Podcasts about matty stratton

Send us a textDevOps dropped on the masses in 2008, but where is it today? In this episode, we dive deep into the evolution of DevOps with Matty Stratton, Solutions Architect at Turbot and Co-Host of the Arrested DevOps Podcast. Matty shares his journey from traditional IT operations to becoming a prominent voice in the DevOps community. We explore how DevOps principles have evolved over the past decade, the challenges of implementing cultural change in organizations, and the rise of platform engineering as a discipline. Matty offers valuable insights on team dynamics, organizational structure, and the importance of understanding incentives when driving technological transformation. Whether you're a seasoned DevOps practitioner or just beginning to explore this space, this conversation provides thought-provoking perspectives on the past, present, and future of how we build and operate technology.Where to Find Matty StrattonLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattstratton/Public Bio: https://speaking.mattstratton.com/bioCompany: https://turbot.com/Arrested DevOps Podcast: https://www.arresteddevops.com/Show LinksDevOpsDays Chicago: https://devopsdays.org/events/2025-chicago/welcome/Five Love Languages of DevOps: https://speaking.mattstratton.com/A5u6CE/slidesThe Westrum Model: https://itrevolution.com/articles/westrums-organizational-model-in-tech-orgs/CALMS Framework: https://www.atlassian.com/devops/frameworks/calms-frameworkFollow, Like, and Subscribe!Podcast: https://www.thecloudgambit.com/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheCloudGambitLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/thecloudgambitTwitter: https://twitter.com/TheCloudGambitTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thecloudgambit

How did Chef and Puppet shape the early days of Infrastructure as Code? Join Matty Stratton as he shares his experiences with these foundational tools and how they paved the way for modern IaC practices. We explore the power of open-source solutions and how they've transformed DevOps workflows.Matty Stratton is the Director of Developer Relations at Aiven, a well-known member of the DevOps community, founder and co-host of the popular Arrested DevOps podcast, and a global organizer of the DevOpsDays set of conferences.Matty 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.

Over the past few years, we've seen conferences ebb and flow. Some community-run conferences have evolved into new things, new ones have sprouted up while other annual favorites have sadly gone extinct. What goes into a community-led conference? How does someone get involved? Let's take a look! Checkouts Mo McElaney * Contributor Covenant (https://www.contributor-covenant.org/) * Presented “Digital Discrimination: Cognitive Bias in Machine Learning (and LLMs!)“ at PyData Conf on July 29 (https://pydata.org/vermont2024) - look out for the video! * Speaking at AI for the Rest of Us Conf (https://aifortherestofus.live/) in London this fall * Ask a Master Gardener Hotline (https://www.uvm.edu/extension/mastergardener/helpline)! Matty Stratton * Hevy (https://www.hevyapp.com/) - lifting app * She's a Beast (https://www.shesabeast.co/) - great program Couch to Barbell; amazing discord for folks/community * Fallout - the game (https://fallout.bethesda.net/en) and the show (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt12637874)! * Devopsdays Chicago CFP (devopsdays.org/chicago) opens Aug 5! Wesley Faulkner * You're Not Listening (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07WJ6MR2P?ref=cm_sw_r_cp_ud_dp_SRV1JX89CDECDC3YMAD4&ref_=cm_sw_r_cp_ud_dp_SRV1JX89CDECDC3YMAD4&social_share=cm_sw_r_cp_ud_dp_SRV1JX89CDECDC3YMAD4) by Kate Murphy Jason Hand * Wild Spaces (https://www.wildspaces.work/) * Becoming SRE (https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/becoming-sre/9781492090540/) * You Have Not Heard Your Favorite Song: How Streaming Changes Music (https://www.amazon.com/Have-Heard-Your-Favourite-Song/dp/191448715X) by Glenn McDonald Enjoy the podcast? Please take a few moments to leave us a review on iTunes (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/community-pulse/id1218368182?mt=2) and follow us on Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/3I7g5W9fMSgpWu38zZMjet?si=eb528c7de12b4d7a&nd=1&dlsi=b0c85248dabc48ce), or leave a review on one of the other many podcasting sites that we're on! Your support means a lot to us and helps us continue to produce episodes every month. Like all things Community, this too takes a village. Artwork Photo by Tyler Callahan (https://unsplash.com/@tylercallahan?utm_content=creditCopyText&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=unsplash) on Unsplash (https://unsplash.com/@tylercallahan?utm_content=creditCopyText&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=unsplash) Special Guests: Matty Stratton and Mo McElaney.

