by JavaScript with even more JavaScript, which is the most fragile part of the stack because it doesn’t fail gracefully. If a browser encounters an HTML element it doesn’t recognize, it just treats it as a div and moves on. If you have a CSS property you mis-typed, the browser ignores it. But if you mistype a variable in JavaScript, the whole thing falls apart and anything that comes after that never happens.  For Chris, a better approach to web development is one that is more lean and more narrowly-focused on just the things you need. His first principle is to embrace the platform. For example, a lot of people don’t realize that DOM manipulation that used to be really hard years ago is really easy these days in vanilla JavaScript. Also, many of the things that JavaScript was required for in the past can be done more efficiently today with HTML and CSS. He also says that we need to remember that the web is for everyone. Because we are often using high-end computers, the latest mobile devices, and fast internet connections, we forget that this is not the experience for a majority of web users. We build things that work fine on our machines but are painfully slow for the people who actually use the things we build. They ended their discussion with reflections. Chris’s reflection was about learning JavaScript and web development for the first time. He says that people learning shouldn’t be made to feel like they need to dive in to the latest trends, but should instead find a way to learn the fundamentals. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/170-the-case-for-vanilla-javascript-with-chris-ferdinandi/id1163023878?i=1000466076138 Website link: https://www.greaterthancode.com/the-case-for-vanilla-javascript BEN ORENSTEIN ON MAINTAINABLE The Maintainable podcast featured Ben Orenstein with host Robby Russell. Ben believes that, in a maintainable codebase, the code should match how you think about the world. When speaking about the domain with your teammates, do you use the same terminology that the code uses? Do you use the term “user” but the code uses the term “customer”? Getting your terms consistent is a specific case of a more general principle of implicit and explicit knowledge. Maintainable systems have as much knowledge put into them as possible so that they become sources of truth. Ben’s definition of technical debt is a technical shortcut you took intentionally after weighing it against alternatives and deciding it was worth it in the short team with the eventual intention of eliminating it. He says it is hard to get time on a schedule dedicated to cleaning up technical debt, so it is your professional responsibility to clean it up as you go. Ben says that asking permission to clean up technical debt as you deliver a feature is like asking permission to do your job well. He says that the idea of “We’ll go fix this later” never happens and, if you don’t believe him, grep your codebase for the string “TODO”. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/ben-orenstein-someday-well-go-clean-that-up-doesnt-work/id1459893010?i=1000466511242 Website link: https://maintainable.fm/episodes/ben-orenstein-someday-well-go-clean-that-up-doesnt-work-_fGCpf6F SUSAN RICE ON COACHING FOR LEADERS The Coaching For Leaders podcast featured Susan Rice with host Dave Stachowiak. From the time she was seven, Susan would hear her parents fighting loudly and violently when she was trying to sleep at night. When the fighting got scary and out of control, Susan would step in. Sometimes that meant talking them down and sometimes that meant separating them. The mediation she did with her parents taught her how to interact with parties who were intractably opposed. This developed in her a lack of discomfort with conflict, disagreement, and argument. She said that this helped her to be willing to stand up and not be conflict-averse. This reminded me of the Buster Benson episode of Lead From The Heart I summarized in my last article. Dave asked Susan about a section of her book Tough Love in which she described some feedback she received from former congressman Howard Wolpe when she was Assistant Secretary of State. He warned her bluntly that she would fail as Assistant Secretary if she did not correct course and she came to agree with that. She was only thirty-two at the time and had never held a position like this before. In 1998, six months into her tenure, a series of crises hit. Africa’s “first world war” broke out and, then in August of 1998, Al Qaida attacked the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing twelve Americans and over two hundred Kenyans and Tanzanians. This was both a horrific loss and a policy blow for those who were working on Africa at the time. Rather than addressing the pain they were all feeling head on, her approach to dealing with it was to charge through it as she did her parent’s divorce. This wasn’t a leadership style that would work in that context and Howard Wolpe gave her the tough love she needed at the time. Over the Christmas holiday, she reflected on what he had told her and realized that he was right. She had to be more patient. She had to be more respectful and solicitous of other people’s views and perspectives. Dave asked what she did first to make this change in her leadership style. Susan says she started by being more humble. She brought people into decision-making even if their recommendations were not ones that she ultimately accepted. She says, ”You can get a long way leading a team, even if many members of the team don’t actually agree with the direction you’re steering towards, if they feel that their advice, perspective, recommendations have truly been heard and appreciated.” Dave asked how she ensures in meetings between high ranking officials that everyone is genuinely heard even when she doesn’t agree with everything they are saying. She says it is not just what happens when you’re sitting around the meeting table. It comes down to the preparations going into the discussion: the quality of the paper that lays out the issues and the actions and the coherence of the agenda. Managing the meeting, though, is the hardest part. You have to make sure the options are given due consideration and everybody gets a chance to express their judgment. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/456-how-to-be-diplomatic-with-susan-rice/id458827716?i=1000466472793 Website link: https://coachingforleaders.com/podcast/be-diplomatic-susan-rice/ COURTLAND ALLEN ON SOFTWARE ENGINEERING UNLOCKED The Software Engineering Unlocked podcast featured Courtland Allen, founder of the Indie Hackers podcast and community with host Dr. Michaela Greiler. Michaela asked Courtland what was different about Indie Hackers compared to the earlier startups he had founded that made for its success. He said that for Indie Hackers, his notion of a business idea changed. Back in 2009, if you asked him about a business idea, he would have described a product idea and wouldn’t have been able to say much about how to get the product in customer’s hands, how much to charge for it, or even who the customer was. With Indie Hackers, he was thinking about all aspects of the business. She asked whether the original Indie Hackers idea was to build a community. Courtland said that while there was no desire to do a podcast at first, he always had a plan to build a community. He had multiple phases for Indie Hackers to go through to get to where he wanted it to be. Phase one was a blog where people who wanted to earn financial and creative freedom though revenue-generating side projects could go to find interviews Courtland had done with people like themselves. He figured these blog readers would subscribe to his newsletter and from there he would build a community forum where people could help each other. Somewhere along the line, the podcast was added based on community demand. Michaela asked how Courtland managed to keep Indie Hackers successful as a business when similar communities are struggling. Courtland believes that there are a few principles behind the success of Indie Hackers. The first is that you are much more likely to generate meaningful revenue quickly if you are charging for something that each customer is willing to pay a lot of money for. Regarding building a successful community, you have to start with your marketing. A community is a chicken-and-egg problem where the whole value of a community is the people inside it, making it really hard to start from nothing. With Indie Hackers, he started with content that brought in the people who could form the community. Courtland had thousands of people coming to the website before he turned it into a community. Another example is dev.to. Its founder, Ben Halpern, spent years just growing his Twitter account, tweeting funny jokes and helpful tips for developers. When he launched his community, he was able to advertise it from his Twitter account. A second thing you need to build a community is to seed it with discussions. As Courtland also described in an episode of Software Engineering Daily that I summarized in “Lighting Up The Brain and Joining A Gym”, he started his community by having conversations with fake accounts that were secretly also himself. Ben Halpern kickstarted the dev.to community with discussions with his friends. Choice of topic is critical too. You want a topic that you can talk about forever. The dev.to community’s topic is software engineering. It is the perfect topic because lots of people are learning and trying to learn from each other and there are countless issues and frameworks to talk about. Similarly, there are countless topics and subtopics around founding companies. As Courtland also said on Software Engineering Daily, you also need to think about the timing for when people get together and the space your community takes up. If you throw a party in a small room, you only need ten people to make that party feel like a success, but if you throw it in a football stadium, you need forty thousand people for it to feel like a success. It is the same with an online community. If you constrain it by saying something like, “Our community is just one discussion thread every Sunday at 3:00pm,” then even with ten people, that community can feel like it’s thriving. He talked about how he got advertisers interested in Indie Hackers and how he eventually got Indie Hackers acquired by Stripe and now no longer spends time selling ads. Not much has changed, he says, now that he is an employee of Stripe because Indie Hackers and Stripe were aligned from the beginning. Michaela asked why he decided, despite his desire to write as little code as possible, to create custom software for the Indie Hackers forum when he could have chosen third-party forum software. Courtland said he wanted Indie Hackers to have a strong brand and it is hard to have a strong brand if the thing you’re building looks like everything else. So he put a lot of time making the community unique. He spent a lot of time on the name of the community and the design of the website, all in support of having a strong brand. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/starting-profitable-business-in-six-weeks-courtland/id1477527378?i=1000465925620 Website link: https://www.software-engineering-unlocked.com/episode-12-profitable-business-courtland-allen/ MATT STRATTON ON HIRED THOUGHT The Hired Thought podcast featured Matt Stratton with host Ben Mosior. Since his move from Chef to PagerDuty, Matt’s focus has shifted from software delivery and infrastructure code to incidents and outages. Ben brought up Matt’s talk “Fight, Flight, or Freeze — Releasing Organizational Trauma.” Matt’s motivation for creating this talk was his own treatment for PTSD and a discussion with J. Paul Reed where they kept seeing similarities between Matt’s experiences and what companies go through when they experience an incident. Trauma occurs when our response to something is ineffective. Two people can have a similar experience and it can be traumatic to one person and just a bad day for the other. We respond to perceived trauma physiologically the same way as actual trauma. Events that are reminiscent of trauma that occurred to Matt as a child trigger him to have the same physiological response today. Organizations do the same thing. An organization that has an outage that is similar to an event that happened before and, say, cost them a million dollars a minute, will react the same way. Just as an adult re-experiencing a childhood trauma because of a triggering event shouldn’t necessarily respond the same way, an organization needs to learn how to respond differently to these similar stimuli. Matt talked about the window of tolerance beyond which you become activated and have an unhealthy response. He says that it can get spiky or you can get stuck-on or stuck-off. If you are stuck-on, you have anxiety and other symptoms. If you are stuck-off, there is lethargy. In an organization, we can get into a hyper-aroused state fearing any type of change, getting into analysis paralysis, or becoming over-vigilant. None of these states are healthy and they trickle down into the emotional health of employees. The good news is there are things we can do to help the organization be better. Ben added that a lot of therapy is about building up the language to describe what is happening so that when it happens or when you are reflecting back later, you can share the experience and develop skills to lengthen your window of tolerance. Matt talked about how in cognitive behavioral therapy we try to identify when a distortion occurs, knowing that the feeling we experience is not something we can change, but our response to it can be changed. In an organization, we can do the same thing. Matt is striving to excise the word “prevention” from his vocabulary and instead become more resilient when something bad happens. For a person, this can mean that you can have something happen and then you can get back inside your window of tolerance quickly. For an organization, this means that an incident can happen and we can restore service and get on with business. We need to normalize incident response. It is not an anomaly to have an incident. The irony is that we’ve gotten worse at responding to incidents as we’ve gotten better at distributing on call. Back in his days as a sysadmin, Matt was on call constantly and incident response was business as usual. Today, if you are doing a healthy on call rotation with developers on call in their own domain, you can be on call for a year and experience just two incidents. Then, when you have an incident, you freak out. You don’t want to be trying to remember how to do incident response and you don’t want to think of the response process as an exceptional thing that we only sometimes do. Ben connected this to the book The Fifth Discipline. He says we always feel like we have to do something in response to something bad happening. The other thing the book points out is that whenever you are doing an intervention, yes, you may have short term actions that buy you time, but at all times, you need to be building capabilities. When you normalize incident response and you regularly show people what it looks like to work together in a high-pressure situation, you learn to respond to incidents in healthy ways. Matt says we need to run our failure injection exercises and game days like real incidents. This is also an opportunity to train your incident commanders. In these scenarios, we know what’s wrong and we can bail out at any time. Then, when a real incident occurs at 2:00am some morning, the people who did the exercise associate the real incident with the calm exercise they did in the office on an afternoon. Sometimes there are people who want run an exercise and not tell the incident response team what’s wrong. Matt has to explain to these people that it is not an exercise in troubleshooting or to stress test your people. You don’t need to inject stress into the people who work for you. You want to do the opposite. When we are doing incident response all the time as part of the regular cadence of work, when a real incident occurs, we will associate it with the positive physiology of our response during the exercise. That means we should treat every incident the same, even false alarms. If you get a few minutes into responding to an incident and realize it is a false alarm, finish it out as an incident. Get on the bridge and do as you would in a real incident. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/6-organizational-resilience/id1479303584?i=1000466488009 Website link: https://hiredthought.com/2020/02/24/6-organizational-resilience/ LINKS Ask questions, make comments, and let your voice be heard by emailing podcast@thekguy.com. Twitter: https://twitter.com/thekguy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithmmcdonald/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thekguypage Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_k_guy/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheKGuy Website:

Coté proposes that there’s three types of apps to pay attention to in enterprises. Or something like that. Also, he has a magical method for doing digital transformation: actually do it. We open up discussing the delightful adventure of doing analyst feature matrixes. Also, some brief discussion of Apple Watches in the impeachment trial. Mood board: The game is won or lost before the spreadsheet it sent. Incrementally updating apps, vs. making new businesses (digitizing) - like, maybe there just needs to be more programmers. It’s not “stupid,” it’s “antiquated.” Don’t make them think it is a big deal, or they’ll be afraid. Finding business case loopholes, or ignoring them. Can you base practices on loopholers? Wearing Apple Watches to senate hearings - a real ok boomer moment - gadgets in meetings in general. Audio books. I just made myself a sandwich, wow. Relevant to your interests Google AppSheet. Gesundheit! Oh, we see – it's Google pulling no-code development into a cloudy embrace (https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/01/15/google_cloud_embraces_nocode_development_with_appsheet_acquisition/) Epic Systems, a major medical records vendor, is warning customers it will stop working with Google Cloud (https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/17/epic-systems-warns-customers-it-will-stop-supporting-google-cloud.html) Not sure what to think about this. Google will have to make clear that it doesn't filch data, agreed on or not. Can they ever convince paranoid enterprise buyers that their data will be safe, not from hackers, but from Google? Google offers IBM AS/400 apps new home in its cloud (https://www.cio.com/article/3514989/google-offers-ibm-as400-apps-new-home-in-its-cloud.html) Google to phase out third-party cookies (https://www.axios.com/google-cookies-phase-out-third-party-5368ef6d-4c2c-40b7-865c-0f6a333f7377.html) - does this mean ads will disappear for me, or just that Google and Facebook will be the only ones who can do it? Forrester study highlights benefits of Google Anthos hybrid cloud app platform (https://siliconangle.com/2020/01/22/forrester-study-highlights-financial-benefits-google-anthos/) - and same with Pivotal (https://content.pivotal.io/analyst-reports/the-total-economic-impact-of-the-pivotal-platform-2020). IBM IBM forecasts full-year profit above estimates on cloud growth (https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ibm-reports-surprise-revenue-rise-211453080.html) Six months after IBM spent $34 billion to acquire an open source software company, IBM's Q4 results showed that 'Red Hat goodness is kicking in' (https://apple.news/A27zjXAg2R3KvxxcuHXir1A) IBM Stock Rose More Today Than in the Last 10 Years. It’s Time For A Shake-Up (https://apple.news/AQhRI3vfZQS6UqjsnMVr8uw) Bad News DigitalOcean is laying off staff, sources say 30-50 affected (https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/17/digitalocean-layoffs/) Report: Firefox maker Mozilla is laying off 70 people (https://www.fastcompany.com/90452530/firefox-maker-mozilla-is-reportedly-laying-off-70-people-in-search-of-revenue-beyond-search?partner=feedburner) Good News AI for code, serverless, monitoring, SD-WAN. Snyk raises $150 million at $1 billion valuation for AI that protects open source code (https://venturebeat.com/2020/01/21/snyk-raises-150-million-at-1-billion-valuation-for-ai-that-protects-open-source-code/) TriggerMesh 2020 - Cloud Native Integration (https://triggermesh.com/2020/01/triggermesh-2020-cloud-native-integration/) DevOps Startup Sysdig Raises $70M Series E (https://news.crunchbase.com/news/devops-startup-sysdig-raises-70m-series-e/) VMware to acquire Nyansa for AI-based network analytics (https://www.zdnet.com/article/vmware-to-acquire-nyansa-for-ai-based-network-analytics/) Australia Australians Stick With Their Banks Through Years of Scandal (https://apple.news/AjCsVk8vdSFG4DrMPHQLaow) Humble Australia Fire Relief Bundle (https://www.humblebundle.com/games/australia-fire-relief) Phone Hacking Here Is the Technical Report Suggesting Saudi Arabia’s Prince Hacked Jeff Bezos’ Phone (https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/v74v34/saudi-arabia-hacked-jeff-bezos-phone-technical-report?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter_axiosprorata&stream=top) U.N. Experts Call for Inquiry into Hack of Bezos’s Phone (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/22/world/middleeast/un-experts-call-for-inquiry-into-hack-of-bezoss-phone.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share) Apple reportedly scrapped plans to fully secure iCloud backups after FBI intervention (https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/21/21075033/apple-icloud-end-to-end-encryption-scrapped-fbi-reuters-report) Grab Bag Istio as an Example of When Not to Do Microservices (https://blog.christianposta.com/microservices/istio-as-an-example-of-when-not-to-do-microservices/) VCs are just tired (https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/16/vcs-are-just-tired/) An introduction to VMware vRealize Operations Cloud (https://searchservervirtualization.techtarget.com/tip/An-introduction-to-VMware-vRealize-Operations-Cloud?amp=1#click=https://t.co/pASAzDcJXW) Nearly 200 CEOs just agreed on an updated definition of "the purpose of a corporation" (https://qz.com/work/1690439/new-business-roundtable-statement-on-the-purpose-of-companies/) 2020: The year of seeing clearly on AI and machine learning (https://www.zdnet.com/article/2020-the-year-of-seeing-clearly-on-ai-and-machine-learning/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter#ftag=RSSbaffb68) 2019 CNCF Annual Report - Cloud Native Computing Foundation (https://www.cncf.io/blog/2020/01/21/2019-cncf-annual-report/) Flow Time - How Fast are We Delivering Business Value? - Tasktop Blog (https://www.tasktop.com/blog/flow-time/) DuckDuckGo Traffic (https://duckduckgo.com/traffic) The billion-dollar battle over .org registry ownership intensifies (https://www.axios.com/org-registry-ownership-battle-d73a356f-4b94-4cb3-8769-9cbbc3526440.html) What Senators Wearing Apple Watches During the Impeachment Trial Teach Us About Invisible Tech (https://apple.news/AnOZnSgFFRje9eTWY0Eqy7w) - seems like an “ok boomer” story. Nonsense Why Texans Love H-E-B So Much (https://www.kut.org/post/why-texans-love-h-e-b-so-much) Travel company’s sneaky ad trick (https://www.news.com.au/travel/travel-advice/accommodation/trivago-fined-for-misleading-customers-on-pricing/news-story/30074634a8f3b90ddee445468a7216ce) Frozen iguanas falling from trees in South Florida (https://www.local10.com/news/local/2020/01/22/frozen-iguanas-falling-from-trees-in-south-florida/) Sunshine Map (https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EO4ssJnXsAA9Q4w.jpg) To Your Brain, Audiobooks Are Not ‘Cheating’ (https://www.thecut.com/2016/08/listening-to-a-book-instead-of-reading-isnt-cheating.html) Sponsors Arrested DevOps Podcast: If you are a Software Defined Talk Listener then we know you love Tech Podcasts and this week sponsor is another great tech podcast — Arrested DevOps. The Arrested DevOps podcast will help you achieve understanding, develop good practices, and operate your team and organization for maximum DevOps awesomeness. Arrested DevOps is hosted by Matt Stratton, Trevor Hess, and Bridget Kromhout. All the hosts are active in the DevOps community and they help put on DevOps days all over the world. So what are you waiting for you can subscribe today by searching for “Arrested DevOps” in you favorite podcast app or by visitinghttps://www.arresteddevops.com/ (https://www.arresteddevops.com/). Conferences, et. al. June 1-4: ChefConf 2020 (https://chefconf.chef.io/) KubeCon EU (https://events.linuxfoundation.org/kubecon-cloudnativecon-europe/), March 30 – April 2, use discount code KCEUSDP15 for 15% off. DevOpsDays Austin 2020 (https://devopsdays.org/events/2020-austin/welcome/) May 4th and 5th Devopsdays Minneapolis, (https://devopsdays.org/events/2019-minneapolis/welcome/) August 4 - 5, 2020 use code SDT for 10% off registration Listener Brett wants you to go to THAT Conference (https://www.thatconference.com/wi) August 3 - 6, 2020 - Kalahari Resort, Wisconsin Dells, WI. Call for Counselors (https://www.thatconference.com/wi/call-for-counselors) (Speakers) open until March 1st. SDT news & hype Join us in Slack (http://www.softwaredefinedtalk.com/slack). Send your postal address to stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com (mailto:stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com) and we will send you free laptop stickers! Follow us on Twitter (https://twitter.com/softwaredeftalk), Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/softwaredefinedtalk/) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/software-defined-talk/) Listen to the Software Defined Interviews Podcast (https://www.softwaredefinedinterviews.com/). Check out the back catalog (http://cote.coffee/howtotech/). Brandon built the Quick Concall iPhone App (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/quick-concall/id1399948033?mt=8) and he wants you to buy it for $0.99. Use the code SDT to get $20 off Coté’s book, (https://leanpub.com/digitalwtf/c/sdt) Digital WTF (https://leanpub.com/digitalwtf/c/sdt), so $5 total. Recommendations Brandon: The Outsider (https://www.hbo.com/the-outsider) on HBO (https://www.hbo.com/the-outsider) Coté: Tasty Meats Paul’s latest kubernetes and Spring talk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tn5gfbJcJ4A). Also, Paul’s food in Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/paulczar/).