Matty Stratton, Director of Developer Relations at Aiven, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud for a friendly debate on whether or not company employees can still be considered community members. Corey says no, but opens up his position to the slings and arrows of Matty in an entertaining change of pace. Matty explains why he feels company employees can still be considered community members, and also explores how that should be done in a way that is transparent and helpful to everyone in the community. Matty and Corey also explore the benefits and drawbacks of talented community members becoming employees.About MattyMatty Stratton is the Director of Developer Relations at Aiven, a well-known member of the DevOps community, founder and co-host of the popular Arrested DevOps podcast, and a global organizer of the DevOpsDays set of conferences.Matty 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. Demonstrating his keen insight into the changing landscape of technology, he recently changed his license plate from DEVOPS to KUBECTL.He lives in Chicago and has three awesome kids, whom he loves just a little bit more than he loves Diet Coke. Links Referenced: Aiven: https://aiven.io/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/mattstratton Mastodon: hackyderm.io/@mattstratton LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattstratton/ 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 brought to us in part by our friends at Min.ioWith more than 1.1 billion docker pulls - Most of which were not due to an unfortunate loop mistake, like the kind I like to make - and more than 37 thousand github stars, (which are admittedly harder to get wrong), MinIO has become the industry standard alternative to S3. It runs everywhere  - public clouds, private clouds, Kubernetes distributions, baremetal, raspberry's pi, colocations - even in AWS Local Zones. The reason people like it comes down to its simplicity, scalability, enterprise features and best in class throughput. Software-defined and capable of running on almost any hardware you can imagine and some you probably can't, MinIO can handle everything you can throw at it - and AWS has imagined a lot of things - from datalakes to databases.Don't take their word for it though - check it out at www.min.io and see for yourself. That's www.min.io Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. I am joined today by returning guest, my friend and yours, Matty Stratton, Director of Developer Relations at Aiven. Matty, it's been a hot second. How are you?Matty: It has been a while, but been pretty good. We have to come back to something that just occurred to me when we think about the different things we've talked about. There was a point of contention about prior art of the Corey Quinn face and photos. I don't know if you saw that discourse; we may have to have a conversation. There may be some absent—Corey: I did not see—Matty: Okay.Corey: —discourse, but I also would accept freely that I am not the first person to ever come up with the idea of opening my mouth and looking ridiculous for a photograph either.Matty: That's fair, but the thing that I think was funny—and if you don't mind, I'll just go ahead and throw this out here—is that I didn't put this two and two together. So, I posted a picture on Twitter a week or so ago that was primarily to show off the fact—it was a picture of me in 1993, and the point was that my jeans were French-rolled and were pegged. But in the photo, I am doing kind of the Corey Quinn face and so people said, “Oh, is this prior art?” And I said—you know what? I actually just remembered and I've never thought about this before, but one of my friends in high school, for his senior year ID he took a picture—his picture looks like, you know, that kind of, you know, three-quarters turn with the mouth opening going, “Ah,” you know?And he loved that picture—number one, he loved that picture so much that this guy carried his senior year high school ID in his wallet until we were like 25 because it was his favorite picture of himself. But every photo—and I saw this from looking through my yearbook of my friend Jay when we are seniors, he's doing the Corey Quinn face. And he is anecdotally part of the DevOps community, now a little bit too, and I haven't pointed this out to him. But people were saying that, you know, mine was prior art on yours, I said, “Actually, I was emulating yet someone else.”Corey: I will tell you the actual story of how it started. It was at re:Invent, I want to say 2018 or so, and what happened was is someone, they were a big fan of the newsletter—sort of the start of re:Invent—they said, “Hey, can I get a selfie with you?” And I figured, sure, why not. And the problem I had is I've always looked bad in photographs. And okay, great, so if I'm going to have a photo taken of me, that's going to be ridiculous, why not as a lark, go ahead and do this for fun during the course of re:Invent this year?So, whenever I did that I just slapped—if someone asked for a selfie—I'd slap the big happy open mouth smile on my face. And people thought, “Oh, my God, this is amazing.” And I don't know that it was necessarily worth that level of enthusiasm, but okay. I'll take it. I'm not here to tell people they're wrong when they enjoy a joke that I'm putting out there.And it just sort of stuck. And I think the peak of it that I don't think I'm ever going to be able to beat is I actually managed to pull that expression on my driver's license.Matty: Wow.Corey: Yeah.Matty: That's—Corey: They don't have a sense of humor that they are aware of at the DMV.Matty: No, they really don't. And having been to the San Francisco DMV and knowing how long it takes to get in there, like, that was a bit of a risk on your part because if they decided to change their mind, you wouldn't be able to come back for another four months [laugh].Corey: It amused me to do it, so why not? What else was I going to do? I brought my iPad with me, it has cellular on it, so I just can work remotely from there. It was either that or working in my home office again, and frankly, at the height of the pandemic, I could use the break.Matty: Yes [laugh]. That's saying something when the break you can use is going to the DMV.Corey: Right.Matty: That's a little bit where we were, where we at. I think just real quick thinking about that because there's a lot to be said with that kind of idea of making a—whether it's silly or not, but having a common, especially if you do a lot of photos, do a lot of things, you don't have to think about, like, how do I look? I mean, you have to think about—you know, you can just say I just know what I do. Because if you think about it, it's about cultivating your smile, cultivating your look for your photos, and just sort of having a way so you don't—you just know what to do every time. I guess that's a, you know, maybe a model tip or something. I don't know. But you might be onto something.Corey: I joke that my entire family motto is never be the most uncomfortable person in the room. And there's something to be said for it where if you're going to present a certain way, make it your own. Find a way to at least stand out. If nothing else, it's a bit different. Most people don't do that.Remember, we've all got made fun of, generally women—for some reason—back about 15 years ago or so for duck face, where in all the pictures you're making duck face. And well, there are reasons why that is a flattering way to present your face. But if there's one thing we love as a society, it's telling women they're doing something wrong.Matty: Yeah.Corey: So yeah, there's a whole bunch of ways you're supposed to take selfies or whatnot. Honestly, I'm in no way shape or form pretty enough or young enough to care about any of them. At this point, it's what I do when someone busts out a camera and that's the end of it. Now, am I the only person to do this? Absolutely not. Do I take ownership of it? No. Someone else wants to do it, they need give no credit. The idea probably didn't come from me.Matty: And to be fair, if I'm little bit taking the mickey there or whatever about prior art, it was more than I thought it was funny because I had not even—it was this thing where it was like, this is a good friend of mine, probably some of that I've been friends with longer than anyone in my whole life, and it was a core part [laugh] of his personality when we were 18 and 19, and it just d—I just never direct—like, made that connection. And then it happened to me and went “Oh, my God. Jason and Corey did the same thing.” [laugh]. It was—Corey: No, it feels like parallel evolution.Matty: Yeah, yeah. It was more of me never having connected those dots. And again, you're making that face for your DMV photo amused you, me talking about this for the last three minutes on a podcast amused me. So.Corey: And let's also be realistic here. How many ways are there to hold your face during a selfie that is distinguishable and worthy of comment? Usually, it's like okay, well, he has this weird sardonic half-smile with an eyebrow ar—no. His mouth was wide open. We're gonna go with that.Matty: You know, there's a little—I want to kind of—because I think there's actually quite a bit to the lesson from any of this because I think about—follow me here; maybe I'll get to the right place—like me and karaoke. No one would ever accuse me of being a talented singer, right? I'm not going to sing well in a way where people are going to be moved by my talent. So instead, I have to go a different direction. I have to go funny.But what it boils down to is I can only do—I do karaoke well when it's a song where I can feel like I'm doing an impression of the singer. So, for example, the B-52s. I do a very good impression of Fred Schneider. So, I can sing a B-52 song all day long. I actually could do better with Pearl Jam than I should be able to with my terrible voice because I'm doing an Eddie Vedder impression.So, what I'm getting at is you're sort of taking this thing where you're saying, okay, to your point, you said, “Hey,”—and your words, not mine—[where 00:07:09] somebody say, “The picture is not going to be of me looking like blue steel runway model, so I might as well look goofy.” You know? And take it that way and be funny with it. And also, every time, it's the same way, so I think it's a matter of kind of owning the conversation, you know, and saying, how do you accentuate the thing that you can do. I don't know. There's something about DevOps, somehow in there.Corey: So, I am in that uncomfortable place right now between having finalized a blog post slash podcast that's going out in two days from this recording. So, it will go out before you and I have this discussion publicly, but it's also too late for me to change any of it,m so I figured I will open myself up to the slings and arrows of you, more or less. And you haven't read this thing yet, which is even better, so you're now going to be angry about an imperfect representation of what I said in writing. But the short version is this: if you work for a company as their employee, then you are no longer a part of that company's community, as it were. And yes, that's nuanced and it's an overbroad statement and there are a bunch of ways that you could poke holes in it, but I'm curious to get your take on the overall positioning of it.Matty: So, at face value, I would vehemently disagree with that statement. And by that is, that I have spent years of my life tilting at the opposite windmill, which is just because you work at this company, doesn't mean you do not participate in the community and should not consider yourself a part of the community, first and foremost. That will, again, like everything else, it depends. It depends on a lot of things and I hope we can kind of explore that a little bit because just as much as I would take umbrage if you will, or whatnot, with the statement that if you work at the company, you stop being part of the community, I would also have an issue with, you're just automatically part of the community, right? Because these things take effort.And I feel like I've been as a devreloper, or whatever, Corey—how do you say it?Corey: Yep. No, you're right on. Devreloper.Matty: As a—or I would say, as a DevRel, although people on Twitter are angry about using the word DevRel to discuss—like saying, “I'm a DevRel.” “DevRel is a department.” It's a DevOps engineer thing again, except actually—it's, like, actually wrong. But anyway, you kind of run into this, like for example—I'm going to not name names here—but, like, to say, you know, Twitter for Pets, the—what do you—by the way, Corey, what are you going to do now for your made-up company when what Twitter is not fun for this anymore? You can't have Twitter for Pets anymore.Corey: I know I'm going to have to come up with a new joke. I don't quite know what to do with myself.Matty: This is really hard. While we will pretend Twitter for Pets is still around a little bit, even though its API is getting shut down.Corey: Exactly.Matty: So okay, so we're over here at Twitter for Pets, Inc. And we've got our—Corey: Twitter for Bees, because you know it'll at least have an APIary.Matty: Yeah. Ha. We have our team of devrelopers and community managers and stuff and community engineers that work at Twitter for Pets, and we have all of our software engineers and different people. And a lot of times the assumption—and now we're going to have Twitter for Pets community something, right? We have our community, we have our area, our place that we interact, whether it's in person, it's virtual, whether it's an event, whether it's our Discord or Discourse or Slack or whatever [doodlee 00:10:33] thing we're doing these days, and a lot of times, all those engineers and people whose title does not have the word ‘community' on it are like, “Oh, good. Well, we have people that do that.”So, number one, no because now we have people whose priority is it; like, we have more intentionality. So, if I work on the community team, if I'm a dev advocate or something like that, my priority is communicating and advocating to and for that community. But it's like a little bit of the, you know, the office space, I take the requirements from the [unintelligible 00:11:07] to people, you I give them to the engineers. I've got people—so like, you shouldn't have to have a go-between, right? And there's actually quite a bit of place.So, I think, this sort of assumption that you're not part of it and you have no responsibility towards that community, first of all, you're missing a lot as a person because that's just how you end up with people building a thing they don't understand.Corey: Oh, I think you have tremendous responsibility to the community, but whether you're a part of it and having responsibility to it or not aligned in my mind.Matty: So… maybe let's take a second and what do you mean by being a part of it?Corey: Right. Where very often I'll see a certain, I don't know, very large cloud provider will have an open-source project. Great, so you go and look at the open-source project and the only people with commit access are people who work at that company. That is an easy-to-make-fun-of example of this. Another is when the people who are in a community and talking about how they perceive things and putting out content about how they've interacted with various aspects of it start to work there, you see areas where it starts to call its authenticity into question.AWS is another great example of this. As someone in the community, I can talk about how I would build something on top of AWS, but then move this thing on to Fastly instead of CloudFront because CloudFront is terrible. If you work there, you're not going to be able to say the same thing. So, even if you're not being effusive with praise, there are certain guardrails and constraints that keep you from saying what you might otherwise, just based upon the sheer self-interest that comes from the company whose product or service you're talking about is also signing your paycheck and choosing to continue to do so.Matty: And I think even less about it because that's where your paycheck is coming. It's also just a—there's a gravitational pull towards those solutions because that's just what you're spending your day with, right? You know—Corey: Yeah. And you also don't want to start and admit even to yourself, in some cases, that okay, this aspect of what our company does is terrible, so companies—people shouldn't use it. You want to sort of ignore that, on some level, psychologically because that dissonance becomes harmful.Matty: Yeah. And I think there's—so again, this is where things get nuanced and get to levels. Because if you have the right amount of psychological safety in your organization, the organization understands what it's about to that. Because even people whose job is to be a community person should be able to say, “Hey, this is my actual opinion on this. And it might be contrary to the go-to-market where that comes in.”But it's hard, especially when it gets filtered through multiple layers and now you've got a CEO who doesn't understand that nuance who goes, “Wait, why was Corey on some podcast saying that the Twitter for Pets API is not everything it could possibly be?” So, I do think—I will say this—I do think that organizations and leadership are understanding this more than they might have in the past, so we are maybe putting on ourselves this belief that we can't be as fully honest, but even if it's not about hiding the warts, even if it's just a matter of also, you're just like, hey, chances are—plus also to be quite frank, if I work at the company, I probably have access to way more shit than I would have to pay for or do whatever and I know the right way. But here's the trick, and I won't even say it's a dogfooding thing, but if you are not learning and thinking about things the way that your users do—and I will even say that that's where—it is the users, which are the community, that community or the people that use your product or are connected to it, they don't use it; they may be anecdotal—or not anecdotally, maybe tangentially connected. I will give an example. And there was a place I was working where it was very clear, like, we had a way to you know, do open-source contributions back of a type of a provider plug-in, whatever you want to call it and I worked at the company and I could barely figure out how to follow the instructions.Because it made a lot of sense to someone who built that software all day long and knew the build patterns, knew all that stuff. So, if you were an engineer at this company, “Well, yeah, of course. You just do this.” And anybody who puts the—connects the dots, this has gotten better—and this was understood relatively quickly as, “Oh, this is the problem. Let's fix it.” So, the thing is, the reason why I bring this up is because it's not something anybody does intentionally because you don't know what you don't know. And—Corey: Oh, I'm not accusing anyone of being a nefarious actor in any of this. I also wonder if part of this is comes from your background as being heavily involved in the Chef community as a Chef employee and as part of the community around that, which is inherently focused on an open-source product that a company has been built around, whereas my primary interaction with community these days is the AWS community, where it doesn't matter whether you're large or small, you are not getting much, if anything, for free from AWS; you're all their customers and you don't really have input into how something gets built, beyond begging nicely.Matty: That's definitely true. And I think we saw that and there was things, when we look at, like, how community, kind of, evolved or just sort of happened at Chef and why we can't recreate it the same way is there was a certain inflection point of the industry and the burgeoning DevOps movement, and there wasn't—you know, so a lot of that was there. But one of the big problems, too, is, as Corey said, everybody—I shouldn't say every, but I've from the A—all the way up to AWS to your smaller startups will have this problem of where you end up hiring in—whether you want to or not—all of your champions and advocates and your really strong community members, and then that ends up happening. So, number one, that's going to happen. So frankly, if you don't push towards this idea, you're actually going to have people not want to come work because you should be able to be still the member that you were before.And the other thing is that at certain size, like, at the size of a hyperscaler, or, you know, a Microsoft—well, anybody—well Microsofts not a hyperscaler, but you know what I'm saying. Like, very, very large organization, your community folks are not necessarily the ones doing that hiring away. And as much as they might—you know, and again, I may be the running the community champion program at Microsoft and see that you want—you know, but that Joe Schmo is getting hired over into engineering. Like, I'm not going to hire Joe because it hurts me, but I can't say you can't, you know? It's so this is a problem at the large size.And at the smaller size, when you're growing that community, it happens, too, because it's really exciting. When there's a place that you're part of that community, especially when there's a strong feel, like going to work for the mothership, so to speak is, like, awesome. So again, to give an example, I was a member of the Chef community, I was a user, a community person well, before, you know, I went and, you know, had a paycheck coming out of that Seattle office. And it was, like, the coolest thing in the world to get a job offer from Ch—like, I was like, “Oh, my God. I get to actually go work there now.” Right?And when I was at Pulumi, there quite a few people I could think of who I knew through the community who then get jobs at Pulumi and we're so excited, and I imagine still excited, you know? I mean, that was awesome to do. So, it's hard because when you get really excited about a technology, then being able to say, “Wait, I can work on this all the time?” That sounds awesome, right? So like, you're going to have that happen.So, I think what you have to do is rather than prevent it from happening because number one, like, you don't want to actually prevent that from happening because those people will actually be really great additions to your organization in lots of ways. Also, you're not going to stop it from happening, right? I mean, it's also just a silly way to do it. All you're going to do is piss people off, and say, like, “Hey, you're not allowed to work here because we need you in the community.” Then they're going to be like, “Great. Well, guess what I'm not a part of anymore now, jerk?” Right? You know [laugh] I mean so—Corey: Exactly.Matty: Your [unintelligible 00:18:50] stops me. So, that doesn't work. But I think to your point, you talked about, like, okay, if you have a, ostensibly this a community project, but all the maintainers are from one—are from your company, you know? Or so I'm going to point to an example of, we had—you know, this was at Pulumi, we had a Champions program called Puluminaries, and then there's something similar to like Vox Populi, but it was kind of the community that was not run by Pulumi Inc. In that case.Now, we helped fund it and helped get it started, but there was there were rules about the, you know, the membership of the leadership, steering committee or board or whatever it was called, there was a hard limit on the number of people that could be Pulumi employees who were on that board. And it actually, as I recall when I was leaving—I imagine this is not—[unintelligible 00:19:41] does sometimes have to adjust a couple of things because maybe those board members become employees and now you have to say, you can't do that anymore or we have to take someone down. But the goal was to actually, you know, basically have—you know, Pulumi Corp wanted to have a voice on that board because if for no other reason, they were funding it, but it was just one voice. It wasn't even a majority voice. And that's a hard sell in a lot of places too because you lose control over that.There's things I know with, uh—when I think about, like, running meetup communities, like, we might be—well I mean, this is not a big secret, I mean because it's been announced, but we're—you know, Aiven is helping bootstrap a bunch of data infrastructure meetups around the world. But they're not Aiven meetups. Now, we're starting them because they have to start, but pretty much our approach is, as soon as this is running and there's people, whether they work here, work with us or not, they can take it, right? Like, if that's go—you know? And being able to do that can be really hard because you have to relinquish the control of your community.And I think you don't have to relinquish a hundred percent of that control because you're helping facilitate it because if it doesn't already have its own thing—to make sure that things like code of conduct and funding of it, and there's things that come along with the okay, we as an organization, as a company that has dollars and euros is going to do stuff for this, but it's not ours. And that's the thing to remember is that your community does not belong to you, the company. You are there to facilitate it, you are there to empower it, you're there to force-multiply it, to help protect it. And yeah, you will probably slurp a whole bunch of value out of it, so this is not magnanimous, but if you want it to actually be a place it's going to work, it kind of has to be what it wants to be. But by the same token, you can't just sort of sit there and be like, “I'm going to wait for this community grow up around me without anything”—you know.So, that's why you do have to start one if there is quote-unquote—maybe if there's no shape to one. But yeah, I think that's… it is different when it's something that feels a little—I don't even want to say that it's about being open-source. It's a little bit about it less of it being a SaaS or a service, or if it's something that you—I don't know.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by Honeycomb. I'm not going to dance around the problem. Your. Engineers. Are. Burned. Out. They're tired from pagers waking them up at 2 am for something that could have waited until after their morning coffee. Ring Ring, Who's There? It's Nagios, the original call of duty! They're fed up with relying on two or three different “monitoring tools” that still require them to manually trudge through logs to decipher what might be wrong. Simply put, there's a better way. Observability tools like Honeycomb (and very little else becau se they do admittedly set the bar) show you the patterns and outliers of how users experience your code in complex and unpredictable environments so you can spend less time firefighting and more time innovating. It's great for your business, great for your engineers, and, most importantly, great for your customers. Try FREE today at honeycomb.io/screaminginthecloud. That's honeycomb.io/screaminginthecloud.Corey: Yeah, I think you're onto something here. I think another aspect where I found it be annoying is when companies view their community as, let's hire them all. And I don't think it ever starts that way. I think that it starts as, well these are people who are super-passionate about this, and they have great ideas and they were great to work with. Could we hire them?And the answer is, “Oh, wait. You can give me money for this thing I've been doing basically for free? Yeah, sure, why not?” And that's great in the individual cases. The problem is, at some point, you start to see scenarios where it feels like, if not everyone, then a significant vocal majority of the community starts to work there.Matty: I think less often than you might think is it done strategically or on purpose. There have been exceptions to that. There's one really clear one where it feels like a certain company a few years ago, hired up all the usual suspects of the DevOps community. All of a sudden, you're like, oh, a dozen people all went to go work at this place all at once. And the fun thing is, I remember feeling a little bit—got my nose a little out of joint because I was not the hiring mana—like, I knew the people.I was like, “Well, why didn't you ask me?” And they said, “Actually, you are more important to us not working here.” Now, that might have just been a way to sell my dude-in-tech ego or not, but whether or not that was actually true for me or not, that is a thing where you say you know, your folks—but I do think that particular example of, like, okay, I'm this, that company, and I'm going to go hire up all the usual suspects, I think that's less. I think a lot of times when you see communities hire up those people, it's not done on purpose and in fact, it's probably not something they actually wanted to do in mass that way. But it happens because people who are passionate about your product, it's like I said before, it actually seems pretty cool to go work on it as your main thing.But I can think of places I've been where we had, you know—again, same thing, we had a Pulumi—we had someone who was probably our strongest, loudest, most vocal community member, and you know, I really wanted to get this person to come join us and that was sort of one of the conversations. Nobody ever said, “We won't offer this person a job if they're great.” Like, that's the thing. I think that's actually kind of would be shitty to be like, “You're a very qualified individual, but you're more important to me out in the community so I'm not going to make your job offer.” But it was like, Ooh, that's the, you know—it'd be super cool to have this person but also, not that that should be part of our calculus of decision, but then you just say, what do you do to mitigate that?Because what I'm concerned about is people hearing this the wrong way and saying, “There's this very qualified individual who wants to come work on my team at my company, but they're also really important to our community and it will hurt our community if they come work here, so sorry, person, we're not going to give you an opportunity to have an awesome job.” Like, that's also thinking about the people involved, too. But I know having talked to folks that lots of these different large organizations that have this problem, generally, those community folks, especially at those places, they don't want this [laugh] happening. They get frustrated by it. So, I mean, I'll tell you, it's you know, the—AWS is one of them, right?They're very excited about a lot of the programs and cool people coming from community builders and stuff and Heroes, you know. On one hand, it's incredibly awesome to have a Hero come work at AWS, but it hurts, right, because now they're not external anymore.Corey: And you stop being a Hero in that case, as well.Matty: Yeah. You do, yeah.Corey: Of course, they also lose the status if they go to one of their major competitors. So like, let me get this straight. You can't be a Hero if you work for AWS or one of its competitors. And okay, how are there any Heroes left at all at some point? And the answer is, they bound it via size and a relatively small list of companies. But okay.Matty: So, thinking back to your point about saying, okay, so if you work at the company, you lose some authenticity, some impartiality, some, you know… I think, rather than just saying, “Well, you're not part”—because that also, honestly, my concern is that your blog post is now going to be ammunition for all the people who don't want to act as members of the community for the company they work for now. They're going to say, well, Corey told me I don't have to. So, like I said, I've been spending the last few years tilting at the opposite windmill, which is getting people that are not on the community team to take part in community summits and discourse and things like that, like, you know, for that's—so I think the thing is, rather than saying, “Well, you can't,” or, “You aren't,” it's like, “Well, what do you do to mitigate those things?”Corey: Yeah, it's a weird thing because taking AWS as the example that I've been beating up on a lot, the vast majority of their employees don't know the community exists in any meaningful sense. Which, no fault to them. The company has so many different things, no one keeps up with at all. But it's kind of nuts to realize that there are huge communities of people out there using a thing you have built and you do not know that those users exist and talk to each other in a particular watering hole. And you of course, as a result, have no presence there. I think that's the wrong direction, too. But—Matty: Mm-hm.Corey: Observing the community and being part of the community, I think there's a difference. Are you a biologist or are you a gorilla?Matty: Okay, but [sigh] I guess that's sort of the difference, too which—and it's hard, it's very hard to not just observe. Because I think that actually even taking the mentality of, “I am here to be Jane Goodall, Dr. Jane Goodall, and observe you while I live amongst you, but I'm not going to actually”—although maybe I'm probably doing disservice—I'm remembering my Goodall is… she was actually more involved. May be a bad example.Corey: Yeah. So, that analogy does fall apart a little bit.Matty: It does fall apart a little bit—Corey: Yeah.Matty: But it's you kind of am I sitting there taking field notes or am I actually engaging with you? Because there is a difference. Even if your main reason for being there is just purely to—I mean, this is not the Prime Directive. It's not Star Trek, right? You're not going to like, hold—you don't need to hold—I mean, do you have to hold yourself aloof and say, “I don't participate in this conversation; I'm just here to take notes?”I think that's very non-genuine at that point. That's over-rotating the other way. But I think it's a matter of in those spaces—I think there's two things. I think you have to have a way to be identified as you are an employee because that's just disclosure.Corey: Oh, I'm not suggesting by any stretch of the imagination, people work somewhere but not admit that they work somewhere when talking about the company. That's called fraud.Matty: Right. No, no, and I don't think it's even—but I'm saying beyond just, if it's not, if you're a cop, you have to tell me, right?Corey: [laugh].Matty: It's like, it's not—if asked, I will tell you I work at AWS. It's like in that place, it should say, “I am an AWS em—” like, I should be badged that way, just so it's clear. I think that's actually helpful in two ways. It's also helpful because it says like, okay, maybe you have a connection you can get for me somehow. Like, you might actually have some different insight or a way to chase something that, you know, it's not necessarily just about disclosure; it's also helpful to know.But I think within those spaces, that disclosure—or not disclosure, but being an employee does not offer you any more authority. And part of that is just having to be very clear about how you're constructing that community, right? And that's sort of the way that I think about it is, like, when we did the Pulumi Community Summit about a year ago, right? It was an online, you know, thing we did, and the timing was such that we didn't have a whole lot of Pulumi engineers were able to join, but when we—and it's hard to say we're going to sit in an open space together and everybody is the same here because people also—here's the difference. You say you want this authority? People will want that authority from the people that work at the company and they will always go to them and say, like, “Well, you should have this answer. Can you tell me about this? Can you do this?”So, it's actually hard on both cases to have that two-way conversation unless you set the rules of that space such as, “Okay, I work at Aiven, but when I'm in this space, short of code of conduct or whatever, if I have to be doing that thing, I have no more authority on this than anyone else.” I'm in this space as the same way everyone else's. You can't let that be assumed.Corey: Oh, and big companies do. It's always someone else's… there's someone else's department. Like, at some level, it feels like when you work in one of those enormous orgs, it's your remit is six inches wide.Matty: Well, right. Right. So, I think it's like your authority exists only so far as it's helpful to somebody. If I'm in a space as an Aivener, I'm there just as Matty the person. But I will say I work at Aiven, so if you're like, “God, I wish that I knew who was the person to ask about this replication issue,” and then I can be like, “Aha, I actually have backchannel. Let me help you with that.” But if I can say, “You know what? This is what I think about Kafka and I think why this is whatever,” like, you can—my opinion carries just as much weight as anybody else's, so to speak. Or—Corey: Yeah. You know, it's also weird. Again, community is such a broad and diverse term, I find myself in scenarios where I will observe and talk to people inside AWS about things, but I never want to come across as gloating somehow, that oh, I know, internal people that talk to you about this and you don't. Like, that's never how I want to come across. And I also, I never see the full picture; it's impossible for me to, so I never make commitments on behalf of other people. That's a good way to get in trouble.Matty: It is. And I think in the case of, like, someone like you who's, you know, got the connections you have or whatever, it's less likely for that to be something that you would advertise for a couple of reasons. Like, nobody should be advertising to gloat, but also, part of my remit as a member of a community team is to actually help people. Like, you're doing it because you want to or because it serves you in a different way. Like, that is literally my job.So like, it shouldn't be, like—like, because same thing, if you offer up your connections, now you are taking on some work to do that. Someone who works at the company, like, yes, you should be taking on that work because this is what we do. We're already getting paid for it, you know, so to speak, so I think that's the—Corey: Yeah.Matty: —maybe a nuance, but—Corey: Every once in a while, I'll check my Twitter spam graveyard, [unintelligible 00:32:01] people asking me technical questions months ago about various things regarding AWS and whatnot. And that's all well and good; the problem I have with it is that I'm not a support vector. I don't represent for the company or work for them. Now, if I worked there, I'd feel obligated to make sure this gets handed to the right person. And that's important.The other part of it, though, is okay, now that that's been done and handed off, like do I shepherd it through the process? Eh. I don't want people to get used to asking people in DMs because again, I consider myself to be a nice guy, but if I'm some nefarious jerk, then I could lead them down a very dark path where I suddenly have access to their accounts. And oh, yeah, go ahead and sign up for this thing and I'll take over their computer or convince them to pay me in iTunes gift cards or something like that. No, no, no. Have those conversations in public or through official channels, just because I don't, I don't think you want to wind up in that scenario.Matty: So, my concern as well, with sort of taking the tack of you are just an observer of the community, not a part of it is, that actually can reinforce some pretty bad behavior from an organization towards how they treat the community. One of the things that bothers me—if we're going to go on a different rant about devrelopers like myself—is I like to say that, you know, we pride ourselves as DevRels as being very empathetic and all this stuff, but very happy to shit all over people that work in sales or marketing, based on their job title, right? And I'm like, “Wow, that's great,” right? We're painting with this broad brush. Whereas in reality, we're not separate from.And so, the thing is, when you treat your community as something separate from you, you are treating it as something separate from you. And then it becomes a lot easier also, to not treat them like people and treat them as just a bunch of numbers and treat them as something to have value extracted from rather than it—this is actually a bunch of humans, right? And if I'm part of that, then I'm in the same Dunbar number a little bit, right? I'm in the same monkey sphere as those people because me, I'm—whoever; I'm the CTO or whatever, but I'm part of this community, just like Joe Smith over there in Paducah, you know, who's just building things for the first time. We're all humans together, and it helps to not treat it as the sort of amorphous blob of value to be extracted.So, I think that's… I think all of the examples you've been giving and those are all valid concerns and things to watch out for, the broad brush if you're not part of the community if you work there, my concern is that that leads towards exacerbating already existing bad behavior. You don't have to convince most of the people that the community is separate from them. That's what I'm sort of getting at. I feel like in this work, we've been spending so much time to try to get people to realize they should be acting like part of their larger community—and also, Corey, I know you well enough to know that, you know, sensationalism to make a point [laugh] works to get somebody to join—Corey: I have my moments.Matty: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, there's I think… I'll put it this way. I'm very interested to see the reaction, the response that comes out in, well now, for us a couple of days, for you the listener, a while ago [laugh] when that hits because I think it is a, I don't want to say it's controversial, but I think it's something that has a lot of, um… put it this way, anything that's simple and black and white is not good for discussion.Corey: It's nuanced. And I know that whenever I wrote in 1200 words is not going to be as nuanced of the conversation we just had, either, so I'm sure people will have opinions on it. That'd be fun. It'd be a good excuse for me to listen.Matty: Exactly [laugh]. And then we'll have to remember to go back and find—I'll have to do a little Twitter search for the dates.Corey: We'll have to do another discussion on this, if anything interesting comes out of it.Matty: Actually, that would be funny. That would be—we could do a little recap.Corey: It would. I want to thank you so much for being so generous with your time. Where can people find you if they want to learn more?Matty: Well, [sigh] for the moment, [sigh] who knows what will be the case when this comes out, but you can still find me on Twitter at @mattstratton. I'm also at hackie-derm dot io—sorry, hackyderm.io. I keep wanting to say hackie-derm, but hackyderm actually works better anyway and it's funnier. But [hackyderm.io/@mattstratton](https://hackyderm.io/@mattstratton) is my Mastodon. LinkedIn; I'm. Around there. I need to play more at that. You will—also again, I don't know when this is coming out, so you won't tell you—you don't find me out traveling as much as you might have before, but DevOpsDays Chicago is coming up August 9th and 10th in Chicago, so at the time of listening to this, I'm sure our program will have been posted. But please come and join us. It will be our ninth time of hosting a DevOpsDay Chicago. And I have decided I'm sticking around for ten, so next year will be my last DevOpsDay that I'm running. So, this is the penultimate. And we always know that the penultimate is the best.Corey: Absolutely. Thanks again for your time. It's appreciated. Matty Stratton, Director of Developer Relations at Aiven. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with an angry comment talking about how I completely missed the whole point of this community and failing to disclose that you are in fact one of the producers of the show.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.