This week the title says it all. There’s also some more bread talk. Mood board: “I love the talk about bread, can I get some stickers.” Do they have markdown in Intranets now? Kicking to fit use cases. Porting of Ports Crapplications, aka, “Crappity crap” Relevant to your interests Microsoft will stop supporting millions of computers running Windows 7 on Tuesday — here's what you need to know (https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/13/microsoft-windows-7-support-ends-jan-14.html) “According to Net Applications (https://netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx) figures from December, 32.74% of all laptops and desktops still run Windows 7, behind Windows 10. Windows 10 runs on more than 900 million devices (https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/12/microsoft-rolls-out-november-2019-windows-10-update.html).” Now It's Really, Truly Time to Give Up Windows 7 (https://www.wired.com/story/time-give-up-windows-7/) Google acquires AppSheet to bring no-code development to Google Cloud (http://axios.link/JlHc) Check out that Agriculture Inspection app (https://www.appsheet.com/samples/A-mobile-app-for-agricultural-fieldcrop-inspections-and-reports?appGuidString=b3accf6f-4aac-48fa-bce3-be0d7400f932)! Stack Overflow Bolsters Leadership Team With New Chief Product Officer, Teresa Dietrich (https://apnews.com/Business%20Wire/fc8d802729a94adfa795266ab3aecd52) Spotify Is Now the Single Biggest Podcasting Platform (https://www.fool.com/investing/2020/01/14/spotify-is-now-the-single-biggest-podcasting-platf.aspx) Rob Bearden takes over as Cloudera CEO (https://www.zdnet.com/article/rob-bearden-takes-over-as-cloudera-ceo/) Microsoft Azure has an edge over Amazon Web Services at big companies, Goldman Sachs survey says (https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/07/microsoft-azure-cloud-winner-at-big-companies-goldman-sachs.html) Observability — A 3-Year Retrospective (https://thenewstack.io/observability-a-3-year-retrospective/) Anthos Ups Google’s Enterprise Efforts (https://go.forrester.com/blogs/anthos-ups-googles-enterprise-efforts/) The president of Marc Benioff's Time reveals how he plans to restore the neglected title and make it a billion-dollar business (https://apple.news/A_3dkPprHQBWldgSNqU0-4Q) The Endgame for LinkedIn Is Coming (https://medium.com/@lancengym/the-endgame-for-linkedin-is-coming-31d4a8b2a76) Equinix is acquiring bare metal cloud provider Packet (https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/14/equinix-is-acquiring-bare-metal-cloud-provider-packet/) Your iPhone can now help you securely log into your Google account with a simple tap (https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/15/google-smart-lock-for-iphone-update-lets-you-log-in-to-google-securely.html) Google pays $160m for Irish retail tech company Pointy (http://axios.link/5dMw) Mozilla lays off 70 as it waits for new products to generate revenue (https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/15/mozilla-lays-off-70-as-it-waits-for-subscription-products-to-generate-revenue/) M&A: Negotiations Don't Start Until Someone Says No (https://www.channele2e.com/investors/mergers-acquisitions/ma-negotiations-dont-start-until-someone-says-no/) Red Hat OpenShift Updates Hit Multi-Cloud, Security (https://www.sdxcentral.com/articles/news/red-hat-openshift-updates-hit-multi-cloud-security/2020/01/?utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzRss&utm_campaign=sdxcentral) Introducing Red Hat OpenShift 4.3 to Enhance Kubernetes Security (https://blog.openshift.com/introducing-red-hat-openshift-4-3-to-enhance-kubernetes-security/) Nonsense Top 20 IT Podcasts of 2020 (https://www.vertitechit.com/top-20-it-podcasts-of-2020/) When Buying in Bulk Is a Mistake (https://apple.news/Av1aOhCiBRG-HJYmWPBWwYQ) Zero Mass Water has a new rooftop well that pulls water out of the air (https://venturebeat.com/2020/01/06/zero-mass-water-has-a-new-rooftop-well-that-pulls-water-out-of-the-air/) CES 2020: The Planty Cube Aims to Make Vertical Farming More Modular and Automated (https://thespoon.tech/ces-2020-the-planty-cube-aims-to-make-vertical-farming-more-modular-and-automated/) Sponsors Arrested DevOps Podcast: If you are a Software Defined Talk Listener then we know you love Tech Podcasts and this week sponsor is another great tech podcast — Arrested DevOps. The Arrested DevOps podcast will help you achieve understanding, develop good practices, and operate your team and organization for maximum DevOps awesomeness. Arrested DevOps is hosted by Matt Stratton, Trevor Hess, and Bridget Kromhout. All the hosts are active in the DevOps community and they help put on DevOps days all over the world. So what are you waiting for you can subscribe today by searching for “Arrested DevOps” in you favorite podcast app or by visiting (https://www.arresteddevops.com/)https://www.arresteddevops.com/ (https://www.arresteddevops.com/). Conferences, et. al. NO-SSH-JJ wants you go to DeliveryConf (https://www.deliveryconf.com/) in Seattle on Jan 21st & 22nd (https://www.deliveryconf.com/), Use promo code: SDT10 to get 10% off. JJ wants you to read about Delivery Conf Format too (https://www.deliveryconf.com/format). June 1-4: ChefConf 2020 (https://chefconf.chef.io/) KubeCon EU (https://events.linuxfoundation.org/kubecon-cloudnativecon-europe/), March 30 – April 2, use discount code KCEUSDP15 for 15% off. DevOpsDays Austin 2020 (https://devopsdays.org/events/2020-austin/welcome/) May 4th and 5th Listener Brett wants you to go to THAT Conference (https://www.thatconference.com/wi) August 3 - 6, 2020 - Kalahari Resort, Wisconsin Dells, WI. Call for Counselors (https://www.thatconference.com/wi/call-for-counselors) (Speakers) open until March 1st. SDT news & hype Join us in Slack (http://www.softwaredefinedtalk.com/slack). Send your postal address to stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com (mailto:stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com) and we will send you free laptop stickers! Follow us on Twitter (https://twitter.com/softwaredeftalk), Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/softwaredefinedtalk/) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/software-defined-talk/) Listen to the Software Defined Interviews Podcast (https://www.softwaredefinedinterviews.com/). Check out the back catalog (http://cote.coffee/howtotech/). Brandon built the Quick Concall iPhone App (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/quick-concall/id1399948033?mt=8) and he wants you to buy it for $0.99. Use the code SDT to get $20 off Coté’s book, (https://leanpub.com/digitalwtf/c/sdt) Digital WTF (https://leanpub.com/digitalwtf/c/sdt), so $5 total. Recommendations Matt: Bruce Sterling’s annual State of the World (https://people.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/507/State-of-the-World-2020-Bruce-St-page01.html). Brandon: Slack cleaner (https://github.com/kfei/slack-cleaner). (https://github.com/kfei/slack-cleaner) (https://github.com/kfei/slack-cleaner) Coté: Apple News+?

We discuss weird speculation that Google Cloud would buy Salesforce. It seems like bullshit, mostly, but it gives us a good jumping off point to talk cloud strategy. Also, Coté talks about being part of the VMware Tanzu team, how kubernetes could become the white box of the PC market (this is a good thing), that being #3 in a market is probably just fine, and we discuss poisoning-by-bread. Mood board: This is a New Year’s resolution we can all get behind: it’s time to just give up on some stuff. Man, this coffee is bad. Carbohydrate Coté is angry. Coté gets his birthday wrong. You’re really just pretty negative. Our man in Tanzu-land Cotem. After the headline, that article didn’t need to be written more. I’m not going to get into it, so here I go. The Turn the hydra head into a nanny acquisition strategy. Man, I should have just started with the bread. Relevant to your interests Tanzu Coté - VMware completes $2.7 billion Pivotal acquisition (https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/30/vmware-completes-2-7-billion-pivotal-acquisition/). Google buying Salesforce acid-dream - Google could acquire Salesforce and spin out its cloud business to catch up to Amazon and Microsoft, analyst predicts (https://www.businessinsider.com/google-salesforce-cloud-platform-spinout-analyst-prediction-2020-1) ServiceNow! Sort of examples the vagueness of Google’s Cloud Corporate Strategy. Drunk under a lamp post M&A click-bait strategy. “We only want to be #1 and #2 in a market.” Known fix: just redefine your market so you’re number one or number two. Share price premium for # 1 or #2 in the market. Pay people cheaper than you get paid to do things fallacy. Google 2023 deadline for Google Cloud to beat Amazon. Things we didn’t get to - Gartner, Splunk & McKinsey – IT Infrastructure & Operations (https://www.forbes.com/sites/steveandriole/2019/12/16/gartner-splunk--mckinsey--it-infrastructure--operations-------------predictions-for-2020/#35937dbe1dd2) A Cloud Guru Announces Acquisition of Linux Academy (https://www.prweb.com/releases/a_cloud_guru_announces_acquisition_of_linux_academy/prweb16790924.htm) For The New York Times, a swing and a miss at Amazon Web Services (https://mostlycloudy.substack.com/p/for-the-new-york-times-a-swing-and) Google execs reportedly debated getting out of cloud computing, but instead set a goal of being a top-two player by 2023 (https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/17/google-reportedly-wants-to-be-top-two-player-in-cloud-by-2023.html) Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microsoft in Cloud (https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-brass-set-2023-as-deadline-to-beat-amazon-microsoft-in-cloud) Stratoscale closes down, lays off 60 (https://en.globes.co.il/en/article-stratoscale-closes-down-lays-off-60-1001310966) Anyscale, from the creators of the Ray distributed computing project, launches with $20.6M led by a16z (https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/17/anyscale-ray-project-distributed-computing-a16z/) Compare Red Hat OpenShift vs. Cloud Foundry in a Kubernetes faceoff (https://searchitoperations.techtarget.com/feature/Compare-Red-Hat-OpenShift-vs-Cloud-Foundry-in-a-Kubernetes-faceoff) IBM tailors Swift relationship after 'review of open source priorities' (https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/12/17/swift_ibm_pulls_back_open_source_priorities/) AWS hits back at open-source software critics (https://www.zdnet.com/article/aws-hits-back-at-open-source-software-critics/) Amazon Conference Badges Tracked Attendees' Movements (https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/pkeyqk/amazon-conference-badges-tracked-attendees-movements) IBM to Google: Istio, Knative, TensorFlow should be under 'open governance' (https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/12/20/ibm_istio_knative_tensorflow_should_be_under_open_governance/) Exclusive: Pentagon warns military members DNA kits pose ‘personal and operational risks’ (https://news.yahoo.com/pentagon-warns-military-members-dna-kits-pose-personal-and-operational-risks-173304318.