The word “developer” has always been evolving, from assembly to systems, operations, and beyond. The term “Developer Relations” has traditionally meant we're engaging with people who consider themselves full-time professional developers. However, over the past few years, the term “developer” has expanded to encompass more than this professional developer persona. These days, some DevRel teams advocate for, evangelize to, and create communities for SREs, Enterprise Architects, students, or decision-makers in early-stage startups, in addition to low-code or citizen developers. While these people may fall outside of the traditional developer persona, many DevRel teams are looking to support these people who are using our technology for one-off solutions to their problems. We're interested in learning more about whether this changes the scope of DevRel, and if so, how. Checkouts Jennifer Ritzinger * How to Make a Monster: Hollywood Special Effects Makeup With Morgan Muta - Atlas Obscura Experiences (https://www.atlasobscura.com/experiences/special-effects-makeup-course) Matty Stratton * Keyoxide (https://keyoxide.org/) * The Storyteller (https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Storyteller-Audiobook/0063076128) - Audiobook by Dave Grohl * Fall Guys (https://www.fallguys.com/) - silly game I play with my kids Wesley Faulkner * LumaFusion (https://luma-touch.com/lumafusion-on-android/) PJ Hagerty * Clearword (https://clearword.com/) - actions items and the important part of meetings, not just transcription * Spy X Family (https://www.crunchyroll.com/series/G4PH0WXVJ/spy-x-family?from=spyxfamily&utm_source=ip_cr&utm_medium=content_crunchyroll&utm_campaign=titlemarketing_all_spyxfamily) * Don't get COVID Jason Hand * YouTube Shorts (https://www.youtube.com/c/MicrosoftDeveloper/shorts) - on Microsoft Learn Shows & Events * CrossClip (https://crossclip.com) * ArtistWorks (https://www.artistworks.com) Mary Thengvall * PLG + CLG (https://www.commonroom.io/blog/use-product-led-and-community-led-growth-together-for-better-business-outcomes/) Artwork photo by Tim Mossholder (https://unsplash.com/@timmossholder?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText) on Unsplash (https://unsplash.com/@timmossholder?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText) Enjoy the podcast? Please take a few moments to leave us a review on iTunes (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/community-pulse/id1218368182?mt=2) and follow us on Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/3I7g5WfMSgpWu38zZMjet?si=565TMb81SaWwrJYbAIeOxQ), or leave a review on one of the other many podcasting sites that we're on! Your support means a lot to us and helps us continue to produce episodes every month. Like all things Community, this too takes a village. Special Guests: Jennifer Ritzinger and Matty Stratton.

Matty Stratton is the Director of Developer Relations at Aiven, a well-known member of the DevOps community, founder and co-host of the popular Arrested DevOps podcast, and the global chair of the DevOpsDays set of conferences. Matty 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. Demonstrating his keen insight into the changing landscape of technology, he recently changed his license plate from DEVOPS to KUBECTL. He lives in Chicago and has three awesome kids, whom he loves just a little bit more than he loves Diet Coke. You can follow Matty on Social Media https://twitter.com/mattstratton https://matty.wtf/ Also take a look at some other links from Matty https://www.arresteddevops.com/ https://devopsdays.org/ PLEASE SUBSCRIBE TO THE PODCAST - Spotify: http://isaacl.dev/podcast-spotify - Apple Podcasts: http://isaacl.dev/podcast-apple - Google Podcasts: http://isaacl.dev/podcast-google - RSS: http://isaacl.dev/podcast-rss You can check out more episodes of Coffee and Open Source on https://www.coffeeandopensource.com/ Coffee and Open Source is hosted by Isaac Levin (https://twitter.com/isaacrlevin) --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/coffeandopensource/support

In part two, Dave and Emily continue their chat with Matty Stratton. If you missed it, please listen to part one of this conversation in Episode 043. Matt is a Staff Developer Advocate at Pulumi, founder and co-host of the popular Arrested DevOps podcast, and the global chair of the DevOpsDays set of conferences. He is a well-known international speaker and brings over 20 years of IT Operations experience. Matt recants the early days of DevOps, shares more tech history, and offers an exciting look at what is yet to come for the industry. Matt on Twitter: https://twitter.com/mattstratton Emily on Twitter: https://twitter.com/editingemily Dave on Twitter: https://twitter.com/thedavedev Matt's Website: https://matty.wtf/ Matt's Podcast – Arrested DevOps: https://www.arresteddevops.com Matt on Twitch – DevOps Party Games: https://www.twitch.tv/devopspartygames Matt on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattstratton/ Matt's Presentations and Upcoming Speaking Events: https://speaking.mattstratton.com/ Subscribe: Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/f8bf7630-2521-4b40-be90-c46a9222c159/aws-developers-podcast Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/aws-developers-podcast/id1574162669 Google Podcasts: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5zb3VuZGNsb3VkLmNvbS91c2Vycy9zb3VuZGNsb3VkOnVzZXJzOjk5NDM2MzU0OS9zb3VuZHMucnNz Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7rQjgnBvuyr18K03tnEHBI TuneIn: https://tunein.com/podcasts/Technology-Podcasts/AWS-Developers-Podcast-p1461814/ RSS Feed: https://feeds.soundcloud

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

VALENCIA – The goal of DevOps was to break down silos between software development and operations. The side effect has become the blurring of lines between dev and ops. For better or for worse. Because the role of software developer is just continuously expanding causing cognitive overload and burnout. This is why the developer tooling market has exploded to automate and assist developers right when and where they need to build, in whatever language they already know. In this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, recorded on the floor of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2022, Matty Stratton, staff developer advocate at Pulumi, talks about this recently universal Infrastructure-as-Code and that impact on both dev and ops teams. Earlier this May, Pulumi released updates that took the platform closer to becoming a truly polyglot way to enforce best cloud practices, including support for: Full Java ecosystem YAML Crosswalk for Amazon Web Services (AWS) in all Pulumi languages Deploying AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) in all Pulumi languagesThese are significant updates because they dramatically expand the languages that are available in this low-code way of creating, deploying and managing infrastructure on any cloud. "A lot of times, in Infrastructure-as-Code, we're using domain-specific language using a config file. We call it Infrastructure as Code and are not actually writing any code. So I like to think about Pulumi as Infrastructure as Software." For Stratton, that means writing Pulumi code using a general purpose programming language, like TypeScript, Python, Go, .NET languages, or now Java. "The great thing about that is, not only do you maybe already know this programming language, because that's the language you use to build your applications, but you're able to use all the things that a programming language has available to it, like conditionals, and loops, and packages, and testing tools, and an IDE [integrated development enviornment] and a whole ecosystem. So that makes it a lot more powerful, and gives us a lot of great abstractions we can use," he continued. Pulumi now follows the low-code development trend where, Stratton says, "We're enabling people to solve a problem with just enough tech." But specifically in their common coding language, to limit the tool onboarding needed. This is not only attractive to new customers but specifically to expand Pulumi adoption across organizations, without much adaptation of the way they work. Just making it easier to work together. "I've been part of the DevOps community for a long time. And all that I want to see out of DevOps and all of this work is how do we collaborate better together? How do we be more cross functional?"