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAE0JhKe_XfOhdcOGvu6l8lKLn4C2yptTBJ5q1RVejnyxYCU2HLoo2WWccf-ZhDFh5OUypD2mJND5PxZEF3m4bogO9BX6tTYVB9uywg1EQV8AvLXUFPBf-EyrE4vISxKZM8HAMVVeUc5xiPum5ez9MGcjuPy2SeMNwN_hnO-IXbdM) Employee error to blame for massive data leak (https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/12/surveillance-camera-company-wyze-confirms-leak-of-user-data/) Video games are easy channel for money launderers (https://www.ft.com/content/4658d340-24f6-11ea-9a4f-963f0ec7e134) BigID bags another $50M round as data privacy laws proliferate (https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/06/bigid-bags-another-50m-round-as-data-privacy-laws-proliferate/) The Biggest Problems With Bluetooth Audio Are About to Be Fixed (https://news.google.com/articles/CAIiENtnIajSFSjFkfxM7Anh2o0qFQgEKg0IACoGCAowlIECMLBMMJ-mHg?hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US%3Aen) Introducing Cloudflare for Teams (https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-cloudflare-for-teams/) Major union launches campaign to organize video game and tech workers (https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2020-01-07/major-union-launches-campaign-to-organize-video-game-and-tech-workers) Code-wise, cloud-foolish: avoiding bad technology choices (https://forrestbrazeal.com/2020/01/05/code-wise-cloud-foolish-avoiding-bad-technology-choices/) Accenture Buys CyberSecurity Services Business of Symantec (http://www.finsmes.com/2020/01/accenture-buys-cyber-security-services-business-of-symantec.html) Sponsors Arrested DevOps Podcast: Arrested DevOps is hosted by Matt Stratton, Trevor Hess, and Bridget Kromhout. All the hosts are active in the DevOps community and they help put on DevOps days all over the world. So what are you waiting for you can subscribe today by searching for “Arrested DevOps” in you favorite podcast app or by visiting (https://www.arresteddevops.com/)https://www.arresteddevops.com/ (https://www.arresteddevops.com/). Conferences, et. al. NO-SSH-JJ wants you go to DeliveryConf (https://www.deliveryconf.com/) in Seattle on Jan 21st & 22nd (https://www.deliveryconf.com/), Use promo code: SDT10 to get 10% off. JJ wants you to read about Delivery Conf Format too (https://www.deliveryconf.com/format). June 1-4: ChefConf 2020 (https://chefconf.chef.io/) Jordi wants you to go to GitLab Commit (https://about.gitlab.com/events/commit/) Jan. 14th DevOpsDays Austin 2020 (https://devopsdays.org/events/2020-austin/welcome/) May 4th and 5th SDT news & hype Join us in Slack (http://www.softwaredefinedtalk.com/slack). Send your postal address to stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com (mailto:stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com) and we will send you free laptop stickers! Follow us on Twitter (https://twitter.com/softwaredeftalk), Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/softwaredefinedtalk/) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/software-defined-talk/) Listen to the Software Defined Interviews Podcast (https://www.softwaredefinedinterviews.com/). Check out the back catalog (http://cote.coffee/howtotech/). Brandon built the Quick Concall iPhone App (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/quick-concall/id1399948033?mt=8) and he wants you to buy it for $0.99. Use the code SDT to get $20 off Coté’s book, (https://leanpub.com/digitalwtf/c/sdt) Digital WTF (https://leanpub.com/digitalwtf/c/sdt), so $5 total. Recommendations Matt: Star Wars/Mandalorian, The 15 most awe-inspiring space images of the decade (https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2019/12/18/20995427/astronomy-pluto-black-hole-mars-curiosity-rosetta) Brandon: macOS Catalina Patcher (http://dosdude1.com/catalina/); Upgrade your Mac SSD (https://mattray.github.io/2019/11/12/upgrading-macbook-pro-ssds.html) Coté: iPhone 11 Pro, most recent (https://www.vox.com/the-weeds) The Weeds (https://www.vox.com/the-weeds) episode (https://www.vox.com/the-weeds), The Weeds episode called “Midichlorian chili.” (https://overcast.fm/+FOOQJ9lCo) Ourto: “I love bread,” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtV9Vi6tSVk) Parry Gripp.

When humans are faced with a traumatic experience, our brains kick in with survival mechanisms. These mechanisms are the familiar fight or flight response, but can also include the freeze response - which occurs when we are terrified or feel that there is no chance of escape. The communication, coordination, and decision-making skills needed to battle this are amongst the most sought-after skills. In our latest episode of CCC Talks, Matt Stratton explains how and why you should seek to remedy trauma.