About “Matty”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. Demonstrating his keen insight into the changing landscape of technology, he recently changed his license plate from DEVOPS to KUBECTL.He 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.Links Referenced Pulumi: https://www.pulumi.com/ Arrested DevOps: https://www.arresteddevops.com/ 8bits.tv: https://8bits.tv Twitter: https://twitter.com/mattstratton LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattstratton/ speaking.mattstratton.com: https://speaking.mattstratton.com twitch.tv/Pulumi: https://twitch.tv/Pulumi 8bit.tv: https://8bit.tv duckbillgroup.com: https://duckbillgroup.com TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Vultr. Spelled V-U-L-T-R because they're all about helping save money, including on things like, you know, vowels. So, what they do is they are a cloud provider that provides surprisingly high performance cloud compute at a price that—while sure they claim its better than AWS pricing—and when they say that they mean it is less money. Sure, I don't dispute that but what I find interesting is that it's predictable. They tell you in advance on a monthly basis what it's going to going to cost. They have a bunch of advanced networking features. They have nineteen global locations and scale things elastically. Not to be confused with openly, because apparently elastic and open can mean the same thing sometimes. They have had over a million users. Deployments take less that sixty seconds across twelve pre-selected operating systems. Or, if you're one of those nutters like me, you can bring your own ISO and install basically any operating system you want. Starting with pricing as low as $2.50 a month for Vultr cloud compute they have plans for developers and businesses of all sizes, except maybe Amazon, who stubbornly insists on having something to scale all on their own. Try Vultr today for free by visiting: vultr.com/screaming, and you'll receive a $100 in credit. Thats V-U-L-T-R.com slash screaming.Corey: Couchbase Capella Database-as-a-Service is flexible, full-featured and fully managed with built in access via key-value, SQL, and full-text search. Flexible JSON documents aligned to your applications and workloads. Build faster with blazing fast in-memory performance and automated replication and scaling while reducing cost. Capella has the best price performance of any fully managed document database. Visit couchbase.com/screaminginthecloud to try Capella today for free and be up and running in three minutes with no credit card required. Couchbase Capella: make your data sing.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. Returning today for yet another round on the Screaming in the Cloud podcast is my dear friend, and hopefully yours as well, Matty Stratton. Since the last time we spoke, you've changed jobs, Mattie; you're now a staff developer advocate at Pulumi. I don't believe you were the last time you were on this show, but memory escapes me.Matty: You know, I was just wondering that myself, and I guess we'll have to go back to the archives.Corey: Yes, but that sounds like work, so we're going to roll with it anyway.Matty: Everyone who's listening, go do the homework for us. And, like, just tweet and let us know what my job was last time.Corey: And yell at us if we get it wrong, of course.Matty: Yell at us if we get it right.Corey: In the interest of being, well, I guess a little on the judgey side—because why not I tend to be good at that.Matty: I was hoping to be on the judgey side on this show.Corey: Oh, absolutely. You have a very strange career trajectory, in that—the companies you work for and how that winds up going back and forth. But when we first met, you were at Chef; and Chef, great company. And after that it was PagerDuty; great company.Matty: [laugh].Corey: And then it was IBM Hat, which I—was it Red Hat, was it IBM side?Matty: For me, it was Red Hat.Corey: So, it went from Chef, which is great, and a company that was doing a lot of things on the container side of the world became a thing and mutable infrastructure did sort of change Chef's business model. And then you went to PagerDuty, the wake-you-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night service named after some legacy technologies. And should be very direct in the popular consciousness, IBM views pagers as newfangled technology in some circles, in some areas, so it feels like you were traveling back in time a bit, again and again and again. On the federal side as well which, for excellent reasons, is not usually the absolute bow wave of innovation because you don't usually want your government doing that in some ways. And now you've leapfrogged into Pulumi, which is sort of the bleeding edge of the modern way we think about provisioning cloud infrastructure.It feels like it's a very interesting trajectory. Now, this is speaking as a complete outsider, I'm going to assume that's not how you view basically any characterization of any of those companies I've just named. How do you view it?Matty: You know, I don't know that I necessarily disagree with the way that you've put everything, but there's some nuance and some interesting stuff when it comes to that. So, I'm going to specifically talk about the Red Hat thing; why did I leave PagerDuty? And one of the interesting things is, I actually had an offer from Pulumi at the time that I took the job from Red Hat. So, it actually took me a year to come and work at Pulumi. And the little bit of the short answer is Red Hat backed up a big truck of money. And we all have a price.Corey: Yeah, the dulcet tones of a dump truck full of gold bricks emptying itself into your backyard, it's hard to say no to.Matty: The reason that I want to bring that up is that has nothing to do with specifically Red Hat the company versus other companies. It was the role. It was a sales-oriented role, so if you don't know, sales gets paid a lot of money and there's good reason. One of the reasons—again, if you don't work in sales, you don't necessarily know this—is, the last day of the quarter, you will have your VP of sales talking, he'll be like, “Corey, you are amazing. I love you. Look at this big deal you brought in.” Twenty-four hours later, “What have you done for me lately?”Corey: Mm-hm.Matty: That didn't matter, right? And I remember the CEO of PagerDuty—so Jen Tejada—at one of the sales kickoffs I was at, she said—you know, because salespeople, like, you might know this, like, the top sales reps in the company, they go on trips, they have all this stuff—and Jen said, you know, “I've got engineers here that are like, well, I don't understand.” It's like, “How come the salespeople get to go to Bermuda or do whatever?” And she's like, “Would you like your paycheck to change every quarter based upon specifically what you did and have the stress of what have you done all this stuff? No? Okay, cool. Then you can keep”—you know, there's a trade-off. So, the point of that was—Corey: And as your paycheck gets smaller, you're getting closer and closer to losing your job because a salesperson needs to perform to keep. It's very feast or famine. It's a heck of a role, and I have nothing but respect for people who can do it.Matty: And people can do it well. And I do feel like a lot of people don't understand how sales works, especially in a larger organization, and I think it's really important. So, one of the things that was interesting is we've all—I shouldn't say all, but many of us have worked in jobs that have some form of variable compensation, some kind of annual bonus. So, let's say for example, at x company I'm working at, they're like, “Mattie, your bonus is equal to 10% of your paycheck.” Well, the most it could be, generally speaking, it's like, let's say that your bonus would be, I'm just going to make up a number and say it's a $10,000 bonus.That's the most it could be, and that's if everything is amazing. Maybe I'll get a little more. Now, your commission, your what they call your on-target earnings and sales, they'll tell you a number and they'll say, “Okay, Corey, you're on-target earnings are, say $200,000.” And you're like, “Oh.” But whatever.The thing is, if you're only getting you're on-target earnings, you probably are needing to look for another job. So, you remember, like, we hear it differently, those of us that have done bonuses in a non-sales way. We're like, “But that's not a lot.” You're like, “No, but what they tell you your commission is, it's actually… it better end up being more or else you have trouble.” Anyway, point is—Corey: And in some cases, it could be a significant multiple of that number as well, for top performers.Matty: Absolutely.Corey: The upside is always interesting, and calculating out the nuances of the sales plan is always a challenge, speaking as a business owner. It is a very specific field that has a bunch of nuance to it. Something I learned very early on is that if you manage salespeople as if they were engineers, or manage engineers as if they were salespeople, you are going to have an absolutely terrible time.Matty: I think one of the things that, along those lines, I've have had conversations with people who work in different parts of technology, different parts of the business, who their long-term desire is to be a CEO, and I'm like, you really should go spend some time working in sales because most CEOs—again, this is blunt, but it's true—if you think about it, what is the area of the business that they pay the most attention to? And I don't mean, they don't care about the other stuff, but who is the person on the executive team that the CEO is mostly joined at the hip with, and it's your chief revenue officer, it's your head of sales because you have to understand that, you have to understand pipeline, how that—you have to understand a lot of things as a CEO, but if you don't know how sales works—it doesn't mean know how to sell but know the ideas behind it. I mean, you should know how to sell, but you know what I mean?Corey: Yeah, I think every CEO is selling. It is a sales job, whether that is selling the company to prospective employees, whether it is selling strategic partnerships, whether it's being brought in to help close strategic deals, et cetera, you're always selling in that role.Matty: That's a very good point. I should rephrase that, where I wasn't saying you don't need to know—Corey: CEO who has no idea how to sell [unintelligible 00:07:42] the fundamentals of—like, you put them in a meeting, and they wind up saying the wrong thing and pooching the deal, yeah, they're not CEO for very long.Matty: It's not just knowing how to sell, it's understanding how a sales process works. That's sort of the thing.Corey: I'll take it one step further beyond that, and that is that I believe that every professional is working in sales and is selling something, but not everyone's aware of it“. Well, I'm an engineer, and I don't do any sort of sales work.” Well, I hear about that from folks who are—“I have all these great ideas, but none of them ever get implemented.” Well, you're not doing an effective job of selling the idea. “I keep getting put up for promotion and not getting it,” or, “I'm not doing well in job interviews.” Or, “I'm trying to get a raise and it just isn't working for me.” And every job has elements of sales to it. I'd argue a lot of facets of modern life have sales elements to it.Matty: They do and I think the reason that people get hung out—I agree with you; I could not agree with you more. I have a talk I used to give called “The Five Love Languages of DevOps” but it was really a talk about effecting organizational change, and you have to be a salesperson, right? But I think we have this—and this is a much larger topic because it comes into how people always want to distance themselves from sales—we have this thing in our head that when we think of sales, we think of tricky people. Shysters, right? Someone that's trying to, like, pull a fast one on us, like the used car salesperson thing.And I'm like, that's not most salespeople. Like, salespeople want you to—because when we talk about learning how to sell, it's not learning how to trick somebody. It's actually learning about how to—I mean, here's the biggest thing. You want to know—we talk about DevOps all the time and stuff like that, you know, and empathy. You want to know one of the most important skills of a salesperson is? Freaking empathy.Because you need to be able to understand what your prospect—and that's if you've, you know, there's the book, The Challenger Sale, which like all business books can be summarized in a blog post, right, so you can just go read the blog post about The Challenger Sale; that'll tell you everything you need to know, but a good salesperson that's a challenger-style salesperson knows the customer better than they know themselves and knows there problems they might have that they're not aware of. And it's not because they're smarter; they have a different perspective. So, the same thing is true. So, to Corey's point, we're always selling. And even whether it's figuratively, like, conceptually—but I used to say when I was a Chef I said, the two best sales—most effective salespeople at Chef were Adam Jacob, the founder, and Nathan Harvey, the VP of community.Sales engineers are powerful because a customer will tell things to a sales engineer they won't tell the rep because they think the rep is trying to take advantage of them, which isn't true. Most important conversations that happen are on the walk from the front desk to the conference room. How many conversations would I have with the SRE, or whatever, who was the one who came to get me from reception, and we're just walking to the conference room. I learned so much there than in any other discovery session? You know, and then you use that to be—Corey: And there's not such thing as an easy sale either. And I think that gets overlooked a lot. Like, here at The Duckbill Group, if you bring us in on a consulting engagement to fix your AWS bill, you will turn a profit on that engagement. That has always been true. And we are quite literally selling money.It is effectively one of the easiest possible sales you can make; it is incredibly easy to calculate out what the ROI looks like on any of these things, and it's great, and we still have a full-on enterprise sales force because that is what it takes to wind up getting deals done when you're selling business-to-business. These are not selling t-shirts to the masses. It is a nuanced field, and honestly, when I'm interviewing people, one of the easiest ways for me to discount someone as a potential hire is that they start talking smack about sales because it is clear, first, they lack empathy, and secondly, they don't understand what sales does.Matty: One of the things that I think people who are not connected with it don't understand that again, back to Corey's point about because selling is hard, and selling internally is hard. So, this is the thing. So, you can have a champion inside your prospect who's, like, “I'm all about hiring Duckbill.” But they have to convince other people. So, what are salespeople really good at doing? They're really good at helping you build your business case to be able to get your thing that you want.Corey: How to turn your champion into an effective advocate for the thing that's going to make their job easier because they're not the person that signs off on it.Matty: And they're not the expert. Like, this used to happen when I was at Chef and I would have a customer who was like, “Okay.” They go and buy a bunch of licenses, and they're like, “Well, it didn't get deployed.” And we're like, “Well, how can we help you?” And they're like, “Well, no, it's just internal stuff. We got to convince people or whatever.”And I was like, “So, what you need to do is what you're telling me, what you need to do is sell Chef, right?” “Uh-huh.” There is nobody on this planet better at selling Chef than Chef. So, that's where that comes in because again, that's how everybody wins. So anyway, I went there because I was getting paid like a salesperson.Also, I one thing I wanted to touch on. So, you're right, usually, public sector is not seen as the most cutting edge. One of the things that's interesting at Red Hat, especially on the sales side—and friends of mine who are working on the commercial side may disagree with this, but it's generally not been true—what they call NAPS, so the North America Public Sector, I used to say I was a NAPS specialist, which sounded awesome. Because that was my title, I was NAPS specialist; I specialized in NAPS—is actually—Corey: Your status in the internal messaging system should always be sleeping at that point, why not?Matty: Sleeping. Yeah. But it's sort of known that actually the kind of emergent tech group and sales inside of the public sector, inside Red Hat, is very innovative compared to other ones. So, a lot of stuff was created there. So, it was we were doing something around a transformation office that wasn't being done in the same way anywhere else, so it was very exciting.So, I—also was the opportunity to go and work with people like Andrew Clay Shafer and John Willis and people that were—you know, it was all the people I was going to get to work with. So, that got me excited to be there. And then Covid happened, and I got news for you. Like, my job was to have challenging conversations with people about how they should do work differently. It's pretty easy to tune somebody out on the Zoom, it's a lot harder to tune somebody out when they're challenging you in a room.So, it was very hard to do this job during Covid, so our team really kind of disbanded towards the end of the year. I was really on the fence to join in the first place, and the person who was referring me to come work on the team who wanted to convince me said, you know, “What's holding you back?” And I said, “Well, it's not”—I said, “I really like developer advocacy. I like DevRel. That's not this job.” And he said, “Hey. Come try this for a year, and… if it turns out you didn't like it or wasn't for you, then go back and do DevRel.”And so that's sort of what happened. And I have seen though I am much happier in a smaller organization that's creating—you know, like, I like to feel my impact. I think everybody should spend some time in a large org because if you're going to be working with other people—right, you know what I mean—especially if you're a vendor, if you work on the vendor side like I do and stuff, Corey, you and I've talked before about background and doing developer advocacy, and I always say that, like, I do DevRel on easy mode because it's very easy for me to have empathy for my prospects and community because I did the job for 20 years. It's not impossible to be effective doing this job if you haven't literally done it. It's just that much harder. So, I [crosstalk 00:15:04]—Corey: It's a lot harder. And there's a credibility question and the rest. Yeah.Matty: I do this on easy mode. I can sit there and I can say, “Yes, I feel your pain. I literally did it for 20 years.”Corey: And you're at a point, too, let's be clear here, that you have a gravitas to you. I use you as my default example when I talk about, like, the expression of DevRel in that if you—like back when you were at PagerDuty, which I guess dates the reference a bit, but it was, okay. If you sit down and say you're doing on-call wrong, now I've been around this industry at that point 15 years or so, and I'm pretty sure I'm not. But if you're going to say that you have already got my attention in a constructive way, not in a, “Well, let me just tear this apart.” It's, no, no. I'm about to learn something by whatever it is you're about to say. And it's very hard to have that level of credibility without having done the role.Matty: That's true. Without doing it in that way. I mean, this is [crosstalk 00:15:59]—Corey: In the practitioner way of practicing the thing for which you are advocating. Like, someone telling me that I'm doing on-call wrong, who has never themselves been in a role where they themselves were on call is a little lacking in the authenticity department. It's not impossible and it can't be overcome.Matty: And you have to do it in a different way, right?Corey: Yes.Matty: And this goes back to another thing that I say a lot—my pithy Stratton quote is, “DevRel contains multitudes,” right? So, this is one of the things that we ran into, like, when we're building out our advocacy team at PagerDuty, it was seeing sort of my boss was an amazing dude and everything like that. I love him, but like, we don't scale horizontally. Our team was made up of enough of different kinds of people that, like, the way that I was able to do it because I had a certain experience, you couldn't expect that out of another one of my teammates because they actually had a different way of doing it that was just as effective, but in a different way because they have a different background, they have a different—so that's—Corey: And there's so many ways to do DevRel. Oh, yeah. Like, I'm going to call it my own bias here where when I think about DevRel, I think about it through a lens of the way I approach things, and when I give conference talks, of how I present myself, and the rest. And my approach would absolutely be aligned with what I just described, “So, you're doing AWS billing wrong.” And based upon who I am, and what I do, I can make that claim with some credibility.If I were relatively new to the industry and giving a talk about AWS billing, I would not lead that way because it does not present nearly as well, and it's going to call into question a whole bunch of skepticism. I would instead approach it as, “Here are some interesting facets about AWS billing that you may or may not be aware of.” There are different ways to approach it. Let's also be clear that it's not just conference talks; it can be blog posts, it can be documentation, it can be writing sample code, it can be Twitter, it could be TikTok of all things. There are so many ways to communicate with an audience, and your audience is wherever you happen to find them.Ideally, not in line at the Starbucks harassing the poor person in front who's just trying to order their coffee, but you know, as long as it's all consensual, talk to people who are interested in this stuff, wherever they happen to be.Matty: I think that's a really important statement you said there towards the end, which is meet people where they are, whether that's where you want them to be or not. And this comes up, it's interesting because one of the things—I'm a big believer in repurposing of content, and that's just partially because of effectiveness, but it's like, hey, if I give a talk, I should make that a blog post, I should make it a video, I should do a code example. And it's not so much because then I can hit all my OKRs with my boss.