SHOW: 74SHOW OVERVIEW: Chris talks with Matt Stratton (@mattstratton, DevOps Advocate, PagerDuty) about how to better manage OnCall Rotations, integrating DevOps concepts with OnCall, and suggestions about better organizing to handle alerting and observability.SHOW NOTES:OpenShift Homepage - http://openshift.comTry OpenShift 4 - http://try.openshift.comLearn OpenShift - http://learn.openshift.comMatty Stratton - DevOps TalksArrested DevOps (podcast) - Matty Stratton is a co-hostSHOW TOPICS:Topic 1 - Since you work at PagerDuty, how does PagerDuty use PagerDuty?Topic 2 - What are some interesting uses of PagerDuty you’ve seen out in the wild?Topic 3 - You’ve built on call rotations. You’ve got your scars. One thing I’ve noticed is discussions about alert fatigue. Do you have any suggestions around how organization can better handle on call and alerting in general? (“Fight, Flight, or Freeze - Releasing Organizational Trauma”)Topic 4 - DevOps at 10. For me, DevOps crossing into that double-digit year number seems to have increased awareness of it and its potential for orgs not embracing it. What have you seen in terms of organizations embracing DevOps? What are Matt’s highlights of DevOps after ten years?Topic 5 - You're writing an article on SysAdvent website called “15 Ways to Make On-Call More Fun”; It’s supposed to be published around December 3rd. Watch https://sysadvent.blogspot.com/ for this year’s stuff.FEEDBACK?Email: PodCTL at gmail dot comTwitter: @PodCTLWeb: http://podcast.podctl.com

PJ sits down with his good friend and fellow DevOps enthusiast, Matt Stratton of PagerDuty. The pair discuss observability, DevOps, SecOps, PagerDuty Summit, and the importance of community interaction.    

Matt Stratton beams aboard the Datanauts starship to share his opinions and experiences with DevOps. Is DevOps a role you can hire for, or a culture you create? If it's the later, how do you get started, what are the impacts, and how do you iterate? The post Datanauts 166: Can You Hire ‘DevOps’? appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Matt Stratton beams aboard the Datanauts starship to share his opinions and experiences with DevOps. Is DevOps a role you can hire for, or a culture you create? If it's the later, how do you get started, what are the impacts, and how do you iterate? The post Datanauts 166: Can You Hire ‘DevOps’? appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Matt Stratton beams aboard the Datanauts starship to share his opinions and experiences with DevOps. Is DevOps a role you can hire for, or a culture you create? If it's the later, how do you get started, what are the impacts, and how do you iterate? The post Datanauts 166: Can You Hire ‘DevOps’? appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Matty’s Talk, Fight, Flight, or Freeze — Releasing Organizational Trauma @ REdeploy 2018 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_ITD-l8fuo) 02:59 – Matt’s Superpower: Taking metaphors and ideas around self-help and turning them into allegories and analogies of how we could be better at technology The Five Love Languages of DevOps (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGCfwvjHKGI) The Four Agreements of Incident Response (https://noti.st/mattstratton/F827sZ) 03:58 – What does healing organizational trauma mean? 05:50 – Incident Response Communication 16:00 – Trust, Hyperarousal, and Hypoarousal; Stuck On or Stuck Off 23:32 – Leading By Example, Not Being in a Rush to Solve Problems, Seeking to Understand, and Encouraging Safety 29:23 – Handling Postmortems: How to do them well and how to do them effectively 39:17 – The Hero’s Story vs The Story of the People; Crafting Our Narratives John Allspaw: In the Center of the Cyclone: Finding Sources of Resilience (https://re-deploy.io/videos/11-allspaw.html) Reflections: Coraline: The metaphors of storytelling. Matty: Creating a forum of discussion around postmortems. Janelle: Thinking about Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0226468011/ref=as_li_qf_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=therubyrep-20&creative=9325&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN=0226468011&linkId=73f5c4c2470b0803b490491e0c0355e2) and how, at the foundation of our mind is essentially a system of shapes that we see the world through, that we reason about through, that we feel emotions through, and that creates the sense of gut. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode). To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Amazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks! Special Guest: Matt Stratton.

Listen to my conversation with DevOps expert Matt Stratton. This is a great introduction to DevOps!

Our guest on the podcast this week is Matt Stratton, Senior Solutions Architect at Chef and Co-Host of the Arrested DevOps Podcast. We discuss building DevOps communities in new cities with DevOps days, as well as best practices from Orbitz and Target in DevOps adoption. Matt highlights great ways to start small with DevOps (maybe even without calling it DevOps) in your organization to gain traction and prove results to make adoption smoother in large companies.

Nick Schoenbachler, Jordan Berry, Miles Backstrom, and Matt Stratton recite passages from the Sermon on the Mount and give testimonies about scripture memorization.

This week we have an interview with Mike Tai and Matt Stratton of apartments.com.  Mike and Matt share with us some of the things that make their website (which gets over 4 million unique visitors a month) scale. Download / Listen to the Show http://shows.thirstydeveloper.com/TD062.mp3 New Twitter Feed Thirsty Developer has a twitter feed, friend us at http://twitter.com/thirstyd