—I mean, that's part of it, right?—but not everybody likes the same kind of content.You know, there are people who really like videos, and there are people who are like, “I don't want to learn from a video at all.” And there's two ways you can approach that. One is you can say, “You're wrong. Videos are better. You should watch all my videos.” And take a guess about how well that's going to work with them getting your information or say, “I'll meet you where you are.”And I learned this even well before doing DevRel when I just thought about internal communication at an organization I was at when I was at Apartments.com and I was like, how do we get information? And you can't just say, like, well, we have this email we send to everybody. Well, everybody doesn't read email, right? So, it could be, maybe some people like RSS feeds, they want to capture it there. And the example I always gave was the most effective way that I ever saw that information was communicated inside our organization was signs in the restroom.Corey: Oh, yeah. That's a well-renowned way of doing it. That I think that Google pioneered this for a while. They had these all these things up about interesting things going on inside the—Matty: Oh—Corey: —company, about the way some systems worked—Matty: —I was at Google office and using the restroom, and I was standing there, and right in front of me with a whole good practice on cross-site scripting vulnerabilities. I guarantee they probably sent that email to everybody, it's probably been in meetings, and the people who saw it, [unintelligible 00:19:53] they saw it in the restroom.Corey: Now, of course, I'm sure they probably sell ads on those sheets, but okay.Matty: Yeah. You know, a little bit of that. When I was at Apartments.com, the floor that I worked on, the main restroom I used was a shared restroom with another office, which meant corporate never put anything up in there, and there was actually a fair amount of stuff that I didn't know about because I ignored it everywhere else and [unintelligible 00:20:14] anyway. So, the point is, back—if you will do work in person, which who is doing that anymore and why bother?—your most effective way to communicate. So, if you can figure out how to do DevRel in signs in a restroom at a conference—ohh, conferences should sell sponsorship of restroom signs.Corey: The jokes write themselves and almost certainly violate the code of conduct of at least four different [unintelligible 00:20:38], but it works. It works.Matty: [laugh]. We'll take those to Twitter.Corey: You've been around the industry for a while. You are one of the cohosts of the Arrested DevOps podcast; you've been instrumental in organizing a number of DevOps Days… or Devs-Ops days, however you want to mis-pluralize that is fine by me; roll with it. Ant—Matty: We argue more about the capitalization than the pluralization.Corey: Very fair. I want to talk to you a little bit of how the DevOps movement slash community slash role has evolved. For a long time now, it's been, “Great. So, where are the DevOps people sitting?” And then when you hear the shouted response of, “It's not a job. It's a culture,” good work. You found them. Now, you can go talk to them and all. What has changed over the past few years in the world of DevOps?Matty: So, I am fond of saying you can't buy DevOps, but I can sell it to you.Corey: Oh, absolutely. You're an exemplary DevOps salesman.Matty: Yeah. So, what happened? When we think back across the decade-plus, you know, back since 2009, one of the things I think that's interesting is, when we look at things like DevSecOps, or the other portmanteaus that are being created. It's a little bit like that meme, right, with the astronaut: “Wait. You mean, it's been DevSecOps all along?” You know, it's, “Yes, always has.”That's the thing. Like, for those who don't know, Andrew Clay Shafer is best known as coining the term. And I love Andrew, but wow, is it the worst name in the world for what we're talking about. Because it makes us all think that it's only about development and operations. And it's always been about cross-functional across all of those things. And if it helps us to give it a different name, great.Corey: It's replacing dysfunction with cross-function.Matty: Yes. There we go. That's DevOps right there. That's the best definition of DevOps I've heard. You heard it here.Corey: That one coins a phrase, in case you wondered.Matty: So, we still use the term CALMS to say what is about: It's about Culture, Automation, Lean, Measurement, and Sharing. That's held up for a reason. For something that was scrawled on a napkin in 2010, there's a reason we still talk that way. It sounds like we talk about culture more than anything else, and it's not because it's more important. It's because it's the one that we have to scream from the rooftops.You don't have to convince engineers to play with automation tools; they're going to do it. That's fine, right? So, they're all equal. Now, that said, what's changed is we have definitely found DevOps to feel a lot more that it's about automation. It's about the technology. We've veered away from the people to your statement about, like, “Oh, it's a culture, not a ti”—well, it's all of these things.Corey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Oracle Cloud. 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Visit snark.cloud/oci-free that's snark.cloud/oci-free.Corey: Well, one thing I do want to call out because the whole point of having you on the show, of course, is to embarrass you with proof-positive, for example, that you are in fact, a good person at heart despite, you know, your dubious friendship with people like me, is we both used to be adamant about the idea of DevOps is not a role, not a job title, and we both stopped, but for different reasons. The reason that I stopped was that I took a job as the director of DevOps at a company because I was trying to solve about five or six different things that were important for me to negotiate for, and job title did not make the cut of impactful changes. You had a far less self-serving reason for no longer picking that particular fight. What was it?Matty: [laugh]. I do want to call out one of my favorite jokes which is not supposed to be gatekeeping, but it's making fun of Corey so it's okay—Corey: Hmm.Matty: —Nathan Harvey said years ago, and it was actually I think, intended as a shot at our friend Pete Cheslock, who also has had the title of director of DevOps, which said, “The only DevOps tool is a person that calls themselves director of DevOps.”Corey: Oh, absolutely. It's super lucrative. I was really insulted by that and cried all the way to the bank.Matty: Uh-huh. Now, I'll tell you there's two reasons that I've changed my tune on—you know, I used to say it's not a tool, title, or team. I still will agree that it's not a tool. The title and team—and the reason for that is twofold, and neither of which are self-serving other than I don't want people to think I'm a jerk. The first reason that deviated me from a little bit was again, to go back to your friend and mine, Pete Cheslock, he gave a talk, I don't remember where it was, but he made the point where he said, “You look at it, the title ‘DevOps engineer' is a 30 to 35% pay bump, so it's like, I don't care what you call yourself. Go get paid.” So, that's that.Corey: Yes.Matty: So, first of all, I was like cool—Corey: J. Paul Reed did a whole talk-pay thing that shined a light on that.Matty: Absolutely. The one that I think is more empathetic and probably was… is maybe a little more important—or equally so—Ian Coldwater has pointed out before, and this really resonated with me, is that when we get on Twitter and are like, “Oh, my God. DevOps engineer is not a real title, blah, blah, blah.” The people that hear that are the people who have that title. They did not give themselves that title. It's very exclusionary, and all that will happen out of that is it doesn't eff—Corey: “I'm going to go quit my job and not be able to make rent this month.” “Why?” “Because Twitter said that my job title was bad.”Matty: Yeah.Corey: All the reasons to quit a job, I promise you job title is not one of them. Unless it is something horrifying, as into the territory of discriminating or belittling. There are always exceptions to every rule, but by and large, “That's a ridiculous job title,” is not the reason to quit a job. Says the self-proclaimed chief cloud economist.Matty: Totally yeah. I mean, like, you know what is very similar? There's a meme about, like, every time people want to make fun of a political figure or something and they'll make fun of them being overweight, or any kind of thing, and the meme is like, the only people who hear that are your friends that have a similar condition, not the actual person you're making fun of, so all you're doing there is hurting people who… so that's a similar thing.Now, I will say—and I think you and I might disagree about this a little bit, so that'll be fine—Corey: I hope so.Matty: So, when I hear—and actually the title doesn't do this, for me; it's actually very specifically a DevOps team. When people say, “We have a DevOps team.” This is not a perfect analogy when I say it's a code smell; I call it an organizational smell. And what I mean by that—it's not as bad as a code smell—what it does is it makes me ask more questions. If it's relevant to me to ask questions. It might be none of my damn business. If you tweet that I'm on the DevOps team, I'm not going to come into your mentions and start questioning your existence, but—Corey: Oh please, I have way better personal attacks than that.Matty: Oh, yeah. But if I'm working with you and we're working on that, or we're having a conversation, and it comes up that you have a team called DevOps Team, I'm going to ask questions because that could be, okay or it could be, [sigh] I want to use the word dangerous lightly; it's not, but like, counter-effective. And the reason for that is if the DevOps team is the one who does all your automation and you haven't really enabled other squads and all you've done is move a silo around, doesn't make you a bad person, but that's not the most effective way you could be. So, it makes me start to ask questions, right? But sometimes DevOps teams are people who lead in the organization, they are empowerment teams, maybe they run dojo, maybe they are subject matter experts that help.As long as there are good bridges still being built, it's not bad, right? So, it just—again, it raises questions. It's not inherently wrong. I am sure that… Pulumi where wo—actually, many of the tools I've worked with have been called DevOps tools; I will still tell you there's no tool that gives you DevOps, right? You can't—Corey: But when other people—like, read as ‘buyers'—refer to you as the ‘DevOps tool company,' well, you can be right or you can make a sale, in some cases.Matty: [laugh]. Yeah, I'm not going to tell you—Corey: On some level, you have to meet people where they are, and this is a part of that. I say that in full sincerity. Same story with the idea of culture. I hear this question all the time, “How do we wind up making all of our engineers aware of AWS billing issues?” And to a point, you should have understanding that when you turn something on it runs forever, bigger things cost more than smaller things, but the knowledge fits on an index card.You shouldn't have every engineer wanting to—or needing to—become deep experts in this space. Having a centralized team that specializes in that, at a sufficient level of org size and maturity, makes an awful lot of sense, and they can float around. But yeah, having the AWS bill team, in some cases is the right answer and others it's the complete wrong answer, and it really does depend. I think the way that we solve this problem, authoritatively, is a way that neither you nor I can argue with it because the only source for authoritative DevOps answers is from the source itself, and that is, of course, Emily Freeman, whose treatise on the subject, DevOps for Dummies, despite the weird title, is absolutely fantastic work that gives insight into all of this. And are you prepared to tell her she's wrong? Because I'm certainly not.Matty: Well, there are plenty of people who will. As we know.Corey: Yes. And we call them shitheads if we're being perfectly honest with you.Matty: Yeah. [laugh].Corey: The internet what a ple—no, Emily is an absolute treasure in the space and I'm continuing to watch her meteoric rise with nothing other than pure admiration. It is just spectacular to see her succeed.Matty: I could not agree more. This is something I struggle with a little bit. I don't think Emily would mind me saying it this way. This is the thing where you don't want to sound condescending, but I always love when I look at people and it's not—it's going to come off a little bit about, like, “I knew them when,” and it's not like I was a Corey Quinn fan before he went pop, but I love to see and remember where we all came from, and it's true of myself and it's true of other people, but that's one of my favorite things is I love to see my friends succeed.Corey, I love to see what you've done. Like, I think back to when we knew each other. I'm not saying you weren't successful, but it's funny, this [unintelligible 00:30:08] sounds a little condescending to be like, oh, I'm so proud of you, but I am. And I'm impressed. It's great to see.And Emily's another example. Like, I remember when I first met Emily, and not like I was any big deal, either, but it's like, everybody comes from somewhere, right? Like Jacquie Grindrod who just recently left Hashi, I remember when she started to get into DevRel and I was talking to her because she's like, “I may be thinking I want to do this thing.” And you look and you see these people. And it's not supposed to be like, “Oh, I remember when you were like the cute little baby DevRel.” It's not like that.And it's like, it's just impressive to see—and not even impressive. It's you like to see people who do good work and have a good heart and want to help people grow and be successful. And I'll tell you something, here—we're going to get real for a second—you can be jealous of them. It's okay. And I'm going to be honest, there are times that—Emily and Corey are both good friends of mine, and there are times that I'm like, “Wow. I'm a little jealous of you. Sometimes I'm a lot jealous of you. Sometimes I'm not at all.” So, I'm telling everybody, it's okay to be jealous. [laugh].Corey: I agree with the sentiment that I changed the word ‘envious' because envy is one of those, like—Matty: Okay.Corey: —“I want that, too,” whereas jealousy is a lot more a shade of, “I want to have it and I don't want them to.” And I don't believe that's the direction you're heading in. [laugh].Matty: No. Thank you. No, you're exactly right. Envy is the better one yeah because it's never—Corey: Now, I recently learned the distinction there by getting very wrong and saying things I didn't intend to imply, which is why I bring it up. Again, let my mistake be something others can learn from. Sometimes the best purpose I can serve in this industry is as a counter-example.Matty: Example. I was going to say, you know, just for everybody, I remember at the beginning, you know, Corey said, “Maybe we'll learn something.” I'm like, I guess that's what we learned [laugh] is the difference between envy and jealousy.Corey: Yeah.Matty: [unintelligible 00:31:50] gotta say, you know, it took us half an hour to get there. But you know.Corey: No no. And I appreciate your friendship throughout the years. Like, you were one of those people that has been something of a guiding star, where it's, sometimes I get it right, sometimes I get it wrong, and you've always been someone who has been very willing to share which side of the divide you think I'm on with anything that I've done. And for lack of a better term, you knew me before I basically bought ink by the barrel. And back when I was just the conference speaker that had to follow one of your ridiculous talks, like, “Oh, God. Those are big shoes to fill. I'd better learn how to give a conference talk.” So, most of what I become is your fault. But I do want to thank you for your guidance over the years on these things.Matty: Can we tell the real story about how I claim ownership of The Duckbill Group?Corey: By all means, take it away.Matty: Oh, okay. So, [[laugh]] I honestly still think that I should have a part ownership in The Duckbill Group because for those of you who don't know, Corey mentioned that I had worked at PagerDuty, and actually that job came down between the two of us and Corey didn't get it. And then went and started his own company and became famous and amazing. So really, it's because of me is what I'm trying to get at. I—Corey: To be fair, they made the right hire. Which one of us do you think makes the better employee, let's be very clear?Matty: [laugh].Corey: And yeah, I am thrilled to deal in you in on ownership of The Duckbill Group because the way we're structured, you cannot have ownership without also assuming liability. So yeah—Matty: [laugh].Corey: I would love to dump legal responsibility for my shenanigans on someone else. Come on in. Yeah, there's always a cutting edge to everything else. But no, you're right. I always wonder what would have happened if that decision had gone differently.And I'm very glad it played out the way that it did. You were the right hire for the company in a way that I never would have been. But I would have given it a good try for a while before they begrudgingly had to fire me or I sensed the axe was coming and left on my own. That is the nature of me as an employee. You have a very different perspective because you're good at things that I'm terrible at.Matty: And vice versa. It was interesting. You just talked about, like, how would things go different? So I—yesterday—just recorded—I don't know when it's going to come out—I was on a podcast called 8 Bits—so it's 8bits.tv—and it's really a show about people's journey through tech.And what was interesting that came out of that conversation was, first of all, how much of how I got to where I am is because of spite. Which you're going to have to go back and listen to the episode to hear the whole story of all the spite. But we did talk about, like, those junction points that happen that seem innocuous. And it's like, I made this one choice that wasn't even necessarily a choice and you follow all the forking logic that gets you to, Corey, you and I are sitting here on a podcast right now. How many decisions that weren't even decisions? There's the alternate universe where this doesn't happen where this doesn't exist, right?Corey: It's weird how this stuff all works. Years before I'd met either one of you, you videotaped my wife's law school musical and burned it to CD. We found that out when you were here over dinner one night.Matty: That was my favorite thing.Corey: It was surreal.Matty: Yeah, I was at dinner with Corey and his wife and we got into a conversation about that she had gone to law school in Chicago. And I was like, “Oh, funny thing. Like, I produced the video of the law school mu”—and she was like, “Wait, what was that?” And I couldn't even remember. I had to, like, dig back into, like, an old blog post. And was that and then yeah, and Bethany, like—Corey: She walks into the other room and comes back with a DVD that you burned, your handwriting on it.Matty: Yeah.Corey: Yeah.Matty: Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. The world is small. Be nice to everybody.Corey: It never hurts. I want to thank you for taking time out of your day to basically tell stories once again. It's always good to talk to you. If people want to learn more about who you are, what you're up to, where's the best place they can find you.Matty: So, really the best place is Twitter. You know, so I'm at @mattstratton on Twitter. If you're not a Twitter person, that's okay. LinkedIn is not great for fi—I don't always remember to post stuff there. If you want to know about upcoming, you know, so if you go to speaking.mattstratton.com, that has all my previous talks, my upcoming talks, and things as hopefully we'll have more and more of that.And yeah, and every week, I stream on twitch.tv/Pulumi on Thursdays. And it's not webinars, it's not slick demos, it's just me screwing around and sometimes having fun people on, and sometimes just proving how little I know about coding. So yeah, good times. Thank you for having me on, again, Corey. It's always fun.Corey: Of course. Links to all that's going on in the [show notes 00:36:20]. And as always, it's a pleasure.Matty: Also, I will say, Corey, I'll give you the link to that 8bit.tv, if you want to put that in the [show notes 00:36:28]—Corey: Oh, of course, we will.Matty: —if people want to go and find that. Because I think it's similar, connected to what we talked about.Corey: Good. I look forward to listening to it myself. Mattie Stratton, staff developer advocate at Pulumi. 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 long angry comment detailing that DevOps is in fact a role and here's what it means, and then go ahead and describe a sysadmin.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

In this episode Matty Stratton makes a special appearance talking to us about Digital Transformation, Government Agencies, the impact of COVID, and thinking ahead.

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

Live from DevOpsDays Portland, I speak with Gene Kim, Author of "The Phoenix Project" and the upcoming book "The Unicorn Project."  When I started this podcast, one of my goals was to talk to Gene about his own experiences in IT, thankfully this trip to DevOpsDays in PDX helped that happen.  Cameos by Jennifer Davis, Matty Stratton, Jason Yee and Terri Haber! Gene Kim is a multiple award-winning CTO, researcher and author, and has been studying high-performing technology organizations since 1999. He was founder and CTO of Tripwire for 13 years. He has written five books, including “The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win”, “The DevOps Handbook”, “Accelerate” and the upcoming “The Unicorn Project”. Since 2014, he has been the organizer of the DevOps Enterprise Summit, studying the technology transformations of large, complex organizations. https://twitter.com/RealGeneKim Transcript - https://aka.ms/AA6107c The Unicorn Project - https://itrevolution.com/book/the-unicorn-project/ DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas - https://events.itrevolution.com/us/

This week I speak with my friend Matty Stratton as we discuss the hard times and the processes to make them better. Matty Stratton is a DevOps Advocate at PagerDuty, where he helps dev and ops teams advance the practice of their craft and become more operationally mature. He collaborates with PagerDuty customers and industry thought leaders in the broader DevOps community, and back when he drove, his license plate actually said “DevOps”. Matty has over 20 years experience in IT operations, ranging from large financial institutions such as JPMorganChase and internet firms, including Apartments.com. He is a sought-after speaker internationally, presenting at Agile, DevOps, and ITSM focused events, including ChefConf, DevOpsDays, Interop, PINK, and others worldwide. Matty is the founder and co-host of the popular Arrested DevOps podcast, as well as a global organizer of the DevOpsDays set of conferences. He lives in Chicago and has three awesome kids, who he loves just a little bit more than he loves Doctor Who. He is currently on a mission to discover the best pho in the world. Transcript (txt format) - https://aka.ms/AA5pv8x Pagerduty Summit - sept 23-25 in San Fran. Breakathon, etc. https://community.pagerduty.com/summit for a great discount PDS19SAT Devopsdays chicago - use the code ADO2019 for 20% off. Devopsdayschi.org http://arresteddevops.com http://speaking.mattstratton.com Breakathon - https://www.eventbrite.com/e/breakathon-at-pagerduty-summit19-tickets-65736757411 https://twitter.com/mattstratton

As Developer Relations becomes more mainstream, the understanding of what makes someone qualified to be a Developer Relations professional is getting cloudy. Do you have to have a technical background? And if so, does that mean that you’ve held a “Software Engineer” title? Or simply that you’ve taken the time to understand the technical pieces of your product? Jason, Mary, and PJ are joined by Karissa Peth, Sr. Developer Relations Program Manager at Microsoft, and Matty Stratton, DevOps Advocate at PagerDuty, as they dig into the nuances of the various Developer Relations career paths.

As Developer Relations becomes more mainstream, the understanding of what makes someone qualified to be a Developer Relations professional is getting cloudy. Do you have to have a technical background? And if so, does that mean that you’ve held a “Software Engineer” title? Or simply that you’ve taken the time to understand the technical pieces of your product? Jason, Mary, and PJ are joined by Karissa Peth, Sr. Developer Relations Program Manager at Microsoft, and Matty Stratton, DevOps Advocate at PagerDuty, as they dig into the nuances of the various Developer Relations career paths.

I’ve always looked up to the Arrested DevOps Podcast since it started so many years ago, so I’m super excited to have this week’s guest: Matty Stratton. We talk about all sorts of fun stuff, such as how career progression isn’t linear, how we’ve accidentally fallen into doing interesting work, and much more.

Jesse Fewell on Drunken PM, Dave Dame on Agile For Humans, Stephen Bungay on Boss Level, Julia Wester on SPAMCast, and Matty Stratton on Greater Than Code. 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. This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting February 18, 2019. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the week when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers. JESSE FEWELL ON DRUNKEN PM The Drunken PM podcast featured Jesse Fewell with host Dave Prior. Dave and Jesse talked about the role of the Project Management Office (PMO) in organizations that are transitioning to Agile methods. Jesse talked about the invitation-orientation of the Agile PMO as defined in the Project Management Body Of Knowledge (PMBOK) in which the PMO acts to support teams as they learn to become agile. Dave brought up that most people he has spoken to from PMOs want everyone in the organization to “do Agile” the same way, which Jesse described as management junk food. This led to a further discussion about why people want consistency and why most of their reasons are due to misunderstandings and anti-patterns like optimizing resource efficiency over flow efficiency. They also delved into some of my favorite topics: the leadership circle concept from Anderson and Adams, the competing values framework, and Carol Dweck’s ideas around fixed and growth mindsets. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/evolving-role-pmo-in-agile-organization-catching-up/id1121124593?i=1000428696329&mt=2 Website link: http://drunkenpm.blogspot.com/2019/01/the-evolving-role-of-pmo-in-agile.html DAVE DAME ON AGILE FOR HUMANS The Agile For Humans podcast featured Dave Dame with host Ryan Ripley. Dave talked about growing up with cerebral palsy which led to a discussion about the opportunities brought about by improvements in accessibility in recent years. He talked about how a technology like Apple Pay that might seem like a relatively minor innovation to most people can be a complete game-changer for somebody with cerebral palsy as it lets them pay for something without having to trust a stranger to go into their wallet. He talked about how social media has given him a voice where in previous generations there just wouldn’t be the opportunity. Nowadays, he says, the biggest accessibility obstacles at work for him are not buildings lacking ramps and elevators, but the inaccessible nature of the company’s org charts. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/afh-105-agile-leadership-and-management-with-dave-dame/id991671232?i=1000429122862&mt=2 Website link: https://ryanripley.com/afh-105-agile-leadership-and-management-with-dave-dame/ STEPHEN BUNGAY ON BOSS LEVEL The Boss Level podcast featured Stephen Bungay with host Sami Honkonen. This episode is a few years old, but I recently finished reading Melissa Perri’s new book The Build Trap which referenced Stephen Bungay’s book The Art Of Action and I have been reading his work non-stop ever since, which got me interested in hearing more from him. I liked what he had to say about uncertainty’s central place in strategy and its distinction from risk. He also told a compelling story about a friend of his working in strategy at a UK retailer and how he went against the traditional rollout of store layout changes to all stores at once and instead rolled out changes a few stores at a time so that he could tweak the design as he went. This is something any entrepreneur would recognize as Lean Startup thinking, but it was completely foreign to the management of this retailer. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/stephen-bungay-and-strategy-under-uncertainty/id1041885043?i=1000376171555&mt=2 Website link: http://www.bosslevelpodcast.com/stephen-bungay-and-strategy-under-uncertainty/ MATTY STRATTON ON GREATER THAN CODE The Greater Than Code podcast featured Matty Stratton with hosts Janelle Klein, Coraline Ehmke, and Jessica Kerr. They began the discussion by having Matty summarize his REdeploy conference talk ‘Fight, Flight, or Freeze – Releasing Organizational Trauma.’ Taking the idea of incidents and outages as a form of organizational trauma, Matty talked about the importance of being able to tell stories about your incident responses and how that helps the organization process the trauma. He cited John Allspaw regarding the idea that incident postmortems should ask questions that trigger conversations rather than give answers. Janelle brought up the point that the stories we tell are sometimes lies that cover up the trauma rather than address it when the environment of the organization lacks psychological safety. This brought them to a discussion of blameless postmortems and how a culture of blamelessness is so hard to build and so easy to lose. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/116-healing-organizational-trauma-with-matt-stratton/id1163023878?i=1000429285663&mt=2 Website link: http://www.greaterthancode.com/2019/02/06/116-healing-organizational-trauma-with-matt-stratton/ JULIA WESTER ON SPAMCAST The Software Process & Measurement podcast featured Julia Wester with host Thomas Cagley. Tom and Julia talked about the need for spectrum thinking, discussed the distinction between spectrum thinking and binary thinking, and then Julia described how she uses the Cynefin framework to identify whether or not a problem requires spectrum thinking. While this is a straightforward concept, I see binary thinking being applied all the time to address problems that require something more akin to spectrum thinking. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/spamcast-532-spectrum-thinking-interview-julia-wester/id213024387?i=1000429098317&mt=2 Website link: http://spamcast.libsyn.com/spamcast-532-spectrum-thinking-an-interview-with-julia-wester FEEDBACK 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/channel/UCysPayr8nXwJJ8-hqnzMFjw Website:

Do you like to hear yourself talk? Especially while on a stage and in front of a lot of people? How do you come up with ideas to talk about? What process do you use to build a conference talk or presentation? Today, we’re talking to Matty Stratton of PagerDuty. His job involves building conference talks and finding ways to continuously improve them. Public speaking can be intimidating, so he shares some tips and tricks that have worked for him. Some of the highlights of the show include: Avoid creating something brand new for every event Don’t tell flattering stories about things that happened to you; may be uplifting, but doesn't resemble reality Failure stories are fantastic because people relate to making terrible decisions Everyone who gives a talk panics, gets nervous, and thinks they’re about a sentence away from stammering and falling off the stage; almost never happens Audience wants you to succeed because they're there to learn; no one is hoping a presenter messes up Preparation is key; could build a talk at the last minute, but it would be much better, if you prepared for it Don’t intentionally try to think of something; have conversations with people and listen to other talks to develop anecdotes, stories, and cold opens Humor can be tricky; what you think is funny, other people might not Make things memorable; show good ideas by showing bad ideas - it’s the ‘don't do this, do this instead’ model Submit early and often, but submit appropriately; if you are always submitting stuff that’s inappropriate for an event, your stuff starts to be ignored Sometimes, you may want to avoid slides that auto advance; if you trip over yourself: Stop, repeat, back up,  take questions, etc. Try not to read from notes or slides; takes the life and engagement out of the talk People can only do one thing at a time - listen or read Practice: Record yourself every time you practice and watch it; focus on blocking and tackling You have about 45 seconds to grab people's interest before they look at their phone; get them engaged via a story, picture, or anecdote Links: Matty Stratton’s Presentations Matty Stratton on Twitter PagerDuty Arrested DevOps Hot Takes, Myths, And Fake News—Why Everyone Is Wrong About DevOps, Except For Me DevOps Dispatch LastWeekinAWS Jez Humble Robert Rodriguez Rebel Without A Crew Adam Jacob from Chef Terrible Ideas in Git Azure DevOps Emily Freeman Decker Communications Don't You Know Who I Am?! Datadog